Here is something random for you….
Conversation between the Lawn Care Millionaire and Lawn Care Marketing Expert
We talk about all sorts of stuff while enjoying fine American beers…
Elon Musk
https://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/
Cybernetic arm
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Dean Kamen’s “Luke” Arm
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9 uncertainties that are less so after Obama’s re-election
Andrew: Hey Jonathan, what’s up. We are here…why don’t you tell them where we’re at and what we’re doing.
Jonathan: We’re in Celebration, Florida which is near Orlando. He’s up from Miami; I’m over from Dallas, and we’re actually here seeing a friend, Dean Jackson, who you probably wouldn’t know who he is, but he’s really one of the sharpest marketing guys that we know. We’ve been following him for some time at some level, but he’s kind of a behind-the-scenes guy. He’s behind a lot of really big, successful companies in terms of an advisor/marketing guy. He’s behind some huge products; again, in terms of advising and consulting. That’s why he’s not really a known name. We’ve been up here since Sunday. It’s Wednesday night, and we’ve been hanging out and talking about marketing and business and strategy. We wanted to shoot a video here.
Andrew: Dean’s a guy that we’ve actually been trying to get close to and pick his brain and hang out with for a long time. As you know, we spend quite a bit of money every year to educate ourselves, learn new things, keep up to date on what’s going on in marketing and apply that to how we help our clients and how we help our clients ultimately help their clients. We’ve had three really fantastic days with him and just really digging into the guts of what you need to do to fulfil your client’s needs and to get them to buy from you. Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to. Marketing is all about getting people to raise their hand and say, “Yes, I’m interested in your product,” and ultimately to purchase your product or service. We’ve really dug into some guts. We’ve dug deep into each of our businesses; what we offer in different ways that we can offer even better products and services and even create a better message for our clients and help them even further than we do now.
Why don’t we share a couple things that we took away? There were a number of things for me. There was one thing in particular actually that just reinforced what I’ve told a lot of my clients already, who we do email marketing for. That was that he really breaks down email marketing into the core reason why you’re doing it. It’s really to move your prospect or your existing client along a very specific path, to take some very specific action that you have in mind for them. Maybe that’s upselling your product or service, getting them to buy a promo or increase their current service level amount. How that relates to email is that…he really broke it down to communicate with them in the way that you would communicate with a friend, sending an email message to a friend.
Jonathan: Right. So sending these long HTML messages that are pretty and fancy and have your logo and all this stuff over them. The minute somebody sees that stuff it looks like advertising. It looks like you’re sending them something marketing. It doesn’t look like it came from your buddy or your mom or somebody you’re friends with. Immediately it’s called out to you, “Hey, this may not be for me.”
Andrew: Kind of interrupt you, you know that mail? When we’ve talked about mailing, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but talking about the mailing concept of direct mail. All mail is sorted into an A pile and a B pile. The A pile is the stuff you’re going to read, you’re going to look at. The B pile is the junk mail, the junk you don’t want to look at. Email has the same thing. So you were talking about…the scenario here of what does B pile look like that there’s no point in wasting your time sending?
Jonathan: Even to take that thought a little bit further that’s a perfect example. Too often we get in the mindset that doing what everybody else is doing is what we need to be doing in our marketing. I constantly reiterate this to my clients: don’t copy your competitors. Look outside your industry and think of creative ways that you can distinguish yourself in your marketing, in your message, and the way that your company appears in the marketplace. How that relates to email is that if you think about the email that you get and the spam and all the newsletters that you subscribe to. You’re probably getting a newsletter from Apple. You might be getting one from West Elm or various catalogs or newsletters, whatever you subscribe to.
Andrew: It looks like junk. You know it’s junk as soon as you see it.
Jonathan: If you think how they look they’re very well produced, they’re slick, lots of graphics, they’re HTML. They look like they’re produced by a company.
Andrew: When do you ever look at that and say, “Cool. Steve Jobs has sent me a personal message.” You know that it’s just some guy somewhere in a company of tens of thousands of people that wrote some email to you. Nothing about it feels like it’s really for you. It feels completely concocted and it doesn’t feel real. It immediately does not pass the smell taste and you probably will ever look at it.
So how can you do it differently? How can you distinguish your message from your competitors and get it right because ultimately you want your email to be read by the clients you’re emailing and you want them to take action on what you’re saying. The way Dean broke it down, and this is something that I’ve said to clients before, is that don’t focus on making your emails to your clients look pretty. Focus on what you want it to do. You want them to take an action. So how do you get them to read your email and take an action? You need to communicate with them like you would a friend. How do you send emails to your friends? They’re very casual. They’re often very brief and they get right to the point.
Jonathan: By the way, if this is slightly boring; this is worth a lot of money. So this should not be boring. This is a big, big, big deal.
Andrew: This is a very big deal and it’s something that I implemented at the beginning of last year right before [inaudible 0:07:00] and encouraging people to sign up. It’s to communicate with your list, or in your case your customers, as you would a friend.
Jonathan: Or your prospective customers. Customers that called once and you didn’t close them, and now it’s four months later and you’re trying to go back to them and reactivate them or get them now.
Andrew: Let’s give them an example. We’re kind of talking about the theory so let’s give them an example of how you’d email a lawn care client that…a great example is a lot of people request estimates. A lot of people request estimates and you send them their estimate and never hear from them again. What can you do to reactivate them or turn them into a client and create a personal relationship at the same time?
Jonathan: I’ll give you a scenario where it’s been three months since they last talked to you. So we’ll send them an email that says–you’re the prospective client that I haven’t talked to in three months, Andrew. I’m the guy that we talked to three months ago on the company. I sent him an email. It could be automated. You could be using AWeber or some product or service autopilot or some product to send this out, but you could also be doing this manually and there’s nothing wrong with that. I would send him an email in the subject line I would say, “Andrew” and in the body of the email I would say, “Are you still looking for lawn care? John.” Send. That’s real. But if I went and I embedded a logo in it, cool graphic, our phone number and the whole marketing message about why we’re so great and wonderful and why you should care about us and then a little advertisement and a coupon and it’s in three different colors and a beautiful font, who cares?
Andrew: Now it’s impersonal. Now it’s just another company sending them a marketing message. Sending them a generic message that doesn’t get at the core question: are they still looking for a company to provide a service? You want a simple yes or no. If you’re getting that email from me you have to wonder, would your first thought be, “Oh, this is spam. This isn’t real meaningful.” Your first thought would be, “It’s real.” It’s coming from an individual person at your company.
Jonathan: And now you either have to choose explicitly to ignore me or you feel compelled, and it was a simple yes or no question. You could say what? I say, “Are you still looking for lawn care?”
Speaker 1: Yes.
Jonathan: So that comes back to me.
Andrew: Or it could be, “No. I have one and they’re working out okay.”
Jonathan: Or, “Yes, I am, and the company I’ve got right now is doing a horrible job, blah, blah, blah,” and they give you a whole book. But regardless it elicited a response.
Andrew: You opened the door of communication. You started a conversation with a prospect, a lead that you sent an estimate to previously and they didn’t respond and they didn’t hire you. Now you have a conversation with them again. Now you have communication with them again and previously they’d shut the door by not responding to your original estimate, but now you’ve opened that communication again. Now you can market to them again on a personal level. Now it’s not just some business trying to get their way which is to get their prospect or get this one person to buy something. It’s the owner of the company or it’s a person at the company. It’s not the company initiating the contact. It’s a personal message.
Jonathan: This is a big [strategy] too because think about just something simple if you added this in your business. Let’s say 100 leads last year that you didn’t sell. You send this out to 100 people via email. It’s easy, it costs you nothing. Let’s just say ten, you engage, let’s say engage half and ten become clients and clients are worth two grand a year each. You get ten new clients that’s worth 20 Grand. Something as simple as blasting 100 emails that could yield 20 Grand. There’s no way you’d ever yield 20 Grand if you blast 100 emails of a big HTML, fancy email.
And that’s just in year one. If a client sticks with you five years that’s 100 Grand in revenue that you’ve made off something so simple. I’ve been pretty decent at this strategy already, but I’ve done a lot of over explaining. I never do HTML emails. I don’t like them. I’ve bought into this strategy for a long time. But sometimes I use a three-sentence email. Or sometimes I say, “Hey, are you looking for this? And by the way this and that?” You build in two or three questions. How can you get this thing done with the fewest number of words possible just to get a response back? I think that’s the way to be thinking about this.
Andrew: That’s the key, getting a response back. Once you get a response back then the lines of communication are open and you can start to slowly ease them down the lane to hopefully becoming a client of yours in the future or in the near future or immediately. You’ll be surprised what’s going to happen. You know, this relates so closely to direct mail as well. It’s the same thing. Too many companies are sending glorified business cards. It’s a postcard but essentially it’s the same old random image, the same old stock image of a red lawn mower and company name, phone number, website. Boring. That’s what everybody else does.
Jonathan: Who cares? Goes to trash.
Andrew: This technique can apply to direct mail as well. We won’t get into direct email here, but it’s the same thing. Your goal with any one-way communication, one-way message, one-way marketing message whether that’s email that’s going in one direction or a postcard or a direct mailer that’s going in one direction, the goal with that is to get it to come back the other direction. And the comeback to you is getting a response, initiating a response.
Jonathan: And what’s the simplest way to get them to respond? What’s the thing that’s most important to them? It’s all about them. The simplest format. It doesn’t need to be overly complicated; it doesn’t need to be long.
Andrew: Most people try and cram in the sales pitch and every single thing all at once and rather than slowly easing them into the buying process. It takes a while for people to make a buying decision a lot of times so if you can slow down the process step by step they don’t know they’re going through the process. They’re just having a conversation and then suddenly after they’ve gone through a couple steps they’re buying from you, [as you’re client].
Jonathan: And they’re buying from you as a trusted friend and advisor versus a guy that pitched them something and you’re starting the whole conversation, started the whole relationship from a sales and business standpoint. It’s all business behind the scenes, but it feels different. And much of what we’re doing is about the presentation and [theatre] and feel.
Andrew: And that’s the approach that people respond to. Something that I always remind people is I don’t hire any salespeople in my company. We don’t have any salespeople. If you call you’re probably going to get me on the phone or you’re going to get an account manager on the phone who works directly with clients just like I do. That was done very purposefully because I don’t believe in a hard sell, and I think personal relationships are worth a lot more than trying to force people down a dark tunnel to make them buy your product.
I think if you can establish a relationship, build trust and credibility over a period of time that’s worth more. And I think it also increases the life cycle of your client. How long they stick around with you. How long they stick around with you and do business with you, so I think it’s a really huge thing. Dean’s a fascinating guy. He has a really interesting business model. He has several different products that are focused specifically on the real estate market.
The real estate market, how does that have anything to do with what you’re doing? Marketing is marketing is marketing. The core principles in marketing just like the core principles in business, they apply. Different types of business, different [inaudible 15:32].
Jonathan: I think a couple of the most important things in your business, I’ve said this before, it’s the people you hire. It’s getting really good at hiring people. It’s getting really good at marketing, understanding marketing and being good at it. It’s finance and it’s technology that you implement in business. Those at the end of the day are the big things and marketing is near the top. I think it’s number two personally. I think the people you hire is number one and marketing is number two. Neither one will work without the other.
The reason I interrupted him to say is this is one of the skills of life if you’re going to be in the game of business for a long period of time this marketing education that you get, the study that people that understand it, all applies to whatever else you go on to do later. So this may, whatever you’re doing now, the business you’re in, maybe a stepping stone for who knows what later. There’s no way you can predict what might be coming down the road especially as you get smarter and make money and build your company it opens up so many opportunities.
So what we’re talking about here, the time you invest in this stuff, is huge down the road. Great example: he brought Dean doing real estate. But Dean’s the genius behind so many other businesses not even related to real estate but he learned a lot in real estate. I’ve learned lots of business skills in completely unrelated industries to what I’m doing now. The same with you. This investment of knowledge and this skill of marketing is just huge. It can take you anywhere long term. So you were saying, he’s building some pretty interesting business models, products behind the scenes, started in real estate.
Andrew: A great example of taking ideas from other industries, whether it’s marketing or business processes on how to run your business, a great example is the banking industry. The banking industry took the whole concept of drive through banking from restaurants.
Jonathan: Fast food. It’s huge now. I never go in the bank. In fact, I hardly ever go to the bank.
Andrew: I think they actually charge you to talk to a human these days. Or even call. We’ve just had a fantastic, really exhausting actually three days. It’s been intense from 7:00 in the morning until 11 o’clock at night we’ve been focusing purely on business and really outlining our next business plans as well. Dean has a really interesting company, really interesting business model. What are some other companies that you keep up with in the news that you think are doing interesting things these days?
Jonathan: I like the big companies, so they’re bigger names, but I really like Amazon. Jeff Besos. Those guys are insane. They’re the smartest guys around and Elon Musk. If you don’t know who Elon Musk is…you know who Amazon is but if you don’t know who Elon Musk is…
Andrew: Let’s talk about Amazon for a second. The thing about Amazon, we’ve had this conversation before, the thing about Amazon that’s so awesome is that people think that it’s just a shop where they can go and buy books and buy diapers or cereal or any other consumer product. But the Amazon portfolio, the huge number of services that they offer, technology services, cloud services, platforms that you can build websites and store data on. I don’t want to get super technical but…
Jonathan: A good example, think of Prime. You buy Amazon Prime which is a service; this is a good example for everybody’s business. You buy Amazon Prime, they sell it to you for 79 bucks a month under the concept that you’re going to get free two-day shipping on almost everything you buy, but then they go on and bundle a bunch of services. It’s kind of like the old AOL model where they would sell you dial-up Internet, but they’d pile on for 19 bucks a month or whatever they’d charge.
Amazon’s doing the same thing. Talk about all the things they’re doing; they’re a freaking competitor to Netflix. You get Prime and then you also get their movie library of, I don’t know, 20,000 movies. You get all these other pile-on, add-ons, so Andrew is talking about all these other things–not to mention Kindles. They’re competing with Google and Apple, but then they’re competing with Netflix. They’re competing with Walmart and Best Buy. They’re in the gift card business with Chase. They’re in everything. The ability for a company like that to scale into so many industries is a huge testament to the ability to manage people and hire incredible people in a wide variety of fields.
Andrew: They’re insane.
Jonathan: If you think about it, if you think about everything that Amazon does they’re part FedEx, they’re part a technology company like a freaking Cisco or a Google. There is a huge Cloud infrastructure behind them. A lot of very large websites that you probably use are hosted on Amazon’s platform.
Andrew: Toys R Us.
Jonathan: Their technology platform. Their data’s there. Their websites are hosted there and they’re built on Amazon platforms. Most people think of it as “Oh it’s just a shop to go buy a book,” or whatever. It’s Barnes & Noble combined with FedEx combined with Netflix combined with Apple. I just think Amazon’s a really fascinating company. If I was ever to work for somebody again, which will never happen in a million years, Amazon would be one of the first places that I’d probably go to because they just have a fascinating business model. Very forward thinking. Not afraid of getting into any new industry that makes sense.
Jonathan: Not afraid to say, in a sense, “Screw the stock market, screw the investor.” They do care about the investor but, ‘We’re in this thing for the long term. We’re making decisions that are right for us seven years from now not just have the profits in one quarter.’ I highly respect a company that runs that kind of a business. These guys are what, 15 years old. They’re not even that old. I don’t know how old they are, but it’s not that old.
Andrew: They would be right around I think probably right about ‘97, ‘98, ’99 would be right around the first basic version of Amazon.com launch. That would be about right.
Jonathan: Think about the scale too of what they’ve done. You go out and you say, ‘I’m going to buy an iPod shuffle.’ They know that well, you might want to buy these headphones, and you might want to buy this little case, and you might want to buy this other thing that goes with it. Oh, by the way, here’s the 20 other things that other people like you bought based on your past purchase history. And on top of that, because we’ve figured out that we can up our sales by 30% by doing a one-click checkout…the thought in terms of systems and processes and process mapping and client experience mapping that they’ve done behind the scenes…
Andrew: Their [research engines].
Jonathan: They’ve architected this is such a way that this is the kind of stuff that we need to be doing, that we want to be doing in our businesses, and they’re just an incredible role model to look at.
Andrew: Pretty amazing. Something that we do for a lot of our clients is tweak their landing pages for higher conversions. And Amazon, just like Google, Google does this as well, Amazon is religious about testing every aspect of their sales pages, how things are laid out, where buttons are positioned. All of this stuff has an impact. We’re talking miniscule percentage points that have an impact on how often people click the buy button or take different specific actions on the page. If you think about it, even if you’re increasing the number of conversions by 0.3% we’re talking millions of dollars on Amazon’s scale. So they are one of the most religious testers of how they lay out a page and that whole process of split testing everything.
Jonathan: Speaking of which they also own one of the other really interesting companies [inaudible 23:57] Zappos. Those guys, you were talking about testing…
Andrew: I love Zappos.
Jonathan: Those guys are insane. They create a specific video for every pair of shoes. I mean, the scale of that. Who thinks that up and says, “We sell 15,000 different kinds of shoes. We should make a video, a ten-minute video about every pair of shoes we sell.” I mean it’s crazy.
Andrew: I buy every single pair of shoes off Zappos for probably three or four years and then why they started drop shipping everything and I get my shoes the next day. I literally order five pairs of shoes and send back four of them. That’s exactly what Zappos wants you to do. They’ve done the math, they figured out that if we take the fear of buying a product and getting stuck with it because it’s not exactly right; it’s not the right size or not the right color or it’s just not perfect, they’ve taken all of the fear out of making that purchase because you can return your shoes for 365 days.
Jonathan: What a great topic: risk reversal. This is a big topic in business. If you have a really good product, if you are 100% confident in what you’re doing and 100% confident in your service, how can you take the barrier of doing business with you away? How can you take the friction, how can you take the risk away from somebody that wants to do doing business with a company like you from doing business with you and making you the most attractive business? That’s what they’ve done. They’ve made themselves the most attractive business because there’s no risk of buying a pair of shoes that may not fit. There’s no risk ordering something and it not being the color you thought it was going to be. They took all the risk away and as a result they…what’s his name? Tony. Whatever.
Andrew: That’s a good book to read. Good book, by the way.
Jonathan: Anyway, he sold his company for a billion bucks.
Andrew: He still works in it.
Jonathan: He still does. He loves it, but he sold it for a billion bucks but it all went back to orchestrating the client experience and risk reversal. Big thing to be thinking about in business is how can you take all the risk off your client and put it all on you?
Andrew: If you believe in your service, if you believe in what you’re offering maybe there’s a way that you can take the risk of trying your services out off of your prospective clients that are on the fence.
Jonathan: Think about sales 20%, 30%. It’s a big deal.
Andrew: It was huge for them. It’s probably the difference maker. Two weeks ago I returned a pair of shoes to Zappos that were still in the shoe box. I hadn’t worn them for probably 375 days. I’d had them in my closet for more than a year. I tried to return them through the website. It was after 365 days and I could not return them. Picked up the phone, called Zappos, said, “I have a pair of shoes. They’ve been sitting in my closet for a year. I just never got around to wearing them. I’d like to return them.” He said, “Sure. We’ll give you credit. Here’s a UPS return label.” I didn’t pay for shipping. I sent the shoes back. They gave me an $80 credit. I bought another pair of shoes.
Jonathan: Who was the company you got me to buy jeans from?
Andrew: Bonobos. Another great one. Same model. You don’t pay for shipping. I think I ordered $1,500 worth of clothes for you.
Jonathan: Yeah. And that was the story you told me. You’d had something for a year and then you’re like, “I never wore it, never even tried it.” And just mailed it back to them and got credit.
Andrew: He never buys clothes for himself.
Jonathan: My wife buys all my clothes.
Andrew: His wife buys all of his clothes and I always rag on him because I like clothes, and I like shoes, and I like all that stuff.
Jonathan: But he lives in Miami where you all put on a show.
Andrew: I’m very shallow.
Jonathan: I’m in Dallas where there is no show.
Andrew: I always get on him for not buying clothes but not buying new clothes but not being very concerned with fashion or whatever. There’s nothing wrong with that. Anyway, I bought him $1,500 worth of clothes, shipped them all to his house.
Jonathan: On my credit card though. Let’s get that…that was my credit card.
Andrew: … and said, “Ship back what you don’t like.” This is the first time you used Bonobos. There were a couple of things that he liked. Sent back $1,200 worth
Jonathan: About 1,000 bucks. Probably 500 bucks. Had they not had the risk reversal I would have never said, “Sure, whatever.” You just told me the story, I tossed you the credit card and you bought me a bunch of stuff.
Andrew: That’s true.
Jonathan: I had no idea what I’d bought, had no idea how much money I’d spent. I had no idea.
Andrew: And I told you…
Jonathan: That I could send it back.
Andrew: Send it back if you didn’t like it. And they don’t charge you shipping.
Jonathan: If that hadn’t been the case I would have said, ‘How much did we spend? What are we getting?’ I didn’t care. You’d spent four grand but I wouldn’t have been any more worried than if you spend 1,500 bucks.
Andrew: It’s things like that.
Jonathan: That made the point. That made the sale. That would have never happened if they’d not had that risk reversal with me. It’d never have happened.
Andrew: Now look at you. Very fashionable.
Jonathan: I’m wearing the same clothes I had before and I’m not wearing any of them.
Andrew: Who else are we…
Jonathan: Elon Musk.
Andrew: Elon Musk. He is one of the co-founders of PayPal which everybody frigging uses. That made him a multi-billionaire.
Jonathan: No. Made him rich.
Andrew: Make him a couple billion?
Jonathan: I didn’t think so.
Andrew: Made him a billionaire?
Jonathan: I don’t know. Who cares? It made him rich. It made hundreds of millions anyway. But he made a lot of money.
Andrew: Before that he started a company called Zip2–this is really dating us in internet years, but if you go back Zip2 was one of the first, before Google maps, Zip2 was one of the first map apps. Back when we were on [inaudible 30:08] modems, 19K modems, Zip2 was basically sending you jpegs, gifs to your screen. It wasn’t nearly as interactive as Google maps, but that was really the first [popular] map application. That was his first program, he wrote it. I think he had a partner at that point. He sold that for many millions of dollars as well. He sold PayPal. Had all this money.
Jonathan: Could have been done.
Andrew: Could have been done. Could have retired. He was very young at that time even when he sold PayPal. He decides, “I have all this money. What would I like to do next? I’d like to send a greenhouse to Mars and grow plants on Mars.”
Jonathan: I’d like to into launch rockets into space and circumvent NASA.
Andrew: I’d like to build my own rockets and go to Mars and put a camera on a greenhouse and watch plants grow on Mars and I’ll be a big old PR sign.
Jonathan: And he had a McLaren which is a million dollar sports car.
Andrew: He was like, ‘I love sports cars. I’ll start an electric sports car company.’ So he started Tesla. He’s got a power company, Solar Roofing.
[crosstalk with waitress]
Andrew: You’ve got to admire a guy who has all this money, could buy himself a ridiculous yacht and just hang out and not do anything else the rest of his life. Easy. But instead he thinks, “I want to go to Mars.” So what does he do? He starts doing research. He’s not a rocket scientist, he’s not an engineer. He was a programmer. He had a physics degree and so he starts going through the process of what would it take to build my own frigging spaceship, my own rocket to get there myself? And he basically breaks down the whole process that NASA goes through, finds huge inefficiencies and decides, “I’m smarter than NASA. I can do it better. I can build a better rocket cheaper, and I can make it reusable.”
So he built the company SpaceX, and if you’ve been watching the news, SpaceX here recently, they were the first private company to launch a reusable rocket to outer space and dock the space station, which is huge. We’re talking about…think of all the problems that you have to solve in order to create a reusable rocket and to get to outer space and to do all these different things.
Jonathan: You’ve got to figure out every problem in advance. You can’t make mistakes.
Andrew: You make mistakes, what quicker way to burn through money, literally. No pun intended. Well, pun intended I guess. You make a mistake, you make a calculation wrong, you get the metric system confused with the U.S. system, you’re blowing up a multi-million dollar rocket.
Jonathan: But it’s bigger than that. You screw that up on your first launch and the company’s over. Everybody runs. He almost loses it all between this and Tesla. Out of money, down to nothing, doesn’t create his stuff to keep it going and now he’s got…Tesla’s public.
Andrew: He doubled down.
Jonathan: He went all in. Everything on the line. I just find it–he’ll go down in history as one of the smartest guys. I think he’s incredibly fascinating.
Andrew: That’s one of the most fascinating things right now. Some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs right now are really doing some interesting stuff in our universe anyway. I mean, more interesting stuff than…
Jonathan: Who’s the guy that just did the prosthetic arm that you showed me? That’s crazy.
Andrew: Dean Kamen was working on…there’s a prosthetic arm that we saw in the news here recently. I’ll put a video up along with this video so you can see. It’s so cool. It’s awesome. I love technology and geeky stuff. And the demo is the guy just has a nub and the arm is plugged into his nervous system, the nerve endings in his arm where he’s lost his limb right here. He has enough control by thinking about making his arm move that he can move each individual finger on this hand, this prosthetic limb. He has that much control over it; he can pick up eggs and crack them. He has that much control. This is crazy. We couldn’t do that ten years ago.
Jonathan: No. We’re talking about all kinds of stuff, but I think the takeaway, if you think about the scale and what these guys are doing and what’s gone into it, it should be inspiring. We’re building these little businesses in a sense compared to the scale of what these guys are doing. Why can we not…we do. I mean this is what we do, but we all need to be more [inaudible 34:58] architects these things, think through these things in terms of what is the client experience. What are all the processes and procedures that have to happen in my business? What are the things that have to happen that somebody else can do, and I can hire them to do these things? I don’t have to be the guy doing them.
You figure all these steps out. It’s a lot of work but this is how you build a company that runs itself. This is how you build something exciting and interesting. I think these kinds of people that are doing something on such a massive scale should be inspirational. They’re doing this; all we need to do is that and if we do that we build incredible companies making millions of dollars and run themselves. I find it incredibly inspirational.
Andrew: I do too. Those guys are awesome. I love reading about that stuff. I love science. I love NASA. I love those things. It’s very motivational to see somebody operating at such a high level, managing huge teams of people, being able to hire the best people, and being able to put so much money on the limb because they believe 100% that they can do it. No matter what they’re not going to fail. I think that’s awesome.
Jonathan: So what’s the biggest news?
Andrew: Biggest news? We have the same president. Can’t say, “We have a new president.” We have the same president. Let’s not talk about politics.
Jonathan: Well, so…No. We have to ask…
Andrew: How is Obama being re-elected, how is that going to affect things in your world and my world as a business owner?
Jonathan: There are some things we know for sure. Some things that now we know. We’ve got to deal with heath care, but whether it’s going away or not, whatever, but now we know for sure it’s not going anywhere. Now we know taxes are going up. For sure. We can make predictions. [inaudible 37:05] probably not going to change. I have my theory. I don’t know what that means for [H2B]. That’s a concern. But labor is probably going to be steady so we, in terms of a business plan, the next four years we know we have to dress up here.
Andrew: Some people might not know, but you’re going to have to be a company of a certain size for those regulations…the way it’s laid out right now.
Jonathan: Over 50 people.
Andrew: Over 50 people the health care is going to directly affect you. You’re going to either have to pay a fine if you’re not paying for healthcare for your individuals or you’re going to have to pay for healthcare for your individuals if you’re a company over 50 people. So this is a very big deal. It’s going to affect a lot of your larger competitors. So think about that.
Jonathan: I think these are things that you need to be thinking about right now for planning, so I think that’s going to hit in 2014. I think that all goes into effect; you have to double check me on that. Some of the things in our company that we knew we had to plan for, we’ve been thinking about them because we’re definitely way over the 50 people, so we’ve been thinking about these things, and now we have to deal with them. Now we’ve got to put plans in place.
Whether you were pro or con or the status quo, we know what we’re dealing with now regardless whether it changed or didn’t change now we know what we’re dealing with. It’s been decided and so we as business owners have to plan and we have to figure out how we’re going to deal with it. However you felt on the spectrum whether you think it’s going to destroy jobs or it’s going to be good for the economy, my argument is regardless of whatever happened here we were all still going to build businesses. We were all still going to go hire people because we’re trying to make more money and grow our company. What we do as business owners is figure it out, go with it and now we’ve got to deal with it. So be thrilled about it, whatever the scenario is but now we know what we’ve got to do.
Andrew: Or quit and go get a job.
Jonathan: And then get laid off because it’s all going to end. It’s all over. The Mayans.
Andrew: The sky is falling. I thought that was last year.
Jonathan: No. It’s this year. We’re not going to do any business planning until 2013 just in case. That’s huge news, but I think the positive, regardless of who got elected, the positive is now you know what you’re dealing with. Now it’s time to start planning appropriately and thinking about what the strategies are, thinking about what new things you’ve got to do, what people you’ve got to hire. This is interesting times.
Andrew: But any good business leader can plan ahead. I encourage you to do that and make your plans now.
Jonathan: Anything else we need to talk about?
Andrew: We covered quite a bit. This is kind of an oddball show; we just covered quite a few different topics, but that’s what we’ve been thinking about this week and what we’ve been up to so we thought we’d share. I hope you enjoyed it. Please comment. Send us some feedback.
Jonathan: Have fun in your business. See ya.
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