[00:00:00] Speaker A: You know, you want to do something maybe adventurous.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: My clients have zero expectation that they will ever meet me in person.
[00:00:06] Speaker C: This company helped us out. I think you should talk.
[00:00:09] Speaker D: I'm Richard Gerhart.
[00:00:10] Speaker E: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart. You just heard some snippets from our show. It was a great one. Stay tuned, especially if you want to start a new business.
[00:00:20] Speaker F: Ramping up your business.
[00:00:21] Speaker D: The time is near.
[00:00:23] Speaker F: You've given it heart, now get it in gear. It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:00:31] Speaker D: I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:38] Speaker E: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law and I have my own startups and podcasts.
[00:00:44] Speaker D: Welcome to Passage to Profit, the Road to Entrepreneurship, where we talk with entrepreneurs and celebrities who tell their stories about their business journey and also share helpful insights about the successes that they've had.
[00:00:57] Speaker E: Did you know that 2 in 5Americans want to start a new business or are business owners? Well, we have lots of information to help them too.
[00:01:04] Speaker D: And we also talk a little about the intellectual property that helps them flourish. We have a very special guest, Carsten Pfau. He is the general managing partner at Agra Terra. He's also an investor and he's also a TV personality. He's a fantastic guy. We can't wait to hear from him.
[00:01:22] Speaker E: And you're going to want to stay tuned because after him, we have Jason Greenwood with Greenwood Consulting. If you're even thinking about doing E commerce and you want to do it right, don't do it till you listen to what Jason has to say. And then, I mean, this story to Maureen Linton with Inertia Resources, it's going to blow you away. So stay tuned.
[00:01:44] Speaker D: But before we get to that, it's time for your new business Journey, where two in five Americans want to start their own business or are already business owners. And today we're going to be asking our panel a very important question. How do you spot business opportunities that others don't? So let's go to Carson first. Carson, how do you respond to that question?
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Somehow it's in your guts. I mean, I get business ideas presented basically on a daily basis. You know, it's like little light bulb in your head and it gets on and off depending on what is presented to you. It's not a system you have, it's not an algorithm. It's really something. You have to be intuitive and you have it or you don't have it. And I believe this is difference maybe between successful investors and people who are not successful in this field.
[00:02:31] Speaker D: That's very, very insightful. Jason, what's your spin on that?
[00:02:35] Speaker B: For me, I think it comes down to pattern recognition more than anything else. You know, I've been working in the E Commerce space for over 24 years now and I've seen lots of technologies come and go. I've seen lots of opportunities come and go. I've seen lots of businesses and brands come and go. Over this time, I think that's honed my ability to recognize patterns in the industry.
[00:02:52] Speaker D: I think it even applies if you go to live in different regions of the country. People on the east coast are going to do business in a different than the people on the west coast in the United States. I think there's a lot of value in that. D'Mauri, what are your thoughts?
[00:03:05] Speaker C: One of the things that I really like to do when it comes across with this question is to make sure that I ask a lot of questions. I will always act like the third grader in the room in regards to knowing about a new process or a new opportunity. So one of the things I like to do is just ask a lot of questions.
[00:03:19] Speaker D: For me personally and the way we operate our business is really talking to our clients. Finding out what's going on in their lives creates a lot of new possibilities.
[00:03:28] Speaker E: Well, you are lucky because you're in a very forward thinking industry because patents are all about new ideas.
[00:03:33] Speaker D: Absolutely. Now it's time for Carsten Pfau and he is like done so much, came from Germany and he went to Paraguay. He's got a real estate business and investor business and he's also been a popular TV personality. Carsten, tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you get from Germany to Paraguay?
[00:03:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess this was one of those decision you make when you're still young. You feel like you can do whatever you want. If you fail, you can just redo it because you're still young and you have everything still in front of you. I graduated for Germany at a young age, actually I was 26, which for Germany is young. And I thought, okay, I have some spare time, so what to do with that? And I figured, okay, I go to South America, I learned a language and I have some time abroad on my resume that will certainly help me later when I search for like a corporate career I was preparing myself for. And yeah, Paraguay, because my dad at some point had bought some land here but he never Came to Paraguay ever, just bought it through an agency and I thought, well, I go there because it's so exotic, nobody even knows where it is. So Germany, if you talk about Pro Wide, they guess it's in Africa. So I thought this was something, you know, you want to do, something maybe adventurous, something nobody else was going to do. And I thought this would give me a head start in the corporate world later. But then life turned out to be different for me. So one year I had planned to stay here and one year turned into two, and two into three, and 28 years later I'm still here. And I've never regretted it ever. So I'm quite happy to be here. But of course it's funny, I mean, in the heart of South America, many people dream of going to Europe, going to the US and search for like the so called better life. If you imagine a highway in one lane, all those people looking for a better life someplace else, on the the other lane or the opposite direction is just me and Uruguay. And you can imagine many people telling me quite a lot of things actually. I went to a country that in 1996 was in a very bad shape, in a very bad position. Now it's one of the best countries to invest in. It's really stable, it's growing quite well, it has a very great investment environment. But when I got here at a very young age, it was like the wild, wild West. But then of course there's the opportunity. You search for opportunity, you have to go to places where nobody else dares to go. And yeah, that's a little bit of my story.
[00:06:16] Speaker E: How did you get into the agribusiness? That's a great business to be in down there, it seems like. Did you have a choice of a lot of different types of businesses?
[00:06:24] Speaker A: Uruguay is a country that has a strong agriculture. It's one of the largest beef exporters, largest soybean exporters, largest wheat exporters. They do a lot of stuff. And when you get to a country such as Parva, you sooner or later you get in touch with the agro business. And I started really small. We bought like a truckload of cattle and put it on a piece of land my brother and I own. And this was basically how we kicked it off. But it really went to a different level when we had the idea of actually opening an investment firm in Germany, which with the only purpose of actually investing in Paraguay. And of course 9 out of 10 potential clients told you like, where from? Why it's where exactly you want me to invest. In the country I don't know existed, but there was always this one guy or this one lady who said, oh, well, this is really an interesting idea. Yeah. And then, I mean, we made over $100 million with that. So that's something that really took off from very humble and small beginning. That, I believe is a good thing.
[00:07:31] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of my mentors once said, where leaders go, there are no maps.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: Oh, that's totally true. When I got here with, I would say, my German glasses on, and I expected everything to be like, in Germany, or I had spent some time in Miami as well before that. And also, so I had some experience in the US And I expected something similar. And it was exactly as you describe it, really getting to a place where basically no infrastructure, there's basically no financial world and no investment market that had to be invented. Things are about to happen, but they haven't happened yet. And if you see, you know, the first settlers who got to the US they found something similar. I mean, there was basically nothing and then. But you had a feeling that at some point in time there will be something, and you want to be part of that. I presented some business ideas to people in Paraguay in the 90s, and they looked at me like. Like a cow would look at the astrophysics book.
And you can really get frustrated and feel, okay, I made a mistake. I'm in the wrong place. I should have gotten someplace else. And then you doubt yourself. You doubt your decision. You have sleepless nights. You think, what did I do with my life? I end up in a place nobody really wants to be in, but it turned out to be the right decision. And sometimes you have to have the stamina, you have to have the stomach to do stuff like that. And, you know, when things don't really happen overnight, you still have to be there, and you still have to be patient. And this is probably the way to go.
[00:09:01] Speaker E: Karsten, I have to say, you must be one heck of a salesman if you were able to get investors to invest in something they didn't know much about, like that. Because, I mean, we have clients who go to these pitch competitions that, you know, we have asked the investors, and Richard is actually in a couple of investment groups where they look at people's proposals. Nine times out of ten, they're rejected.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:23] Speaker E: So how did you convince these investors in Germany to invest in something in Paraguay?
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Believe it or not, sometimes I really look at myself in the world and think, how did we actually get to do that? And it was tough at the beginning And I mean, you hear from so many people that this is like, a lousy idea. And then our financial press in Germany, they picked up what we were doing, and they will say, like, oh, this is the worst investment idea ever presented. Imagine that. I mean, so that's certainly a title you don't want to carry. But then you always have those people who look at stuff differently and think, okay, in a developing country such as Paraguay, you have high returns, you have high risk. So you have this mixture between you're going into high risk, but you expect a very high return. And I was or still am representing a bridge, so to speak. So I know the German mentality. I'm educated in Germany. I brought up there. Then I went to Paraguay. I know the Paraguay mentality. I know the laws, the written ones, and the unwritten ones. And people thought like, okay, usually we probably would not invest in Paraguay, but promise of return is quite interesting. And if we have somebody who is kind of, you know, he's from us, he knows what we think and what we expect. And building this bridge was probably the reason why maybe 1 out of not 1 out of 10, but maybe 1 out of 100 people would actually do business with us. And over time, of course, you know, work gets around and people talk about it. And then, of course, you have, like, initial success. You know, people talk to their neighbors, to their friends and relatives. And I made this crazy investment, and I made really some money. And then they say, oh, yeah, can I do the same? And this is how all you do it. But I mean, to be honest, at the beginning, you hear so many times what a crazy idea that is and how crazy you are to even offer that. You have to get through that.
[00:11:19] Speaker E: What kept you going?
[00:11:20] Speaker A: It's a good question, actually. I don't know. Maybe I'm just crazy enough to do, or maybe I did not have anything else to do. Sometimes it's a good thing to not really have a plan B, actually, to be quite honest and to think, like, okay, I'm convinced about my own decision. I think I'm doing the right thing, and eventually I will convince people to come on board.
[00:11:39] Speaker D: How long did it take you from the time you started the investment company to feel like it was a success.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: From that point on? I would say two tough years. But of course, there was the time before we even founded the investment company, which were, I would say, was like 10 years, where people would tell me, like, you're wasting your time. You go to South America and you just waste your time there. And that Includes my own relatives. And then my founding the investment company, we already had gotten to a certain level. Then we did it for about two, maybe three years. We heard what a bad idea it was and then suddenly it took off.
[00:12:19] Speaker D: What did you do with the investment money? Where did you put it? In Paraguay so that it would generate a return for your investors?
[00:12:27] Speaker A: Now that's the interesting part. I mean, I'm basically on both side of the isle or the ocean, so to speak. I own our core, own the companies we invest in. And at the other side I have this investment company that raises the cash and raise the money for that. And then we invest in stuff we manage ourselves. It's not that we invest in third party projects. Then we have real estate, we have agro industry, agriculture, and has grown quite a bit. For many investors, that was part of why they actually did it, because they said, okay, it's you are managing it yourself. It's not that we give the money to somebody else and you're advising us, but you're there. And also you have quite a lot of skin in the game as well. And that was for many, that was a decisive point to make the decision in favor of.
[00:13:17] Speaker D: At the end of the day, so much of business and investment is based on the relationships that you have, the business relationships that you have with people because they were investing in you. Karsten Right. They believed that you were going to put their money to good use and that you were going to be successful. And so I think it's really important for all entrepreneurs to really appreciate that the relationships that you have and the people who believe in you are the things that drive you to success. You're listening to Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gerhardt. We'll be back with more Carsten Pfau, General Managing Partner at Agriterra right after this commercial message.
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[00:16:04] Speaker E: Our special guest, Carsten Pfau. I have been dying to ask you this question, Carsten. What did you do about the language barrier? Because we're talking about team members and I know in Germany everybody spoke German, but I assume in Paraguay they're speaking Spanish. Did you speak Spanish?
[00:16:19] Speaker A: No, not at all. I mean I really got here and I didn't speak Spanish, which was part of my mission was to learn just to never language stayed in Paraguay and to learn Spanish. That was my basic mission. And of course you have to do that. I mean without the language is lost cost. Like can you start? And there are many Germans here in Paraguay, believe it or not, and they don't speak any Spanish and they really don't even give it a try. And then they like are surprised when they get screwed off about my French. But it happens a lot. That's the minimum. We should learn the language. Yeah. In Germany we have many, many immigrants from all over the world and certainly in the US you have to say I believe learning the language of the country where you go to migrate to Uruguay. So the very least I can Learn Spanish, I believe that's the very least I could do. And then of course, I mean, in business, how would you do it if you don't speak the language? That's really, I would say, just don't even try.
[00:17:20] Speaker D: I think it shows respect for the country that you're learning in, and it's very important. I lived in Switzerland for a while in the French part, and my French was never quite as good as a native French speaker. But I think the Swiss French, they appreciated my efforts.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: I mean, people in France, they really appreciate it also. I mean, in business, how would you understand what's going on? And sometimes you have to read between the lines and how would you do that? So that's a very basic thing to do. Your iPhone or whatever cell phone you use basically speaks the language, Chinese or whatever, but you have no control over it. You don't really know what the machine is translating. Maybe it's saying something completely different can be tricky. I mean, I got here and I couldn't even order a cup of coffee. I brought a book. I was still a time where I would read a book. Now it's easier with the Internet and so on. But when I started I had to use book. Now I'm on tv. So I must have learned the language at least a little because, I mean, they haven't kicked me out yet. So.
[00:18:21] Speaker D: Karsten Pfau, general managing partner at Agriterra and he's also a TV personality, how can people find you?
[00:18:28] Speaker A: Well, this, this thing called the Internet is quite good, actually. Just Google my name. You will find me, certainly, as there's a lot of stuff about me on the Internet as a website. The company has, of course, a website. Just write me and I will try to respond.
[00:18:44] Speaker E: It's C A R S T E N p f a u.com passage to.
[00:18:53] Speaker D: Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gerhardt. Time for Intellectual Property News. Elizabeth, what's going on with Intellectual Property News today?
[00:19:01] Speaker E: Some dirty tricks, if you ask me. Tesla wanted to use some still shots from Blade Runner in some of its advertising and Blade Runner said, no, we want to keep our brand pure.
[00:19:12] Speaker D: We have our own agriculture program.
[00:19:14] Speaker E: We don't, we don't want to intermix our brand with Tesla. So no, please don't use our images in your branding. So Tesla said, okay, well, now we can get around that. So they generated their own images using AI that look eerily similar to the images that Blade Runner had used. So Blade Runner didn't like that, of course, Warner Brothers. And now there's a Lawsuit.
[00:19:39] Speaker D: Yeah. And it's really interesting. So for those of you who are unfamiliar with copyright, the standard is substantial similarity. Right. And so the question is, are the images that Tesla created trying to mimic the images In Blade Runner 2049, are those images substantially similar? And in the US these kinds of copyrights disputes, if they go to court, are decided on a battle of the experts basis. So Tesla would hire their own graphic artist expert who would testify. No, the images are completely different, they're not substantially similar. Whereas Warner Brothers, the company that produced Blade Runner, would have their expert who would testify that, oh, yeah, they're so close. Obviously there's an intermingling. And so part of the challenge in this type of situation is really trying to understand, well, how much difference does there have to be to make sure that there's not an infringement? We'll see what happens. But I'm curious about what our panel thinks. Jason, you're an IT guy, so you're probably pretty tuned into the world of artificial intelligence. What's your spin on this?
[00:20:55] Speaker B: I expect this to be a long term battle. This is not going to be settled overnight. It's not going to be settled on the basis of one case. It's just going to be a constant battle between rights holders, both of not only copyrights, but also trademarked material as well, and they're going to have to work out licensing for that.
[00:21:13] Speaker D: It's an interesting topic and I agree with you. Damarian, what is your take on this?
[00:21:18] Speaker C: It makes me feel there's going to be a lot of opportunity for graphic designers who are actually doing everything organic.
[00:21:23] Speaker D: And AI is still not to the point where it's perfectly human. Carson, what do you think?
[00:21:28] Speaker A: It's interesting, but again, there should be clear roads for that, and I agree with that.
[00:21:34] Speaker D: Yeah, I guess the moral of the story is be careful with your AI. You're listening to Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Garrett, Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind. Coming up soon. We'll be back right after this.
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[00:23:51] Speaker D: Our special guest today, Carson Pfau. Elizabeth, what's going on with your projects these days?
[00:23:56] Speaker E: Well, you know, who doesn't just love contractors, especially when they don't show up.
[00:24:02] Speaker D: You mean like construction contractors?
[00:24:04] Speaker E: Yes. So we're remodeling. So during COVID Richard and I put together this studio upstairs in the building that we own. And we had the mics we're using now, which are very expensive mics and mixer board. We had lights. We had cameras.
[00:24:18] Speaker D: We need all the help we can get.
[00:24:19] Speaker E: Yeah, so it was really a real studio that we used during COVID and we had a step and repeat behind us, but the building's very old, and we remodeled the whole downstairs and we bought it, but the upstairs is pretty gross still. So last fall, about a year ago, we looked at maybe selling the buildings. We're hardly using it. And things weren't just right because commercial buildings, who wants them anymore? So I said, well, why don't we rent out the podcast studio, did some research. Podcast studios are making some money. So we decided to remodel it. But before we even did that, though, I started a meetup Group. So I went to a POD tour in New York and met this woman who lives like 20 minutes away from me. And of course we met in New York. We both live in New Jersey. And she wanted to start a meetup too. So I said, well, let's start a meetup and see if there's any interest in this area for people doing podcasts. And then if there is, then we can put the money into the podcast studio. So we started the meetup. We did it in person and on Zoom. It's podcast and YouTube creators community. Her name is Stacy Sherman. She's got a huge LinkedIn following and it's been a huge success. We've had incredible people come and speak. We've done this kind of tour thing where they come Tuesday night once, we do it once a month, Tuesday night and speak at our thing. Then they come into the city on Wednesday to iHeart and do the radio show with us. So based on the success that we had with the meetup, we decided to go forward with the remodel project. But it's been very difficult getting contractors. I had somebody was supposed to show up this week, never showed up, never contacted me, nothing. But we have got the carpet down, so that's a huge one. We've got most of the ceiling done, so we're doing ceiling carpet. We tore apart the. Had some help tearing apart the bathroom. So we have had some contractors come and do some work. So getting pretty close to getting this podcast studio done and I have people waiting to use it, so that's pretty cool too. And I have somebody I'm working with on a podcast now who I just had her come and use this. We're recording this from our house right now from my office in our house. I had her come here, record her podcast here so she could get the good sound quality with the mics. A lot of people starting podcasts, they don't have good mics and the sound quality is crummy. And then they wonder why nobody listens. Right. So anyway, that's kind of what I'm really spending a lot of time on this meetup, spending a lot of time on the studio and of course, doing my job at Gear Harlow.
[00:26:31] Speaker D: That's great. You're quite the communicator, aren't you?
[00:26:33] Speaker E: I'm a podcaster. I should know how to talk. Anyway, enough about me. I am so excited for our next two guests. I mean, these guys, like I said when we sat down here, this. I feel like I'm in a graduate level business class with These guys, they're so smart. We're going to talk to Jason Greenwood right now. He has Greenwood Consulting. He works in the area of E commerce and has helped so many people with his company. So welcome, Jason. Tell us all about it.
[00:26:58] Speaker B: I grew up in Southern California, born and raised. Went to school in Southern California as well. Then in my early 20s, moved to New Zealand. Lived in New Zealand for almost 30 years. And then a year and a half ago, my wife and I moved to Mexico and we now live in Puebla City, Mexico. So we're in latam now. A lot of what you said resonated with me, I guess, in terms of getting outside your comfort zone, traveling, experiencing new places, experiencing new languages, experiencing new foods, new ways of life, new ways of looking at the world not only as a person, but also as a business person and trying to take those ideas and create a world that you want to live in. At the end of the day, instead of letting your life be a victim of circumstance, actually create the life with intention that you want to live. And that's what I'd like to think I've been able to do. And one of the reasons why I started my independent consultancy four years ago after being in the industry for over 20 years, was that I did want to be able to have that location freedom. I did want to be able to have that financial freedom. I was already servicing clients all around the world anyway. And if there's a silver lining to Covid at all for our industry, it was the fact that anybody working in the E commerce space has pretty much been able to work remotely forever. But the reality is, is that pre Covid clients, especially whether you had an agency or whether you're a consultant or whatever, clients would at least have the expectation they would meet you one time in person. They'd shake your hand, they'd eyeball you, maybe you do a presentation to the board of directors, whatever it is, then they'd shake your hand and sign on the dotted line. The beautiful thing about COVID is that even that basic prerequisite of doing business with you was removed. And now my clients have zero expectation that they will ever meet me in person. Now, luckily I now. Now that the world's back opened back up again, if I'm in their neck of the woods, I'll. I'll make an extra effort to go and visit them at their office or whatever the case may be, but there's no expectation that that will happen.
[00:28:52] Speaker D: I have to ask though, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
[00:28:56] Speaker B: I think making A business connection is pretty easy to do remotely. Making an emotional connection is hard to do. That's how I'd characterize that. And so certainly the in person thing, that's why I continually go to conferences and I'm speaking at conferences. I try to do as many in person things in my industry as I can. And I also put out content. I've got over 430 episodes of my podcast released, the E Commerce Edge podcast. I put out content almost every single day on LinkedIn and Reddit and across multiple other channels. So I think that fortunately for me, because I've got such a large corpus of content in the world, people usually by the time they come to me, they feel like they already know me. They got to know me through my content. And so more than anything else, they just want to try to figure out, are you really the same guy? Like when we're talking business, are you the same guy?
[00:29:44] Speaker D: You don't edit your podcast too much?
[00:29:46] Speaker E: I, yeah, I do. I just want to point out that I did go and look for YouTube videos of each of you. Now, Arsten's was in German, but I kind of followed along. That's okay. But that's the first thing I do if I'm going to meet somebody is I go look for them on YouTube because I do want to get a sense of who they are. But I do want to ask you, Jason, did you work in the e commerce field and then went and started your own consultancy based on what you knew in corporate? And how did that transition go?
[00:30:14] Speaker B: So I had already been working in the industry for 20 years by the time I started my consultancy. So I've been working in the industry for 24 years now. That's a long time. That's, you know, I would be certainly one of the older generation working in this industry. There's not that many people that have more than 20 years of experience in E commerce.
[00:30:29] Speaker E: There was an e Commerce Commerce 30 years ago.
[00:30:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, it was certainly hard, let's put it that way. When I first started working in the e commerce world, everything about e commerce was difficult. Nobody trusted it. Technology was difficult, Internet was slow, like everything about E commerce was hard. So it certainly got a tremendously easier to get started in E commerce. But I would say it's just as hard, if not harder now to be successful in E commerce because there's so much competition there.
[00:30:55] Speaker D: Now you want to go back to this question about in person versus zoom.
[00:30:59] Speaker B: A little bit remote technology has allowed me to service clients globally.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:31:04] Speaker B: I don't have to physically be there with them. So I clients in Europe, I've got clients in Latam, I've got clients in North America, got clients in Anz. You know, it definitely makes it easier to address a global audience through your content and then service global clients with remote technology. So there's definitely benefits to that. But I can tell you that as someone that was heavily involved in conferences pre Covid and is now still heavily involved in conferences post Covid, I couldn't personally wait for the world to open back up again so that I could be with my peers, hanging out with my peers. And sometimes because we're geographically isolated, oftentimes conferences and industry events are the only time in a year that we might physically be together in person. And I would always go out of my way to organize after parties, dinners, drinks, those sorts of things, those social activities outside of the conference environment, wherever we're able to be there together. And it's just a good opportunity and reason for us to be in the same place at the same time. So I think there's no replacing the human connection and we still can't translate that through the screen just yet.
[00:32:04] Speaker E: I agree with what you said in your intro, that sticking your head above everybody else in e commerce is like trying to be a drop in the ocean and trying to differentiate yourself. What do you do with people with your E commerce? So I'm assuming that you take people and help them figure out how to rise above the noise with their e commerce company. Is that a correct interpretation?
[00:32:24] Speaker B: It is somewhat. I have for the last four years I've niched down more and more and more into the B2B E commerce space. So helping manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors establish digital routes to market. So that's quite different. You know, the first three quarters of my career I was working with B2C and D2C brands. So, you know, businesses selling to consumers. Right, and manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors selling to consumers. But latterly, what I recognized when I first started my consultancy is that B2C and D2C e commerce consulting is very red ocean. It's absolutely saturated. Every consultant, every agency, every everybody wants to work with the household name retail brands. But what I witnessed, and this is one of those goes back to that pattern recognition thing that I mentioned earlier. I saw that especially during COVID B2B brands started to realize, oh my God, our sales reps can't go on the road, they can't go to job sites, they can't go and take orders in person, they can't Go schmooze. They can't go knock on doors to win new customers. Historically, manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors have relied on field sales as the primary drivers of their business. And during COVID that string to their bow was largely taken away from them. And so they realized we're not prepared to have like 90% of our revenue come through digital channels. We're just not set up to support that. And so I recognized that B2B's manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors are about five to 10 years behind their B2C and D2C counterparts when it comes to digital capabilities and digital knowledge and digital skills. So now I have focused very much on helping these brands architect, design, not only their technology stack, but their processes, their go to market, their channel mix, all that stuff. That's what I help those brands with. So I help them with search and select for the technology for their implementation partners, et cetera.
[00:34:18] Speaker E: I do want to go to Carsten for comments or questions.
[00:34:21] Speaker A: I agree that personal meeting for me it's still the way to go. I do zoom all the time, but I still try to get the in person meeting as often as I can and I even fly around the world to do that because I totally agree that there's still something missing when you do it online. It never beats the personal experience. And I believe in business, if you want to build this relationship you mentioned before, then you have to be ready to meet in person. Still, it may be different in the future, I don't know. And probably the younger generation is growing up with this technology. I mean, we have to get used to it and the younger people, they.
[00:34:59] Speaker C: Grow up with it.
[00:35:00] Speaker A: So it's probably different. But from my point of view, to do business, I still prefer in person meeting.
[00:35:07] Speaker D: Jason, when we were on the phone you mentioned that B2B was sort of like the Wild west when it comes to coming up with systems because it is so different and it is more complicated. What would a beginning entrepreneur who wants to be in the B2B market wants to use E commerce? What kind of advice would you have for them to help IT work as smooth as possible with as little money as possible?
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Depending on the category or the market that they're working in, there are different preferred ways of doing digital business with each other. If I'm a manufacturer, for example, and I'm wanting to sell via distributors, and those distributors want to do business with me, they want to buy off me as the manufacturer. What is very, very common in the digital world for distributors is what's called E procurement, meaning They've got a procurement system inside their business and they do that procurement digitally, they do it electronically. It can either be part of their ERP or it could be standalone procurement system. And they want to do it that way, they want to buy that way because it's more efficient for them to buy that way than to ring up their sales rep at the manufacturer or to send an email, or to send a fax or whatever. All the execution of the transaction and the pulling down of the products catalog from the manufacturer into their procurement system, they want to do that in an automated way. They want to be as efficient as possible because distribution margins are razor thin. And so if they have a choice of working with one manufacturer who doesn't support digital purchasing, and then they have the opportunity of working with a manufacturer that does support digital purchasing, they can save themselves 1, 2, 3% worth of cost of procurement by doing things digitally. And so that's what's called punch out. It's a colloquial called punch out. So there's a catalog that the manufacturer can send electronically to their E procurement system. They place the order through their E procurement system and a purchase order number and then that is transmitted back to the manufacturer electronically. So in addition to self service E commerce, like what we see in the B2C world, in the B2B world there's three different digital sales channels. There's the punch out I just referred to. There's edi, Electronic Data Interchange, which is one ERP talking to another erp.
[00:37:16] Speaker D: What is an erp?
[00:37:18] Speaker B: Enterprise Resource Planning System. So it's a back office business system. Then the final way, which is what I primarily help specialize in, is what's called self service E commerce, allowing manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors to set up an E commerce website where their customers can log in, they can see the catalog, they can add products to their shopping cart and they can check out. And then they usually are purchasing on account and then they get billed for that after the fact. They get billed on an invoice basis just like they would in the traditional person to person B2B world. So that's really where I help a lot of the brands I work with. They are an existing direct to consumer brand that say, for example, might have a Shopify website for their D2C sales, their customer retail sales. And Shopify now has some limited B2B capability in their Shopify plus edition of the platform. And so a lot of these D2C brands, they will dip their toes in the water of B2B by starting to offer tiered pricing or custom pricing as a tiptoe, a way to tiptoe into that. So they can still use their Shopify platform, but now they're offering custom pricing to their B2B customers based on volume purchasing and based on an on account credit based purchase instead of having to put in their credit card every every single time they make a purchase.
[00:38:33] Speaker E: So this sounds like a very complicated field. I think you can't just jump into it and know what you're doing. I think people probably need a consultant for this. How do people find you?
[00:38:43] Speaker B: Greenwood consulting.net is my website. They can also go to the E commerce edge on any podcast platform and YouTube. We've got over 430 episodes there. That gets all the way from the basics into the nitty gritty of E commerce. And I have some amazing guests with an incredible array of knowledge. And then of course connect with me on LinkedIn. I put content on LinkedIn almost every day.
[00:39:03] Speaker D: I strongly recommend that you follow up with Jason and check out what he has to offer.
[00:39:08] Speaker E: Passage to Profit the Road to Entrepreneurship with Richard Elizabeth Gerhardt. Last but certainly not least, Damorean Linton with Inertia Resources. So you worked for somebody else for a while and then decided to make the leap yourself. And you have just been knocking it out of the ballpark with this company. So please tell us all about what you're doing.
[00:39:27] Speaker C: My mentor was actually one of the first people to do what I do in the US So when he retired he left kind of a couple of us. The nest egg, the energy suppliers. So I'm actually from Houston and most of the energy suppliers in the US are based out of Houston. So I really get relationships with some of the largest energy suppliers in the world. So we just took a different marketing approach. Most broker in my field, like they have a hundred different energy suppliers and we only use the top five in the world. So it's actually so funny that Jason's talking about B2B because that's our number one channel of being able to reach out to customers. One of the things that I always believe about any business is to figure out how to differentiate yourself and how to be different than what everybody else is doing. And every single other person in my business all are going for the Fortune 500, the Fortune 1000 customers out there. And I say, you know, well, when you watching anything or when you're looking at the market, you know, most of America is small business owners. I mean, at the end of the day, typically once you get to that Large customer, you actually secure that large contract. In our field, you're taking pennies compared to when he actually talks about margin. You're not getting as if it was that small business customer where you make a little bit more of a large, large ones, you're doing a lot of work and it's a small margin. So we kind of hang our hat on that. We have a physical presence in every single state that we do business in. Right now we're in 22 states. Over my career, I've accounted for business to business and door to door wise over 5 million people in the US and in Canada being acquired on the home or business to business. So I figured myself as one of the experts when teaching people how to do that. Where it comes from, foot position, shoulder position. When I look at the customer, we're not to look at the customer, everything. So we've taken what we've learned residentially and kind of moved that over to small businesses. And it's allowed us to be able to build a connection with small business owners. You know, large CNI customers, you know, they have people that they can pay to be able to watch their energy. What we virtually do is we help small, mid sized and large businesses hedge against their future energy costs so they can get the lowest kilowatt rate possible.
[00:41:22] Speaker D: How does that work though?
[00:41:24] Speaker C: In the Northeast, what virtually happens is that the utility companies purchase the energy for homeowners or business owners that if they don't tell them where to purchase it from. Now the restrictions typically in the Northeast is those utilities are very small, so they're only capable of really purchasing six months of energy, three months of energy, or even in some cases one month of energy for a customer. And that's retail costs. That's super expensive. So a homeowner or small business can tell the utility saying, hey, I would like you to purchase five years worth of energy or six years worth of energy, or seven or eight or 10. And when they're doing that, they're getting a much lower rate compared to just having the utility purchase it in six months.
[00:42:01] Speaker D: So what is the average difference between six month contract and a five year contract?
[00:42:06] Speaker C: You're talking about over, over the term of five years. Like if I were to go back and say, look, I signed up in 2019 compared to 2024, you're talking about a 30 to 40% difference in the energy rate. Energy pricing naturally increases about 2 to 4% every single year. If everything in the world is normal, business owners will tell you right now that that numbers jump Considerably after Covid, just because when everybody went to go work from home, utility companies around the world expected people to use this energy and they didn't do that. So they've had to increase pricing over time. It's continuing to happen that are going to keep doing that so that they can get back the money, the losses they're trying to recoup over time.
[00:42:43] Speaker B: So.
[00:42:43] Speaker E: Carsten, do you have a question or comment?
[00:42:45] Speaker A: No, no, I'm really just following. I'm surprised about the energy thing. I wasn't thinking about that actually. But then again, I'm in the country where you have an energy market, so you have just one company you buy from a lot. Yeah.
[00:43:02] Speaker C: And what Carson saying, there's so in the US there's places where you, you can pick and choose who your provider can be in those places where you can't choose the energy company at all. And a lot of times in deregulated areas, which they're trying to force more states to be able to do that, you can pick and choose your provider. You can pick and choose the plan or even the purchasing strategy. And some aspects if you're a small business looking at shopper electricity.
[00:43:23] Speaker D: But I think a lot of people in the US feel like the energy companies are monopolies and they don't really consider that there could be other options. But if you told me I could save 30%, then I would become interested.
[00:43:38] Speaker C: Our industry is what we call a point of pain purchase, which means that typically people will not reach out to something that we're doing until they see a bill that's astronomical. Like, hey, what is this? And I heard about doing something about this. Let me look into this a little bit now. So that's one of the reasons that we go business to business so often. Because a lot of times, like I said before, small business owners are running their business. They're not looking at the electricity bill, they're just, you know, just paying it. And so one of the reasons our guys try to do very professional users to go buy, show them what they're doing, show them what they're using. Signal you're paying 15 cents, you should be paying 12. Using the exact same electricity company, your account number is going to stay the same. Nothing about your bill is going to change. Just instead of getting six months, you're going to buy it for five years. When you're switching your supplier, then you. Some people think that you're actually changing your light company and you can't physically even do that. Like that's what we, we we make jokes with that with customers all the time letting you know, like, hey, if we were to change your light company, we'd have to come back and move your meter around and change everything else. But what I would tell most people to understand, if hesitant about it, just understanding the rate increases are going up every single year and to protect themselves from that because it's not changing anytime soon. We can already see 2025, 2026 and 2027 curves and it's going to jump up probably about 8 to 9%.
[00:44:51] Speaker D: So what advice do you have to non business owners to residential electricity customers? What can they do to help manage their energy costs?
[00:45:01] Speaker C: Well, there's some really simple things that they could do. The first thing I tell everybody is try to keep all of your energy inside the house. That age old thing where your grandmother used to say hey, if you open the don't air condition the entire neighborhood.
Grandma was telling the truth. So try to keep your electricity or your heat and your cooling inside the house. Whenever your house starts to have to work harder to be able to cool it or heat it, you're spending more for electricity. One of the things that most people don't realize is that actually the appliances that you have that are not normally used, if they're plugged in, they're still using air. So sometimes that toaster or sometimes that air fryer that you may just have linked into the wall and you're not thinking about it, it's still using energy all the time. So a lot of people don't know that. I tell a lot of people that they don't know that energy is about five to six times more expensive between 8am and 5pM so if you're going to use the dishwasher or the washing machine or anything like that, do it in the morning, in the evening, are all off peak times on the weekends. So if you do that, your meter doesn't work as hard for your kilowatts. So if you actually wash your dishes, dishwashing, do it in the morning or do it after 6pm LED lighting works and also smart thermostats naturally. Keep everything kind of where it's at, where you can set up different parameters on it. But those are the big five things. Taking out things that are not being used, using the washing machine, washer and dryer between off peak times, trying to keep everything inside the house. Those are the big components to making sure that you keep your energy.
[00:46:26] Speaker D: That sounds good. I'm glad we bumped into each other because I feel like we're going to have enough money for another vacation this year.
[00:46:35] Speaker C: LED lighting will typically, just by itself, lower the bill about 15 to 20%. If you're doing the other stuff, you could probably get it down another 10 to 15.
[00:46:42] Speaker D: So when we first started buying LED lamps, they were saying they have a life of like 30 years, but I find myself replacing them more often than every 30 years. Right. So have they changed the construction on those, do you know?
[00:46:56] Speaker C: Or it just, it really depends on the brand and where you're getting those from.
I tell everybody that you kind of get what you pay for with those things. So try to get the best product. It may be a little bit more expensive, but you'll probably replace it less. But 30 years is a stretch, most people say. I tell people 5 to 10, regardless of what the brand says.
[00:47:16] Speaker E: Damaurian Linton with Inertia Resources.
[00:47:19] Speaker D: Where can our listeners find out more about you and Inertia Resources?
[00:47:24] Speaker C: Inertiaresourcesinc.com Our staff is on point to be able to answer questions for anybody around the country in regards to electricity, natural gas, solar projects, you know, biothermal, geothermal, community solar.
[00:47:38] Speaker D: Well, after this discussion, I have more energy than I did before we started.
[00:47:43] Speaker E: I do want to just do a shout out to you a little bit here because it says in my notes that your commercial industrial clients have experienced over a hundred million dollars in savings for some of Boston's most prominent businesses. That's amazing.
[00:47:56] Speaker C: That's pretty good. Yeah, we actually. That needs to be updated. That number is now 135 million as of today. We picked up some really big clients over the last 12 months. Some very large construction companies, some household names that we have NDAs. We picked up some major clients in the past years that were actually managing their energy horribly. And we have a 97% acceptance rate. So it's very rare that we get in front of a client and we can't help.
[00:48:20] Speaker E: How are you getting in front of these clients?
[00:48:22] Speaker C: Our main way of business, believe it or not, is business to business. But that's for our small CNI section. For a large cni, we have affiliates all over the country. I still believe that regardless of we, I mean, we do SEO marketing and everything like that, but a lot of our major clients are because we have someone that owns a private equity company or hedge fund and they make introductions to us based on relationships. So we try to make sure that all of our clients are very well taken care of and they actually go out and pursue other clients for us. And our I would be totally honest. Our largest customers that we have, which I would say our top 200 to 500 were not because we knocked on the door. It wasn't because we emailed them. It wasn't because of a call. It was because hey, though, this company helped us out. I think you should talk to them.
[00:49:07] Speaker E: Client referrals awesome. You are listening to Passage to Profit the Road to Entrepreneurship with Richard Elizabeth Gerhardt. Our special guest today, Carsten Pfau and two amazing presenters. This has just been a great show, but don't go away yet because they're going to tell you their secrets.
[00:49:23] Speaker C: I'm Jack, CEO and co
[email protected] when I left my job as a Wall street banker back in my 20s, I.
[00:49:30] Speaker D: Felt completely lost trying to navigate the.
[00:49:33] Speaker C: Process of hiring a financial advisor. I thought it should be easy to find the right financial advisor.
[00:49:39] Speaker D: So I created a place where young.
[00:49:40] Speaker C: Families could feel understood and their unique needs would be met with empathy and expertise. That's why I started usehabits.com where we help you find your financial advisor free of charge.
[00:49:52] Speaker D: Use habits.com it's passage to Profit now it's time for Noah's Retrospective.
[00:49:59] Speaker E: Noah Fleischman is our producer here at Passage to Profit, and he never stops trying to make sense of the future by looking at the past.
[00:50:08] Speaker B: I just can't stand those disruptive ads that break in when I'm browsing YouTube, especially when I'm watching a file of classic television commercials. I don't think anyone's ever going to admit to a fondness for television commercials, much less to a fondness for watching them. But then again, try to explain why all those bundle videos of all those eternal commercial breaks from decades past are now the most visited files out there. Truth is, for many of us, those commercials were the wallpaper of our impressionable past. We're the TV generation and we're cherishing our memories even if we don't want to live in the past. A few good minutes with the old commercials is worth a smile. We can live around the new ones. A woman I know actually tells me her teenage daughter likes to watch those current day ads on her device all the time. Now that's what you call a contemporary figure.
[00:50:53] Speaker F: Now more with Richard and Elizabeth. Passage to Profit.
[00:50:57] Speaker E: And now it is time for Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind. So I'm going to go to Carsten first. What's a secret you can share with our audience?
[00:51:05] Speaker A: It's an interesting question. I mean, if I tell you, it would not be a secret anymore.
I think it's some pretty plain, basic stuff. Don't make up any excuses, especially not to yourself, and give it your all. This is something you really have to do and be brave enough to delegate. I believe that that could be some advice I would give people.
[00:51:28] Speaker E: That's excellent. Okay, Jason Greenwood, what's your secret?
[00:51:32] Speaker B: My recommendation is hone your empathy gene at every opportunity. Empathy is a superpower in business, and being able to walk a mile in your customer's shoes is a super important part of being able to form a connection with them that will last the test of the ages. That's the reality. And as I said earlier, I think one of the ways you can do that the best is to travel as early and as often as you can, live in as many countries as you can, experience as many cultures and languages and colors and just do business with as many people globally as you possibly can. Just try to see the world through as many other people's eyes as you possibly can, and that will naturally help you to be a more empathetic person.
[00:52:13] Speaker D: I think that's really a great comment. And it's easier now than it ever was before. Forty years ago, getting on a plane and going to a foreign country was a big deal. And now travel is so much easier, especially for young entrepreneurs. I think it's a real opportunity to go and travel around and live in different places, meet different kinds of people. And I think that those experiences will help you in your professional and personal life too.
[00:52:40] Speaker E: And if you're traveling in the U.S. do the TSA pre check. It's definitely worth it.
Maury and Linton, what is your secret that you're willing to share?
[00:52:50] Speaker C: I have two. It's one of my favorite quotes. I think I kind of took it from somebody and made it myself. We do things today that other people won't, so tomorrow we can do things that other people people can't. So I would say to run a successful business, you have to have a lot of humility. You have to also be able to throw your ego out the door. One thing about me, when I was starting my business, I was willing to put on any hat every day, whether that was a sales hat or if it was a marketing hat or if it was an Internet hat or whatever it was. For the first six months here in Boston, I would walk to the field for a half a mile to a mile a day just to be able to go to prospect the customers. And a lot of people aren't willing to do. I would say the other thing is make sure that you try to plan for the worst. I used to make sure that every single time I ever said I dealt with somewhere, I was going to talk to every big client that we would speak to, you know, what objection are they going to come up with? And just go through it and play through it with my mind over and over and over, like, how is this going to mess up? Like, it's going to mess up. Let me plan for it. And I train our people to do that. And it's made them so much better when they're going to go to their one large meeting or two large meeting, their planning in the back of their mind, like, what could this customer possibly say, possibly come up with? Because a lot of time in sales, we go in there thinking, hey, this is a great proposal. I talked to him already. This is great. And then you go in there and you get blindsided because you don't go through and think of how that could kind of mess up. So that's what we train our people to do. And I would say that it's really, really helped us be able to grow, as they call it, Murphy it out. Murphy's Law. It's the worst thing.
[00:54:15] Speaker E: That's really great advice, too.
[00:54:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:54:17] Speaker D: And I mean, I think in the law business, too, those two tools that you mentioned, you know, preparation, you want to understand what your witness. Witness is going to say before you ask the question so that you have an appropriate response. And the other part of that is people used to ask, well, what do you do, Richard? And I would say, well, I write term papers for a living. I sit there and I write patents and long documents. And a lot of people don't have the patience for that. But that's part of the profession. Eventually you get trained to do that, but it's also something that other people don't necessarily want to do. I try to stay organized, and I'm constantly surprised by people who are winging it every day. And I think you lose a certain level of productivity if you don't invest some time in that activity. So that's my secret.
[00:55:05] Speaker E: You are a good one.
[00:55:07] Speaker D: Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer, Noah Fleischman, and our program coordinator, Alicia Morrissey and Rishiket Busari. Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find
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