[00:00:00] Speaker A: How do you get through all the pitfalls of growth and the messy middle and the growth paradox and all these different things without falling off the cliff?
[00:00:07] Speaker B: You can bypass all these expensive market research consultants.
[00:00:11] Speaker C: 60 minutes is fine. 60 minutes turned into 5 hours.
[00:00:14] Speaker D: I'm Richard Gerhardt.
[00:00:15] Speaker E: And I'm Elizabeth Gerhart. You just heard some snippets from our show. Stay tuned to hear tips about how you can start your business.
[00:00:24] Speaker F: Ramping up your business.
[00:00:26] Speaker D: The time is near.
[00:00:27] Speaker F: You've given it heart. Now get it in gear. It's passage to profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:00:35] Speaker D: I'm Richard Gerhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
[00:00:42] 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.
[00:00:49] Speaker D: Are you one of the two in five Americans wanting to start your own business or already a business owner? Stay tuned. This show is about starting and growing your business. Welcome to passage the road to entrepreneurship, where we learn why and how ordinary people, just like you, started and grew their businesses. And we also talk about the intellectual property that helps protect your innovations. Today on our show, we have John St. Pierre. He's an author, entrepreneur, coach, and co host of the entrepreneurs United podcast, and we are really looking forward to speaking with him.
[00:01:23] Speaker E: Have you ever been stranded waiting for help forever? Seemingly more than once? If so, rmeasterly with them, spelled t h y I m, has a solution for you. And then after we hear from her, we are going to hear Justin Chen talk about Pikfu. P I c k f u, which is really something that I could use because I just went through this situation with someone I'm trying to come up with.
[00:01:51] Speaker D: Sounds like a really neat idea. I can't wait to hear about it.
[00:01:54] Speaker G: So, yeah.
[00:01:55] Speaker D: But before we get to our distinguished guests, it's time to talk about your exciting new business journey. Two in five Americans want to start a new business. So should you start a new business journey? Often our listeners ask, how do I identify my ideal customer? Let's turn to our guests to find out how they identify their ideal customers. John, talk to us a little bit about how you identified your ideal customer.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: I never actually believed that the riches were in the niches. I actually believed everybody could be my customer. I could actually go after everybody. Let me build this product that everybody can use, or everybody can you. We can service everybody. And it wasn't until I realized that the more specific you can be and I know, Elizabeth, you do a lot of marketing stuff. The more specific you can be on exactly who you're targeting. You can be so focused in your marketing, spend in your focus, and when the people see your message, they resonate with it and they click on it. And so the one tip that I learned that changed everything for me was to visualize my ideal customer with very, very, very specific visualization techniques. What is this person's name? Where do they live? Do they have a family? Not family. What kind of car do they drive? How old are they? What do they do in their daily lives? Why do they need your tool? And very, very specifically outline two to three customers that are your ideal visualized customer as a very specific pinpoint. And then you can build around that to get a little more general, but be very, very specific on who you're targeting. And that really helped me. That visualization component changed everything for me.
[00:03:22] Speaker D: That's great. That's great advice. Justin, how did you identify your ideal customer?
[00:03:27] Speaker B: We kind of had the similar approach to John where at first we thought we could build a tool that was going to be helpful for everyone. We put it up on the Internet. We thought all entrepreneurs could use it, and they can, but it's incredibly hard to market to everyone. So what we did, we started with a hypothesis, and then we just kind of watched customer behavior. We talked to our customers. In the beginning, we thought it was going to be other bootstrap entrepreneurs like us. As it is, they don't have a lot of money, so it definitely helps.
[00:03:51] Speaker D: Not ideal from that standpoint.
[00:03:53] Speaker H: Exactly.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: Ideal is kind of mutual, right? So it kind of pivoted to authors for a while, self publishing authors, testing book titles and book covers, which are also great, but it's not a very recurrent activity. Then we started having game companies testing characters and all that kind of stuff, marketing assets. And then we finally landed on e commerce brands. And what we found was that there were so many product decisions that they were making with such a valuable impact. So product design and packaging, branding, marketing assets, and with such frequent cadence that this became our ideal customer. And so it actually took quite a bit of searching and analysis and talking to customers for us to identify our ideal customer. I wouldn't advise people to get caught up on saying, like, I have to know this from day one before starting my business, because you could have a product vision or a hypothesis, and you just kind of have to keep testing that and flexing that in the market.
[00:04:44] Speaker D: That's great. Rm Easterly, how did you identify your ideal customer?
[00:04:50] Speaker C: Well, I was my ideal customer because I was the one that got stranded.
But I ended up working for all the gig companies and the major roadside company that left me stranded for 5 hours on a busy highway and learned that I was not the only person that had ever been stranded for hours waiting with roadside assistance, but also learning that people needed help inside and outside. It's everyone. So we actually don't have a specific target market because two thirds of the population is 18 and up that will require our service or that would actually need it. So the customer was anyone that needed help.
[00:05:27] Speaker D: There you go. That sounds great. Elizabeth, how do you identify your ideal customers?
[00:05:33] Speaker E: I think talking to people and seeing really who does really want this and who's really motivated and would want to spend their money that way. So I've been talking to a lot people about the podcast studio. Some people are more serious than other people, and I have changed my target market a little since I first got this idea. I do want to have it for people that just want to do a podcast, but I think I would love to get business clients more.
[00:05:55] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:05:55] Speaker E: So, yeah, just talking and seeing what people really want.
[00:05:58] Speaker D: Yeah, I agree. For the law firm, we've been doing intellectual property law now for 18 years, and really, our practice has evolved over time. So I think our ideal customer has actually changed over that period. And part of it depends on the team that we have. If people have certain skills and patents or copyrights or trademarks or, or maybe litigation, then our marketing sort of changes to kind of focus and search for clients that need those kinds of skills. You know, I'm not really sure that the search for the ideal customer ever really ends right. As the business grows or changes, I think your ideal customers can also grow and change. So I think that when people want to start their new business journey, pinpointing the ideal customer is really an important part of that. And so now it's time for our entrepreneur extraordinaire, John St. Pierre. Just an amazing guy in so many different ways, and we're so excited to have him on the show. He's an author, and he's also an entrepreneur who created two very successful companies, each $50 million. So it actually takes, I think, a lot of skill and talent to do that. And he's not just an entrepreneur, he's a visionary leader. And he co founded and scaled, as I mentioned, the two companies with over 50 million in global revenue. So welcome to the show, John, really great to have you here. Tell us a little bit about what you do and what you bring to the people that you work with.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: In terms of what I do today, I'm the chairperson of a company called Rhombus Group. We're a private holding company with five small, medium sized businesses totaling somewhere around 150 million in revenues. I also am an entrepreneur coach, so I work one on one with entrepreneurs. And very specifically, to your question of my target customer, who I'm looking to work with, it's very specifically I work with entrepreneurs that have been in business 510 plus years, that have scaled their business to between five to 20 million and are looking to grow their companies to 100 million. And along that journey, how do you get through all the pitfalls of growth and the messy middle and the growth paradox and all these different things without falling off the cliff? Because I did one of those companies you mentioned, I grew to $58 million in global revenues after 15 years of a bootstrap hobby startup business. 15 years later, we're $58 million in global revenues. And I got fired from my own company.
[00:08:21] Speaker D: You got fired from your own company?
[00:08:23] Speaker E: I've heard of that happening.
[00:08:24] Speaker D: How did that happen?
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Oh, boy. Well, there's a lot of stories around that one. But ultimately, I lost control of the ship. And what I mean by that is I had a vision to grow this company to 100 million plus. And when we were around $10 million in revenues, I went to my partners, I said, five years, a hundred million. Let's go. I know how to do this. Let's go. Make it happen. Had banking partners lined up, had a small investor lined up. Let's go. So we raised $5 million of capital, got some bank financing, went, started acquiring some businesses, got to around 50 million plus. And I'm like, okay, we're right on target. Let's keep going. Let's raise the next round. But this next round's got to be a little bit bigger. We probably need to raise around 20 million this time to raise the right capital to acquire these last few pieces, to get to 100. And in that capital raise, I made some drastic mistakes and basically lost control of the management of the board and the faith of the board in that process. And within six months of that capital coming in, they replaced me with somebody they thought was more apt to run the company to the next level and showed me the door. And what happened is I was chasing this revenue growth. Meanwhile, my equity was going the other way.
[00:09:29] Speaker D: Oh, no.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: And I was deluding myself through this process and really didn't have alignment to what I was thinking.
[00:09:34] Speaker D: So for our listeners who aren't so familiar with the concepts of raising capital. Can you talk just a little bit about what that means?
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I wrote a book recently called the $100 million journey, and it came out on November 30, 2023, which was five year anniversary from the day I was terminated from our company. And the first principle in that book, I go through seven principles of entrepreneurial success. The first principle is build and protect your equity. And when you form a company, what typically happens is you don't have that confidence to go alone. So you bring on partners. Hey, let's go in this together. A third, a third, a third or 50 50? Let's do this together. Well, how many partnerships like that ultimately stand the test of time? In other words, there's equilibrium. Somebody's providing more, somebody's providing less. Life changes and partnerships become somewhat problematic. But as an entrepreneur, equity is how you will create wealth through this thing called business. So everybody glamorizes raising capital. I was glamorizing it. Oh, my gosh, we just raised 20 million. This is great. We're going here. We're going to make this thing happen. But ultimately, equity costs something. And so when you give up your equity, you're actually giving up control. You're giving up your ability to grow your business for the future. And so I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, of which principle two in my book is build your own capital. If you build your own capital through proper net operating cash flows, you don't need outside capital. You don't need to go hat in hand to investors and bankers to loan money, dilute your equity. So control your own fate and don't be glamorized by, I got to go raise capital. Go create your own capital by selling your goods and services.
[00:11:04] Speaker D: I think those are important lessons. I think a lot of our audience are people who are looking to start lifestyle businesses. But there's also a percentage who are really focused on creating a big, impactful company that has shareholders and that can grow at an enormous rate.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: A lot of startup entrepreneurs have a vision of what they want to build, and it could be a lifestyle business like you talked about, or a high performance big business. But there's also ways that this is where the magic sauce is. There are ways to create a high performance business where you don't have that many shareholders if you structure it the right way. Right. So I'm now the majority owner of 100 million plus dollar company in control of my own destiny. That's a much different picture than somebody who's trying to grow a large business and own 10% of it. So there's a lot of things to consider in that journey. So, you know, I mentioned principle one, build and protect your equity. Number two is grow your own capital so you're not dependent on anybody else. Principle three is reinvest that capital very smartly in that company. I lost. I was making profits in this business venture. I was LiKE, oh, let's diversify. Let's go over here. And we were taking good net operating cash flow and putting it into other areas to try and grow too wide and not sticking with our niche and what we did. And we were making strong margins of our business. We try to diversify too quickly. So reinvest smartly is principle three. Principle four is build a culture of intrapreneurship. Build a team that treats this business like your own. You need that in order to grow your business and have people that can really think like an owner within the business. Principle five is protect the house. You went through all the work of building this business, but as an entrepreneur, there's a hundred holes in the boat, and you plug 99. You guys are attorneys. Where's the water come out?
It comes out of that hundredth pole. You did not plug. It will. It's vulnerabilities. And how many entrepreneurs assess their vulnerabilities, have proper protections? Build a group of protectors around them, advisors, and protectors like attorneys, cpas, wealth advisors, that can help them protect every decision they're going to make. So that's principle five. Principle six is accessing owners liquidity. A lot of entrepreneurs think the only way they're going to get cash out of this thing is if they sell it. That's not necessarily true. There are ways, and tax efficient ways to move money from your balance sheet of your company to your personal balance sheet. Your personal balance sheet helps the company, helps the entrepreneurs within that company potentially gain a little bit more juice out of what they're doing and really helps the company propel its growth. And then principle seven, which is the beautiful one of them all, is how do you move from CEO to chairperson? You know, today I'm the chairperson of the company. We have CEO's in all of our companies. I don't operate within the businesses. I'm able to focus at a very strategic level. And the amount of times over my 25 years as an entrepreneur, I heard someone say, john, you got to work on the business, not in the business. I'm like, yeah, it's a lot easier said than done, buddy. My sleeves are up to here. I got dirt all over it. I'm shoveling. You're telling me to work on the business. How am I going to do that? Well, you can't do that until you do principles one through six.
[00:13:49] Speaker E: It's very, very hard to find the right people in the right position so that you do feel like you can step back and go to the more strategic growth planning for a company. I mean, with Gearhart Law, Richard has struggled with that. And how do you find the right people? What do you look for?
[00:14:06] Speaker A: I think, first off, we have a real big problem with our entrepreneurs in America is they don't know how to interview. The real big problem I'm finding is that we hire fast and fire slow when it should be maybe the other way around, which is you got to be very diligent with how you're hiring people and bringing people into your culture and into your organization. So profiling exactly what you need in each role is very important. But then when we bring them in, we got a secondary problem in America, is entrepreneurs don't train appropriately. They throw them to the wolves and they say, oh, we're too busy. Just jump in and figure it out. And they don't provide them enough guidance and coaching and support. But then if you think about today's work environment, too, today's workforce, they want to feel like they're a part of something. They don't want to feel like a number. They don't want to feel like a paycheck. They want to feel like they're a part of this business. So how do you create structures? I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs about creating phantom equity structures where, you know your top level management, as they grow to that level, can actually be part in the growth, appreciation of the value of the company as a bonus program, not necessarily as equity, because that's principle one. You got to protect that. But how do you bring people into the organization and make them feel like they're a part of it and allow them to grow, allow them to fail. Provide situational leadership and servant leadership techniques to help foster their growth so they can take on more and be challenged by more and own a p and l of the business. You have to develop that talent. Every business is very different. I know, Richard, a few people in the law industry, and that's a very tough one because of the nature of that industry. And students are graduating that want to work in the high rise buildings downtown New York City, and it is a different climate. But you have to be really, really diligent at bringing on the right people into your culture, leading them appropriately and making sure you guide them and train them to, you know, think like an owner.
[00:15:40] Speaker E: I agree. I mean, that has been a challenge.
[00:15:42] Speaker D: The other part of it is a lot of people go to law school to practice law. They don't necessarily go to become a business owner or a manager. And I think that's probably true in a lot of different professions. And so finding the people who are capable on the professional side, but also have an interest in the managerial side, there aren't that many people out there who really have that kind of passion. But we do take steps. We give our team members lots of opportunities to try new things, and they get to work in different parts of the administrative side of the business so that they understand the invoicing and the accounting and the administrative systems. And so, over time, my two significant partners have gotten more and more opportunities in those areas.
[00:16:28] Speaker E: I want to talk about the coaching. I have a coach right now who's helping me with this podcasting stuff, who I adore. She is amazing. And I'm not at the level where I could use you as a coach, John, but don't you think that people need, no matter how much their companies are worth, they need coaches, like, forever, all the way through.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: Let me fall on the sword on this one. During the rapid rise of that company that I lost, I was building a business. And one of my best friends, he's actually the co host of the Entrepreneurs United podcast. His name is Rich Hoffman. He's an executive with certapro painters. You guys may know that.
[00:17:00] Speaker D: Oh, sure. We use them many times. Yeah.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Rich has been a best friend of mine for 25 plus years, and he calls me in the midst of our rise, like, we're, let's call it, we're 35 going on 50 million. Like, we're cooking. And he calls me and he says, john, I'm looking for a new coach. He's like, would you be interested in a mutual coaching arrangement where I coach you and you coach me? Because we've had this relationship forever, and let's do this. And I was like, yeah, rich, like, I don't think I have time. Like, right now, I'm just, I got so many things going on. He says, okay. He says, well, who's coaching you? I said, coach. I don't need a coach. Like, I have my plan. I know what I'm doing. I don't need anybody right now. Like, I have this vision. I'm big in this company to 100 million. It wasn't. But 18 months later, I was fired. I didn't surround myself with the protectors, the coaches, the mentors, you know, bouncing ideas by them. Does this sound right? Does this shareholder agreement look right? Like, should I bring these investors in this way? Like, I wasn't consulting anybody. I was just full of vinegar, thinking, I know everything that's going on. I'm going to get everything figured out because I have this done. And it was that rude moment of bang smacking right in the face or in the gut or whatever you want to call it, that I was on the floor going, oh, my gosh, what a bozo. I didn't surround myself with the best coaches, this protector group, like I mentioned earlier, attorneys and cpas and wealth advisors to consult with today, I don't make one decision without all my board of advisors around me. If it's a big decision, I'll make small decisions, I'll eat lunch and I'll do different things and we'll make decisions in our business.
[00:18:22] Speaker D: I'll have the turkey today.
[00:18:26] Speaker A: Any one door decision which is irreversible, there's a lot of two door decisions we make as entrepreneurs. No problem, you can reverse that. But any one door decision, such as bringing on investors, selling your equity, doing things like that you cannot reverse, you should never, ever, ever do without the proper group of advisors coaches around you and surrounding you. So, yes, Elizabeth, everybody needs coaches and advisors, and I failed at that once miserably.
[00:18:49] Speaker E: I agree. I think all through the whole process, but different coaches at different levels probably.
[00:18:55] Speaker D: Because you really do need the different perspectives of different people because we don't all see things the same way. And getting input from a lot of different sources, I think is important. And in some ways, it kind of runs counter to your instincts as an entrepreneur. You're doing it because you want to do it kind of your way. Right. Part of the entrepreneurial challenge is proving that your theory, whatever it is, is going to work itself out. And so that's where your focus is. But you definitely need people in your circle who are going going to push back and say, no, don't do that. That's not the right thing to do, and at least consider their opinion before you make a decision.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: Yeah. The world's best have multiple coaches. I always like to give the Tom Brady example, best in the world, multiple Super Bowls. He has a nutrition coach, a quarterback coach, a strength coach, a recovery coach, a mindset coach. He's got all these different coaches helping him make sure he's the best at his game. But yes, us entrepreneurs, Richard, like you said, we think we got it all figured out. We got, we don't need any help. That's a sign of weakness. We don't need help like, we got this. Well, it's the complete opposite. We need to surround ourselves with the best.
[00:19:56] Speaker E: So what do you think is the best piece of advice you've ever gotten from a coach or somebody else?
[00:20:01] Speaker A: It's this concept of patient ambition. I had reckless ambition and that's why I failed. I now exercise patient ambition, still ambitious. I still want to build. I still want to grow. I want to maximize life offerings. I still got a lot of things going on, but I do it now with patience. I do it now with, I don't have to make a decision today if it's a big decision. I'm going to take my time and probably think about it. My group around me. I don't have to go raise capital today to grow my fat, my company faster so I can dilute my equity and put myself in that position. I want to be more in control of my own destiny. And I think patient ambition was the key to that. And once I got that key from a coach, I was like, yeah, that's it. I need more patience.
[00:20:37] Speaker E: That's a tough one for me. Richard's pretty good at patience.
[00:20:41] Speaker D: I don't know. I feel like I'm impatient on a lot of things because you realize you only have so much time, you only have so much bandwidth, and so you're, you want to get from point a to point b, and so you're going to rush through some things. But I do think, though, that especially on the big stuff, if you're taking on new big commitments, you need to let it marinate for a little bit and think about it because how it looks today is going to look different tomorrow.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: Well, I'd say you guys have it. Patient ambition.
[00:21:12] Speaker E: Yeah, we just have to put it together.
[00:21:15] Speaker D: This is great. We're talking with John St. Pierre, the.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: Author of the hundred million Dollar Journey.
[00:21:21] Speaker D: And he's also the co host of Entrepreneurs United podcast. But we'll be back with more John and our other guests. And also coming up at the end of the show, our secrets of the entrepreneur mind. We'll be back right after this. On passage to profit.
[00:21:37] Speaker F: I represent low cost airlines, and we know a lot of you are not traveling right now. And we understand. However, if you do need to travel between now and the end of the year, now is a great time to lock in some of the lowest prices we've seen in a lifetime. Hey, in normal times, we can save you up to 75%. But now airlines are practically giving away seats. We have inside deals on over 500 airlines. Here are a few sample round trip deals we found. Seattle to Vegas, $35 Chicago to Atlanta, $85. Los Angeles to Atlanta, $100. Of course, there are some limitations, but the airlines want your business right now, and cancellation and change feeds are flexible. So fly somewhere this year. Book now, save a ton. Call right now. 8589-8747-7858-9874-7785-8987-477 that's 858-98-7477 have you ever met a single person in your life that enjoys paying taxes? No. No one does. If you can't sleep at night because you have a huge problem with the IR's, I've got some free advice for you. This service is strictly limited to individuals that owe the IR's $10,000 or more in back taxes. And if you qualify, we can guarantee that you won't be writing a big fat check to the IR's or our services cost you nothing. The first 100 people that call today will get a free tax consultation worth $500. Stop worrying about your IR's problem. We can help you. We promise. Call the tax doctor right now. I mean right now. To learn more. 800 9178-5468-0091-7854-68. Hundred 917-8546 that's 809 178546. Now back to passage to profit once again, Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart and our.
[00:23:42] Speaker E: Special guest, John St. Pierre. And it's really interesting. He is helping people really catapult their companies, helping entrepreneurs. He's an entrepreneur coach. We've just been asking him kind of how he does it. He has a book about it. I do see something here in the show notes, why Cash is king and queen. Tell us about queen cash and king cash.
[00:24:04] Speaker D: I've never heard of queen Cash before.
[00:24:07] Speaker A: Well, we want to be correct here. Cash is not King Cash is king and queen. But the saying is, if there's 100 entrepreneurs in the room, and you said, who measures the performance of their business based on their profit and loss statement? Like 99 hands would go up. That's how most entrepreneurs measure their performance.
But the reality is the profit and loss statement tells one part of the story. And Alan Milt, he wrote the cash chapter with Verne harnish in the book scaling up. It's a really popular business book. And I interviewed him and he said, you know what the problem is? Just looking at your profit and loss statement is like reading the first chapter of a murder mystery novel and thinking, you know how it's going to end. It's not the full story. Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity. It's really cash as king and queen. And how do you calculate net operating cash flow? And he proceeded to tell me, you know what, John, he's like, I've interviewed 3000 CEO's and I'm in this business. Not one of them could correctly tell me how to calculate net operating cash flow. Do you know how? And im like no. And by the way, I got a degree in accounting. I was an entrepreneur for 25 plus years. And I understood the p and l very well. I understood the balance sheet really well. And I had graduated to now evaluating my business at the balance sheet level, that kind of graduated to that level. But how much net operating cash flow is your business generating? That will tell you how fast your company can afford to grow. And then theres a Harvard Business review actually titled that how fast can your company afford to grow? Well that was an article that I had missed, right. Because I was trying to grow my company from basically zero to 100 million, trying to grow 50% a year plus. But the reality is when you ran the numbers on what my self financeable growth rate is, which is theres a way to calculate self financeable growth rate, my company could probably afford to grow around 5% but I was growing 50%. Where does that 45% delta come from? Bank debt investors over leveraging your balance sheet and diluting your own equity and putting yourself in the position to get fired. And that's why cash is king and queen.
[00:26:08] Speaker E: The problem with investors is, yes, they give you money, but they take a piece of your company. So that's what diluting the equity is, right. So you don't own 100% of your company, they own a piece of it. So the more that you give away, the less of it you own.
[00:26:21] Speaker D: The more your business grows. And the more complex it becomes, the bigger the challenge is in managing cash flow. And for a long time I tried to keep everything in my head and I would look at the bank balance and I would look at our profit and loss statement and I would be doing all these mental gymnastics. Okay, I've got payroll coming up and I've got this credit card payment that's due here. And I'd write it all out. And then based on that, I would kind of try to figure out what bills I was going to pay when. But the problem with that is if you are going to grow, you have to turn some of the money back into the business and you don't really know how much of that you can afford to do. And what can end up happening is that you take on debt, credit card debt or line of credit debt, and you can, if you're not careful, you can get yourself into trouble with that, right? And you're trying to finance your growth through those strategies, but then you don't even know if that growth is actually paying off. And then at some point, you just can't go any further with that. So you really need an operation that really runs efficiently and is consistently profitable. But I would be interested in knowing, John, how you kind of attack this cash flow problem, and especially as it pertains to maybe smaller companies that are just getting started and how new business owners can help manage their cash issues.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: Yeah, Richard, I think your listeners should rewind the last 45 seconds and listen to you again. What you said was exactly correct. Exactly correct. You can grow a business. You can grow a business to 100 million and grow yourself poor and not own any of it and be over leveraged and lose it all. That's the story, right? You can grow yourself poor. You can grow yourself out of business, because as your business grows, you need oxygen, and oxygen comes through really knowing what your net operating cash flow is and how you're calculating that. And are you generating enough cash to further finance your continued growth? And so what happens is a lot of small business entrepreneurs, to speak to that audience specifically, is they feel like they got to go raise capital right off the bat, as opposed to, no, no, no, go sell one or two of your widgets or one or two of your services or whatever, and generate cash. Then take that cash, know how much cash you're generating, and then reinvest what you can properly reinvest and grow slower on a more patient ambition level where you're fully in control. We were too anxious. We want to, like, go, go. We want to chase the shiny object. And believe me, I'm that person. I want to go too fast sometimes. That's why this patient ambition thought of grow the cash you need to fuel your business and how to do that. The best tool I can give is on my website, which is 100 mjourney.com. so 100,000,100 mjourney.com dot. I have a free workbook on there, just thousands and thousands of dollars of value on it. But the one biggest tool that's in there, there's a financial workbook where you, all you have to do is punch in your p and l and your balance sheet numbers, and it'll automatically calculate your net operating cash flow and your self financeable growth rate rate. And that's been an eye opener. I did a session with, with a company, a franchise company with many of their franchisees. And in one call I said, in this hour and a half, I'm going to show you guys how to generate an additional $100,000 of net operating cash flow this year by changing two or three things. And it was all in working capital. It was all on the days that their Ars and their AP's are their inventory days. It was all in those things that sometimes you're just growing, you don't have time to think about. But all you have to do is make two or three tweaks and all of a sudden you can generate more cash flow to infuse in your growth.
[00:29:42] Speaker E: So what I'm hearing you say is step back or step up to a higher level, and don't look at money as just like a dollar came in the door today, but you have to look at it from a really high level and how it's flowing through your organization. I think one thing that your heart law that we've come to terms with is getting a lot of clients is great, but you don't necessarily want every client, because if they're not going to pay their bills, you know, then it's actually costing you money to have that client instead of bringing money in 100%.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: And in that workbook I mentioned, one of the things that's in there is called a customer cash flow ladder. You can actually look at all of your customers in this particular format to determine how much marginal cash margin you're making on each of those customers. And you're right. A lot of entrepreneurs who think their best customers are their best customers are not. Some of their best customers are not their best customers because of how they pay. You may have a good gross margin on them, but if they're not paying you on time, you're not generating the net operating cash flow you need. You're better off with a lower margin customer who pays you in advance.
[00:30:38] Speaker D: Interesting point. We've worked with clients who say, well, we pay in 120 days, so you end up tying up a lot of people who are working, you know, attorney labor, administrative labor, and then you can't pay them from that invoice for 120 days. So you have to come up with a way to finance that. And so it's a big challenge. So John St. Pierre, the author of.
[00:31:01] Speaker A: The hundred million Dollar Journey, and he's.
[00:31:04] Speaker D: Also the co host of Entrepreneurs United podcast can you tell us how people can find you.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Any social media handle at Johnstpierre 100, also at the forementioned website 100 mjourney.com dot, you can find me there. All the information, the free workbook as well as links to Amazon to buy the book if you're interested.
[00:31:22] Speaker D: Well, that's great. Please, everybody, reach out to John. If you have any questions. Check out his book. And now it's time for IP in the news.
[00:31:31] Speaker E: Elizabeth, Apple has come up with a new pair of glasses. I don't know if you guys remember Google Glass.
[00:31:37] Speaker D: I remember Google glasses. I never doubted.
[00:31:39] Speaker E: I met one guy that worked at Google that was wearing a pair of them when he came to a meetup event.
[00:31:44] Speaker D: Oh, really?
[00:31:45] Speaker E: Yeah. But otherwise, I never saw anybody. But now Apple's taking a crack at this, right?
[00:31:50] Speaker D: It was only a matter of time.
[00:31:51] Speaker E: They have an issued patent on it. And it's really kind of interesting what these glasses are supposed to do. The thing that I thought was the most interesting, I mean, they're supposed to do a bunch of different things, but is they can tell where you're looking.
[00:32:02] Speaker D: So you can tell where you're glancing.
[00:32:04] Speaker E: Track your eye moves.
[00:32:05] Speaker D: I don't know. I mean, that's just like, like too much information, I guess if you walk into a store and they would want to see what products on what shelves you're looking at.
[00:32:16] Speaker E: Yeah, but that's benefiting them, not you. But the one thing that would be of a benefit to somebody like me is that they do have GPS built in.
[00:32:25] Speaker D: That's right. When we're wandering around New York City and we can't find the restaurant and.
[00:32:29] Speaker E: They, they say they can go opaque, so you can use them for meditation or for, for sleeping. And it was just a recently released patent. Let me see if there were some other really cool things.
[00:32:39] Speaker D: Well, you can use them for meditation. Like, they'll turn themselves off and the glasses can detect whether you're sleeping or awake. So you wouldn't want to take these to any really boring meetings because otherwise the powers that be would be able to detect whether you're paying attention.
[00:32:54] Speaker E: But the other thing is the opaque structures may be used in head mounted devices such as virtual reality goggles that have forward facing cameras. So virtual reality goggles with cameras that capture images of the real world so you feel like you're walking around virtually, but it's in the real world.
[00:33:12] Speaker D: Anyway, I think we should ask our guests what they think about this exciting new technical development. John, you're on the hot seat again. Tell us, what do you think about this?
[00:33:21] Speaker A: Love it. I think, Elizabeth, what you were just talking about is called augmented reality, which is you have your reality, and then they augment it. So when you're walking, you can see different things. And I saw something recently. It was this weekend, actually, there was a sailing competition on tv, but what they did is they overlaid on the water, almost like a football field kind of thing, with, like, the. They can't go out this outskirt and where they needed to go, but it was all digitally put on the tv. Like, it augmented the reality of just the water and the sailboat. And so that's what I think is coming, is augmented reality. Through these glasses, where you actually are walking down the street, you do see the sidewalk, you do see the people walking by you. But as you look up at the store and look at the shoes in the shoe store, it'll be like, oh, yeah, here's how much these shoes cost, and here's what this is, and a whole bunch of different things.
And Richard, what you just mentioned already exists our business. One of the businesses we have is pretty big in the digital signage business. And what people don't understand is when you go into these retail environments and you look up at a digital sign, they actually count how many people look at it. Are you a male or female? What your age demographics are, how long you looked at the sign, that's all already in these digital signage. They already have this. Who's looking at me?
[00:34:28] Speaker D: I feel so scoped out. I mean, this is the world that we're living in. Rm Easterly, what are your thoughts?
[00:34:34] Speaker C: I love the idea.
[00:34:35] Speaker D: Justin.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I love the augmented reality aspect of where these glasses are going. I was just on vacation in Japan, and I was using the Google Translate app quite a bit, using their camera functionality, where you can just have it overlay the translations. And to be able to do that in glasses automatically based off where my eyes are looking, would be incredibly useful for any traveler, especially where you're not able to read the local language. So I could see the ability to track where you're looking to be. An important ip for the Apple glasses.
[00:35:05] Speaker D: Is if you put it in that kind of context, it has a real practical benefit. Don't forget that if you want to learn more about patents like the one we just talked about, you can go to learn more about Patents.com, or you can go to learn more about trademarks.com. and in either place, you can download a white paper, or you can set up a consultation with a Gearhart law attorney. Time for another commercial break.
[00:35:31] Speaker E: Passage to profit the road to entrepreneurship with our special guest, John St. Pierre, and your hosts, Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. We will be right back.
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[00:37:25] Speaker F: 808 244596. 808 two, four 4596-824-4596 that's 808 244596. Passage to profit continues with Richard and.
[00:37:42] Speaker D: Elizabeth Gearhold and we are just having a really great discussion. Our featured guest today, John St. Pierre, and he has a lot of really interesting insights about entrepreneurism. And we just finished up with IP in the news. And now the spotlight turns to Elizabeth Gerhardt. Please share with us, Elizabeth, your current projects.
[00:38:03] Speaker E: Well, I was sharing some of what I'm doing with John St. Pierre before we came online and he, he had some really good ideas that I'm not going to share with anybody.
I'll talk to John about it some more, but I don't want anybody else anyway. But I, I had been doing Blue Streak, a video directory of businesses. B two b businesses. It's kind of on the back shelf till I'm ready to come back to it again. Last fall, I said to Richard, what are we going to do with our building? Because we have a building in summit, New Jersey, that we had a lot of people in at one point. It has two floors. Even before COVID we had remote people.
[00:38:36] Speaker D: So once Covid hit, everybody went remote.
[00:38:40] Speaker E: And so we've been using the top floor of the building. That's where we are today, to record passage to profit. We did that all through Covid. So Richard bought a whole bunch of great equipment, set it all up, and it's a decent studio for the two of us. But I said to him, why don't we rent the studio, fix it all up, and rent it out to people? So I started talking to people about renting the studio, and I have to.
[00:38:59] Speaker D: Be honest, I didn't really think it was such a great idea. But then we saw some revenue projections from other podcast video cast studio, and they were really attractive, so that sold me instantly.
[00:39:11] Speaker E: Right. And I started talking to people, and there was a lot of interest in people doing podcasts, and not everybody wants to set up their own equipment. What I'm finding, though, talking to people, is that they really want the coaching along with it. So I'm going to be doing the coaching along with it. But the thing is, we had the real estate, we had the technical know how, and we had the know how on how to do a good podcast. So it kind of all came together for me, and I'm very excited about this. Trying to find a contractor to do the work has been a bit of a challenge.
[00:39:41] Speaker D: So, Richard, she's going to put me to work. She's going to put me in overalls and whatever.
[00:39:45] Speaker E: Like, it's unskilled labor. It shouldn't cost that much. So we'll just do it ourselves, because this is crazy. It's just like a matter of principle, you know?
So, anyway, so we're working on putting this together. I've talked to the mayor of our town. We're in a small town summit. The mayor's going to come to the grand opening. I've been networking a lot. It's kind of everything we've done. Since patents are federal and a lot of trademarks are federal, everything we've done for Gearhart law has always been pretty much worldwide because we have clients all over the world. So it's really fun for me to be doing something hyper local I'm really kind of enjoying it. I'm going to all the local networking events. The podcasting field is growing rapidly. Richard and I went to an event down in Florida, and I did want to just mention Podfest. Yeah, yeah, Podfest. Richard and I are going to each be on a panel at the empowered podcasting conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the end of June. So it's empowered podcasting. And I think that that's going to be a fun time. A lot of podcasts get together.
[00:40:40] Speaker D: You're around people who like to talk, that's for sure.
[00:40:45] Speaker E: So that's kind of what I've been doing. So enough about me. Now it's time to get to our guests. We're going to start with RM Easterly, who has the company called them, spelled t h y I m. That's very clever, by the way. And I can hardly wait to hear her story about this company and how she started it. So welcome, RM.
[00:41:02] Speaker C: Thank you. So them, they help you in minutes. Is everyday people helping everyday people in 15 minutes or less. Using our applications, the them helper and the them pin app, we got the idea for the name because we were trying to figure out something that was very clever, that would be a conversation piece. And we went through a lot of names, a lot of names before we settled on Thyi am. I had some really out there. And then as you're looking to obviously trademark, you want to make sure that it's not something that's already there, nothing someone else has. So t h y I m. That's what we do. They help you in minutes. And that's how the name came as far as the company. I got stranded on highway 96 in 2017 and I had a membership with the biggest roadside company in the US. They told me 1 hour. I had ran out of gas the night before my brother used my vehicle. He did not fill it up. I ran out of while are you. And I wasn't paying attention to the meter. So as I'm sitting there, they said 60 minutes. 60 minutes is fine. 60 minutes turned into 5 hours.
[00:42:10] Speaker D: And I said, oh, my God.
[00:42:11] Speaker C: I just wish anybody, somebody would bring me gas. I don't care who it is, I just need one gallon to get me. And I said, well, I wonder how many other people have experienced this and why am I paying for a membership and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I went down this rabbit hole for the next five years, like 2019. I started taking it serious because I got stranded again. It wasn't as long of a wait, but this is unacceptable. So I went and worked for all the gig marketplace companies to understand the gig market. And it was horrible. I hated it, but I needed the market research. And then I went and worked for the actual company that left me stranded and every single department that I could work in to hear what people actually needed. And then, then I met my partners and we took it from just roadside to indoor outdoor, not just people that are elderly or disabled. When we did the test market and the surveys and the giveaways and the focus groups, 18 to 55 plus scored the same. It was just insane. So I said, okay, we're going to do this May of 2023. From idea to launch, we launched in February of 24. We built the apps out the prototype, we tested the market, pretty bootstrap, more so. But everyone that's involved in my company does hold equity. So as I'm listening to John St. Pierre, I have been very, very stingy with my equity, but it's going to help millions of people.
[00:43:35] Speaker E: So where are you located? Where are you doing this?
[00:43:38] Speaker C: The first city we launched in was Lansing, Michigan, the capital of Michigan. And then we expanded in seven more cities in Michigan, two in Texas and two in Georgia. So now we're in Plano, Texas, and Richmond, Texas Marietta, Georgia and Smyrna, Georgia Jackson, Michigan Kalamazoo, Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan Bay City, Michigan Midland, Michigan and Saginaw, Michigan, as well as Lansing. So in two months, we opened up eleven more markets.
[00:44:07] Speaker E: Wow.
[00:44:07] Speaker D: So how does the app work? If somebody has the app, how do they get help?
[00:44:12] Speaker C: Okay, so if you were broke down right now and your battery wouldn't start, you would go to, you can download it on the Apple Store or directly from the website. If you have Android put in your information, your name, phone number, email address, create your password. If you want to create an account, or if you just want to be a one time user, you will go to indoor outdoor, roadside in the app, select it, say what type of car you have, pay for it, it goes to the helper app. So a helper within 15 minutes of you. Only helpers within 15 minutes of you can see it. So we know that it would only take 15 minutes for them to get there. They would see it say, yes, I can do that service, and they will be to you in 15 minutes or less. And you can monitor them through the app and communicate with them as well. It's the Amazon of everyday services.
[00:44:56] Speaker D: That sounds great. So you have a pool of people standing by ready to help on a moment's notice. Where do they come from?
[00:45:04] Speaker C: They're everyday people, just like you and me. It could be the person that's standing behind you in line at the grocery store. When you go outside, you try to start your car and it doesn't start. That person actually sees the request and they come out and they jump start your vehicle. Our helpers don't use their vehicles to jump start cars. We have helper kits and there are these mechanical devices that jump start the vehicle for you if you need a jump start. So they're everyday people, 18 years and older that have passed a background check that we have vetted, that are safe, good people to come and help you inside, outside or on the roadside.
[00:45:38] Speaker E: That's a really good idea. I love the fact that you work for these companies and you saw what worked and what didn't work. So you said it was a horrible experience being a gig worker. So what are you doing to make it not so horrible for your gig company?
[00:45:52] Speaker C: The difference between our gig market and the others, DoorDash, Instacart, Grubhub, they tell you what service to take. So if you do not accept, especially with Doordash, you don't get better services. The other thing is when you go select the service and you get to the restaurant, you don't even know where you're going afterwards. So I go pick up your food from McDonald's. I have no idea where I'm going until after I pick your food up. We don't tell you which ones to select. You select which ones you can do. You will know exactly how much you're being paid, exactly where you're going. You will know who the person is and they are rated as well. Our pins, which are the people in need of service, rate the helpers, and the helpers rate the pins you know, and you decide what service you can and cannot do. And there's no acceptance rating drop off. So you don't have to worry about if you don't accept every single request that is on your list, you will not be rated lower. Also, we have higher paying wages in the market than all of the other gig marketplace companies.
[00:46:54] Speaker D: What is the financial model for your business? Who pays what?
[00:46:58] Speaker C: Those services range from $10 all the way to a $100 depending on which service you select. The pins pay, the helpers receive a percentage of that, and the company receives the other percentage. We also have helper kits to assist our helpers. Assisting the pins. So we create the kits that better assist them. Indoor, outdoor, and roadside kits. And the helpers buy them directly from us as well.
[00:47:24] Speaker E: John, did you have a question or any advice?
[00:47:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, the first thing that came to mind is a business development deal with waivers. You know, I don't know if you guys have ever used Waze before, but you see these little cars passing by you and you can almost click on it to see, like, you almost see who's in the car. I tried to, like a couple times. I'm like, I can't. Can you communicate with that person that's right next to you that just like, how's it work? But you have all these waze drivers that are driving that use this app. You could just imagine. You can click the button to say, hey, I need a Samaritan to help me. And this app picks up and brings somebody close by. It just seems like there's a lot of business partnership deals that could be applied in different areas. Like, think about. I think about Waze app, but I think about a whole bunch of different areas that could be really explosive to partner up with some companies that could use these services. I think it would just be a partnership deal. You know, Waze, you're going to get x amount for anybody who uses this feature. It's almost like an app store where, you know, all these new softwares now have connections to other apps. And so basically, RM's company can be an app within Waze that, you know, when consumers use it and they pay the $20 or the $100, Waze gets a piece of of it and they don't have to do anything.
[00:48:27] Speaker E: That's interesting. Have you thought of something like that, RM?
[00:48:29] Speaker C: We have thought about it in the long term, especially being able to assist other roadside companies we patented because we're the first to market. So we have first to market advantage. Nothing like it exists with simple services. So we thought about being able to better assist these roadside companies because I work for the biggest one, and partnering with them would be beneficial to their company as well as helping their members. We want to help them because we know that they need the help. I worked there for many years. The problem is that they don't listen to the consumer. The average everyday person, not a Fortune 500 executive, not someone that makes six figures, the average everyday person. And the smaller people are always forgotten about. The veterans, the elderly, the disabled, the urban community. You have to listen to the people to be able to mesh with them, to know what they want. And a lot of these bigger companies who are roadside especially, and even thumbtack and Angie's list, they're not listening. And that's the main. The main thing. So being able to partner with them to better help them help their members who are paying, we have thought about that.
[00:49:36] Speaker D: Great. So, aram, you mentioned that you patented your app. What played into your decision to do that?
[00:49:46] Speaker C: I knew I had a mega company on my hands and I wanted to make sure that I protected it so that someone like Uber or Doordash or Instacart could not come and try to add that later. So I covered every single base possible with the application and the surface method as well. We're going to add as we go. So we have a lot of secrets in our boat that we will be able to add to that no one else will be able to mimic.
[00:50:12] Speaker E: Yeah, I mean, I can see this going far and wide and really helping a lot of people. Just those little things that you need to get done, that's hard to do by yourself. That's right. Okay, well, thank you. Rm easterly. So they help you in minutes. T h y I m. That's the website. And unfortunately she doesn't have it in New Jersey, but I know that she will soon because she is really rocking and rolling with this. So I look forward to it coming here. Can you repeat the states where it is again, please?
[00:50:40] Speaker C: Right now it is in Plano in Richmond, Texas, Texas, Marietta and Smyrna, Georgia, and it's in several cities in Michigan. We will be opening new markets soon. It's happening fast.
We will be international and very soon as well. Just download the app. We have a download and hold giveaway. So if you're one of the first five people to download the app and use and book a service as a pin, you will absolutely win one of the first five people. So download and hold it.
[00:51:12] Speaker E: Okay, cool. Passage to profit the road to entrepreneurship with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. Now we're on to our next presenter, Justin Chen with Pikfu Pickfu. And that's his website. I am really interested to hear about this because I could see many places in my life where I could use it in my business life. So welcome, Justin. Tell us what you're doing. Tell us what Pikfu is.
[00:51:32] Speaker B: Pikfu is a self service consumer research platform, and we're trying to enable anyone to gather real feedback from their target audience in a matter of minutes. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to democratize consumer research so that every entrepreneur, every small business owner, they can make data driven decisions, just like the large corporate brands like Kraft and Procter and Gamble, the kinds of stuff that they do with market research. So say you're launching a new business and you want to get feedback on your business name or your logo or even your product idea. Instead of asking your friends and family, you know, because they are buyers, you can head to pickfoo.com dot. You create a simple poll. You ask a question like which logo do you prefer for a dog grooming service? And then you could target a general us audience or maybe 50 us dog owners. And within a matter of minutes, we're going to go out, we're going to find those folks, we're going to get them to vote on different options, we're going to get them to write explanations of why they made that selection and then also give you demographic information. And we take care of all the heavy lifting of finding the respondents, making sure the data quality is high, and then compiling all the results into an easy to understand way so that you can bypass all these expensive market research consultants and techniques that larger companies use.
[00:52:41] Speaker E: That's excellent. As I said, I started a meetup with Stacey Sherman. I think I said that to promote the studio, podcast studio more in the consulting business. We've been going back and forth on the logo. We gave it a name, but we don't want to say the name yet. She, she came up with a super cool name. I love the name she came up with for this effort we're doing. But I'm like, no, I like this one. She's like, I like this one. Like, we have to ask some people.
[00:53:06] Speaker B: That's why we built it. Yeah, it's to get out of your own echo chamber. Because a lot of times teams start debating and, you know, they're not necessarily a target audience. And your friends and family a lot of times aren't either. And so really being able to reach out to your potential audience, whether that's by demographic or certain attributes, like maybe moms who own homes or something like that, you can target all those different attributes on Pikfu and get their feedback directly.
[00:53:29] Speaker D: So I guess the logical question is where do you find the people who are going to answer these questions? And are they part of the Pikfu family or how does it work? Yeah.
[00:53:39] Speaker B: So there's a whole world of consumer panels out there. So whenever you see research cited either by large corporations or, you know, news articles, they're all typically tapping into the same consumer research panel. So we tap into those same ones that a crafter and procter and gamble would use, but we do so in an automated way and we put our own layer of data quality and audience targeting on top of that. So the reason why a lot of this research is so expensive is that typically you do need a market research consultant to figure out which panels to use, how to create the surveys, how to create the questions, and then more importantly, clean the data and then compile the results. And all of that is extremely manual and requires a lot of expertise. And so we're trying to make it so that anyone who doesn't have any of that expertise can do so in a very easy to use way. So we have everyday people testing out out logos or testing out decisions that they're making in everyday life.
[00:54:30] Speaker E: Wow. So, John, do you have a question or a comment?
[00:54:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess I was looking maybe for a little case study. So if you look at RM's product time, how could that product use pickfu to further research what market they should go into next? Which markets need the service? Would they use the service? Like, can you give us an example of how that would work exactly, using that exact business model?
[00:54:51] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So a popular use case is idea validation. And so even as early as, as just a nugget in your head, you could describe your solution on pickfu and get people to give you open ended feedback. So perhaps you have the hypothesis that it's, let's just say homeowners, and they have long care needs. And so you could target homeowners on the platform. You could ask a question like, I'm starting this new business that will give you access to people on demand in 15 minutes, you know, for $15 or whatever it is, and then you could further describe it. Would you be open to this and tell me why or why not? And you'll just have people give you open ended feedback. Think of it as going into a coffee shop and just asking this exact same question, but with a little bit better targeting and filtering on the data quality. So any question that you would ask in person to your target audience is something that you could ask on Bigfoot. And we'll have people test out things like napkin sketches of product designs that they're working on or storyboards of videos that they're planning to shoot. It really is anything that you're working on that you can get feedback on?
[00:55:50] Speaker D: Part of me wonders, can you ask two similar questions but get different results?
[00:55:55] Speaker B: Yeah, we try to guide that as much as possible. So you're definitely right. You could ask a question in a biased manner and you may get skewed results. So we do have a lot of templates on the website with questions that are phrased in the best practice manner. And so those are a great starting point and we also have a great customer success who's happy to hop on a call with you to discuss your poll if you want some feedback on if you've asked the question correctly, and all of that. So while it is self service, we do recognize that humans need help with software sometimes. And so we do have a team to help with that.
[00:56:25] Speaker E: So how are you marketing this?
[00:56:27] Speaker D: Yeah, so let's know exactly how to do it.
[00:56:29] Speaker E: Let's know exactly.
[00:56:31] Speaker B: Like I said before, we've kind of had a kind of a meandering journey because we thought it was going to be just other entrepreneurs and obviously anyone can use it, but it's very difficult to market to all entrepreneurs. So for a while we were marketing to authors and that's still a great segment for us. We're very popular in the self publishing space base for book titles and book covers. But now we focus a lot of our marketing efforts on people building physical products to sell to consumers. So people who sell on Amazon, or maybe they have a shopify store or an Etsy store, and they want to get feedback on product designs or their packaging or their branding and or any of their marketing materials that they're using to sell these products, this has become our best customer segment just because of all the decisions that they're having to make. You can imagine before you put $10,000 into some inventory, you would want to get some feedback on what color variation do people want? You know, is this the pattern that they would be interested in buying? And these are all incredibly impactful decisions that you want to de risk because you don't want to be stuck sitting there with $10,000 worth of product that's just not moving because you didn't get feedback on it.
[00:57:34] Speaker E: John, do you have another? You look like you're thinking about something there.
[00:57:37] Speaker A: I just keep thinking about a b testing. You know, I have this book that just came out, but I had to choose on my own, like between four covers, like which cover was the best and to be able to a b test, a marketing campaign, an ad campaign. I'm even thinking right now, Justin, like, I have some Google Ads that I'm running for my coaching services. Like, I could put together three or four coaching ads and say which one would resonate with entrepreneurs the most of this category. Like, so I think a b testing and what Richard, what you were talking about related to the question, it makes me think about like chat GPT, you can ask chat bt the same question, but if you ask it four different ways, it's going to give you like seven different answers. Right.
[00:58:13] Speaker D: So I was working with AI this.
[00:58:16] Speaker E: Morning, and that's why AI stuff is driving me crazy.
[00:58:21] Speaker D: I asked it a question, like went into complete left field. So how you ask a question there matters a lot.
[00:58:27] Speaker A: Yeah, but it just resonated with you, Justin, when you were talking about the business story is okay polling okay, I understand. Like, I was thinking surveys in my head. But then when you hit the A b testing, like, which ad will get the biggest impact or the biggest lift, or before I buy inventory, what should the packaging be? This or that. Like, there's some pretty big decisions there that people just go within their own internal teams and make a gut judgment. They could test. I'm assuming that's a big part of your business.
[00:58:50] Speaker B: That's right. I mean, if you could think about it as hypothetical, a b testing, because typically a b testing, you're putting something live, but these could be all decisions that you haven't made yet, you haven't launched it yet, the product isn't live that you're not able to a b test that you don't have a website to a b tested on, or maybe you're selling it on a marketplace where you don't have control of that platform so you can't test something. So there's a lot of decisions that we're all making. Flying blind, which is kind of scary in retrospect. But on the book COVID side, we, one other story we had was we had an author who came to us and he was working with a publisher, and they had different visions for the book cover. As you can imagine, he was about traveling all around the world. He had visited every country. This author wanted to put photos, like a photo collage of, like, everywhere he had been. The publisher wanted to go a completely different way and they wanted to do something a little more tasteful, kind of like the country stamps on the passport. And so he decided to use Pickfood to try to prove them wrong. So he tested it. He lost. He trying to mess with his cover to, like, blend the two, and eventually he lost every single time. And then he relented to the publisher. So it finally convinced him that, okay, like, I'm going to go with my publisher because, like, they actually did have a better design. He went on to become a New York Times bestseller. But a lot of times it's the option you don't think is going to win. A lot of times it's hard because, like, these are all very personal decisions. As entrepreneurs. Like, we all know exactly what book cover we want, which company name or logo. Like, we have it in our head. And to get this kind of feedback from the general audience can be eye opening. And sometimes that brutal feedback is what.
[01:00:16] Speaker A: You need, though it's good for resolving internal conflicts.
[01:00:19] Speaker E: I think it's so important because with the whole marketing thing that I've been doing and talking about the podcast and everything, I'm telling people your podcast cover art is really important, because if you go to these directories, you see like a bazillion podcasts, and all you see is their cover art. And so that's like your first impression, like when you walk in and meet your boyfriend's parents for the first time or whatever. And I think it can be really valuable for that, too, because we're trying to turn some of our content at Gerhardt Law into a podcast. We have this monthly content, and we had somebody do the COVID art, and then we had our assistant. She doesn't care if we get mad at her. She'll say what she thinks, whatever's on her mind. She's like, I just think that's terrible. You need to send it to somebody else.
[01:01:01] Speaker D: Well, can you also use this for personal questions? Do you ever get, like, personal questions, like, should I date this guy?
[01:01:07] Speaker B: Yeah. We've had people testing dating profile pictures and bios.
My co founder used it to get feedback on baby names in a funny way. He did it in the reverse where he was deciding between two boys names, and he wanted people to give them their best shot at making fun of them because he wanted to know, how bad could it be with these two names and then choose the one that would be made fun of the least. That was a fun way of using the.
[01:01:33] Speaker E: So how is the company doing? Is it fairly new? It seems like such a great idea.
[01:01:38] Speaker B: We built this 15 years ago as a side project. My co founder and I were building a completely different business, and we needed to get feedback on a website redesign. We were tired of asking our friends and family, we should have gone into a coffee shop, but we're both introverted engineers. So we decided to build a solution to get a digital focus group. And that's kind of where it came to fruition. And so we left it as a side project for many years, and we kept iterating on based on, you know, customer feedback. But eventually it started really resonating with this e commerce segment and mobile gaming as well. And so that gave us kind of the kick in the butt to go and go full time on this particular project. And so that's when we decided to start growing out the team and kind of reinvesting a lot of our cash flow into organizational growth and marketing.
[01:02:22] Speaker E: So how much does it cost?
[01:02:24] Speaker B: Like ballpark, it starts at a dollar per response. So 15 response is $15. So it's incredibly affordable if you want to do a little bit more targeting or add more complexity to the poll. It does get more expensive, but we try to make it as easy and cheap as possible and you get to.
[01:02:39] Speaker E: Control how much you spend. Can you tell us your website one more time?
[01:02:42] Speaker B: Sure. It's pickfood.com, so pic kfu.com dot. It's free to sign up. When you do sign up, you'll be guided through a free onboarding poll, so you could actually try it out for free without putting in any information.
[01:02:53] Speaker E: Passage to profit the road to entrepreneurship with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart and our special guest today, John St. Pierre. We will be right back.
[01:03:01] Speaker I: For over 75 years, the Marine Toys for Tots program has provided toys and emotional support to economically disadvantaged children, primarily during the holidays. But needs are not just seasonal, and now neither is toys for tots. They've expanded their outreach to support families in need all year long with their new programs, including the foster Care initiative, giving toys and tangible items for children to move with inspiring hope for a brighter future. The native american program has grown to benefit over 200,000 children annually, providing toys and books to participating reservations and the Youth Ambassador Program, a select group of our nation's youth children, helping children going above and beyond to raise peer awareness and encourage local community support on behalf of toys for Tots. To learn more about how you can help, visit toysfortots.org and help bring hope to a child's future.
[01:04:00] Speaker F: It's passage to profit.
[01:04:02] Speaker D: Alicia Morrissey is our programming director at passage to profit, and she's also a fantastic jazz vocalist. You can scroll to the bottom of the passageprophetshow.com website and check out her album. And I just want to point out that passage to profit is a nationally syndicated radio show and we're heard on 31 stations, some in Texas and some in Michigan. And we also have a podcast that's rated in the top 3% of podcasts. So how about that?
[01:04:35] Speaker E: According to listen notes? That's pretty cool.
[01:04:37] Speaker D: And now it's time for secrets of the entrepreneurial mind with Elizabeth Garrett Heart.
[01:04:45] Speaker E: Yes. So I will start with you, John St. Pierre. Do you have a secret that you could share that's helped you be a successful entrepreneur.
[01:04:53] Speaker A: It's a secret that shouldn't be a secret. And it's one that I learned after the big failure that I experienced that I think is critical. A lot of entrepreneurs have business plans. I'm sure RM and Justin have business plans. I always had business plans. We'd sit our team down every year and we'd have our business plan. We know where we're going to go with our business. But you yet, if I actually challenge 100 entrepreneurs and say, do you have a life plan? Do you have a 30 year life plan? Do you have it written down on a piece of paper? Your strategic business plan for you, the person, the individual, nine times out of ten, they think they know. Like, I thought I knew what I wanted to achieve. And what ends up happening is what I found was that I was running my business this way and I was running my life this way. And that's where entrepreneurs, we get ourselves into trouble and we can't have work life abundance because we have a lot of work and not a lot of life or a lot of life, and our work doesn't get there. How do you achieve both of those is really having really good clarity on your life plan. A 30 year life plan for yourself that you can then when you build your business plan, make sure they're aligned and make sure you're building your business to achieve your life plan, and not just building your business to achieve a business plan. And that's the big secret that I learned that really changed the whole game for me.
[01:06:07] Speaker E: Wow, that's really a great secret. So rmeasterly. T h y I m. They help you in minutes. That's the website. What is your entrepreneurial mind secret that has helped you achieve your success?
[01:06:21] Speaker C: When you're listening to people, you take bits and pieces from it and you apply it as necessary. But everything that someone says does not mean that it applies to you and your company, your target audience, your consumer. Everything isn't the same. That's my secret. Stay true to you and apply when necessary. Like lotion.
[01:06:39] Speaker D: I love that.
[01:06:40] Speaker E: That is so true. So Justin Chan Pikfu pickfu. And that's his website. What is your secret that you're willing to share?
[01:06:50] Speaker B: I think it's what's helped with our success has just been obsessive with customer feedback and being customer driven. Like I said, our journey has been taken us in a lot of different directions. And if we had stuck doggedly, I guess, with our initial hypothesis without listening or seeing how people were using the product, I don't think we would be in the same place today. And so I think you can always have your company vision and your product vision, but you do need to adapt to how the market wants to use your platform or your product. And you really need to talk to your customers to understand where their pain points are. Because, like Richard was saying before, ideal has to be for your business, and you need to be ideal for them. And it's kind of a two way way street. Just because you're providing some value, maybe they're not providing enough value to you as a business, and you don't have to service every customer out there. Like, choose your customers wisely and the ones that are going to help your business grow.
[01:07:42] Speaker E: Richard Gearhart, what is your secret?
[01:07:45] Speaker D: There are so many things I would say, but I would say most recently a big secret is to stay flexible and roll with the punches, because the business landscape changes. Is just every day. I mean, even a few years ago, who'd have thought AI would be where it is? And now it's gonna be a factor, and we have to adapt to it. So I think being flexible and rolling with the punches, I think keeping a positive mental attitude through all the ups and the downs is really important.
[01:08:16] Speaker E: I wanna go deep in the weeds with mine, so bear with me. We're going deep in the weeds here. So this is about your business name. I made this big mistake with this one business I was gonna start. I searched Google for the domain, and I didn't buy it right away. And I went back the next day, and a troll had bought it and wanted to sell it to me for $5,000. And so I probably have bought ten domains trying to figure out the right name, right. But if it comes to me and it's a name I might use, and I'm looking and nobody has it, then I just buy it. And that's my secret. So eventually, you probably will use, we've.
[01:08:50] Speaker D: Got thousands of domains for sale. Contact Elizabeth Gary.
[01:08:55] Speaker E: They only cost $12 a year, and so it's not a lot of money. But if you really do want that name and you think that you're going to think about it, well, it could be too late. So that is my secret.
[01:09:05] Speaker D: Well, that's great. And passage to profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 31 markets across the United States. Thank you to the P two P team, our producer, Noah Fleischman, and our program director, Alicia Morrissey. Look for our podcast tomorrow, anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in the 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. Gerhardt Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
