I Want to Double Sales Again Next Year

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Shan busy Paul DS and Liz picarazzi talk about their plans and goals for 2023 sha whose marketing efforts still haven't recovered from the pandemic is hoping to build on the success of a recent event Paul coming off his best year ever is investing $150,000 in a marketing campaign including a new website targeting a different set of customers and Liz too is attempting to shift her customer base in her case from residential to Municipal work more immediately however Liz who does not relish dealing with legal issues has to decide how to confront a copycat competitor even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report with Jak magazine recently named the best newsletter for business owners and which you can subscribe to for free at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast our regulars Sean busy CEO of Kinesis which is based in Portland Oregon and works with small businesses on marketing culture and strategy Paul DS who is CEO of Paul DS cabinet makers which is based outside of Philadelphia and and makes custom conference tables and Liz pazi who is CEO of City bin which is based in Brooklyn New York and makes trash enclosures and package bins the episode is titled I want to double sales again next year welcome Sean Paul and Liz it's great to have you here it's now officially December and there's no denying that 2022 is just about in the books so I want to talk to you about your plans and goals for uh 2023 I'm curious to what extent macro conditions are a factor in your thinking I'm wondering if you're investing in growth how much risk you see yourself taking whether you're facing any tough budgeting decisions Liz can we start with you sure absolutely it's good that you asked the question about planning for 2023 because I'm not a very good planner it's not something that I really enjoy doing and I immediately thought of really two major areas that I see as goals the first one is actual Revenue which is kind of the easiest to measure I want to double Revenue again next year I think we could do more of that more than that based on our current growth but that's kind of officially what the goal is and then the second area is to flesh out or to Define and flesh out our Municipal line so this year with all of the government work we basically transformed our residential trash enclosure to be for municipal use and University use we made a lot of really great changes and therefore it's a it's a whole new product really that could be marketed definitely priced a different way and so I haven't really sat down and kind of worked on the messaging and the marketing and the even the architecture of the website with this big kind of change in our customer base needs to be thought through so for me the second goal for 2023 is to really Define this customer segment and really kind of develop marketing and different sales channels around it in some ways it it feels a little bit like a new business the Target customer is different their needs are different and functions on the product are different so that's you know for me I'm a very creative person I'm excited to do that but up until now it's really been just kind of flying by the seat of our pants with this product product line and I'm excited to formalize it you said that you really don't like planning how important do you think it is if you don't like it do you think you can just not do it so I always do it and I often do it with my EO group we kind of force ourselves to sit in a room for an entire day and to write it out we sometimes do exercises to help bring out the answers to the planning so I actually do enjoy doing that when it's a group but when it's just on my own I don't really like it and I'm in a different EO group now and I don't think that they do that planning I need to to check on it but when I do planning I am not as focused at the numbers as I am about general areas that I want to be developed that sometimes don't have you know metrics so moving consolidating all of our op operations into one space was a goal for 2022 and we are going to achieve it that's very binary did we do it or not so you know I say that I don't like it I think it's just that I'm like a lot of entrepreneurs I feel like I need to be inspired to sit down and do something like that and that moment doesn't often come that way at least not in like an eight hour time block and you know even back when I was a student I would always think you know to write this paper for this class I need an you know six-hour block of time and um then that makes it really scary to start the Tas because you think it's six hours when it really could just be two so I don't know if that makes sense but I do approach planning in the same way I kind of did schoolwork in that it's kind of all or nothing I either have the time to do it or I don't Sean or Paul how important do either of you think planning is and and how seriously do you take it I guess you would not call me a planner either in that I don't try to predict what will happen but I always am monitoring it as the events occur and comparing them to past situations so I don't do a budgeting process and then tell every person in my company oh you've got this much to spend or anything like that just don't think it really makes much difference in a company my size we're going to probably get close to 5 million in revenues this year 27 employees so it's not a tiny company but we're subject to what clients show up and what they want and whether it's big orders or small orders so there's a lot of planning that you just can't it's not really feasible to do now I am doing some marketing planning and I think that when it gets to be my turn to talk about next year I can go into that but I'm not huge on planning as if I can really map out a future I just don't believe in it how about you Sean I've kind of come full circle on this you know we for a long time would do annual planning we would build a you know one-page plan with dates throughout the year of achieving certain goals and I think from a correlation standpoint it seemed like that was effective for us when we were you know trying to go from you know a business that was hundreds of thousands of dollars to to a business that was over a million you know I think more recently especially through the pandemic the truth of a statement that I heard before the pandemic is just keeps ringing over and over and over again which is that you know we live in volatile and uncertain times and that the moment you plan is really kind of your dumbest moment so that's the time you have the least amount of insight and information and you're trying to you know sort of control the future which I think feels really really good in lots of ways but at the same time you're giving Liz another excuse not the plan Sean I was just thinking the same thing I think one of the things that has to be brought into the discussion is what resources are available to spend time on planning I think that there's a lot of organizations that would listen to us and be like well that's why you're small you don't plan well there's a very large school of thought out there that says you know you're not going to get where you want to go if you don't figure out where you're going and you need to set goals for yourself and and you know Focus your energy in a certain direction I'd say goals and planning are a little different to finish this this uh narrative here the switch we have made is more towards initiatives and more of a Sprint or agile based way of working so you know in the coming year we know we want to achieve certain things there's certain priorities that we think are important so we'll set goals and objectives in the near term as to what we're going to do then we work on those see the results bring in the understanding and learning that came from that and then adjust and I think that's really different than a sort of slavish plan which is very common you know it's like lots of people had plans that they developed in January of 2020 and I promise you none of those were relevant anymore so that's an extreme example yeah I'm not sure that's really an argument against planning but although you're certainly right no it's I and what I'm I'm not arguing against planning I'm arguing towards a different way of planning and actually I think a way of planning Liz would like a lot better which is more based in real time and more frequency of iteration and updates than our typical and that are common in the corporate world because the corporate world is trying to create a veil of certainty for their shareholders yeah I I think that um the way I plan is not necessarily like here's what I expect to happen next June but more being ready for situations I've got two finishers what happens if one of them is sick and can't show up what happens if the truck breaks what happens if this person disappears what happens if we can't hire those things I have plans for and for very common scenarios like what happens if I need to hire another person I have a very strict plan which is just a set of procedures to implement and then you you end up with a new employee so I think that for small business businesses turning situations into systems is actually the most effective way to plan hiring is a good example if you're growing your company you're going to hire people however often you do it it's a good idea to sort of have an understanding of what you're going to do when you need to do it do you have ads pre-written do you know which platform do you want to use do you have some way of keeping track of all the applicants do you have a way of scoring the applicants to decide who you want to talk to more those are things that I spent a lot of time doing which is building out little Solutions systemic solutions for common problems and I don't know whether that's exactly planning or some other word to call it but that's that's what I think of as planning which is build capability that's ready for the most likeliest scenarios and then also build internal Communications with the company and culture so that when something really out of field like a pandemic or whatever you have a culture that can respond to it people are ready to respond to hear direction to provide input that's the I think the most effective planning for a small business it's really difficult to say oh we're going to grow 10% next year and that means 2 and a half% each quarter and here the numbers and you know like that stuff just doesn't really make much sense to me no but the the other kind of planning I think is pretty critical Liz just said that she hop to double next year she didn't tell us from what to what Liz well I'm not going to share that exactly but maybe I will well I mean if it's from a dollar to $2 dollar it shouldn't be much of a trick right well I I will share I will be transparent yeah like why wouldn't you tell we would be going from two to 4 million I mean that's not going to be super simple except your manufacturing happens somewhere else so at least you don't have to build it all that's the your your your sources problem yeah you got to finance it that's probably the biggest problem this is such a good illustration of most people conflate planning and strategy and most people actually miss the strategy entirely like what Liz is talking about is actually strategy she's saying I'm G to augment my strategy I'm going to add to my strategy I'm going to go into I'm going to a new playing field that's a strategic move of which there is great uncertainty and you know it could fail right that's a good illustration of strategy there's lack of certainty there's a lack of clarity of where we need to go and what we need to do but there's a theory of the case and what a lot of organizations do is they do planning which is kind of what Paul was describing which is like contingencies or improvements to ecosystems or Capital Investments and that's fine you know like that's legit and real and should be done but then they combine the word strategy with that and they say we're going to do strategic planning and actually what they're doing is just more operational changes and and just plan it's just planning right and most organizations actually don't even do strategy whereas like both the other folks on this call either today like Liz described or as Paul said in the past of like you know kind of shifting a lot of his way of working and moving into the you know kind of more of the B2B or b2g space like some of the things he's described have been strategy oriented and so I think when you asked the question Lauren what are you doing for planning I think it's really important that the listeners here get the difference between the two it may be more important to do strategy at any given moment or it may be more important to button up your your operations at any given moment there's a lot of variation in smaller businesses as to what the owner is best at and capable of and my observation over the years has been that I got a lot more value out of addressing things I was bad at than continuing to do more of what I was good at and so I think it's a question like what are you leaving undone if you're like me you You're great at sort of operationalizing it's harder to get strategic and sounds like Liz is easier to be strategic and harder to be operational yep yeah I mean who are you where are you right well and it also involves choices so you've heard me talking on here about bears and the bear prooof trash enclosure expansion to the West Coast that was an incredibly exciting project for me but I had to make the decision to put down the bear and focus on the rats I really had to embrace those rats and now I don't have time for the Bears and I hate that because last February when we were doing our installations in Aspen and it looked like the sky was the limit for you know that need in in Aspen Colorado like I just don't have time for it and I know that it's in our future we've probably are 75% of the way there but it's part of the strategy is saying what am I going to stop doing you know I'm going to be focusing Less on package lockers also which bums me out but we just you know we've got this growth with trash enclosures we've got a lot of high-profile jobs there's going to be more press my focus has to be on New York City trash and rats yeah that's another great illustration of a strategy it involves trade-offs it it involves doing something and not something else you know it's a great illustration Liz of you know that tension of gosh I got to put this thing down because this other thing is really the thing and that's another good illustration of why I think iterative working is a superior way right if you had started the year out and said we are going to make this the year of of be enclosures and you just worked at that I worked at that I worked at that I worked at that and didn't pay attention to the inputs that you were getting from you know New York City and like the Press you would have been on a like kind of Fool's errand out in Denver right and instead of the kind of growth you've experienced I think it's just such a good illustration of the difference between planning and a strategy and iteration but you you have set the goal of doubling your Revenue Liz what does have to happen for you to do that in terms of marketing manufacturing financing what what are you concerned about there we just need to get more cities so we got Philly this week we are talking to Boston we recently got Hoboken and these are pilots it's not like a rollout but if I look at all the municipalities that have issues with trash on the sidewalk it's virtually every city so I have a very big market and I just need to find the ones this guy is still the limit it is still the limit with the trash enclosure so you know to grow production too I mean I do have a very good relationship with my factory I have been with them for five years they give me very good trade terms if we had a PO from a city I think that I would be able to finance it that way I mean I definitely need to look into it but they welcome the growth they've been very accommodating of the growth and um I guess I also should think about diversifying so you know we had thought a bit about Mexico did a little bit of poking around diversifying your manufacturing manufacturing yeah that's definitely on the back burner because I spent so much time trying to reshore production last year I put that to the side and said let's just focus on the factory that's working well for us and um you know so we'll see if they can handle production that's where I would want it to be Paul how about you you mentioned your marketing plans for next year this is a project that's really been going on for about nine months now and it is producing materials and messaging aimed at a very particular target market for me which is Architects and interior designers as opposed to the way we get most of our business now is mostly through people doing Google searches which is just a grab bag of everybody you can imagine the Architects and interior designers have a particular set of concerns and a particular set likes and dislikes about the product and how the transactions go it's it's a subset of the kind of work that we do now but I think that there's huge potential for growth so I've been putting together what we need to go talk to them and we're about 23ds of the way through putting together branding film and and uh we've done market research and now we're just starting to put up a new website that's aimed only at these buyers and I hope to have all that done by let's say the end of February and up and running and then we're going to roll out the advertising and see how it goes so that's a strategic shift in trying to get to buyers who are buying our product but doing it in a way that's different than what we normally do and it's going to cost me I don't know 150 Grand over the next year and it's a roll of the dice so the planning part is just the execution of what I can control and the unplaned part is what will happen so that's why I'm I I've hesitate to say oh yeah I know what my Roi is going to be on that I just don't you don't know yeah I I have hopes but I don't know hey Paul I'm kind of curious like did this meat exceed or disappoint you in terms of your expectations about the timeline of kind of building up this new ecosystem and you know really being like ready to go it sounds like it's going to take about a year all all in before you're like really kind of ready to go yeah is that is that reasonable that doesn't surprise me yeah okay so that was sort of your expectation that's about as fast as I could have moved anyway given that I like to be involved in a lot of the content that we put out I have my standards as a writer and for photography so it's never going to be a situation where I just write a check and hand it off to somebody I'm always very involved in these things and I'm not sure on the actual constraint but it's moving at a speed that I'm comfortable with not too fast not too slow yeah can I just replay that little piece of conversation for like every client I ever meet because you know universally everybody wants it done in six months and I'm like you need a year you know to really like shift markets to go after new customers to do it all right so I appreciate you sharing that did you learn anything along the way yeah absolutely the first thing we did with this marketing company we engaged was have them go out and you know do some market research talk to people who are the Target and ask them a bunch of questions that we didn't know the answer to and that took a while for them to round up people who are willing to sit down for an hour or so what kinds of questions what do you worry about we sell a custom product and we're very familiar with what that means but we weren't sure how the target market thinks about that purchase what do they default to what are they afraid of if they go custom who do they like to work with what's the advantage of being local as opposed to not local and there were a bunch of things like that that we had suspicions about but I didn't actually know that by talking to people I just had suspicions so doing the market research interviewing people reading the transcripts listening to the interviews in one case I did follow-ups with one of the people it was is just very informative it really clarified in our minds the difference between this buying audience and our average customer which is it's just a different situation and most of our current marketing and procedures all kinds of things that we do are a great fit for someone who's just searching for a table but a bad fit for someone who's a professional who does this over and over again because we turned up a concern that the custom maker doesn't really pay any attention to what the architect wants to accomplish in the entire project other words Architects have a design vision for how things look and work and we've developed our business to do all the designing for people who don't have any help available and Architects as it turns out are extremely sensitive to the idea that someone's going to come in and be like yeah yeah I got it give you know you get out of the room now and I'm going to build whatever I feel like with this customer so we got to dial back a lot of what we say and how we say it and so in the course of that came to the conclusion that the website that we currently have which is aimed at an untutored buyer it was just offensive to an architect and designer there's a lot on it that's just like absolutely wrong that uh calls forth a cringe factor from Architects and we just can't make that work for two audiences so you just got to come with a second website that was something that turned up in the middle of the summer and now I've finally engaged a firm and but I'm very methodical about these things and I'm always willing to believe there's more that I don't know than I do know and so I'm just feeling my way through it Paul how many folks did you guys talk to you know to get a start to see a pattern you know was it 3 12 100 we talked to I think 14 people and that was a budgetary constraint the initial proposal from the marketing company was to do a small amount of this and I can't remember the exact number and I looked at that and I said hey triple that I want more you wanted more oh interesting I want more input at the very beginning because what I was worried about is if you only talk to one person and you're trying to choose them out of the phone book more or less so it's not someone we know like if you run into a nutcase you're going to be you're going to be on on bad information and I that's one thing I do know from my experience just receiving Google search is that there's enormous variation in who's on the other end of a phone on any given day in any given situation so I wanted more there I paid more for it and it took more time but I'm glad I did that yeah you didn't do any kind of um like large scale market research like total size of Market or anything I don't care I don't care much about that because the total size of the market first of all all the market research on office furniture is now worthless because Co is right like nobody really knows how this is going to play out I have my suspicions that the large companies are going to suffer a lot because they built their capabilities their capacity their factories number of employees all around a certain level of purchasing that was pre pandemic and you know the post pandemic office furniture world is clearly not going to be as big as the pre pandemic the total size of the market compared to what I'm capable of doing is thousands of times bigger than what we could do so I don't really care what what the overall size is I'm more thinking about okay what's what's more likely that someone's going to if they're going to be spending money on this thing are they going to want just a catalog piece or are they going to want something special and I see a big opportunity for us but that's my fantasy planning you know it could play out anyway I don't really know exactly what will happen do you have any concerns about being able to meet the demand if this campaign is successful and you do have a whole bunch of new clients that's like my favorite concern are you planning for it I've I've been yeah I mean we actually experienced 25% growth this year and so I've uh I've now rented new space bought new equipment hired new people people and I'm ready for to maintain this new level or even to go farther but that's the goal so yeah I've been been sort of getting ready to do that how about you Sean you you had told us that you had an event scheduled for November that you call Catalyst that you were hoping would kind of get your marketing back on track was that helpful and is that influencing your thoughts about what might be possible next year yeah I mean for anybody who's ever held an event they know that the Returns on events don't happen right away you know I mean you're talking um Goodwill reputation brand you know these are the kind of things where you know there's probably a dozen people in that room who probably can't even buy services from us but are in a position to recommend us to other people and those kind of conversations you can't predict when they're going to happen so you know our strategy there is have a room full of influencers some potential clients um some actual clients and then just great people put them all together have a really fantastic event don't sell to them um we were really cognizant of not selling to people and position Kinesis as a hub of the owner operated business as the Hub of businesses that care about culture and people as a company who's connected to really great businesses and organizations and leaders and it was awesome I mean just well I'll let Liz talk about it because she was a speaker and a participant so she can be the you know kind of what was it like to be there not having expectations tell us the real story Liz yeah well one thing I can and say is that at no point did I detect any selling in fact only through talking about it now did I realize that that may have been part of your intent like it was definitely really focused more on the program in the content and that was definitely maybe very um kind of understated yes um I just was really noticing that Sean has a lot of clients that have been with him for a long time and has definitely very great references and there's just a certain Vibe or culture around the people that were at that event um and I really liked it it it definitely did not feel New York and I don't mean that in a bad way for either New York or Portland but there was definitely you know a different feel to it like guess I've said it before on here I think that anytime that entrepreneurs can be in a room together is valuable so I really like to be able to feel that like on the other side of the country and I also think that those events are great for Content too so Sean like you say sometimes the dividends from those events don't happen until later and it could be once you slice and dice the content that you got then you push that out and then that's going to bring people in so the event itself is a very good strategy and I thought it was really well executed and I met a lot of really great people you know also a lot of family-owned businesses which I relate to yeah there were a lot of there were a lot of couples there yeah I mean Liz was one of our speakers you know we had this kind of Rapid Fire almost like a mini Ted Talk where how much time did you have Liz we only gave you like five minutes or eight minutes it was really short and so we had these like SE ser of entrepreneurs talking about an idea there were folks who talked about you know the idea of you know really transforming your culture there were folks who talked about upside thinking so the idea of like taking big risks and and what's a strategy for taking a big risk that won't destroy your company so it's like the idea you know is how do we create a learning environment how do you create a space where owners and entrepreneurs can really learn and grow from each other have out you know kind of breakout groups um and make it highly participatory as opposed to the typical conference where people kind of talk at you we wanted less of the talking at you was Co a factor at all I mean I hear people saying you know it's it's over and if you throw something people will come flights are full was that a concern at all you know Co was a problem in a very in a way you wouldn't think of which was when you do an event you need to plan that almost even a year year out right and the problem is if you think back to like a year ago or or so when we were plan it was like right after Omicron and everybody was having this moment of like oh and so we were like wait how are we going to have an event are we going to have the next version of Omicron are we going to have a Delta that was actually deadly you know so planning an event with the uncertainty of covid was really difficult and the problem with that became we kept having to put off key decisions until way too late in the game and so that's where Co became a real problem is the uncertainty of what it would be doing in the fall so that was problem one and so to mitigate that to some degree we we had to choose spaces that were really large and had things like Large Garage Doors really good ventilation big Open Spaces where people could be apart from each other if they wanted to be so that meant you know you spend more money right a bigger space more money nicer spaces in some ways you know that have great ventilation we had dinner the night before so we had to have that at a space that was very open and not a sit down dinner a standup dinner so that you know people could distance if they wanted to or wear masks if they wanted to so it just totally changed a lot of decision making but you know at the end of the day I we felt pretty good about it because there were people there that you know had family members that were imuno compromised and so they wore masks the whole time but the vast majority didn't and so we wanted to make it comfortable if you were cautious and yeah that's that worked out okay but it made planning way harder so where does this leave you in terms of thinking about next year oh we're going to do it again for sure we're today trying to finalize the date it'll be in September next year and that's the another thing is we H it in November which is risky with weather in Oregon um we got we got really lucky it didn't rain or snow but next year we'll do it in September all right last topic today uh Liz I gather you've discovered you have a new competitor can you tell us about that well I wouldn't call it a competitor I would call it a copycat so I mean I have been kind of on a roller coaster with this I'm feeling better about it but I'll I'll tell you what happened a couple of weeks ago I saw on Instagram in a story of someone who's kind of a distant sort of business colleague with a logo that was for a company that I knew he was starting that was for garbage enclosures and I thought okay I know he was coming up with this let me see what it is so I go into the website and I see that the design of the product is identical to City bin in terms of first off its modularity so we do modules that can be put together so if you have six trash cans you get six modules the actual shape of it individual parts of that bin are exactly identical to City bin the color is the same and as if that wasn't already bad enough when I went to then their website I saw that some of the copy was the same as ours the imagery was derived from ours like when we talk about functionality and as if that wasn't bad enough then I went to their Instagram and I saw that they were following most of City Ben's followers including my 16-year-old daughter and distant cousins of some of my Venezuelan employees in Venezuela like there's zero reason for this company to follow those people if they weren't going after City Bin's followers so you know this definitely was very confronting um when it first came up it was actually right before I went to Portland so I probably talked Sean's ear off about it she was fired up I was very fired up I had just found out and you know so I needed to shop again for intellectual property attorneys I had done it around a year ago and just sort of dropped it partly because of my very irrational dislike of legal work but this time I really needed to find one that was going to help move me ahead on this because this is this scream sees and desist you know I'm I'm actually really looking forward to that letter to be drafted I did hire one of the companies uh or one of the firms it's an IP lawyer that's helped one of my good business friends and I really trust her judgment and she also knows me really well so she knows stylistically you know who would I want to work with and I said you know I'm kind of up and down with it the reason I've been up lately is that you know in inspecting their website further it really does look like they just they're they're priced only 5% below us and they have far less functionality you know they haven't been in market for 10 years like us they don't have you know hundreds of customer testimonials so if I was a consumer trying to decide between that company and a city bin I would sayh in the world would I pay you know 5% less to get so much less than City bin offers and then the second part I've been thinking a lot about and it may be kind of arrogant but I can be that way sometimes is this guy is a total idiot for not coming up with a product that was in its own part of the market so if I were him I would have made a trash enclosure that was in between a rubber made shed and a city bin with City beenin being like the luxury one so as a business person I'm actually a little disappointed in him are you giving him advice here yeah the strategy is terrible it's a horrible strategy and because it's a horrible strategy it can play out for us in ways that two weeks ago when I was complaining to Sean I didn't anticipate and just one illustration we had a potential customer this week um with a price objection as we call it and so we always send a followup that says you know these are some of the other options you might consider like we really just want you to have a trash enclosure even if it isn't ours and so Frank instead of us you know putting the usual things in there as the links he put this company and it was you might want to check them out because we know a that it's only cost 5% less and they'll realize well why would we get this if we could get the real thing and secondly we don't think that company is going to be able fulfill so if that customer ordered $110,000 worth of product this guy does not have a warehouse full of City bins like we do what he has is a prototype in front of his house that he took some pictures with with with his daughter which is another thing in my marketing I use my family in marketing a lot so he had his daughter doing a demo so that's really what happened I know I'm kind of going on and on but a few years ago in 2017 we had another copy cat and we were able to get through a season toist a licensing fee from it and so that's good for the patent attorney because there is a record of City beenin Licensing its product to another company and that's a precedent I don't think I understood at the time was as important as it is I do have a patent I do have a trademark we'll see how well they protect me but the other thing I've got some concern about is that I don't like spending my time on this you know I don't like spending my time or my money on legal stuff so there's this kind of resentment that comes up that um is hard for me to shed like I feel like I'm kind of grumpy about like this guy that did this is like robbing me of the things I want to be working on and it's just dumb we're human beings these things happen but I have this resentment against him is because he's taking my attention away from things that I want to be focused on Liz do you have a sense at this point if or where he has crossed the legal line I mean copycat products have existed since there have been products there's certain things that clearly one can do do you know what lines he may have crossed I don't yet I think that there's a lot of evidence of intent which you know my lawyer said that even though that legally can't necessarily be used in a seasoned assist it can be mentioned so the copying of the web site you know that's a copyright infringement you know the trade dress is something where you know if you're driving by and you see something that looks like a city bin but then upon closer inspection it's not that is a trade dress violation because you're making something that may have very poor craftsmanship that people will think is a city bin and that's what happened a few years ago is that a condo owner made these trash enclosures using the exact same materials as ours exact same materials but when you looked at like the aluminum edges you could see it was all Jagged so like if someone got scratched on it for example that could be viewed as someone could think oh that's a city bin so we'll see I mean I I could see it coming back as you don't have a leg to stand on and um I don't know what I'm going to do about that I think that if you're still married you should stop Frank from uh sending people to this company because that seems to me like an enormous mistake why well first of all I we run into versions of this because I make something that a lot of people can make I've I personally just try to ignore the uh opposition or the competitor but if you said hey here's a company that we recommend you take a look at it kind of undercuts any legal argument you might make that these people are are infringing like why in the world if they're infringing would you send your customer to them and I don't know whether the lawyer heard about this yet but I can't imagine they wouldn't say don't do that again that that strikes me as just being really counterproductive Liz has the momentum the marketing Acumen the the she is the story right now and the last thing you want is the story to switch from our champion against rats the person who's in you know uh Time Square to legal battle and when I look at like me too competitors coming in it almost always is determined by how good of marketers they are you know oftentimes the me too wins because they're better marketers than the original innovator if you think about like Steve Jobs and apple much of their ideas and Technology they copied off of other people they were just way better marketers and I think you have the inverse situation where you have probably somebody who's a shitty marketer who's trying to mimic and copy you but they're actually not very good at marketing I don't know that you want to give them fuel so somebody said you can give them fuel by suing them that becomes their marketing no I I think that that at this point right now before this guy's got any traction at all firing a shot across his bow is probably worth doing sure you got a lawyer lawyer writes aw letter I mean the lawyer will tell you whether you have any a leg to stand on and if they if you do go ahead take one shot and then ignore them just yeah strengthen your own game like we know that all of our clients have other choices in the market they can always buy something cheaper they could always get something faster and like yeah I don't care here's what I'm going to do for you I'm going to make every minute of interacting with me so wonderful you're not even tempted to look anywhere else and if you do you're going to be comparing the experience you're getting from Paul DS with whatever you're getting from somebody else and I guarantee you it won't be as good as experience so I let the other people worry about them I worry about me and making sure that my game is strong yeah the other thing too is if you think about your price strategy you're playing the the premium game Liz right yes and so the premium game it gives you the most important thing in the world which is margin and Mar then gives you the opportunity to do better marketing to do more promotion to do all the things that get your product in an upward spiral of awareness if he does what you say and like you know first of all he's playing the failed game of like slightly cheaper but if he goes to that middle point now you know like what his margin is going to be on this thing right it's not going to be awesome and so he's not going to have resources to do the kind of stuff you're doing so he's always going to lose I mean he's he's sort of behind already in terms of playing the me to game I I just I don't see you spending a lot of energy on this being very helpful past I think what Paul's saying you know threaten him see if the threat does something but then don't take it further than that because you get it into the public sphere now you're like the story and like that's not a good story no not at all I mean you could keep an eye on his Google reviews to see how it's going if he's starting to rack up hundreds of great reviews then then you've got a competitor M if there's no there's no reviews or they're bad reviews don't even worry about it there's people who can make tables I don't give a damn you know they they they're not me I can't control what they do but I can make what I do excellent and that's my strategy Liz do you have a sense that he's gotten any traction at all no I don't I think it's a prototype he had one of them made and he took some photos of it so on their Instagram uh there actually it's all renderings there aren't any real photos yeah that's what struck me too as a as a potential buyer I was looking at their account I'm like these aren't even real this is total vaporware your problem isn't as big as you think you're going to you're going to spend five grand on a lawyer they're going to do what they do and then forget about it play play your own game is that what the lawyer said to you Liz well they want their fees so yeah no I mean I interviewed four before I decided on the one and one of them that I didn't hire and this wasn't the reason said that I wouldn't have basically a leg to stand on and um these really it's actually two people that are working together on it um think that the that the letter is a very good start but said that in terms of my IP security I should be focusing on new patents rather than enforcing past past ones and I think that is because some of the municipal work that we're doing is going to be patentable I would like to focus my budget more on that than on the residential product that you know this guy obviously has been looking at closely over the years and is now trying to copycat the difference between the two products being that the municipal work has to be stronger and tougher yeah better Hardware better locks latches I think you also are leaving on an important Point like the guy who's copying you what's his background so he's actually a property manager a fairly large one in Brooklyn and he also like renovates and flips homes you know my biggest tget is property managers they're probably close to 50% of our business so I do have a little bit of a fear that he's going to have connections in that property management world but I also know that everybody in the property management World in New York knows who City bin is because we've been marketing to them so you know hopefully they'll look at him and be like what is this shoddy copy a city B yeah and people who flip houses in my experience tend to be Corner Cutters um you know I I just don't see somebody with that background being a phenomenal marketing and branding person right well he doesn't he has three other companies and if you look at their websites or their Instagrams they're not very good so that's definitely not his strong suit well he's also not a manufacturer do you know how he plans to make the things that I don't know either um we are definitely on the lookout really everybody on the team were all pretty Furious about this or maybe a little bit amused at this point it's a compliment yeah it it could be a compliment and we I'm not going to say the fellow's name but he looks like the actor Bob Balaban so we refer to him as Bob it is Bob bab all right well we will certainly be eager to hear more about that as the situation evolves Liz my thanks to Shan busy Paul DS and Liz picarazzi it's been great talking to you all year and I'm excited to see what you guys do in 2023 wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's l r n at 21h hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think you can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by Jess Theron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]