Why Isn’t This Product Selling?

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Shan busy Liz picarazzi and Sarah seagull talk about how long to keep trying when a product isn't selling the way you expected for Liz the problem product is her package Locker which is designed to defeat porch Pirates but hasn't really taken off especially considering how widespread the concern is could the glitter bomb guy be Liz's answer or is it time for her to back off plus in the age of zoom and remote workers what have the owners figured out about running effective meetings and if you're pricing a range of services in a proposal do you price your offering all a cart do you charge everyone the same price and is there a way to ease a client into a monthly retainer even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations brought to you by our principal sponsor the great game of business will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report when Jake magazine 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 are regulars Sean busy CEO of Kinesis which is based in Portland Oregon and works with small businesses on marketing culture and strategy Liz picarazzi who is CEO of City bin which is based in Brooklyn New York and makes trash enclosures and package bins and Sarah seagull who is founder and CEO of seagull Communications a public relations firm based in San Francisco the episode is titled why isn't this product [Music] selling welcome Sean Liz and Sarah it's great to have you here to start today I I want to talk about meetings I've deliberately avoided this topic mostly because I've spent too much of my life in bad meetings but a lot has changed in the last couple of years uh with the technology with more people working remotely in some ways I think it's gotten a little bit better in some ways it's gotten much more difficult but there's also this constant growing awareness of how bad meetings are so I'm wondering has anything changed for you guys have you figured anything out has it gotten better has it gotten worse honestly you just sort of set up like the typical meeting problem with that right which is creating engagement it's so much harder to create engagement when you're in a virtual space that's that's just been my experience well here let me point out something funny about that Sean because arguably we are having a virtual meeting right now and um people actually go out of their way to listen to our meetings that we have virtually and I I have a sponsor that pays me to be a iated with these meetings so in a way that kind of suggests that it is possible right yeah yeah uh uh well we're just amazing I mean that's no I I think that the the real challenge that I've seen is that it's easy to be passive right it's really easy to be passive in a in a virtual environment and so to your point why do people listen to our meetings right you know the reason is I think two things one you've got a highly engaged group in the meeting right everybody's here voluntarily we're excited to share our experiences and learn from each other so we're a highly engaged group and then I think the other key piece is you're the facilitator so you Lauren you manag to kind of keep things moving forward prompting people asking the right questions and so the experience I've had is that running a meeting has become it puts a lot more work on the person who's facilitating the meeting because they not only have to you know present what they want to share but if you want to make it a great meeting they have to engage everybody in the room and so to do that you know you're fortunate you have a bunch of entrepreneurs we have no shortage of things we want to talk about and we're all quick starts so that helps a lot but in an organization you're going to have introverts you're going to have folks who maybe are nervous about speaking up and so one of the things I found found that's really helpful is to help prepare people in advance so to say to them this is one of the topics we're going to talk about in the meeting and I want you to think about X Y and Z and then we're going to you know go around the room or have kind of a popcorn style of feedback to get folks participating and to uplevel the energy in the meeting those have been some of the insights that I've had Sean let me just follow up with that quickly you you said go around the room when the pandemic hit you gave up your office space I assume you're using that term metaphor ially are are most of your meetings uh virtual at this point yeah I mean probably 80 to 90% are virtual at this point and what impact has that had personally I'm uh seen that over time that's I don't love it you know we're looking for office space this year I think we need to change that ratio to you know maybe 6040 um so that we're actually seeing each other in the real world and you know I think there's a good argument that a lot of meetings are are kind of a waste of time so eliminate those and then there's another type of meeting that's more functional I think that's pretty good for uh an online meeting but then I think they're really important meetings having them in person there's a lot of value to that so trying to shift more towards that in 2023 is is important for me we used to buy lunch for everybody on Friday and gather around and you know it was optional you didn't have to attend but the camaraderie that grew out of that and the you know just fun and levity and ending the week on a high note really helped our business it just really helped our culture you know I mean we had singled digigit turnover for years and if you compare us to let's say a traditional marketing or PR consultancy you know that industry has got 30 to 40% turnover before the pandemic so you know the things we were doing were really effective at you know creating a sense of shared connection and camaraderie so I don't know that those are quote unquote meetings but they were really important in terms of getting people together and you know replacing that in with zoom is it's okay but I'm call me a skeptic uh I just I don't think it's the same I know it's not the same promise you Liz how about you what's uh what's it been like for you well I should say that my attitude towards meetings is largely informed by what corporate meetings were like when I worked at American Express and there were you know as in most corporations there were way too many meetings I remember there was sometimes a meeting about a meeting about a meeting and it went from there sometimes they called it an alignment meeting but before the alignment meeting which what would happen before you went to a decision maker with a bigger meeting is you might have a pre-alignment meeting so you know that's what my reference point is and so I kind of feel like since I became an entrepreneur 10 plus years ago that I'm kind of in heaven with not having a lot of meetings having said that there are some things I've learned along the way that seem to have really helped the first one is kind of similar to what Sean said is if you let people know what the meeting is and you also maybe give them a teaser of what to think about or what to bring nothing big but so they know that they will be asked to participate so I had a meeting last week that was like that I gave people the there were two questions about a week ahead of time and so they came to that meeting prepared to talk about in our case it was best client and worst client of the year for 2022 and it was fun we do it every year did they have to bring reasons I mean no they didn't have to bring anything I think most of us have had experience with with those clients luckily we don't have that many bad clients but when we do it it is it it helps to talk about it and usually we joke about it because there's just sometimes some ridiculous people but so back to kind of what my uh what my learnings were the first one is engage them ahead of the meeting the second one is have someone who is like a scribe who's taking notes on what the action steps are who's doing it what's the deadline and in our case it's usually Frank actually and we did not have that role of scribe and follow-up notes before he joined the company and that's just I mean he's a COO so that's part of it he wants to make sure things are moving ahead but that was a step that we took that was really important and then the third thing that I learned is there's a very big difference between a meeting of knowledge workers and a meeting of doers and I prefer the meeting of doers because then there's kind of a mix of thought discussion and AC discussion my installation team we don't meet with them that often but when we do there's very solid actions that come out of it that are not like in the knowledge realm they're more in the doing realm oh but I do have one other thing actually I should say and that is when I was in corporate sometimes when I wasn't invited to a meeting I didn't like that either because that would mean I was not considered necessary at the meeting and in many cases that was probably true but in some of them when I really thought I should be there that would get to me so it's a little bit contradictory complicated relationship with meetings but overall I really like meetings more as an entrepreneur than I did as a cubicle worker it's really important that I come to this totally unnecessary meeting please invite me I mean I think that's the thing about especially as you get into the corporate structure so much of it is about politics and power right so you know the the attendance invitation to a meeting becomes a symbol of that versus in a small business it's a lot less of that BS and that's really cool I'm kind of curious Liz I like I love the Scribe it's such a valuable role I'm kind of wondering if if we could replace Frank with AI um I I've seen all these uses for AI that are really stupid but I've been thinking about like summarizing meeting notes and I think that you could potentially just put a recorder in the room record the meeting and throw it into AI I think that otter otter.ai does that we record all of our meetings and I think there's a new function on it where it will give you a summary yeah I had a client do that recently with chat GPT I haven't played with it yet it was amazing I was like whoa that's pretty good so anyway just a thought cuz we do that with our clients you know and it's really valuable especially when you get months down the road and you've made decisions way back when to be able to refer back to like well we made that decision why did we do that I'm thinking that's a good application for AI right I like the idea of it because it's all indexable as well yeah yeah that's great that's actually really great Sarah how about you first of all I think that most of you know that I want to say a year ago we switched to having something called non- meetings week yep where we were finding that you know during covid and just too many Zoom calls that people were getting burnt out of having to prep for client calls so we only have um meetings with clients every two weeks and we've never had any push back from that in fact most of our clients are relieved that they don't have to talk to us every week but the way that we kind of sell that as a feature is that we're on slack with them all day every day so really the meeting that we have every two week with the clients is it just to talk about things that aren't effectively talked about on a slack chain we send out an agenda for our calls with clients we have a scribe on every one of our client calls and then we send out action items so that's basically our like this is what we talked about it's a Google doc right and we just you know cut and paste and update it and and it's for the entire year so you can search um search it pretty easily which is nice one thing I try to do is I make sure if there's a meeting that involves my greater team which we have a a weekly um meeting on Mondays just to get all of our ducks in a row is to make sure that most people have some sort of um ownership where they have to run through what um what's being done so everybody gets called on and it's not a surprise so it takes those people that kind of like to to not be in the center stage and and make them kind of participate do either of you have all hands meetings or you you know monthly team meetings any kind of like a a way to distribute to the whole company what's going on we have one every Monday even in your non- meeting week yeah so you do have internal meetings and we try to arrange them where if there are people that are not on certain clients that we address those clients and the things that we need to do for those clients early on so they can drop off the call so they don't have to stay the whole time but yeah even our contractors are on that call what about you Liz yeah we do meetings every Tuesday actually I shouldn't say all hands on deck it's the Office Team and not the installation team and with that everybody just brings what they're doing and we go around the room and we talk about it we've got describe the one thing I would say that doesn't always go as well is we don't often follow up on what is to be done like there isn't anyone playing that enforcement role and so I don't think it's bad how it is but I think it could be improved a bit and and I'm actually the worst person because I'm like the entrepreneur with ideas all over the place I'll volunteer myself to do things and then I won't do them and I won't remember because I didn't I didn't take notes at the meeting either you know so oh you got to get somebody to put it into your your uh project management system and then assign it to you absolutely because it's like sometimes especially if they writing tasks like I am one of those people where I am a good writer but I have to be inspired to write and that may take three weeks you know so if it's something that's du I you know having that person follow up with the action items is something I need to put in place why isn't your scribe Frank following up and uh keeping track of what you've committed to that's why he needs to be a robot I would actually pass that baton Liz and I would say you know whoever is asking you to do that writing project or the project that you said that you you volunteered yourself for is say to them hey keep following up with me on this yeah so it's not on you if you don't have like a checklist that you go by yeah well and I I sometimes do that but inconsistently to ask like the project owner to follow up but I you know I feel like I'm on the I'm the bottleneck a lot of the times and I hate that feeling so I really need someone to also enforce that with me I mean back to your question Lauren around you know what has what has changed and what have you given up when we were really in fast growth mode you know 30% 40% a year you know fastest growing company in Portland five years in a row what we were doing in that era was every month we were reviewing the month past and talking about all of the success and wins that we had had we would do open book financials and talk about our growth and we would go through new sales new customer acquisition um it was really a moment momentum building kind of activity every month and then at the end of the year we would have a review and basically what I would do is I would take all those meetings which which had which were pretty slide heavy and I would compile them and kind of do a year in review and what was really cool about that process was that it just generated a lot of awareness around what we were achieving as a company and I think that's a a real value to a meeting in terms of sharing what's what's been accomplished because it's really easy to forget what you've done especially over the course of a year and bringing people into that momentum as a company was very very powerful the reflection I've had on that in the in the year sense is that it puts a lot of onus on the owner if if they're kind of like the center of that kind of ring Master cheerleading kind of thing which I was at the time and that can be kind of tiring so so I think taking the good of that of Reflections and momentum and sharing is a very good thing for a meeting and I think it's easy to forget what you've accomplished as a company because you get so focused on doing the work and delivering the work no that's important like we're terrible at that in terms of recording our wins because we're so focused on just you know doing the day-to-day that you know we work on submitting for awards but we're very bad at being like Oh okay we got all this coverage or we we we did this wonderful thing in March and it's like December because we've moved so quickly and so far beyond that and we didn't record it in any way so that's a that's a really smart kind of way to get everybody excited about the momentum and the of the company Sarah at your regular staff meetings I assume you have a mix of people who are in the office and people who are on Zoom is that right so we have office as I mentioned I think in previous podcasts have you moved in we've moved in we're still like Furnishing everybody who's on staff was in the office on Tuesday and it was so nice and there was just this buzz in the air that I think everybody was excited about I asked everybody what they wanted to do and our team meeting is going to continue to be on Mondays but everybody plans to be in the office on Tuesdays so we made kind of a our rule of thumb for being here is if you're within 15 miles of the office you have to be here 2 days a week if you're outside 15 miles you have to be here one day a week and they kind of all figured it out on their own that everybody's going to be here on Tuesday and then the rest of the folks are going to come on on Thursday so it's just a nice nice to have everybody here and have those opportunities for larger conversations if needed so did you say that your meetings are on Monday or on Tuesday Mondays so we do them on Zoom but they involve our contractors and they're not here you're choosing to do your meetings on a day when you don't expect everybody to be in the office well because our contractors are on our team call right well some people do choose to do the the mix and that's that that's what I was going to ask you about and and I understand why you would want to try to avoid that I was wondering if youve tried it at all it is challenging to have a mix of people in the office and people uh on Zoom obviously yeah no so we just do it on the zoom people who are on who dial in do a call like that are they don't it doesn't feel like they're really there or part of the conversation that they're just kind of listening in so we're going to keep the Monday team call and it also includ like those are people that can't come into the office because they live in other parts of the country so I think that that's kind of the way we're going to move forward yeah I I will add you know that that really fires something up for me Sarah which was we had one remote employee before the pandemic and she would you know kind of zoom in to those all hands meetings and in retrospect that's a shitty experience I'm pretty sure that that's a bad thing to have that mixture of some people remote and some people in person for meetings that are that are important I agree I think it's fine if it's kind of functional like data is being transmitted but like any kind of leadership or culture building or anything like that I think you need to accept that if you're going to have remote employ have fewer of them and make them in person I I just or have them all remote like you're doing well it depend and it depends on the size of the meeting too like if it's just three or four people you can have somebody zoom in you're all and it's more engaging but as soon as you go over five like it's not productive for somebody to be zooming into you know four other people talking yeah yes Liz you you I don't think this probably applies maybe it does I don't know do you do you have any experience with this not really I we have one we have an office we have one employee who works virtually four days a week so you know with her we easily just use zoom or Google meet with contractors you know they don't usually come into the office kind of like Sarah the contractors don't come into the office for the meetings they'll be coming in virtually so but as you know the company grows I know that the probably the structure and the number of the meetings are going to change but I'm pretty happy with how it is right now s when you draw the distinction between employees and contractors do you actually have a requirement that employees come in the office or Can employees be fully remote if you're on staff you have to live in the Bay Area I want to see your face you know and we have contractors that we love that live outside of it but I had a long discussion with my operations manager and they're just not as invested in the in the the success of the company if they're not here and the team is a pretty tight-knit team they like each other and we want to add to that and you can't really get to know people on a personal level if you're entirely remote all the time so we came to the it's a tough decision but we came to the decision that if you want to be on staff you have to come into the office if you live you know within those parameters right now the hybrid work requirements will probably change by the end of the year we'll just keep upping it based on kind of social norms and and what people want but it's a nice Vibe when people are here and and having real conversations and you're just more productive because you're not waiting for somebody to get on the call you're not you know having to log in you're you can literally turn the corner or look across your desk and say hey what do you think of this hey can you look at this you know and it's it's a time saer too what are you going to do with a Valu employee tells you they want to move across the country but remain an employee I will cry I don't know I can't tell you what I would do I have employees that will go like I have one employee who loves travel and she will go and um you know live in Mexico for a month but come back and I have no problem with that but if one of my staffers decides to you know relocate to you know Florida I don't know I don't know I don't know how I would approach that if if they're too valuable obviously there would be a uh have to be some deep thought into that but I prefer to people to be here Sean have you confronted this oh yeah I mean we've confronted it before the pandemic you know when I had an employee who said hey I have bad news you know I love it here but I I got to move to San Diego my family's there I need to be with my family and I was like well we're going to figure this out cuz you know she was just too valuable and luckily on the west coast the flight from San Diego to Portland was pretty tenable and so we flew her back and forth a lot it helped us figure out Zoom before we needed to figure out Zoom which was great um so I have I I I have heard to thank for that she's still with us which is great and then in the pandemic I had another employee who was like hey I got to move to Maine because I have I have a young child I have family there I I really want her to experience her you know grandparents and I was like I can't argue with that and so we're like all right we're going to figure it out and um we've made it work but we're hiring for a new role and we're hiring in Portland you know and I and I think those two employees have worked out pretty well for us because they're long tenured employees they've been with us a long time I can count on them I trust them they work hard we had an employee who we hired in the pandemic who promptly moved away right after we hired him he didn't even ask he just moved to another town and I was like wait a minute we didn't say this was a remote role but there were other employees who were working remotely so I could understand why he would make that assumption we made it work but he ultimately didn't work out as an employee and I and I reflected on this a lot and I think that he missed out on the mentorship the one-on-one connection he missed out on the kind of cultural norms that we established when we were together he missed out on just a lot of the camaraderie and I I've kind of I've thought about this a lot and I'm like onboarding somebody remotely takes real discipline and it can be done I've seen our clients do it but it's a it's a whole different thing and so going forward I'm not gonna I'm not going to do that anymore all right next topic Liz you've told us a few times that you're feeling some pain with regards to your package bin line my quick summary correct me if I'm wrong is that you believe in the product but you haven't gotten the sales you expected and now you're feeling some pressure to focus on other products that are selling do I have that right and what's your current thinking yes so you get it absolutely right Lauren you know in 2022 there was a lot of discussion about whether we would even keep our package lockers going and and um I'm very much in favor of doing that and I have won that argument we are going to continue our package lockers um they are profitable but barely so the kind of the background on this is that after we had our trash enclosures there were people that saw the potential in our trash enclosures as package lockers so as much as I would love to take credit for our package Locker it was actually our own clients that saw that potential and brought it up with us and so we adapted our pack our trash enclosure to package locker and we've been selling them now for I guess it's four years we have two different types now we have a second one that I developed and we launched during the pandemic um and that one has not done quite as well but it is one that we developed because carriers can deliver into that package locker without having to use a lock and that is one sort of inhibitor of the first package Locker that we developed called The parcel so the conundrum is that we are really known right now as that trash enclosure company and you know that company that's in Times Square and we get a lot of press for our trash enclosures and we rarely get much attention for our package lockers however we were in curbed which is a division of New York Magazine last month uh for the holidays which was really good and that was one that I like successfully pitched to them them so for me it's almost like less of a financial issue and it's more of a brand issue and that's that I really came to understand City bin as evolving toward an outdoor storage brand so really to be the outdoor storage of California closets so California Closets is all about interior storage City bin is all about exterior storage and that can be a package Locker it can be a trash enclosure it can be a mailbox it can be a deck box and we have all of those products now if you look at City bin marketing 3 four years ago you're going to see it's very much about the outdoor storage brand that can be modularly combined together so it's a very unique product to be able to combine trash and recycling enclosures with a package locker with a mailbox and actually with Planters like it's in the California closet's model of modularity and being able to add on that was something that really really excited and continues to excite me um but it does mean to continue invest in components that aren't selling nearly as much as the trash enclosure um and the other reason I've been very attached to that is if I ever were to be acquired if I were the acquirer I would like the idea of acquiring a portfolio of products that work together the modularity I think is incredibly valuable and so to kind of let go of investing in whether it be time or money in the package Locker it feels a little painful why do you think the bins haven't sold better so I think it's that they have not we haven't really put much money behind marketing I think that aspect of having the carrier need to unlock the bin is an inhibitor the package lockers on the market are just a drop function so that the carrier can drop the package in without having to use a lock so Amazon I want to say has a feature that we tried briefly where they can automatically open our garage door and drop um packages in and close the door we stopped it because our dogs were attacking them um literally ended up with a driver on top of a car after our dog got out after them but could you do something like that so that the package B like the accessibility for the driver is easier I don't think we would ever go that direction actually to high-tech it's too high-tech for one second our main Market is New York and people don't have garages or driveways or alleys here there's really nowhere but inside an enclosed bin to leave something and then the other thing is I don't think Amazon's offering has been very popular um I know when it first came out I felt a little threatened and that went away you know it went away I mean the other thing Amazon is doing and probably a lot more successfully is they have their Lockers in a lot of you know 7-Elevens gas stations Whole Foods and that while will protect the package it certainly is not convenient you know if you buy something online it's largely about convenience and to have it delivered to your house if you need to get in the car and drive to Whole Foods and go to a locker then that takes away that convenience factor yeah I just I I love the the concept of it and I think it's worthwhile especially like I mean in my area like people are constantly getting um things taken off of their um from porches I mean if you look at Tik Tok I mean there are thousands and thousands of videos of people you know sharing their ring cam of somebody's stealing there are people that like you know sabotage people that steal packages I can't imagine this maybe it is a marketing thing but glitter bomb guy right yeah the glitter bomb right the glitter bomb for those of us who haven't heard of this I I can guess but tell me what's the glitter bomb guy yeah so there's this YouTuber named Mark Rober he actually used to be a NASA scientist and about four or five years ago he started doing videos where he baited packages he had cameras all around with uh glitter that he had engineered to basically explode when the thief opened the package um in subsequent you know releases of it he even put um iPhone cameras in every direction all four directions to be able to video the perpetrator but also to upload the video to the cloud to be able to then give to police one of the last functions he added was actually a fart spray where when the person opened up the box they got sprayed and so in the videos you will see these thiefs being sprayed with the fart spray okay you need to partner with him you need you no I'm serious you need to partner him with him he needs to be your spokesperson and you need to do a campaign that is like this is the solution so you don't have to have a PhD to to catch people in the ACT I mean I would love that and the thought has often crossed my mind but I look at his sponsors are all big Brands so I just assumed he wouldn't be interested well there's him and then there's there's a plenty of copycats that do similar things but it's just the idea of like making sure that all of your mark goes towards those people that are lamenting about packages being sold I mean if you go on next door I would just say next door is full of this I know and I actually used to advertise on next door as well for the package lockers and that was not worthwhile you know you talk about portfolio of companies you know and you you are killing it with the Simplicity of your message right now right which is like anti-at get rid of the trash the pr you are of the moment and and if I look at company I think the parallel is solo stove which is solo came up with a genius idea it's actually not made that well it's okay there are better ones but they came up with a pretty genius idea of kind of a smokefree outdoor fire pit they created a category of of product that was all their own they just dominated from a marketing perspective so I see you doing the same thing right you're dominating from a marketing perspective you're creating a category and what they did is you know they sold the private equity which makes me sad but what private Equity then did is injected a ton of money into marketing and scaled it even further and then they went after adjacencies then they started adding the Solo Pizza Oven and the solo this and the solo that and and basically what they're doing is they're capitalizing on the customer base which at that point is big enough to really sell new products to your challenge I think with the with the um package thing I I mean I love the package idea I want one I think you're starting to fight a war on two fronts and you know if you had a lot of capital if you were like yeah I got Capital then I would I would assign somebody to be in charge of this product line I would hold them accountable to certain performance blah blah blah blah blah but you don't have those kind of resources right I do not could you split the brand like could it could it could it be you know its own you know extension where it's its own because maybe maybe what sea is saying is that you know you're confusing your core audience and maybe it's it's you know an offering that's under a different umbrella I mean it's called it has its own brand product named parcel bin right but but I think your idea of like or the California Closets of the outdoor I'm like you know that's cool conceptually and I get it but I don't think it's a thing that enough people are passionate about except you and whereas people are passionate about the rats and the trash and like solving that problem and it's just so good and then I think there are probably people who are passionate about parcel theft and and like fixing that Pro well look at the guy who does the glitter bomb right so there's a passionate group over there I don't think there's a ton of overlap between the two so having two separate Brands I think makes sense but you're just I'm just talking energy and time and yes you're so good at what you're doing right now and you're scaling it and it's killing it this feels like maybe not quite as a distraction as the bear prooof stuff was but a thing that maybe put down for a little while and then come back to once you have more horsepower you know along those lines Liz I love the idea of the modularity and the fact that these products all work together but you're really focused right now on selling your trash enclosures to business districts municipalities and their need for a modular uh package bin that fits along with it is probably non-existent I'm guessing non-existent so that's you know that gets in the way of you seizing that moment right now when you're doing so well in that particular area well that is really what the challenges like if I had an investor and they saw the potential in our package lockers and wanted to help me hire someone for it I actually think it could do really well but am I really willing to take on an investor for the sake of that you know there would have to be a lot of other things and um you know I mean one thing I should say it's not we're going to like decommission or discontinue the package lockers we're probably just not going to be in a strong inventory position like the next time we place an order we normally do order a lot of them and they just take a lot longer to sell on the next run we may not order any and then we wait for the orders to pile up and then it's just you know it's every six months sort of thing almost more like a a Kickstarter model where you buy something knowing that it's going to take a while to get to you and then our orders would be based on what the actual sales of it had been yeah I think you know I think you know the answer right I think you know the answer Liz right you you're doing so well in this space I just I I agree with you if you had an investor at the ready who said hey here's $3 million to build this brand then basically you would split your time as Chief marketing officer between the two Brands but there's so many other duties you have around culture and recruiting and uh operation I know Frank's got a lot of the operational stuff but like your vision and and keeping it from being just a boring you know production oriented thing like that's your magic I would not give up on it I would just put it as you know to the side as when when you do have more bandwidth or financial you know wherewithal that that becomes your next brand that you launch and that it's a thoughtful doesn't get lost in your parent company but it's its own next thing where you can do it even better than you did City B because you've learned so much I want to try to hit one more topic Sarah you've talked about struggling a a little bit with the way you do your proposals and how you quantify items that you put in your proposal can you tell us a little bit about your concern there I'm a menu person I love a menu like I love to look at the thing and know my Coca-Cola is going to cost me $2 my burger is going to cost me $8 whatever it is and be able to check those boxes off and be like all right here's what you're going to do and this is going to be across all the boards of every single client and it's not that right so my proposals are really like me kind of gauging past experience what I think that the client will have to invest in it like whether or not it's worth it for our portfolio to to to to reduce our Baseline fees like I haven't found the mat the secret sauce like you know my question is like Sean is your pricing static do you have set pricing for everything that you do Liz it's a little easier for product because you know what goes into the product and here's your price but like in terms of the service industry it's just this foggy gray area that I struggle with yeah uh and and they let pressure a lot of times for from buyers is to they want alicart too right they want to be able to buy this but not that and and that's that adds complexity to the sales process what we found works really well um and I don't know if this can work for you or not but we found that the early stage work we do with a client we productize that so we we call it a thing we call it true north it's a set of certain activities that we've done over and over and over again and are really valuable and most clients have done 80 to 90% of them and so we do have kind of a uh Choose Your Own Adventure kind of a set of activities that go into True North things like you know customer interviews employee interviews market analysis etc etc etc and then what we do is we customize that based on the client's situation we might delete something if the client's done a good job with it and they have it they've already done it we might amplify something that's needed more but it's more of like a fine two tuning than a full sale here's your Buffet pick and choose what you want and then the price is consistent and we say to them look we've done this over and over again we know what it costs to do you know it's X dollars per month for four months and then at the end of that we have a much more customized thing we've produced for them that they create with us so The Upfront stuff is known and it's a product because people like to buy known products and then once we've built trust in a relationship that's when we move into the more of the alak cart or the more of the choosing what's right for the client but we also frame that up in it's a range it's going to be a range of prices from say 10 to 20,000 a month and we're going to figure that out together so I'm setting expectations in the beginning what pricing is going to be all the way through with greater range um further on down the road does that does that help at least or does that make sense yeah it does it it's interesting because I was thinking on my drive to the office today about a product something that we do for every almost every one of our clients at some point during our relationship is we do these gigantic competitor reports where we look at all of their competitors and tell them where where what they're doing well in terms of the you know public relations and social media I was thinking to myself that this would be a great product to offer up and I could definitely put a a quantifying number to that for sure sure but I was like would people want that I'm assuming yes I would think so I would think so yeah especially if you showed them a sample because so few people I think would feel like they could do that on their own well yeah we have all these tools and resources and things that we subscribe to and access to whatever that you know we were able to kind of pull data that will tell you like what city bins competitors are doing um and you know it would be a a productized delivery where we're saying okay the city ban this is what your competitor is doing we're not suggesting that you do that too but you know just for visibility into what they're doing so you're aware of it you know these are the places that they're being covered this is why they're being covered by these reporters this is why they're getting so many followers on their LinkedIn Channel because of X Y and Z like in in doing that um I can definitely see that being a way to start with clients that I'm unsure of in terms of their budget how are you charging for that now oh it's just part of our you know what we do when we work with a client we will kick off with a client and we'll do we'll ask them you know what their top competitors are um and then we'll go back and we'll do a deep dive and see everything that their competitors are doing so so it falls under the The Heading of a monthly retainer that the client is paying you yeah and then sometimes we'll do like kind of a a re a revised look at that at the end of the year like how do we stack up and it's funny though when we do that we always have to say you know we have to look at your real competitors like we're not going to be you know comparing your your local coffee shop to to Starbucks like we need to be realistic in terms of what your competitors are so how would that change things for you Sarah how would you blend charging for that one service with charging a monthly retainer I think it would also help us identify where they actually really need support you know if we were to do that up front and then say all right you know they're they're not doing too badly in terms of social media compared to the competitors it's not really something that we need to offer so probably you figure out a line item for that I don't know I just it sounds like from what you just said that maybe charging them to do that upfront specifically for that analysis would then help you set an appropriate monthly retainer going forward that both of you would be happy with yeah because the client's going to be scared of the word retainer I I find that you know who whoa wait that sounds like a big commitment and so what what a early stage process enables you to do is to build trust and and insight so you learn like is this a good client do we like working with them do they like working with us right so there's this like chance to learn about each other and then you know you're asking them for a commitment but it's a small commitment and the other thing I found that's a just like super killer way to do things is you you give them some kind of a guarantee with it right so you say hey we're going to work together for four months it's $5,000 a month for these four months during that period we're going to do X Y and Z it's a product I service at any point you can can stop and you know if you're really unhappy we'll refund that month's that month's engagement and nobody ever does that right because you're giving them good work it's a good valuable relationship so it's it's one of those things that can add a degree of certainty to take the risk but then at the end of the day if you're good at what you do it's never going to be taken advantage of and so I found that to be really effective well I'm going to do it you guys are going to have to help me figure out how to do it but yeah I'm going to do it so I got to do a little comparison I I want to figure out a way to make it easy for us to update and go along but also make it customized to every client so all right I'm going to do it all right cool we solved the problem let's uh we'll see or we created some new ones that she doesn't know about yet let's hope that's why it's a weekly podcast my thanks to Sean busy Liz picarazzi and Sarah seagull uh and of course to our sponsor the great game of business which helps businesses Implement open book management and employee ownership you can learn more at Great game.com thanks everyone 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 RN 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 podcast follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by just thubron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]