John Branch IV is a wedding and events photographer and business influencer with over 180,000 followers on YouTube who come to him for advice on launching and running a profitable photography business. He speaks with PocketSuite about his journey and how running is own business beat working at the top of corporate America. He has some smart ways of looking at growing a business, making more sales and creating a personal brand. Our podcast is available on YouTube and all major podcasting apps.

Find links to John Branch IV YouTube page and business website along with a full transcript below.

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Website: https://jbivphotography.com/

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Full Transcript

PocketSuite::

Welcome to the Booked Solid Podcast. I am your host, Hansa Bergwall. Of course, we are the podcast for everyone with clients to run and grow a business. We have a fantastic guest for you today, John Branch. He is a wedding photographer with a very popular YouTube channel. I think you’ve got like 180,000 subscribers now or something like that.

John Branch:

Yep. Around there.

PocketSuite::

So thank you so much for joining us, John.

John Branch:

Happy to be here.

PocketSuite::

So first maybe you could start by just introducing yourself and your story. How did you get into photography and how did you get into wedding photography in particular?

John Branch:

Yeah, so I’m John Branch, as said, and I’m a wedding photographer and I’ve been doing it for about 10 years now. Funny enough, I actually majored in music production and sound design, but later on got into photography just because I love the arts in general. I’ve dabbled in most of them, and the real reason I got into photography was more so a means to an end. My wife, when we started having kids, wanted to stay home and I was thinking I needed to pick up a second job, but she told me to start a business. At the same time, I had a failing audio business, which is a longer story, and also I was getting a lot of people just telling me, “Hey, your photography’s actually not so bad. You have a pretty good eye for it.”

So I took about a year to really study the craft of photography and just jumped in head first. I think wedding photography, mainly because I’m just more of a people and events person. I really like events. Growing up, I was the eldest child of the eldest children, so my parents were both the oldest, so I was the first grandkid out of all of the kids that were had. Because of that, I was a ring bearer in at least, I want to say three, maybe four weddings, and I just remember liking weddings so much when I was little, so I feel like that’s why I just gravitated towards them again, and I really just jumped into weddings and here I am now 10 years later, doing well still.

PocketSuite::

Tell me about the first wedding that you shot, if you can remember.

John Branch:

Oh yeah. So my first wedding, I was booking-

PocketSuite::

The first one you land the gig. That’s the real question. Everyone talks about that first time making the sale. It’s so hard.

John Branch:

Yeah. Oh, it is. It’s definitely the hardest. I was using a service called Thumbtack at the time, which they’re still around, and the way they worked is you paid money to buy tokens, and then when you applied for a job, when someone needed help, you used those tokens. My little loophole I found at the time is that if you applied for engagement sessions, they cost less tokens, and then I would try and convert those couples into actual weddings.

So my first wedding came from Thumbtack and it was actually a very, very small, they didn’t want much. They were just like, “Hey, could you cover the ceremony and maybe a little bit of pictures after? No big deal.” And yeah, it went really well. Actually, most of the time when I go back and look at those photos, I’m surprised they really aren’t that bad. A lot of times photographers love to be like, here’s my first work, and it’s like, Ugh, what happened? My stuff’s actually, it’s fairly decent, surprisingly enough, and it was a fun little wedding. I was maybe there for four hours. It was a great introduction. And then I kept using that same process of using Thumbtack to book engagements that turned into weddings to continue on from there. And then I just started naturally getting weddings.

PocketSuite::

So just you got your first… I like that story of coming in through the side door, working a system that you found, get in on an engagement photo moment, the popping the knee under the cherry blossoms or at the seashore, and then having a great experience and then you’re the natural person to ask about the wedding as well, that’s a good plan. It seems to me that event photography is so specific and so high pressure, you really have to get it at the moment, and if you miss it, it’s hard to do it again. What is that like, navigating that? It sounds like, I don’t know, really high pressure every time.

John Branch:

Yeah, very high pressure. There’s a couple of things I talk about often that helps me deal with the high pressure of events, and from a technicality point, I always tell photographers to focus on practicing with street photography. When I started my business, I was in New York, so I was in the perfect place for doing street photography, but what I personally always found that was the same between street photography and wedding photography is that if there’s a moment about to happen, you have to learn to anticipate it and already have an idea of the composition you want in your mind and be able to snag it as it happens. And there’s no going back. You can’t go up to the bride and groom or something later and be like, oh, excuse me, could you stop and do the first kiss again? Or I think I saw a clip somewhere where the photographer yells at the couple because they were going for the first kiss, but the photographer wasn’t ready and it was just like, no.

So street photography and wedding photography have that same instantaneous, you have to anticipate it, see it, and grab it and know your settings are correct. And I think that’s a great way to practice because at least in street photography, if you miss it, no big deal. Get used to getting those shots there and then transfer that over to weddings.

PocketSuite::

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in weddings too, how common are things like ugly crying, red wines spill on white dresses, things like that?

John Branch:

Luckily it’s not that common. So in my 10 years, my closest story to that, God, it was tragic. Oh my goodness. Me and the groom were going out to take some portraits. It had rained earlier, but it stopped, and we were going to this spot where they wanted to take photos and there was a little bit of a hill in this parking lot, and me and the groom were both like, “Hey, let’s walk around this way.” But she decided to go over the hill because it was the fastest way and she slipped.

PocketSuite::

She slipped?

John Branch:

Yeah, and this was before the first dance and everything, and it was just like, oh, and there’s this mud all on the back of the dress, and it was like, oh my goodness. And we were able to take the photos we needed without being able to see the mud, but she handled it in stride. She did really well, but it was definitely like, oh no. But that’s 10 years. So that’s like the one time I’ve ever [inaudible 00:06:57].

PocketSuite::

Okay, that’s good. You’re always thinking that something is going to happen moments, and I’ve always thought about that too. Does the emotion of the moment really translate into the pictures, or do you have to create that with your craft? I’m thinking of how often I take a picture at a beautiful sunset and then you’re just backlit and it doesn’t work.

John Branch:

Yeah, yeah. There’s definitely two sides to it. I think sometimes the moments really do truly just happen and you’re there and you’re able to capture it. But most of the time, the way I look at it, a lot of the times, our day to day is very mundane, for the most part. Exciting things only happen when they do. So sometimes you do have to lead people to those emotional moments, which I think is a huge part of a wedding photographer’s job. So it’s not that I have to make things so perfect so that the photo is perfect, but more so I know that, Hey, I’m going to stand you here and then this person’s going to come to you and y’all are going to fill the space with emotion, but I’m going to hands off, but I need you to at least be here because that’s what’s going to make it look nice. Give them some prompts or something, ask them questions, something to think about. That stuff will lead you to the emotions.

I will say, I think one of the best emotional photos I’ve ever had, my couple, it rained on their wedding day pretty heavily, and they were supposed to have an outdoor ceremony, but they were cool and trusted me enough that when their guests started arriving, they actually did their cocktail hour twice. So they did it when the guests arrived to wait for the rain and then the rain stopped and this one shot, I absolutely love this shot of them after the first kiss and everything, and they’re walking back out and you could just tell they’re super happy and the guests are just like, yeah. And again, I was there for the emotions. So that’s another reason why I liked the photo so much is I just remember how they were still able to have their outdoor ceremony like they wanted, and it was just really… So that’s the two. You have the handheld emotions where you lead it, and then you have epic moments where the story leaves the photo and there’s always a story behind the photo.

PocketSuite::

I love that. The rain clears and stuff like that, those great moments. So about 10 years ago, you had your first wedding. Tell me about the journey of going from getting wedding jobs to starting to build a brand and launch a YouTube channel and help other people succeed in this business.

John Branch:

It’s a very interesting journey, and I feel like you’re always learning. One thing I do love about wedding photography or client-based services is that you can learn from any industry. And at the time, so I had shot for about four to five years while I had a day job. I used to work at Apple, and I also worked at Squarespace. So I was in two companies that had really high level customer service, and I learned a lot that I could apply to weddings for that. And over the years, it’s really was just seeing how similar all of these jobs are, because a lot of times I think photographers get blindsided by the art of photography and how your photos are supposed to look and miss the fact that wedding photography is pretty much 85% customer service, just how you’re dealing with your couple, how you’re helping them plan out the day, how you’re setting expectations. Because if you’re not doing that stuff, things can easily fall apart. And that was things I learned-

PocketSuite::

Tell me a little about about the John Branch style of customer service. How does the journey begin for the people that you work with and how do you make sure it really shines throughout?

John Branch:

Oh my goodness. I think the two biggest things I like to focus on, and this is why on my website, my approach is artistry and authenticity. Authenticity is the biggest one. So I try to just be me upfront and forward the whole way through and letting my couples know what they’re receiving because they’re just receiving me. One way to explain that is the fact that I usually tell couples that I’m attending their wedding more so taking it away from just being the photographer at your wedding. I’m attending your wedding as a guest, and that’s the feel I want everything to be. So that’s one side of it.

And then the second side of it is very handhold-y, more so in the fact that I like to plan, I like to… And the funny thing is I’m really not a planner. I’m a very go with the flow type of person, but I’m going to help my couple with their timeline, even if they have a planner so they can see what the photographers think is going to work for the timeline, and then me and the planner can work that together. And that section of it lets them know that even though I may seem so nonchalant and very chill about everything, that I’m very much thinking about a solid, this is what we’re going to do at this exact time type of plan. And then within having a plan, in my opinion, there’s freedom.

There’s much more freedom when you’re like, okay, these are the times we’re going to go, but I’m going to show up early, so if you’re ready, we’ll start shooting then. And then if we have extra time, whatever, it’ll be great. So it’s a lot of that getting me and this just very much laid back approach with very guided guidelines.

PocketSuite::

Yeah, that’s great. That actually makes sense to me because if you are a go with the flow person, what you need is a planner to make those pictures happen so that you can just go with the flow of that plan and then enjoy your day and not have to do it yourself, as it were.

John Branch:

Yeah.

PocketSuite::

That’s customer service, right? Make the plan and then let things fall where they may, if rain happens or things have to be change, but…

John Branch:

Exactly. Exactly.

PocketSuite::

Be the one to do the work of making it happen work. Because it’s work.

John Branch:

It’s a lot of work.

PocketSuite::

And yeah. Tell me about starting your YouTube channel. How did that begin?

John Branch:

So my YouTube channel was actually a longer story-ish because I had a YouTube channel in the past where I was teaching about music production and sound design. So I had YouTube chops from the past, but back then I had no goal or idea. I don’t know, I just liked making videos, I guess. I got that channel to about 9,000 subscribers, and that was back in the golden age of YouTube, like 07, 08.

PocketSuite::

Oh, yeah.

John Branch:

So when I moved back to North Carolina from New York, this is also when I quit my day job and went full-time wedding photography. My wife and I were living off of our savings at that point because we literally just up and left to New York with no plan at all. So I was here and I was like, “You know what? I think I’ll just start doing YouTube again.” No real reason. And I can remember telling my wife, “I’m just going to do it. I’ll try and do a video a week or maybe two a month and not really care.” And I think I got about 20 videos in, and I had one do pretty well, and then I got into the YouTube monetization program. So then I was like, well, I guess I should do at least once a week, and it just flowed from there.

So I already had a natural knack for YouTube. Again, I majored in music production and sound design where I was working on commercials and TV shows, so audio editing is the cousin to video editing. So that wasn’t too hard for me to do.

PocketSuite::

Yeah, of course.

John Branch:

So yeah, I had all the skill sets already just there because when I first started, lot of people were always like, wow, your quality is so high. And it’s like, well, I’d been a photographer for six years. I understood lighting composition. I’ve been editing audio, I literally went to school for it, and videos just the same. Most of the time when I edit my videos, I edit like an audio engineer. So it all made sense, fell into place. And people liked how I teach.

PocketSuite::

And you actually offer a course in having your own YouTube channel. Can you talk a little bit about that? It’s on your website.

John Branch:

Yeah, so that course is a very starter course. I want to go more in depth, but it’s a very great place to start out. And just like, I don’t really know how to approach YouTube. I don’t know how to plan out my videos and make them impactful with the algorithm. Maybe I don’t know as much about cameras. What’s a great starting place? It’s a lot of that stuff that gets you started and in the door because what I’ve found at least, and I guess I just have the natural ability, but you have to find what people want to see. What I would say is the downfall of most people starting YouTube is they lean too much on only what they want to do in their videos, and they don’t make it enticing for the people who are trying to find something, if that makes sense. Because again, you can talk about very obscure things. You just have to find a way to make people be like, oh, that’s a thing that I want to hear about basically.

PocketSuite::

So talk me through that process and how you choose a recent title for a video you made.

John Branch:

Yeah, so there’s two answers to that. So the first one is what I have called riding waves, not bandwagons. So basically what that is, if there’s a subject that you talk about often, it’s under what I would call your umbrella of topics. Find places where that topic is becoming popular, but you’re riding the wave because it’s something you already do. Bandwagons are things that you don’t do, but you’re doing it like, well, everyone else does it. It’s the only way to get seen by the algorithm.

My example of this is my first video to do well was about editing photos on an iPad in Lightroom, which this was back when no one thought it was legitimate. So as a professional, I was like, you can actually professionally edit your photos, but when did I release that video? When a new iPad was announced, so I was riding that wave, okay. And the video did really well because no one else talked about it and everyone was searching for iPads. So then people who didn’t even think about it maybe, it came up and they’re like, oh, yeah, how cool. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing for your titles and stuff is really thinking about, again, what other people would want to see. Now, I start this out with research. I use a program called vidIQ, and it has a lot of data in it that you can search through, but you can do this just on YouTube itself, search in the search bar, and you’ll see recommendations that will come up and use that to formulate your title, because that’s the thing. I’ll sit down and brainstorm my videos, but then also go back and search and use vidIQ to really hone in on how I should title it. Because the biggest mistake I see a lot of people make is they’re still using what I would consider blog titles for their videos. And those don’t translate well to YouTube. They’re great titles, it’s better suited for a blog.

PocketSuite::

It’s a different medium.

John Branch:

Or something of that sort. Yeah, it’s a very different medium.

PocketSuite::

How important are your YouTube, social media in terms of getting new clients, or is it monetized in other ways? I know that one of those truisms about marketing right now is be on social media, but I’m wondering, where do you get most of your wedding clients? Is this a channel for them or is it really other things?

John Branch:

Yeah, so it actually has turned into the majority of my inquiries now, which I never thought it would do that. I’ve been very surprised myself. But what it seems like is that one person in the couple is slightly into photography, and so they find me and they’re like, oh, wow, John Branch, it’d be so cool… I actually even, because I’ve been doing the full wedding behind the scenes videos, I’ve had couples who are like, “I’d love you to do one of those for ours as well.” So I was very surprised.

But I think it’s just because I’m, again, authentically just showing myself and what I do and they can see that and respect it. So I do think it’s really big, and that goes for any social media in general, just really show yourself and what you’re doing and who you are, and people will eventually be like, wow, this is so cool. I like how you did X, Y, Z. The more someone can get to know you, the more comfortable they’re going to feel. This is why, actually, I’m even updating some of the stuff on my website and my contact form replies with actual videos. Because it goes so far, and I know a lot of photographers, they’re like, I don’t want to do video, but if you can sit down in front of someone without actually having to sit down in front of them and they can get to know you, it’s almost like watching TV shows, you feel like the characters because you’ve been watching them live out whatever story it is.

PocketSuite::

As a marketer, I can just underline that. If you can get someone to take the time to watch a video, it is very powerful.

John Branch:

Extremely powerful. Yeah. Again, I had no idea it would happen with YouTube, and again, I’m not getting as many leads as I used to, but the leads I get are extremely strong and hot leads. I really don’t even have to… I have meetings with my couples, but they’re just like, yeah, you’ve seen what I do, you know so much about me already. So I’ll just answer some questions and we’ll go from there.

PocketSuite::

Right. You already made the sale by doing the videos, so they come in much more ready to say, you are the one we want. I’ve watched 10 of your videos and I’m convinced.

John Branch:

Yeah, I had a couple pretty much tell me, they were just like, tell me how much we have to pay you. And I was like, wow. I was like, this is crazy. I never had this before.

PocketSuite::

Oh, what are the opportunities you see in your industry right now in photography specifically? Where do you think the industry is headed?

John Branch:

Oh my goodness, this is such a good question too because I think about that often myself, and I think that that’s what happens when you’ve been in it for about a decade. You start being like, things are different and they’re changing. Media in itself I think is a big opportunity. People love to feel like they’re in their own reality TV show, and I feel like there’s a way to really hone in on that for couples. We’re already starting to see photographers hire a TikTok specialist on the day of to just make TikToks and reels and stuff for the couple. I feel like I see a lot more of that maybe.

PocketSuite::

Yeah. That is a big trend overall in the marketplace of everything right now is just gone are the days of the top thing being the Instagram filter and the absolutely gorgeous people. People really want those more raw, real TikTok-y moments. The more behind the scenes, the more authentic sort of side note that is behind those big moments. And if you can capture those two maybe in video, is that how you would do it, these behind the scenes wedding videos you were talking about?

John Branch:

Yeah, definitely. And it’s easy. Hire someone and hand them your phone and just like, Hey, record stuff. And when you get back home, you can figure out what to do with it later, but just record anything.

PocketSuite::

Yeah, it’s funny because I think of wedding photography as being that ultimate expression of the polished photograph event moment, but even that is moving in this, yes, we’ll have that, but also the bloopers behind it and the authentic stuff that happens behind the scenes.

John Branch:

Yeah. And I think it depends on the couple too. I think there’s a clear divide. There’s people who want very just real and raw, and then there’s other people who basically want you to cover it like Vogue, and they want all of the video to just be very clean and even the behind the scenes to just be very cute and clean. So yeah, I think media in itself is where photo is moving. And again, I know for photographers they’re like, I’m just trying to take photos, but even seeing it from the YouTube perspective, it goes a long way. People love to see things happening and feel like they’re at the actual event.

PocketSuite::

So why did you decide to go in the direction of offering courses, creating videos for newcomers? Was it a lot of people were asking you? Did you identify an opportunity, just that natural impulse to mentor?

John Branch:

Yeah, more so than natural impulse to mentor. I’ve always, for some weird reason, just absolutely love to teach people, and it’s always come from a place of when I’ve understood something to the degree that I understand it, I want to help you understand what I’ve figured out. And again, a great place that really shows that I just like doing that for literally no reason was my previous YouTube channel where I was teaching audio production. Yeah, I would make some money. I would get a hundred dollars check every couple months, but there was literally no reason for me to do it. I was just like, I love teaching. Check out this thing I figured out how to do. So that was really the first place. I myself had a mentor when I was about three to four years into wedding photography, which he definitely saved me because I was doing well, but I had no idea what I was doing. He definitely helped out with places to be like this, how you should do these things.

PocketSuite::

How did you connect with your first mentor? Who was she? How did you find her?

John Branch:

So my mentor was Phil Porto of the Portos, and we met at a workshop and if I remember correctly, we hung out a little bit, but not a lot, but we hung out enough to know of each other. And then he was posting that he needed a photographer, like an associate photographer in the New York area, because he is from there, but he lives in Florida. And I was just like, “Hey, I am willing to try that out.” And he was like, “Oh, I remember you from the thing.” He was like, “Yeah, sign me up immediately.” And then from there, he just took me under his wing and honed in on a lot of stuff.

And it’s the same thing that I want to do for other photographers because photography in itself and having my own business has made a huge impact on my life. So really at the end of the day, I just want to share stuff. And I know it’s hard nowadays, because there’s a lot of people just floating around making courses. It’s actually one of the, I don’t know if I can call it imposter syndromes, but it’s one of the things I deal with being like, I want to make a course that’s fairly priced, but I don’t want people to feel like, oh, here he goes, another person on YouTube making a course. That’s why I also have a lot of free stuff, because I really do genuinely just want to teach people.

PocketSuite::

John Branch:

And I have a three-hour video, it’s free. Other photographers are like, wow, this guy put a whole three-hour video for free. Yeah.

PocketSuite::

We see it being a platform where people run businesses is that a lot of businesses fail in their first couple years, but we’ve noticed that talking to the ones who succeed is that they follow that natural impulse to look for mentors, to look for coaching, to reach out and make connections in their industry, and they stop it with a lonely road thing where they think they have to figure out absolutely everything for themselves. So what’s your advice to someone in that position who’s looking for the right advice, the right coaching, the right courses, the right… In any industry? How do you find the right person for your business?

John Branch:

That’s a great question. I would say first and foremost, really vet out your coaches and understand their strengths. Because again, there is, especially in our internet economy right now, there’s a lot of people who just shoot out courses to make money. So make sure that they legitimately care to mentor and you understand what it is you’ll get from them, because everyone has their strong suits. I can’t teach everyone how to do everything. I’ll be perfectly honest, booking couples is not my strong suit, so I can teach on it, but the level I’m teaching on is only as far as I’ve gone myself. I’m looking for people to teach me about it. And it’s understanding that about mentors.

I think early on, it’s easy for us, as people, humans in general to just put your mentor on a pedestal because they’re a little bit further than you, but even your mentor is looking at someone else, putting them on a pedestal, being like, oh, if I could only get better at this thing. So just understanding that mentors are people too, and that there are shady people out there, so vet them.

Second off, I would say, to not be too afraid to pay for your mentoring either. And this is one of those subjects that people get very divisive about because, again, there’s a lot of people just out there trying to take your money, but I’ve found that the quality of mentorship is better when there’s actual transaction behind it. Because even with my mentor, and I think about this all the time because again, I go back and forth with myself about should I charge? How much should I charge? Technically, I was paying my mentor as well because I was an associate, so he was getting a cut from every wedding I shot for his business. So really, that was the payment for the mentoring. So it’s just understanding where mentoring sits. If you can find a totally free one, that’s great, but just realize at the end of the day, everything is a transaction in some way, form or fashion. And I don’t know if I explained that the best way, but-

PocketSuite::

No, no, I think it’s important that it’s just part of the process, that there’s different ways of getting this and it’s a service, but go get it. Go get what you need to succeed.

John Branch:

Yeah.

PocketSuite::

So I’ll have links to your YouTube channel and your website in the show notes. Any other things you want to plug or mention before I let you go?

John Branch:

That’s the biggest stuff. I got the natural fields preset, which is my personal preset that I actually use on all of my photos. That’s a website in itself. And then, yeah, just my YouTube and courses. Again, get into the YouTube because it’s a great way to get your feet wet and learn the general overall aesthetic of weddings. And then from there you can look into courses and stuff.

PocketSuite::

All right, cool. Well, thank you everyone once again for joining us on the Book Solid Podcast. As always, the best way to support this podcast is to run a business on PocketSuite, but we also really appreciate those five star reviews or sharing this episode with someone who you think could really enjoy hearing this wisdom from John, and have a great and fantastic day.

Eddie Zhang opened a gym and discovered that the success of his space was dependent on the success of the trainers. That started a long road of becoming an amazing fitness coach helping trainers around the country succeed in getting booked solid and making their goal income. Listen for an amazing story and some great tips on building a business. Watch the episode on YouTube or subscribe on the podcast service of choice!

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Full Booked Solid Podcast Transcript:

PocketSuite:

Welcome to the Booked Solid Podcast, a place for anyone with clients. I am your host, Hansa Bergwall. And thank you so much for joining us yet again. We have a fantastic guest for you with Eddie Zhang.

Eddie Zhang:

Hello.

PocketSuite:

He is a business mentor for fitness trainers in Columbus, Ohio. He’s a gym owner and he’s fantastic. So thank you for joining us today, Eddie.

Eddie Zhang:

Oh, pleasure to be here.

PocketSuite:

So why don’t you start at the very beginning for us. How did you get started on your entrepreneurial journey starting your first business?

Eddie Zhang:

Man, that is a great question. I have to rewind all the way back to probably around year 2020. No, sorry, year 2010 to 2011. Man, it’s been a long time. Back then I was just first starting to get into fitness and I was basically working at just a normal cubicle job. I literally had a cubicle and I was clocking in, clocking out my 40 hours every single week, and it just felt like something was missing. I was just like, “Man, is this really what the rest of my life is going to look like where I wasn’t really passionate about what I did?” It was was my first job. So you’re excited to get your first job and jump into the real world, and that quickly fades. The excitement fades real quick, and then you just start thinking, “Man, is this really how I’m going to spend the rest of my life?”

So I was working with a personal trainer at the time. I mean, he had his own struggles. He was struggling to make ends meet and he didn’t have a consistent client base or anything like that. But something I just noticed was that he was just really passionate about what he did. And on top of that, he was in a lot of ways more in control of his life than I was. That’s something I noticed where he could control his own schedule better. He could just make decisions that only affected him and such. That was something I was actually really envious of, and it kind of just opened my eyes to the power of entrepreneurship and running your own business and all that. So just by spending more time with him, the more people you spend your time around, you just start to think more like them.

I started wanting to become more a business owner. So I saw that he did not have his own gym and he wanted to, and he got all the money together. He pieced out all the equipment, found a location, and right before he was about to pull the trigger on opening his own gym, he kind of hesitated and he shared with me that he didn’t really want to spend his time managing a building and managing a gym. He wanted to be a coach, he wanted to be a trainer, he wanted to be hands on the floor working with people and such. So he kind of took a step back and that’s what got me thinking. In Columbus, Ohio back then, there was not a lot of places where a trainer could just have a gym to run their own business. And most of the gyms around here, they want to take a percentage of the revenue that you generated. They wanted more control over your schedule, what time you could use their gym space, what time you can’t and all that.

So there really wasn’t a lot of options for him. And that just really got me thinking, what if there was a gym specifically for coaches that did not want to personally guarantee hundreds of thousands of dollars, spend tens of thousands out of pocket to start their own gym? What if I just did it for them? What if I built the gym and I took care of the gym? And all they would have to do is just run their business and just focus on coaching their clients from there. So that’s kind of how my first business Training Grounds got started. You can get me talking and I can keep going and going, but I’ll just stop there.

PocketSuite:

Yeah, that’s a great story. I’d love to hear about your first year of Training Grounds, how you got your first coaches to sign up and use your space and stuff like that.

Eddie Zhang:

Oh man. Yeah, that’s a story in itself. So obviously we had our trainer who needed the space, but we really started to run with the idea. I had one business partner of mine, he was my roommate at the time, and we were both working with him. So both of us wanted to try our hand at starting a business and such. We started connecting and talking with every coach in town. All the trainers at local gyms, all the trainers on social media, every trainer that we could get ahold of. We were just cold pitching basically our idea. We didn’t have anything to sell because there was nothing there yet. It was just an idea. And everybody was like, “This is a great idea. Oh my gosh, I would use this space. I would absolutely do it.”

So we really ran with it, and we put together some money, raised money from friends about our great idea. I don’t even know how I convinced people to give me money for this. We raised $145,000 from various friends, some invested as little as $5,000, some invested as much as $50,000. But we were like, “This is the next great big idea.” And then when we went out and we finally found a location and we deployed the money and we got everything set up, out of all the trainers that said they wanted to do it, two showed up. One was my coach, the other one the was just one coach. We had 30 or 40 people… Because we were trying to get bank financing for this and banks don’t finance startups, by the way, guys. But we were trying to show them, “Look, we already have 30 or 40 customers wanting to do this.” And out of the 30 and 40 signatures that we had, only two followed through. Only two followed through there.

PocketSuite:

Oh my God, that is such a fascinating story. So then what did you do? All these people who are like, “Yeah, I want this.” And then [inaudible 00:05:47].

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah. It kicked our butts into overdrive. We realized that it was just like, “Okay, well, we have this space now.” And we’re bringing in maybe not quite $2,000 a month and our overhead was $10,000. We had a little bit of a runway because we set aside about three months worth of expenses, $30,000 in a bank. And we were like, “We’re about to blow through this very quickly.” When you have a clock, that 90 days goes by very, very fast.

PocketSuite:

Wow.

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah. We went back to reaching out to trainers again, and we hit up every single trainer and we were just like, “Hey, just let you know that we’re here.” It was basically the digital version of door knocking where on social media, we just hit up every single coach that we could ever just get in contact with. We invited them over for a tour of the gym. There was no pressure or anything. We were just like, “Hey, if you ever need a place or know a coach that might need their own gym space, keep us in mind.” Yeah, we had a lot of people come by and just check out the gym.

I used every social media platform possible. We had Instagram, we had LinkedIn. I signed up for whatever the pro version of LinkedIn was back then where you could search people by their job titles. So anyone that was a trainer that lived in Columbus, Ohio, I was cold messaging them. Everyone on Instagram that tagged themselves flexing at a gym, I would message them. I would actually go through this list weekly. So on Mondays, it would be all the lifetime fitnesses. Who posted themselves in the last week. If they looked like a coach, I was shooting them a message. If anyone new showed up, then I’d shoot them a message.

Then it was the Planet Fitness Day, and then there was the Small Gym Day or whichever. And I just kept reaching out to people and we ran through our reserve, and then we had to basically put our own money into it. So thankfully, my partner had a nice healthy doctor salary that he was helping with, and I still actually worked my full-time job at the same time too. So both of us were just contributing anywhere from a thousand to some months, $3,000 a month a piece into this place in order to keep it afloat. And slowly but surely, we started increasing our client roster. We had trainers coming in. We had trainers dropping off. I don’t think we broke even for… Well, I’m sorry, not broke even. We didn’t reach equilibrium where our revenue was equal to our expenses for two and a half years. Yeah.

PocketSuite:

Oh my God. That is some real staying power.

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah. Well, I mean, there was really no option. It was just like, “Well, we either call it quits here, and we’re on the hook for about half a million dollars of personal guarantees in terms of equipment, in terms of the lease space.” I knew I’d have to declare bankruptcy. It was just like, “Well, it’s either we quit now or we keep pushing ahead.” I think what really helped though was we saw that we could get coaches. It just wasn’t happening as fast as we wanted, but we were able to get coaches. It was a good idea, and it was a very sick, sick setup for the coaches. so we were able to get coaches to come and try us. Just the problem was not many of them stuck around, but we were slowly getting more than the coaches that were dropping off.

PocketSuite:

Yeah. I guess it’s hard to get people to really change their habits. People don’t always factor that in. Thank you for sharing. Entrepreneurial stories often involve those sort of [inaudible 00:09:21].

Eddie Zhang:

Oh yeah.

PocketSuite:

It’s good to hear them. Just so that people remember to have that [inaudible 00:09:27].

Eddie Zhang:

I don’t know a single entrepreneur that doesn’t have a rocky period. It may not be a rocky. I’ve heard people have rosy starts, but then rocky middles, rocky ends. If you’re listening and you’re in a rocky period right now, that’s totally normal. In fact, get used to it.

PocketSuite:

So at some point in there, I know that between being a gym owner, you became really invested in the success of the trainers who were at your gym and became a business mentor for these people. Because their success was tied with your success. Can you talk about how that started for you?

Eddie Zhang:

Actually, that’s a great question because that’s pretty much the continuation of the story itself is in order to… The way we looked at it was like, “Okay, we can get new trainers to come in here and try our gym all the time.” But our turnover rate was very high. Our turnover rate on average was six months. Meaning some coaches would try us for a couple months maybe and then drop off. Some coaches would-

PocketSuite:

When they dropped off, would they leave just because their business wasn’t strong enough to afford [inaudible 00:10:35]?

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah, exactly. It was just that. They weren’t making their ends meet. They weren’t covering their living expenses. So many of them, they were part-time trainers trying to make it full-time. Some of them were servers on the side trying to just cover the difference in order to live their lifestyle. Going through that myself at the time, I understood why it made somebody really think maybe I’m not supposed to do this and such. The way that we looked at it was like, “Okay, every time we seem to get a new coach in here, we’re barely keeping our head above water.” Because basically, a client would drop off. And I know any coaches listening right now probably remembers this, where anytime they seem to sign on four or five new clients, it’s three or four more drop off. It’s two steps forward, one step back and such.

So I started to really think about it and I was like, “Well, what if there was a better way to do this? What if we could help these coaches? Instead of constantly trying to sign up new clients for ourselves, new coaches, what if we could actually help them run their business and they actually stayed around longer?” They didn’t drop off. And that way we wouldn’t always be looking for new coaches and such. So that’s kind of where the idea of the business mentorship started. Within just Training Grounds with only the trainers at my gym, I reached out to all of them actually and saw, “Does anyone want help trying to grow their business? Totally free. I’m not charging anybody anything. I’ve just got some ideas that I think might be able to help and such.” Yeah, we started working directly with the coaches on basically what they were doing wrong on the business side of things.

Because I’ll tell you, what I quickly came to realize is that many of these coaches were incredible coaches. They know everything that there is to know about exercise science, human physiology, nutrition, macros. They know all that kind of stuff. But what they didn’t know was business. They didn’t know marketing. They didn’t know sales. They didn’t know human psychology. In fact, I’m going to throw this out there. They didn’t actually know what coaching was. A lot of these coaches think coaching is simply just, “Here’s a set of instructions, here’s your workouts, and you go off and do them. Or I’ll watch you go do them and tell you what to do.” And that, my friend, is not actually what coaching is. You’re going to get me started on a mini rant here.

PocketSuite:

Coaching [inaudible 00:13:08].

Eddie Zhang:

I’ll keep it short and simple, but if you’re actually going to coach someone, it’s not just giving somebody a set of instructions. Coaching is actually helping them. You have to actually help them execute on those instructions. Now, 99% of people, there’s nothing physically stopping them from following your instructions. What’s stopping them is always these limiting beliefs and these limiting ideas in their head, whether it is, “Am I good enough for this? Am I not good enough? Does this sound salesy? Does this sound pushy? What will other people think of this? What if nobody responds to my offer?” It’s head trash. There’s all this head trash inside of their head about what they should or they shouldn’t do, or what’s socially acceptable, what’s not, or whichever. So real coaching is more of… It’s almost like it’s psychology. It’s almost like what a therapist does.

Any fitness coaches listening to this will understand when I say that many times, they’re more a therapist to their clients than they are anything else. And that’s actually more in alignment with what coaching is because there’s nothing special about this set of instructions that any fitness coaches give their clients. Anyone can give them workouts. Anyone can give them nutrition advice. Anyone can give them these set of instructions. But if you can actually help your clients overcome any limiting beliefs or any limiting blocks that they have up here in their minds, that’s actually when they can actually start physically going out and following your instructions. Yeah. “Oh, I’m too busy. Oh, I don’t have time.” That’s not true. That’s actually not true at all.

PocketSuite:

Yeah. I mean, I get it with the in and out of the gym myself. It’s so hard to keep to a schedule. Okay. So explaining to people… Just talk about some early successes you had with a coach who wasn’t quite getting there in terms of their business and how you helped them turn it around.

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah. Actually our first coach, her name was Caitlyn. And I’ll actually share just a couple things that anybody can take that we helped her with in order to get them to see more results and such. So Caitlyn, like many coaches, they kind of just sat around and they were just hoping and praying that new clients would just show up. So they would post on social media, they would post photos of themselves, inspirational captions, be like, “You can do it,” those kind of things like that. But at the end of the day, nothing seemed to consistently work. Sometimes they would post something and a client would show up or somebody would reach out, but nothing was really consistent. When it comes to business, there is actually a science behind this where if you look at any business out there, they’re able to actually predict how many clients they’re going to get by doing whatever set of instructions or whatever strategy that they go out and implement.

But most people don’t have the right strategy. They don’t have the right system. They just simply see what other people are doing and then they copy it, and then they just sit back and they just hope and pray that it gets results and such. So it’s not necessarily that she was doing anything wrong. She was posting and she was showing up on social media and all that, but she wasn’t saying the right things. So for example, a lot of fitness coaches like to talk about their workouts and their nutrition and their accountability and things, but that’s actually not what gets people’s attention. So they’re doing the right things by posting and talking. They’re just not posting and talking about the right things. They’re posting and talking about all the technical things inside of their program about how they can help with this and how they can help with that. But what we did with her is we got her to stop doing those things and start speaking directly to… She wanted to work with more young women.

I actually don’t really like this word because… I don’t really like this word, but it is the word that people understand the most is, what is a trigger for the people that you’re trying to help? What is something that literally, when you talk about it, it’s bringing up past trauma, it’s like a trigger? And when I say past trauma, I don’t mean, “Oh my gosh, you were abused or you were a victim of domestic violence or whatever.” Yes, that’s definitely a form of past trauma, but trauma is really anything that upsets us about anything. So when it comes to fitness clients, what are the triggers that are getting people to basically stop their scroll and pay attention because you’re literally triggering them? So we got her to dial in on what the triggers for her audience we’re getting.

So some of these triggers might be… Since she was working with many young women at the time, they’re just coming out of college. A lot of these women were thinking that back in college, I could eat whatever I want. Back in college, I was fitting into all these small clothes. Now that I’m entering the workforce, all the clothes I’m buying are bigger. I have to watch what I eat more. So now she started posting and talking about these things. So instead of just workouts and nutrition, she’s talking about how uncomfortable it is to go out and buy new clothes as you enter the workforce, about how you’re trying to impress the people that are at your job, but nothing that you seem to put on fits you anymore. Nothing looks good on you or whichever. These are the things that her clients or audience were actually experiencing.

She’s triggering them by bringing up these past experiences that they’re encountering. From a human psychological point, they literally cannot ignore it. So instead of talking about workouts and nutrition and things that nobody cares about, she’s talking about the things that are actually triggering her audience. And all of a sudden they stop scrolling and they pay attention to what she’s actually saying. Because social media is nothing more than just a constant stream of information at you. And if you want your information to stand out, you have to get them to stop scrolling because most people just scroll through Instagram, double tap, scroll through, double tap, double tap. But they don’t actually pay attention to what you’re saying.

PocketSuite:

Yeah. So if anyone wants to try this at home, this is called persona based marketing. And I can attest. I’ve been marketing for 20 years that it’s very effective. And the principles being used here are that instead of just putting out general marketing information for everyone, you think about your perfect client. Maybe this is someone you know and is already a client, and you speak directly to them and you talk about the experiences they’ve had and that they’ll understand and that they will know are for them because that is your perfect client. That person will stop and go, “Oh, this person is talking to me, not to Tom, Dick and Harry over there on the other side of town that really are in a totally different life position.” And sometimes people don’t want to do this because they want to just say, “Well, everyone could be my client. And so I don’t need to talk specifically to this one specific group.” But if you talk to everyone, everyone will ignore you.

Eddie Zhang:

Nobody hears. Yeah.

PocketSuite:

You talk to someone specifically, they’ll pay attention and it really works.

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah. And the funny thing about that is too, is that even though you’re speaking to one type of person, you end up working with a lot more people other than that type of person too. And what generally happens, especially when it comes to Caitlyn, for example, she started speaking to these young girls who were entering the workforce and all that kind of stuff. But she started getting other people who could start resonating with… Maybe they weren’t picking out clothes for their workday, but they were picking out clothes for a family event or something like that. Then also her clients started referring people to her where it’s just like, “You got to work with my coach. You got to work with my coach. She’s been so helpful. She’s been so helpful.” So they start referring other people to her that weren’t necessarily who she was speaking to directly, but indirectly she was getting more clients as well.

So it’s funny how a lot of people don’t want to cut out a portion of the population because they can serve everyone, but that’s exactly what they end up doing when they don’t speak specifically enough. And yet when they speak specifically enough, they end up working with more people in the general population. So yeah, it’s funny.

PocketSuite:

Yeah, because it’s a real need that some people have, and sometimes more people will identify with that than you’d think from the vision that you had. Yeah, it’s really effective. And it’s also just helpful. I’m talking to you right now, not some gray amorphous cloud, and therefore this conversation is more pointed and interesting than if I were just talking into the ethers. I’m talking to you. So whenever you can imagine a you right in front of you that you’re talking to, you’ll speak more naturally. You’ll speak more specifically. It’ll just be much more engaging for anyone who happens to overhear.

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah. For most coaches, if you’re not sure where to start with that, most coaches start with just themselves. It’s like I’m speaking to the me from 5, 10, 15, whatever, two years ago that first got into fitness. What basically life experience… What can you post and what can you say that will basically trigger someone just like yourself from before you became a coach when you got into fitness? And so for her, that’s what made it so much easier for her because she was literally just speaking to herself. So it was very easy for her to come up with, “These were the things that I’m going through and these are the things that I’ve experienced, and these were my triggers.” And lo and behold, there were many other young girls just like her that really resonated with it.

PocketSuite:

So what happened with her business? Did she succeed? Is she still training and having a great time?

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah. Actually, this was back in 2018 and within 90 days… It was four months. She went from about four, $5,000 a month to over $10,000, $11,000, $12,000 a month from there. And then she-

PocketSuite:

That’s a six figure income for a year. That’s great.

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah. No, it was really awesome. Believe it or not, she almost hit 2 million last year. So now she has a team.

PocketSuite:

What?

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah, now she has a team of… She had a team as high as eight coaches, a total of almost 18 people in her company between salespeople, virtual assistants, coaches, all that kind of stuff. She’s actually scaled back down a little bit because she’s still learning how to be a business owner and her problems are no longer getting clients, lead gen, marketing sales. Her problems now these days are just hiring correctly, how to make sure the team works together well, the culture of a team and those things. So she’s still going through growing pains, which I’m going to tell every entrepreneur, every fitness coach, listening that your growing pains never really stop. They just look different. Yeah.

PocketSuite:

Yeah. I’d rather have the growing pains if a multimillion dollar business than just trying to meet myself. So this sounds like a great success and trajectory. I’m so happy for her. I know from your story that being a business coach for fitness trainers has actually in the subsequent years become a bigger part of your business then the gym itself.

Eddie Zhang:

Yes.

PocketSuite:

Can you talk a little bit about that transition?

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah. Once we started helping all the coaches in our gym, it started with Caitlyn and quickly we were helping almost every other coach. I would say about maybe half the coaches in our gym. The other half, I’ll just be honest, they just weren’t trying to be full-time business owners. They loved coaching, they wanted it to stay a hobby, but they openly admitted, “I don’t want this to be a full-time thing and turn it into more like a job.” They’re just like, “I just like doing this.” The ones that wanted this to be a full-time thing for them, our average retention rate went from, like I said, six months to basically over a year.

In fact, people didn’t leave unless they outgrew our space. We had seven coaches basically leave because they outgrew us and they needed their own gym. So they actually started their own gyms because they were outgrowing this gym space that I was renting to them. So we hit full capacity and we basically stayed anywhere around 90% capacity from 2018 all the way through. Even today. I would say today we’re about 80% capacity.

PocketSuite:

That’s really interesting because you started with this idea that these coaches just need a space when really what ended up being the real business was like a place for mentorship and business growth.

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah. Just having the space, I quickly realized, well, if you have the space, it’s not enough because you’re not going to be able to keep the space if you don’t know business and you can’t make money. That was the lesson that I learned was that there was a lot of great coaches out there, but not enough coaches are business owners. They don’t think like a business owner. So simply providing them with the equipment, providing them with the space is very much if a fitness coach just provided somebody with the workouts and, “Here’s a program. Here, go off and follow them.” But that’s not what your clients actually need. Your clients actually need your coaching in order to stay accountable. What am I doing wrong? How do I fix this? All that. So yeah, I quickly realized it was the same thing for us.

PocketSuite:

Okay. Tell me about how the business mentoring became a part of your business offering.

Eddie Zhang:

Oh, yeah. After we started helping the coaches in our gym and their business was stabilized and our gym was basically full, I was like, “Man, I know that there are other coaches out here.” We only helped seven or eight of the coaches here. I was like, “There’s definitely other coaches out there. There’s other trainers in our city. There’s other trainers in other gyms.” We decided to open up our mentorship for basically everyone out there that wanted our help. So we started marketing to just coaches around the city, and coaches know other coaches, coaches know other coaches on social media, just coaches know other coaches. So we started having a bunch of people start asking us, “Well, how are you helping your coaches make six figures? I never even thought we could make six figures and such.”

Yeah, we just started marketing the same channels on social media, but we just cast a wider net. Instead of focusing all of our marketing and our outreach on just local Columbus, Ohio, we started looking at other cities. We started asking just the coaches, “Hey, do you know anyone that might need help with their business?” It’s literally as simple as that sometimes. You just ask, “Do you know anyone that’s running a business and they’re struggling? Love to give them a couple strategies that they can use to get new clients.” And they’re like, “Oh, my friend runs a business. I don’t know what he’s doing to get clients.” We reach out. Sometimes they’re appreciative of… Literally, we’re just trying to give them value. So sometimes they’re appreciative of it. Others times they’re like, “No, I’m good on my own,” and we leave them alone. But we do that enough. Yeah, we filled up our mentorship to about 30 or so coaches at one point just helping them fix their business basically.

PocketSuite:

That’s really cool. Well, thanks so much for sharing your entrepreneurial journey and how a business space for trainers became a business mentorship and business coaching business. I think that’s so interesting. What you think people need is often not what they really need, and I love stories like that. So if anyone listening at home wants to get in touch with you, maybe is interested in business coaching for their fitness program, how would they do that?

Eddie Zhang:

The best place to reach out to me is on social media, so I’m still very much on Instagram. That’s my favorite platform to use. So I am @EddieZhang on Instagram. It’s really where I spend most of my time. I’m on Facebook a little bit too, but I spend like 90% of my time on Instagram.

PocketSuite:

So we’ll definitely include your Instagram handle in the show notes.

Eddie Zhang:

Yeah.

PocketSuite:

Thank you everyone for joining the Booked Solid podcast, a place for anyone with clients. Again, the best way to support the podcast, of course, is to run a business on PocketSuite. We make it easy to run a client-based business, and we help people succeed. On average, people make 30% more because they run it on PocketSuite. Also, we appreciate those five star reviews or telling anyone who might want to hear it about the podcast. And of course, Eddie, it’s always such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for joining us today.

Eddie Zhang:

Absolutely. If anybody’s still listening at this point, I’ll throw in a little bonus. If anyone wants to just get a couple of our strategies completely for free, just DM me PocketSuite, and that way I know you listened to the podcast and I’m more than happy to give you one or two of our top performing lead gen strategies.

PocketSuite:

Awesome. Yeah, do that. I think that would be great. All right. Thank you so much, Eddie.

Eddie Zhang:

All right. No problem.

In this episode we talk about how Zach learned to get his wedding photography business booked solid in one year. He has a number of helpful tips and tricks that would work in any industry. 

As usual, find the link to your podcast service of choice and a full transcript below. 

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Full Transcript of Booked Solid Episode 7: Closing the Sale with Zach Gray

PocketSuite:

Thank you again for joining us on the Booked Solid Podcast, a place for anyone with clients. Today we have Zach Gray. He is a pro photographer and a coach that helps other photographers achieve their dreams and get to that six figure salary. Thank you so much for joining us today, Zach.

Zach Gray:

Hey, thanks so much for having me on. I’m really, really stoked to be here with you guys.

PocketSuite:

Thank you. You started in the photography world with your own business 14 years ago. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started in this business?

Zach Gray:

Well, yeah. When you asked me that question, I kept saying, “14 years,” and then I actually did the math again and I’m like, actually it was 16 years ago, so it was 2006, 2007. I was a touring musician. So I have this really odd story. A lot of people have heard this, but this was sort of in the era of when I was this really popular wedding photographer back in like 2010, ’11, ’12, ’13. And I have this very in unusual story of being this poor kid from Northern Minnesota who only has a third grade education and got my GED when I was 21 and thought I was an idiot and never thought I was going to succeed in anything and was only good at one thing, which is playing these guitars hanging on my wall. And I moved to Nashville touring with an artist here on a label making a thousand bucks a month and I thought I was rich because I’d never made that much money in my life and didn’t realize $12,000 a year was actually way below the poverty line and I had no clue.

And then I got married in 2005 and my wife was super smart and educated and a 4.0 college grad. And I had this crazy idea to get off the road and start a photography business. And she was like, “You could totally do that.” And nobody in my life had ever thought that I was capable of doing something. So we started this photography business and I thought, we just got married so weddings, there’s money in weddings. People spend a lot of money on weddings. I thought that makes sense. It’s creative and artistic, which are two things I love with music, so photography scratches that itch for me. And from June of 2007 to December of 2007, I shot 19 weddings and thought we were crushing and killing it and this was amazing. And then at the end of it, we did the math and realized we only made $4,000 in profit of doing half a year’s work.

And I was like scratching my head like, “Oh no, this is not good. What is missing?” Because after shooting 19 weddings I thought, “The photography’s getting there. I think the photography’s good. Why are people not spending enough money to make this profitable?” And then this crazy thing occurred to me that I actually knew nothing about how to run a business. And once I realized that, I went into business mode and I went, “Okay, I got to figure out how to run a business.” I started taking out friends who I knew were making a lot of money and asking them, “How do you make money?” Instead of saying, a lot of us photographers go, “How do you take really awesome photos? How do you get that cool lighting on your shot?” I said, “How do you actually make money?” And I was surprised at what everybody said.

They didn’t talk about the quality of their photographs. They started talking about creating an experience for their customers and doing something special and unique and all these things that I had never heard about. So then I started reading all these business books. I read like 10 business books over the winter of 2007. Had a new business plan in January of 2008, which was in five years I want to make a six figure income, which to me was outrageous. That was a huge goal for me because I’d never made more than $12,000 in a year. And in five years I wanted to do that. And here’s my new business plan. And I created this whole thing that I was going to do. Launch, relaunch the business in January of 2008, and by February had made six figures in 60 days. And when that happened, I just went, “I got to tell everybody I know how to do this.”

PocketSuite:

All right. What did you change? What happened differently from those 19 weddings before to however many weddings you did after that made it from like $4,000 in profit to a hundred thousand?

Zach Gray:

Well, I read this book, we talked about this off camera. I read this book by Michael Gerber called The E Myth. And in the E Myth stands for the Entrepreneurial Myth, Why Most Small Businesses Fail. Because 94% of all small businesses within 10 years in America fail, 80% in the first five years. And the reason for that is because a franchise has a model that knows how to attract a customer, how to price for profit, and how to take care of that customer, how to manage them well, and then how to execute. So he calls it the entrepreneur, the manager, and the technician. And I realized I was actually only good at one thing, the technician, technically taking nice looking photos. That’s the only thing I knew how to do. I didn’t know how to manage a customer’s expectations. And in this day and age, if all you do is manage their expectations, big deal. They expect you to do that. They expect you to take good pictures. They don’t expect you to take bad pictures. They expect amazing photos. They expect amazing client service. But what else do you have?

And that’s what the book talked about, which is we actually live in something that Tim Sanders calls the experience based economy. People will pay a premium. You want to make more than average? People will pay a premium for how they feel about the experience, how they feel when a bride opens up a wedding album and the story is unfolding in front of her, and you help tell that story. It’s not about the quality of the pictures, it’s about the storytelling. So when we switched from, I want to take really good pictures as a photographer to, I want to create a great experience, I want to tell amazing stories that matter, I want to talk about the emotions of what all of this means and happen to take good photos and manage my customers well, every partnership that I built, every person that I started working with went crazy about this experience we had created and it spread like wildfire.

Before I knew it, I had so much work, I didn’t know what to do with it all. And I started referring it to my friends and they were referring it back to me when I wasn’t booked and the business just exploded. And that was the difference, was understanding that people pay a premium for how they feel, not for just high quality.

PocketSuite:

Okay, walk me through that for a minute. One of the first weddings that you did where you were focusing on how your client felt, what did you do to make it into an experience for them rather than just buying pretty pictures?

Zach Gray:

So I think the first thing was realizing that one, I have to have the right lead. So there’s a sales process I use which is from Dave Ramsey’s book, Entree Leadership. It’s called qualified, rapport, educate, close. And if you walk through those first three stages, everybody closes. And I learned this from him back in early 2008. And he says step number one is you have to have a qualified lead, somebody who understands what you do and why you do what you do. They want to buy into it. So qualifications are things like, can they afford it, whatever my price is? And I decided to set my prices above average because I wanted to say something with the pricing that this is not average photography, it’s above average. And price alone is one step to say that.

So qualification based on price, qualification based on interest, qualification based on need. Did they have a need for my service? They’re getting married at say in weddings. Can they afford it? I actually put in my contact form, what’s your photography price point range. And I noticed this trend, if it was within 25% above or below, they were qualified. If it was more than that, once you hit over about 35%, which when you learn about pricing strategy and the pricing bell curve, you realize it becomes very hard to create enough value to move up 50% in price. Doesn’t matter how great the thing is, it’s really hard for you to move. So if I believe I’m going to spend two grand, but it costs three plus thousand, it’s really hard for me to make that jump. So that was another qualifier.

Another qualifier I put in my contact form was, on a scale of one to 10, how excited are you for Zach to shoot your wedding? I never booked anybody that was below an eight. If they didn’t put eight or higher, they were just price shopping or they had just Googled and I was on the first page of Google. They didn’t hear about me from a referral source. They didn’t hear about me from one of my partners, which is one of the most important things to build on beginning of your business is partnerships. They didn’t come from a partner, they came arbitrarily, and now I’m trying to win them instead of them already being warmed up and becoming a warm lead for me. So step number one, qualified.

If I get a good qualified lead and they come and sit with me, the next step is rapport. And rapport building is everything here. It is everything to do with this, Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People, which means it’s all about them. Has nothing to do with you. People are not interested in you. People don’t care about your story. People don’t care about how good your pictures are. They care about themselves, and not in a selfish way, but in the sense of, “I’m going to come spend money in here. What is the return I’m going to get on my investment for this? How is this going to impact my life?” So the goal of rapport building is very simple, I have to talk about them and find out what makes them come alive. So when I would sit with somebody in a meeting, on the phone, or preferably in person, Dale Carnegie says, “Step number one, smile.” You can’t make this sound without smiling. So we got to smile. We got to be genuinely interested. This is my favorite quote of all time from Dale Carnegie. He says, “You can win more friends in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people than you can in two years trying to get other people interested in you.”

So I took that ideology and I said, when I sit down with a bride, I need to be like this, “Tell me your story.” And they would go, “My story?” Because I’d like to use a question that’s sort of unusual to make them think. And they’d go, “What do you mean?” I’d go, “I don’t know, what matters to you?” And usually whatever they started talking about was something that was important. So maybe they would say, “Well, I went to the University of Tennessee.” And I would go, “What’s your major?” Follow up questions, genuine interests, and just ask about them. All that to say is you build this rapport by becoming genuinely interested in other people, using their name, which is the sweetest word in the English language. They say, write your own name. Using their name, asking them questions and building to a point of step number three, which is education.

So then in the education process, it’s very simple. Most photographers will take out a book or they’ll talk about their cameras or they’ll talk about, maybe if they do albums, they’ll say, “My albums are printed on Kodak Endura paper and it’s a leather cover.” And clients don’t care about any of that stuff. But what I would do instead is I would say, “Well, thanks so much for sharing all that with me. Let me tell you about what I do.” And then I would have my wedding album, a 78 page wedding album, sitting in my lap with my fingers stuck in a page. And I would tell them a story because photographers are storytellers. That’s what we do. We get to tell stories. So we need to learn how to tell our own stories really well. And I would tell the story of Steven and Scarlet, which is the album. I only had one album. That’s the only album they ever saw.

And I would tell the story of Scarlet, five years before I photographed this picture I’m about to show you, her father was diagnosed with stage four terminal cancer. And he had one dream, the father-daughter dance, walk her down the aisle and give her away to somebody that was going to take care of her for the rest of her life, because he knew he wasn’t going to be there anymore. But he was never going to be there for the wedding and he knew that. She hadn’t even met anybody yet. So that week, he went out and bought her a white dress, got out his video camera and videotaped the two of them doing the father-daughter dance in the living room. Five years later, she meets Steven the love of her life. They have the wedding in the backyard, there’s an empty chair with a picture of dad and a moment of silence. The reception begins, and then the lights dim and it’s that moment of the father-daughter dance. And there’s like, I still get goosebumps. I’ve been telling this story for 12 years. I still get goosebumps thinking about it. The lights go down. And on the back of the reception tent, they start playing this video.

And in that moment, Scarlet reaches out her hand to her mother, grabs her mother’s hand, and if we want to put this image up, we can later on, reaches out her hand for her mother and her mother covers her face with tears streaming down her face. And my wife captures this beautiful photo of her and her father in the background and then her now. And I open up the album and I say, “This is what we do. Does this sound like what you’re looking for?”

PocketSuite:

Wow.

Zach Gray:

And in that moment, we’re in stage four, which is called the close, where you ask a very specific question, “Is this what you want? Yes or no?” And that’s the beginning of getting the right customer. When somebody picks up that book and I charged at that time say, 30% more than average, tell me the value of that book for Steven and Scarlet. What’s the price? Can you put a price on it? You can’t. If that book is $10,000, which by the way, that 78 page book is $7,800. That’s what I charged back in 2011 for that book. And people bought them all the time. And people wondered, “How can you get somebody to spend $8,000 on a book?” I’m like, “Because you can’t price this book. Because it’s the story. It’s not what it’s printed on, it’s something else.” So that’s step number one is get a qualified lead, convert that lead.

And then once you have a lead and they’re qualified and they’re converted, now we have to create an experience we’re talking about. And I say, “It’s very simple. We’re going to sign a contract that says here’s what I’m going to do for you, and I’m not doing that. I’m doing this. And all of this are things that have to do with you and something specific about you personally with whatever type of photography I’m doing.” So for weddings, it was all about the relationship and it had nothing to do with …

PocketSuite:

For those listening on the podcast version and not on YouTube, he just made a little box for the contract.

Zach Gray:

Small box.

PocketSuite:

And then the bigger box for all the values someone is going to get.

Zach Gray:

Yeah, I call it surprise and delight. We have to surprise and delight our customers. Because if you tell a customer as an example, “Hey, it’s going to be 30 days to edit your photos, turn them around and get them back to you.” And on day 29 and a half you send them the photos, they basically just pat you on the back and they go, “Great, thanks for doing exactly what you said.” But what I would do is I would say it takes ninety, and I would tell them this four times when I book them, right afterwards, right after the engagement session, right after the wedding, “Reminder, it’s 90 days before you’re going to see the photos.” But I had this insanely fast editing process. The average wedding photographer took about 22 hours to edit a wedding. I could do it in two hours. I would take two days off after a wedding, and then Tuesday morning, edit all the photos. I knew when they were coming back from their honeymoon because our intake form told us. And the day they got back from their honeymoon, I would send them an email saying, “Hey, I couldn’t wait to get this done. I know it’s 83 days early. Your photos are ready. When do you want to come see them? And by the way, I already designed the book. Come look at the book.” And they would go, “What?” Surprise and delight.

PocketSuite:

That’s good.

Zach Gray:

We got to under promise and just completely over deliver all the time.

PocketSuite:

What I really like about your story is when you’re in a service-based business, it’s really all about getting all of the value out of your time. It’s like you just told a beautiful story, you sold me, but I’m not a qualified lead. I’m already married, so I’m not going to buy today. So if you did that to me, that’s a wasted half an hour or hour or however long you spent.

Zach Gray:

Of course, yeah.

PocketSuite:

I really love going back to the online lead form. You’re on your pocket suite. You put in all these questions and you know the right ones to qualify a lead so that some come through and you just say, “Oh, this is for my buddy so and so who works in this sector. Or this is for my other buddy who does the ultra premium only. But oh, this one looks exactly right for me. I’m going to spend that hour of my time with a photo book doing that sale. And I’m reasonably confident I can close it because it’s qualified, it’s right, and I can tell a story that is right for this person.”

Zach Gray:

Yeah and I think you touched on something interesting, which is sort of this idea that you’re talking about wasting an hour of time. And I think people in the creative industry, because I came from music and then into photography, a lot of people that get into those types of freelance work tend to be a little more on the creative side and some of them are very creative. One of the challenges is that when you’re doing something that’s passionate about, it’s very easy to not pay attention to the details, not to pay attention to what you’re actually doing. And a friend of mine, Kevin Swan, owned a wedding album company called KISS Books, Keep it Simple, Stupid is what it stood for, KISS Books. They were just really simple books because albums were very complicated 10 years ago when they started.

And we would go around the country on these little tours doing little workshops. And he would take random people, all these photographers that were coming in, he’d go, “Tell me how much money he made last year. Tell me how many hours you on average put into this, this, this.” And he would kind of do this whole breakdown, and then he would show them that they were making an hour. And most of them were shocked to be making 4, 5, 6, $7 an hour. They could have went and worked at McDonald’s and done this as a hobby and actually made more money. They just didn’t realize that they were spending all of their time doing this. And it seems like they’re making money, but it’s because they’re working 120 hours a week. It was craziness.

So we would try to help people to understand that there’s a value to your time, and when you’re doing something that you shouldn’t be doing, you need to have somebody else or something else do that thing so you can keep doing the thing that produces the higher amount of value and money. And that was a new concept to a lot of people.

PocketSuite:

Yeah, it’s about discipline. When you’re being creative and enjoying that and working on your art form, that’s one thing. But when it comes to the business, it really pays to be smart about it, to not chase every lead, to know what is the right lead for you.

Zach Gray:

For sure. And photographers that are listening can probably relate to the idea of, you know you’ve got to be efficient with editing and that’s a big process in photography. So you get your photos, you start going through them, and then you see one you really so you stop and you just start working on this one photo and your efficiency goes out the window because you’re excited. And that’s a challenging thing to curb, is that that mentality.

PocketSuite:

That’s really, really cool. So take me through a little bit more of your journey. So you’re making more money than you ever dreamed, actually getting a business discipline.

Zach Gray:

Yes.

PocketSuite:

After those first months where the profit just wasn’t there. And when was the first time you took on another photographer and coached them on how to do what you do?

Zach Gray:

So I did my first workshop at the end of 2008, which is kind of crazy. Most people that were in the industry at the time thought, “What do I know? I’ve only been doing this a short amount of time.” And there was a lot of truth to that, but I’m very tenacious. And I’m sort of a big fan of the best way to retain and to understand and to learn something is to coach and be coached at all times. Meaning, if I learn something, immediately teach it to someone else because it helps solidify in my mind what I understand about it. It helps me to get better at that thing, and it also helps that person to understand this new fundamental truth maybe that I learned. So I was always kind of a student of that. I was always trying to learn and then I was always trying to teach.

So at the end of 2008, I did my first workshop where I was teaching photographers some of the photography things that I was doing that were working. And I called it in-camera workshops because most photographers were really focused on editing to make their photos look cool, and I wanted to focus on shooting really good photos because it’s just much more efficient. And then by 2009, I started coaching and helping other photographers in their actual business side of things.

And about a year after I started coaching, this couple from Texas heard about this coaching I was doing. They were cattle farmers about an hour and a half outside of Houston. Their name are Luke and Cat. And you can Google them, Luke and C-A-T Photography, Luke and Cat Photography. And they had worked about a year and they were really frustrated because they had shot nine weddings and they had made $1,100 in profit. And they had heard that I was coaching people, I’d helped some people get some success. So they flew from Texas to Nashville where I live, and they paid me $3,500 for an afternoon to just offload onto them everything I knew. And they were very coachable, very teachable, very tenacious, which are things that I didn’t know at the time. So came, I gave them all this information, then I gave them three months of follow up, one time a month for the next three months. They took what they learned and from 2011 when they made $1,100 profit, $9,000 in sales, the next year they did $174,000 in sales and only had 18% in expenses. And now they still run about a 400 plus thousand dollars a year photography business, while they’re still also cattle farmers. They own 10,000 acres. It’s called the V8 Ranch down in Texas. And they are just butt kickers.

And they were always that story I went to to say, “If you believe that you have what it takes, if you’re tenacious, you have the right information and a good coach, you can do so much in a short amount of time in a 12 month period. With focused intensity and a little bit of time, you can do something spectacular.” So when that happened and Luke and Cat went from not having their dream to having their dream 12 months later I went, “I got to do this. I just love helping people so much.” What I should have done is said, “Give me 20% of your business in exchange.” I wish I had done that because then I’d be super rich if I had done that with everybody. Instead, I just charge this small amount of money, three, four, 5,000 bucks and help people make a six figure income for the rest of their lives. And it’s a real honor to be a part of that and to help people do that.

PocketSuite:

And when you do this, do you kind of diagnose what people are doing right and wrong? Or do you just say, “Throw out whatever you’ve doing before, I’m going to walk you through my process.” How does that work? How does your coaching process work?

Zach Gray:

I think it’s not very difficult, if you’re familiar with artificial intelligence right now, you can ask chat GPT how to run a photography business and it’s probably fairly accurate. I’ve actually done it a few times and it’s pretty close. Finding the right information of how to convert a lead and how to tell stories and how to create an experience is not that hard. What’s really challenging is when somebody’s working on a process and they get stuck and they’re not sure where they’re stuck, that’s really difficult. And what’s really difficult, I think, is believing that you have what it takes. I think that’s the thing. I’ve coached personally 1500 photographers in my workshops in group settings, and then I’ve coached about a hundred thousand online on my email list, and then dozens and dozens of people one-on-one like Luke and Cat.

And I think the number one thing that I’ve noticed between people that make it work and people that don’t, are people that are just struggling with that identity piece to believe that, if I put myself out there, if I take my creative thing, whether that’s the business or the photography, and just put it out there and get really bold, am I going to get shut down? Am I going to get a too many nos and not be able to handle it? It’s really a belief system of, do you have what it takes? And I think that phrase, do I have what it takes, has been the biggest thing that I’ve actually tuned my coaching to. About 50% of it is mentality, belief, atomic habits, the things that help us to branch out. Because that was me. I was that dumb, poor kid from northern Minnesota that thought he was stupid. And if I did anything, who’s going to care? There’s no value here.

And then when I realized, if I behaved and acted and created something of value and put it out there, people actually wanted it, and it gave me so much confidence. I realized, “Wow, this is spectacular. I want to help other people realize what they’re capable of and put it out there.” And then building a plan and a formula, it’s actually not that hard. It’s not that complicated. And I’ve got the formula, I’ve got the plan, I can hand it to you. But that self-discovery of confidence is probably the biggest thing.

PocketSuite:

So when you see someone who’s struggling with that doubt in their identity as a professional photographer or really any small business owner, how do you see that doubt expressed in sabotage? Is it about not charging enough for the cost of what you do, that you’re not actually making profit? Is it being afraid to ask people for business? What are the spots in which that sabotages you?

Zach Gray:

I’d say it’s probably two things. One is they spend a lot of time working behind the scenes on stuff. They work on their website, they work on their photography, they download a bunch of pricing sheets, and they work on the stuff that they need to put out there, but they don’t put the stuff out there.

PocketSuite:

Avoidance behavior?

Zach Gray:

Yeah, that’s one of the biggest things I notice is, “I’m working on all this stuff.” And I’m like, “Great, but all we need to do is we need to build partnership relationships, which requires you to go out and build relationships with people and say, ‘Here’s what I do. Here’s my value.'” That’s the most important thing when you want your business to start getting momentum, and that’s where I see people hesitate and get stuck. Is because now it’s like, “Okay, I can do all this work and I can kind of get lost in this, but as soon as I have to do this, it’s kind of like, ‘what are they going to say?'”

I remember when I first started out, our prices were really cheap, and that’s typical. Cheap price, you’re saying something about yourself, “I don’t have enough value.” You’re not just saying “I’m new.” Some people have been new for 3, 4, 5, 6 years and they’re still new. It’s like, “You’re not. We got to raise the price up or you’re not going to make any money here.” And I remember the first time I did a significant price raise to where the price was really there, and I got this amazing, highly qualified lead from my friend Chuck Arland who was a $8,000 wedding photographer. This was back in 2008. So his client got referred to me. He said, “I’m not going to shoot weddings anymore.” He was getting out of the business. “But you got to get Zach and Jodi to do it.” And they drove in from Atlanta to Nashville. So a four hour drive to come meet with us at a coffee shop, because I didn’t have my own studio or anything. We’re sitting at the coffee shop and we’re talking about how this is going to be great. We’re listening and we’re building rapport. And then I slide the pricing across the table at the end. And I remember just doing … I was waiting for them to look at it, laugh, and just go, “Oh my, this is stupid.” Because it was like $6,000 packages were in there. It was crazy.

And I was like, “They’re not going to book any of this and I’m being way too tenacious and they’re not going to think there’s any value here.” And they sat there for what felt like forever, but it was probably 60 seconds. And then they said, “Package two looks really great, but I think we might do package three,” which was the $6,500 one. And sure enough, they booked the $4,500 one right there on the spot and then upgraded a couple days later to the $6,500 one. And I was like, “Why am I so scared all the time? I need to be confident that I can create $6,500 worth of value.” And that really made a huge difference, but it required me to slide that price across the table. That was the hardest thing is to say, “I believe I’m worth this. I’m hoping somebody says it’s true.” And there you go, that’s a big component of it.

PocketSuite:

All right. So let’s say it’s ready to level up my business. I’m a photographer or I own some other kind of business, and I know that the going rate can support a little bit more, and I do amazing work. What’s your advice to me for owning my identity as an amazing business owner that’s worth it?

Zach Gray:

Well, one, I think knowing some data and some truth has helped me a lot. One of my coaches when I was first starting out was one of the top 10 highest earning photographers in America for 10 years straight. And she told me, she said, “The average client will spend three to four times that they initially believe they’ll spend.” Which means if a client comes in the door and for a wedding and they’re going to spend two grand and they spend around two grand, remember I said that 25% rule, within about 25%, but that’s what they initially believe they’ll spend. But then if you create value, they will spend up to $8,000. And I thought, I remember when she told me that I was like, “That just can’t be true.” But then I started doing that. I took what she said, and I said, “Okay, I’m going to book them at say $3,500, but then I’m going to create as much value as I possibly can by creating a phenomenal experience and making them feel important and valued and et cetera, et cetera.” And I remember having a $3,500 bride at the end of the day, spent $12,500 on books and parent albums and their family bought stuff and all these products and all these extra services that they bought.

And I went, “Julia is right.” I mean, she was always right about business. That’s why she was one of the best in the world. I was like, “Just got to listen to that.” So I think that is a huge component, is realizing that you can be a $1,500 photographer and you can make $6,000 from the exact same client. That’s possible. And the onus is on me to create value. Can I create value? Because value and price just go like this. If you want the price to go up, the value has to go up. It’s that simple. And once these two meet people, stop spending. It’s that simple. So create more value, people will spend more money. Create less value, people will spend less money. It’s really that easy.

PocketSuite:

Well, this has been an amazing conversation. Zach, if someone wants to find you, learn more about your coaching, see some of your old photography portfolio, where do they go?

Zach Gray:

Well I’m sort of like by appointment only these days. But if somebody wants to reach out to me, you can go to my Facebook page. So you can go to the Photography Business Coach or you can find me on Instagram, Zach Gray, so it’s just instagram.com/zachgray, Z-A-C-H-G-R-A-Y. And just send me a message, follow me, send a message and say, “Hey, I need help with coaching.” I’m building a number of different businesses, some of them are outside of the photography industry and one of them is inside the photography industry for coaching specifically to help photographers make money every single month with their business. So if you’re interested in that, probably the best way is on Instagram, find me on Instagram and then just send me a message, and I would love to help in any way that I can. Yeah, that’s probably the best way.

PocketSuite:

And do you have a newsletter as well? Did I hear that?

Zach Gray:

So I did for a long time. I had a really large email list. But that has sort of been put on pause for the last year and a half while I’ve been building these other businesses. And that may get revived at some point, but right now it’s not something I’m focused on because I’m focused more on individual and helping people in small groups instead of mass content to hundreds of thousands of people.

PocketSuite:

All right. Well, in the post about this episode of The Booked Solid podcast, we will have Zach’s Instagram and other places that you can find him if you want to follow him and hear about future offerings and stuff like that. As always, thank you for joining The Booked Solid podcast. The best way to support what we’re doing, of course, is to run a business on Pocket Suite, but we absolutely appreciate any five star reviews or sending this podcast to anyone that you know think needs to hear some of the wise words shared today. So thank you so much again, Zach, for joining us.

Zach Gray:

Yeah, you bet.

Booked Solid Podcast Episode 6 with Steve Beagelman

Steve Beagelman started in the franchise industry when his family franchised their family business. He started working on his family franchise from his college dorm room and fell in love with the business model. Now in 2023 franchises are a huge trend in businesses that book clients and Steve has some ideas why. In this episode you will learn why franchising can be a great model for this sector.  

Listen on:

Follow PocketSuite:

Pocketsuite.io

YouTube

TikTok

Instagram

Follow Steve:

SMB Franchise Advisors

Forbes.com Contributions

Full Interview Transcript:

PocketSuite:

Thank you again for joining us on the Booked Solid Podcast, the place for anyone with clients, and we have a fantastic episode planned for you today. A very special guest, Steve Beagelman. He is the founder of SMB Franchise Advisors. He writes for Forbes. He does a lot of speaking and what he speaks about is how small businesses turn into big franchises and really live the American dream. And if this is an area where I think a lot of people in service-based businesses are curious about, or at least that’s what we’ve been hearing. So we’re excited to have you on today Steve. Thank you for joining us.

Steve Beagelman:

Hi Hansa, how are you today?

PocketSuite:

Really, really good. I was wondering if I could just, if we could start at the very, very beginning. What is a franchise exactly? It’s something that I feel like, I know McDonald’s is a franchise, but I feel like it’s actually, it’s something that’s a lot bigger than that in a lot of ways.

Steve Beagelman:

It is. Franchising’s a huge industry and people don’t realize that. I mean, there’s over 800,000 franchises out there in 400 plus industries, so people don’t realize that. People think that it’s just like you said, McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Donuts, but it’s way more than that. And franchising really is an opportunity for you as a business owner to share your product or service with a much wider audience. Right. And it allows you to utilize other people’s capital to grow your business, to take your little business that you’ve opened and operated in one location or one geographic territory as a home services business and really expanded to other people in other markets and have people who are passionate about the business operate that business in local communities across the country.

And franchising really is a huge industry. I mean, the International Franchise Association is a very large organization that kind of helps the industry grow. And I’ve been in the industry now for over 35 years. And like I said, I mean there’s over 800,000 different franchise locations out there across the country and over 400 different industries. Not brands but industries. I mean there are thousands of franchise brands.

PocketSuite:

How did you get your start in the franchise world?

Steve Beagelman:

Well, I got started in the industry over 35 years ago, Hansa. My family got me into this business. So my parents started a little packaging and shipping store in 1986 in Long Island, New York. And just as we were kind of talking about, one day somebody walked in and said, wow, this is a really neat idea. Have you ever thought of franchising? And my dad said, I don’t really know anything about franchising. I think McDonald’s is a franchise. And the person said, you’re right. They are a franchise and they have 10,000 stores. And my dad said, okay, who are you? And the person said, I’m a franchise attorney and I can teach you about franchising and one day you can have 5, 10, 50, 100 of these. And my dad said, so I’m listening, tell me a little bit more. And he said, well, people pay you an upfront franchise fee to use the rights to your name, your system, your process and your training, and then they pay you an ongoing royalty on their gross sales typically.

And my dad said, you mean on their profit, right? And he said, no, you typically receive it on their gross sales. You don’t necessarily know what the profit’s going to be. Some people have three cars on the business and a boat and other people run it lean and mean. So you typically get paid on the gross sales of the business. So it sounded very intriguing. Other people operate the business in their local communities. You don’t have to build the location, you don’t have to staff it, you don’t have to run it. And one thing led to another, and we did franchise the business. And I was a kid back then and I decided I was very interested in business at a young age. So I asked my dad if I could intern for the vice president of franchise sales that he had hired to sell franchises.

And as a junior and senior in high school, I did that. I went from high school in a pair of khakis and a polo shirt like I’m wearing now. And I would go to the corporate office after high school and I would sit next to the vice president of sales and watch him meet potential franchisees and learn everything about franchising. And I just thought it was the coolest thing. So when I graduated high school, I said to my dad, I know what I want to do. And he said, great, what’s that? And I said, I want to sell franchisees. And he said, you’re 18 years old, you can’t do that. And I said, sure I can. I’m 18, but I look 23, which when you’re 18, you look 23. It’s really good. It’s tough when you get older and you look older. But anyway, I said I could do this, and I convinced them to let me do it.

And as an 18, 19 year old kid while going to college, I spend the weekends doing franchise shows across the country and go back to my college dorm room with 100 or 200 leads of potential franchisees. And I would call them from my dorm room at night, which you couldn’t do today because of caller ID, but they didn’t have it back then. And I sold franchises. I was selling one or two franchises every month and I loved it. I thought franchising was a great business. So in 1991, I decided to start my own business. So I created what you know as today is the food delivery industry. So you made,

PocketSuite:

Hold on, back up one second. What does selling a franchise mean exactly?

Steve Beagelman:

Yeah, so awarding a franchise, bringing a new person into the business to open the business in their community. Right. So somebody who’s,

PocketSuite:

Basically you’re selling the idea of buying into someone’s franchise concept.

Steve Beagelman:

Correct. Correct. So I was the franchise salesperson for my parents’ business at the time, and I would talk to people who are interested in owning their own business in that community of their concept, so opening their own packaging and shipping store of our brand in that community.

PocketSuite:

So give me the pitch. Why would I, as someone thinking about starting my own business, want to buy your franchise?

Steve Beagelman:

Yeah. So whatever the franchise is, typically a franchise is a proven concept. Right. It’s a proven business model. And most people that want to open their own business or become franchisees, they want to follow a proven business model. They’re not looking to invent their own concept. So whether it’s when I was a part of Rita’s Italian Ice or my food delivery concept that I started in the early 90s, or any of the 450 plus brands that we’ve launched into franchising with our consulting business, people want to follow that proven business model. They’re looking to be entrepreneurs but not on their own. Right. I mean, if they wanted to go create their own concept, they would try and do that on their own. But most people don’t know how. How do I perfect the ordering system? How do I perfect the staffing? How do I perfect the marketing? How do I perfect the customer service?

And people become franchisees in businesses because they want to follow a proven business model. And whether that’s for an emerging brand or a existing brand, that’s a large, large brand that’s been around for decades. We’ve done work for companies like Lawn Doctrine, Bath Fitter and companies like that, that are great service brands that have been around for decades and decades that people want to be a part of. So you could be part of an emerging brand or you could be part of a legacy brand that’s been around a long, long time if you want to be a franchisee.

PocketSuite:

Right. So you get, basically the pitch is, I would get all the benefits of being the boss, having my own business, but I don’t have to go through the chaos and the frustration of figuring out what works and what doesn’t by myself.

Steve Beagelman:

That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So you’re following that proven business model because you want to be an entrepreneur, you’ve decided for whatever reason, you’re tired of being in corporate America. You’ve been a stay at home parent for a while and now you want to go back into the workforce but don’t want to go work. You want to own your own business in a community that you know and love, but you don’t want to create it, whether it’s a subs sandwich shop, whether it’s a full service restaurant, whether it’s a home service business, any of those brands. It could be a pet business, childcare, whatever it is, but you don’t want to go create it because you may not know it.

So that’s kind of what a franchise really is. It’s following that proven system and getting the opportunity to have that support staff at the corporate office where you pick up the phone and you can make a phone call and they’re going to guide you through it. They’re going to help you with the suppliers, they’re going to help you with the products, they’re going to help you with staffing issues, they’re going to guide you every step of the way. They’re not running the business for you. That’s your job locally in your community as a franchisee, but they’re going to be there for you as a support staff. And that’s what franchising is.

PocketSuite:

And what do you give up to be in a franchise? Obviously some of the profits, maybe you can say a little bit about, typically about what that is. And do you have a big brother looking over your shoulder all the time? How does that part work?

Steve Beagelman:

Yeah, people ask that question a lot. So you are going to pay what’s called an upfront franchise fee for the rights to use the name, the system, the process and the training as I mentioned earlier. And then you’re going to pay an ongoing royalty. Typically, that is on gross sales. Sometimes it’s a flat fee, but typically it’s on gross sales on the business. So you are going to give something up for that ongoing support. But I will tell you Hansa, that in a lot of cases people get passionate about a particular brand that they want to be a part of, and they may be passionate about that industry, but they don’t know how to operate the business, they don’t know how to set it up. So we have businesses like some of the businesses we have in the pet care industry, there’s no way that the franchise owners would’ve known how to set up a luxury dog hotel on their own, just no way without joining the system that they did of canine resorts, or luxury pet hotel.

So they gave them the tools to become successful and set up that facility that they wouldn’t be able to do on their own. And early on, especially the first year or two, that’s when you’re going to need the franchisor the most for support because you’re getting your business off the ground and you’re still learning the business yourself. So even though you’re going to go through a training program with the franchisor, you’re not going to know everything inside and out by the end of training. So you are going to have questions along the way. Now when you’re in your seventh year and your eighth year and your 10th year, you’re not going to have as many questions as you do in the first couple years, but that’s what franchise is.

PocketSuite:

So basically, when you were in your dorm room selling franchises, you weren’t necessarily looking for people who are experts in packaged stores already. You were saying, Hey, you want to start a business? I got this lead, I have a great business. We’ll show you the ropes. You don’t have to be an expert in order to open up the next family package store of yours.

Steve Beagelman:

Yeah, exactly. Whether it’s my parents’ packaging business or any of the brands that we’ve been a part of, people get passionate about, I want to own my own business, I’m excited, but I don’t know what I want to do. And they could research on the internet, they can go to a franchise trade show like I used to do years ago, and there still are some of those franchise trade shows throughout the country in certain markets throughout the year. And they could walk the floors and say, I’m not sure what I want to do. I think I want to own Dunkin’ Donuts. But then they walk through the franchise show and they’re like, you know what? I really like this sub shop, or I really like this home service brand. I don’t need brick and mortar.

So a lot of people don’t know what they want and they want to learn, and that’s what they can do by again, searching on the internet, going to trade shows, working with what’s called franchise brokers out there. There’s lots of different ways that they can kind of research. What are you looking for? Are you looking for a part-time business, a full-time business? Are you looking to do something absentee, semi absentee? There’s all these different opportunities in franchising now that people can look at if they want to become a franchisee.

PocketSuite:

Really cool. And let’s look at it from the other angle now. Obviously we have a lot of people in the service industry and all kinds of different places of people with clients who have come up with winning concepts, maybe have a first location that’s doing great and have opened up a second location. Why go the franchise road rather than own all your stores, control everything that goes on, just have a multi-location business? What’s your pitch to that successful business owner who has a proven concept to look into franchises rather than some of the other roads to growth?

Steve Beagelman:

Yeah, I think that when you’re a small business owner and you’ve built your business, whether it’s a $500,000 business, million dollar business, $2 million business, there’s nothing wrong with taking that business and continuing to grow it organically yourself. So if you’re servicing a market in Greater Philadelphia where you and I are based and you want to grow and you take it into the suburbs and you grow it maybe from the suburbs in around Philadelphia and you grow it out to Lehigh Valley, that’s great. You can keep growing your business organically and that’s terrific. There’s nothing wrong with that strategy, but if you want your brand to become much bigger and you want to see your brand in Boston and you want to see your brand in Long Island, New York, and you want to see your brand in Miami, Florida and you want to see your brand in Houston, Texas, you just can’t do it fast enough on your own.

It’s just so hard to grow organically yourself at a national level at a big, big scale. And again, do you want to build a business from a million dollars to two or three million? That’s amazing. But if you want to build it from a million dollars to a 50 or $100 million company, it’s just too hard to do on your own. And you need lots and lots of capital, you need lots and lots of staffing, you need a corporate infrastructure that’s pretty significant and management team to be able to manage that. And it just becomes challenging for people. So again, there’s nothing wrong with taking your half a million or million dollar business and continuing to grow it yourself. That’s awesome. And if you’re satisfied with that, that’s a great plan. But if you want to take something and build something into a major company, and we’ve had clients of ours that have grown from one location, literally a home service business in his parents’ dining room table to now 300 markets across the country.

He could never have done that himself organically. Franchising allowed him to do that, where now he’s in Denver, Colorado and Houston, Texas and LA when he started in Long Island, New York. A brand that fixes exercise equipment, we helped franchise in Greater Philadelphia and Don had a really nice business but wanted to expand it. Well, today, Don’s in over 100 markets across the country. Could never have done that organically himself, certainly not in the same time period that he was able to do it with franchising. Franchising allows you to grow much faster than you can typically on your own, typically, not always but typically.

PocketSuite:

What did you say this fitness business name was again?

Steve Beagelman:

Fitness Machine Technicians. They repair exercise equipment. So when your treadmill breaks at home, who do you call?

PocketSuite:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Beagelman:

My treadmill sat in my basement as a dust collector for a few years until I met Don at Fitness Machine Technicians. He said, that’s what we do, Steve. And they came in, they fix my treadmill. $150 later, I was using it again. They also go into the Courtyard Marriott and fix the treadmill. They also go into Temple University, they also go into the gyms, Planet Fitness and they fix the ellipticals and all those things. And today the brand is over 100 markets across the country and actually did a private equity transaction last June. So super exciting and Don will tell you, the founder, Don Powers, that he was able to fulfill his American dream by expanding his business across the country, which he never could have done on his own. Was it hard work? You bet it was. Absolutely.

PocketSuite:

Yeah.

Steve Beagelman:

Franchising is not easy.

PocketSuite:

We have appliance and machine repair people on PocketSuite. It’s a great business because you have to really specialize in a particular kind of repair and when people need you, they need you.

Steve Beagelman:

Yeah.

PocketSuite:

So what it sounds like is opening a shop in Philly and then maybe Delaware, Bucks County, you can grow a good business, but there’s just another amount of leverage when people in other states maybe like Texas are buying in. Like you don’t have to put out the money to open a new location, hire staff yourself because the person who’s buying into your franchise is doing all that. So you can just get this leverage of scale so much faster than you could ever hope to do on your own investing that much in all these locations.

Steve Beagelman:

Exactly. And again, there’s nothing wrong with either strategy, it’s just what’s right for you. Some people find that franchising isn’t the right strategy because they want to control everything. So that is the other aspect that’s important Hansa, is you will give up an element of control when you do franchise your business. So franchisees have to follow your proven strategy, but you have to understand that the employees work for the franchisee, they don’t work for you. So you can’t walk into a franchise location and start telling all the employees what to do. Okay. If there’s something that’s not being operated correctly when you go check up on the operation because you have the right to do that as the franchisor you get to tell the franchisee, listen, these things aren’t up to the standard. This needs to be adjusted, et cetera, et cetera. But you can’t start directing the employees what to do. The employees work for the franchisee. So there is that,

PocketSuite:

Hopefully,

Steve Beagelman:

Element of control.

PocketSuite:

We want to see you succeed and really think you should make these shifts in order to stay true to the proven concept,

Steve Beagelman:

Absolutely.

PocketSuite:

Rather than a contiguous power struggle.

Steve Beagelman:

Franchising is all about them becoming successful Hansa. There’s no doubt about it. You need your franchisees to make money. That’s what franchising’s all about.

PocketSuite:

It sounds like a real relationship business. If you’re good at partnering with people, this is a great way to go.

Steve Beagelman:

The tagline of my company, Hansa, is it’s all about the relationship and that is what franchising is all about. You’re absolutely right.

PocketSuite:

That’s really cool. You wrote an article in Forbes kind of wrapping up the year 2022, and you said that some big growth areas in franchises are not what you typically think of as like the McDonald’s and the fast casual restaurants, but in places like home improvement concepts, personal services, pet related businesses, education, these are all kind of service-based businesses. And I was wondering if you had any highlights from any of those areas that you could talk about?

Steve Beagelman:

Sure. I talked about two of them just now in the fitness area, GYMGUYZ, which is a mobile personal trainer that goes to your home. I mean, Josh started it in his parents’ dining room table and now is in 300 plus markets across the country and they go to your house and do personal training. So when you say to, oh, it’s snowing outside, I’m not going to go to the gym today. Well don’t worry, they’re coming to you and they have all the equipment in their vehicle. It’s a pretty neat concept. Or fitness machine technicians where they go and repair the equipment. Absolutely. Home improvement, great category. We have a concept called renovation sales. They literally go into your home and renovate your kitchen or your bathroom prior to sale. So a realtor or say to you, Hansa, listen, I think your house is worth $500,000 when you’re going to sell your house.

However, if you redo that kitchen, I can get you 650 and it’s going to cost you $25,000 to renew it or to renovate it. So this company will come in and do the renovations of that kitchen for you and then the realtor can sell it for the $650,000 for it. So they’re growing in leaps and bounds. I think they’re well over 50 franchise territories in the past year plus of franchising. They’re growing very rapidly. Handyman services, anything that goes into your house and fixes things and comes in, especially the last couple years during COVID, people are doing so much work at home.

So Ace Handyman and so many other handyman services, businesses are just growing in leaps and bounds. The closet industry and renovations of your garages, things of that nature are growing like crazy. So all of these businesses and then pets, pets are off the chart, whether it’s dog walking or coming into your backyard and picking up the dosa scoops and picking up your yard. All of those businesses growing very, very rapidly. So home services, businesses where you don’t need brick and mortar, those types of concepts are growing very, very fast in the franchise community and we don’t see any reason to see that they’re going to slow down.

PocketSuite:

And why do you think that is? Why are these service-based businesses suddenly really discovering the franchise way when it wasn’t as big in these areas before?

Steve Beagelman:

I think part of it is cost. So you can get into these businesses for less money than it’s going to cost typically for a brick and mortar business. That’s one. Second reason is you can get into the business much faster. So if you need to go buy a brick and mortar business, whatever it is, whether it’s a Subway or a Jersey Mike’s or a big business like a childcare facility, it takes time. It takes time to find the location, get it zoned right, get the architectural drawings done, get it built, and then open the business. Whereas a home services business, you typically will sign a franchise agreement with a franchise concept and then you could be trained that next month and open the month after that.

So it happens very quickly that you then are in business. So a lot of people like that, and I think a lot of people also like the fact that they don’t have to sign a big lease, they don’t have to commit themselves to 10 or 20 years on a lease with a big personal guarantee. They may be able to do this home service business from their home, or they might need a small little flex office part-time where they need employees or have some of their vehicles parked or something along those lines. So I think those are some of the reasons that those businesses have really, really expanded. The junk industry, we’ve done a business called Junkluggers and several others in that category that have really exploded in franchising as well.

PocketSuite:

Right. Right. I kind of get it. If you are wanting to buy into a fast casual concept or something like that, you’ve got to pay for real estate and a place where people are, which is very expensive, probably hundreds of thousands if not investment to get the real estate under your name. But if you have a mobile detailer franchise, they need maybe a really nice branded van and some supplies and you’ve bought in. So you can target a lot more people who don’t necessarily have as much in the bank set aside for starting their next business. You can really partner with people who are up and coming rather than already made it.

Steve Beagelman:

Absolutely. I mean, we have concepts that are roofing concepts, tree service concepts. Monster Tree Service was one of our brands, although they need some vehicles, they’re not going and renting a physical retail location so they can be up and running pretty quick once they get their vehicles. Redbox plus, I mean, those are brands that we’ve done that have been very, very successful in the franchise sector. I mean, Redbox Plus started in Minnesota with one or two locations, grew to hundreds after it was acquired by Josh Skolnick from Monster Tree Service, and they grew and then they sold to private equity, they sold to BELFOR.

So Monster Tree Service now owned by Authority Brands. So after they grew to hundreds of locations. These are great success stories, but there is a lot of work from the beginning to there. I mean, I want all your listeners to know that. Franchising is hard work, but it is rewarding and it is exciting. A lot of our clients say they’re very excited about the opportunity to work much more on their business versus in their business. They still love their brands, but they want to see it become bigger. And that’s where franchising comes into play. And we get to help people expand their businesses through that model.

PocketSuite:

Yeah. And it’s I’ll say it is a trend we’ve been seeing in our business at PocketSuite as well, not just in Forbes Magazine. We’ve been in business for a number of years and franchises really weren’t something we were paying attention to, but over the last year or two, there’s just a ton of service based franchises now running on PocketSuite in the pet care industry or some of these other areas. So it’s been kind of exciting to get to know about these customers and the sort of very exciting growth road that some of them are on.

Steve Beagelman:

Absolutely. The trajectory for home service brands is really incredible, and it’s probably the fastest sector that we see growth in. While we certainly still see fast casual restaurants growing and we see childcare growing and lots of other concepts that are growing and franchising, there is no doubt leaps and bounds home service brands are one of the fastest sectors we have.

PocketSuite:

So let’s say I’m listening at home or at my office and I’ve got a service-based business and it’s doing great, what is the checklist that I would want to know that I have in place of whether franchising my business is right for me?

Steve Beagelman:

Typically, we’ll have several conversations with someone to get to know them, get to know their business, and ask them some pretty detailed questions to understand whether franchising is the right vehicle for them. First of all, is their business franchisable? That’s number one. Some concepts just aren’t. Some are just great in a specific region and just really can’t be duplicatable or replicatable, and that’s okay, that happens, but we’re going to spend a lot of time getting to know the brand and getting to know the people. And then we’re also going to get to know whether they’re right for becoming a franchisor, because as I said, you’re going to have to give up some control. There is a lot of work involved, there’s a huge time commitment involved. And some people will say, listen, I’m just not interested in working that hard. I don’t want to do that at this stage in my life or whatever reason. I have a great quality of life. I’m making a lot of money. Life is good. I don’t think I want that effort.

So we spent a lot of time talking to people and making sure it is the right direction for them, and it’s the right direction for us to help them take their business to the next level through franchising. So if they were sitting at home and listening to this and trying to get an idea, I would tell them, think about internally with yourself. Hey, am I willing to give up some control? Do I want to see this brand really become bigger, whether that’s regionally or nationally? Right. So I was part of Rita’s Water Ice. We grew that brand to 350 locations at one point, so before we sold it to private equity. So it’s really up to you what you want to see your brand become. And if you decide you want it to become bigger and you are up for the challenge of working more on your business than just in your business, then franchising may be a good direction for you. And then it’s worth having a conversation with a member of our team. And then we’ll kind of guide you through the process of whether we think it makes sense or not.

PocketSuite:

Cool. And what kinds of businesses are you most excited about partnering with on the sort of franchise journey right now? Any sort of wishlist ideas or things like that?

Steve Beagelman:

There’s so many that I love so hard to say Hansa. I love anything with pets. I love anything with kids. I love anything with parents. So senior care, great industry. There’s nothing we won’t do for our parents. I was just talking earlier with a friend of mine and just had a place his parent in a home and finding the right place is so, so critical. We’re launching a brand that helps people place their parents in the right facilities. That’s such a stressful thing for people to go through or senior care where they’re coming into the home and helping take care of an elder family member. So those are great businesses.

Kids are great. Anything with kids, we’ve done Soccer Shots, which is a mobile soccer concept, grew to hundreds of franchises, also did a private equity transaction last year. So anything with children, sports, fitness and pets as I said. I’m a dog lover. I have two goldendoodles myself. I’m actually an equity investor in a few franchise brands in the pet industry. I love pets. So I think the pet space is growing in leaps and bounds too. So there’s a lot of great industries out there. And clearly everything in home services is great as well. So I have a lot that I’m passionate about, that’s for sure.

PocketSuite:

All right. So I am a business owner. I’m curious about this, but it sounds like you really need to talk to an expert in order to figure out if this is the right path to you. So where do I go? What do I do to get started on exploring this idea?

Steve Beagelman:

Yeah, I mean if somebody wants to learn more, they can certainly visit us at our website, smbfranchising.com. So it’s literally my initials, smbfranchising.com, and they can inquire on our website. They can also email me directly if they want, and it’s Steve S-T-E-V-E@smbfranchising.com. And I’d be happy to set up an introductory call with them and get to know them a little bit better and answer their questions and learn more about their business and discuss franchising. But another way they can learn more is just go to the IFA, International Franchise Association has a great website, that’ll educate you a little bit about franchising. But a lot of times people want to talk to somebody to really get to know more about the industry, but also discuss their particular business. And in those cases, it’s best if they just reach out to us and we’re happy to have a call with them, either myself or a member of our team.

PocketSuite:

Cool. Cool. And I will add that we do have some special services at PocketSuite for franchises and multi-location businesses. So if you are going that route, reach out to us too. We’ll get you hooked up with some extra support that you might want. And on the other side of it, let’s say I am an entrepreneur. I’ve been going the hard road for a while, and I’m totally frustrated with maybe a concept that hasn’t gotten proven yet and I want to ditch it and buy into a proven concept doing something else. I love being my own boss, but I’m tired of it being as hard as it often is out there. Where do I go to find out what franchises I could buy into, what might be interesting to me, sort of shop around for a concept I want to be part of?

Steve Beagelman:

Yeah, that’s a great question. Obviously find, I tell people you want to find something you’re passionate about. Right. I like, I’m not a car guy. Well, I like I driving a car that I like, but I don’t know anything about cars. Right. So you could tell me, I can make a ton of money in the car business, but I’m just not passionate about it. Right. So I wouldn’t want to be in that industry because it’s just not the right fit for me. So I want to do something that I’m passionate about. I tell people all the time, if you love pets, look into the pet industry. There’s so many different opportunities. If you love kids, look into the childcare industry, look into kids’ sports. There’s so many, kids’ education, there’s so many different businesses out there. Do stuff that you’re passionate about. But you could research owning your own franchise.

There’s so many different websites out there. You can Google it, you can go to any of the search engines and say, looking to own a franchise. You can go to some franchise trade shows. So there’s some great regional franchise trade shows that are out there. So you can just Google franchise trade shows in my area and then go to a couple of them. I would highly recommend it. If somebody wants, they could email us directly too and we can kind of guide them or direct them to the right place. And I would read some books on becoming a franchisee and just learn, you want to learn everything you can. But I would also say another opportunity is to contact a franchise broker. So these brokers will help educate you about different franchise opportunities that you may not have ever thought of. So you’re thinking you want to own a Dunkin’ Donuts, like I said, or a McDonald’s, you may not even be financially qualified or they may be sold out in your area.

So what else can I look at? I have no idea. These brokers will help guide you and say, well Hansa, what are your interests? And you’ll say, well, I really love home services. Well, I want to work from home. I don’t want to work weekends. I love working with kids, whatever it is. And they’ll narrow down the search and then they’ll make introductions to brands that you may not have even heard of or had thought of, and they get typically compensated on the other end. So you don’t have to worry about that on your side. So it really is just an educational process that you need to go through, whether it’s with a broker or on your own. You need to research, you really do. And get to know the franchise company, attend their what they call discovery day to learn about the brand. Doesn’t cost you anything to do that except your time. But you want to know everything about that company before you then write a franchise fee check and invest in the brand to open that concept in your community.

PocketSuite:

Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Steve for joining us today. I feel like I learned so much, and I’m sure many in our audience did too, because this is a world that you feel like it’s a familiar world, but it’s a whole rabbit hole of information that I simply is new to me. And thank you everyone once again for joining us on the Booked Solid Podcast. Of course, the best way to support this podcast is to run your business on PocketSuite, but we also appreciate those five star reviews on wherever you’re listening to this podcast, as well as recommending it to friends.

Steve Beagelman:

Thanks, Hansa.

PocketSuite:

All right, thank you.

We have a special episode for you today with Spencer Claeys who built a profitable roof cleaning business with some smart local marketing tactics. Now he has racked up over 500,000 followers on TikTok and YouTube that he guides to making up to $1,000 a day doing exterior cleaning.

We talk about how he leveraged Facebook advertising, works on making the right offer and built a big social media following teaching small business tips.

Listen on:

Follow PocketSuite:

Pocketsuite.io

YouTube

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Follow Spencer Claeys:

YouTube
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Full Interview Transcript:

PocketSuite:

Welcome, everyone, to the Booked Solid Podcast with PocketSuite. We have a special guest for you today, with Spencer Claeys. Thank you so much for joining us.

Spencer Claeys:

Sweet. How’s it going?

PocketSuite:

So Spencer is a pressure washer, a roof guy. You started your business out of a Toyota Corolla a few years ago. Can you just tell our listeners that story?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, no, for sure. So right when I got out of college, I’d kind of worked every little crappy job I could, been in the Navy Reserve as well, and then the pandemic had hit. So then things were looking kind of weird, but I remember just waking up one day and just being like, I need to make money. I’d kind of just, I’d just finished another job and I was like, I can’t go back to that. So I just went out, bought a cheap pressure washer, started going door to door in my Toyota Corolla.

And so I was doing some pressure washing jobs. That actually worked pretty well. And then the market was kind of weird, and people up here don’t really want pressure washing as much. I kept getting asked like, “Oh, do you do roofs? Do you do gutters?”

So I was like, “Yeah.” That was my instant answer, even though I’d never really done a roof before. I’d cleaned my dad’s gutters before, since I was a kid, but never as a business. But I said yes, and I went out, did the job, and then I was like, okay, cool, roofs aren’t that bad. Make way more money. So then I just went full in on that, and then the next year, just been scaling that, just working on getting more jobs with Facebook ads and running the website and all that sort of stuff. So it really took off.

PocketSuite:

That’s great. I didn’t realize that it had only been since the height of the pandemic that you were doing this. Just so that everyone knows, Spencer now has like 186,000 followers on YouTube, with a fantastic channel about how to run a roof cleaning or a pressure washing business. Where do you live, by the way?

Spencer Claeys:

I’m up in Seattle. Seattle, Washington.

PocketSuite:

Okay, cool. So I guess with the climate there and the trees and the wet, there’s just a lot of full gutters, huh?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, definitely. If you drive around, there’s so much moss, green stuff growing everywhere. So every area is different. If you were down in the southwest, there’s more solar panels to clean out there. There’s window cleaning pretty much anywhere, or out where you guys are. There’s definitely, when I was in New York a bit ago, I mean, you could see if you drive around, see the houses with some black streaks. That’s the [inaudible 00:02:55]. It’s like this bacteria that grows. But yeah.

PocketSuite:

So you obviously leveled up a lot since you first knocked on a few doors in Seattle, asking to do some pressure washing. Can you talk about some of the milestones in your own business growth?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, the first step, obviously if you’ve never done anything before, you’ve got to get decently good at whatever it is you want to do. So for me, when I started doing pressure washing, I cleaned my dad’s driveway first. Just kind of learned the basic skills. If you’ve already worked, if you already kind of know what you’re doing, cool.

But then the next step is okay, getting consistent jobs, because that’s really the only benefit of having a job, a place where you clock in, is you have that consistent work. So that’s really the next big hurdle, is just making sure you have consistent work. So for me, that was just, I also majored in marketing, so I was comfortable, familiar with marketing, but then I started learning a little bit more about that because I was like, okay, I need to get good at this. Otherwise, I’m not going to make any money.

And I kind of stumbled into Facebook ads. And once I dialed in the numbers, kind of know how much a lead should cost, how many, on average, how many messages it takes to book a job. Then once you get those numbers down, then you just start scaling up from there. So for me, I only spend like 10 bucks a day on ads, and that keeps me booked solid, as you guys would say.

PocketSuite:

No, that’s great. 10 bucks a day on ads. So just walk people through if they’ve never used Facebook ads before for anything, how as a service business that’s local, like pressure washing, you actually have to visit someone’s house. How would you set that up to get more leads?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, so there’s really two types of marketing. There’s search marketing and there’s interruption marketing. So search marketing is Google. Someone’s like, I want my house cleaned now. So they type that in. But most people, like 97% of people are not thinking about you. They’re not thinking about your business. So your job is to get in front of them.

So there’s a lot of different ways you can do that. Facebook ads, TikTok ads, whatever ad you want. You could run a billboard floating through the sky. It really doesn’t matter. But as long as we get our message in front of somebody. So for me, Facebook has just been the easiest, it’s the simplest, and you can really just, I feel like you can put your business out there the quickest. So that’s why I like it.

PocketSuite:

Cool, cool. Yeah, it works really well. I remember I’ve used it before. You can get right to the zip code, right to the place. So as a solopreneur who’s working by yourself, often people think of advertising as something that’s done by John Hamm on Madison Avenue in a cool office. How did you figure out how to write an effective ad yourself?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, I mean it definitely didn’t come overnight. I remember my first campaign, it just flopped. It’s one of those weird things where if it doesn’t work, it’s super frustrating because you’re putting money into it. So it feels like going to the casino, it feels like gambling. But I remember just, I took a few courses, read books. Eventually later down the road, I’ve had some really good mentors that have helped me. But getting comfortable with that, it definitely, it is kind of hard, but once it works, it’s like discovering fire, it’s so awesome.

But yeah, just once you figure it out, like I said, I got my book. I kind of teach how to run the ads through that. But you’re putting a message to a market. That’s all marketing really is. We’re just putting a message out to our market. So like we said, you could have a billboard, you could have a Facebook ad, you could have an ad on Google. We just need to put our message in front of somebody. So I want to keep it pretty simple.

So once you figure out that, then all you really need to do is, okay, what am I offering? And have some sort of, oh, that’s another key is having a really good offer. That’s where I would first start. So have a good offer. Then it can be as simple as putting up a picture, putting up a video of you doing the work, or whatever ad you want to run. And then just putting that out, targeting people who you think would most likely purchase your services, which is homeowners in most cases. So find those things, line those all up, that’s pretty much all you need to do.

PocketSuite:

So I have a marketing background too. So what we’re talking about, everybody, is iteration or A/B testing. It’s that idea of spend $10 on an ad and if it doesn’t work at all, it’s like, oh, okay, well I’ll try something else tomorrow until you get something that works and then you double down on that. And all of a sudden-

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, exactly.

PocketSuite:

So yeah, that’s a great strategy. Do you remember the first ad that really worked for you?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, I remember, I think it was a $99 driveway cleaning special. And it’s kind of funny because in this industry there’s this whole stigma against being the $99 guy because everyone’s like, oh, that’s the cheap guy. But I remember that was the first thing that really worked. I think I heard it from someone, you want to be the cheapest, the best, or the quickest. Choose two, I think it is. So something like that. So you can either be cheap and quick or fast, or no, it’s not going to be cheap if it’s good and the best.

So basically you’ve got to figure out what you’re offering, where you want to structure your business. And for me, I started being the cheapest. And then once I figured it out, I was like, okay, I can actually charge way more money. So then I switched it up. And then recently some of the best ads have just been a simple eight to 15 second video of me cleaning something, paired with my offer and then just explaining the whole process behind it. So that formula works really well right now.

PocketSuite:

It really does. Any sort of cleaning video is just the whole trend online.

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, it’s satisfying. People like to watch it.

PocketSuite:

Any sort of pressure washing, car detailing, anything kind of calming that just looks nicer at the end, people just love that content.

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, and that’s another really good point too, because we’ve got to remember what all these platforms want. They want people on the platform. So we want to keep them engaged. We want to have a good ad that not only makes us money, but we also want to keep Facebook happy. If we have some crappy ad that someone saw and they’re like, ugh, and they click off, Facebook hates that.

So then you’re going to have a lot higher cost per acquisition of a customer, because Facebook doesn’t want to show your ad. They still will, if it even gets approved. But the better we can help them out, the more engaging we can make it. So yeah, that’s where a lot of those cleaning videos do really well because they’re very engaging so you like to watch it.

PocketSuite:

So you have a whole video on your YouTube page about how to make a good offer versus how to make a killer offer. And I think this is good advice for anyone starting out. So can you just explain what that means?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, so I mean offers is like, there’s been entire books written about it. I know Alex [inaudible 00:10:24], Dan Kennedy, they talk a lot about that thing. So it’s kind of a hard thing because a good offer is just something that you’re kind of like, hey, we exist. Better than nothing. It’s better than nothing. Because that’s really most businesses’ problem, is literally just telling people, hey, we exist. That’s really a lot of what marketing is. Because that’s the biggest problem, is people don’t know you.

So from there, that’s your good offer. But then a killer offer, or even better, an irresistible offer, or we also call it the Godfather offer, an offer so good you can’t refuse, so that comes down to really knowing your target customer, exactly what people want. So what we want to do is we want to know our customers better than they know themselves.

So for me, I know how to speak to them, I know how to talk to them. And that’s another really key point. Notice how you speak to people and notice how they’re going to speak to you back, because we’re speaking the language of our market. And so once we can really effectively articulate their problem to them the best, that’s really how you start having a killer offer because you can explain to them exactly what they want.

It’d be like if you told me exactly what type of women you liked, and then I was able to write an ad with the exact description of the woman that Hansa just gave to me, you’d be reading this ad, you’d be like, holy crap, that’s awesome. I know that’s a random example, but that’s kind of what we’d want to be doing, versus, hey, here’s girls over here on this website. I mean, random example, but it gets the point across. Versus, you know, you want to be as specific as you can.

PocketSuite:

And can you tell me about a time when you got that feeling of I just made a killer offer, and what it was and why you feel like you nailed it?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, because there’s so many different things that go into it when you have, because obviously most people are just like, what’s the price? That’s their biggest question. But like I mentioned, I can’t remember who said it, but it’s like he who can the best articulate the problem that your customer’s facing is going to win the sale.

So if you can correctly articulate exactly what they want, what they’re looking for, that’s the best way to go about it. For me, I think that was, like right now I run, one of my best specials is a 299 roof and gutter cleaning special. But then I walk them through the whole thing, how exactly the process is going to go, what they can expect. I give them the whole thing. And that sort of process works really well.

PocketSuite:

Yeah. You have actually a lot of good money making videos on your site that are seasonal, something like this. You have one, how to make 5,000 a week hanging Christmas lights. How is that in terms of just thinking about the year ahead and having those seasonal promotions, was that a big part of how you built your business?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, I mean, like you said, solopreneur business, I don’t really have, I’ve been kind of flying by the seat of my pants, but you notice seasons, notice what people like to spend money on. So that goes back to the offer. We want to know exactly what people are doing right now. So right now it’s springtime. We’re getting into a lot of spring cleanings. So a lot of cleanings there. Over the summer, that continues, if you know how to market.

And then the fall, roof and gutters is a lot more popular, and getting into the winter you have Christmas lights. So it really becomes being adaptable, being able to figure out what your customer wants and then just offering it to them. So I think a lot of people, and that’s what I really love about this business, it operates out of a truck, but I mean, it doesn’t really matter. If people want junk hauled, I’ve hauled stuff for them before. Whatever someone wants you to do, find however many people want it done. That’s how you find what business you should be getting into, if you don’t have a business yet.

PocketSuite:

Yeah, no, it’s good. Seasonal promotions are great. We have this tool called smart campaigns, where you can just message all of your former clients and tell them, hey, spring cleaning’s here. Do you want that 299 gutter deal or whatever it is that you’re selling. Or, hey, the holidays are here. I’m much more comfortable being up on a roof than you are. Do you want me to hang your lights for you? Stuff like that. It’s a great way to stay booked solid and have another reason for former clients who hired you and are happy with you to book you again.

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, for that, I mean, because I think the graph was like 97% people are not thinking of you or they’re not thinking of your business. So if you have a way to get in front of them like that. So definitely, yeah, just finding what people want. That’s the biggest thing, that even when I do help other people with their business, it’s just answering those obvious questions.

Because I’ve had people try and exactly duplicate what I’m doing, but they’re trying to do it in South Georgia or somewhere and they’re trying to speak to people the same way that I’d speak to people up here and it doesn’t really work the same. So you’ve got to really know what your people want and know how to speak to them wherever you are. Because this type of shit works anywhere. It works in any industry. A lead is a lead, so it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing, as long as you know your customer and know what they want, and you can give it to them. You’ve got a good business on your hands.

PocketSuite:

Yeah, absolutely. What was the most surprising thing about building a business in this industry for you?

Spencer Claeys:

Most surprising thing is I just love the freedom aspect too. And just being really, also just being open with your customers, really good at communicating. I think if you do that, for me, I was able to just, I don’t have any uniforms. I call my customers all by their first name. There’s no corporateness. So I really love that. I really love the freedom to be able to just do whatever you want, and as long as you’re providing a great service and a great business, you’re going to make a lot of money. People don’t really want to do business with super corporate structure, I’ve noticed. I mean, some people do, but on the other hand, I prefer to go to smaller, locally owned stuff as well.

PocketSuite:

It’s a feel good thing for sure.

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah.

PocketSuite:

When did you decide to start helping other people getting into pressure washing or roof cleaning to start their businesses? Your YouTube channel is really dedicated to helping people succeed.

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, I really went in on it last year. The start of last year was when I went hard. And then because yeah, I’ve been doing the business for a couple years and I was in all these Facebook groups, and people are just constantly, how do you get more customers? How do you get more business? And meanwhile, I’m literally just spending five, $10 a day on ads, and sometimes I’ll even shut my ads off because I’m too busy.

And once I figured out the Facebook ads, I was like, okay, more people need to know about this. And so yeah, that’s one of the big things that help out today. So there’s just so much money, there’s so much opportunity out there. So no reason to hold back.

PocketSuite:

So you decided to share what you know, and can you just talk about the process of going from okay, I’m sharing a couple videos about explaining how I do it to these Facebook groups that I’m in, to 186,000 people following along your business story. I can see from the comments that a lot of people are starting to build their businesses based on your ideas. How did that journey happen?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, I mean it really started hard from TikTok actually. So TikTok was my biggest platform. It still is. I think I have almost 350,000 on there.

PocketSuite:

Oh, wow.

Spencer Claeys:

And then, so YouTube grew way slower. I think I was posting since January of last year, but I don’t think I got my first thousand subscribers until maybe the springtime. And then, so I was going just a little bit. I’d only posted a few videos. And then once I saw that, and then once I really learned the power of YouTube, of being able to put up a video and then people can watch that video for years, because TikTok is awesome, but it has a very quick burn rate. People watch the video and it may go viral, but then in two days it’s going to be dead. No one’s ever going to watch it again.

But YouTube has much more of a longer term presence. And then once I’ve been doing this for a while, I was like, okay, well I need to start thinking long term. How am I going to make money if I’m not necessarily doing roofs? Not going to be 26 forever. So the more I can help share that, spread the message.

PocketSuite:

Yeah, that actually really aligns with what’s happening in social media these days. If you do see being an influencer or sharing what you know as part of your business plan out there, TikTok is where all the attention is right now. But YouTube is where you can create a record of who you are and what you do that really stands for itself.

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, TikTok is cool. I would definitely still recommend it for anyone trying to get off the ground. But then, I mean, YouTube is just cool because I think you just really need to set your expectations very low, just be like, hey, I’m putting these videos out just to help other people. If it helps one person, then it was worth it. So I think for me, that was kind of a switch in my brain, where I’m just trying to help people. I don’t care if this video gets 10 views because it will, in the beginning, it’s going to get only 10 views, if you’re lucky. Maybe it’ll get less than that.

But eventually it’ll start to gain traction. And then just the way the algorithm works, it’s just going to pick up over time. And then some shorts go off, they’ll go viral instantly. You can’t really control these things. So that’s what I would say to anyone trying to get started. You can’t really control all of it. You can just control the value you and the help that you’re putting out.

PocketSuite:

That’s really cool. And does it help you book clients now? Is it its own sort of profit source for you? What has your journey with social media been?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, social media has been great because, yeah, I’ve got a few jobs from it for sure, for roof cleaning. But I mean, I don’t focus on, as you know, I mostly talk about business, so you could do that too. I’ve heard of a lot of people do that. Hey, this is my business. And at the end of the video they have book my services, which is a really smart thing to do.

But for me, I have some books, some courses on how to do all this stuff, even do some one-on-one coaching as well. So make some money from that, helping people. And then the more people that see that, the more people want to buy the book. But you could do choose to do either one. You could just try and be the influencer thing or actually using it for your business growth, whatever business you have.

PocketSuite:

So if I were to buy your book, what would I learn from it?

Spencer Claeys:

Well, I got a couple right now, and the third one is on the way, but it’s the first one’s just how to market your business, how to use Facebook ads primarily. And then the second one is a little bit more specific, how to start a roof and gutter business. So it’s whatever you’re looking for. And then the third one is called Your First 100,000 Followers. And that’s the social media thing we’ve been talking about. So it’s how to get started on there, pour gasoline on your social media channels, and get after it.

PocketSuite:

So just simple how-tos, like this is how I did it, this is what you do to do something similar, get booked solid.

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, exactly. I love books too, because I love reading as well. I’m always reading a book, especially when I’m on a job. And I’ve found that for me also, when I learn a skill and if I can encapsulate it in a book, then it’s like, okay, cool, now I can move on to the next skill. So that’s how the journey started. I started getting good at ads. So then I wrote that book.

And then I knew how to build a business. And so I wrote that book, which all those got me to having hundreds of thousands of followers. And so then I felt, I was like, okay, this is the next thing. This is the next skill I can teach. So the next book I write might be How to Write a Book or something like that. Just going up the stairs of all the skills. So that’s what I’ve been doing right now, which is kind of fun.

PocketSuite:

Nice. So that’s awesome. So you’ve got a couple books out, you’re helping people build their businesses. Are you still solo out there, or have you hired people now that you have a booked solid kind of thing? Are you hiring more people to take more jobs, teaching them what you know? What’s your plan for growth?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, I mean, I made that decision a while ago. I was like, I love this business, but I also don’t really see myself having the next roof cleaning company where I have 50 trucks and stuff. So I’ve just, I’ve kept it solo. I’ll have some buddies out to help me if I need help from a job. I’ll definitely hire someone to come out. So there’s that.

But yeah, I kind of also was like, okay, well if I can take all this info, keep it online, put it online, grow that business as well, I’d rather have the online take off because I also have some other partners that we might be going both directions. I might be helping them grow their own roof cleaning thing or partnering with them or something. So there’s still a lot of things in the works, but yeah, just kind of-

PocketSuite:

Yeah, there’s a lot of lifestyle questions at that point of when you fill up your own book. You did one thing, which is starting to teach other people, train other professionals. The hiring people route, you can make a ton more money if you are doing three times the work with three people under you, but it’s so much work, right?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah. So I think you’ve got to decide what you want, because you can do anything you want to, as well. That’s the other thing that goes back to the freedom thing. The part I love about this business or whatever business you have cleaning wise is you can choose whatever you want. You can do it yourself if you want and just make it, you kind of treat it as a job. Or for me, I saw it as a stepping stone into making some quick money and then I can move on to the next thing. Or you can scale people and hire people. Yeah.

PocketSuite:

What do you do with your freedom?

Spencer Claeys:

I go to the gym, post videos on YouTube. Pretty much that’s my main thing right now. Yeah, I’m always editing. I do some coaching calls and such, but I don’t really have too much, I wouldn’t call it free time. I usually just call it, because I’m pretty much always working. My girl will tell you, I’m always on my phone making a TikTok or something.

PocketSuite:

Yeah. But you get to decide how you’re going to spend your day and what avenues to explore. Really cool. So what is your advice for anyone who comes across your TikTok channel or your YouTube, thinks that, hey, I’ve got a Toyota Corolla, maybe this is for me, I could make a lot more money doing this. What warnings, are there major safety issues with getting up on roofs? Do you need certifications? What is your baseline advice for someone just starting out?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, so I mean, I’ll say this, definitely be safe, make sure you’re licensed, bonded, insured, all that sort of stuff. That being said, when I started, a lot of other people started, maybe those things aren’t quite up to par, but you’re still getting after. At the end of the day, get out there, start making money. I won’t tell you to not. Be smart about it, obviously. And also what you mentioned too, being up on a roof. But find the demand in your area, find what other people want to do. You’ve just got to have that hustle. It’s just got to be in you, making that money.

It’s hard in the beginning, don’t get me wrong, but it’s one of the most rewarding things you can do when you have your own business and you can look back and the times you were hustling, it’s pretty awesome. So yeah, just getting after it is the key, though.

I pretty much laid out everything on all my videos, and yeah, I mean, you get some questions here and there that were just like, man, you didn’t really watch the video. This is not that hard. At the end of the day, it’s not that hard. I don’t want to complicate it. I’ve seen a lot of channels where people try and complicate things so then they can sell a course. I try and make it as simple as I can, share as much as I can. And then my courses and books are only for people who want to actually go deeper, and I’ll actually show you in-depth stuff. But yeah, just getting started, getting after it, that’s the biggest key for anyone.

PocketSuite:

Yeah, just get started, make some money, it’ll fall into place. Okay. Where can people find you on TikTok? Where can people find you on YouTube? Where can they get some of your books or your courses?

Spencer Claeys:

Yeah, just hit up any of, I’m just Spencer Claeys is on any channel, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and then yeah, any of those bios will have access. You can get my books, get the courses. And if you buy some of the courses, some of them come with one-on-one calls with me if you want to dive deeper. So yeah, that’s pretty much it.

PocketSuite:

All right, awesome. Well, thank you, everyone, for joining the Booked Solid Podcast. Best way to support the podcast is run your business on PocketSuite. That’s what we are made for. So I hope you think about that. But also, we’d love a five star review on any podcast service, and thank you so much for joining us.

Ines McNeil is a dog training industry expert and founded the industry-leading dog training business coaching company, The Modern Dog Trainer, in 2014. She’s also on the board of directors of the Association of Professional Dog Trainers. Ines helps hundreds of professional dog trainers around the world figure out how to build a six-figure dog training business. We ask her in this episode about her journey as a new dog trainer in college and how she came to train dog trainers on how to create successful businesses around the world. Find links and a full conversation transcript below.

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Full Interview Transcript:

PocketSuite

Welcome to the Booked Solid Podcast. I am your host Hansa Bergwall from PocketSuite. And we have a fantastic guest for you today, Ines from Modern Dog Trainer. Thank you so much for joining us.

Ines McNeil:

Thank you for having me. I’m excited.

PocketSuite

So once again, we have another fantastic dog trainer on the show. And you’ve been in business for yourself for a long time. Can you talk a little bit about how you got started?

Ines McNeil:

Oh my goodness. Yeah, it’s a long story as it is for most dog trainers. I grew up really just loving animals. I had a neighbor, one neighbor had about 12 dogs, rescue dogs at any given time. And the other had about 30 rescue cats. So I got a lot of exposure to a lot of different animals right out the gate growing up. And that evolved into volunteering at the local shelter, noticing that behavior really was the number one reason why dogs didn’t get adopted. And I was really passionate about helping them get adopted and finding homes, especially in Texas where most shelters were kill shelters back then. So it became a very strong passion of mine.

PocketSuite

So how many years ago was that when you first hung your own shingle and got into business? And was it just directly dog training or was it something else in the pet industry?

Ines McNeil:

Yeah, I know most people started out pet sitting and I did a little bit of pet sitting for neighbors in high school. But it was really when I got into college that I started my business. You know, who doesn’t want extra money in college. And so I knew that I had some skills that I could utilize and help other pet owners through those challenging situations as a dog owner. And so I started my own business in college, which is 12 years ago at this point.

PocketSuite

Do you have any good stories from college, just being a side hustler, doing school, figuring out business as you go? I mean, I feel like that is such a crucible for so many business owners today.

Ines McNeil:

Yes, yes. I think I learned as much outside of college as I did in college. I very much was interested, that was back when kind of blogging and passive income really was becoming a thing. And so that’s really what got me started online. And starting a blog as I wanted to not only have my in-person dog training business, but share my journey. And share what I was learning alongside that on a blog. And that grew into an audience of dog trainers that also were very interested in what I was up to. And that’s evolved into helping other trainers with their business, because they were looking to me for advice and I was sharing what I was learning. And it became a really great community.

PocketSuite

Oh, wow. So was the beginning of Modern Dog Trainer? Or did you call your blog something else back then?

Ines McNeil:

My very first blog was called The Crossover Trainer. And that was where I shared my journey of with my own dog and my own experiences of going from being kind of a dominant space trainer, somebody that really used pack mentality. Just, not necessarily forceful, but very much like, “I’m the boss, you’re not”, kind of training. And I happened to adopt the one dog that it hadn’t worked for. And so I was very much in that journey of, “Well, what does work?” Because I was getting a degree in biology, very much understood science. And wanted to figure out the science of training and why things were, or were not working. So I shared my crossing over journey into positive reinforcement based training

PocketSuite

For those of our listeners who aren’t in the pet industry at all. Can you just back up a little bit and explain what the crossover journey means? There was this sort of overarching predominant way of training dogs years ago when you started.

Ines McNeil:

Yes.

PocketSuite

And you were part of a kind of revolution where a new kind has, I don’t know if it’s become the most popular kind, but it’s become a very popular kind. Which you are definitely a part of. Can you just talk a little bit about what that means?

Ines McNeil:

Yeah. So being a crossover trainer means that you started out using one method and crossed over to the other side of the fence, as we like to argue. Into a different methodology, usually a more positive reinforcement force-free type training methods. So yeah, I think that it can be a challenging journey, an intimidating journey to realize what I’ve been doing is not a best practice. To put it politely. And so you go through some emotional turmoil of like, “What have I done to my dog?” If you were a professional trainer using those methods, you did teach other owners how to do that with their dog. So you want to be passionate with yourself, realize that you did the best you could with what you knew back then. And now, you just have to move forward and do better moving forward. But it really is an interesting journey. And one that is becoming more and more rare as people start out in dog training right out the gate as positive trainers. Which is really amazing to see.

PocketSuite

Yeah. And in terms of building your business, what was the point when you were really cooking with gas? What was your level up moment?

Ines McNeil:

Several different time periods. So there’s two that I want to speak to and for two different reasons. One is the one I had with my dog training business and one is the one I had with the Modern Dog Trainer. So the first one was, when I first moved across the country, I had to move my entire dog training business. And it was a couple of months in the works, I knew it was going to be happening. And so I was proactive in updating my digital marketing presence, so that I could hit the ground running in my new state. So I moved from Texas to New York. And I made sure everything was updated on my website so that when people were searching for dog trainers, I would start showing up in New York where I was going to be. So I very much used those skills that I learned as a blogger in updating my website and optimizing my website to be found by other new clients in my new location. Which was really amazing to see.

It’s much harder nowadays to do that because of, just the quantity of trainers and businesses in general. But it’s still a very much, is an important piece of the puzzle. And then my second, I don’t know, level up journey was really when I took the Modern Dog Trainer full-time. And that came as a result of having had a baby, and I wanted to make sure that it was kind of like a make or break moment. It was either, it really grows and develops into something that can provide for my new family. Or it needs to really be set by the wayside for the next five years as I raise a toddler. So it ended up working out, and I’ve been able to help so many incredible trainers. I can’t even say across the country, it’s across the world. I’ve worked with people in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Europe, on top of lots of people in the US and Canada with their businesses. So it’s really been an amazing journey.

PocketSuite

Yeah. Modern Dog Trainer, you now train other trainers and what you learned how to do starting in college of creating a successful dog training business. You actually have a book, I guess it’s an ebook that you have for free on your website called 10 Common Mistakes New Dog Trainers Make With Their Business. And I was wondering if you could share a couple that you’ve seen over and over again, that might be relevant to anyone starting a new business.

Ines McNeil:

Absolutely. I think if there’s one thing you walk away with is really to start with the end in mind. And build your business to be something that you want to be running in five years. And that means having policies and structure and offers that you enjoy delivering. I see a lot of trainers, and really this goes for any small business, offering services that they don’t actually truly like offering. Maybe some trainers like group classes and others like private lessons, and you find them offering things that they don’t really fully enjoy. If you don’t like group classes, then don’t offer that. Figure out how you like to work and really give yourself permission to lean in on that. And stop forcing yourself to do things just because you see other people doing it, is very much the biggest takeaway I would love for you guys to walk away with. Really embrace who you are. And allow your business to support who you are from the get-go.

PocketSuite

We actually see that over and over again in so many different industries, that there’s just a lot more room to specialize than people really believe. And that it can help with your branding. If you’re a mobile detailer and it’s hard to do both old Honda Civics and luxury cars, you should probably pick a lane, you’ll do much better. Sort of knowing how to really specialize on one thing you do really well.

Ines McNeil:

And even with that example, like car detailer, immediately what comes to mind is, what if you specialized to be a car detailer for pet owners or dog owners? They have a different level of…

PocketSuite

That actually exists by the way. That is a specialized service [inaudible 00:10:03].

Ines McNeil:

If you like dogs and you like clean cars. Yeah.

PocketSuite

Yeah. That’s so good. What’s another one that you just see over and over again with people starting a new business?

Ines McNeil:

Oh, not taking time to do the math of what it really does cost you to offer services. Instead of looking at, these are my expenses, this is how much time I have to actually serve clients versus do admin work in my business. Which you will need time to do. People just start off by looking at, “What are my competitors doing? And I’m just going to copy what they’re doing and I’m just going to copy what their pricing is because that’s the easiest answer.” But really, you don’t know what goes on behind the scenes in their business. And you don’t know the level of quality of service that they’re giving their clients. And so your business has to start with how you want to do things. And how much money you want to make. And how much time you want to be working. And just ignore the competitors. The only people that matter are the clients that are going to be willing and able to pay you.

PocketSuite

Yeah. So what are the most common expenses people forget about to factor into their pricing? Because I know with a service-based business there’s usually a lot of them. What do you see happening often? Is it people’s time that they’re undervaluing? Is it something else?

Ines McNeil:

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I would say time. You just don’t realize how much time you need to be spending marketing, building structure into your business, and delivering a great experience. And I think that that’s just not really accounted for. People think they’re going to have 40 hours a week to do dog training and be training with dogs and their owners. But the reality is that you need a third of that time, at least for administrative work, for just building your business, for marketing that isn’t really accounted for. So you shouldn’t be basing your prices off of a 40-hour work week when you’re only going to be able to be actually charging for two-thirds of that time.

PocketSuite

Yeah, basically what you’re saying is that if you are doing 40 hours a week on direct to dog training, you’re actually working 60 hours a week. Because there’s a ton of other things that have to get done.

Ines McNeil:

Yes.

PocketSuite

So think about your work-life balance and price and plan accordingly.

Ines McNeil:

Yes. Exactly.

PocketSuite

That’s really good. The world has changed a lot in the last bunch of years since you were in college. What are the things that are sort of new that you think service-based businesses really have to do? Do we all need TikTok accounts, social media? What are the ones that are like, “Absolutely, yes, this is really effective. I’ve seen it over again.” And what are the ones that are like, “If you enjoy it?”

Ines McNeil:

I’ll start out by saying that I have not adopted TikTok in my business. I know a lot of people use it. I don’t even know if we’re going to be able to keep using it. I don’t know what the legislation’s going to end up doing with it, but ultimately it comes down to who are your clients and where are they, right? If they’re not on TikTok, then don’t worry about TikTok. That is irrelevant. So it really comes down to really making sure you understand your ideal clients. And you understand where they go to for help or to look for resources. And that’s one of the reasons why I love Facebook. For what we do as trainers there’s really not many other platforms that can deliver such a speedy community. If you think of yourself…

PocketSuite

Okay. So which tools do you use on Facebook? Because I know it’s a huge site with tons of marketing and advertising tools. So which ones do you use?

Ines McNeil:

We use engagement in Facebook groups.

PocketSuite

Okay.

Ines McNeil:

Yeah.

PocketSuite

You have a Facebook group.

Ines McNeil:

Yeah.

PocketSuite

Word of mouth, people get referred in and then you have a lively community. That’s how it works?

Ines McNeil:

That’s a very simplified way of putting it. But ultimately for our students, we have our students who are building their new dog training businesses, go out into the community virtually. So go out into Facebook groups and build connection, build a reputation very quickly, thanks to the internet and Facebook. The reason we love Facebook is because there’s not really another platform that offers that group functionality that you can immediately just be in the room with 500 of your neighbors.

PocketSuite

Right.

Ines McNeil:

Right? So it’s a very important tool that we like to use.

PocketSuite

It has to be so… Well, I guess nowadays there’s a lot of virtual training with dog training. But usually, traditionally it’s a very local business.

Ines McNeil:

Yeah. Yeah.

PocketSuite

Do you find with trainers that you work with that people are doing more virtual trainings with people around the country? Or is it still very local?

Ines McNeil:

So with the pandemic, when that hit, so many trainers went virtual. That was basically the only option you had to continue your business is help people virtually. And that was something I was doing back in 2014, almost 10 years ago now. I had a full virtual dog training offer and I ended up working with somebody that was in Africa back then. Because nobody else was offering virtual training back then. But nowadays, it absolutely should be on your radar. It doesn’t need to be something you are implementing like this month. But I think that it’s a great piece of the puzzle to building a sustainable and profitable business. It’s going to allow you to grow a lot faster and serve people when travel constraints are in place. And just serve a wider audience as maybe your favorite clients move away. Or you need to move somewhere else for your own family. It just gives you so much more flexibility in what you’re able to do.

PocketSuite

Really cool. Do you have any advice for anyone who is, maybe gotten to the next phase of their business? They’ve started out and they’re looking to make a couple of their first hires to grow their business.

Ines McNeil:

Yeah, yeah. I remember when I first hired. I was determined to never hire an employee ever. And now I have two of them. And it is a journey, it is a process, it’s going to be a learning experience. But when you get the right people on your team doing the right work, it’s incredible. And it frees up so much of your time for bigger picture thinking and for helping basically, taking on the work that you enjoy doing. So I would say make sure that you hire based off of your needs. Create the role and the checklist of things you need that person to do, before you go out and find the person.

What I see a lot of the times when you’re building your small business, a lot of my students end up hiring maybe another trainer they know of locally. Or they hire a friend because they really like this person. And they get into kind of a sticky situation when that person doesn’t deliver on the work that needs to get done. Or they don’t do it the right way. Or there’s just kind of personal conflict there. So take yourself seriously. Think like you were a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. And think about, “What are my needs for my business.” Because at the end of the day, it completely impacts your livelihood and your success in your business. So don’t let friendships get in the way of that.

PocketSuite

You know, you are the second Booked Solid interview in a row that has warned against that idea of, be really careful hiring friends. Because it’s a different kind of relationship to be someone’s boss and be their friend.

Ines McNeil:

Yes. Yes. And a lot of times, even with trainers that are working for a larger organization and they go from equal level trainers to now one’s been promoted to supervisor and the others stayed. Going from peer to boss is a very challenging transition for many people. So definitely be careful with that.

PocketSuite

It’s just a different kind of boundaries and what you would do with a friend who’s late. Or needs a day off last minute. And how you would treat someone working for you.

Ines McNeil:

Exactly.

PocketSuite

So it sounds like your recommendation is just immediately try to look for people who you can start fresh as a working relationship, rather than trying to transition from friendship. Because friends are valuable too, you don’t want to lose friends.

Ines McNeil:

Right, right. Exactly.

PocketSuite

Tell me about some of your programs that you offer to dog trainers.

Ines McNeil:

Oh, I’d love to. So we really have one signature program right now that’s open for enrollment and it’s the Modern Doc Trainer Academy. This is a six-month program where we deliver essentially proven strategies that have worked for many other trainers before everybody. And so no matter where they are. So it’s strategies that you can bring, come to the table, look at them, think about how they would work for you. And really plug and play for your own business and your own preferences. So we give you the formulas and then you put in your preferences, and who your ideal clients are, and what kind of behaviors you like to work on. And really embrace that for yourself. And then we give you the marketing strategy to go out and find those ideal clients, and more of them. And generate them consistently. So it’s really an amazing program. We’ve had so many amazing success stories and it’s really been able to change people’s lives for the better.

PocketSuite

Can you just define for us what an ideal client is?

Ines McNeil:

Great question. So it’s somebody that you enjoy working with. And you really want to get into just their demographics. Where are they in life, locally? What kind of house do they live in? What kind of family does their situation look like? But also get into how they think, and what they value. And why they wanted to get a dog in the first place? And really understand what they’re seeking to get out of training, so that you can create something that’s going to make sense to them. It’s not about just offering group classes or private lessons. It’s really, “What can I create that’s going to allow them to see the best results possible as quickly as possible.”

PocketSuite

Yeah. I feel like so many times people in business are just looking for any client that they forget that they really get a say in defining their ideal client. Even if you’re doing hair, you probably have an aesthetic. You know, you probably have something that you’re really good at. A price range. You could probably find out a lot of things about what is your ideal person and start relationships where those people are.

Ines McNeil:

Exactly. It makes it so much easier to know what you need to be offering and know what price point you need to be offering at. And know what to do for your marketing. Because if you’re trying to attract just anybody and everybody, I mean, you have an infinite number of options as far as how to start marketing. Right? But when you are committed and have made a decision that, “I want more of these people as clients”, then you know where they hang out. You know what they want out of hanging out with their dog. You’re able to narrow down and start answering your own questions as far as, “What should I do for marketing?” It really comes down to who do you want to attract?

PocketSuite

And I think it’s also huge for repeat clients, which a lot of service businesses live or die on. It’s like, if you find your ideal client, you don’t have to find a new client every couple of months. Because they tend to stick with you a long time.

Ines McNeil:

Right. Exactly. Yeah.

PocketSuite

Cool. So what is next for Modern Dog Trainer?

Ines McNeil:

Well, we have lots of fun things underway. We have just launched and are going to be reopening soon, our new community called the Modern Dog Trainer Collective. This is a space that we’ve been thinking about for well over six months. Because I noticed that there’s some really great dog training schools you can go to. You can go take other people’s classes, but there’s really nowhere to go to discuss really the practical application of what you learn in the classroom, or at a seminar, or at a conference. Right. You kind of take that info in and then you go into a client’s home and you try and figure out how to apply it.

But really we really want to, with this space, is host conversations that allow other trainers to connect with one another. To share what’s working right now, what hasn’t worked. “This is how I applied this certain theory to this kind of client.” So that we can start to discuss what are some best practices, to help people kind of troubleshoot challenging cases. And ultimately we also have a call in there that allows us just to chat as colleagues. That you really don’t get to do as a solo business owner and dog trainer.

PocketSuite

Yeah. It’s something that comes up again and again, is that it’s wonderful in so many ways to have a self-employed career. But you just can’t take for granted the sort of mentorship or conversations that other careers get to have with their colleagues in the office, or what have you. And so in order to really flourish though, you need to have those conversations.

Ines McNeil:

Yeah. Exactly.

PocketSuite

And find those networking communities where you can talk to other people who do what you do.

Ines McNeil:

Yeah. And usually before this, the only place you could do that was at the end of a conference. At the end of a day at a conference, you sit down to dinner with a few other trainers and you get to talking about what you learned that day. And that happens what? Once a year. So now we get to have it every week and some of the conversations that are coming out of the collective are really incredible.

PocketSuite

Can you give me an example?

Ines McNeil:

Oh, just learning. So one of the calls I was on, we were discussing what happens when a client has two dogs. And you’re really only there to work with one. You’ve been paid to work with the one dog, but the other dog who you thought wouldn’t be a problem is, because he can’t be separated without freaking out. And so we got to discuss, how would… You know, these trainers from around the world, we had somebody joined from Japan at 02:00 AM her time. How would you address that situation? How would you manage the situation so that the client is able to succeed, the dog isn’t stressed out and you’re able to deliver the service that’s been paid for. So that’s just one example of how we would apply all these theories that we know to real world situations that we’re coming across in the field.

PocketSuite

Yeah. That happens so often. Client work begins and it’s a little bit different than first described.

Ines McNeil:

Yeah. Exactly.

PocketSuite

What do you do? Okay, cool. Well, I want to give you a chance to talk about, and plug anything that you’re doing. And where people can find you, connect with Modern Dog Trainer.

Ines McNeil:

Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s great. So everything’s on our website, themoderndogtrainer.net. The last fall I published a new book called The Modern Trainers Guide… Oh my gosh, I can’t talk today. The Modern Dog Trainer’s Guide to 10K Months. And that really came out as a culmination of all of my teachings. It’s a high-level overview of what we teach our students so that you can start to grasp the process and the strategy that we teach. And implement some changes right away. And you can get the book at themoderndogtrainer.net/book. And we also have a free Facebook group that I’ll do free live trainings in and share loads of different resources. And we have great conversations in there, called Clients Impact and Profits for the Modern Dog Trainer.

PocketSuite

Very cool. And we’ve had a great relationship, or you’ve had a great relationship with PocketSuite for a while now.

Ines McNeil:

Yeah.

PocketSuite

There’s also a Modern Dog Trainer edition of PocketSuite. So if you want little updates directly onto your PocketSuite homepage, you could download that. And get ideas and tips right from Ines, who we’ve been talking to for the past half hour about building a dog training business.

Ines McNeil:

Exactly. Yeah. No, I just sent out some updates through the app this morning, so definitely grab the Modern Dog Trainer edition of PocketSuite. I’ll be continuing to update my members on there. And it also comes with some of my super secret signature programs that I have my students kind of build from. So you can either use those, grab and go. Or tweak them and make them yours.

PocketSuite

Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us today Ines. Actually didn’t know some of those parts of your story. So it was really cool to hear about the early days.

Ines McNeil:

Yes. Awesome.

PocketSuite

And thank you for everyone joining us today as well on the Booked Solid Podcast.

Sean Dowdell started in the tattoo and piercing industry as a way to make money when his band wasn’t on tour. Decades later, his business Club Tattoo is a multi million dollar business with locations in Arizona and Las Vegas Nevada and he has published two popular books on building a business. We talk about how he built his business empire with grit, hard work, and careful risk taking. Listen to find out why he had to stop selling his most popular items to truly succeed with his business goals. 

Watch or listen to the full interview through any of these links and scroll down for a full interview transcript!

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Club Tattoo Website

Books by Sean Dowdell 

Full Interview Transcript:

PocketSuite:

Welcome everyone to the Booked Solid Podcast, the place for anyone building a business with clients. Today we have a very exciting guest for you. His name is Sean Dowdell. He is the founder of Club Tattoo, a kind of famous shop out of a Arizona and Las Vegas. And he’s written two books, one that got a lot of buzz a few years ago called Tattooed Millionaire, about struggling against the odds and building a great business. And then he has a new book out just the last year called Brand Renegade. So thank you so much for joining us today, Sean.

Sean Dowdell:

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

PocketSuite:

So for those of our audience who don’t know you or the world of tattoo, can you start with a little bit about your background, where you came from and how you found tattooing?

Sean Dowdell:

So I was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, kind of a product of the early, late 70s, early 80s. And I got into music when I was about 12, 13 years old. Started playing drums when I was around 18, started my first band and leveraged into our second band, which became a band called Grey Daze and had some regional success with that. Had a couple of record deals and a couple songs on the radio and were doing quite well. And we ended up touring, these little three to five date tours, like we called them satellite tours back in the early 90s. And while the band was having success, we would come home to basically no money and have our bills to pay. So the bass player, Mace and I came up with an idea to start our own business so that we could operate it and make money while we were out on the road with the band.

That was the original intention of my first brick and mortar business Club Tattoo. And we had leveraged relationships that we had with some tattoo artists that we knew back in the 90s, and we had been promoting this tattoo night at a nightclub called The Electric Ballroom. And when we opened it up, we leveraged our band success to drive traffic to Club Tattoo, and it worked out really well early on. And from our, I guess our local notoriety people came in and started recognizing Club Tattoo as a solid tattoo and piercing studio.

And then from there, the band ended up breaking up in 1998. And then I kind of, I’ll give you the cliff notes version of this, over the next period of the next year or two, I really started to pour my entirety into Club Tattoo and became, I guess at that point, a true entrepreneur where I started looking at the actual business metrics and understanding how the business worked. What drove the traffic, what our clients wanted, what our employees wanted, what our staff needed, and really started to understand the business in a macro view and then really started to drive the success of the company from that point.

PocketSuite:

That’s really cool. So the journey for you, it sounds like really started in that you had built up a, what they would call today a platform first where you had a following of people from the band and then that helped you start your business. Do you have any advice for people who are trying to build up their platform for the first time? Maybe they’ve got a TikTok account or they’ve got their first 10,000 followers on Instagram because they’re making amazing tattoo art of how you kind of thread that needle of turning a following into a business?

Sean Dowdell:

Well, I think there’s several different ways to approach it. If you’re a tattoo artist, those platforms mean a lot to you because they get you noticed and give you exposure to maybe people who wouldn’t normally be looking for you, but they have similar interests in what it is you do. So you get an introduction to those people through those platforms. There’s some great tattooers out there that have just done a phenomenal job at building their own personal brand through the use of those social platforms like Facebook and mostly Instagram and TikTok, especially the last two years. Our brands are strong on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook, but it’s not one of our primary traffic drivers. We use it more of a branding exposure opportunity for us rather than a specific traffic driver where we use things like radius and proximity advertising to drive traffic for that stuff.

But those platforms give us exposure in a general sense to our brand and what it is we do. And then if people want to dive further, they can come in and do that. So the advice I would give if we’re talking about a brick and mortar type business, use the platforms as an exposure opportunity first and then a traffic driver second. If you’re an individual creator, I think the exposure component of that is equally as important, but it really is your traffic driver and word of mouth at that point too. So two different ways to look at it as an individual or as a company or a brick and mortar. That’s the way I approach it, at least. That’s the way I look at it.

PocketSuite:

Okay. That’s really interesting. So getting back to the storyline though, when you really started to pull up your sleeves and commit to being an entrepreneur running Club Tattoo, what were some of the learning experiences that you had going from kind of musician looking to make money on the side to full-time trying to build your dream business?

Sean Dowdell:

Oh man, I could answer this 50 different ways. Some of the most important lessons I learned early on was that, and it took me a few years to figure it out, is that I thought I was 21, 22 years old when I started my company and I thought everybody in my company were my friends because I treated them like friends. But loyalty wears thin, especially when you’re talking about money. And you start to realize that people have their own personal interests, which doesn’t make them bad, but you have to be conscious that those elements exist in your company.

And you can be friendly as a business owner to your staff, but you have to be very careful about being friends with your staff because then it makes the boss, employee relationship very difficult to manage and navigate. And I think it can cause confusion not only for your staff, but for you as an owner and you start treating people as friends when you should be having that employee relationship. But at a given time, it’s very difficult to discern what to be at what time. So I think that’s a first. As a small business owner, the first thing to know is that your staff is your staff first and your friends second. And as a young man, that was a very difficult thing for me to learn.

PocketSuite:

Hey, let’s talk about that very directly. Because I think it’s an important growth moment that a lot of entrepreneurs have because you have multiple locations in Arizona and Las Vegas today. I took a look. Look up Club Tattoo, by the way. It’s great. Artists have amazing portfolios and clearly you encourage them to have different styles, which is really cool. But as you were growing your group of artists, what would be an example of a boundary that you would make as an employer that you might not draw as a friend? How did you start creating those different kinds of relationships as employer, employee and what not to do as a friendship relationship that someone might abuse in a business context?

Sean Dowdell:

Yeah, for the first thing that comes to mind, thinking back to those early years was letting the excuses get in the way of your judgment as a boss. When somebody says, oh, I can’t make it in today 20 minutes before their shift because I got to go get my driver’s license renewed or whatever. It’s like as a friend, I’d be, oh, okay, that’s fine. Come in. Now, I’d be like, time out. You knew you were supposed to be here at a specific time. You can do those things on your day off, before or after your shift, or you can ask for a day off and get your shift covered. So I couldn’t differentiate what was a good excuse and a reasonable excuse back then between friends and as a business owner.

Now it’s very easy for me, and maybe some people would think that it’s maybe a colder approach, but I think it also, it gives your staff reasonable standards to know what to expect from their leaders. They’re not going to see these favoritism yeah, because you’re friends with this guy, he gets to do this thing and you’re not friends with this girl, so she doesn’t get to do these things. And you’re able to create this baseline standard where everybody has to meet it and is treated equally. And I think that makes for a much better broader work environment for your staff.

PocketSuite:

Right. So when you’re making the transition, some of the things you have to do, drawing boundaries might seem cold, but they actually create a warmer, more collegiate atmosphere.

Sean Dowdell:

Absolutely. And your staff knows exactly what to expect on the front end.

PocketSuite:

That’s really cool. Any more examples like that? I thought that was kind of gold.

Sean Dowdell:

Ooh. In our industry, especially in the 90s, it was kind of a CD underground industry where people were trading motorcycle parts or free rent in their apartment, and then they would be trading the service that I as a business owner would be giving my portion of that business to these employees personal wants and needs. And it had nothing to do with our business and it had to do with their either selfish outlook or inability to create business for themselves in the first place. So for me, I had to draw a line, and this happened pretty quickly within the first year or two where I realized, wait a minute, as a business owner, I’m getting taken advantage here. This guy’s trying to get his rent paid by tattooing his landlord for free. Yet I as a business owner, I’m losing that artist’s time on the floor. I’m losing the opportunity to sell this person a tattoo. I’m losing our 50% commission or whatever the commission base was off of that.

So those were standards as well that we had to put in and draw really hard lines and say, no, we are not going to trade motorcycle parts for tattoos. We’re a real business. This is a real company doing real things. And you can’t go into Louis Vuitton and trade motorcycle parts or free rent for a purse or Cartier for a bracelet because they just don’t operate like that. So I had to start treating our business like a real business and get away from those, in my opinion, those underground business practices.

PocketSuite:

Right. Right. Having things above board, having your policies set and making sure it makes sense for the overall business.

Sean Dowdell:

Yeah.

PocketSuite:

So making that lifestyle transition from rockstar to tattoo club business owner, what were some of the trade-offs? What did you enjoy more about your new life? What did you give up?

Sean Dowdell:

Well, for the first, my wife and I always joke, the first 15 years of our marriage, we traded the youth and freedom of the weekend barbecues and the trips and stuff like that to try to build our company and build our little empire that we were working so hard at. We were working 70 hours a week for 15 straight years, and I still work 60 hours a week because I love it. It’s a passion for me. So that was an initial trade-off. When I was 20 years old, I could just load up the car on a Thursday and go to San Diego for two days just because I wanted to. At age 25, 30, I couldn’t do that. I had this right or wrong, I put this massive amount of responsibility on my shoulders that I felt like my employees and my staff and my team were always relying on me and I had to lead by example as far as how hard I was willing to work.

So I never took shortcuts and that was something I sacrificed and my wife sacrificed as well for the first 15 years of our marriage and our business together. As I get a little bit older, I’m 49 now, I’m able to travel the world a lot more and I have a little bit of wealth built up. But all that stuff came from hard work and sacrifice in the early years. And I think some of the things that are missing from the younger generation right now, and I hate to sound like my father, but I feel like it’s true, is the work ethic on a grand scale is definitely missing. But the expectations of immediate gratification and entitlement seem to be far greater than I remember. I remember being grateful for the opportunity to earn my way to get to certain levels and get to certain things.

And I understood that there was a process I had to do and sometimes it was tedious and took a long time and I had to look at, okay, I want to buy my first house. And my wife and I were saving money in our sock drawer literally for two years until we had enough to put a down payment on our house. And it seems like nowadays these expectations of, well, I want this, I deserve it, I should be able to have it right now. And I never managed my life that way or my business that way. I also think it’s one of the reasons why you see such young people getting into such massive amounts of debt. And I never did that.

I was always scared to death of debt, product of a young childhood in the Jimmy Carter years of America where credit and interest rates were through the roof and you found yourself underwater very quickly if you had large debt service. So I just remember that, being scared to death, this depressionist economic mentality I had, especially in my, I still have it actually, and I think it’s served us very well. Being frugal when you need to be, spending when you need to be, when it makes sense, and trying to make sure that you’re thinking of a long term goal in saving money. I think it’s a lost art right now.

PocketSuite:

Now that’s a good question because personal debt obviously can ruin lives, but a lot of people build their businesses by getting out business debt, which is very different. Did you manage to build your business without that or did you use that?

Sean Dowdell:

Some of our expansion was done through debt. One of the first things I can think of was back in 2004 we opened, or 2003, we opened up our second studio in Tempe, Arizona, and then a year later we bought the commercial property that it was sitting on. And that was a scary thing because it was $400,000 for us at the time. And since it was a commercial loan, I think we had to put down 20 or 25%. So we had to save up not only the 80 or $85,000 we had to put down against the loan, but we had a $100,000 worth of renovations we had to do with it. So we took out $100,000 business credit line to do the renovations, saved up the cash for the down payment. And I was so scared of that.

And I remember looking back thinking that the payment was like $600 a month and now the building is worth like $6 million. So it was one of the best investments we ever did, and it served our company very well. But at the time I just remembered being scared to death. So we took on what I would say was calculated risk, and those were some of the early things. But later on we took on a lot heavier risks and sometimes we lost that bet. When we opened our first studio in Las Vegas, Thora and I put up almost $700,000 in cash and we borrowed a million dollars from the bank, and that was scary. And that was right in the middle of 2008 when the world was melting down. But we had been working on it for five years to that point. So,

PocketSuite:

Wow.

Sean Dowdell:

We just saw it through and opened up in the first quarter of 2009 and thank God we hit a home run with that was our store at Planet Hollywood Miracle Mile Studio, Miracle Mile Shops. And that store does phenomenal, and we’ve since paid off that million dollars and that store does absolutely phenomenal for us. It’s our flagship store. But out of that came a little bit of arrogance and I write about that in Tattooed Millionaire and Brand Renegades where we have our blinders on thinking that we’re kind of invincible and we had this unbeatable business model. We’d be successful no matter where we went.

So we opened a store in San Francisco at Pier 39 and borrowed another million dollars and ended up having to close it after three years and lost a million dollars in debt that I still had to pay, but lost a million dollars in cash that Thora and I put up. So that was a gigantic learning curve, but once again, we had taken these risks, but at the same time, I don’t know, a lot of small business owners like in our case where they could have closed the business, still taken on a million dollars worth of debt and survived to live another day.

PocketSuite:

That’s fantastic. So what is your advice for someone with a service and as your job booking clients who wants to expand, already has that healthy fear of personal debt, avoids it for using business loans to expand wisely?

Sean Dowdell:

Oh, man. So debt is a very long subject. I think debt is important to leverage correctly, but as a young entrepreneur, it’s very difficult to understand what is the proper leverage for your business. Because I have a lot of young entrepreneurs that come up and they think their biggest problem is a lack of money, and most of the time it’s not. They’re two or three problems away from that. And I tell them, I said, Thora and I write about this in our book Brand Renegades where we talk about affordable mistakes. As a young entrepreneur, if somebody would’ve given me $100,000, I probably would’ve spent it in all the wrong areas and still had that debt service to pay. I wouldn’t have understand what it was I needed to borrow money for in the first place. And I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes young entrepreneurs make is they borrow money for the wrong reason.

So that being said, if you really understand your business and your growth potential of what you can leverage the debt for and it has a very specific purpose, then I think it’s okay. I think in a general sense, expansion debt is okay to take on. I think in a micro sense inventory, unless it’s in the very short term and what I’m talking about three to six months debt service for inventory voids. So cashflow issues where you need to fund inventory. If it’s not for that purposes and you’re thinking this is going to fund my entire business model, you’re adding upwards of 10 to 15% sometimes to your bottom line to do that. So I don’t think that that’s a very smart thing to do unless it’s a very short term debt cycle that you’re talking about for inventory purposes.

PocketSuite:

Cool. It sounds like your recommendation is use it for clear business growth opportunities, like a new location.

Sean Dowdell:

In a macro sense.

PocketSuite:

In a macro.

Sean Dowdell:

Clearly you have situations that don’t meet that idea, but I think if you really have to understand debt, it’s pros and cons and it’s tough as a young entrepreneur because you think your problem is, I just don’t have enough money to do everything I want to do. Well, you’re right, but you shouldn’t have enough money to do everything you want to do because you’re going to do a lot of things wrong. So make those mistakes without money because you can rebound from screwing up a two or $3,000 problem. You usually can’t rebound as a young entrepreneur from a $300,000 problem.

PocketSuite:

Really cool. I want to circle back to another thing you said a little bit earlier of just how much work it took to get the business off the ground. Because I think a lot of times people underestimate how time intensive being an entrepreneur can be. Just paint us a picture. What were you doing all day that took 70 hours a week in those early days?

Sean Dowdell:

Well, so in the early days I was actually taking on a shift at the store as a body piercer. So I would pierce for about 50 hours a week, and then I would do inventory. I would pay all of the accounts payable or I would be writing checks, I would be doing research on new products, I would be cleaning the stuff in the business that needed to be cleaned. I’d be working on marketing ad development, I’d be working on relationship building, I’d be working on taxes, I’d be working on understanding the banking business and long term savings. There’s so many things. And another thing, so I do a lot of public speaking and I have a lot of young entrepreneurs, like I said, come up and want to speak with me. And one of the biggest things outside of I don’t have enough money is I want to own my own business so that I can work less.

And I said, you are absolutely not in a position to open your own company if you think you’re going to open your own business and work less. It does not work like that. I don’t know anyone that works 40 hours a week that has become wealthy or super successful in a business or financial sense. Anyone that’s willing to put in more than everybody else has a much better chance of success. And that’s just based on the average. If you’re trying to be average the results are going to be average. You have to put in, if you want to be 50% better than your competition, you’re going to have to work 50% harder. It’s a really simple math equation that most people get wrong.

PocketSuite:

So at what point did you stop piercing for 50 hours a week? And how did you stay connected to the passion for tattooing and your industry once you made the transition to doing mostly management work?

Sean Dowdell:

That’s an excellent question. So I stopped piercing 50 hours a week when we opened our first flagship studio in Vegas. And that would’ve been 2009. I had to come to turn, and I kept piercing for years after that. But I stopped piercing about four or five years ago and my passion didn’t lie in piercing anymore. And over the years, I had developed products and I have invented jewelry and tools and chemicals and things that helped our industry. And that’s really where I started to turn my passion for our industry was inward on creation, not only in products and product lines or innovative tools, things like that. But and my wife and I started developing business standards and processes and basically trying to make our business better from the inside out. So we stopped working in our business and started working on our business. So we had to take a step back.

And there’s that point of inversion, right, whereas a small business owner, it’s really difficult to know when to get out of the way of the business growth. And you start realizing the business is moving faster than you are. So start pulling in other people. And it’s very expensive, uncomfortable exercise to do because you don’t know if your business can afford to do these things. But without doing those things, your business isn’t going to grow to that next level. So sometimes you have to once again, understand the metrics, but then take the risk and make sure that you’re investing those business dollars into the right area so that your company can grow the right way and that it’s not based on just your labor alone for growth. And that’s when I think you can really start to compound the business growth is when the business is growing without your individual hourly work.

And I know I took a long way around this answer, but 2009, I kind of stopped piercing full time, did it part-time after that fact. At that point I had been teaching seminars all over the world. I put out a couple of DVDs, like I said, I had a couple patents and did all this other things. So I just really started to say, well, I clearly still love my industry. How do I make it better?

So we invented a computer software program and started making our studios look just level up and level up and level up and started to take our approach, okay, well what is our real business model here? We’ve figured out that we can’t be all things to all people. So which niche of the market did we want to exist in? Do we want to be at the lower price niche for our service industry or we want to be at the upper price because we can’t sell these low price items and be this super high quality studio? So we had to make those choices and it was difficult. I literally took $150,000 worth of body jewelry inventory and threw it away. Threw it away.

PocketSuite:

Wow.

Sean Dowdell:

And said, we cannot sell this in our store. And my wife was very upset with me at the time. I said, we literally have to rip the bandaid off here because we’re confusing our client. We’re trying to sell them a $10 acrylic piece of jewelry next to a $500 piece of yellow gold. They’re confused. You don’t go to once again Louis Vuitton or Cartier or John Varvatos and have these gigantic variances in the product offering. You might have some variation in the product offering as far as price point, but it’s all going to be relatively within the same model. And when you’re trying to be all things to all people, you’re just confusing people at both ends.

PocketSuite:

So which segment did you decide to commit to?

Sean Dowdell:

The luxury end.

PocketSuite:

Luxury end.

Sean Dowdell:

We got rid of all the cheap stuff in our studios, 100%. Went about 70% to 80% gold in our studios. We thinned out, we started doing all these custom displays, all this custom millwork. Everything became centralized around our clients’ experience and how do we keep making their experience better? Not only through customer service, but the aesthetic of the studio, the layout of the studio, our offerings, our process of ringing the client up, our aftercare offerings, our online experience, our e-commerce experience, all these things work together into help building what our brand model really was. And those things all need constant work, and that’s really where our passion lies at this point.

PocketSuite:

Wow. So it sounds like you didn’t really step away from your passion and move into management. Your passion evolved into creating a full experience for people. I wonder if you could share a few ideas about how you did that for someone who maybe is going from tattooing into opening a shop or is in a different business and is thinking about going from being a service provider to providing an experience for their customers?

Sean Dowdell:

There’s a business mantra that, and I forget who said it, but I go back to it often. And something that helped us revisit our business model was 80% of your revenue is produced by 20% of what you do. So figure out what that 20% is. And we did that exercise and that’s how we came up with this. 80% of this body jewelry revenue was coming from 20% of our offering. What are we doing with this other 80% of our offering? Well, we’re not only taking up space, but we’re giving our clients the wrong options. So we got rid of it all and focused. We literally poured the same amount of money, actually doubled the amount of money and put it back into that 20% of what we are doing. And that’s our entire body jewelry model now, and our revenue shot through the roof. I think, and don’t quote me on this, but I want to say from 2010 to 2016, I think we just about 80% increased our revenue models.

And then from 2018 to 2023, we’re up about another 60% on our revenue models. So it’s just been a refinement along the way and finding out what those things that really made our businesses tick and it became easier to manage our business because you’d be surprised at what you think is all of this stuff that you’re trying to do, if you really reduce it to what your clients are spending their money on and want from you or expecting from you, it’s a lot easier to manage this and put all your efforts into that 20% and scale it. So that’s what we did.

PocketSuite:

Yeah, I mean, it really makes sense when you think about your own behavior. If I walk into a luxury tattoo parlor or whatever it is, some other kind of thing, because I really want to have that experience because someone’s put the time and attention to make it an experience someone wants to have. And then you have a super cheap offering that isn’t really up to par with what that experience is. A lot of people will just choose it because they’re there for the experience and they’ll just buy the bottom dollar ticket for that.

Sean Dowdell:

And then when you buy the bottom dollar ticket, you’ll never buy the high dollar ticket because psychologically, if you’re at Walmart and you buy a $10 ring, I’m just making stuff up here on the fly and you buy a $10 ring, the chance of you going back and buying a $5,000 ring from Walmart is probably not very high because psychologically you view Walmart as the place you got your $10 ring. So we don’t operate like that. It’s very rare to go to the same car dealership and buy a $2,000 car and then come back and buy a $100,000 car from the same car dealership. It’s very common that we all bought our first cars as $2,000 and then bought $100,000 car down the line. But I almost, I’ll bet 101, you didn’t buy from the same car dealership. So you have to go along with that psychology of the buyer and understand what are they expecting from you. And then you need to become that and you can’t give them too many choices because you end up confusing them.

PocketSuite:

Wow. I feel like I could ask you questions for another half hour. You’re really good at business, but instead of doing that, could you just tell our audience before we go a little bit about what they could learn if they were to pick up a copy of Brand Renegade or Tattooed Millionaire?

Sean Dowdell:

So Tattooed Millionaire is more my personal story. Don’t let the title fool you. This isn’t about me being awesome and rich and a badass. This is about me getting my ass kicked for 20 years and just getting back up and trying to figure out a way through it and move forward. This has a lot of my music history and stuff in here. So that’s something you can learn. You learn a little bit more about me personally in this book. And then my wife and I wrote Brand Renegades together. This just came out through Entrepreneur Press last year and it’s doing quite well, Our Fearless Path from Startup to Global Brand. And it talks about the business practices and standards that we implemented to create Club Tattoo and what made our company stand out and be differentiated from our competition. And one of the things that I just picked up in the conversation is that you keep using the word tattoo parlor, and I never say that term.

We’re a tattoo studio and just that little piece of language can psychologically differentiate us from our competition because it automatically elevates the concept in your mind. So those are the things that we do. We just talk about the way we look at our business, the way we look at our staff, how we treat our staff, how we pay our staff, how we have these different standards that really didn’t exist in the tattoo industry. It’s becoming more commonplace now, but we really were at the forefront of all this within our industry. So that’s something I think you can learn and the way we approach marketing and different, we compartmentalize our marketing in ways so that we have different expectations of what those marketing triggers will do for us.

PocketSuite:

Great. So we will of course have links to Sean’s books in the show notes. Thank you Sean and everyone for joining us on Book Solid, the podcast for anyone with clients. Leave a review, drop a follow on your favorite platform. And of course the best way to support our podcast is to run your service business on PocketSuite. And we have a special industry edition for a number of industries, including tattoo. So if you’re running a tattoo shop, come join us and thank you so much for your time today.

Sean Dowdell:

Thanks for having me. Take care.

In this episode we talk to Michael Shikashio about how he built a thriving dog training business focused on difficult aggression cases. He is the founder of AggressiveDog.com and focuses on
teaching other professionals from around the world on how to successfully work with
aggression cases – You may know him as the host of the popular podcast “The Bitey End of the Dog” or from being covered in major media like the New York Times, New York Post, Fox News, Baltimore Sun, Women’s Health Magazine, Real Simple Magazine, SiriusXM Radio.

Below you can connect to this conversation through your podcast service of choice or on YouTube. Keep reading for links to Michael Shikashio’s website and training business and a full written transcript of our conversation.

Listen on

PocketSuite Links

www.pocketsuite.io

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@PocketSuite/featured

TikTok

https://www.tiktok.com/@pocketsuite

Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/PocketSuite

Michael Shikashio Links

Website

https://aggressivedog.com

School

https://aggressivedog.thinkific.com

Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/michaelshikashio/

LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelshikashio/

TikTok

https://www.tiktok.com/@michaelshikashio?lang=en

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu6htNW022cxP3ecTYqBfjA

The Bitey End of The Dog Podcast:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1185767

Full Transcript

Hansa Bergwall:

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Booked Solid, the podcast for anyone with clients, from PocketSuite. I am your host, Hansa Bergwall. And we have a fantastic guest for you today. His name is Michael Shikashio, CDBC. He is the founder of aggressivedog.com and focuses on teaching other professionals from around the world on how to successfully work with aggression cases. You may know him from the host of the popular podcast The Bitey End of the Dog, or from being covered in major media like the New York Times, New York Post, Fox News, Baltimore Sun, Women’s Health Magazine, Real Simple Magazines, Sirius XM Radio, and on and on. Mike Shikashio has also built a thriving dog business. He knows how to book clients. He trains other trainers. He’s built a brand that is in demand around the world. And we are going to be talking about all of that. So thank you so much for joining us today. And it’s all right if I call you Mike?

Mike Shikashio:

Absolutely. I appreciate that, Hansa. Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to get jumping in a conversation.

Hansa Bergwall:

Okay, fantastic. So I guess the first question I have is how did your dog training career begin?

Mike Shikashio:

Yeah. So I could probably talk since we’re focusing a little bit on business and dog training, which is a great blend of topics for me, is that I was working at a casino many years ago of all things, so totally dog training related. But I was fostering dogs, a lot of dogs that were from rescue and they needed a place to sort of as a foster home. So I was doing a lot of that. I wasn’t really into dog training at the time, I just wanted to help these dogs more because one of the number reasons for dogs to be surrendered or given up on to shelters and rescues is because of aggression issues or behavior issues.

So I kind of got more and more into that behavior and learning about it. And I kind of always wanted to be a business owner as well, some sort of entrepreneur doing something on my own. So I was thinking dog daycare at one time, but that shifted to, I caught this behavior bug as they say, where I was really interested in training and behavior to help these dogs. So I thought, what better way to be able to do something where I can have that business side and that entrepreneurial side as well as kind of make a change in the world for the dogs and their people. And so it kind of blossomed from there. I started training, all of the typical stuff. And then that turned into just the aggression space that I’m in now.

Hansa Bergwall:

It feels like an intimidating place to start with the aggression cases. If you have a scary dog, you might not want to trust a newcomer to those kinds of cases. How did you really begin and get your first clients?

Mike Shikashio:

Yeah, it can be. And I don’t recommend it for everybody. There’s a lot that goes into it where you have to build up some self barriers, meaning, because you’re going to have dogs barking and lunging at you sometimes and you’re just there. I’m just trying to help you and they’re telling you, you’re not allowed here kind of behavior that’s directed at you. But yeah, it’s a passion of mine. I know that these dogs are mostly just, they’re hurting inside. Something traumatic has happened in their life or they’re just being fearful of something. So once we understand that, then you look past all of that barking, snarling and lunging at you, behavior that you sometimes see. And then the same thing with the people. I’m looking to help the owners because they’re often confused and don’t know which way to go. So that’s the rewarding aspect for me for sure.

Hansa Bergwall:

Tell me about one of your hardest aggression cases and how you broke it down.

Mike Shikashio:

That’s a good… I get that question a lot and I’ve never able to really narrow it down because when you think, okay, difficult aggression cases, you’re thinking 200 pounds, large dogs snarling and snapping at you. That’s kind of what a lot of people think of severe aggression.

Hansa Bergwall:

I definitely imagined a chihuahua.

Mike Shikashio:

Maybe a chihuahua that’s bitten somebody’s arm off or something. We have, if you’re looking at severity. But usually it’s the complexities and the people. And I know a lot of business owners are dealing with different types of clients all the time. And that’s the art of it is navigating those conversations. Because actually when you start getting down to working with the dogs, many of the cases are the same. You’re just seeing the same thing over and over and over. It’s the dynamic of the person you’re talking to that’s going to be so different depending on the case. So your clients really, you’re going to have difficult clients sometimes. And as business owners we have to navigate that. We have to know how to have conversations that are going to be fruitful, but also empathetic and understanding those clients’ needs. So I think some of my most difficult cases have been like that.

If clients that are really struggling, really having a tough time, feeling very down, blaming themselves and which then leads to, they don’t really feel motivated to do a lot of things, which then becomes issue for us because we’re trying to make change for the dog, but the client’s not necessarily doing it. And then we feel bad because maybe it’s something we’re doing. And then the client’s like, you have to motivate that client and you can’t blame them because a lot of times they have valid reasons for not actually wanting to do things. Because maybe they’re scared of taking their dog out because the dog is dragged them down to the ground or bitten somebody else. So those are my most complex cases is convincing the people and helping them take the path forward with their dog. And I think that’s universal though with any industry. Right?

Hansa Bergwall:

So let’s talk about the talkie or the sometimes snappy end of the client. How do you deal with difficult clients and do you have any examples?

Mike Shikashio:

I think you have to… Obviously with all of our clients, we want to be professional, we want to be, want to be empathetic, but we also have to set barriers for ourself. Self-care is very important. We can’t just [take] it as they say and take all of the bad things our clients might say to us or about us. So I think that’s how I first step into the picture is just saying, okay, let’s give this client a chance. So I think your question was more specific cases? Was that it? I forgot the question.

Hansa Bergwall:

If you have an example, maybe, no names of course.

Mike Shikashio:

Yeah, I had one client so that their dog was actually dangerous, and the dog had bitten them very severely. So the owners, but they were not seeing the potential danger and severity of it. Actually, one of the clients was sent to the hospital with really… Needed surgery because of the dog’s bite injuries. But because they’re so attached to their dog and they don’t… They also don’t want to be blamed for saying, oh, it’s your fault. And that’s how they’re feeling. They feel like it’s their fault or they feel like it’s… And sometimes of course it can be, but most of the time it’s not. And it’s just a misunderstanding of their dog. And so that was one of my do most difficult cases because I had to convey to this client, this dog is actually dangerous.

Hansa Bergwall:

They didn’t know even after being bitten?

Mike Shikashio:

No, that was why it was so difficult because I’m trying to convince them and they just weren’t seeing that this actual dog could possibly kill you someday. And you have to navigate that conversation very carefully because you might be their only chance they’d kind of listened to…

Hansa Bergwall:

Was it just denial? And they thought, oh, he just had a moment. He’s not really like that.

Mike Shikashio:

Exactly. And there was actually three separate attacks. One of them was really bad, two others were pretty bad, but one was very bad. And I think it’s, again, because our culture says we have to… It’s never the dog’s fault. Sometimes it’s the opposite of course, in our culture, but a lot of times we push this narrative of we have to save them all. We can’t keep this… It’s your fault. And so the client was feeling very guilty, sort of had all of those ideas pushed on them. So they weren’t thinking of that at all. They’re like, we can’t re-home. We can’t return the dog to the rescue. We have to stick through this. And I’m like, maybe you don’t because this dog is dangerous. And I didn’t use those words at first.

Hansa Bergwall:

But you had to eventually?

Mike Shikashio:

Eventually, yeah, because-

Hansa Bergwall:

Just like this dog could kill you.

Mike Shikashio:

Yeah, I was worried about their safety. Yeah. But that’s rare. Those kind of cases are certainly not common.

Hansa Bergwall:

No, I’ve almost never met a dog that is aggressive at that level. That’s really crazy. What do you think of that narrative as a dog trainer that deals with aggression cases? Because it is pretty prevalent in the space that it’s the people, it’s not the dog whenever there’s problems. And yet I have a dog and I love him to pieces and he’s a very good dog, but he’s definitely got a strong personality. Where do you stand on that? I’m very curious.

Mike Shikashio:

I think it’s just people have their own perspectives of… Because it’s a living sentient being, right? So it’s different than we’re talking about selling bikes or something. So we’re not necessarily worried about the emotions of another animal if that’s our business. So I think it’s when the emotions are involved, their own views, their own perspectives, it’s like any other topic that’s out there, whether it’s nutrition or the type of exercise you do or health, there’s lots of different opinions and lots of different noise in the environment on social media and things and where people are learning about topics.

But then when you throw in, it’s a living sentient being, you get all kinds of differing viewpoints. And I think that’s something we have to be aware of because if we come in with our own viewpoint of saying, all right, you got to do it this way, this way, and this is how I want you to work with the dog, that doesn’t take into account the client’s viewpoint. And that actually is… It can be detrimental to not only the client but also the animal. And I think that’s universal for all businesses. I think we always have to come from a [good] place, especially in a helping type of profession.

Hansa Bergwall:

And it’s a really interesting balance of responsibilities because of course people hire you to save the dog and to help them with the dog, but then you might have to weigh what’s going on and say, well actually I have to protect the owner here or the people in the situation too, because of what you do.

Mike Shikashio:

Absolutely, and society. So that I’ve had clients that their dog is very dangerous and we have to think about… A good question to ask is, would I want this dog living next to me with my kids, with my dog, with my family? That’s a good question. And if the answer is no, we should be considering, as trainers, is it ethical to say this client is going to be able to handle a dog, a professional trainer. So it’s lots of considerations when it comes to aggression.

Hansa Bergwall:

So I have TikTok and of course I get a lot of dog content. It’s almost like, who doesn’t?

Mike Shikashio:

Yeah, it’s so cute.

Hansa Bergwall:

And they have these influencers and things that brag about how great they are with aggressive dogs and they make it seem like any dog, they just need the right, I don’t know what trainer or assertive way with them and they’ll immediately calm down and be good. And I imagine that’s true in some cases, but it sounds like you’re saying that it’s absolutely not all dogs are that easily trained to be safe again.

Mike Shikashio:

Correct. I mean, unfortunately that’s the… Especially TikTok, social media, right?

Hansa Bergwall:

Yeah, that’s not real.

Mike Shikashio:

People like the flashy stuff and gets more views and more likes, and then it’s easy to edit that kind of stuff too. It’s very easy to just show a dog barking, lunge and growling and then take a picture of the dog. Sleeping just happens. Dogs have to sleep once in a while, look, I solved it. And that’s the sensational side of social media. But it’s also, unfortunately, that’s the issue with punishment. Punishment works really well at first in many cases, but it doesn’t solve the long-term problem, really changing how that dog feels about what’s going on. So you can stop anybody from doing anything if there’s enough punishment or restraints. If I’m holding a gun to somebody’s head, they’re probably going to stop doing whatever they were just doing and then… But obviously it’s not going to make you feel better about holding that gun to your head. So that’s what we see on TikTok, unfortunately a lot. There’s a lot of good trainers though. So they just need more attention.

Hansa Bergwall:

How do you deal with that client interaction when the outcome is a lot different than what they had imagined when they hired you? They wanted to turn their angry beast into a cuddly mate. And instead you’re like, well, these are the things you would have to do to safely have this dog at home and in your neighborhood and he’s never going to be safe around children or X, Y, Z, sort of give them the rules for owning this dog. And it’s like, how do you navigate that conversation?

Mike Shikashio:

That’s a really great question because I think it’s important, again, for all professions, especially helping professions. So not just dog training, but to set expectations from the start. So your very first conversation, our first time meeting that client, you want to build rapport and trust with the client first, but during that first session, you should be setting expectations about what to expect in the future. So that way you don’t have to have those difficult conversations later on. Because if you go in with one viewpoint saying, all right, I know this dog in my mind is going to be like this in three or four sessions or three or four months or whatever it is, and the client has another mindset of, oh my dog’s totally going to be great because I have this trainer now, that’s going to be a problem three months down the line if things are differently.

So always my first session always discuss this is what we can probably expect. And again, if you look at another profession, personal trainer, if somebody’s thinking, oh, I’m going to be in the gym, I’m going to lose a hundred pounds this week, that’s an unreal expectation, right? And so if the personal trainer sets the expectation, say you’re going to do great, let’s just think about what’s going to happen over the next few months and what you might expect depending on the work you put in and all of those other variables like your diet. And same thing for dog training, we have to set expectations so that way I don’t ever have to have those conversations later on. And then if I do, it’s just a subtle reminder, be like, hey, remember when we talked about it? This is where we’re at now. This is what we did talked about three months ago and we’re assessing and look, this is almost kind of what we talked about. So I find that that’s the best way to avoid having to have those conversations later on, especially with behavior, because

Hansa Bergwall:

Yeah, they call that a session zero in some industries, where session zero is about not doing any actual work on personal training or dog training or skincare or whatever it is you do. But it’s all about setting expectations and what it would be. Do you do session zeros or just handle it at the beginning of your first session?

Mike Shikashio:

I would say it’s session zero and one at the same time, if that makes, so I always want to leave the client with some tangible thing to do so they feel like, all right, now I’ve got something to start working on as well as an understanding of what’s happening with their dog.

Hansa Bergwall:

So in terms of your career growth, how long did it take you to get to the point where you’re launching a podcast, you’re teaching other trainers, hosting events where people talk about aggression cases? How did you carve out this niche and take it to the next level?

Mike Shikashio:

Yeah, so I’ve been training for about 20 years and then, oh wow, it’s only happened in the last about eight years or so. I was always just working with clients, so… Not just, but I was working with clients, that’s my main focus for about 12 years. And then I was invited to start speaking. So people started knowing I was in the aggression space working with these dogs. So my first talk was at this conference and I gave a talk about staying safe in aggression cases for trainers. And that started to blossom into other things. So once you start doing that, somebody else is like, oh, that was great though. Come talk here and then come talk there. And then it ends up just… One thing leads to the next. So more talks, more workshops, more seminars, more appearances. Podcasts weren’t even much around seven, eight years ago.

But you start entering other spaces, you get on social media, you get on TV interviews, radio, magazines, all kind of stuff. And I find that it continues to accelerate because the word gets out and without really much effort sometimes. It’s interesting how it works, at least in a niche space, that’s the thing. And so niche is important, I think, to accelerate growth because I think it takes longer to, let’s say you want to be the best dog trainer in the world. Okay, that’s a good goal, but what it’s going to get you there? What’s going to get you recognized? That’s much more difficult to do in that macro versus if we focus on a micro lane in that environment.

So if you want to be the best in a particular type of training, personal training, or you want to be the best type of this particular aspect of skincare. So that’s all I did in the dog training space. There’s some people talking about aggression, but not enough. So let me focus on that because I love it and I love helping the dogs. And I started focusing on that niche, which led to all the things I was talking about. And I launched the podcast a few years ago and started conferences and I shifted to just working with trainers now. So my client base technically is all dog trainers and dog professionals at this point.

I do take a case from time to time to stay fresh. So I don’t… Yeah, and it’s kind of moved into that space and I see it in other industries. You see it in plenty of other spaces where people that, for instance, again, personal trainers, they’ve done it for a long time and then they start to train other trainers and then that’s what they get known for and they’re just creating content and that’s their business model is creating content, training other trainers, selling courses sometimes or doing seminars. So it’s a great space to be in because you can help so many people that way. I find that you just can reach out globally versus having to try to do it in individual units.

Hansa Bergwall:

Right, because you saw 20 years ago when you started this, there was a lot of need for trainers who were willing to take on aggression cases. Because I know some of them won’t. And now you’re helping more trainers in more neighborhoods around the world be in that position.

Mike Shikashio:

Yeah, and the other note too there is that people… Not everybody has to take aggression cases and that’s okay. Yeah. But you see it, I see a lot of trainers getting into that space. I’m just going to focus on aggression cases and I love that because you just get better at it when you focus on one area. And then some people do agility or some people do nose work and some people focus on… And that’s awesome. It’s kind of seeing how the medical profession has all kinds of specialists. So we’re kind of seeing the same thing in the dog training space. And I always recommend people find a niche if you really want to grow your brand because then you get known for that particular whatever you’re focusing on.

Hansa Bergwall:

Yeah, and it sounds like, I’m feeling like, you might be fantastic with dogs, but there’s some things that aren’t necessarily, even if you’re great as a regular dog trainer that aren’t intuitive about aggression cases that you might just need to do a course or learn about. Is that correct?

Mike Shikashio:

Yeah. So if I understand that correctly, do you mean, or maybe if you can clarify that.

Hansa Bergwall:

What I mean is there’s some really specific skills you’re going to want to have if you take on an aggression case that your sort of overall understanding of dogs might not apply in that dangerous instance and you don’t get a second chance. Not to get bit.

Mike Shikashio:

Definitely. Yeah, definitely. I mean the stakes are much higher, of course in aggression cases. So you have to be careful because there’s a lot of liability, there’s a lot of risk potential and you’re also… The potential outcomes for the dog can be permanent. So euthanasia and the unfortunate outcomes for some dogs. So I think it’s very important ethically to, before you take aggression cases, you really should have a good foundation of knowledge and a lot of things. But also have done some work learning about how to work with aggression cases before diving into them. Because the ramifications are much different than if I’m doing puppy classes and there’s nothing wrong with doing puppy classes. I encourage that highly because then you reduce the number of aggressive dogs out there, but it’s a different space and with different potential ramifications.

Hansa Bergwall:

So what’s it like training other trainers? Do you feel find that people are… It’s really easy if people want to know what do you find that people already think they know everything and you have to slow them down? What is that experience like?

Mike Shikashio:

I love it. I love it. I’ve got about close to 1200 students that have come through my course and I think I last count have lectured to around 15,000 trainers over the years. So I love it. I mean it’s just so great to see that anybody who’s coming is obviously opening to learning because that’s why they went to the course or went to a conference. And so I haven’t had really much negative experience with it. I really enjoy teaching, I really enjoy meeting people and I love helping the industry. I love helping the community, love helping the dogs. So it’s just been win-win-win in every aspect for me. On occasion, you have some trainers that are struggling in their own businesses or their own life or dealing with some toxicity that could be happening between trainers. And so those can be difficult moments, but again, if you go back to the purpose of just helping others, that makes it all worthwhile. So wouldn’t change your thing.

Hansa Bergwall:

Stay focused on that. Can you actually paint me a picture of what it’s like to be in one of your classes learning about aggression cases? Are they usually group trainings? Do you do one on one? How do you get started? How does it happen?

Mike Shikashio:

I have a few different avenues for education. So I started with the workshop aspect. So you go to location, you might see 50 to a hundred trainers show up and you teach them the techniques you know. You show them presentations of cases and things like that.

Hansa Bergwall:

Do you have to find them an aggressive dog to bring to this workshop?

Mike Shikashio:

No. No. So most of the time dogs are not allowed because obviously there’s safety risks. Sometimes they do classes with dogs, but when it’s a trainer focused type of seminar, we’re just kind of learning. We do practice with things like-

Hansa Bergwall:

So video cases where you show what’s happening, that kind of thing?

Mike Shikashio:

Yeah, exactly. And we practice things like leash skills and we do some breakouts, so it’s not just sitting there for two days or three days sitting a front of a screen. And then of course you have conferences that people get together at and it’s kind of similar format, learning from other experts. That’s something I’ve enjoyed as well. It’s collaborating with other experts in the industry. I think that’s a highly valuable thing for, again, anybody else that’s not in the dog training space that might be listening in, I highly recommend networking and collaborating with other professionals. Even if it’s you at a conference or you hosting the conference itself, there’s so much value in that for the whole community, of course, as well as your brand. So building your business, it’s very important to do that as well or can be very beneficial for you.

And then I have my course, which is just people sort of on demand, but then I have mentor sessions, group mentor sessions. So in the course creator space, there’s different formats. Sometimes it’s just on demand. You watch the modules and you’re done and there’s not much interaction with the person that created the course. And then you have sort of mine, which is there’s a mentor session where everybody meets as a group and then you have full on flagship coaching programs they call them, where you get tons of time with the instructor. I haven’t done that because I haven’t had the time to do it. So there’s different options if anybody’s listening that’s looking into getting into the course creator space, there’s lots of different formats if anybody’s thinking about jumping into that.

Hansa Bergwall:

Yeah, it’s such an important topic I think in dog training and others such industries that book clients because of course people are working for themselves, but to really have the kind of rewarding career that you have, most people do need mentorship or these kinds of things. So I was wondering, what’s your advice about finding mentors in your industry? Is it really about going to these kinds of conferences or courses, meeting people? Just how did you do it and what would you recommend to any dog trainers starting out who are looking for that more connected experience?

Mike Shikashio:

Yeah, we got to get back in person number one. That’s the whole thing that’s been missing over the last few years is that it’s very difficult to make those connections you’re talking about the relationships without seeing people. You can kind of do it online, but there’s just so much noise in the environment and it’s hard to really get a feel for how somebody is through just a post or some meme that they post. It’s very difficult. So I found most of my mentors early on just going to those conferences and networking and meeting people in person. Be like, hey, you mind if I buy your beer and buy a cup of coffee or something, do you mind if we sit down and then ask if they have the time for that kind of mentor. And it can be formal, they can be a full blown like, all right, I’m taking you under my wing for a year, two years, whatever. Or it could be just, I just want to bounce emails off you once in a while. Is that okay? And that’s okay too. That could be a mentorship,

Hansa Bergwall:

Which kind did you have?

Mike Shikashio:

All of the above. I’ve had a lot of kind people over the years. I mean, there’s a lot been so many gracious people that have been so helpful in my journey. And that’s a beautiful thing because I want to do the same. I want to extend the same sort of open approach to, hey, if you want to learn, I’m willing to teach. Just be nice. That’s it. That’s my only rule, just be nice and then I’ll teach you whatever you want to learn. I think that’s an important aspect of any mentorship. And then finding a good match, of course, you got to find a mentor that’s sort of meets your ideals, matches your ideals in some ways, and that has the time to do it. That’s another thing we have to do. We have to respect the time of others as well.

Hansa Bergwall:

And probably is interested in the same sort of career path as you. You’re looking for people who want to pick up this mission of helping these aggression cases.

Mike Shikashio:

Definitely. Definitely. But yeah, I mean you can learn things too from… Depends. I’ve had business mentors as well. I hired somebody a few years back in more of a professional capacity, but super helpful for my… And I mean that’s one thing we miss too, as dog trainers, personal trainers, or any industry. I don’t think any of us spend enough investing in ourselves on the business marketing side of things, right? Because when you’re so focused on training dogs or skincare or personal training, you don’t have a lot of time to learn about things like SEO or social media ads and things like that. So we need to spend some time investing into ourselves in that aspect as well, to be really successful entrepreneurs I think. So I did some of that as well.

Hansa Bergwall:

Yeah. How did you find it by the way? That’s my world. Marketing and communications.

Mike Shikashio:

This particular person actually reached out to me after seeing my social media presence. So he’s kind of more… He’s very good about not making it salesy though, because you get a lot of those cold calls or emails and things like that, but this person was genuine, took the time. That’s a huge thing. Somebody that takes their time to understand your space and be like, I see what you’re doing and this is what I do. And that’s the big difference. That’s what sold me because this person took the time to learn about me before making that cold call. And I was like, this is the guy for me and amazing. Really, really helpful.

Hansa Bergwall:

Yeah, no, that’s exactly what you do is you can’t do everything and everyone has limited hours in a day. So you find someone who understands your mission and knows that piece of the puzzle and that you can work with and communicate well with, right?

Mike Shikashio:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Hansa Bergwall:

That’s fantastic. And what have you learned as you’ve sort of grown your brand as far as important things to think about? Either finding someone or learning about yourself

Mike Shikashio:

That’s interesting. That’s a great question, especially for this week, as I’ve grown my brand, you’ve become aware of new things as you grow in terms of your public image and how you have to be careful with certain words that you use because you can’t assume everybody knows what you’re talking about or what you’re going through at a certain time. So you do have to be careful with your messaging because you go from, you might have a hundred followers to thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. And when you get to certain levels, at first nobody’s noticing. And then at one point people start noticing, but you’re not really getting criticized. Everybody’s sort of on your team, but then when you get to a certain level, it doesn’t matter what you say, you’re going to have people that get upset or critique what you say.

And it’s hard at first not to take it personally, but you realize that, okay, I guess it’s a good thing. Maybe I’ve grown enough to be one of those people that you’re going to get negative commentary. So it’s a nice sort of reinforcer at the same time. But you also kind of have to set up boundaries for yourself. So any of the influencers that might be listening in now probably have seen or gone through the same thing. And I think one of the things that’s important is to say, okay, I can’t take this personally, it’s just where I’m at in my journey. And I have to be careful not to just snipe back. I can be like, oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about because everybody else is going to see that, and that’s not the persona I want to put out there. It should be kindness all the time. And that’s really important to me.

Hansa Bergwall:

There’s always someone who’s going to try to troll you online, especially once you get to a certain stature.

Mike Shikashio:

Yes, definitely, especially when it’s in a space that’s has a lot of emotions involved too.

Hansa Bergwall:

Yeah, you can’t stop your day because someone’s wrong on the internet.

Mike Shikashio:

Exactly. And that’s at every level. It’s hard not to, but it’s a good practice to put in place.

Hansa Bergwall:

Yeah. Well, just going back down to the mission and the kindness, if there’s one thing you want the whole world to know about aggression cases with dogs, what would that be?

Mike Shikashio:

Both people and dogs are often going through something in their life that you might not be aware of. So first, before you respond to the dog snarling and lunging at you in a negative way, because it’s offensive when we see that or a person getting upset with you in an offensive way first come from a place of why would this person or dog be going through that? Is there something they experienced that day or previously in their life or trauma? And they’re just not able to communicate that to me right now because I haven’t created a safe space for them. So create that safety first. Come from a place of kindness and then you’ll often see a miraculous change in both dogs and people. So that’s what I’ve learned and that’s what I’m going to continue caring for because it works. It really does for me at least.

Hansa Bergwall:

Wow. Those are some wise words. Thank you. Also, I wanted to include a plug zone for any… How could people find you? Do you have any events coming up? Any things people should go check out? I know you have a podcast.

Mike Shikashio:

Yeah, so the easiest way to find me is aggressivedog.com, so not dogs, they’re just aggressive dog, singular, .com.

Hansa Bergwall:

And we’ll share that link in the show notes. So look for it there.

Mike Shikashio:

I appreciate that. And then the podcast I’m doing recordings next month, but the podcast for this season will be launching in June of 2023, so it’s The Bitey End of the Dog if you’re interested in just dog behavior in general. I love to chat with other guests. And yeah, I’ve got the conference coming up in October, late September, early October in Chicago. It’s the Aggression and Dogs Conference, so I’m excited for that. And this year’s exciting. I finally get to travel a lot again, so I’m actually just next month heading off to five different countries and doing a little bit of a mini world tour for a few months, and then got a couple months off of the summer and then back to traveling all over again. So exciting plans for this year.

Hansa Bergwall:

Fantastic. Well thank you so much for joining us, Mike, and for everyone for joining us on Booked Solid. Best way to support the podcast is to do some bookings and run a business on PocketSuite. And following that to leave us a review on your podcasting service of choice. We’re also on YouTube. So thank you for coming and look out for more episodes soon.