Rome Floyd Chamber Small Business Spotlight – Chad Smith with Trinity Motorcar Company and Austin Matthews with Matthews Lighting and Electric
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BRX Pro Tip: The 30 Percent Rule
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BRX Pro Tip: The 30 Percent Rule
Stone Payton: [00:00:01] Welcome back to BRX Pro Tips. Stone Payton, Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, let’s talk a little bit about the 30 percent rule.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:09] The 30 percent rule comes from Steve Jobs when he was in Apple. A lot of people don’t remember that Steve Jobs, he started Apple, but he was also fired from Apple. And when he left, they struggled a little bit and then, they brought him back. And the first thing that he did when he came back was he looked at all of the activities that were happening in the Apple business and he decided that he’s going to focus only on the most important 30 percent of the business.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:35] The things that were really true to the core of what he was trying to do. And then, he was going to prune the 70 percent of the business activities that were just okay, that they just didn’t need to be doing anymore. So, he just honed in and focused on the activities that mattered, the stuff that really was going to drive the business going forward, and he got rid of all the other distractions. And in today’s world, there are so many activities that really don’t move the needle.
Lee Kantor: [00:01:04] They are nice to have, it’s great that they are happening, but they’re not the things that are really driving sales and really driving results for you and your clients. So, it’s better to prune those activities that, you know, maybe, at one time, they were great idea to do and you should have been doing them a while ago, but they’ve just kind of aren’t as productive as they used to be and focus in on the 30 percent of activities that really moves the needle in your business. Focus more and let these distractions go away. Prune what you don’t need, do more of what you do need.
Stone Payton: [00:01:36] All right. I want to put you on the spot for a minute. What do you feel like is the 30 percent that is most important for the studio partner?
Lee Kantor: [00:01:45] The 30 percent that is most important is selecting the right guest to come on a show, having good shows, and having follow-up meetings. If that’s all you did, is pick the right people to be in the room, have good experiences with them, and follow up with the ones that are prospects, you will grow your business. That’s the only activity that needs to be done. Anything else are nice to have, in my book.
When Things Go Wrong
BRX Pro Tip: Rank Your Top 100 Connections
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BRX Pro Tip: Rank Your Top 100 Connections
Stone Payton: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you, Lee, you’re recommending that all of us take some time and rank our top 100 connections.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Yeah. This is an exercise that we have our prospects or our new clients do, is, kind of put together that dream list. Within your network, who are those top 100 connections that you have and kind of put them in different tiers. Your number ones are your current clients, your current vendors, partners, referral sources. Your twos are your best prospects, the people you know and like you but they haven’t done business with you yet, but you’d like them to. And your threes are people who you think could benefit from your services, but they don’t like you or trust you enough yet. But they are, in your mind, good potential fits for doing business.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:55] And then, once you’ve determined the kind of top 100 dream list, now, reach out to each of those folks regularly. But, remember, each constituent should be communicated with in a slightly different manner. And the objective, though, is to move the threes to twos, the twos to ones, and the ones to either more business or more referrals. And then, just invest some time communicating and providing value to each of those groups so that they move from one tier to the next. And if you do this on a regular basis, you’ll be surprised on how much more business you’re going to get and how much stronger your brand is going to be.
Why We Decided to Pitch our Company on the TV Show “Shark Tank,” with Katy Mallory and Lou Childs
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Why We Decided to Pitch our Company on the TV Show “Shark Tank,” with Katy Mallory and Lou Childs
Lou Childs: [00:00:00] First off, getting on the show is like a needle in a haystack. So, 40,000 people apply every year.
Mike Blake: [00:00:09] Forty thousand. Wow.
Lou Childs: [00:00:11] Yes. Every year. So, when we realized when we went on Amazon and after the first five months of being on the market, we had $150,000 in sales and we said, “Why not? You know, we’re crazy. We really do love to have a lot of fun.” As those of you who have seen our pitch can see that we’re in pink pajamas with shark slippers. But we just said, “Hey, what the heck? We’ve got Delta Miles, let’s pick a spot and go stand in line and be in the casting call.” And that’s exactly what we did.
Lou Childs: [00:00:54] Katy is so good at public speaking. I’m a great sidekick and I’m a lot of fun. Of course, during the pitch, I forget my lines and the producers thought, like, that was hilarious. But I think we’re endearing. I think that people kind of feel once they get to know us, that they want to be our friend. So, it was easy. It was easy to just say, “Hey, what do we got to lose? We’ve got a great story and let’s go have some fun.” And that’s what we did. And I think it really paid off that we had that attitude.
Katy Mallory: [00:01:34] My mom mentioned, Mike, that we had some sales and I wanted to expand on that a little bit. Because from watching the show – which I think we’ve both seen every single episode over the last 11 years – we’ve seen that when companies have no revenue or their only revenue is Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaigns, they really get the ninth degree from the Sharks. Because the Sharks don’t feel like there’s enough to go on to feel confident investing. So, having that revenue and not just $5,000 of revenue – but, you know, I think when we applied, would you say, mama, it was more than 200 or 150 or something like that when we first applied? And then, by the time we recorded we had $600,000 or 650,000 in revenue in just a couple of months. So, that made us feel confident.
Katy Mallory: [00:02:27] Of course, there is the exception of the comp fee, which is a brand that Barbara Corcoran invested in that was pre-revenue, but she just really felt like those entrepreneurs were magnetic and she she went out on a limb and invested in them. But, historically, that’s not the case.
SlumberPod
The idea for SlumberPod started in December 2014 when Katy and her husband and baby were visiting Katy’s mother (Lou) for the winter holidays. Because it was a packed house, the three had to share a room. The baby woke up two nights in a row—seeing her parents across the room—and refused to go back to sleep. Sleep-deprived and frustrated, Katy and her family went home a day early. Thing was … their baby was rarely a bad sleeper at home.
Katy scoured the internet for something she could bring on trips to provide her baby a private, dark place to sleep. When she didn’t find anything that fit the bill, she (like many others) resorted to homemade solutions to provide a visual barrier between her and her baby. The homemade solution worked but wasn’t safe, especially private or easy to set up.
While Katy was on maternity leave with twins in the spring of 2016, she and Lou decided it was time to create a safe, easy and portable solution to help make vacations more restful and fun for everyone—and SlumberPod was born!
They’ve had a ton of support and encouragement by way of friends and family, product designers, fellow entrepreneurs, advisors, and are proud to bring SlumberPod to market.
Between the two of them, Katy and Lou have nine children and lots of experience traveling with them.
Company website | Katy Mallory LinkedIn | Lou Childs LinkedIn
Find their full Decision Vision interview here.
The “One Minute Interview” series is produced by John Ray and in the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX® in Alpharetta. You can find the full archive of shows by following this link.
Renasant Bank has humble roots, starting in 1904 as a $100,000 bank in a Lee County, Mississippi, bakery. Since then, Renasant has grown to become one of the Southeast’s strongest financial institutions with over $13 billion in assets and more than 190 banking, lending, wealth management and financial services offices in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida. All of Renasant’s success stems from each of their banker’s commitment to investing in their communities as a way of better understanding the people they serve. At Renasant Bank, they understand you because they work and live alongside you every day.
Prune Your Least Profitable Clients
When Things Go Wrong
BRX Pro Tip: Hire a Writer
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BRX Pro Tip: Hire a Writer
Stone Payton: [00:00:00] Welcome back to BRX Pro Tips. Lee Kantor and Stone Payton here with you. Lee, you’ve got some advice, if you really want to meet the market effectively, hire a writer.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:12] Yeah. I think this is a great opportunity to partner with the college that’s near your place of work and really invest in a journalism student. Hire that star student to write about you and your work. And invest some resources and time and energy to really give them access so they can dig in and write an article about you that, you know, maybe describes what makes you special, what makes you different. A little bit of your back story, the history, a little bit kind of behind the scenes of what you do. Take that, go to another college student, maybe a graphic artist, have them make it look nice.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:54] And then, use that content on your website. You know, write a blog post, have that journalist student submit it to different places as an article about your work. You really are going to get a lot of mileage out of investing in a person who kind of wants their job to be a writer, to really kind of take what you’re doing and elevate it. So, I think that’s a great exercise and you might learn some stuff about how they see you. It might be different than how you see yourself.
BRX Pro Tip: A Day in the Life of Your Customer
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BRX Pro Tip: A Day in the Life of Your Customer
Stone Payton: [00:00:00] And we are back with BRX Pro Tips. Stone Payton and Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, let’s talk through this idea of describing a day in the life of your customer.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Yeah. I think a great exercise for you to do – and if you have a writer on staff, or in a previous Pro Tip, we mentioned hiring a writer or journalist student from a college – this is a great activity to document, and that’s a day in the life of your customer. Write a blog post or an article about what it’s like to do business with you. Interview a client, talk about how they kind of leverage what you do, your services, and what it’s like to work with you. And get into the weeds about this. Talk about is there anything they have to be doing on a regular basis to get the most out of your service? Is there anything you’re doing on a regular basis to help your clients get the most out of your service? Then, use this as a post on your blog or a page in your website.
Lee Kantor: [00:01:05] And then, this is a great tool in your sales process to give prospects an idea what they can expect when they work with you. This way, you can address a lot of their objections. You can kind of give them a feel. It’s social proof about how it works and how other people have leveraged what you do. And it’ll create some clarity around the promise that you’re promising, and how you actually deliver it, and the benefits that your clients are getting from working with you. So, I think this is a great activity. This day in the life of a customer is a post that everybody should have on their website. It should be in a blog. It should be used in your selling process.
