Ed Fox with Tradebank Nashville

Intro: [00:00:03] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s time for Nashville Business Radio. Now here’s your host.

Stone Payton: [00:00:16] Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of Nashville Business Radio. Stone Payton here with you today. And you guys are in for a real treat. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with Trade Bank Nashville. Mr.. Ed Fox Good morning, sir.

Ed Fox: [00:00:34] Great Stone. How’s it going?

Stone Payton: [00:00:36] It is going well. Good. All right, there’s a clue. Sounds like you might be from a little bit south of here originally.

Ed Fox: [00:00:43] Yeah, I’m from the Deep South Southern Hemisphere.

Stone Payton: [00:00:48] Everything’s backwards down there, right? Like summer is winter in the. In the water flows. I don’t know. It’s just different, right?

Ed Fox: [00:00:56] It is, yeah. Like, so take Christmas Day, you go down the beach with a with a cold salad and it’s 100 degrees and. Yep.

Stone Payton: [00:01:05] So what brought you from Australia to to our fair land?

Ed Fox: [00:01:10] Well, you know, I tell people I wasn’t born here, but I got here as fast as I could, did all the paperwork, did it all legally. But actually, I met I met a wonderful girl who came to Australia on vacation and she walks up to me and she says, You spent so long flirting with them two New Zealand girls that I think you made me miss my bus for dinner. And even if you didn’t, you should take me out. And I look around and I say, Look back. And I said, I’ve heard of pushy American women. Now I’ve met one. Well, we’ve been married 32 years. Best thing I ever did.

Stone Payton: [00:01:40] Oh, my goodness. And your entrepreneurial journey, where you doing entrepreneurial kinds of things? Back. Back in the homeland?

Ed Fox: [00:01:48] Yeah. I grew up with a grandmother that was like one of the top ten Tupperware dealers in town. And all my aunts and uncles had some sort of business from a fried chicken restaurant to a, I guess you’d call it industrial salvage these days. We called it a junkyard back then, so they were all business owners. And so at seven years old, I told my grandmother, I said, Nan, when I grow up, I want to be a business owner too. And so I left school at 15 and started the first business.

Stone Payton: [00:02:16] And what was that business?

Ed Fox: [00:02:19] It was a convenience store. A little corner store had been shut down. No, no gas pumps, no petrol station, but just a little old fashioned general store on the corner. And the little old lady’s husband had passed away a couple of years ago and the shop had been empty. And I’d known her from we just lived around the corner and I walked up to her one day. I said, Mrs. Simpson, can I rent your shop? I’ve got a plan. She goes, Oh, you’ve got a plan, do you? So she said, Come on in and come on into the house and tell me your plan. And the next week I opened a convenience store with 80 bucks.

Stone Payton: [00:02:52] Wow. What a. That’s why I love to have these conversations. What an inspiring story. I mean, just sharing that story with other people in your in your ecosystem, in your world and letting them know that you were able to do that. I bet it’s a fun story to share and I bet people find it inspiring.

Ed Fox: [00:03:12] Well, I hope so. That’s the whole plan is, you know, you have to be authentic, right? You do you whatever that is for you, as long as you’re not hurting other people. So for me, the entrepreneurial journey, I get asked a lot, well, don’t you miss a formal education? Or do you think they want me to either support their argument that formal education isn’t needed or say that formal education is needed and we all pay for our education one way or another. I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on mistakes, right on business, and my wife has a degree and is a pharmacy manager for Kroger. And so she’s gone the formal route both can work, right? And so that’s what I want that story to say. Hey, look, if you’re a if you’re a young kid and you want to go into business, go into business, you know, if you want to go to college and get a degree and use that degree in some some other field, then do that. You do you.

Stone Payton: [00:04:03] All right. So let’s talk about Trade Bank a little bit. What got you interested in this whole idea, this this concept of bartering?

Ed Fox: [00:04:12] Well, bartering to me just made good sense when I opened the convenience store. One of the things we did back in 1983 was we had video rentals, right? So VHS and beta back in the day, that sort of dating myself. But we traded movie rentals for virtually everything we needed. So we used barter right from the get go to grow our business. And so when I came across Trademark and I’d always bought it stuff, even as kids and growing into adults, we all barter things all the time. You know, the wife says, look, if you take the kids to the park on Saturday, you know, then I’ll, you know, Sunday afternoon, you can watch football, you can do whatever you want. You know, that’s a barter, right? That’s something that you do well in business. It works the same way. Why pay cash? Why pay a retail price for an item when you could take your wholesale cost and barter that for their retail price item. So even if you break it down to like a bottle of water and a hot dog, right. Stone If I could if you’re the hotdog vendor and I’m the water guy, if I could trade you a bottle of water because you’re thirsty and I’m hungry and I want a hot dog. Well, we both get the value, but we haven’t had to spend the money.

Stone Payton: [00:05:24] I love it. Now I’m operating under the impression that Trade Bank just just provides some some structure and some scale and some convenience and ease of execution to this concept. Right. Because even though I might have a dozen eggs to trade, my neighbor may not have the bacon that I want to trade it for. Right.

Ed Fox: [00:05:45] Exactly. Exactly. So a managed platform is not something that people are very familiar with and we’ve forgotten how to barter. We I have people all the time that just follow their arms and say, I’d just rather pay cash. And I’m like, okay, let me get this straight. You’ve got a ten cent bottle of water that you bought in a case, and I can help you trade that for things you want at full retail boat, but you’d rather just pay the full, full retail price. That doesn’t make any sense to me. And so I realize it’s a failure on my behalf to educate properly. So when you take a managed barter platform and you plug them into the system, think of it like a you ever used cash app, Venmo or PayPal? It’s like an app, right? It’s an app we use on our phone. And and for you to send money to that people they have to be on the app or trade bank has the same sort of app only that you use it within the network. So if I’m a web designer and you’re a voiceover artist, maybe I need you to do some videos on my website, but you need a new website so you and I could barter directly. But like you said, if you’ve got eggs and you want my bacon, but I don’t have bacon, then that’s not going to work. So by using a barter platform app, you can trade what you have with other people that don’t necessarily have anything to trade with you because you’re using the barter currency instead.

Stone Payton: [00:07:02] So are you finding that there are certain industries, certain professional practices, certain types of businesses that really gravitate to this kind of kind of thing and really do well with it?

Ed Fox: [00:07:19] There are industries that do well with it. But more than that, as you’ve come across, I’m sure across the years, it’s more about the attitude of the person behind the business. If they if they grasp the concept, if they grasp the concept of their cost of goods being traded for somebody else’s retail price, and then saving and leveraging that margin and putting that back in their pocket by not having to spend it. It really could work with virtually any industry. Now, there are some legal requirements that certain industries can’t use it, right? If I’m an insurance salesman, I can’t take your premium in barter currency. I’m not allowed to do that. But if I’m a restaurant, if I’m a coffee shop, if I’m a voiceover artist, a web designer, a podiatrist, a lazy guy surgeon, a plastic surgeon, a, you know, basically any other field that can accept cash, can accept barter currency.

Stone Payton: [00:08:14] All right, so let’s talk about me. It’s my show, and it’s my favorite subject. But. But, no, I think it’d be a great way for me to really get my arms around this and helpful for our listeners. Let’s play this through for a moment. So I work with Business Radio X. I own a pretty big percentage of the overall network, but I also I run a business radio studio in Cherokee County, Georgia. You and I were talking before we went on air. There’s a guy here locally that runs the trade bank for this area. Play that like, how would that work for me? Oh, and just to give you some insight on our business model, we don’t charge people to be on the show, obviously, but but professional services, B2B people pay us money to help them design shows that help them use the platform to build relationships. And and so that’s our business model. We’ve been doing it for a long time. So those are, you know, I’m looking for those kinds of clients and then I use all kinds of services. Interesting. You should mention voiceover artists. We use voiceover artists to do our intros and outros and that kind of stuff. So what might that look like for a guy like me, like the onboarding process and how I can get the most out, if you don’t mind. Walk us through that.

Ed Fox: [00:09:29] Yeah, you bet. So having the studio, there’s probably times when the studio is not being used. Would that be correct?

Stone Payton: [00:09:36] Oh, yeah, that’s cool.

Ed Fox: [00:09:38] So that is an booked revenue, right? So if you have if you have an an a studio or a dentist office or whatever and we’re talking in your specific case, you have time in the studio that you’re not getting paid for, get paid for that in barter currency. In turn, take that barter currency. Hire one of my voiceover artists from Nashville, one of my voiceover artists from Wichita, Kansas. I own both those regions. That means that you the cash that you would normally spend on those voiceover artists is back in your pocket because you’re using the barter currency currency and transacting through the app. So you would rent out studio time. Maybe if you do advertising, you would would make some ads for people, you would sell those on barter and then you would take those barter dollars and offset some of your expenses by using barter dollars instead of using your cash. Now you’ve got a whole new revenue stream and you’ve offset some of your regular expenses. So what does that do with the cash that you were spending on those voiceover artists? Now that you’re spending, barter on them that puts that cash back in your pocket. So that makes you healthier, a business, healthier all the way around.

Stone Payton: [00:10:46] So it just dawned on me as you were talking, I suspect that there’s this whole group of people that are already part of the system. Again, here in my world to here here in in Georgia. And so it’s also sort of putting me out there in front of that group, isn’t it? It’s it’s it’s another method for getting the word out about the work that we do.

Ed Fox: [00:11:10] Right. Exactly. It opens you up to a whole new network. You know, sometimes people don’t realize that that all these other networks that are out there I had a financial planner friend who was a gamer. She played she did cosplay and she went to conventions. I said, that’s a whole new market that most financial planners won’t tap into. So now we relate that to Bada Stone. This is a whole network. We have about 4500 members. We’re a boutique barter exchange across southeast United States from Florida, across to Alabama, up to Wichita, Kansas. And there is franchise cities in there. And and the guy you were talking about in the Atlanta area, Lee Conner, would be a great guy to talk to about this if you’re in the Atlanta area. And that would open you up to that network, as you said.

Stone Payton: [00:12:00] So how does the and I ask this question, I come from sort of the sales and marketing side of training and consulting a long, long time ago when I had something more akin to a real job. So it’s how my mindset works. But I’m always interested to know, like, how the whole sales and marketing thing works. And I ask this of attorneys and CPAs and marketing consultants how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for for a guy like you with these multiple entities that are that are doing this business? How do you get to, I don’t know, have conversations like this, I guess.

Ed Fox: [00:12:39] Putting yourself out there the way most other business owners do, joining a chamber, joining a networking group like a BMI or something equivalent A.I. maybe, and just putting yourself out there in front of people. Right. I’m in the process of writing a book. It’s called Be Authentic. Unless you’re a serial killer, then don’t be. That changed. So. So the idea being that if we’re authentic. Right, unless we’re a jerk, right? If we’re a jerk, we need to check. You know, there’s people say, oh, I’m a I just have to accept me for the way I am. No, no, no, you don’t. You can’t build relationships if you’re not a nice person. So be a nice person. So it’s the same with any business. We’re all trying to reach new customers, and I think we’ve forgotten how to be authentic. We’ve forgotten how to share our concerns and our worries. And people think that salespeople are always out there to sell. They’re not. They’re out there to solve problems. And if I solve your problem, is it okay that I make some money because I solved your problem? That’s what I do. So it’s the same thing. Build a network, get out there, meet that network, and invite them to participate in whatever your product or service is.

Stone Payton: [00:13:48] So starting on this entrepreneurial journey, so young, having that success, did you have an opportunity? Did you have some mentors along the way? In the second part of that question, are you finding that now you have some opportunities to to mentor others?

Ed Fox: [00:14:09] Yeah. So you hit the nail on the head of what really drives me right now is I can’t I can’t say I’m a self-made man. Right. Because there’s been so many people that helped me up. So when I started the convenience store with $80, I talked to our at that time, we still had a milkman. He still delivered milk, 1983 in Australia, a little country town, 20,000 people. And I said his name was Ralph Lane, old guy, but he could still carry around cases of milk. And I said, Would you put them in on consignment? He’s like, Do I need cash? I said, But what if you put in like 100 liters on Monday morning and then Tuesday morning I pay you for whatever I sold the day before, and he did that. And so he put them in on consignment, patted me on the head, said, I want to help you out. You’re it’s exciting. We didn’t use the word entrepreneur back then. We said business owner. So he says, exciting to have a kid as a business owner. And then he brings me three or four other guys that put their stuff in on consignment. So all of those guys were mentoring the guys and gals were mentoring me and helping me grow my business to the point that we did 100,000 in 1983, the first year, I didn’t have a clue what.

Stone Payton: [00:15:17] I was doing.

Ed Fox: [00:15:18] You know, 1980, $300,000 for a 15 year old kid. And, you know, mum and dad, I didn’t have a license in Australia. You can’t get a license till you turn 18. So they would deliver the newspapers to the shop and they would buy the groceries and stuff for me, stuff I couldn’t get done. And so again they helped me. Second year they come in and they said, Look, dude, you’re killing yourself. Let us help you build it. Second year we did 300,000, right? And then we we built it up to about half a million. And then I stopped tracking it. It just just kept growing. And then we finally sold it after five years. But it was all about having mentors to help me and learn the steps along the way. And now I’m able to do that for business owners. I’m able to take people that maybe solo entrepreneurs, maybe they don’t know their marketing, they don’t know their advertising, they don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to get their business off the ground. And I love talking on business topics. I love talking business. I love talking and promoting. I have a real passion. Everybody should have a side hustle.

Stone Payton: [00:16:17] Hmm. Well, and I got to believe people love to just hear you talk, right? Don’t you get a little mileage out of that? Awesome.

Ed Fox: [00:16:25] Thank you. And you have some funny conversations like 4th of July, right? So I’m an American citizen. I say Australian by birth, American by choice. I mean, I love to visit Australia. I miss family. But given the opportunities in America, I love Tennessee, I love Kansas. We lived in Kentucky for a year. I love that. I just love those free states. Right. And coming from Australia, which is very controlled, I wanted that freedom and for me, I had a guy the other day says, Do you have 4th of July in Australia? I said, Yeah, it’s right after 3rd of July. Yeah, I’m a bit of a smart aleck, what can I say? You know, they say, Where is your accent come from? I said, me mouth like, No, no, no, where are you from? I said, Well, as long as you don’t say New Zealand, we’re good. I said, I’m from the South. I say, G’day ya’ll, when I want to confuse people.

Stone Payton: [00:17:19] Oh, nice.

Ed Fox: [00:17:21] So I have I have fun with that conversation. It opens doors, you know, I say to people, I say, look, hey, when you go networking, the easiest thing to do is throw out your hand and say, Good day. My name’s Ed. Of course I wouldn’t use today and I wouldn’t use it. I’d use your own name. But, you know, that’s the way that’s the way I say, look, if you need an icebreaker, you say this, say hi. How much does a polar bear weigh? They go, Oh, no, it’s enough to break the ice. My name’s Bob, so I’ve written a couple of Dead Joke books. I do a tick tock channel with nothing but dad jokes. But you know, when you have businesses, when you have multiple different businesses and you’re trying to promote and market the businesses, people want to know the person behind the business. You know, we we in America, Australia, most of the Westernized world, we love chains, right? We love the branding. We love being marketed to. Although we say we don’t, we love being marketed to, but they want we want to be marketed to in the way that is interesting to us. And so most of the time, I find I want to know the person behind the brand like I with you. Stone I would if we were close. I’d love to go out and have a beer or a Coke or a coffee, have something to eat, learn more about what you do, and then I would know better on how to help you utilize Beda to grow your business, right?

Stone Payton: [00:18:43] Yeah. So what you’re saying is Lee should buy me a beer.

Ed Fox: [00:18:48] Lee should buy you a beer?

Stone Payton: [00:18:49] Yeah. Okay.

Ed Fox: [00:18:50] Tell him that I’ll send him a message after we get off this call. And and I’ll. I’ll text you the fantastic.

Stone Payton: [00:18:56] So I know in my world there are at least a handful of what would I call them? Misconceptions. There’s some misinformation. There are some assumptions about what we do and what we’re. Out. And our work gets confused with some other kind of media approaches. I got to believe that there are probably a few just misconceptions, some patterns that you run into that you that you need to clear up to genuinely serve someone. Is that accurate? And if so, can you share a couple of these?

Ed Fox: [00:19:29] Yeah, you bet it is accurate. Number one, awareness. People don’t realize that a managed barter platform is out there or let’s just say Bada. They don’t realize that Bada is done on a high level as well as on an everyday level. They think about Bada with farmers and agriculture, right? Like you said, eggs for baking, but they don’t realize that. But it can happen on a high level. I like telling the story of Pepsi. Pepsi back in the sixties traded billion dollars of Pepsi products for $1,000,000,000 of vodka from Russia. In the eighties. They traded $3 Billion of Pepsi products, and Pepsi became the sixth largest military in the world for a brief period of time because they traded for $3 Billion in decommissioned naval assets, including 17 submarines, a frigate and destroyer now who thinks of Pepsi becoming a military power because they bought a soft drink for military hardware. You know, that’s a barter deal that you would never think of. So there’s misconception out there that barter is not used in today’s economy, but 92% of Fortune 500 companies barter.

Stone Payton: [00:20:40] Wow.

Ed Fox: [00:20:41] Do it all the time. If you just Google search Baidu and do a Google alerts on different things that are busted. So at my level, I get misconceptions like, oh, it’s it’s a cryptocurrency. No, it’s not a cryptocurrency. It’s actually been operating for 35 years or started in the Atlanta market. 35 years it’s been around. Sold their first franchise in 94, I think it was. And teaching people that, you know what? Bada can be as good as cash and in fact it can sometimes be smarter. So one of the one of the misconceptions I break down is I say, stone, if I have $100 cash to put in one hand or we have 100 trade bank barter dollars to put in the other hand. Looks like Monopoly money, but it isn’t. You know, it’s a it’s not a physical note. It’s on the app. If if I let you keep the $100 cash, if we go eat somewhere on trade or we go eat somewhere for cash, and you keep the $100, 99.9% of the time, if people understand it, they’ll say, well, I want to keep the cash.

Stone Payton: [00:21:46] Right, right. I want to.

Ed Fox: [00:21:47] Keep cash and let’s spend your your bot adults, because cash to me has more value. So you’re saying that cash is king, but what you’ve actually told me is, hey, Ed, wouldn’t it be smarter to spend the barter?

Stone Payton: [00:22:02] Well, of course.

Ed Fox: [00:22:03] You’ve just told me that. Oh, I’m going to keep the cash, because cash is king. But what you’ve actually said is it’s smarter to spend the ibotta because we’re going to drive by for burger restaurants to get to the Fifth because he accepts barter. So he’s outbid all his competition for your business by accepting barter dollars. And they go, Yeah, but what’s the benefit to him? Well, now he takes those barter dollars and he buys advertising. We just did, I think we did, up to $2 million on Yellowstone when they launched on Paramount Plus and Peacock, we were able to sell commercials for barter dollars. We had a firm here in Franklin, Tennessee, that does phone services, and they called one called technology. They do voice over IP phone services. And they were able to buy 1000 ads during Yellowstone in a Franklin zip code for two barter dollars and add 1,032nd ads for $2,000. Wow. They can’t they can’t get that exposure anywhere else. And they use the line frustrated by business phone service have rip take it to the train station. It worked great. And then they sent out postcards, but they were able to spend their barter dollars instead of spending their cash. So any time you can spend barter dollars instead of spending your cash, that means more money staying in your pocket. And if we are actually going into a recession, you know, the media would like us to think we’re going into recession.

Ed Fox: [00:23:26] I’m not an economist. I don’t know if we are or not, but I can tell you that if we have that mindset, that it’s going to be a recession. Do you want to spend 100 cents on the dollar for things you need, or would you like to spend $0.50 on the dollar or less because you’re spending that wholesale dollar? So busting down the myths, number one, educating and making people aware that a managed barter platform even exists. Right? That is available to virtually every business out there to get new customers and open up new networks and create new revenue streams without changing their processes. All it is is it go. My wife is a pharmacist and she says it’s like buying in-network or out-of-network. When you have health insurance, if you have health insurance and you shop in network, you save money, right. If you have health insurance, but you go outside of the network that the health insurance provides, you have to pay more. Well, do you want to pay more or less when you are when you have health insurance, you stay with the network. Well, BART is the same way if you’re a trade bank member and you have the option of of buying time on the radio with barter dollars instead of paying cash, that means more cash stays in your pocket to grow your business, feed your family.

Stone Payton: [00:24:39] Well, I’m glad I asked, because, yes, I suspect that all of those are initial thoughts that people will have till they get a chance to have a conversation with you. You strike me as a guy who rarely gets down and you know, I know you’re human. So surely you run out of juice now, now and again. Where do you go? And I don’t necessarily mean a physical place, but how do you recharge the batteries? Where do you go for inspiration?

Ed Fox: [00:25:07] Right. So one of the challenges. Yeah, sure. Depression is something that has run in my family for a long time. I love the fact that in this day and age we can talk about mental health. And so when I get depressed, if you’re on my Facebook page, you will see me do a run of dad jokes and I’ll post a bunch of memes and a bunch of dead jokes. I read an article in Harvard Business Review back in 2014 and it said something paraphrased like the average three year old laughs 200 times a day. And the average 40 year old 12.

Stone Payton: [00:25:39] Wow.

Ed Fox: [00:25:40] That is true. Right. We we don’t have enough laughter. And, you know, Reader’s Digest, I don’t know if you’ve ever read the Reader’s Digest, but they have a page in there called Laughter’s the Best Medicine. And I’ve heard from people that, you know, if you feel down, just start laughing, laughing out loud. Well, you know, we can’t in a work environment or whatever, people think we’re crazy anyway. But but I find when you can make people smile and you can make people laugh, it lightens their heart and keeps them healthy. And so for me, humor is the way I do that. So when I get down, number one, I’m married to the most wonderful wife in the world, and that’s trademark. We’ve been married 32 years. But number two, laughter is the key for me and taking your eyes off yourself and do something for somebody else. So I have people reach out to me through networks like Allina Bell and LinkedIn and Facebook on social media, and then through the chamber and through BMI groups and say, Hey, Edward, you’ve got a lot of skills in marketing and your own personal brand. And, and I would just like to learn from you. And so when I’m depressed, if I can take my eyes off myself and help them briefly, it makes me feel better.

Stone Payton: [00:26:49] What a great piece of counsel right there. All right. So before we wrap, let’s make sure that our listeners know how to get in touch with you, have a conversation with you or or someone on your team, whatever you feel like is appropriate. The social media channels, web website. But I want to make sure that these folks can reach out.

Ed Fox: [00:27:08] Yeah, you bet. So probably the easiest way to see everything that I do and it’s a little messy, but I use a little app called Link Tree. And so it’s link dot E that’s the domain forward slash Ozzy Fox, a U.S. Fox. So link tree Ford slash OSI Fox would take you to all of my different medias, but you can find me on LinkedIn, OSI Fox, USC Fox. You can find me on Facebook under the same thing. I’m all over the place. Just search Edward Fox, Nashville or Edward Fox Wichita on Google and I pop up and it’s either going to be for the sport of cricket or dad jokes or barter because those are the big ideas.

Stone Payton: [00:27:52] Those are the big three. Well, Ed, it has been an absolute delight having you on on the show, man. We certainly appreciate the work that you’re doing. And we want to continue to follow the story. And please, as your book, as you put that book out, please reach back out and let’s let’s catch up on on all three of those things. Okay?

Ed Fox: [00:28:14] Yeah, that’d be great. I love ketchup.

Stone Payton: [00:28:19] Oh, my goodness. Well, thank you. Thanks again, man. This has been a great deal of fun and very informative.

Ed Fox: [00:28:27] Yeah, no, our extend. Thanks for having me.

Stone Payton: [00:28:29] All right. This is Stone Payton for our guest today, Ed Fox with Trade Bank Nashville and of course, dad joke extraordinaire and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you next time on Nashville Business Radio.