Grow Your Business with AI the Does and Don’ts

This is a written Transcription for the Midwest Mindset episode: Grow Your Business with AI the Does and Dont of Artificial Intelligence.

Transcript

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt: To use AI or not to use AI. That is the question. Artificial intelligence feels like the easy button right now, right? But there are important do’s and don’ts when it comes to using AI for your business. On this episode of Midwest Mindset, we are joined by an AI expert, Shawn Quintero.

Shawn is the chief AI officer for Elite Real Estate Systems, and he runs his own business that coaches business owners to success with product launches and growth programs. Hello and welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that makes marketing easy and simple to do for any business.

Today we’re joined by Sean Quintero, who is going to give you the do’s and don’ts of using AI. Let’s talk about all things. I, um, I love AI. I also know that AI it has its limitations. It’s a tool.

There’s a place for it. We did a whole episode about. It is foolish to not use it. It is equally foolish to overuse it and lean on it too much. And I was excited when we first met.

Because you are a an AI expert, I think you’re the only AI expert I know. Everybody thinks they’re an expert on AI. You are truly an expert. In fact, you work with and talk with in regular conversations with the leading CEOs and owners of all these different AI companies.

We hear about Jasper ChatGPT and all these, you know, um, Bard and you’re in the know.

So I was thrilled to have you on the podcast here to talk about some of the basics that I think get overlooked in this very radically evolving conversation about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the practical uses of it. So thank you first and foremost for for coming out and nerding out with us here on the show.

Shawn: Well, I’m super excited to be here, Matt. Um, and I think what a lot of people don’t recognize is that AI is actually been here since the 50s. Yeah. So it’s not something that’s new. It’s something that’s new to the masses. Uh, in 1950, uh, AI artificial intelligence was coined.

And in 1960 we had the very first chat bot. So we think about like, Manny chat and some other things where there’s an auto responder happening that was happening in the 1960s.

There was a chatbot called Eliza, and Eliza was a trained to be a psychotherapist. And so somebody could use Eliza to get therapy from this robot. Right. Which is pretty incredible.

Matt: I feel like I need the I need Eliza today more than, more than ever. Yeah.

Shawn: Um, so so Eliza came around and then we had, um, uh, an AI robot that came about in 1990, uh, which was named Kismet. Um, Kismet was facial.

So there was expression and emotional expression that was taking place with this robot. And this AI, embodied AI is what they call it. And then in 2008, we had Facebook and Facebook, uh, did something massive in 2009, which was, do you remember if if you were an early adopter of Facebook, you would log in and you’d see what was posted most recently. Now you log in, you see things from like five days ago. Yeah, seven days ago, engagement.

Matt: Based.

Shawn: All about engagement. And they made that big shift to an algorithm based feed. In other words, what they really wanted was to see what is going to get the most engagement, because we want to keep people on our platform, because if we keep people on our platform, they see more ads and we make more money from the ad spend.

And so 2009, Facebook changed the game. Essentially.

They said, we’re going to have a computer determine what you see on your on your computer when you log in. And everybody began to kind of adopt that over the last 20 years. Netflix. You log into my Netflix, it’s going to be very different than what you see when you log into yours. Even a basic.

Matt: Google, you open up Google, you go to the website. It’s going to be totally different based on your location and your Google account you’re logged into.

Shawn: So there’s an AI algorithm, right? There’s an algorithm that’s essentially determining what is curated on your feed. So for the last 20 years we’ve seen curated AI. Uh, we haven’t had access to it though. Right. It’s if I log in to Facebook, Facebook makes the determining factor or the determining decision in 2000, uh, just last year, November, October, November of last year, uh,

OpenAI decided we’re going to rush this and we’re going to make open AI available to everybody through ChatGPT. And it was the fastest growing platform in all of human history until like Facebook just released threads and now threads is the fastest growing technically.

Um, but it was the fastest growing piece of piece of technology that was the most adapted in all of human history. And people started using it and they were wowed. Like I could put some input in. I could put a prompt in and get information out. But what has happened is nobody read the terms and conditions, nobody read the privacy policy, and there are.

Matt: Some serious risks with with that. You enlighten me on that. I didn’t even I mean ChatGPT was not my my go to. I was resistant, I was using Jasper, which also has some some privacy concerns as well, maybe not quite as severe as as what ChatGPT is currently facing with literal lawsuits from, what, 50 different companies? You said.

Shawn: It’s wild. So OpenAI is, um, essentially the input that you give, it is used as data that can then be accessed by somebody else’s prompt.

So in other words, if I’m putting in proprietary information, well, somebody can have the right prompt and access that proprietary information, which is wild.

So what happened was all these employees started using ChatGPT started. All of this inputting all of this data in. And now OpenAI can leverage that data and use that data to teach their AI and then be able to answer other people’s prompts. So like, let’s say.

Matt: You have McDonald’s and Burger King. All right. So you see, you have the two chefs that I’m simplifying this, but McDonald’s and Burger King and they’re like, okay, I need to type up a, an email campaign about this burger recipe at, uh, McDonald’s.

And everybody wants to know what the secret sauce is. Well, I’m going to input what that secret sauce ingredients are. Well, then somebody over at Burger King, because it’s a shared platform.

It’s open AI, it’s open to anybody. Now, if they enter the right prompts, somebody of a Burger King could be like, hey, I got your secret sauce. Now, finally. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Well, McDonald’s of course, suing then and Burger King would then see everybody suing. It’s a very.

Shawn: Simplified example.

Matt: Very simplified example. But that’s what I that’s how I do. I like to keep it simple, but in essence that’s what’s happening.

Shawn: Rumors that OpenAI is going to release two more, um, paid services. So right now you have the free version, which is 3.5, and you have the Pro version, which is GPT four.

There’s rumors that they’re going to release a GPT four upgraded option for like enterprise level corporations, because that’s their solution to privacy concerns. Um, here’s what’s wild is ChatGPT is just the beginning. There is just last month, over 3000 AI softwares that were released to the public, 3000 new ChatGPT type things, uh, AI generating software.

Matt: Companies I’m seeing just built off of ChatGPT. It’s wild popping up overnight, and a lot of them are very innovative, practical solutions. Uh, and we’ll get into that here in a bit because they’re some of the best practices I think we agree on as far as how you should use it, how you should implement this, because it’s amazing, it’s incredible, and it’s happening. It’s been here, like you said, since the 1950s.

Shawn: It’s been here for a while. It’s not something that’s new. It’s simply that’s something that’s accessible. We went from a curation AI to now a creation AI. I can go on to ChatGPT or any other of the alternatives and create seven days of content in seconds, which is wild.

Yeah. So we now have access to creation AI with curation. I though there were a lot of really good things that were mentioned, right? A lot of really great things that were mentioned when Facebook democratized information. Everybody has a voice, right?

Which is a great thing. People who have been systemically oppressed, people who have typically not had a voice, they now have access to everybody where they can share what they’ve experienced. So everybody has a voice, which is awesome. The downside is everybody has a voice.

And so what happens is there’s information overload, there’s analysis paralysis. There’s um, all of these really weird, creepy people who are leveraging access to minors. Right. There’s this access that now everybody has it, but also everybody has it. So same thing with creation.

Ai is there are some really positive things, but there’s also some really, um, major yellow and red flags that a lot of people are ignoring. Number one is just trust.

How do I trust? If somebody can take three seconds of my voice and then replicate it, to say anything in any, you know, um, tone of my voice, if somebody can take just three seconds, what’s to stop them from calling my parents and asking them for my Social Security number? Because I forgot, which is something that has happened.

Matt: Thank God that this did not this technology voice cloning was not around when I was in high school, because in high school, I remember we used to take cassette players and we would I would talk really slow and then we would play it back high speed and I would sound like a chipmunk and I would sing songs.

That’s how we would like prank girls in our class. Like that’s the level where we were. Imagine if I had voice cloning technology. I mean, how many I mean, I, I this is joking, but I this is bound to happen. You have revenge porn. Yeah. I mean, we take somebody’s voice because there’s.

Shawn: Not just voice, but there’s video generation as well. There’s deepfakes. Yes. Now it’s so easy to create. So somebody could take you. They can have you dancing naked in like, a square.

Matt: Well, that already exists for real, but so.

Shawn: But nobody would know the difference because it looks so real. It sounds so real.

Matt: And you don’t even have to go so far as to clone me, or my voice or my body. You could just be somebody else and ruin somebody’s life.

You could say, uh, hey, this is just a random AI generated voice saying, yeah, I just want to let you know I’m having an affair with your husband. It’s been going on for two years. Just because you’re jealous or whatever, you know, you’re outside of that relationship. You want to ruin somebody’s life.

I mean, that’s how. That’s how powerful these tools are. And I feel like that’s the unregulated territory or area that is live in right now. We are in right now that is could cause the most harm. Yes. Am I worried about Terminator two? No, I’m not worried about Judgment Day in that extreme. Listen, AI is eventually going to surpass human beings in in evolution. It already has it.

Shawn: In so many different ways, right? It’s passing the bar in five minutes, which is wild. It’s. It’s, um, and what it’s doing is it’s able to create things. So right now there is an AI that generated a bacteria, um, a plastic eating bacteria, which is fantastic to be able to put into the ocean and eat up all the plastic that’s there.

Yeah. And so it’s, it’s solving nearly scientifically, almost scientifically impossible and challenges, which is positive things. Right. There’s an AI that is cellular level, um, an embodied AI, a robot that’s being trained to be injected and it looks like liquid.

So it’ll inject it into your body, it’ll go through your entire body and identify all the things that are wrong, and then start fixing it. Start regenerating the parts of your body that are poor. And so that’s there’s some good things and there’s some really dangerous things.

Matt: Because like my point though, it was exactly that. It’s out of our hands either way. Okay. So let’s say AI takes over ten years, 50 years, 100 years from now. It’s either going to destroy mankind as everybody thinks a Terminator two, or it could save mankind.

Because let’s be honest here, mankind, we’ve done a pretty crappy job of saving ourselves. I mean, you know, we talk about, like, driverless cars as an example of, like, well, freak out when there’s one driverless car accident, but how many humans are in accidents because we’re looking at our phones and stuff. So I think we tend to overreact in the pendulum swing. So let’s get into some of the best practices. Yeah.

Shawn: So principles principles of understanding and playing with AI. Number one, I think everyone should play with AI. Ai is integrating into literally every single area of our life.

There was an AI or an embodied AI that just successfully did a liver transplant, which is wild. There was no doctor’s hands on this operation. It was purely robotic AI. So there are some really good things about it. Um, it’s integrating into every part of our life, so go play with it. If it’s ChatGPT, go play with ChatGPT. Just don’t put like your Social Security number in it or anything like that. Go play with it.

Matt: Don’t clone my.

Shawn: Voice. Ask it to create a poem about dogs and pizza. Ask it to create a, um, a, you know, a summary of your favorite book. Just go play with it. The more you can interact with it, the easier it is. Like my parents, right? They first got into Facebook and they didn’t know anything.

They were like, what do I do? And now my mom’s like an expert on Facebook. And I was like, blowing up. So, so just go play with it. The more comfortable you get with it, the the easier it is to integrate it.

Um, what’s so important is you have to be an informed user, though I, I believe the more informed you are, the better decision you can make for yourself. Uh, ignorance is not bliss in this situation. So go get informed, understand what it is, how it’s being used. Because I don’t believe I will replace humans, but I do. I, I believe humans who use AI will replace humans. Yes, because of the just accelerated, rapid, um, creation you can do with it.

Matt: It’s the it’s a tool like I when we did, Ben and I talked about this initially on an episode of the podcast, and I used the analogy of a pneumatic nail gun like it’s connected to an air compressor. You know, you could go build a house with a hammer and a nail. It would take you a lot longer. This pneumatic air gun, this nail gun, you can build a house faster. You can do a lot more cool things with it. It’s just streamlined.

But it’s still a tool. It can’t build the house for you. And I think when it comes to anything, we work in the world of marketing. And I know you come from an extensive marketing background yourself. Um, we work in this world where we have to understand and know how to connect emotionally. And I think we underestimate, maybe overestimate AI, or we underestimate just how important that feeling brain versus the thinking brain, uh, impacts our decisions. And I think that’s that’s the risky territory when it comes to content creation.

And and some of these, you know, you talk about principles to me, understanding just the baseline principle, like why do humans decide to do one thing versus another? Well, it has to do with emotions. And AI is not at a point where it can have emotions or understand or comprehend. It can try and simulate pretty closely, but it isn’t quite there. So what do you recommend for? It’s not there yet.

Shawn: I will say probably over the next six months you will have AI that’s indistinguishable from human interaction. What I will say, though, is that humans will always still be a necessary ingredient, that you’re still a necessary ingredient when it comes to copy, because you have to edit it. You have to make sure it’s doing everything you want it to, to strategically. It’s a tool. And so there are certain ways which we’ll get into on the practical tacticals that you can make your AI sound exactly like you.

I have my AI, I can ask it to write an email and it’ll sound exactly like I write emails. I write emails with exclamation points. I put smiley faces. I say, OMG, it’ll create content just like me, but you have to train your AI to do it. So we’ll call it.

Matt: Onboarding, which I like.

Shawn: We call it onboarding your AI to to your kind of in integrating it into you. But principle number one is go be an informed user, go play with it and be informed about what it is. Principle number two is your necessary ingredient. It cannot replace you, your human.

You have this consciousness and this experience. Uh, maybe I write will become what’s called general, um, general AI, which is a conscious being and creation, maybe. Who knows? Uh, but right now, you’re a necessary ingredient. That’s principle number two. And principle number three is the better your input is, the greater your output will be. If I go ask and simply ask it to write an e-mail, if I come to you and say, write me an email. And that’s all I say. Yeah. How good is that email going to be?

Matt: Not gonna be very good.

Shawn: You don’t know what the topic is. You don’t know who it’s going out, though. You don’t know anything.

Matt: I would have a lot of exclamation points as well. And smiley faces I do that. I feel like every email deserves at least one smiley face, but that’s just me. Smiley face.

Shawn: I mean, yeah, um, so. So you wouldn’t have any idea. But if I told you. Hey, I like to put a lot of exclamation points. I put, um, happy faces. I am on the Myers-Briggs. I’m an INFP. Uh, my personality. I am also an Enneagram three, so I’m very accomplishment driven.

Uh, I also like to help people because I’m a wing two on disc. I’m a high, I high s. Uh, and so if I gave you all that information, I said, can you write something that kind of sounds like me? Now you have more information to build your email off of. So what we do is we do something called onboarding.

We onboard your AI. We have a very specific prompt where we go over personality, we go over accomplishments. We go over past copy and language that you’ve written yourself.

So I’ll give my AI all this information and then I’ll say, can you analyze this and, um, write in my voice and then it’ll start saying, yeah, of course. What do you want me to write? And now I can ask it. So the more again, the better the input, the better the output.

Matt: Even then, even as close as accurate, because most, most people are going to be hearing like, I haven’t done a single one of those personality tests, so I don’t even know what to tell it. Well, even with.

Shawn: Go take those personality assessments, they’re free. They’re so good.

Matt: However, even with all of those, you still we’re not just handing this the baton off and saying you do all the work from now on, I’m just going to sit back and drink Mai tais, like you’re still the reason you’re you’re necessary is because you’re necessary. You’re part of this equation.

So for a business owner, for anybody using AI, whether it’s writing a property listing, you’re selling a motorcycle or a, a home or, or maybe something more complex, you’re writing a blog article for your website you’re trying to, or social media content you’re trying to post that you still have to, uh, or Chad, uh, use this analogy, which I like. You’re the pilot. Uh, AI is the co-pilot, you know, and I feel like that’s pretty accurate and true. You can’t just say do it all for me. Um, it may do a good job. It made you a poor job, but that that, I feel, is that. Do you see that too much today? Are people swinging that pendulum too far?

Shawn: Here’s what I would say. I would say it’s like a teenager if I. If you ask a teenager to go clean their room, they’ll do a little bit of a good job. But then you walk in and you’re like, okay, wait a minute, there’s clothes under the bed. Let’s actually put those in the laundry, right. So it’ll it’ll do a okay job.

Yeah. You, it’ll give you. So with a poor input. Right. Not not really good prompts, not really onboarding. And like we talked about it’ll give you a two out of ten. They’ll write an email but it won’t be very good with the prompts. It’ll um and the onboarding process that we encourage people to do, it’ll then give you a seven or an eight out of ten, but it’s still not a ten out of ten. And that’s where you come in and you take that eight out of ten and make it a ten out of ten. Now here’s what has been really good.

Like just on the practical side is what would traditionally take me personally, um, if I’m writing like a seven day email drip to someone, um, every single day I want an email to go out that would take me like three days to really, like, go in, write it, get it. Perfect. Now it takes me like an hour. Yeah, because I gives me something to start with, gives me an eight out of ten for all those emails. And I just go in now. Okay. Let me adjust this a little bit.

Matt: That is the secret. That’s the the the big win I feel like we overlook um or don’t maybe don’t give credit where credit is due. And that’s just how this tool is probably one of the most revolutionary and incredible tools at our disposal.

And we have it today. It’s right there. It’s free or next to it, right? It’s pretty affordable, even if you’re paying for a subscription models and we have it, but it’s knowing how to use that tool and I think you’re hitting on that perfectly. What do you get out of it? How much time are you saving a blog article?

We’ve we went through this on on that episode where we talked about, here’s the process you can use to get your first draft written based off of a transcript of a voice message you leave yourself on your way home, or a podcast or wherever you pull it from, but that’s still only going to get you like a 5 or 6 out of a ten for your SEO performance.

So you still have to know, what do I have to check off on this list? And then what? Am I going to add those requirements? Google wants for that to make you an authority and show expertise and all those things.

Shawn: Here’s the thing about AI. And with all of the analogies that we’re we’re sharing, you know, the nail gun, I think is an analogy. The thing with AI is the AI is like a nail gun that gets smarter, right?

It’s consistently. And learning right now. So I’ll give you an example. And it’s kind of a wild example is uh, there was a research company that was training an AI learning, um, platform, uh, English, the English language. Um, after about three months, it started responding in Spanish and the engineers didn’t give it Spanish. Oh, wow.

They have no idea how it acquired a new language. Um, and then three weeks later, it learned Portuguese, and then it learned French. And then, like, there is no the the AI machine is learning at a faster rate than the engineers can identify how it’s learning. So it’s learning at a rapid pace. Openai has so much data on us, so much information. Their machine has learned so much and it’s only getting smarter. So that’s why I mentioned like being an informed user, because right now, with the right prompts, it’s an eight out of ten. I suspect in about a year it’ll start giving us ten out of ten content, 12 out of ten even better things than we can imagine, because now it can create an output, but in a way where it’s also analyzing in seconds psychology, human behavior, human emotion, the history or the, you know, a person’s purchasing behavior, all of this information that it can then input into this email.

Matt: So even then, even then, though, even we get to a couple of years from now, things are like super advanced. Even then, you’re still required because I can’t go out and live your life for you. It can’t go out and have your life experiences. And here’s the thing.

Shawn: I think with AI specifically to that is what I’m encouraging a lot of people to do is imagine if if who wants to spend seven days writing a seven day email drip, nobody wants. I don’t want to do that if I can. Do, you know, in in seven days the work in seven days, but within two hours, that means I have all this extra time to go live life to spend time with my, my, my, my daughter who’s nine months and my wife to to go do life.

Nobody actually wants to be behind a computer and write the emails. Unless that brings you joy. Um, and you actually want to do it? The majority of us don’t. I don’t at least. But you have so much time to go do what you do want. Nobody can write the book for you. Nobody can, you know, create that piece of art that’s from your hands. Ai is going to enable you to have more time to go do the things you want to do.

Matt: Like our podcast is a great example, and that’s kind of why we coach people. Like, okay, there’s a lot of AI platforms and tools for a podcast, specifically for blog writing, all these other elements. And when you start to remove all these things that are tedious, right, monotonous, they aren’t the fun part.

What that actually ends up doing is now you freed up an extra hour or two, which can make a world of difference for you to focus on what you actually love, which is hosting the podcast, which is coming up with creative ideas on stories. And how are you going to what guests are you going to talk to and how are you?

What networking event are you going to go to promote it? Or I mean, there’s so much you could do that’s just a better use of your time. And that’s where I feel like AI is, is you are missing the boat entirely if you’re avoiding it for ego, for nostalgia, for fear, or just a general misunderstanding of what it is.

Um, you are missing the boat big time. Because that that to me is that’s the opportunity, especially for business owners who need that help with the budget. One last thing I want to ask you is, like what? If you because I know there’s a lot of different platforms you could recommend, but what what nudge or supportive direction would you, would you push our, our our business owner who’s like, okay, I admit maybe I’ve been reluctant. I want to try it. How where should a business owner start utilizing? I, I don’t know if that’s a platform or a process or a certain area of their business, but where would you what’s a safe, comfortable place for them to start?

Shawn: Yes. So the very first thing I would recommend is just go play with it. There are so many free platforms to start with. Chatgpt right. It’s free. Go play with it. Everyone’s using it. Just have fun with it. That’s to get yourself normalized to it. But if you want to use it in a very strategic way, um, we have a platform that we recommend to everybody that’s a big alternative to ChatGPT, and it’s called Magi. You can find it if you. I’m sure there’s going to be a link somewhere. Yeah, we.

Matt: Use it as well. You’ve turned us on to it. It’s fantastic.

Shawn: So um, or you can go to our website HSN.com forward slash I um, but it, it is really powerful in the way that it organizes your information. It’s protects your information.

So the thing with Magi is it leverages GPT four. It’s built on the API, um, OpenAI’s API, but you also have other learning platforms that you can use. So there’s cloud, there’s Leonardo for image generation. There’s so many other things. Um, they don’t save your data, so they don’t allow other people to have access to your data when asking prompts like a buffer. So there’s a proprietary security there, which is really key.

So, um, you can build brands out. So you know how I was saying, like, here’s my personality, here’s my information. You can have that saved in as a brand voice. Um, you can add team members to it.

So if you have Vas or any type of like marketing assistance or anything like that, you can give your chats, access, um, your vas access to your chats. Um, and I really like that because you only have to do the work once. You don’t have to have a VA redo the work of seasoning an AI. It’s here’s my AI.

Now go ask it questions because I’ve already seasoned it. And then you can create custom personas. So we’ve created custom service reps where we give all our SOPs, all of our, um, responses to emails, etc. and now instead of people emailing us for like support at our email, they’re speaking to this AI chatbot who has all of the information anyway. So there’s some really cool things that are, um, that you can leverage with Magi that I recommend. Just go to hasten Q, h, e s and q.com/ai.

Matt: And we’ll have the link in the show notes as well. Sean thank you so much man I, I love nerding out. My wife is she is hardcore I mean hardcore into crafting. Um, and so that’s that’s her jam. She’s crafting crafting crafting. And one day she came downstairs. She’s like, are you ever going to get up off your off the couch? It’s been like two, two, three days. You’ve been sitting there on your laptop.

And I said, uh, I said, Wendy, you have crafting, I have nerding. That’s what this is. This is nerding. And I feel like it should be. It’s, you know, probably a national pastime, I think, for you and I. It definitely is.

Very much so. Um, I love talking about this nerding out about it, whatever you want to call it. And I feel like it definitely inspires me doing what we do. Um, sharing this information, the things we learned with business owners, because it really is a game changer. You know, 51% of businesses go out of business their first 3 to 5 years.

I think that would be a dramatically different number if people took advantage of some of the free tools that they can use that are not hard to use, and they’re actually pretty fun and pretty cool once you get into using them.

Shawn: So and thank you for sharing that with this case study. There’s a company that was just started this year. They’ve surpassed $2 million and it’s two people. But all they’re doing is AI. Their AI is doing all the work. So if you can leverage the heck out of AI, there’s.

So much opportunity.

Keys To Marketing Video that Works

This is a written Transcription for the Midwest Mindset episode: Keys To Marketing Video that Works

Transcript

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

MAtt: Every social media channel is now a video platform. Video is dominant and it’s not going anywhere. If you’re not doing video, then you are not growing your business like you could. On this episode of Midwest Mindset, we’re going to give you the three keys to a marketing video.

That actually works. Hello and welcome back to.

MAtt: Midwest Mindset, the podcast that makes marketing simple and easy to do for any business. I’m Matt Tompkins of Two Brothers Creative, where we believe that every business deserves affordable and effective marketing.

Yeah, that’s just what we believe. It’s what we stand for. It’s our code. It’s our code motto. Yeah. Creed, Creed. It’s our creed. Yes. You were a big Creed fan. Ah, yeah, I love Creed. I mean, Creed is great. Creed is great. I don’t know why people criticize Creed. Why? I don’t get it. Yeah, neither do I.

Austin: His voice is incredible. Yeah.

MAtt: It’s like. It’s like Pearl jam part two. Who? What? Why are we judging you?

Austin: No. Yeah, yeah, I’m with you.

MAtt: Yes. Things got weird when you, like, fell off a building and China or wherever he was. And then the whole religious thing kind of got mixed in there.

And I don’t know what’s going on with that. I don’t care. People who I don’t get, people still say.

Ben: They’re like a Christian rock band.

Austin: You know that one of the.

MAtt: No.

Austin: He left he. No, he never was. That was like all.

MAtt: His dad was like a pastor or something. And he, like, rebelled against that by not doing the opposite of that. And then I think eventually he returned to his faith.

Austin: But like the last time I saw him, he was like a mug shot and he was like poor and basically homeless in Florida.

MAtt: I got to meet Scott Stapp.

Ben: I’ve met him. Great.

MAtt: You did? Yeah, I’ve met Scott Stapp. So when I used to do, I was the voice of Sturckow for like seven, eight years. So I introduced all the bands on stage, right.

Read announcements. So people hated me when I’d be like, hey, sorry, but there’s a rain delay. You know, uh, that guy was that guy. Um, and I’m standing there one day, and so a friend of mine, she loves Creed. So I got her tickets, and we’re standing in, like, backstage right next to the stage. She smokes, so she pulls out a cigarette.

She doesn’t have a lighter, and I’m like, well, shoot, I don’t have a lighter either. And then all of a sudden this hand pops in. He’s like, hey, here you go, lighter. And then lights a cigarette.

We turn around, it’s Scott Stapp, and we start talking to him. He’s literally probably top three most nicest celebrities I’ve ever met. Like Bob Saget was one. He’s the nicest. Like, Bob Saget was just incredibly nice. And I would put Scott Stapp up there at number two. Incredibly nice dude.

Austin: He still went to the bar and had a beer with Bob Saget. Yeah.

Ben: Um, Scott Stapp still has a great voice. Still singing really well, dude. Yeah.

MAtt: There for that album that came out, that broke. That album is great. Oh yeah.

Ben: They had the first.

Austin: Real quick though.

Ben: Have you the Creed podcast?

Austin: Because I got a, I got a welcome to Creed.

MAtt: Welcome to the Creed fan club podcast.

Austin: One of the best sketches, um, in my opinion ever is MADtv, the Creed sketch. And they changed the song to My shirt’s wide open and he’s on a cliff. And the guy, like, playing him. It’s his shirt’s wide open. Blowing in the wind. Yeah, it’s it’s hilarious.

MAtt: All right, so it’s time to introduce everybody and then get into today’s episode. Uh, up first we have, uh, Ben Tompkins. Ben looks like the kind of guy who owns a bowling jacket and bowling shoes. He wears them all the time, but never goes bowling.

Ben: I think bowling shoes are an underrated shoe. They are very comfortable. And I can just slide. You can.

MAtt: Slide? Yeah, I just.

Ben: Get a good momentum going. And I run down the hall and slide the rest of the way.

MAtt: Slide saves you a lot of time when you’re sliding because you have to walk. It’s nice. Exactly. Yeah. Uh, bowling shoes are weird. That’s weird that we share shoes.

That’s just kind of an odd thing. And then the bowling balls, too. I, you know, you’re eating. You’re eating fingers.

Fingers sticking in a random three holes and then keep eating, eating, eating. It’s just kind of what were we thinking?

Ben: Think about when.

Austin: You used to be able to smoke, too. Oh, yeah. So then you’re adding the cigarette smoke on top of it.

Ben: Yeah. Bowling alleys.

MAtt: Like I think back to bowling we did because we were on the radio show. We hosted a weekly bowling league. I look back at it and I’m like, how did I not die? Like, yeah, you know, I mean, that’s just all right. So up next we.

Austin: Have Covid started.

MAtt: Up. Next we have our producer extraordinaire, uh, Myron McHugh. Myron, he looks like the kind of guy who hums Britney Spears songs annoyingly loud at work every day.

Ben: But then when you call him out on it, he’s like, no, I wasn’t. Yeah, he denies it.

Austin: Denies denies it. Yeah. He gaslights.

MAtt: Mm hmm hmm hmm hmm.

Ben: That’s oops. I did it again.

Austin: That was.

MAtt: Oops. I did it again. And, uh, last but not least, we have Austin Anderson.

Austin, uh, he’s the kind of guy looks like the kind of guy who he can, knows what type of wood it is simply by smelling it. Yeah. You do, I love that. Yeah.

Ben: Yeah. You definitely.

Austin: Look, I’m gonna start pretending I have that power. Just that you start smelling wood.

MAtt: Unintelligible.

Ben: That’s an oak, you know?

MAtt: Yeah. People will believe anything you tell them. I’ve told people a lot of fables.

Austin: Just to see when.

Ben: You call them fables and you call them fables, it’s not as bad as if you’re like, say, they’re.

MAtt: Not lying. It’s just a fable.

Ben: It’s a fable.

Austin: Fable sounds pleasant. Thank you.

MAtt: Yeah, well, thank you for lying to me. All right, so today we’re talking about the three keys to a marketing video that works. Now, guys like marketing, uh, on social media, every social media platform, as I mentioned in the intro, is a video platform.

Now, um, I want your take on, like, how you see video. Uh, just it’s everywhere. I mean, you talk about reels on Facebook and Instagram Reels or, you know, vertical shorts on TikTok, which is just a dominant video channel. You have YouTube with, you know, the regular videos and the YouTube shorts, uh, just blown up in the last three, four years.

Covet especially was like a, uh, accelerant added to this because I already needed video because you couldn’t meet in person and do all that. We do have our meetings by video now, you know, on zoom, uh, probably most of our meetings.

So video on social media, though, with marketing in particular, uh, what are you guys seeing as like the fails and the successes.

Ben: I think I mean, it’s a it’s a personal connection. I mean, you have this a way that it’s almost like you’re talking directly. To the customer, or the customer is talking directly to the business or whatever.

So it’s an opportunity to build that unique personal connection, probably more so than any other form. But I would say the oversaturation and just not going into it with a good strategy, it’s so easy to say, well, it’s just a simple video. I’ll pull up my phone and just and record something.

And if you have bad lighting, bad angles, bad messaging, um, it needs just as much practice and rehearsal as other things. And we’re going to get.

MAtt: Into that today. A lot of.

Ben: Businesses don’t put that time into it.

Austin: I don’t think that people like everyone’s making videos. Right. So it’s oversaturated. Um, but a lot of people don’t realize how much work goes into making really good videos with the lighting, with the camera, with the editing. Um, you know, I think a lot of people don’t have an understanding of, um, how long it really takes to edit something that’s really good. If you want something long, it’s the.

MAtt: Time and intent and effort to make something good that’s going to actually work, to do it right, right, right. To do it right. It takes work. So let’s get into some of the things like the statistics on video are crazy. I don’t have them pulled up in front of me right now.

But like I mean, it’s like something like, you know, 76% of consumers watch a video over reading, like people only read for 26 seconds and then they start scrolling, you know, and videos are I think it’s like 70 or 80% more likely to buy your product if you have a video. And if you don’t have a video for your product, most people will just skip. It’s like 77% will just skip the product entirely. If you don’t have a video for.

Ben: It, I would say. I mean, that’s 100% true and video is definitely the dominant form here. But that doesn’t mean to just nix the written word.

MAtt: No, we’re not because.

Ben: You need it. You need to know, I mean, your ideal customer is they might prefer that reading aspect. You need more than video. But yeah, you do need both. I look at that.

For me personally, Twitter is just a gold mine of entertainment and hilarity and all these things, and I much prefer reading those things than just watching a video personally. But that’s me, who I am, and there are a lot of other people.

So identifying who your customer is is the first step in knowing like what types of videos, what should I do with the written word, that kind of thing. Well, you have to.

MAtt: Yeah, you have to have both. So the written word and video both are scanned by Google. So search engine optimization, let’s say you type in a search for like cupcakes and you’re based out of here where we are Omaha, Nebraska. So you need written content for cupcakes and you need video content for cupcakes. And you know, we’ve talked about how podcast is like the most affordable and effective marketing tool.

That’s because if you do a video podcast, you get a video, you get audio, which is also search accounts for your your search engine results on on Google. And you get you can pull it into a transcript.

So you’ve got a blog and you can create all these video shorts from it. I mean, that’s what we do here for for our clients at Two Brothers Creative. Um, but it is you can get so much like ten x value out of just one 20 minute podcast episode, you know, um, so that’s why it’s super effective.

But you do need both. You have to have the written. You have to have the video. Yeah.

Austin: Um, I just think that with, uh, you choose video over the written word, if you really want to convey a certain tone, you know, because a lot of times, uh, if you read it, people will put their own tone to it. So I think if it’s really important with, like, how you want it to sound.

Ben: And I just think that today with AI and how AI is incorporating now into video production and with written the written word, there’s just such a tremendous opportunity. When you have a good writer, that good writer can just well, do be so effective. And same with a good video editor.

So you have like I who’s editing videos now, that’s going to be a very basic fundamental edit as opposed to if you have an actual video production guy or person, woman, uh, animal, anything, uh.

MAtt: Magical beast.

Ben: Um, who can actually put in the, the flair and the things that are going to attract and create that tone, then it’s going to be so much more effective.

MAtt: So like the template for us is like, okay, let’s say you want to do something for content, right? Write it out. Right. Write it out. Boom. You’ve got a script and you’ve got that. You can turn into a blog, right? You can take that script. You can use AI as a tool. Say, hey, I want you to incorporate these keywords into what I’ve written. That way it has your voice as your perspective, your unique everything, right?

But it also is going to be factored in for SEO. Uh, then you have that script, right? It’s prepped. It’s ready to go for SEO. It’s a blog post. Take that, throw it in your phone teleprompter script, and you do that as a video. And then the video, you take that, that the script and you paste the script, you copy and paste it into the description on YouTube.

You add all the keywords in your tags, and now you’ve got a video and you’ve got a blog post, right? You’ve got written content. Then you can take an AI platform and you can take that blog and say, I want you to chop this up into seven Twitter posts, uh, one LinkedIn post, uh, one Facebook post, and boom, boom, boom. It’ll do it.

Now, those are rough drafts. You don’t actually use those rough drafts.

Austin: Very important.

MAtt: You have to go through them and edit them and add your perspective and make sure, because you don’t want to use AI for the final version of anything.

Austin: They love the word delve.

MAtt: Delve. Yes.

Austin: My God.

MAtt: So you have to go through, you have to edit it. But that is an efficient way for any business owner to get a bunch of content. Right.

Austin: And then remarkable how it. How everything weaves together. You can take.

MAtt: That video and then you can use it. There’s one, uh, a platform. It’s called opus. And you just upload the video and say, I want you to chop this into ten video shorts, vertical format so I can post them as Facebook Reels, Instagram, blah blah blah, boom boom boom. It’s going to edit it for you. It’s going to add the animated titles, and it’s going to rank the videos on how they would perform for SEO, for search engine optimization.

So there are ways you can I mean, what how much time is that going to take you an hour maybe. And now you’ve got an entire week or week’s worth of content. I mean, an hour or two for an entire marketing plan of content marketing plan for a week seems like a pretty good deal, you know?

So that’s kind of just a, you know, a format, a template that you can follow as a business owner. But let’s get to the three keys to making a marketing video that actually works. First up would be the quality of the look. So videos now are your first impression.

Um, one of my like pet peeves is how people, uh, don’t take into consideration how they look on zoom, you know, like there’ll be a, you know, from home and it’s just a crappy background. Um, you know, I’ve, I don’t have, uh, maybe we can post the food.

Austin: What about when they change the background? But it doesn’t work, so they’re just going in and out of.

MAtt: Yeah. And, like, don’t blur the background. Just just set yourself up so it looks professional and don’t use any background filter, any of that stuff, because that doesn’t look good. It never looks good unless you’ve got a green screen behind you that’s lit properly so it can key it in, and there’s no fuzz and all that stuff. It’s it’s not going to look good. Now that’s your first impression in every zoom meeting right.

So think of that. If you walked into an in-person meeting and it was just a shit show going on behind you, that’s the impression they’re going to have. So like my office and we could probably pull a picture for the video and throw it in here for this episode and if you want to see it. But like my office, I literally designed based on how it looks on zoom, because that’s where all my meetings take place and it works.

So I have a high quality background. I’ve invested time and effort and money into making this look professional and legit. So then when I’m going to a customer saying, hey, this is the quality of services we’re going to provide. I’m also reflecting that quality in the video.

The same premise is true for any video that you post on social media, right? So Ben mentioned, like, I’m going to grab my phone and do a quick little video. Now, you know, maybe behind the scenes stuff on TikTok works and performs. But like overall you want to look professional, right?

You don’t want to look, um. Too cold and, like, too polished, right? You want it to look real and reflect you, but get a ring light. It’s like 15 bucks. Yeah. Uh, shocking.

Austin: How inexpensive they are.

MAtt: It is. And they’re easy. I mean, in fact, I recommend getting two ring lights. You can do actual proper lighting. So it’s called the triangle. So you have like your key light in the front and you have your fill light over there.

So you have two lights lighting both sides of your face evenly. And then you have a backlight that’s going to light your hairline in the back. That’s proper lighting. And I mean, even if you did three ring lights, it’s what, 30 bucks now? 45 bucks, you know, so you need to light it. Well, pay attention to your background and what you’re doing now.

Phones today. Uh, the sensors have passed dSLR cameras like standard cameras. So if you have a new phone, you can use your phone. It’s just you need to set it up properly so it looks good in the back. It looks good in the front. You look good. It reflect yourself. Because this is the opinion.

This is the first impression people are going to have from you and it’s going to stick forever.

So if you want that first impression to be shitty, yeah, go out in the garage where you got freaking bunch of crap behind you and you’re walking around moving your camera. If not, then maybe, uh, maybe go for the professional look.

Austin: Or like the upshot, the classic upshot up the nostrils and everything. You’re like, my favorite is the 30 minutes.

MAtt: People who don’t know how to take a selfie, and they hold it way up high, and then they go, yeah, smile. And like, they’re cut off, like here and there at the bottom. I’m like, dude, what are you doing?

Austin: Yes. And stop taking headshots in the car and the bathroom.

Ben: I just throw.

Austin: Headshots in the car, like everyone, like for social media, their profile pic, there’s so many people. It’s just them doing a selfie in their car.

Ben: Oh, and the bathroom. I’ve seen a lot of bathrooms. Yeah, I.

Austin: Just don’t get it.

Ben: I don’t want to see yourself. There’s a toilet in the back.

MAtt: Yeah, I’ve never seen that. That’s new for me now.

Austin: That you know.

MAtt: Okay. So first tip, first key for a marketing video that works is the quality of the look. How does it look that first impression number two is quality of the content. What is in the video. Right. What is in the video. Is it substance that people want? I preach this regularly with clients and everybody because it’s true.

Um, you want to deliver something of true value, right? So let’s say you’re doing a podcast and an episode of a podcast deliver something of true value. Let’s say you’re doing a video for YouTube.

Are you delivering something of true value? That’s how you’re going to build trust with your customer, because your customer is going to say, wow, they gave me something that’s actually useful that I can actually apply to my life for free.

So that’s going to make them trust you. So then when they need to hire you for services, they’re going to think of you. They’re going to trust you. Right? So the quality of the content I think this is a big one, Ben, that like people skip right over. They don’t plan. They don’t think they just hit record and go.

Ben: Well, it’s like so many things in entertainment, acting, comedy. You see it on TV and you think, I can do that?

I tell funny stories with my friends, or I’m entertaining my my friends and I, we always have fun and, um, I’ll just get the phone out and just do the same thing. And as soon as you hit record, that all goes away because you don’t have the experience of the know how. You don’t didn’t plan, didn’t rehearse, didn’t practice.

Um, but it takes just as much work as doing any other profession. Yeah. You have to have that experience and know how before you do it. Or you have to find somebody who can help you and coach you and give you that experience.

MAtt: Yeah. And I think hiring a professional is what you need to do. And really you can hire people. It’s affordable. It’s not going to break the bank. But like just think about this.

This is an investment in your company that is probably one of the most important things you’re going to do. And if you go cheap or you try and do it yourself, I mean, we’re going to give you tips and resources in every episode of this podcast, but there is kind of a limit to what you can do, right?

Limit on time, limit on experience. You know, the limit on resources. So hiring somebody who’s a professional, who’s good at it, like, you know, I don’t know, two brothers creative and just tossing that out there.

But you know, you know, hey that’s us. I’m not biased at all. But you know, I mean, find it, find a marketing company or a production company that will help you with your budget, fit your budget, and help you do this. And then you can learn from them and maybe eventually start doing it yourself. Right.

So we’ve done that with a lot of clients or say, hey, we’ll do this for six months with you, get you all set up. But your foundation built at that point, you can decide, yeah, I want to continue with you guys doing it or I’ve learned enough and I want to do it myself, you know?

So, um, but the quality of the content matters. You have to put the work in on the front end, like, what are you going to talk about? What are you going to do? What are you going to deliver of true value? Um.

Austin: And I would say too, that with video, I think audio is more important than the actual quality of the video.

MAtt: I don’t know, the statistics may disagree with that. So 85% of people watch videos on their phone with the sound off. So the animated titles, you see, the captions are more important than anything you do. If you don’t have those, you’re going to they’re going to swipe on you. But it’s 85%. Yeah. So it’s crazy. Um, yeah. That blows.

Yeah. Audio does matter. Like people will forgive poor video quality. Sometimes they won’t forgive poor audio quality. If you’re doing a podcast, don’t just do it on your phone in your car. Because I’ve heard those and they sound terrible. Um, all right. Last key to a marketing video that works is the format hook story CTA. So what does that mean?

Okay, so you have a video, let’s say it’s 15 seconds. Well, in the first three seconds you have to grab their attention. You have to hook their attention. Right. So grab them a powerful statement, a question, something funny, something to grab their attention. And you have three seconds.

That’s the limit. Because if you don’t hook them they’re going to swipe. They’re going to go to the next video. Then you deliver the story. That’s the substance. That’s the content. Right.

MAtt: So it could be anything in the video. Here’s a tip. Here’s a technique, here’s a funny joke whatever. But that’s the story right? So you have the hook. You grab their attention, you drop the story in.

And then the last thing is a call to action or a CTA. What is your call to action? What do you want people to do after they’ve watched this video? You know, what is it? And it can be subtle. It could be kind of covert where it’s just maybe it’s your logo animation.

You just want to brand your company. We do that a lot with clients, or I just want you to remember and recall my company and that we gave you something to value in this video.

Or it could be, uh, you know, click on the link and do this, or go to my website or buy my, you know, new, uh, slippers that are made out of human hair. You know, I mean, it could be anything.

It could be anything. Uh, so hook story, call to action format. So those are the three keys to a marketing video that works. Guys, do you have any other bonus tips you want to share?

Ben: Um. Just I don’t trust creative people. I know we get we.

Speaker4: What what I.

Ben: What I mean by that. What I mean by that is when we give a hard time sometimes that you can’t all be creative, that sometimes we just rely too much on creativity and that’s not enough.

But in this day and age, when you find a truly good writer, a truly good video editor, a truly good person who can help create that content, that person is more valuable in the long run than just about anything else.

And the opposite of that what companies are doing now, there’s they’re relying on the quick and easy fix of AI and those things where if you find somebody that can write a good script, that good script could pay dividends for years and years and years. If you find somebody who can edit good videos, those quality videos.

So the relying on truly creative people, I know that’s a broad terms and category, but that, you know, putting investing in that is a very, very good investment.

Austin: Yeah, I would say that, you know, when you say truly creative people, it’s the people that have made that certain thing their craft and have worked on it for years and like, like their passion.

Because what I’ve seen from experience is big corporations hiring just, you know, some 20 year old kid basically who’s like, oh, I’ve seen a lot of movies. I want to be a video editor. Or and they can get him for like 14 bucks an hour, but he really has no idea about like audio and lighting.

Ben: He’s young, he’s on social media, so he must know.

MAtt: So many businesses make that mistake. And it drives me crazy where they hire somebody who’s like 23 and they’re like, oh, they’re on TikTok. They’re on social media, therefore they’re a social media expert.

No, they are not. I mean, we don’t do this with anything else. No, we don’t say, oh, yeah, I see how they constructed that house.

I’m going to go build my own, you know, or it’s like, oh, hey, uh, you’ve taken a poop on a toilet. Why don’t you come over and fix mine? Like using the service doesn’t mean you know how to create the service.

Ben: I guess I maybe an additional step to bring it back to video is trusting a person and finding a person who is a good video editor. A good writer that’s going to help you in the long run.

I mean, don’t time waste, don’t spend. If you can’t do it yourself like we’ve talked about before, you can’t do everything if you’ve never written scripts before, if you’ve never edited before, might not be the best idea for you to dive into it on your own.

MAtt: Yeah, no 100% agree with that. You have to put the time in the work in on the front end to make it work to do it right? Right. Uh, well, cool.

Thanks for joining us here today on this episode of Midwest Mindset. As always, we have free resources for you, something of true value as we were just talking about in the show notes. Just click on the link and download it for free.

Or you can find out more about us and two Brothers Creative at the Content box. Com

Toodaloo.

Shane Harrington Built a Business

This is a written Transcription for the Midwest Mindset episode: What Success Looks Like in Nebraska

Transcript

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

How Shane Harrington Built a Thriving Business Against All Odds

Matt: If I told you that there was a business that generates over $2 million annually, and whose success was built on old school grassroots marketing tactics, you’d probably want to give them all the credit in the world, right?

I mean, this is a huge success story. Unfortunately, many people don’t give the credit that’s due because this business operates in the sex industry. Dun dun dun. Oh, yes. Today we’re joined by Shane Harrington, the owner of Club Omaha.

Now Shane has built an incredibly successful business from scratch, from nothing. Today we are going to give him the credit that’s due, and he’s going to share with us the ways in which he built his business successfully. There are roughly 32 million companies in the United States, of which 81% have no employees.

They’re all solopreneurs, so that means only 6% of all companies nationwide are ever going to reach $1 million in revenue. Of those companies, only about one out of ten are 0.5% of all companies nationwide ever make it to $10 million in revenue.

If your company or my business or anybody’s in the state of Nebraska hit these goals and achieve these accomplishments, they would be celebrated.

Matt: Um, we would be asked repeatedly, what’s the secret to your success? How did you do it? That’s not necessarily how things have played out for our guest on today’s podcast, uh, Shane Harrington.

Uh, I feel like you are a man of mystery. Um, I’m excited to have a conversation with you today about entrepreneurial ism and your your, your business traps the success that you’ve built.

You can’t deny, you know, and I look at it on paper if if it was no name attached to it and no industry, no line of work and just said, hey, here are the straight numbers.

Here’s how long we’ve been in business, here’s how much money we’ve made. Here’s our success story. Anybody would say, man, that’s incredible.

And there it’s all legal. Nothing. Yeah, nothing wrong with what you’re doing, right? However, it has this, uh, this doubt cast on it. I mean, is that, like, tough to live with that a little bit, or is it just. Is that fuel for the fire, uh, to just kind of stick it to the man, flip them, flip the bird. Just keep moving forward.

Shane: Uh, fuel for the fire? Definitely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, at first I took it personal. Uh, the posts, the comments, the, uh, friends that I lost because of the business I was in that chose not to hang out with me.

Some just, uh, ghosted me. Some were, uh, had a conversation like, well, you know, with my job and the church and, you know, I, you know, if we were hanging out, it’d be bad for my, you know, growth at my company or this or that.

Um, so at first, you know, I was a little butthurt, I won’t lie. Uh, but then it kind of became a me against the world.

And when it’s you against the world, but it literally is you against the world, you find ways to fight and persevere.

Because not only do you want to prove, um, your friends wrong, you want to prove everyone who is commenting and hating on you and says you’re this, that, or whatever.

Well, the proof is in the pudding. If you can be successful, nobody can really argue with that.

Matt: I mean, 51% of all businesses in the United States will fail in their first 3 to 5 years. So majority of businesses are just going to fail first 3 to 5 years. And all these statistics that I’m rattling off here today, they’re staggering. It is an uphill climb. It is a battle to get to that top of that mountain. Right?

Yeah. And to do it and then do it again and again and again and do it on a level that I think very few, uh, businesses see in our state here in the Midwest especially.

And then to not get that credit, that that was really my big motivator for initially wanting to have you on. Um, when we started this podcast, um, the, uh, partner at the time that we were, uh, having on the show opposed to you being on the show, I believe it, uh, due to some, uh, religious, uh, you know, beliefs.

And so it kind of got put on, on hold. And I’m glad you’re here today, because I do feel like it is. It is unfair. It is unfair that we judge men and women, especially in this industry, who are not doing anything wrong.

They’re doing it by choice. They make a great living. It is. It is. Sex is something everybody hates talking about. And I feel like.

Shane: Everybody loves.

Matt: But everybody loves and everybody’s obsessed with it. Here’s a here’s a number that will blow your mind. And I want to ask you how you built this.

So correct me if I’m wrong. Over 50,000, um, male is your mailing list or 50,000 subscribers on your website? What’s this, like 50,000 number, uh, that you’ve built up? It’s like a subscription. Yeah.

Shane: So we did a membership. Um, and people would fill out a membership form and subscribe. And I think actually, through all of my clubs, we reached nearly 100,000. But at Club Omaha, it was 50,000 when we stopped doing our our membership. But still.

Matt: Like, you know, how much I would give for a 50,000 member subscription list. Yeah. I mean, how much would any business give for 50,000 members of their own tribe? Yeah, because, you know.

Shane: Like you said, it’s 50,000 of your people. You can buy mailing lists anywhere. Oh, yeah. Yeah, most of the people on that list, maybe 2% of them actually are interested in the product you’re selling. Go get us. We have them all. Yeah.

Matt: Go get 50 people to sign up voluntarily for something. Yeah. Related to your business. And then. Yeah. Try and. Take that to 50,000. So when you first started out, I know, um, you are notorious for making the news, which we’ll get to in a second. Um, I’d like to, I guess maybe ask you this to start. Like, why do people love to hate you so much?

Like, what do you think it is? Is it your set?

Is it your success? Is it the fact that you are successful despite all the haters that you won’t back down? Like, what is it that just you mentioned your name and people like? I mean, I used to think I had a face that angered people, but man, I.

Shane: Mean, no, no, my.

Matt: Name, Shane Harrington. And it’s like, yeah, it changed some people going.

Shane: I think it’s a combination of everything. You know, I was, um, I gotten a lot of trouble in high school. I was voted most likely to end up in the Nebraska State Penitentiary.

So prison was where people thought I was going to go. I ended up being the first person in my graduating class of, like, 732 people to make $1 million. So, um, I wasn’t supposed to make it. I didn’t have family money. I grew up poor. I didn’t go to college. No one loaned me any money to do my business.

Um, and I think that that upset people because the status quo is, is that you do these steps to become successful, and you don’t deviate from them because they’re they’re pre put in our minds from when we’re children and we go to, you know, elementary school and middle school and high school and then off to college that you have to take these steps and follow this protocol and be a good person in their mind.

Them being the church, them being, uh, the people who followed that protocol.

Matt: They have to sign off.

Shane: They have to approve. Yeah, it has to be to allow it.

Matt: It’s a control thing. Yeah.

Shane: Because when I made a lot of money the first time, we we, my wife and I had bought a house in Wilderness Ridge Golf Course in Lincoln, Nebraska, and we lived next to, like, judges and and all the well to do, you know, uh, had a Corvette and the license plate said paid for because I was proud I was I was able to write a check for a brand new Corvette.

And I remember getting my mail one day and one of the older gentleman that lived in our, you know, house area, he looked at the license plate and he said, paid for. How’d you do that?

And it was just like, wow. Like, it really is like that. Um, you know, he’s probably looking back, maybe 68 years old. I was maybe 31 or 2. And so to him, I clearly didn’t follow the correct protocol.

And it upset him. Um, you know, so I think that’s, you know, you know, number one. And then number two, obviously, sex, um, people don’t want someone to speak freely about it, to encourage people to speak about it, to engage in it, to have fun with it. And those are my two things, I would guess.

Matt: And sex is a topic I feel frustrated on a personal level. Um, I feel like probably eight years, ten years of my like my prime years, my 20s were just wasted because there was never a conversation about it.

There was no sex ed class in high school. Small town Nebraska. Uh, parents didn’t have a to date, and thankfully they haven’t brought it up like recently, like today. No conversation about it whatsoever. We didn’t have the internet like Pam and Tom and Lily. The sex tape was like the first introduction to that when I was like a senior in high school. And so and we were like.

Shane: Wow, yeah, you.

Matt: Know, we’re like, oh my God. Like there was no roadmap to follow. Um, there’s a lot more information out there for good or bad for kids today online, on the internet. But it really is frustrating that we can’t just talk about it, because I think that that’s what shuts things down. Um, you know, you say, okay, well, I’m a dancer,

I’m a professional dancer. I’m, I’m an escort or whatever. You work as a sex worker. People don’t even know what that means. I mean, there are a lot of legitimate workers in the sex industry who are just. They just sit behind a camera at their computer all day long, right? And they just produce content.

And so but there’s this stigma that comes with it was I’m curious with your, um, your entrepreneurial start, did you, um, was that related to sex or like, what was your first how did you make your first million?

Shane: Uh, first million. Yeah. Was, uh, on the internet website. Okay. An adult website. Um, my, uh. Ex-wife. Um, she became, you know, kind of a big deal in Lincoln. Omaha, Nebraska. Um, she I was able to place her in some magazines, and so she started getting a following.

Uh, my research told me that, you know, we need a place to send people so they know what she’s doing next. I thought simple, like, oh, she’ll probably do another magazine. We can promote that. Linked up with someone who said, no, you need an adult website like you. You need to create content. I didn’t even know how to barely turn on a computer. Like, what year.

Matt: Was this, by the.

Shane: Way? This would have been in 1999. Oh, wow. Okay, so so like the the beginning of.

Matt: Like AOL chat room days. Yeah.

Shane: Oh, yeah. Dial up internet. You couldn’t you know, sometimes it took 15 minutes to get the connection, you know, the whole bit. So yeah. Yeah. So that was it.

But we got in before anyone did. Um, we were able to build, uh, at the time and still to this day, actually the most successful single girl website in the world, um, thanks to, in part to the church’s, um, and the city of Lincoln who found out about this website and attacked us with everything they had. Um, and they ended up ticketing my ex-wife for being nude in a public place. But the catch was, they actually didn’t catch her nude in the public place.

They saw a picture on her website in a bar in downtown Lincoln, and they gave her a they’re.

Matt: Really trying to stretch there.

Shane: Well, the thing was, is it was the scariest thing that ever happened, but also the biggest blessing we ever received, because here’s my ex-wife calling me from work saying, the police are here, they’re giving me a ticket. They want to take me to jail for public nudity. Those pictures that we took at the, you know, bar downtown, it was Mars Bar was the name. It’s not in business anymore, but, uh, um, we freaked out.

We’re thinking about closing this thing down and next thing you know, we’re getting calls from every newspaper across the world, not just in the United States. They said you’re the first person to ever be ticketed from a picture off a website. This is a huge constitutional issue. All these law firms started calling, and Jay Leno is talking about it has a it’s one of his jokes of the night because he has these jokes and he has a joke about her. She’s the little park going across the bottom of CNN and we’re like, Holy shit, what just happened?

And from that moment on, it just it just just exploded. And then we just work outworked everybody. We just we didn’t stop. It was like, we accomplished this the next, the next, the next. And we just kept going and ran until millions of dollars just came rolling in.

Matt: And when when you started out, when you had like the idea for the website before the, the publicity kind of jump started, everything was that like just something you were naturally into? Like, how did you have the foresight to say, you know what, internet’s going to be a thing.

The dial up isn’t going to suck forever. We’re going to be past the 56, uh, you know, was it 56,000 K, uh, modems or whatever? Uh, back in the day, what was it that made you say, this is where I’m gonna I’m gonna invest and dedicate my time?

Shane: Well, I’d watched I’d watched a show. I don’t even remember what channel it was, but I’d watched a show, and it was this guy who was explaining how the internet was going to be like the the next big thing, like the biggest thing ever, like, you know, and he really hyped it up. It got me a little bit excited. I thought he was dreaming a little bit because, you know, look where we are. I mean, who would have imagined?

Um, but I knew that. She was building up fans, and there was no way that people were going to able to find us, connect with us, connect with her.

And so there had to be somewhere where we could go and create. All I was creating in my mind was very simply a landing page. I was just going to create a landing, a Melissa landing page so that they could go and see next magazine here, next feature, you know, strip club here or whatever it is. I never thought of it as a way to make millions of dollars. I never I’d never signed up for adult websites.

They were there was only a handful of them, even on the web at that time. So for me, um, you know, yeah, I tried to, you know, obviously look at porn and, you know, do my thing, you know, like everybody else did. But I never thought, you know, like putting a website up for my wife was was even a big deal. I thought once I got her in that first magazine, I thought I was the man.

I was like, whoa, how did I pull that off? I’m Lincoln, Nebraska, I have no connections. And here is my wife on the ex-wife on the cover of all these magazines. And yeah, it was, uh, was a crazy ride.

Matt: So from what I’m hearing, just to kind of translate this into terms, I think any business owner listening can take away something here. The make the news is a real strategy. Oh, yeah. Like, go make the news is a legitimate strategy. It sounds kind of silly. Um, but go make the news and then stick to the boring shit.

The routines, the mundane, uh, monotonous tasks that, you know, you want to automate day in and day out. Walk us through that. Like, what are your tips? What are Shane Harrington’s tips for making the news?

Like how do you make news headlines in a way that’s going to it because it can’t come across like fake, you know, no. Phony. No, you can’t. Like you’re seeking attention, right. Um, but it has to have a kind of a, a wink and a nod to it. Like, you know, we we understand that. Yeah, this is ridiculous that we’re on the news for this.

Shane: Well, sex sells. And so I think as a business owner, if you’re not afraid of that, push the envelope, you know, don’t break the law, but push it right to that line.

You know, and any business right now could sit, you know, ten scantily clad women out front holding up, you know, signs, and their business would increase exponentially. Now, will they do that? I don’t know, you know, it’s a big risk. You’re, you know, people are going to talk about you, but you want people to talk about.

Matt: I can’t get one woman to, uh, dress scantily clad in my life, you know? I mean, yeah.

Shane: You pay him enough, they’ll they’ll come. Good. You still gotta pay him.

Matt: I don’t have I don’t have that kind of persuasion.

Shane: You also return every email. You know, when we. My ex-wife and I were really big, I remember we would be flown out to Vegas for, like, the internet awards. Um, and we would have to go to our hotel room and people would say, well, where are you going? Well, we have work to do.

Like, what do you mean you have work to do? Got to return emails. And they laughed at us. The other models were like, we don’t return our emails. Our webmaster does. It’s like, no, we return every single email. Personally, we want to know what our customers want, what they need, and we would return hundreds of emails a day. And yeah, it was crazy. Yeah, it took hours, you know, sometimes 4 to 6 hours in a day to return all the emails.

But we knew that we wanted to grow. We wanted to do all the things that nobody else was doing. But most people just don’t want to work. Even business owners are afraid to work. They want to work Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, and then they want to check out. And it’s like I’ve never checked out since

I’ve been a business owner, I don’t. There is no such thing as checking out if I’m on my honeymoon, my vacation, my birthday. I’m returning emails. I’m working still at the same time because that’s how you take your business to that upper echelon that very few people make. Like your statistics said, it’s because people do not want to put in the extra work.

Matt: Yeah, and it’s not just put in the work because I think there’s that’s kind of a misnomer. We think we equate how many hours we worked to the quality of hours we worked.

And I think, you know, you talked about the 4 to 6 hours with the emails, like that was a lot of hours, but you were using those hours efficiently in a way that’s going to net a return on that investment of time. That’s probably 10 or 20 fold because they’re going to be we need lifelong yeah, fans.

Shane: And to learn what was going on. And the only way to really learn how people like your you know, it’s one thing to say, well, people are signing up. They love us, you know, like we’re making money. No, no, no. Why are they signing up? What what picture sets videos do they like the most? What would they like to see? You know what you did type.

Matt: Of things unknowingly. I think you you you built out you almost Mr. Miyagi yourself back in the day here, right? You built out a legit business ideal customer persona. Yeah, that’s what you did, right? You got in the weeds, you listened, you talked with your customer, you got to know them, and you built it out. What are their desires? Their pain points, their needs, their fears. And when you can get into that headspace, you know where they are, where they. Been time where they want to be with where they don’t want to be. Um, that’s where you can really dial in your marketing and how you’re going to approach, you know, selling your products or service, uh, to that individual, that ideal customer of yours.

Shane: Yeah. I wanted to do an automated one, don’t get me wrong. Like, it would have saved me a ton of time, but there’s that. They wouldn’t have made me money because the customer is not dumb. You have to remember like they’re spending their money. People are smart when they spend their money.

They want to be getting a value. And we were the best value for your money because we had the best product and the best customer service, both at the same time. It wasn’t good enough just to have one or the other. You’ve got to have both.

Matt: And I think in today’s, you know, age of AI, it’s very easy. It’s too easy to just let I do everything for you and miss the point entirely. Right?

Because what you’re talking about is you’re giving customers an experience. Yep. Right. And that’s what that’s really the only commodity that there is in life is an experience.

You know, you you can’t take your cars with you. You got the the memories of the experience. Um, and so like as far as putting in those hours though, like I feel like for a lot of entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs I think is they’re sometimes called, I’m working 60, 70, 80 hours a week.

Okay. And then are you having meetings with your staff? Are you setting metrics and measurables? Are you implementing, uh, like we use an iOS here with our company and operating system for your company, uh, to your business to set goals and just measure success over three, five, ten year plan. And they go, no, no, I’m just working a lot of hours and I feel like there’s a lot of people who just want to have a job they can’t get fired from.

They don’t really want to be a successful business owner. And you can see those types. They’re rare. Like those those numbers we mentioned at the beginning of the episode are it is rare to find that I don’t know if it’s that quality of just constantly seeking learning and, uh, just kind of it’s like a relentless, um, approach to just never giving up, which I know you have every entrepreneur that’s successful has that as well.

And the, the, um, as far as the button up, the, the making the news, any other like, secret tips you can give us on like making.

Shane: No, I just I think you press the envelope on every way, shape and form and that’s how you do it. You go against the grain, you know, um, if they tell you to go left, you go right, you know, you do your own thing and then you stand out and people pay attention to you. And for me, the business I’m in, they pay attention to me in a negative light.

So then they’re trying to get me. They’re trying to destroy me, show me up. And so, you know, craziest story I have, I think, from the websites is, um, I got a call one time from the FBI. I was a little scared.

The FBI was calling me like. Like it was the FBI. It wasn’t like a prank call. Like they they they was legit. And and they said, um, you know, uh, we’ll make this quick. Um, your website was reported to us from local law enforcement where you’re from. Um, and there was illegal activities going on on it.

And I said, okay, you know, like, like, okay, like, did we do something wrong? And he said, no, I literally wasted 12 hours of my life going through your entire website. I can’t find any bestiality, any child porn, anything. And I said, well, that’s illegal. We would never have that stuff.

And he said, well, it was reported to us that it was a very serious matter. And so then we have to go and then investigate it. And literally the conversation was 32 seconds or something like that.

He said, I’m sorry, Mr. Harrington, to waste your time, you won’t hear from us again. And I thought somebody really in law enforcement baited the FBI into hopefully because in their mind, these conservative Christians in Lincoln,

they thought that this just people having sex on a, on a website was had to be illegal. And it’s like, no, it’s not illegal. And you just wasted this man’s time. Who could have actually been investigating a website that maybe did have illegal activities on it, and he missed it because of you.

Matt: And I feel like we have to understand where people are coming from. I’ll use this like a minor analogy here when you’re in traffic. I used to get really frustrated, you know, people cutting you off, you get angry, you get the road rage going. Now, it doesn’t get to me because I can kind of take a step back.

And I realize that dude is angry. He’s got road rage, cut me off. Has nothing to do with me. Yeah. Has something to do with something going on in his life? I don’t know, maybe his mom’s in the hospital.

It could be something serious. Things going on. Right. So I have a little bit more empathy and compassion and and and and grace, I guess right under fire. And I think that’s the case here too, with haters on a bigger scale when you have somebody.

When we did our comedy television show Omaha Live, there was a lot of hate, not nearly the hate and vitriol you’ve gotten because it involves sex with your industry.

But, um, you know, you have to consider that these people who are telling you that you’re going to. Hell, this is wrong. You’re the spawn of Satan. You’re all of these things.

Shane: Those were pretty nice, actually. They’re a lot worse than that.

Matt: The, um. That’s all. I cleaning it up here for the podcast.

Um, those very same people are the ones who are often doing far worse things behind their own closed doors. Sure. I mean, how many times have we seen this story play out where it’s the, the the pastor who is, you know, homophobic and then turns out later, he’s actually gay and he’s in the closet and he’s battling his own demons and identity crisis.

And so I think that sex is an easy scapegoat to just whitewash and just get, you know, throw a bunch of hate at. And I don’t think it really solves anything. It doesn’t do anything because it doesn’t help the women who work in the industry.

And it doesn’t help anybody. Um, with the women who work like, give me just an idea of like some of the boring, mundane things we probably don’t know have to happen on a daily basis at, uh, Club Omaha, your strip club, because there has to be just, like, boring, like t.p.s. reports level. Just like.

Shane: You know, for us, um, I don’t know that that I find any of it boring, to be honest with you. For whatever reason, this was the job that I was meant to do. I, my mom and I have had this conversation and she was a very Christian person.

))))))I grew up very Christian, went to Catholic Church and was confirmed and, you know, lived in the church basically for years of my young life. And, and, um, you know, we battled back and forth because, you know, obviously she didn’t like what I did. Um, and then one day she, she obviously, as success grew, bought her a new car, things like that. She, you know, she finally was like, you know what?

I still don’t like what you do, but you’re damn good at it. And my mom doesn’t cuss, so. Damn is like, actually a cuss word for her. So it was her way of, like, letting me know, um, that I accept it because I see that this is who you are. So for me, I don’t really find, um, the the job itself boring in any way. What? I mean, like what?

Matt: I mean by it is like like there has to be a moment. I mean, this is what I’m envisioning in my head, like where you’re sitting there and you have to get a clipboard out. You got, like, your Walgreens, like readers, you know, because we’re probably about the same age. So let’s be honest. You got to I.

Shane: Squint, I haven’t, I haven’t, I haven’t sucked down to the Walgreens readers yet.

Matt: And you have the clipboard you bust out like the, um, the, uh, printed off, you know, uh, Excel form that’s got, like, everybody’s names. So, you know, for, like, attendance for the night and you’re like, all right, um, Barbie here, you know, Mercedes here, I guess I would say, like, there has to be Daytona, whereas. Is she late again? All right. That’s. Yeah.

Shane: We our girls are independent contractors, so they literally can come and go as they please. So there isn’t a lot I don’t have very many employees because none of the girls are actually employed by me. Um, I would say the part I guess that I would dislike the most is just paperwork in general. Um, we’re constantly changing, adjusting, and adapting our contracts to fit, uh, new laws, um, new rules at the club. Um, there’s constantly a girl that’s. Doing something you never thought could be done. Like, oh, we never thought about that. We better add that into the contract too. So when that happens, I have to redo the contract and then I have to have all of them sign it again. And so we have to read through to be legal. You have to read through every single line. We have about a four page contract. Um, and there’s a lot of initialing and things like that. So it’s probably about every 2 or 3 months that, you know, we’re printing out a new contract. That’s the kind of stuff that that’s that’s the part stuff. Yeah. That, that that’s the part that’s the hardest for me is it’s like it’s so repetitious to what I already did. And I feel like. Sort of a waste of time. I mean, obviously you have to do your legal work, but it becomes a bit much even for the girls.

Shane: They’re like another contract. I’m like, well, so and so decided to do. And we never thought about that. So it wasn’t in the contract because you the one thing about this job is, is no night is the same as the next night and in a way that you just can’t even fathom. Like every time you think you’ve seen the craziest thing or heard the dumbest thing, it’s like the next night just blows you away and you’re like, oh yeah, I can’t say that anymore because you just know, you know, tonight we have, uh, you know, Toy Show Wednesday.

Tonight we’ll be really busy and, uh, something crazy will happen. And but it’s what makes the job so fun is you really never know what’s going to happen. So you don’t get that lull so much. And then I also believe in the jobs that I don’t like generally are the jobs that I’m not as good at. Um, so then you hire people for those jobs, you know, delegate. Yeah. I half of my success is being able to train, hire and put the best people in the best positions that they’re good at so that I have the best at this, this, this, this, this. So, you know, my team is really, you know, what’s taken me to the next level in the website time my wife and my, my ex-wife and I at the time, we did everything ourselves.

Shane: Like, literally like we almost killed ourselves. We were working 120 hours a week type shit, but we did make a lot of money. I don’t have any regrets for it, but I learned a lot then, moving into this phase of my life and into the new business being the the gentlemen’s clubs, um, you you hire great people and then once they prove to be great, you pay them a great amount of money. So now I overpay all of my people, if that’s even a terme. I sometimes feel like, um, that undermines their abilities when you say overpay. But comparative to any other gentleman’s club, I pay significantly more to all of my staff, and I do that because they make me look good. They make my job easier. Um, so as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten smarter, which we all should. I hope you know, you get wiser, smarter. Um, and so for me, um, you know, my, my slogan on life is teamwork makes the dream work. And my team is stronger than anyone. I don’t care any strip club in the whole country. I put my team against them and we smoke them every single day. I don’t care if you’re the, you know, biggest strip club in in the world. Nope. We still smoke you.

Matt: I don’t know, you’re you’re you say that you’re just lucky, though, that the original Chippendales is not still open because they may give you a run for your money. Yeah. Um, but you’re right. These are some of the basic building blocks for any successful business. You know, you want to bring in the right people, build the right team. You have to surround yourself with a leadership team, too, like you’re talking about not just people. You give orders to people who can step up and lead. And, uh, you know, it’s taken us time. I think I would compare your, uh, two different, uh, timeline trajectories, but like your, uh, your go at the website and kind of just the Wild West at the time was how we did it with Omaha live. And it was like, I don’t even know how to what an entrepreneur was, let alone how to spell one. You know, I didn’t have any hours or any consistency. It was just, you know, late nights, all nighters, drugs, just bad all around bad, bad, bad. Right? Yeah. It was a party.

Shane: And, you know, that’s how we were.

Matt: Um, but looking back on it, there was a lot that I learned by doing it the wrong way. Yeah. And so now I can apply that today and like, okay, I’m going to pause. I’m going to take time to really find and build the right team and build this team that. Now, like you said, we have we have a team here as well where it’s like we are really performing at a high level and this team has come together, um, in both leadership and in execution. And so I think that that’s important to, uh, to be willing to delegate. Yeah. Good rule I kind of learned is like, if they can do it 80% as good as you, then let them do it. Yeah. You know.

Shane: Exactly. No one no one’s ever going to be like when it’s your business. No one’s ever going to quite work it as hard or as thorough as you would. But if you like you said, if they’re at 80%, you thank them and let them run with it.

Matt: Or in the case of, you know, our production director, Martin, um, who’s producing the show right now, 22%, you know, you gotta no, I’m kidding. He does a great job. Um, he’s probably like, 95, 96%, you know?

Shane: You know, sometimes you get really lucky. Yeah. You know, I have a lawyer, and my lawyer is, like, 100%. And, um. And I’ll pay this guy until the day I die because he helped me on the one thing that I could not do at all. Legally, you cannot represent yourself. Not against city, state governors, mayors, city council, the police chief.

You know, you need a good lawyer. You need somebody who will grind for you, who will fight for you. No matter what gets thrown at them. And for me, you know that that’s where that whole teamwork thing he introduced me to. Um. I need somebody that’s good. I need to pay them well. And if I do, and they do their job, I’m going to succeed and I’m going to make it. And he kind of helped get me over that hump.

But also, like I said, taught me that valuable lesson that if you put the right team together and we’re all working for the same common goal, uh, you know, there’s no limit to what we can do. So I pay a lot of my guys on bonuses, too. So you get a great hourly wage, don’t get me wrong.

Shane: But you also get a bonus. Every time we do something great, everybody gets paid. It’s a team win. Yeah. So then everyone’s fighting to break records. Like, if we break a record on privates, or we break a record for the night or for a Wednesday or for it’s it’s everybody gets paid extra.

And I think that that really changed the whole game for me. Um, because it’s like if we don’t do well, they get paid good still, but they don’t get that bonus. You get start getting used to that bonus and you’re like, shoot, we can make that again and again and again and and when we’re all working together, we’ve broken, I would say, upwards of 100 records in just the last year.

Wow. So it’s like we break a record and we think like, oh man, we can’t do any better than that. And it’s like, nope, we did better and better and better. And everybody’s kind of gotten, uh, high on the bonuses, you know, like, no, I want I want to keep getting these bonuses. We can keep doing better. And and we just all keep pushing.

Matt: Yeah. I mean, you want your team excited, you want to get them motivated.

And that has to come from inside. It can’t just be a forced external thing. Yep. Um, you know, the the drivers for solving any problem. You know, you have your internal I need money, you know, your your external, your internal. Like I really want this bonus so I can show up. My neighbor Todd and philosophical is the one people forget often. And that’s where you’re a part of something bigger than yourself. Yeah.

That’s why George pride in it. Yeah. George Lucas said like pizza, free pizza and beer is is more effective than any six figure salary you can give. Yeah I mean it is it. People love just that that camaraderie that that teamwork and that, you know, being a part of something bigger than themselves. What would you what’s the if we, as we kind of wrap up here, like what is the biggest misconception about yourself and what is your what would be like your single greatest tip for an entrepreneur or business owner right now?

Um, because we’ve talked a lot, a lot of different things that we talk about a lot on this, on this podcast. But, um, it’s interesting through your lens how they are identical. They mirror each other because you’re a a business. Yeah, it’s a legitimate business. Yeah. We do.

Shane: I know we pay taxes. Yes, I know the whole bit.

Matt: And I think people forget they’re like, oh, it’s not a business. It’s, you.

Shane: Know, you know, if they knew how much I was paying in sales tax every month and income tax every year, they would say, oh, wow, you’re.

Matt: Probably paying for those like schools and churches that, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re protesting you.

Shane: Yeah. It’s it’s crazy. And, uh, so what’s the biggest.

Matt: Misconception about you today that you still feel lingers.

Shane: On? Um, you know, you I don’t know if you can ever shake like, you know, the creepy strip club guy, you know, like that. That’s just, um, because there are so many of them, you know, people always say, like, do you feel like you were unfairly treated? Well, of course I did. My, my my civil rights were violated, and I proved that in court. But. I understand why sometimes. Now I don’t understand the churches and things like that.

But I understand that you. See those 60 minutes and 2020 specials. And they are about the creepy strip club owner who was hooking his girls on drugs and was prostituting them out, and was encouraging underage girls to drink and things like that. That is kind of how that name or that thing got associated. Obviously, with us, they not just were an easy target because they were in a business that people didn’t like. They actually held true to exactly what people thought they were. They actually were.

Matt: Some people earned the reputation.

Shane: Yeah. And it was.

Matt: It was unfair to other people who may be doing it a different way. Well, it’s.

Shane: Actually what made me get in the strip club business. So my ex-wife would feature when she became very well known, she would feature all over the country. Strip clubs would hire her to come in and, and and I obviously met them because, you know, I work hand in hand with her.

I did all her contracts and everything, and almost all of them were complete pieces of shit. Really? Yeah. They were sleeping with 17 different girls. They were, you know, partying every night with them. They were getting drunk and doing coke in the bathroom with the the customers and things like that.

Matt: Sounds like a normal day here at our studio. So.

Shane: So what I thought was I at that time, I had a lot of money, but I thought, you know, if I ever decide to go into a different business, I’m going to go into the strip club business and I’m going to try to run it as close to a fortune 500 company as you can. We’re going to have contracts and rules and regulations, and everyone’s going to follow them from me to security to the dancers to whatever.

And when I would tell this to owners that they would, they just laugh at me. They’d say, oh, you’re dreaming, can’t be done. You don’t know these girls.

They’ll screw you over in a second, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I said, no, no, no, I really think you can create a more positive environment. Sure, it may be harder to get your staff of girls that follow that protocol, but I believe if you do it, you will reap the benefits for years to come. And so when I decided to get in the business, that was my thing. How do I help make these girls better? How do I get them to quit smoking? Quit doing drugs, quit drinking?

Um, how do I get them to build their credit up? To save money, to invest money to come up with a 2 to 3 year plan? Because I tell every girl that comes in and trains with me, I say.

Shane: Tonight is your first night at my club. I guarantee you I’ll make you a life changing money and I will keep you safe. Those are my two promises to you. I want you to promise me that this isn’t your lifetime job. That in 2 to 3 years, you will then move on to your big. I call it the big girl job. Mhm. Um. And so. I am doing things as good as possible. Um, I look in the mirror at night and I feel good about who I am. Um. I feel good about the changes that I’ve made in my girls. I can’t fix them all now, you know. Of course not. Do all of them listen to my investing tips and not drink and things like that? No, but I would say I probably have somewhere around a 30 to 40% of them actually follow through and come up with a escape plan, so to speak. They go to school, they pay off their bills, they buy a car, they get an apartment. We help them do all of that. Um, we’ll do reference letters, we’ll do income verification letters. We’ll even call the apartment complex on the phone, and I’ll speak to them directly. No other business is doing that. No other strip club is. But no other business is probably doing that.

Matt: Yeah. No, you’re you’re you’re 100% correct. And I think that that’s admirable. Admirable to, uh, to hear that you’re doing. And I’m glad that you shared that, because it’s interesting. We talked about the churches and these groups who have a this moral, uh, motivation. It’s against our values, what they’re doing over here.

Where are they? In helping young women who maybe need some guidance, who maybe they are dancing or stripping, and it’s because they’re desperate for money, but it isn’t what they want to do their whole lives. Where are they actually in stepping up to help them? Instead, they’re just casting a stone.

And I remember this because my our dad’s a pastor, so I grew up in the church. And I remember, um, you know, there is a there is a reason that the first person that that Jesus revealed himself to was a prostitute in the town, very first person. Yeah. You know, and and I think, you know, yeah, it’s like, uh, people in these organizations, we get high and mighty, and they feel like I’m just going to cast the first stone and judge, and they forget what their Christianity is.

They describe it is actually supposed to be all about. Yeah. You know, and so, um, so that’s good to hear. And then what any last tip you have for like a, um, for an entrepreneur or business owner, we talked about, like, standard operating procedures, your checklist, your, your, um, um, get your processes and procedures in place, make the news as much as possible, um, and, uh, and pay attention to the legal stuff. Any other big tips you can leave us with here today?

Shane: Uh, learn everything you know. Know how to do every single thing that your business does so that no matter what happens, somebody quits. Uh, what gets sick?

You know, you can literally cover anything, you know, um, whether it’s fix the computer, DJ, uh, plunge a toilet, um, you know, whatever it is, you need to know how to do it. Um, you’ll go a lot further. You’ll also gain a lot more traction.

My girls. When they saw me in a suit plunge in toilets one night because they backed up and I got shit all over my pants and they were like, oh my God. I know. Had to be done, you know? And so if you’re willing to do all of the shit work. Mhm. As well as take the credit and whatever. Well, well you’ve got to be able to do both sides.

But if you know how to do every single thing that your business does, even if you have someone better than you at it, go learn from them how they do it. So that if you need to to slide by, you can. Because there’s nothing worse than having, you know, five people on your team and one calls in sick or two get Covid or whatever it happens to be. Um, and then you have to shut your business down because you don’t know or no one knows how to fill in their spots. You don’t want. That is important.

Matt: You don’t want to let an employee of yours hold your business hostage because they hold the keys. They’re the only ones who know how to do it. Yeah, I’m a big proponent of that as well. Like do every job in your company.

Shane: You don’t have to be the best at it, but you have to know how to do and manage through every single scenario that your company does.

Matt: It’ll help you gauge things like how to measure, you know, progress. And should that take that much time, you know? Or is that are they just kind of, uh, going slow like it took me ten hours to do that? It’s taking them 20. That doesn’t seem right, you know. So the.

Shane: Only thing. Oh, correction, though, there’s always something you can’t do. Because though I can dance and I could strip, no one would. Actually, my customers wouldn’t want to watch me dance. But if I needed to get up there to buy us some time, I goddamn would be up there.

Matt: I did, I actually did this last year, uh, last, uh, fall, uh, a I tried a pole like a stripper pole. Yeah, yeah, 20 foot tall, uh, stripper pole. Now, they didn’t have it hooked up correctly, so the pole didn’t spin. Okay, okay. And it was very painful. Yeah, it was very painful. I have all the respect in the world now for for dancers on poles. That is like, I don’t know how they do it.

Shane: Like, it’s not just that, you know, I think that people need to understand that to be a dancer is one of the toughest things that you’ll ever do. You sell a little bit of your soul every time you go there. You it’s not.

Matt: Really that sexual to them. You know, you crush your.

Shane: Body because you’re constantly on nine inch heels, dancing on a pole, walking a 10,000 square foot building all night long in a.

Matt: Thong. Yeah.

Shane: So, so mind, body and soul. These girls are giving up a lot to entertain you. Um, yes, they are being paid very well, but. But I think a lot of people forget, you know, if you put yourself in their shoes for a night and had to give your mind, your body and your soul the way that these girls do, you would have a newfound respect for them.

Matt: Absolutely. Or just watch the movie, uh, hustlers with Jennifer Lopez. They they lay it out pretty good in that one. Uh, I appreciate you coming on, man. Yeah. Thanks for having.

Shane: Me. I appreciate you.

Matt: And, uh, congratulations on your success. And and here’s to cheers to all the controversies to come. Yeah.

Shane: Oh, yeah. There’s going to be more. I’m opening another club soon. So when you get on the news, keep going. Next time you get on the.

Matt: News, then we got our coordinate something so that like, we can somehow get some like cross promoting collaboration. You got you two brothers in there.

Shane: Yeah. Got you. We’ll come.

Matt: Do our podcast from wherever they’re protesting you.

At in the corner. Sounds good man. I’m in. All right.