Don´t Go Out of Business in Your First Yea Transcription

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: Hello and welcome to the Omaha podcast, where Omaha’s most successful entrepreneurs help you grow your business. I’m your host, Matt Tomkins of Two Brothers Creative. So how many businesses fail? Unfortunately, the odds are not in our favor. Over half of new businesses fail within just the first five years. Only about 25% of businesses make it longer than 15 years. So how do you not go out of business within your first year? On today’s episode of the Omaha podcast, Anequim´s CFO Jeremy Aspen joins us. He’s going to share with us why businesses fail, what to look out for and how to increase your chance of success and the crucial things that you need to know on how to not go out of business in your first year. We’ve been doing these episodes helping local business owners and entrepreneurs in Omaha, Nebraska, here. And as a resident of Omaha and a relatively new small business owner in the last few years, at least giving it the full go, the full, full throated effort. I thought, you know, I got this down. I know everything. Like I’ve watched all the videos and I’ve seen the TED talks and, you know, I’m just crushing it. And we did an episode about businesses going out of business and how that’s just a 25 25% of businesses make it longer than ten years.

Matt Tompkins: And that is just a shocking statistic. And I don’t think any of those businesses ever thought that they would be the one that would go out of business. So I thought, you know, well, maybe I should maybe I should just be sure, you know, went in and looked at things. And I’m glad I did, because there were a lot of things I just never considered. You know, I’m more creative and kind of free going. I’m not the analytical business expert, so I learned a lot very quickly or had to make some some very, very big changes. And this can be a process that is often skipped. And I want to share that because I think I’ve done almost everything wrong when it comes to how to not go out of business In your first year or two of operations today, we’re going to learn from a guy who is all the things I’m not, I don’t know. Cool. Yeah, I mean, that’s a good way to do that. Isn’t that how you introduce people? I’m all the things Matt is not.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah, I’m pretty much everyone here in town gets it.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah. Jeremy Aspen is here on the show. Jeremy is currently the CFO and founder of Anequim, and he also had Wistar Property Management Group, which you recently sold. We’ve had your wife on the show and Jeremy was like, What about me? I’m like, okay, fine.

Jeremy Aspen: One, whatever will make you feel part of the family.

Matt Tompkins: You’re pretty cool too, but you have some really innovative and I think some very, very practical ways that people can start a business and have a game plan. I have a business strategy to fund that. And then if you have started out already, how to not go out of business.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah. So it’s one thing that we do as a company. So one thing if, if your viewers are wondering what’s anarchism, we have only about six employees in the United States. All five of them are here in Omaha and we have 900 employees outside of the country out in Mexico, specifically in the Philippines. So that you haven’t heard of us might not be all that surprising.

Matt Tompkins: Hang on. You were in the news headlines. So let me back up All humblebrag for you for a second. So Anequim was recently named the fourth fastest growing private company in the state of Nebraska. And like, what, 509, 612 612. I knew.

Jeremy Aspen: It was.

Matt Tompkins: Started with an S. Yeah. So 612 in the country, that is just phenomenal. And this this company that you and Gwen Aspen, you started, you founded you created from just an idea.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: In a phone. And how many years ago was that that you got to start it to where you are today.

Jeremy Aspen: Well okay so that would have been probably about 15 years ago where we started with Star Group, which was a local company, property management company, and then I think it was 2017. Yes, 18. We started up an income.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah. And it’s gotten years. Yeah.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah. It’s been great. But a lot of the reason that has worked out okay is because I’d made a whole bunch of those mistakes with my first company. And that’s where I think if there’s some young up and coming entrepreneurs, let me just tell you, there’s things you can do to make things not go wrong or not for it to be so hard. I mean, you can still muscle through all the trouble, all the pain you used to put yourself through all that trouble. But you can also really increase the likelihood of survival, your company’s survival with. I guess if I were going to pick one word, it’d be just discipline.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah. I mean, it’s okay to not be original in the sense that operating a business, the operations, the financials, your sales and marketing, there are creative elements. Yes. That are original and be innovative, but the basic structure of it, it really works pretty, pretty, pretty much across the board. I mean, it doesn’t matter what business it is, there are certain fundamental things that you need. And I did some research for today because I wanted to see how like how good or bad I actually did. And I’m sharing my my story flaws and all because I think perhaps the biggest disservice that we make is by going out and pretending that everything is just fine and everything is good and well. Let me. No, no, I’ve got plenty of money. I’m going on a vacation. I haven’t even seen my Instagram photos. I mean, come on.

Jeremy Aspen: You see, my credit card is great.

Matt Tompkins: And then we’re then we internalize all of that stress and it becomes overwhelming. It affects not just the business, but your personal life, your health, your relationships. It is detrimental effect. So so I share that. Say I’m not perfect. I mean, there are a lot of things I do, right? I mean, trust me, my wife will tell you, but I will share when I. I am learning because that’s what this is all about, is you’re always learning, as I’m sure you are today. So the list I found, Jeremy know the taxes is number one. And I think by this they mean put money aside for taxes.

Jeremy Aspen: Well, yeah so but I’m I’m one of the I really like to be able to focus on things that I’m good at. And I get really frustrated when I have to do anything that isn’t included in that. That isn’t something that I’m good at. Taxes and insurance are my least favorite things in the world. I hate it, but you don’t really want to neglect it. But if you do look into it enough to understand that, or if you know your numbers well enough, you can understand about what your tax bill is going to be at the end of the year. And especially if you’re paying it quarterly, if you’re just starting, maybe you’re not there yet, but a certain amount of your revenue, just keep it off to the side, you know.

Matt Tompkins: Which I didn’t do. I went on like wild, just luxurious, all inclusive. The Norwegian is the Norwegian yacht tours they do or whatever they’re called. I did like five of them in one year and I’m kidding you. That didn’t do any nice.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah. Yeah. You get those experience at front load life with those experiences when you can’t afford.

Matt Tompkins: I’ll be broke when I’m older. Yeah, I’ll wait till I’m rich or whatever you want to call that.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah. Yeah. You destitute, you’ll be more destitute.

Matt Tompkins: Was this a mistake you think you made early on? Like not setting enough money aside with.

Jeremy Aspen: No, you know what?

Matt Tompkins: Star before with.

Jeremy Aspen: Anyone. So when it comes to the taxes and just money, generally speaking, I’ve just never done debt. So there’s this other thing. It depends on the kind of business that you’re operating, because if you have an inventory intensive company, you’ve got to push cash through your system, you’ve got to buy inventory, you’ve got to hold it. And then and it makes it a lot harder to hold money off to this physically hold money off to the side. And because it puts you it’s somewhat detrimental to your ability to pay other bills and things. So there is a bit of a dance and balance. But if we’re talking like a services industry like ours, I’ve just always been really disciplined to make sure that we we had enough money saved off at the side of the year. And you have to because they what it sounds counterintuitive, but nobody’s ever gone broke paying taxes sounds in sounds ridiculous. But the fact of the matter is, if you’re paying your taxes, you’re going to be okay. You’re not paying your taxes, you’re in trouble.

Matt Tompkins: So, yeah, which I definitely did. Government. No, I’m kidding. And I want to I just want to back up just a second. So at the end of this episode, if you have made all these mistakes like I have, and I may be asking this just for myself to just save my own skin, but we’re going to Jeremy’s going to give us some some some pro tips on on how to get the how to right the ship, how to get back on track. So I don’t want you to feel like, oh, my God, I have rued I’ve done all these things wrong and it’s the end of into my business. No, that’s not the case. As long as you recognize it and deal with it and have a plan and follow through with it, I think you can always get things back on track. Jeremy, with your with you the way you started out. Maybe you can kind of, because like the things I did here, like, you know, the taxes don’t spend all of your income is another one. Do the bulk of the work yourself and I do do that for most of it. Promote yourself and you have to network and market fast. But I think you can offer a very unique perspective, a creative way to look at this in how you approach how you and Gwen when you started off with with with Star.

Jeremy Aspen: So you didn’t.

Matt Tompkins: Have the millions of dollars in the fame and fortune, right?

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah. Well, so we do I mean, if I’m if I’m talking to a business owner and by the way, we do do some consulting for hundreds of other property management companies around the country. And this is stuff that we tell them, you have got to have policies and procedures so that you audit so that decisions are already made. You don’t need to. Every time something comes up, use your brains power to determine what the next step is. Automate it. If you can automate it, automate it, but at the very least, make sure that you’ve put the you frontloaded all of your energies into the procedures so that you can into your operations so that you’re saving yourself time down the road. So an example is payables. Have a system that includes you put the bills into your software, you code it correctly, and then on a certain day of the week you approve the bills. And then on another day of the week, the next day you print the checks. Get used to doing that right now.

Matt Tompkins: So simplify that, though, because people heard the word code and they’re like, what? Okay, right, right. So so simplify it.

Jeremy Aspen: You get a bill for rent. Yeah. All right. You know, when it’s due. When you get the bill, let’s just say they invoice you, you put it into the system, you put it in your QuickBooks or whatever software that you’re using, you put it in correctly who it’s going to get paid to. What the due date is, and then you code it, which is to say you put you code it as rent write. These are rent, you save it and then have the start with the discipline now of every Thursday morning sometime going in and just approving the bill, making sure that the bill that you are sent is the amount that you agreed to and hit print. If it’s the only bill you have that week, that’s fine. You start, you’re building the discipline and then on Fridays print the check and then in two weeks it’s going to be checks. And in four years it’s going to be hundreds of checks. But you’ve already got the discipline. You’ve you’ve already got the system. You also already have that written down so that when you hire someone else on board, they’re already following the procedures. And there’s there’s a benefit to doing this, not just that you have this discipline, but your vendors also can predictably rely on when they’re going to get paid. So what’s that do? It stops them from calling you and asking you pay your pay your bills on time and just be absolutely certain that you don’t have vendors that are wondering when you’re going to get paid. It’s so easy to avoid.

Matt Tompkins: It’s it’s really it’s automation in in the sense that these this is what I was alluding to at the start of this episode, that there are things you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You’re going to have to pay bills, you’re going to have to get paid from your customers or clients that are hiring you for your product, buying your product or your your service. And like, we started off with QuickBooks, and I think the reconciling your books and some of those things we might be able to touch on on an a broad view because it can be intimidating. It was for me. Yeah, right. It’s overwhelming. There’s like so many options within QuickBooks and there but there are other services like Bill.com is one that we use that are very simplified and you can, like you said, you enter the vendor, their information, you enter your customer and their information, you have their bank, whatever, however you’re doing, your ACH payments or credit card payments, once it’s set up, you don’t even have to think about it. It’s just that you can set it up to just auto renew once, however often once a month, once every two weeks, whatever it might be.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah. And then to use another example of receivables, if the a day goes by past the the credit date that you’ve extended to them, they know they’re going to get a call because your procedure is to run every day or every week a a list of all the clients that are overdue by whatever day you determine ten days and you call them, you call them, you don’t send them an email, call them up, let them know that you’re watching it. Find out when they can get it. Have them give you a date of when it’s going to be paid. Make a note in the system. And if they don’t, if you don’t get the check by then you call them up. That happens, say, three times. And if they don’t have it back in you three times, the next step is you just send it to collections. If the client knows that this stuff is going to happen, they’re not trying to balance their cash flow with your you with your money. They just know that this is the way it’s set up. You can be professional. You have to be professional about it, be professional about it, but have a very systematic way of approaching these things because that predictability, that stability and the predictability, the predictability that come from it save tons of time down the road.

Matt Tompkins: And that’s how you’re able to project your future earnings budget to know, are we growing, are we falling behind? Like, are there things can we go to this conference next year or whatever it might be that you want to invest in, like early on, would you say, because I found this to be true not just with the the financials and establishing some of those routines and and automations, the procedures for those things that we have now, but also the how you interact with your your customers and in the sense of not selling them the product, but just the the details on the back end. So having an agreement, having a contract that you can sign, or at least that very clear in an email form, at the very least of here are the expectations for you and for me, because if you don’t and I don’t know if you if you had a moment where you didn’t do that, it’s hard to go back because then you have to basically just start over with that relationship and you lose I don’t know how many months or years, depending on how this may have gone south.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah, well, so so in a nutshell, here’s what I think kind of has to happen. You have a product or you have a service. That is what you’re bringing to market. So you don’t need to be the best at necessarily at having that. You can. You can sell a commodity, but you have to be the best. You have to have something that brings it kind of has you stand apart with the competition or makes you at least a viable competitor to the people that you hope to be competing against. But there is a lot of other aspects of business, which is where almost all these small businesses fail, and it’s the boring shit. It’s paying the bills, it’s collecting money just to even just stick with the two examples we have there. What you want to do as a business owner is set it up so that shit is so easy that it’s boring. You don’t. To use brainpower on procedures that have literally been in place for thousands of years, like paying bills is not. If you’re if you’re creative paying bills or you’re working hard to pay bills, you’re definitely doing it wrong. It’s a 2000 year old process. Get it down, make it boring. So the time that you save today is something that is time that you can use. Well, you save time today. The things that you’re creating, these procedures that you’re doing right now, what you’re trying to do with those is save next Tuesdays afternoon, next Thursdays afternoon, next. And every time. Well, that’s another thing you’re saving all this time in the future so that you can focus on bringing to the market what you’re good at, not these basic business things. They’re there. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: It sucks away from your just your general enjoyment for that. You’re supposed to be the things you’re supposed to be enjoying as a business owner, doing what you love. You’re setting your own schedule. Well, I’ve done the same thing and I think it’s it’s common and it’s not it’s not abnormal to say that I this is I hate doing this part of the job. It’s boring. It’s tedious. I just don’t want to do it. So then you wait till the last minute to do it, and then you have to pull in all night or you’re working late. And then the next week comes along and you’re like, Well, yeah, I could like, work ahead. I could do my homework on Friday so I could go out and party Saturday, but I waited until Saturday and now I can’t go out. So just like, take the time. Trust me, I’ve done it wrong and I’m doing it right now. It is so much off of your your shoulder plate. Yeah, it is so stress relieving.

Jeremy Aspen: Break every one of those things down into their smallest component parts that you can dedicate resources like a time to break it down, put it in in its normal, orderly thing, input the bill into the system, code it, approve it, pay it, and then just have it set up so that those things are always done in their sequential, sequential or you know what the next step is. It’s really, really easy. Make that shit boring.

Matt Tompkins: So so the how are you doing it? The the stuff that is boring and maybe it’s exciting. It’s pretty exciting to somebody. I don’t know. Somebody believes processes and procedures are sexy somewhere on in planet on planet Earth. We’re going to have some of those links and resources to how you can find places to do that. In the show notes here today, like I mentioned, QuickBooks Bill.com Suite process or Process Street make it super easy and convenient, but aside from those like the routines and the automations of the things you’re going to have to do, what are some other areas specifically to the money and not going broke?

Like, that’s one way you don’t go broke. You stay on top of those things. Another way you don’t go broke is figuring out a way to a start your business in the first place and be have income to survive on for you and your family if your business isn’t generating huge profits right in its first year.

Jeremy Aspen: Well, yeah. So there’s a couple of different approaches to this. The approach I’ve always taken is that we’re self funded. We just do everything. Even when we were we so you can bootstrap or you can borrow really. I mean that’s kind of if you break it down to the simplest parts, if you’re bootstrapping, like in our case, my wife worked for 18 months where we didn’t bring any sort of a paycheck on at all.

And then after that we started bringing in a paycheck and then it kind of blew up over the course of years, turned into what it was. There’s another way of doing it, which is to borrow, like to put together a plan that shows potential investors what you’re planning on doing. And and then in those cases, you kind of have to frontload the you have to be able to predict kind of something you said earlier. You have to know what it is that’s coming in the future so that you can explain it to investors so they write a check and then be able to demonstrate to them that you’re on track. It’s a much more complicated way of running a business,

I think, but it’s also one that has more likelihood of being able to work in the long run. So you give a little bit up. Hours is riskier and just that we weren’t willing to take on debt or or bring on new partners. So we don’t have that flexibility of bringing in other people’s cash to keep cash flow, keep people paid and all that stuff. So there’s there’s.

Matt Tompkins: Jerry just spilled his water all over his pants, which I just want to tell people because it was it was very rewarding for me. I don’t know, it was gratifying to see you spilling your usually it’s me spilling on myself or ripping a hole in my pants. You mentioned something like when we were talking kind of before the podcast and it was a eyes glossed over moment for me. So I explain what you were talking about there as far as getting the financials and working, working ahead versus you put it in better terms than I did.

Jeremy Aspen: Okay.

Matt Tompkins: Oh, and simplify for somebody.

Jeremy Aspen: Okay. So okay. All right.

Matt Tompkins: Who passed basic college math.

Jeremy Aspen: Okay. Well. So compound interest is something like Einstein thought it was one of the most amazing things in the world. And it’s because, like with your your your house payment, you know, you’re paying all this interest upfront. Compound interest is basically you have you borrow a $100 and then you’re going to pay $1 a year for it, right. To borrow. And so but let’s say you don’t pay it.

So then the next year you’re going to have to pay interest on $101. Right. And so it keeps compounding and it can it can work for you or it can work against you. But if you can get compound interest, work in your favor like banks do, it’s like it’s like a hurricane in a good way and that I should that bad example. Sensors are good. What compound interest is dangerous in a lot of ways, but it’s also an instrument that you can use to really make yourself rich or like.

Matt Tompkins: With the funding idea which you have if you’re looking to sell, fund or get funding through your business plan from a lender or a combination of the two, I think in both cases you want to end up in a situation where in a relatively short amount of time you’re not still paying these huge payments or interest on things and you’ve kind of figured out like an interesting creative way to do that when you started with.

Jeremy Aspen: Starr Yeah. So there’s yeah, compound interest. If it’s something that you’re not really familiar with, maybe this is tip number one. Better learn that one. Yeah, like do a Google search. Basically.

Matt Tompkins: I throw it around at dinner parties and just dig it. Yeah.

Jeremy Aspen: People, especially the girl, the girls. Oh, man. Oh, my God. So. But what you want to do in business, just like how compound interest can work against you or work for you, you need to put your energies in at the front end. You need to take a little bit of time every single week to work on making your procedures tighter and easier and more boring, because the sooner you can get into that flow, that boringness, the sooner that you can spend the extra time doing work that really changes. It sets you apart.

Matt Tompkins: Or working on the business.

Jeremy Aspen: Growing, work on your business, work on the next one. Like get these things, prioritize low hanging fruit first, get the payables thing down pat and then go on to the receivables. Just get those things knocked out because every part of your week, especially when you’re starting, most importantly, when you’re starting your business, you have to set time aside to make the future better, not just to push out your product.

That’s that’s going to make that’s going to keep you in a position where you are not able to fund anything new, anything exciting. Keep up on technology. Make sure you do that stuff at the front end so that in the future you can reap the rewards of that extra time and more efficient systems to make you more money.

Matt Tompkins: I feel like that’s really the general consensus here. As far as a major takeaway from this episode is you have to put in the time and the work and you can do it in increments like set aside 30 minutes a day to work on those processes and procedures, set aside 30 minutes a day to get your financials in order. And this may be years before you even start the business, you know, start putting money.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: Start putting away money. Like now for a business you want to open later. I know. In my case it was knowing that this time was going to come. When I wasn’t going to renew my contract, I was going to go just, you know, no net, no safety net.

And you slowly start building up, you know, working on the side and you’re a freelancer and you’re doing this gig economy work so that you can roll that into what becomes your business. And so I think putting the work in on the front end, I know it’s it’s not like the the sexy fun thing to do.

Jeremy Aspen: Certainly not, you.

Matt Tompkins: Know, but that is really the key to not going out of business in your first year, not just not going out of business, but having a successful profitable business in the long haul.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah, it’s kind of sounding repetitive. You have got to spend your time working on the stuff that every business has. It’s predictable. You’re going to pay bills, you’re going to collect. You just get those basic things figured out ahead on how you’re going to operate.

Matt Tompkins: If you look at like the top things, I mentioned how at the beginning of this episode, how, how, how common it is for podcasts, for businesses. Well, podcasts in this case.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: Okay. Go out of business. And it’s really startling when you see that. And I think this is the top reasons they list are usually like management. They it’s, you know, financials, funding, not having the money. But those two things, the main things they mention all really can be solved with one quick solution, and that is doing the work on the front end planning set aside. You know, in fact, Gwen gave me the tip when I said, this is overwhelming. I can’t do all these this process and procedures and then setting your.

Quarterly goals and annual goals. And she said, No, just sit down like do an hour a week where you learn something new. So this hour, this week, I’m going to learn how to reconcile my books and make sure everything matches up in QuickBooks. And then the next week I work on my processes and procedures, and I think that’s a more manageable way to approach it and makes it realistic for some, a business owner like myself who doesn’t want to do it to actually get things done.

Jeremy Aspen: And so if you’re going to give people you mentioned a couple of things that I think. So if you don’t know how to reconcile or the value of reconciling your books, go figure that out. We have consulted for hundreds of management companies and almost none of them do bookkeeping correctly. Not rarely do they actually do reconciliations correctly. And it’s especially when you’re dealing with other people’s money like they are, it’s one of the best things you can do to to weed out confusion in the confusion in the future, and to have an accurate understanding of where your books are and get your stuff reconciled.

Matt Tompkins: And so for somebody who doesn’t know, reconcile your books in a basic terms.

Jeremy Aspen: Reconcile your books is what you’re doing is you’re going to take a bank statement. Well, let’s do this. We’ll start the other way. You have software that you’re inputting charges, transactions into.

Matt Tompkins: Like QuickBooks.

Jeremy Aspen: Or like QuickBooks. And then what you want to do is like that universe that you’re living inside of for financials, you want to make absolutely sure that it is reconciled or is exactly the same in as close to real time as possible. As to what the bank is telling you happened. Same with credit cards. You’ve got to keep an accurate recording of what you’re doing, and then you’ve got to make sure that the banks are are on are on the same page as you. That’s a huge because sometimes you’ll duplicate a transaction or you’ll forget to put one in something like that and as close to real time as possible, make sure they are in there. So this one’s here, you click it in your books is done and, and, and it just gets rid of a lot of confusion.

Matt Tompkins: And you reconcile books daily, right? I do, yeah.

Jeremy Aspen: So every single.

Matt Tompkins: Day. And that allows you to have pretty accurate projections too.

Jeremy Aspen: I know exactly. So yeah I mean every single and we just did like last week, $1.2 million of invoices and our books are all done. I know exactly what our profitability is for months to date. And that’s the sort of stuff that you can do. You can project in the future better. Reconciliation is one of them. Get that one figured out. Nobody does it. And you got to and you can make it boring. Like how we do it is every day.

You can do it every Tuesday or Thursday, but do do it. Just set that time aside for your administrative stuff a certain time of the week. Get it knocked out and it’ll it’ll also help you understand like did the client actually pay? What if there’s a deposit in there that you didn’t register? Well, maybe they did pay, maybe they used ill pay.

Matt Tompkins: And you’d be surprised how that happens. Even with a good system in place, things can happen. They will happen. I mean, and that’s what I did when I, I said, well, I haven’t really, because bookkeeping is it’s I think most business owners is probably not their number one skill or forte that they can just jump in and be as you know as or sure as proficient as you are in that in that area.

And it was it was reconciling the books say wait a minute, why does this is why things aren’t looking right? You can resolve it. You can make a plan. And I’m glad that I am doing that because it is easier than you think to get off track. It is easier than you think to not do these things like, you know, setting money aside for taxes, not blowing your your money on a Caribbean cruise or whatever it might be. Real quick, because I know we got just just a couple of minutes here, but what would you tell somebody who has done some or many of these things wrong? It’s they’re still in business. How do they right the ship?

Jeremy Aspen: The the very first thing you do after you hear about this is this go make your basic business procedures boring and you’ll spend a lot of time doing it. But it’s it’s not insurmountable and it’s got to be done because those boring tasks are the one that you’re going to end up hiring people for. And here’s another thing. If you’re if they’re boring tasks like you’ve already got it pretty automated, you also get to pay people a little bit less money for doing work that doesn’t require as much thought.

You instead of hiring an accountant or a CPA, you can hire a bookkeeper because the procedure takes care of the details about how you’re going to report your income to the IRS because you put it in the system correctly. The other one is valuing value, valuing your time or your product correctly. A lot of times at the beginning you’re going to have pressure to try to compete and.

Matt Tompkins: Try to yes, you’ll say yes, you’re.

Jeremy Aspen: Going to say yes to stuff you don’t think is right. Stop it, don’t feel it, recognize it. Don’t let yourself go down that track, because there are also going to be the clients you’re probably not that are probably not going to pay you.

Matt Tompkins: And they’re going to be the most difficult.

Jeremy Aspen: Oh, and they’re definitely going to be the most typical. They’re going to have the best excuses. They’re going to see. I sent the check. You didn’t reconcile your books, so then you got to run through your entire statement, figure stuff out. The other one is reputation. Don’t lie once ever.

I run into it all the time where people kind of make these white little lies and it just and people know it and it digs into the reputation and you can’t get out of that. Don’t lie once.

Matt Tompkins: Ever. One final tip, Jeremy Aspen, I appreciate the insight here today and I expect you to do our books before you leave and reconcile everything.

Jeremy Aspen: You just got.

Matt Tompkins: Done. Yeah. Oh, you did? Okay, John. It’s all automated. See how.

Jeremy Aspen: He.

Matt Tompkins: Did it while we were doing this episode? No one thing that I think really helps, generally speaking, that I have learned in and just kind of my evolution here, you know, of what little there is, some would tell you. But what I’ve learned is to separate yourself from the company. And all these things here are company decisions. They’re not personal decisions.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah, that’s.

Matt Tompkins: Good. You’re not making a company decision that you have to say no to the project or you have to have to say, Hey, client XYZ, you’re you’re cut off because of this. It’s a company decision. It’s the personal side that we get confused. It’s that emotional side. We want to make people happy.

We want to overdeliver. But you have to separate yourself from that same thing that goes with the basics of the reconciling your books, the financials, the routines, the processes and procedures. Those are company things that the company needs. You don’t personally need them.

That’s why they’re boring to us. But keep that in mind. There is a separation when you do that simple thing. Just the thought experiment just kind of separate yourself. It makes things so much easier to do and that I would recommend highly for people. On a philosophical note, I guess.

Jeremy Aspen: Well, in what you’re doing in that case is like in your case, the cameras don’t turn on until we get whatever 50% of the that’s it. And then it’s their decision whether they want the cameras on.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah. And being clear up front. So I mean up.

Jeremy Aspen: Front, a lot.

Matt Tompkins: Of very helpful tips here today. We’re going to put a bunch of resources for you in the show notes from websites. You can go, like I mentioned earlier, to get your process of procedures, Keep it nice and simple and it’s easy to use. You don’t have to think about it ever again.

Set up your billing. You know, DocuSign is great for digitally signing agreements and contracts. Listen, if I can do these things, anybody can do these things.

Jeremy Aspen: I’ve known Matt a long time. There’s a lot truth to that.

Matt Tompkins: Jeremy Aspin with anarchism, also formerly with with Star, founded to two companies on the rise. I’m glad. I’m glad you’re finally on the rise. It’s good. I mean.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah, yeah, it’s getting embarrassing.

Matt Tompkins: I know the.

Jeremy Aspen: Success was just tantalizingly or, uh. Yeah, the. And you, I mean, don’t appreciate what you’ve done. I mean, in the last couple of years, you’ve really turned this thing around. You’ve got a real. I mean, this. Look at this place. It’s really cool. You’re doing a lot of the right stuff.

You’re. I know you’re beating yourself up for doing a lot of the wrong stuff. You’re doing a lot of the right stuff, though, as evidenced by the fact that you’re here.

Matt Tompkins: We’re sitting here today. Yeah. So I appreciate I appreciate that. And yeah, it’s hard to do as the.

Jeremy Aspen: Oh yeah.

Matt Tompkins: Sorry to say.

Jeremy Aspen: Critical as hell. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: You’ll only focus on the things you did wrong or the.

Jeremy Aspen: Nature of the being in charge is that you have a very filtered list of crap.

Matt Tompkins: That is the what do they call that? The the imposter syndrome.

Jeremy Aspen: Yeah, right. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: And that’s for a future episode. It could be a whole episode or a whole podcast in and of itself. But some helpful stuff here for you today. Jeremy Aspen, thanks so much for joining us.

Jeremy Aspen: Thanks for having me.

Matt Tompkins: Thanks once again for joining us here today on the Omaha podcast. Hit that subscribe button. Follow us on Apple, Spotify. Wherever you’re listening to the podcast, we have more episodes on the way and we want to hear from you. What more do you want from the Omaha podcast or other topics that we haven’t covered yet that you’d like to hear right here on the show?

You can reach me to Brothers Creative at gmail.com. Hit the subscribe button though, so you never miss an episode and we’ll see you next time. Hot Pockets. Where? Omaha. Successful entrepreneurs help your business grow.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: Hello and welcome back to the Omaha podcast, where Omaha’s most successful entrepreneurs help you grow your business. I’m your host, Matt Tompkins of Two Brothers Creative, and I’ve been excited for this episode to come out for a while now because this episode in particular, it checks off all the boxes for everything that we wanted this podcast to be for you to help you grow your business. I do believe this is going to end up being one of the most resourceful episodes for you yet, because on this episode of the Omaha podcast, we are going to reveal Nebraska’s best kept secret for businesses. Oh, and I almost forgot. It’s totally free.

One thing I love and very much appreciate about entrepreneurs is how much of a unique mindset it requires because the odds are not in our favor. 50% of all businesses will not be open after five years, and only about 25% of all businesses make it to 15 years or more. Those numbers can be terrifying. And they were top of mind for Joe on the day we recorded this on his way to the studio about the odds not stacked in favor of small business owners.

Joseph Kenney: So this morning I was driving down Highway 75, heading south through rural Nebraska, and it was a real honor to go to the ribbon cutting of a brand new grocery store in Peru, Nebraska.

But at the ribbon cutting, I couldn’t help but just sit back and think, what are the chances that this business isn’t going to be here in five years? What are the chances that this business is going to fail? And conversely, what’s going to prevent it from failing?

Matt Tompkins: Now, no business owner goes into it believing they’re going to be one of those 75% that go out of business. But how do you find out what you need to do and how you’re supposed to do it? We had a chance to sit down with Cathy Lang, the executive director of the Nebraska Business Development Center.

They help entrepreneurs and business owners, just like you find that long term success, but also avoid the pitfalls that set back too many businesses early on.

Cathy Lang: So, Joe, what I love about your story is that these two individuals are solving a problem. And as long as they are solving a problem and have customers that want that solution, they will survive. They will stay in business. I think for a lot of business owners, they need to take the time to think through what problem am I solving and if they can have clarity about that, I think they have a greater chance of being successful in the long run.

Joseph Kenney: I think you’re right, Cathy, but it does beg the question, clearly businesses are solving needs regularly, but they’re still failing. Why are they failing?

Cathy Lang: So the other topic that we had visited about was the idea of understanding your cash flow, understanding your balance sheet, understanding your business. And that starts with a business plan. But very specifically, it’ll hone in directly on all of your financials and the Nebraska Business Development Center, which provides no cost confidential one on one services to business owners focuses in that area very specifically.

That is one of the areas that all of our consultants are trained in, and we spend most of our time in that area of business acumen. We are one of many providers in the ecosystem, but that’s our niche.

Joseph Kenney: So what’s the catch? No cost Confidential one on one doesn’t happen, does it?

Matt Tompkins: And I was looking at the list of all the things you provide me being the team here. We’re looking at it going, Oh, wow, Well, when how soon can we schedule an appointment to go down there? We ran into this same issue of of cash flow, and it was actually an episode we did about businesses failing. I thought, you know, I should probably take a look at that. And I’m glad I did, because a few things go wrong. Any business hours included could really base some tough decisions with cash flow. Do you start with an analysis or how do you approach cash flow?

Cathy Lang: So we will do it from two different perspectives. It depends on the client. We have clients that come to us that have not started business yet, so they are just starting and so we’ll do financial projections with them. We will look at the market, we will understand their competitors and we will work with them to build their financials. And let me be really clear, we work with them to do this and here’s why. They have to know their financials. And so if they don’t know their financials inside and out, we have done them a disservice.

The same is true of their business plan. So we work with them on their financials. And so a brand new business will do projections, but if they have an existing business, then we’ll look at their existing projections or their existing financials and and look at how much are they paying for rent, what are they paying for labor and help them analyze where are the pressure points within their business that they can adjust and then let them make those decisions and implement those to help the business be more successful.

Matt Tompkins: And it’s confidential. You mentioned that earlier, which is great. And also, is there no judgment is like a judgment free zone because I feel like the businesses that face cash flow problems, you mentioned earlier that you help them when they’re starting and they’re in there already in business. Is that the same with a business plan? So a business plan, is it too late?

Cathy Lang: So I think it is never too late to create a business plan. And if you’ve gone out and you’ve been brave because it takes a lot of guts to start a business. So if you’ve gone out and you’ve been brave and you’ve started your business and you have no business plan, and that happens, then along the way, you’re you’re concerned, you’re struggling, you’re looking at your financials. You can.

And come to us at any point along the way to work on a business plan, because the benefit of that is it provides great clarity to the business owner, Oh, what are we doing? What are our objectives? Who are our customers? And it can help a business who maybe drifted out a little farther than they should have in terms of the purpose of the business to pull them back. And then looking at now, how would your new financials align to this more clear, concise business plan? And that’s helpful to any business owner at any point, right?

Joseph Kenney: 67% of businesses don’t have a business plan. Excuse me, is it because they don’t have the knowledge to do it? They didn’t know you should have it or they don’t have the funds to do it before they started the business? Which would you say?

Cathy Lang: I think it’s more that they really wanted to start a business. They were very passionate about a concept and they said to themselves, I’m going. And so they began. But as they move along, they become more sophisticated. And then it’s a question of how do you find the resource to help you find to write the business plan. Right. And so to your point, I mean, we and no one likes me to say this, but it’s true.

I think the Nebraska Business Development Center is the best kept secret in economic development in Nebraska. If you know us and if you’ve worked with us, you know who we are. But if you never have, how do you find us? Right. And so a lot of people don’t know we exist.

Matt Tompkins: Well, that’s what we’re doing here. We’re telling the world and the world. I think a lot of businesses keep things secret and they don’t want to ask questions because it’s embarrassing or it feels embarrassing.

Joseph Kenney: Pride gets in the way.

Matt Tompkins: Pride gets in the way. And I’m going to ask a question here that I think I know a lot of people are thinking in their head right now, What the hell is a business plan and how do I even get started making it? It’s not just the the doing it. It’s not knowing what it is in the first place.

Cathy Lang: I think a business plan provides incredible clarity to the owners to know exactly what they’re focused on, and then they stay focused on that problem they’re solving and who are the customers that they want to reach, that they know they are going to solve a problem. They’re going to solve something for a customer.

Matt Tompkins: How much do you charge? How much profit should a business have? And so you have 30% profit after you’ve paid everybody in yourself, right? Oh, well, I know. No, I’m not even getting paid. It’s something you don’t think about. You don’t know. You don’t want to ask because it’s embarrassing.

Cathy Lang: And that’s why I think at least for the the work that we are doing with our clients and doing it confidentially, they know it is confidential.

They know it is one on one. That’s the other thing. You can go to a class how to write a business plan and they’re great and people can dip their toes into Do I really want to start a business and they can go and have those classes? But when it’s your turn and it’s your business plan, you want to be talking to someone who is talking to you and you alone. And so that’s why we believe our services are so valuable for folks that are starting and growing. Small business in Nebraska.

Joseph Kenney: How long is a business plan, even a range, and how long does it take to develop one?

Cathy Lang: So it can? It depends on the client. Some clients get right into it. They set up their business plan, they get it done. It can be three pages, it can be ten pages. It depends on the business, but it’s up to the passion of the business owner, how quickly they want to get it done.

We have people who have come to us and then about a year later they come back and that’s okay because you know how scary this is. You’re not ready to quit your job. You’re not ready to go yet. So we are there for them with them for the long haul. We have customers that are clients that come back to us. We help them start five years later. They’re ready to add a new line to their business. So they’ll come back and we’ll redo the business plan, we’ll redo the financials, and off they go with their new line of business.

Joseph Kenney: How often do you have customers come in, business owners that come in out of necessity, They’ve wanted to rent a space. They wanted to get a loan, talk to a VC firm, and they are requesting a business plan be in place.

Cathy Lang: I would tell you that most of our referrals come to us from lenders. So someone has gone into their local bank, they’ve got their idea written on a napkin and the business or the banker will look at them and go, Come back. After you’ve been to the Nebraska Business Development Center, and the person will say, Well, what’s that? Well, here you go, Here’s a card, get a hold of them.

Matt Tompkins: It’s terrific. My wife told me the same thing the other day. Don’t come back until you’ve gone to the Nebraska Business Development Center. I know at the beginning of the summer I wait a certain amount and till like a couple of weeks ago, I had lost about £19 just from stress, because it’s a new level of stress. When you start out and it’s just you and then you involve other people and there’s more on the line and you care about those people. You care about this idea, this business, this thing you’re doing, what would the percentage change? Like how many businesses would still be open? If they didn’t consume all of that stress like I was doing for a while, how many businesses would still be open? Had they just spoken out?

Cathy Lang: I think that’s what we all hope. But here’s the other thing about a business owner, and you know this. You guys are both in this in this space. You’re very passionate about what you do. You want to go do it. You are head down, hyper focused on this is my business. People always say, why don’t small business owners ever come to these events? They’re running their business, that’s why.

And so you are all consumed in that. And so to pull yourself out of that, to even take a breath is hard. And so how do we make sure that they know about these services that are out there? They are easily accessible to them. 24 seven and then it will make it easier for them. So that’s why one of our programs at NBC is called Source Link Nebraska. And it is a platform of all of the government, education and nonprofit resources that have anything to do with business development. In Nebraska. We have about 500 of them and they are all available on this platform, 24 seven and there’s a calendar of events. So if you wanted to go to how to write a Business Plan Class, it’s listed there and we have other materials that are like we have a template business plan available. So they’re all out there sourcing Nebraska dot com.

Joseph Kenney: So how often do people resist meeting with you simply out of pride, getting in the way for where they are financially speaking or where their business is? I mean, at some point do they overcome it and get to you and say, I wish I would have done this sooner?

Cathy Lang: So we do have clients that tell us that I wish I would have come to you sooner. I knew about you, but I was busy getting my business started, so I just didn’t.

Joseph Kenney: Think We run private Facebook groups in cities across the United States that are hyper focused on just local and independent business owners. And one day we heard from a business owner that was really struggling. So I took to the private Facebook group and mentioned, Hey, listen, if you’re struggling, you have to reach out to somebody for help. Here’s the situation. We, of course, didn’t mention the name of the business, the business owners name, but we did describe what that business owner is feeling right now.

They’re feeling miserable. They aren’t feeling successful. And they couldn’t tell you whether money is coming or going. Within minutes, people started reacting to that post saying, thank you, thank you, thank you. Pretty soon people started saying, Gosh, I’m really struggling to. This is where I need help. Is there anyone in the group that has experience? But privately I started receiving messages that said, Hey, I won’t post in that group, but I need help. I’m struggling. I’m going to lose my business. If if business owners could just understand and I can speak to this. I’m a serial entrepreneur. Since the age of eight. Yes, pride has gotten in my way over the years. The reality is, is if you don’t let go of it, you aren’t going to be here.

Matt Tompkins: Right. You mentioned the busyness of the schedule, and that’s been my excuse. And it’s probably not an excuse. You make time for things that are important. That’s just a truth. And it was actually Joe telling me that story. I think I am. Like most small business owners, there’s a lot of things you didn’t think about when you started.

Cathy Lang: I think people think, Oh, well, if I reach out, then I’ve got to get at this appointment. It’s going to take time and now it’s going to be another four weeks. I will tell you that if a client reaches out to us, we are talking to that client almost immediately. I would tell you within a couple of days maximum. And so I think for business owners to realize, no, if you reach out, these partners are here to support you, they will make time to meet with you and meet on your schedule, because that’s the other thing, what works for the client. And we’re there to serve the client. So we want to meet at the time that works for the client.

Matt Tompkins: That’s a key thing to get you like some of the resources and funding is one of them, like helping people find funding. So government contracts, people don’t know a lot about this little secret.

Cathy Lang: So when it comes to funding your business, first of all, I want to be very clear. The Nebraska Business Development Center does not have grants and we do not have loans. We get a business ready to go for financial resources, whether that’s a loan or VC funding or whatever. There are very few grants for small businesses to start, and a grant is undiluted capital. You don’t repay it.

And that’s a pretty narrow little place. We actually have a program coming in the state of Nebraska that’s going to help with that. But it’s very, very narrow. Government contracting is a business expansion opportunity. So first of all, the government buys everything. The government buys everything.

Matt Tompkins: And they’re listening right.

Cathy Lang: Now and they’re listening. And so that’s federal, state and local all. Those all those branches of government buy everything, but they have a process you have to go through to be able to take your goods and services and offer to them. And that’s the government contracting piece. I could list off like ten acronyms all about government contracting and everybody would glaze over. We have team members at MDC, consultants who help the business owner navigate the process of government contracting.

So you get registered, you get into the database so that you get notices when your business niche is the government is looking for something from you. You then have to prepare your contract. You have to do all the work to get it. It is it is a bureaucratic process, but our people are there with you along the way. Again, one on one confidential, at no charge to help access those government contracts. And as a business, what’s so important is you’ve now expanded your market. You have a new customer.

Matt Tompkins: There’s a dirty little secret. I want to say real quick, just to jump in, is the government has to award a certain number of percentage of their contracts that they they do to small businesses.

Cathy Lang: Yes, We have clients of ours who almost their entire business is government contracting. They have been incredibly successful at it. We have businesses who go out and they have their regular business and then they just turn and pivot and the same service is being provided to a government entity. It’s a new customer.

Joseph Kenney: Would your team come back at some point in the future for another podcast and talk about this a little bit more in depth?

Cathy Lang: Yes, absolutely. And that is that would be real value to your listeners because it is detailed and we have team members who will do a great job of explaining it, right?

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, getting a government job. Joe, is that.

Joseph Kenney: What you’re saying? That’s right. We’re about to.

Matt Tompkins: Pivot. Yeah. These are real issues that every business owner faces, entrepreneurs face. What would your message be to the small business owner who is listening right now to encourage them? What would your personal message to them be?

Cathy Lang: Don’t give up. Stay focused on the problem you’re trying to solve with your business and reach out. Reach out to the partners that are in this ecosystem that are here to support you.

Matt Tompkins: I love doing this podcast. I feel like the side benefit for me is I’m learning so much in every episode, so which is good.

Cathy Lang: We want you to be a client and then you can be one of our stories.

Joseph Kenney: If you’re an entrepreneur or a solopreneur, you’re an aspiring business owner, an established business, a seasoned veteran. Chuck Pride in At the Door. This is confidential expert information at no charge.

Matt Tompkins: Thanks once again for joining us here on the Omaha podcast. Subscribe. So you never miss an episode, and we’ll see you next time.

It’s the Omaha podcast where Omaha’s most successful entrepreneurs help Your business grows.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: You cannot be incredible without the Hulk. Now, don’t worry. You didn’t accidentally stumble upon a marvel fanboy podcast. This is the Omaha podcast where Omaha’s most successful entrepreneurs help you grow your business. I’m your host, Matt Tompkins, of two brothers. Creative. But yes, I am using the Incredible Hulk for an important analogy today. And I’m not being facetious. I’m not trying to be silly. I promise you, if you stick with me through this short episode today, there is a major takeaway for your business and your life. I want to share with you today a moment I haven’t perhaps shared with many people publicly because it’s the moment that I died. Literally, and how I came back from that.

So let’s start off with The Incredible Hulk. First, if you don’t know the Incredible Hulk, here it is. It’s Dr. Jekyll, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That’s that’s The Incredible Hulk, really, in a nutshell. You have Bruce Banner, who is this brilliant, brilliant scientist. He has like seven PhDs and he’s just amazing. He can speak all these languages. And Gamma gamma radiation is his specialty. And he has this dark, dark secret, though. He has this weakness. And that is The Incredible Hulk. He hates it in the movies. They describe it as it’s like a raw nerve because he has no control over this weakness. He has no control over the Hulk. And when his weakness, when the Hulk is is unleashed upon the world, it is a path of sheer destruction left in his wake.

Matt Tompkins: Innocent people and bystanders are hurt. And the best case scenario you can hope for is to point the Incredible Hulk in the direction of your enemy and hope he’s angry enough. To just take them out. That’s what the Hulk does. Hulk Smash. It’s a terrifying character. I know that any time the old man or the old TV show about The Incredible Hulk with Lou Ferrigno, any time they show clips of The Incredible Hulk, even though it’s kind of cheesy by today’s CGI standards, my wife, Wendy, she’s still terrified because as a kid, this was this terrifying beast in the comics. He’s 10 or 12ft tall, just these bulging, ridiculous muscles.

And he’s terrifying. I think that’s how we feel about our own weaknesses. Our own weaknesses in business especially, we don’t want to tell other people because it feels like this raw nerve. We’re humiliated by them. We feel shame, we feel guilt. And so we don’t talk to other people about it. We don’t open up about it. We don’t ask for help. If we can’t even tell people about this, how are we going to ask them for help? We have our our moments in our life. And I like to refer to these as our crucibles. Everybody has a crucible, at least one, if not multiple in their life that defines them from that point moving forward.

Matt Tompkins: For me, my crucible was my addiction. Now, while I was doing the TV show Omaha Live, it was my first run at being an entrepreneur. Being self-employed and I failed on every front. I had no clue what I was doing. I did everything wrong you could possibly do except the TV show.

The TV show came before everything else in my life. As I’m sure you put your business above many things in your life, including your own health, that you probably shouldn’t. We probably shouldn’t do that, right? But we do it anyhow. We give it everything. And that’s what I did with the TV show. It was a hit TV show. It did great. Local TV show. Yes. But it had great ratings. Did a great. It was great. Compliments galore. The acclaim, the credit. It felt amazing. But I had this beast I had, as Matthew Perry describes in the title of his new book about addiction, this. Horrible, terrible thing. This big, terrible thing. And it was a secret for many years.

Now, while I was doing the TV show, I let myself just do everything wrong, as I mentioned. And then I did the ultimate stupid thing. I started supplementing these pain medications I was taking for multiple surgeries I’d had on my body. I’ve had eight altogether. I started using them not for the physical pain, but for the emotional strain, the anxiety, the stress. And this happens with business owners, I think, more than many other professions, because there is so much stress, so much anxiety and so much pressure not put on us necessarily from the bill collectors.

Matt Tompkins: Yes, it’s there from the the least you got to pay to the vendors and everything else. But. It’s put on ourselves. By ourselves. It becomes this beast. It becomes our Incredible Hulk. But it’s not incredible yet because just as in the comic books, Bruce Banner, he viewed this green monster, this beast, as this terrible thing to be ashamed of. He viewed it as his weakness. So my big, terrible thing was my addiction.

And I remember honestly, I don’t remember this. I was told this after the fact. My lowest point in my addiction. And that was when I. Died, as I mentioned. Now, was I legally legally pronounced dead by paramedics?

No, but it’s as close to death as you can get. And I’ll take it. I don’t want to get any closer. I was went over to my drug dealer at the time, went over to his It wasn’t even his house. Think it was his brother’s house. He was just crashing at in his basement, did a massive amount of cocaine and fell over like a tree that had just been chopped down. Hit the concrete floor. And he this is what he told me after the fact, because I don’t recall any of this. He told me that you were as stiff as the concrete floor itself.

Matt Tompkins: Your eyes were in the back of your head. You were foaming at the mouth and then you just stopped breathing. And it felt like an eternity that you just laid there. He said, I was pounding on your chest. It was like hitting concrete. It was so hard. And he thought I was gone. It felt like an eternity for him. And then out of nowhere, I sprung up. I said to him, Well, see you later. And I ran off out the door, went on with my day. It wasn’t until a week or two later that he told me this, that. It really terrified me. I mean, to this day, there’s still underlying trauma from that because I don’t know if it’s worse to have a near-death experience that you can remember or to have a near-death experience that you can’t Not remembering it is terrifying.

That is my moment of shame, that that is a moment that epitomizes my addiction. It was kind of like that movie, the movie Pulp Fiction, that scene where John Travolta has to use the adrenaline needle to, like, resuscitate Uma Thurman’s character. But it didn’t feel like a movie because it was real. It was it was terrifying. It wasn’t a cool scene and a Quentin Tarantino movie. It was my life. And there are many times my life shouldn’t have continued, and I’m thankful that it did. I am very grateful for that.

Matt Tompkins: But that was that was my weakness. My addiction was my weakness. And I say was past tense because. It was my weakness until I realized after years of therapy and treatment and I’m coming up on eight years in recovery in January, I realized that my greatest weakness is not my weakness at all. My greatest weakness has become my greatest strength. And I mean that sincerely. In the movies, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Incredible Hulk and Bruce Banner eventually become merged.

Together, they become this character known as Professor Hulk, where he has the best of both worlds, as he describes it in the comics and in the movie. He’s super smart. He’s this genius. He has the rippling abs and, you know, the muscles and all that stuff. If you’re into that sort of thing, I mean, I don’t know who is I don’t know who would want that at all. No. But he combines them together. He figures out a way to merge the two together. And that’s the lesson. I know it’s a comic book movie. I know it’s it’s for fun and entertainment. But as I was sitting there in the theater, I was watching this. And so I’m a few years in, you know, I think I was like maybe 4 or 5 years into my sobriety at the time. And I didn’t really feel like it had clicked. I still felt ashamed. I didn’t feel like I had the confidence to speak publicly about it as I am now.

Matt Tompkins: I felt there was an immense amount of shame and guilt that comes with addiction. Just as I know there’s an immense amount of shame and guilt that comes with your big, terrible thing. Your weakness that you perceive it as a weakness right now, that thing. You’re in debt to the bank. Six figures. You don’t know how you’re going to make next month’s payroll.

Maybe you’re struggling with substance abuse. Maybe you’re struggling with family issues, losing a loved one, letting down your spouse because you’ve given everything to this business and you’re not giving anything to them and you know it. You can see it, but you don’t feel like there’s anything you can do about it. Because if you detract your attention away from the business for just a second, it’s going to crumble like a house of cards. Cards. So I’m sitting there in the theater, I’m watching this Marvel movie. And yes, I’m a marvel nerd. I’m a fanboy, but bear with me. The Incredible Hulk Bruce Banner,

They have this this scene where they reveal Professor Hulk and he talks about how he has the best of both worlds. It clicked with me. It was this aha moment. And yes, you can roll your eyes at me if I had an aha moment sitting in the AMC movie theater watching an Avengers movie. Comic book movie. Yes, I know it doesn’t sound any better as I say it coming out of my mouth right now.

Matt Tompkins: But it was it was an epiphany. I said, why am I running from this weakness? Why am I running from this? Why am I not embracing this? And the moment, the moment that I embraced my weakness, the moment, the moment that I said, you know what? There’s the whole saying, I know it sounds cliché about not don’t be a victim, be a victor. But I didn’t really look at it that way. I looked at it as, There are two mats here, there are two mats. There is Mat who struggles with this addiction, who goes out and does things he should not do to his body. He almost died in the basement of his drug dealer’s house.

That’s not good. There’s this other man who’s fun and he’s funny and he’s entertaining and he has all these talents and has so much potential. But these two mats are at odds. They combat with each other over who gets control for the day. When I stopped looking at it that way and I looked at it like this these both are me. My strengths and my weaknesses are both me. And when I merge them together, I become the best version of myself. I really do. And it’s really the only way forward. To be incredible. You have to embrace the Hulk. You have to embrace your weakness, I feel, to be incredible, not just professionally, but personally.

Matt Tompkins: If you allow yourself to hold yourself back by ignoring the things you perceive as your weaknesses, it will lead to true failure. It inevitably will. There are all kinds of different exercises. There’s the Myers-Briggs, there’s strength finders. There’s all this these different ways to find out what your strengths and your weaknesses are. And that is very important.

I do believe that you need to know what your strengths are. You need to know what your weaknesses are. You can build off of your strengths. You can shore up your weaknesses. But I also believe there’s this extra thing that we we aren’t encouraged to do enough of, and that is to embrace our weaknesses and turn them into strengths. I will tell you right now, I can say this with 100% sincerity.

Honesty. Absolutely. That if it were not for my addiction, I would not be the person that I am today. I remember a few years later I was hosting a news talk program. I was like the three hour Monday through every day, Monday through Friday, three hour talk show every day. And I remember a couple of weeks into it and I thought, there is no way in hell I could do this had I not gone through my addiction, which sounds so weird. It sounds so bizarre, but I would not let you take away my addiction, my greatest weakness. I would not let you take that away for anything in the world.

Matt Tompkins: And that yes, I am considering the torment it put my family through, my friends and everybody, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything because it has taught me grace. It has taught me humility. It is humbled me as a human being, and it has given me the tools to overcome other adversities, other adversities that we all face, that you’re facing right now as a business owner.

So don’t shy away from your weakness. Embrace your weakness. Brené Brown talks about the power of vulnerability, how vulnerable vulnerability is a strength that is so, so spot on. Being vulnerable, being open, it not only helps you, it helps everybody around you in your circle. I mean, I started doing my one of the very first podcasts I did was for myself, and it was a podcast all about mental health and addiction. And I would I would get these messages from people that I knew or didn’t know, telling me about the stories of their kids, how one woman I knew her son and we we sadly lost. We lost him to alcoholism.

And she said, I wish my son and you could have shared this sooner. You could have helped each other. And that’s true. Now, to to bring this around to the important point of what you can take away from this today for your business and for yourself for growth overall.

Matt Tompkins: If you open up if you first step one, embrace your weakness. Don’t shy away from it. Step two, open up about your weakness to other people. When you do, you will be astonished at the response you actually get. We have this again, Brene Brown.

The story that we tell ourselves in our head that if I tell them I’m horrible at finances, if I tell them that I don’t know what ROI stands for, whatever it might be, return on investment. By the way, if you want to know, most people know that maybe I’m slow to the uptake. I don’t know. But my point is, if you just ask, if you just open up about it, if you set your pride away for just a minute and you talk to people, you open up, you ask for help, you know what’s going to happen. It’s the craziest thing. They’re going to help you. They don’t see it as a weakness. They’re not going to roll their eyes.

They’re not going to make fun of you. I mean, sure, there are percentage of human beings who are just total dicks, but I can guarantee you I haven’t had that experience and I don’t think you will either. You know, Joe and Chris and I, we talked about this early on about these episodes where. In fact, we alluded to this on the last episode where there are too many business owners who don’t speak up, too many entrepreneurs who who don’t say or share the reality of their situation.

Matt Tompkins: We try and live through this avatar world on Instagram where everything’s amazing. Everything is awesome. Everything is perfect. No, I’m a successful business owner. If that’s the case, then why do 75% of businesses fail in their first 1015 years? It’s because people don’t open up and a embrace what they perceive to be their weakness and then ask for help. Share it with other people.

That’s that’s true growth. It is. And the same thing that happened to this fictional character of Dr. Bruce Banner and The Incredible Hulk when he embraced the Hulk. No longer was he this beast, this hideous thing, this horror, big, horrible, terrible thing to be ashamed of. All of a sudden now is an equal part of him. And he became his greatest self. I’ll conclude this with sharing and I’m sharing this last because it’s a very it was a very emotional moment. And that was the first time outside of my immediate family, my brother and my parents. And Wendy, when I first shared that I was struggling with addiction, which was one of the hardest things to do. But I remember my my boss at the time, my general manager of the radio station I was working at at iHeart Media, and I remember that he came outside. I was standing outside and was just not in a good space and he could tell he came up.

Matt Tompkins: He said, Matt, what’s going on, man? He’s like, You’re not, you’re not yourself the last, you know, six months or more. What’s going on? And I was at the point where I just I didn’t care anymore. I was at the point in my life where I had major suicidal ideation. I was at one of my lowest points. I wanted it to end. By it I mean me because I couldn’t take this suffering anymore and I let it all out. I said, I’m struggling with opioid addiction. I’m, you know, I’ve been clean for 30 days or whatever it was at the time, but I keep relapsing and I don’t know what to do. And I am struggling with major depression.

And and I, I don’t see a way out of this. And instead of seeing an eye roll, instead of seeing him chuckle or walk away or any of those things that we imagine people will say, like if you said to somebody what your weakness is, you said, Hey, I’m I’m really terrible at math and I need someone to help me with my books. We think they’re going to laugh at us. They’re going to go make fun of us.

And the networking groups that said, no, they’re not. They’re going to do what They’re going to do what he did. And that is he gave me the biggest, longest bear hug I’ve ever received from another man in my entire life. And it’s still it’s.

Matt Tompkins: Still.

Matt Tompkins: It it’s emotional today to think about because the moment I did that and he followed that up by saying, Matt, get his hands on my shoulders, he said, Matt, my brother went through the same thing.

Matt Tompkins: Do you know how many people you work with struggle with addiction and substance abuse and mental health? Obviously, he couldn’t tell me there are laws that prevent that for good reason.

Matt Tompkins: But you are not.

Matt Tompkins: Alone in this. You are nowhere close to alone. I’m here for you. How can I help? Do you need some time off?

Matt Tompkins: Do you need.

Matt Tompkins: What do you need?

Matt Tompkins: That is how good people respond to you. So I go back to how we.

Matt Tompkins: Started.

Matt Tompkins: This, this short episode here. To be incredible. You must embrace the Hulk. What is your Hulk? What is your greatest weakness? In air quotes I’m doing right now. What is it? See what happens when you share your greatest weakness with somebody else.

Matt Tompkins: Bring it up in your networking group.

Matt Tompkins: See how many people and I would guess it’s probably going to be everybody sticks around afterwards. To offer their help. Especially in a community like this in Omaha, which is unlike any other in the country. Go. Be incredible to be incredible. Embrace the.

Matt Tompkins: Hulk.

Matt Tompkins: Now, caveat to all of this. Don’t literally hulk out in your own house, because.

Matt Tompkins: If you are a small business owner, you.

Matt Tompkins: Probably can’t afford to remodel your entire living room if you smash it all to hell. So don’t take that literally. Go embrace the Hulk and be incredible, because you are.

Matt Tompkins: Thank you so much for joining me here today on the podcast and thank you for letting me share this with you.

Matt Tompkins: I appreciate it greatly. Subscribe so you never miss an episode. And we’ll see you next time.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: Hello and welcome back to the Omaha podcast, where Omaha’s most successful entrepreneurs help you grow your business. I’m your host, Matt Tompkins, of two brothers, Creative and one of the biggest challenges for any business actually comes after you close the deal and make the sale, and that is to get those customers to come back and buy from you again. It’s not that they don’t want your product or service again or that they won’t need it. They will. It’s simply the challenge of customers recalling your business to keep it top of mind for when they do need you.

Recurring revenue is crucial to any business’s long term success, which is why the subscription business model is gaining so much traction and results growing from just 15 billion to nearly $500 billion industry in the coming years. Now we’re going to learn about how to create a subscription business model today from a woman who has done it herself. But not only has she built her company entry envy into a success story. Jennifer Colwell is also paving the way for more women entrepreneurs and women in the trades.

Today, we will learn how to create a subscription business model to bring your company those precious returning customers.

Wow. We gotta change up in the music today. I like it. That’s probably enough. Yeah, we’re good.

Matt Tompkins: Now, in order for me to properly introduce our guest here today on the podcast, I want to take you back in time with a not a fable. It’s not a fable, right? No, it’s a tale. It’s a piece of history. Charles Lindbergh, he is famous for being the first to fly the Atlantic. But who was the second person to fly the Atlantic? Don’t worry. It’s not a name that any of us remember, but his name is Bert Hinkler.

And how could you forget a name like Bert Hinkler? Now, we don’t remember Bert because he wasn’t first. But we do remember who was third to fly the Atlantic. And that was Amelia Earhart. So why do we remember Amelia but not Bert? Well, like Bert, Amelia couldn’t be first. So instead, she did like our guest. Jennifer Cowell did as well.

She created a new category for her to be first in. Now, Jennifer truly innovated with her business model, and she had to because she literally left behind a six figure corporate job. Nice, steady pay. I don’t know if I’ve ever made six figures in my life. I don’t know if I could leave it. But Jennifer did to follow and pursue her dream with entry envy, and she had to come up with a new way to generate that recurring revenue.

And that was the subscription business model. It’s something I stumbled into as well here in the world of video production and podcasting. But Jennifer had this this seed, this idea of a subscription business model planted pretty early on. And we talked about that my.

Jennifer Colwell: Freshman year of college. My marketing professor said, If you’re ever going to start your own business, which I had no interest of at that time, I just remember him saying, make sure it has a reoccurring revenue model. And I thought, What the hell are you talking about? This is Dr. John Hafer from Uno, and I asked him to expand. What do you mean? And he said, Omaha World-Herald a subscription model as basic as that, but gave several other examples. So it’s always been in my mind, how do you have a business that you ensure that customers are coming back for? So I go on and graduate from college.

I managed law firms for almost 20 years and the last ten years I spent in my head. And as I went back from my executive MBA eight years ago, I knew I wanted to own my own company, but I couldn’t figure out what it was I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do that had the passion. With that reoccurring revenue model. You have to make sure when you’re starting a company, it’s going to be profitable. And what? Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: I think that’s maybe I missed the that’s that’s the crucial rule. I forgot. That’s why this isn’t working. Dang it.

Jennifer Colwell: But you do you have, you know, you can love it all you want, but you got to figure out how to make money off of it. Right? And there’s a lot of people who don’t actually love their business, but they have a really profitable business, so maybe they enjoy the profits, but not the company. I wanted it all. That’s that’s what I always say. Dear Santa, I want it all.

Matt Tompkins: But she didn’t stop there. She didn’t just want her own success. She wanted other people to be successful as well, to elevate other women in different industries, especially in the trades. She shared with us where that came from.

Jennifer Colwell: It sounds altruistic, but I want to help people. And as the executive director of a law firm, my job was to make lawyers more money. As I sort of went back for my MBA, I still had in my mind that I was going to have a law firm consulting practice, and it was actually the process of writing a book.

Sometimes we learn what we don’t want to do when we put our pen to paper, and I was about 80% of the way through a book on how to manage a law firm, quickest way to establish credibility is to become an author, right? So as I was writing the book, I realized that I did not want to do that. I did not want to build this business. It wasn’t going to be something that I wanted to do. I had opportunities to buy other people’s practices like it. It would have made so much sense. But the passion wasn’t there.

Matt Tompkins: And then came the year 2020, which I’ve noticed a theme here. A lot of people seem to have found 2020 to be a catalyst in not just the obvious ways, but in the I’m finally going to take that risk. I’m finally going to see that idea through and start that business. It was that way for me. I mean, what better year than to start a brand new company than in the middle of a global pandemic? Right.

Jennifer Colwell: It was a rocky year. In 2020, January, I got divorced of 2020. Little did I know that COVID was coming two months later and would really rock my world even further. And I moved into a fixer upper in August of 2020. So I buy this house. My dad was a carpenter and has retired and I kind of grew up helping build our spec houses and on side jobs and just always around construction. So I did not know well into my 20 seconds that not every woman knew how to use a drill, right?

Like power tools are an okay thing. So I just start tackling the house one room at a time. And I came home every day and I looked at the outside and I’m like, Oh, it looks old, it looks old, but I’m out of time. Energy and money. So how do I add curb appeal without expending a lot of those resources that I don’t have right now? And so I painted the garage door, I painted the front door, and I went on a mission to find a modern house number sign. And that’s how entry and became to be.

Matt Tompkins: So the idea for entry envy is born, but it would be the subscription business model that would give this idea its proverbial roots in the ground. And just like the idea that seed that was planted by her professor in college, it would grow into a mighty oak. All right, I’m done with the metaphors.

Jennifer Colwell: The term mind blown is what I have absolutely said over and over. In 48 hours, I built this company in my head, like once I in the whole thing came because I had I had created this little sign on the front of my house that had a planter box on the front of it. And the planter box was adorable. But I’m thinking, Well, we’re in Nebraska. What are you going to plant in that?

That’s going to grow more than three months out of the year, and then you’re going have to water it twice a day and then it’s going to rot the wood and then you’re going to have water all over your front porch. And I was like, this is a horrible idea. I get it all done. And it’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. And I thought, Great, I have to do this every month. What did I just create? And it was in that same breath that it was like, What did I just create?

Does anybody else do this? So Marketing 101. Go find out. Go do your competitor research. Does anybody do faux floral subscriptions? No. Does anybody sell house signs with planter boxes that have a subscription or add on piece? No. And so it was like, wait a second, not everybody needs a house number. Some people are going to want their last name.

Jennifer Colwell: Some people just might want to say welcome home. Some are going to need a vertical, some are going to need a horizontal. And then what about the people who live in apartments or condos or assisted living facilities? They have a front door, too. So I created another one. So for me, I knew that you have to keep it simple in business. So it’s one subscription. It doesn’t matter what their sign looks like, it’s one subscription, and that’s what’s keeping them coming back every month. But then, well, some people might only want quarter from a from a, you know, kind of an affordability standpoint.

So we created a seasonal option. So the monthly one has all the holidays and the seasons and then the quarterly one only has the seasons. So yes, it was truly in 48 hours that it was like the light bulb went off and I just thought, I’ve got this. But then of course, as a part of that, I mean, I went straight to the spreadsheets and said, Can I how much do I think this is going to cost? How many of you know, how many widgets do you have to sell in order to be profitable? How long is that going to take? And of course, you’re just you’re guessing, but you have to go into it with a plan.

Matt Tompkins: Marketing 101. She’s used that term a couple times in this episode. And I’ll be honest, I do kind of feel like I’m being taken to school by Jennifer and that’s okay. That’s okay. I am taking notes. I’m a better note taker and I am paying attention. Unlike when I was in in high school and college, all seven years of college. But let’s not revisit that. I can attest to you that the subscription business model, it is a viable option for you. It is for me. It is what we use here at Two Brothers Creative.

And when we started out in video production, I had done videos, just, you know, freelance work here and there. I was working in radio and television, and you would do a video and then, you know, you’d do a TV commercial or a music video or a promotional video. And then you may not see that client ever again because they may not need another video like that ever again. So you’d have to go find new clients. It was really hard to establish that recurring revenue.

And I had that same kind of aha moment that Jennifer has talked about where I thought, Wow, we could take a podcast, could add high quality video to it, and then we would have both a great product for the client because now they have all these videos and this content for content marketing work great. They have fresh new content every single week with every new episode of their podcast. But for us from the business standpoint, we have a viable subscription business model. I know it’s viable because I don’t know how many subscriptions I have signed up for on my phone and then completely forgotten about just altogether.

And then I looked at my wireless bill. I’m like, What? What is this?

Matt Tompkins: In all seriousness, though, a subscription business model can work for you and your business. And if you’re thinking, No, Matt, no, it just doesn’t work for me. I mean, how would I do that? It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t add up. I don’t see that. I don’t see how that works. We’ll just take a step back and take another look at it like Jennifer did, like I did.

Like so many people are with these subscription business models. Odds are there is a way that a subscription business model will work for your company. So let’s get to it. Now. You have the idea, now you have the innovative way to be first in your category, in that new category, With this subscription business model, how do you actually get started? How do you actually put the boots on the ground and begin the work?

Jennifer Colwell: Well, I think that I’m going to go back to the basics. You’ve got to have the foundation. So I continue to do research and said, okay, I think I have a great idea and I and it can be profitable. If it works out the way I think it will do. I have product viability, right? So, you know, you have people who have already an existing business who may already have that product viability established. But if somebody is thinking about starting a subscription, okay, have you had anybody by this who is not a friend or family member? Right. Basic question.

Matt Tompkins: Grandma, would you buy some popcorn for me? Yes, It’s Matt, your grandson. The Boy Scout again. Right, Right, right, right.

Jennifer Colwell: Oh, I know. So, you know, I did my I did my research at a craft show, and I wasn’t even selling anything. I just exhibited as a as totally market research space, had five sample signs. And at the end of six hours, I had 250 email addresses from people that said, Let us know when you go online. We’d like to buy one. Oh, okay. Hold on. I think I’ve got something here. So then I had 20 years of managing, of managing businesses behind me, which was great. I had a lot of education. I didn’t have a clue how to start a company. Not a clue. I mean, that’s a whole different ballgame. So I think my my advice on that side is don’t go it alone. You know, I hired a coach to kind of help me with those basics.

We needed to make sure that we had the strong foundation to build the company. I think, as you said, a lot of entrepreneurs jump off the cliff and then they build the plane. And to an extent, yes, we do that as entrepreneurs no matter what. But I’m I didn’t go into this as a hobby. I went into this with kind of lofty goals from the beginning and saying, okay, if this is where I want to be, how do I get there? And so I knew that I was not going to do a DIY website and then move it later to something better. I researched what’s the best platform to put this on, right? I made.

Matt Tompkins: That mistake. I may I admit I feel like there needs to be like a wix anonymous group out there. Just. Yes. Hi, my name is Matt. I created my business site on Wix. I know. It’s.

Jennifer Colwell: It’s okay. Everybody does it however. But I you know, I researched, you know, first of all, you have to have a platform to manage your subscription software. So what is that? And so, you know, there’s a lot of companies out there competing for that space. So what’s the one that fits your business the best? Now, as much research as I did, we know in the world of technology, things change. So the company that was the best one six months ago is no longer the best one today.

And as your company changes, that has to change. So I never say there’s mistakes. There’s feedback, right? There’s never failure. It’s just learn and move on. And as much as you try, you get it. So I also researched what are the top three reasons people subscribe and unsubscribe. There is a term in the subscription world called churn rate, and you know, this is basically how many customers you’re losing. I realized early on that a subscription based model is the ultimate example of of necessary five star customer service all the time because they’re not going to come back, even though you have them hooked, if you will, if you’re not delivering, if they don’t find that value. So the top three reasons that people subscribe or at least among the top three, are they have a need, it’s meets it’s convenience and they like getting happy mail.

People like getting presents in the mail. And the top three reasons they unsubscribe is it doesn’t have enough value, right? Like maybe it’s too expensive. They feel they no longer use the product or they have too much of it or they don’t like it, Right. But somewhere in those. So building that, it taking whether you have an existing business or you’re thinking about starting a business, you have to think about, okay, does my product or service meet those characteristics of why somebody is going to buy it and how does it ensure that somebody is going to not unsubscribe or stop getting it?

Matt Tompkins: Yes, there are no guarantees. There are no guarantees in life. My mom told me that literally every day growing up, she still calls me and tells me that I don’t know what her deal is. I don’t know where mom got burned with guarantees, but it’s. It’s true. Mom is right.

Yes, there are no guarantees. But what we can do is we can you know, we can we can hope for the best plan for the worst planning, planning, planning. That’s what it’s all about. So I asked Jennifer, what are some just simple one, two, three steps that can be taken to find out if your idea your business is a viable subscription business model.

Jennifer Colwell: Most subscriptions do not have a required physical base product and a physical reoccurring subscription product. So for example, Peloton, you have to buy the base piece of equipment, but the subscription is electronically delivered. So peloton’s limitation is how many peloton’s can they produce, right? But from the software standpoint, that’s unlimited. That just depends on the server size, right? For us, ours was both complex because not only was it a physical based product, it was a custom based product. And then we were delivering a physical product on top of it.

Now with that being said, ours is also unique because most subscriptions that deliver physical products have to project how many subscribers they’re going to have and they cap it at that point. So if you we’re in the it’s not only competitors, we don’t have any direct, but our space is home decor subscriptions. So the other home decor subscription companies are going to say, okay, we’re going to guess that we have 500 subscribers for this quarter and we’re going to buy months in advance from whatever country this amount of product, right? Because they have to be able to produce 500 of those exact same boxes that are going to get shipped to their customers. And if they guessed high, they have excess inventory. If they guessed low, they have missed opportunity on sales.

Matt Tompkins: Either way, it’s a lot of stress either way.

Jennifer Colwell: Either way, it’s a lot of stress. And subscription models very much can be for us if they’re a physical product for us. We went into it with the mentality that everyone was actually going to get a different end product because if I have ten women who all have their little welcome signs on the outside of their doors at the assisted living facility, they don’t all want the same thing.

Matt Tompkins: I’m hearing more of that standing out, being first in a new category like we started off at the beginning of this episode, innovating, coming up with a new way to do it. Businesses really just all about coming up with creative solutions. What creative solution are you going to come up with?

Jennifer Colwell: That is the issue is how many solutions can you create, you know, and don’t don’t even though, yes, a subscription model, there’s some outline and framework. You don’t have to stay within it. We are doing it very different and I am totally good with that. As long as you can figure out how to make sure it’s profitable.

Matt Tompkins: Yes. And that’s the thing. You have to make a profit. You have to make money to stay in business or you won’t have a business for very long. To quote Steve Martin from the movie The Jerk. Oh, so it’s a profit deal. Somebody hates these cans. So what is next? What is the next phase for Jennifer? Her success at Entry Envy has set up her next success, which is focused on on helping more women, specifically in the trade industries.

Jennifer Colwell: So going back to that whole mission of getting women in the trades, what I think is important about the women in the trades issue is it’s really a complex societal issue, more so than it is a logistics. And what I mean by that is there are lots of women and other minorities who would be interested in going into the trades, but we’re not even making them aware of the opportunity necessarily, because that’s not the conversation we have been overly successful as a society, sending every single person to college that we possibly can for the last 35 years to the point we’re graduating more women in both law school and medical school than we are men. Now, over the course of the last ten years.

And that’s that’s faint. That’s wonderful. But the problem is, is right now in the trades piece, it really, truly has a shelf life. You cannot lay drywall when you’re 80 years old. You can practice law when you’re 80. But the trades has a shelf life for every one young person we have entering the trades right now, we have 3 to 5 that are retiring and the shortage of workers is exponentially.

Jennifer Colwell: We talk about the we talk about the subscription industry exponentially increasing in revenue and profit. We are going to have an economic infrastructure crisis because not enough people are going to there. Now, the good news is, is that this is a quick solution because it’s not like we have to go have ten years of education to get doctors trained. We can create people working in this space fairly quickly. My piece of this puzzle has something to do with being able to build entry and B as a platform to have conversations with a lot of the customers that I have are moms and helping shift that.

We are employing several high school girls and young college girls already that are helping with build the signs and the construction side of it and painting them. And I will continue to be able to do that. I will never outsource this piece because I think it is so important and providing that positive space for leadership to help them learn.

Matt Tompkins: I remember when I finally graduated college after just seven and a half years, I didn’t have a doctorate. No, I just had an undergrad and I worked in radio in broadcasting. So that degree really didn’t do much for my line of work. But I was I was having a party. I was celebrating. And Gary Sattelmaier, who I worked with at the time, and radio, he came up to me and he said, Matthew, congratulations.

And I said, Congratulations for what? I have this degree. It feels meaningless. It’s not like I need this this degree to push buttons on a board. And he said, no. He said, Matt, you you know what? That that piece of paper means? It means that you finish something. And you know, Gary was right.

I did finish something. I just wish it didn’t cost me $40,000 in student loans to finish. Figure out what works for you. To recap this episode here, we talked about the basic principles of marketing, as Jennifer did with entry envy. Be first in your category or create a new category. You can be first in. You must innovate, do the market research, do the homework, do the testing,

Find out if it’s a viable business idea or a viable product. And do not discount the subscription business model. It really can work for just about any product or service. But you have to do the hard work. You have to do the boring shit. As Jeremy Asman describes it. You have to do the math, the projections, find out if this is going to work. You can find out more details on entry envy. And our guest today, Jennifer Colwell, in our show notes. The links are there for you now, including that subscription business model.

Find out if it’s a good fit for you and your business. Speaking of subscription models, that’s what this is, this podcast. Subscribe now so you never miss an episode and don’t know about you.

But I’m digging the music this week. I don’t know who’s in charge of the tunes. Ben, was that you? Nice job. Good job. Yeah. Okay. It’s not that impressive.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: An overnight success 15 years in the making. I love this line because it captures the moment where the dream meets the reality. Hello and welcome back to the Omaha podcast, where Omaha’s most successful entrepreneurs help you grow your business. Now we all have a dream. We all start out with a dream, and a dream is important. That’s what fuels your passion.

But how do you go from having a dream to accomplishing your dream? Okay, I admit that sounded really vague. Sounded like it could be a instagram post with a cat or something. Hashtag mondaymotivation. Let’s make it more specific.

Let’s make it more real. How do you go from being a company that is literally just you working in your own basement on a card table that you found stuffed in the corner of the laundry room that your Aunt Rita just happened to leave by mistake a couple Christmases ago? How do you take this company from your basement with no windows and Aunt Rita’s card table desk to being a company that is worth millions and has over 300 people working for it? Fortunately, we have somebody who can answer that very specific question because they did it.

Our guest today on the podcast is Van DB. He returns to the show and we’re going to keep it simple. Van is going to give us the practical methods, the techniques that you can implement for your company today.

Matt Tompkins: Today. I’m excited to hit on some. This is something every business owner, every entrepreneur aspires for dreams of. Is the business just taking off and scaling? And you hear that term and some of these buzzwords like scaling and growth and KPIs and you know, they it can get overwhelming. And, you know, we buy all these books and we listen to these people who have been there, done that. It still can feel very overwhelming.

And so hopefully today what I’d like is you do a great job of, you know, the KISS methodology of just keep it simple, stupid, so important, which, you know, knowing me and how slow, you know, how slow I am and absorbing information. But let’s simplify this for for business owners here in Omaha who want to see that type of growth. So the first thing I want to ask you about is how do you get started? What is the first step? Because you and I both started literally in our basements with both of our companies.

We did. And tell me like, what was the what was the beginning stages of of DB Realty? What did that look like back then and how did you get that ball rolling?

Van Deeb: So, you know, it started out in 1983. So 2023 will be my 40th year in real estate. Congratulations. Thank you. And in 1983, I started working for another company and I worked for another company for ten years, which I really encourage entrepreneurs just like you.

Did you work for another company and learn as much as you possibly can before you start your own. I know so many entrepreneur entrepreneurs that just want to start out. They want to, you know, they they want to bypass being in the ditch. They just want to go straight to owning their own business.

Matt Tompkins: It’s like the social media, you know, 15 seconds of fame approach where No, no, no, no, no. I just got to put it out there. As long as, you know, I think it’s good I’m going to be a millionaire tomorrow. And people think that with social media, I’ll create my TikTok dance challenge, and tomorrow I’ll be signing endorsements for McDonald’s. Yeah, exactly. And then it doesn’t happen. And there’s this real, real cold, rude awakening when it doesn’t happen and you don’t know what to do.

Van Deeb: Yeah, well, you know, if you’re going to grow a company, you’ve got to have people that believe in you and trust you and want to emulate you. Well, if you haven’t been there and done that, why would somebody do that? So I started out selling real estate. I didn’t know anything about it. I was a sponge. A sponge, a sponge. I had a car that wouldn’t go more than 40 miles an hour. I had no money. I waited tables to feed myself. And so. Did you have a.

Matt Tompkins: Daughter at this time, too? Right.

Van Deeb: I had a daughter maybe six years later. Okay.

Matt Tompkins: So it was still pretty, pretty early on, right?

Van Deeb: Mean still pretty early on. And I’m learning the ropes and, you know, I just wanted to be a sponge. I tried to learn as much as I can. So when I did open up my own company out of my basement in 1993, the risk factor was minimal because I’ve already been there and done that. I’ve watched brokers, I’ve watched real estate business owners. But one thing I went in my company, a mission is I wanted deep realty, which they are continuing that at Nebraska Realty today.

I wanted that company to be known for one major, major component, and that was this company knows how to treat people. And I want to tell you, the majority of the real estate companies out there, if the broker owner said jump, the real estate agent would say how high? It was quite the opposite of the model that I built. My model was built on, and it was very unique. And I know it may be common sense to you, Matt, but it wasn’t to people in my industry. In my industry. Here’s the broker, here’s the agent, here’s the client. Well, the broker is trying to really impress the client. They’re doing everything they can to attract the client, and they’re telling the agent, This is what you have to do.

Van Deeb: This is our policy. At 113 in the afternoon, you’re you’re allowed to go to the bathroom. I mean, it was that kind of dictatorship. And I’m like, Dude, real estate agents keep your lights on. They’re your boss. It’s quite the opposite. So when I built my company, if an agent said Jump, I said, How high? So people knew in my actually our motto that was on the door.

A company built by agents for agents. So all of the little things which you’ve talked about a lot in our, you know, years of friendship, that it’s the little things that mean the most. And I agree with you, Matt. And so I did the little things that the other companies did not do to make the agent feel like it’s their company. And all I am is support staff. So I had to prove that I had a cubicle the same size as theirs. I could barely get my. On it. You know, I was not the big cheese. I may have owned it, but I’m an equal person and that’s what I wanted to portray. I’m there to help you.

Matt Tompkins: And showing them that you’re willing to do the same exact work that they’re doing and you’ve done it before. And so there’s a level of respect there. I think, you know, when I look back at your comment you just made there, and I look back at when we started out with my brother and I starting with the TV show editing out of my basement, the two of us crammed in a makeshift bedroom office, editing all hours of the night. And and we had we would have to sneak into our dad’s church.

He was a pastor of a church in Bellevue. We would sneak into their basement banquet hall at like 9:00 at night on Saturdays because nobody was up there. And we would use that for our well set up and film, like guerilla filming all these comedy bits and then go home and edit and put it together. And it was that way for the first three, four years. And, and you know, I look back on it now and it’s, it’s, it’s amazing that we pulled it off. It’s a.

Van Deeb: Great show.

Matt Tompkins: I loved watching it but yeah like that was where we cut our teeth and cut our teeth there. We started with one camera, four lights. That was back when we were still using bulbs that blew fuses and everything. And I look around now at what we have today, and even the last season of that show, we had 23 people volunteering to just be a part of that show, writing and acting and stuff.

Van Deeb: And people say, people still say today that you guys made a Heisman Trophy winner. Funny.

Matt Tompkins: We did. Yeah, we did. Two of them, actually. Yeah, we had Johnny Rodgers. Yeah, right. So so getting started, you know is but that time you put in people kind of they don’t acknowledge that they see rags to riches. They think, okay, he was I didn’t know he was a millionaire yesterday. Now he is. Oh, it must have he must have been the Mega millions winner. And the reality is there, you know, for us to have this the success we’ve had over the last couple of years and the same thing with your company, when you started it in 93, you had a decade, 15 years of building up to that moment to where you had built these relationships and trust. And, you know, you’ve been there, done that. So that that’s a way, I think, to recommend to people to eliminate some of the risk financially is, you know, start building up clients on the side.

That’s what we did was build up enough clients to where now we’re making as much as we’re making with the full time job, we can step back from that and then keep building. It doesn’t have to be overnight, and it usually isn’t overnight. No.

Van Deeb: You know, it’s kind of a funny cliche that I hear is, you know, I was an overnight success. It only took 15 years, you know, because it’s the truth. There’s no such thing to me as an overnight success. Yeah, there’s a lot of work that goes involved in it, but you have to be willing to do the work. It’s the four letter word, w-o-r-k. And you know, with that, to me, if you’re a hard worker, you’re on a level playing field, you know, with the best of the best. We competed with a Warren Buffett owned company.

And one of the coolest things that I’ll ever remember is when groups of real estate professionals from this Warren Buffett owned company would migrate to my company. And it just was a real excitement because they had a lot more to offer technology wise, luxury offices. But what we had to offer, we’d had the culture, right? Yeah. The least attractive offices of any real estate company, the least attractive people made fun of me because our desks, they called government issued. They were the old metal desk that nobody wanted, so I got them for free. But people came there. It was a real testimony of we’re treated like we matter. And our culture, our culture is all about what’s important to the real estate professional.

Matt Tompkins: It’s a good exercise for any business owner to go to all their clients and ask them, Why me? Why choose me? Or you’ve made this point to me in past conversations of if you lose a client asking why, why, why, why?

Van Deeb: What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong? You’re very important to me. Why aren’t you doing business with me? You know.

Matt Tompkins: And I look at that. I did that after, like the first year of doing the two brothers, just, you know, full time. And it was amazing to me. It was kind of eye opening. They said, Yeah, we get it. You have the cameras and the gear and I’m sure it’s expensive and it’s nice and none of that. I mean, yeah, we assume you’re going to have that. That’s just part of it. So that’s kind of like your desks. It’s like it was more about what we appreciate is your experience and you. It’s more about the people.

Like you said, you’re buying the person, not the product. And I think we look at like, okay, we got to have everything has got to be shiny. It’s got to cost this much. And we’re comparing and this, you know, fear of missing out, you know, life that we’re all pushing towards with social media. And, you know, in reality, it’s it’s how do they make you feel? How are you treating people and culture? So what did you do early on to create that great ineffective company.

In culture when you were starting from scratch, how did you how did you like kind of build the first initial few people to run with it? How did you get them to run? How did you decide what your culture was going to be?

Van Deeb: You know, the blueprint was people first. The blueprint was if we treat the agents like they’re our customer, we’re going to hit a home run. So I’m going to give just a couple of quick examples of what separated our culture with our competition and our culture. So, for instance, when you sell a house, usually the real estate agents waiting 30, 45 days, 60 days, or if it’s a new home, you might wait six months to get your commission. You’re on straight commission. You’re not getting a paycheck until it closes.

And so they may wait that long for closing. And then the company would send the check through all this process and protocol and the agent would get paid about 5 to 10 days later. That was not fair to me. I didn’t I didn’t like that. So this is one thing that we did different. If somebody had a closing at 12:00 on Friday, they got paid at 1:00. And we did that because we can every broker can if they wanted to, but they chose not to. The word got out, man, you close a deal. You close a deal and you’re working at DB Realty, you’re going to get paid immediately.

Well, and the co broker, the other person that brought the buyer or had the seller, they’re getting paid quicker, too. So our whole blueprint was what can we do to make sure that the people that work within the firm have the attitude of I get to go to work, not I have to go to work. So my goal was to have all of our 350 people say, I get to go to work today and it was up to us, the leadership to make that happen.

Matt Tompkins: And I’ve used this terminology for social media. When people are trying to grow their brand through social media of creating superfans and one superfan is equal to about 100 or 200 just casual fans, they will promote it for you. And so you you know, I’ve always been a big believer in pay people. Well, even even for me, there’s a lot of times where it was tough.

Like even today, I don’t take a big salary. I’m just covering my living basic mortgage and that stuff for now because I want to make sure the people that are working here are taking care of it and are happy and then, you know, rewarding people with, you know, praise and and, you know, constructive advice and and also financially, you know, all the different ways you can incentivize people. That to me builds such a great kind of repertoire with people that then if you get in a situation like we got in with with COVID, where everything’s shut down, money is dried up.

And the I think companies that were ran well, the employees said, we’re part of this. We get it. You know, it’s not anything you did. We can ride this out together. And there were companies that survived and then there were other ones that that didn’t that fell apart.

Van Deeb: I think the key the key is value added. We’re always thinking about ways to add value to our customer experience. We need to think of ways to add value to the people we work with. And I’m a big fan of action. You know, don’t tell me, show me. Don’t tell me you love me. Show me you love me so I can’t right now. Van, the camera. We can talk about that later.

Matt Tompkins: Okay.

Van Deeb: So like, for instance, I want to give you an example. When I built another, I started another company two years after I sold DB Realty. But this one is designed to keep super, super small, very small. And the agents I have now, of course, I get the check, the broker gets their commission check. What can I do to show value? I cut the check the second it comes in and I take it to their home. I drive it to their house and I leave it on their front door or I let them know I’m coming. That’s value added.

Matt Tompkins: Little things too, like along those lines. And I can’t take credit for this because my wife is really she’s hardcore into crafting, so she makes stationery and cards. But I’ve done that with you and other clients where just putting together a thank you card way cool, which, you know, it’s a homemade thing and you don’t throw it away. You write a nice, you know, sincere message in there.

And, you know, we had a project, I think, when we were working on something for you where it was there was just unforeseen circumstances that delayed it and you did a lot of value added and it’s like, you know what? Like and I was clear about it from the beginning, this is what’s going on. But, you know, when you when you have that that culture it between your your employees and yourself and with your your clients, your customers there’s a lot of leeway. And they will they will ride it out with you because again, it’s about believing in you. What are some of the things like that? People when your business starts growing, you’re starting to become a decent sized company.

You know, you’ve got 50 agents and maybe then 100 agents. At what point did you hit a inflection point before things got really big? Up to the point when you when. You sold DB Realty? We had 350 agents. So what was it like? Was it 150, 200 agents or employees to where you’re like, okay, this turned into a whole new level of Super Mario Kart. I got to, like, really, you know, I got to get my practice time in.

Van Deeb: Yeah, actually, this may sound a little strange, but I liked the company better when there was ten people. Really? I just. Yeah, it got the smaller. It got really big. And I’m. I was very grateful, but I liked the family style business when it was smaller, like I have right now with Big Omaha Realty, just a really small company. It’s very manageable and we’re having a really good time. But you know, it’s people and you know, I had such great humans that ran DB Realty. I was not the reason. Db Realty was successful. Db Realty was successful because of guys like Andy Alloway, Christy Barrett, Christy Lisi.

Matt Tompkins: And he’s taken.

Van Deeb: The he’s taken the.

Matt Tompkins: Lead.

Van Deeb: With. Yeah, he’s got one of the largest companies in the whole state now. Incredible. Yeah. And it’s the same staff that I had.

Matt Tompkins: But you know, we’ve got personal friends that work there, you know, shout out to Angela Starks who works there. Good friends with Wendy. And they’re just like the best people there. The people give a.

Van Deeb: Shout out to Angela Starks, too. She’s a great gal.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, she’s she’s fantastic. But she’s the kind of person you’re around and you just feel better after being.

Van Deeb: And they promote that. That’s the culture and.

Matt Tompkins: That’s what it’s. But that’s what you want to create.

Van Deeb: But, but, but there’s a real estate company in Omaha and I people know me that I don’t have a filter, but I’ll be very careful today. You don’t. And but there’s a real estate company in Omaha that has been around since 1857. I won’t tell you the name, but they continually have the same amount of agents. They should have 3000 agents. They just should. They’ve been around for 200 years, but they always have around 400 agents. You know why? Because they treat people poorly.

Their culture, not good turnaround. If you go in there to one of their offices and the first thing you see is a frown on a receptionist, you know that the culture is something wrong. So it’s it’s a choice. Either the leadership is going to implement a great work environment. You treat everybody like they matter or it’s going to be the opposite. And we believe that you treat people like they matter. Now. It’s not just people that worked at DB Realty. It was every agent out there and they admired that. They admired that we’re giving them the same respect that we do or that we did our own agents.

Matt Tompkins: I’m curious too, with with when things started scaling on the size and just pure volume of that many people to manage and the revenue and all that. Um, how important was it to have systems like we’ve talked a lot with some of our clients about and we’re in the process of this, of creating processes and procedures so that the quality doesn’t suffer. And it’s, you know, you follow these steps and you can do execute this sale of this home just as good as Agent C, d E so that you can increase that volume. Because otherwise I’ve noticed it’s hard when it’s when it’s all in the owner’s head and nobody else knows what we’re supposed to do or how we get to that, the expectations or standards of quality, you know, putting it down in writing, did you have a metamorphosis with that from where you started at home to.

Van Deeb: Yeah. So we managed by committee. I mean, I would come in to, you know, committee meetings with our staff and I would have these ideas of what we should be doing da da da. And somebody, maybe one of the admin people will say, Hey, what if we did it this way and that way? And I’d say, That’s a better way. Let’s do it your way. I think you’ve got to listen to the people that have that are interested in growing the company and always be willing to change. I would go into a situation which this is the way we’re going to do it, where this is it and I’ll leave there doing it completely different.

Matt Tompkins: And you mentioned that a few times now it sounds like it’s a recurring theme of having the right people, having the right team, especially your leadership team. It starts there. That’s your foundation, your leadership team and your core values. Knowing what are your company’s core values. If you scale off of those, off of that and you don’t have those two things figured out or in place, it’s you’ve got a house of cards that could collapse at any moment. Yeah, I’m sorry, what we like the last as we wrap up here, what are the last few big lessons learned or pieces of advice you can give to our our entrepreneur listening right now who hasn’t again, just at the beginning ways they could maybe accelerate the process if they want missteps to avoid pitfalls like what’s your kind of top three takeaways?

Van Deeb: One of the things I would say is if you know, you want to get in a certain industry and you want to own your own business, go work in that industry. Don’t own it. Go work there for a couple of years. Make sure that’s what you want to do because it can be very costly if you just jump into an industry and you have no experience in it. You just think that’s what you want to do. Go work in the industry, make sure that’s what you want to do. Because working in that industry, like when I worked for another real estate company, I’m constantly thinking of things that I want to do different when I own my own.

And it makes you think, Gosh, if they did this, they’d be a better company. Well, I’m going to save all that for when I open mine up. So one is don’t jump right into it. Take your time. It’s not a race. Go work right. Go work for another firm before you start your own.

Number two is use the 24 hour rule. Words are like swords. When you’re starting out, it can be very frustrating and you can get upset. You can be confused if you have a challenge. Instead of responding to that challenge immediately, give yourself a 24 hours. Andy Alloway, my general manager, now the owner of Nebraska Realty, he taught me that and that it’s really hard, it’s really hard.

Matt Tompkins: It does. Therapists recommend that for relationships and marriages, like don’t talk about it for 24.

Van Deeb: Hours if you wait and Andy used to teach me that, wait 24 hours and I want to taste it. It’s amazing. You wait 24 hours the next day. The response may be no response.

Matt Tompkins: It’s like, what were we mad about?

Van Deeb: Unbelievable. But it’s hard to do because I want to respond immediately. So that’s one thing that I would tell them. And number three is be resourceful. When I first got in real estate, I knew I wanted to be the best. I wanted to be number one. So what did I do? I called up I called up the number one agent when I was in Texas, and I called up the number one agent in Texas. She didn’t know me from Adam. Hi, my name is Van DB. I’ve been admiring your success for a long time.

Can I buy you lunch? And I went to have lunch with her. She didn’t know me from Adam, but I used my resources just like you do when you have a question, you call up. People took her to lunch and I left there after that lunch. So high of emotion and excitement that I couldn’t talk because I would have stuttered the whole time I was so high because I left there going. And if we had cell phones back then, I probably would have called everybody, Hey, I just had lunch with Mary Harker and she’s this.

And I left there feeling she’s no different than me. She just worked hard, disciplined, drive, desire and determination to be the best I have that I can do it, too. And the biggest turn on is three years later I was above her for for volume and sales. But it did something to me. It did something to me knowing I’m with the number one agent and she eats like I do. She uses a fork, she talks like I do. What’s different? Drive, desire, determination and discipline. And I and we all have the ability to to really bring those four characteristics. Yeah, it.

Matt Tompkins: Works the same way with health, physical health, trying to lose weight where if you stick to it on a diet and you’re good for 2 or 3 months, you see great results. And then we just throw in the towel and we go back to old unhealthy habits and it all comes back and then some.

Van Deeb: And I want to invite your audience. I want to invite your audience to to look at Facebook and look at Matt Tompkins with his shirt off. The guy is preaching the word. He looks darn good.

Matt Tompkins: But people ask me that all the time. Just yesterday. So what are you doing? What is the secret? Are you how often discipline weights? I’m like, I lift weights once or twice a week. It’s nothing, but it’s discipline. With the nutrition, it’s discipline. There are no cheap meals and.

Van Deeb: You don’t put poison in your body. That’s a big part of it. I try.

Matt Tompkins: Not to. I mean, every now and then, you know, it’s Friday night. We’re out for kicks, you know. You want some some rat poison. No, I’m kidding. But. But yeah, but it’s the same. It’s. It’s a minute by minute, day by day, week by week, month by month process. You have to fully commit and stick with it.

Van Deeb: And being successful is not results. Yeah. Being successful is not an 8 to 5. It’s 24 over seven. And you got to constantly be thinking of ways to better yourself.

Matt Tompkins: Again, you can find out more about Van DB at Van db.com. You can hire him for your speak to your employees get them motivated get them inspired excited. He talks about so many great other inspirational stories he hasn’t even shared here with us.

There are a lot more and I think it’s you’re a great resource for companies to bring in and talk to people about, hey, I’ve been there, here’s how I did it. Here’s what I learned from my failures. Oftentimes more so than the successes, even the things you took away. So you can also listen to his podcast, check out his radio show, The Journey, and you got a newsletter you can sign. I mean, you’re just like a one stop shop.com, like I feel.

Van Deeb: Well, you’ve helped me with some of that over over the years. You’ve been a.

Matt Tompkins: Big I think I’m subscribed to everything. So every, every, you know, every I have.

Van Deeb: At least one subscriber. Yeah, but no, I just. Want to reach people. If you have something to say that’s going to benefit others and help people get there quicker. What are we waiting for? We’re supposed to help other people accomplish their goals and dreams, too.

Matt Tompkins: My new favorite line is we’re doing this. Love it. We’re doing this. I love that. You know, maybe doing different things, but we’re still doing this together. That motivates me. Van, thank you so much for coming on again. Appreciate it.

Van Deeb: I’m honored to be on your show.

Matt Tompkins: We’ll talk to you soon and I’ll hit you up when we’re ready to sell the house. You know, once this market gets not once. I can actually afford to buy a new house to move into.

Van Deeb: Okay. I’m going to wait outside, So when you’re ready, just come out and get me, okay?

Matt Tompkins: I will. I’ll be there. Thanks for joining us here today on the podcast. You can find out more about Van DB and his success story in the show notes. Also in the show notes. One clicky Click Linky link away from additional resources and support from us.

We love helping business owners like yourself for free. I know it’s not a good business model. It’s probably a dumb business model, but you know, we do it because we truly love helping you, just as others have helped us. So if you need help with anything from SEO to social media, YouTube channel, anything, if you just have a general question or you need to be connected with the Nebraska Business Development Center or any of the guests we’ve had on the podcast, please reach out and contact me directly today.

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Matt Tompkins: Is the Omaha podcast. Where? Omaha.

Successful entrepreneurs help your business grow.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: There’s something to be said for starting small, but every business wants to grow and scale to their maximum potential. So how do you build your business empire without sacrificing the very things that made your business successful in the first place? How do you stay true to yourself and your brand identity? Hello and welcome back to the Omaha podcast, where Omaha’s most successful entrepreneurs help you grow your business. I’m your host, Matt Tompkins of Two Brothers Creative.

Now every business wants to grow into an empire, but most do not. The reason they try to be something they’re not and customers can see right through it. In this episode, we’re joined by Mike Tyler, who built the Todd and Tyler Radio Empire with Todd Brant by following the same strategy as successful businesses.

Today, we’re going to learn how to build an empire based on who you are, not who you think you should be. I had the honor of being on our guests a radio show back in the day. It was an honor not to be on the show. I mean, it was. But the big honor is that I can I can say that I. I forced Todd and Tyler to hit the dump button. And I don’t know why. I feel like that’s an achievement in and of itself.

Mike Tyler: Yeah, you probably did. It’s been a long time since we first met. A long time ago. Yeah, exactly.

Matt Tompkins: We were doing. We were doing, like, a parody of a jingle about Johnson and Johnson K-Y lubricant. Oh, my God. And you can imagine where that went.

Mike Tyler: Oh, my God. Oh, man. Was in that much. But just, you know, the whole band was in. Yeah, the whole band was. That’s right. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah. Best part is my brother Ben was with. He was there and he was working some job, at average job at like a some place where they did blood work or something. I know, but he had the whole office tuned in. Oh really. And they’re all listening. And then I sprung this random, random jingle on them. And. But, man, I tell you what, Mike Tyler here, our guest, the Todd and Tyler Radio Empire.

Mike Tyler: Yeah, Empire.

Matt Tompkins: You guys, you guys are. Have you got your own empire?

Mike Tyler: We’re going to.

Matt Tompkins: Talk a bit about how you built that here today. But, man, I’ve always I always looked up to you guys the way that you guys carry yourself, the way that the ethic of like treating everybody with respect and and just being kind of staying true to yourself in the whole process, that’s a key.

Mike Tyler: That’s the key. Completely be true to yourself because audience can tell if you’re fake. Yeah, the first thing they can do, they can tell if you’re fake. And when we got it’s just a radio one or just the other one. We’re talking about the video. Yeah. Okay. I mean, so when we got here in 93. Shit. Yeah, we were just who we were. I mean, we was like, we had nothing to lose, you know? We’re hired from out of town.

We didn’t know Omaha and Todd knew more about the Midwest than I did. I was in the East Coast, guys. So at first I heard out to the Midwest, actually when I first got married for the interview. But yeah, we just we just were true to ourselves because, you know, I’ve never been phony about that. If you’re phony, the audience spots it right away.

Yeah, right. And granted, you exaggerate certain things in your life when you’re on the radio. You know that you’ve done radio for years, but you’re basically coming from the same point of view. You’re not faking it. And we were never told to do anything except we’re just who we are, you know?

Matt Tompkins: And you came into it, and I’ve had this experience once before where you come in after like a heritage show. Yeah. And you’ve got that backlash of people, you know, and I mean people, they just they just don’t know what they miss. The familiarity they missed.

Mike Tyler: No, that was yeah. We had, you know, you told about Otis back in the day in and actually we’re Facebook friends. Otis is a great guy but it’s been we’ve been here 2930 years now longer than than he was there. But no, there was a lot of there was backlash. But it was also we were doing something completely different. So it was like it was we reveled in the fact that we didn’t care about what would happen before.

We never we never really we never cared about slaying. I always thought we did. We didn’t we didn’t kiss the ring of anybody. We got the town we appreciate. Omaha was a cool town, I thought right away and everybody and a lot of people embraced us right away. But we didn’t have to kiss the ring because, you know, we weren’t from here.

We didn’t know anything about it. We weren’t Husker fans, We weren’t this that. We just came in with our perspective on things and people seem to enjoy it almost immediately. Hopefully. Yeah, they did, obviously so. But yeah, there was a lot of backlash. There still is backlash, you know?

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, I mean, but that’s that’s one thing that gets tossed around a lot today that, that we can hit on is that word authenticity. Right. Everybody says, oh, be authentic. And then you look on every single platform and like, that’s not nobody’s really being authentic. No, that’s true. I mean, true authenticity of just truly being revealing your raw self and your it’s almost like just being vulnerable in a way of like, you know what? I’m going to be myself and not hold back.

Mike Tyler: And no, we hate it. No, I mean, we’ve shared a lot of our personal life over the years and sometimes too much. I admit that. I think sometimes too much. But we but that makes you more human. I mean, that’s not what you are. Everybody’s got everybody goes through loss, love, kids, you know, death, all that stuff. So, I mean, everybody goes through that. So if you’re not living your life that way, at least the kind of show we do, it would have been phony. Yeah. Yeah. Because. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: And, you know, you don’t get the respect I think that you deserve from other people in the industry. Maybe I do think that is a thing. And that always I always question that because people would bring up like well you know you guys the Tyler they’re doing this and it seems to be working really well like no, no, no, no, no. You can’t do it. That you can’t do it.

Mike Tyler: That this is this is my pet peeve because you’re exactly right. You told me before about you going to bring that up. First of all, ratings don’t lie. We’ve been number one in our demos and a lot of demos for for since 97, you know, three years after and kicking ass. So I have no problem with that. The people and they finally let us in the Nebraska Broadcast Hall of Fame.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, yeah. And that’s me. Surprisingly.

Mike Tyler: Well, that took a while, but we had some people that we knew that appreciated what we did that were in that building, whatever that organization is. So I really didn’t care about that so much. But I, but I did in a way, because you bust your ass. We’re all in the same business. Yeah.

And there should be a nod to Hey, you. Did you do really well in the ratings? There should be that way. But there has been that a lot of it’s envy, jealousy or whatever, but a lot of it just people don’t do what we do.

And a lot of people thought originally, maybe even ten years ago, well, if I could shave dirty words and hang out, I’d be number one. No, no, you wouldn’t. People. It’s not the same thing. Yeah, you have to pick your spots. But, you know, it really never bothered me. Probably bothered me more than Todd in the beginning about the respect from. But we’ve done this so long now. Yeah. You know, my respect is to keep giving me contracts. They pay me well, and I have fun every morning.

Matt Tompkins: And you’re in multiple markets.

Mike Tyler: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s.

Matt Tompkins: That’s proof there in and of itself.

Mike Tyler: But once again the audience so I really cared about well advertisers too, since they have to pay the bills but the audience aren’t really cared about. I didn’t care if a guy and it’s funny about you mentioned some I don’t mention names but some of those radio stations companies in this town wanted us to work for them. Every time a contract came up, there was a little whispers, Hey, hey, it was that kind of stuff. So that was a grain of salt to me.

Matt Tompkins: And it was funny when we used to go as we were working for a competitor at the time. Yeah. And you would, we would reach out because we were also playing in a band and you went back and you used to have the local bands on your show for performances and we would reach out and you guys were like, Hell yeah, come on over here. More than welcome. Yeah.

And I remember we would get back and we would tell like, our, our managers I hit we were just on Tyler this morning and they’re like, what you were they let you Don’t they know where you work? And I’m like, yeah they don’t really care. Like, I mean, and which is a quality I think that is, is something to admire because there’s a lot of lacking of that in every industry where it’s just this mutual respect and it’s like we’re all in this together. Like, yeah, we may compete on certain things, but I mean, we have to hate each other.

Mike Tyler: Anybody that’s been in radio has is a kindred ship and a brotherhood. I mean, party, big party shows right down the hallway. We work with those guys 15 years there, but we hang out. We say, Hey, what’s up? You know, so it’s you. Of course there’s ratings.

You don’t get ready, you don’t you don’t keep your job. But if you don’t respect people in the business and say, listen, I did what you did years ago, I know that. Yeah. Yeah. I think you’re just a dick if you’re not really, which you might not like certain people in the business for other reasons, but if you don’t respect. Listen, we’re all in this business. It’s a crazy business. Always has been. And it’s even crazier now because nobody’s working it anymore.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, no kidding. Well, now, today I want to talk a little about like, there are commonalities in what makes a great a successful radio show and what makes a successful podcast. Both of those the same things make a successful business. And I kind of discovered this in the process of like doing podcasts like we do for our company and coaching people. And I, I started looking at this and, you know, this process of like finding an ideal customer and being unique, for one thing, being known for one thing and, and, you know, knowing exactly who you’re speaking to, you’re your target listener.

Those same things apply to a business, You know, who is your ideal customer and being known for one thing. And you know, you guys, I think if you look at any radio station in our even in our market, I think in any market, the ones that are the most successful follow that formula. You know, they’re known for one thing. You know, if you think 92, you think Todd and Tyler and you think, you know cat one of three, you think country music, you know, you think 16, 20, you think sports talk. That’s what it is.

And so, like when you going through your career and looking at what made you successful and from day 1 to 30 years later. Right. I mean, are those takeaways accurate? I mean, you kind of did you apply those intentionally or have you seen those develop?

Mike Tyler: Well, it’s funny because about 97 or so, 96, I think it was, is when we our the last time we played any music in the morning was about 96, 97 and we went all talk at that point. And so we were still related to the station because we’re still at 10:00. Music would come on. So yeah, and the format is still rock, but it’s also a little younger rock now. So that aspect, but we also we know who we’re talking to. Listen, that’s why we call the station down the hallway from us, the, the middle of station or the, you know, the girl.

Well, we’re playing Chris music now. Whatever. Yeah, we, we, we have different names, different I’m going to say, I wouldn’t say on the air here. So we know who our main audience is and that’s dudes. And then we always say, and girls that can women should be women that can just are just cool and they hang out. I’m not offended by stuff they listen to. So we know who that audience is. It’s just dudes, you know, of all walks of life, you know, suits, you know, blue collar guys, all that stuff.

And I think that because that’s what we are, we’re just regular guys hanging out. So we aim at that. They sell that a lot. I’m sure that’s what they do. And, you know, every kind of aspect of just a guy’s life, basically.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what did you think when you guys were kind of figuring out your recipe? I guess the formula for like, just, just your the roles on the show interacting back in the day, what was kind of the process you went through to find out, okay, this is what we’re going to be known for. This is this is our unique thing.

Mike Tyler: That was well, Todd and I were on the air together in Pennsylvania for about six months before we moved here. And we knew each other for about a year before that. So we. We we got along really well. We’re the same age. We made each other laugh, although we have different backgrounds to the rest of our lives. Growing up, at least we had. So we made each other laugh. So that’s all that was.

That was the core. We moved here with just us too. And of course, they gave us our news guy Craig and stuff like that. But obviously over the years we’ve had a lot of different people either have been full time or part time on that show with us. And for some people left. Some people left because they had to or we replaced them, you know. Yeah. And they were all great radio. They were. Yeah, it is. It’s just the way it is. They’re all great people. And they still, you know, people we work with in the past were great and people working now are great and things change and that causes some animosity sometimes. But, you know, we’ve got to just it it’s just a it’s still a business.

Mike Tyler: It’s still a business. So we didn’t realize, I think the roles Todd and I took on were just our normal personalities, you know? I mean, I was a little more hardcore about things, although the funny thing is I get accused of stuff that Todd says because he’s hard ass. And then Todd is, you know, Todd. Todd is what he is. He’s like my best friend and he just hangs out. We make sure that, you know, really it was it was more organic, you know, you know, you know, you play music.

You’ve been you were on a radio for a long time. You know that it’s a more organic situation. You figure out people’s strengths and weaknesses and you pull on that to make the team sound good. And and it’s there’s a little click in my brain when we’re doing the show. I’m thinking, man, I could I try to lead people in a certain ways. That’s their strengths. And I think that it became so natural without we just kind of we kind of roll.

Matt Tompkins: With it and well, I mean, like from a business perspective, I think that that’s a big takeaway is that we oftentimes we put people in roles and we don’t I mean, there’s a lot of different like Myers-Briggs strengths finder test that a lot of businesses do with their employees.

But I mean, and I think those are good because you don’t want you have somebody in one position who’s like is just big vision. No, no, no organization, discipline, super creative, and you don’t want them doing your books, you know, like you don’t want them doing something that’s just analytical process driven. So we try and we put people in these roles or seats on the bus that just doesn’t fit.

And then we wonder, Well, why isn’t this working right? And maybe find out where do people naturally fit organically and kind of build off of that?

Mike Tyler: Yeah, for the live show. Exactly. Because the thing about I would know how to sell a radio station. I wouldn’t know how to run a radio station. I was a music director years ago, but that’s nothing. I’m getting spam call.

Matt Tompkins: It’s great. Todd He’s like, Hey, you’re talking about me.

Mike Tyler: And oh, I just know it’s it’s our producer. I’ll talk to him later. So yeah, you could call me probably better, I guess so, yeah. So I wouldn’t do any of that stuff. So, you know, you work in radio sales, staff, traffic, the bosses. I mean, they all do the stuff they do because they do it well and then we do what we do well. So it’s kind of a well, those guys tell dick jokes and we go sell it.

So but within the the aspect of the actual show, yeah, you have to put people in the strengths that they are better at than, than other things. Not that they can’t expand because you can expand especially more get used.

Matt Tompkins: To it, but you wouldn’t have the longevity of the success you had if you hadn’t didn’t have those people in the right.

Mike Tyler: No, not at all. We’re lucky to have.

Matt Tompkins: And I think I mean to catch you up, but I think like in radio especially, that’s what I’ve seen as a commonality of shows that don’t last go to short term is that they’re trying to be something they’re not. Right. You know and radio is an industry I think is up against that problem big time. Oh yeah. With the syndication. Oh yeah.

Mike Tyler: Everything it’s there’s less, there’s less opportunity.

Matt Tompkins: I mean like my last radio gig. Well, second to last radio gig was it was seemed like the perfect dream job. And it turned out I felt like Bob Saget playing Danny Tanner on Full House, where it’s like, This is not me. I’m not this person talking about is crunchy peanut butter better than creamy peanut butter? Let’s do a poll and take calls. That’s just not me. No. And it just didn’t fit, you know?

Mike Tyler: And you’re right. Those kind of shows, I’ve known guys over the years that had to do shows like that, and they’re not like that at all. I mean, they’re not that they’d rather blow out and just be themselves.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, just be honest.

Mike Tyler: Yeah, right, right. Yeah. And, and they get stuck in that and that becomes phony to them too. And they don’t enjoy it after a while.

Matt Tompkins: You know, It was I’ve.

Mike Tyler: Heard those kind of shows. I know those kind of shows. I know guys. They’ve done those kind of shows, though, that also are those guys. They’re so straight laced off the air and everything. Say, Well, that’s that bitch.

Matt Tompkins: You, right? I mean, some people can pull it off. Yeah, but I just for me it did. I mean, I remember sitting there and I was I was in the bathroom one day just thinking like, man, am I. Is it because I’m depressed that I don’t like my job or am I. Am I depressed because I don’t like my job? I can’t figure out which one it is. Yeah. And yeah, when I moved moved was moved over to a different station. I was by myself, could kind of do my own thing. It was, you know, it was made clear to me like what was what was wrong or what the problem was. And I think we do that with with businesses.

We do that with people who are entrepreneurs. They’re like you guys, very creative, very passionate, got a lot of energy and they know they’re good at one thing and they want to maximize that, that one thing. And you know, so making sure. You’re in the right lane, I think is a is a big thing.

And you know, you guys did a lot of things early on. And even today, I know even now that you’re in multiple markets, but like the husk going after the Huskers doing things that were like unique to you made you stand out as like one in a million to differentiate yourself. Right. And I think there’s a lot of lessons that businesses can take away from that, too. Like, how am I going to stand out from everybody else in in my field?

Mike Tyler: Yeah, early on too, especially because I think I mean, it’s things they started narrow casting to. There were less shows like ours. I mean we in the beginning there were some shows that tried to be like us or try to do their own thing, but going after the same audience and and then then it kind of filtered away everybody. Now there’s just narrow. There’s just narrow things. This is what you guys do, this what they do. So that happened a lot. But but we you know what? We didn’t really sit down.

You know, I get a great story about I always tell the story about the arena. When we built the arena, I walked in that morning and that was back before we built before they got the vote in. To what? By the way, at the time? What was the question originally? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you remember back in the day, this should have been the mid, mid, mid nineties we because I, when I first moved Omaha I thought what a great city and the Civic Center was old a piece of crap. So they needed a really cool arena here. I said I never understood why.

And then there was a big vote and there was a lot of people, old people saying, I don’t want to vote for taxes. And so I walk in the top and we’re literally about to go on the air. And I go to Todd. I go, Hey, why don’t we say we quit if they don’t vote the arena? And and he goes, Yeah, let’s go for it.

Mike Tyler: So should we turn the mikes on that morning? And we started talking about dead. Hey, listen, a vote for the arena is a vote for us to stay on the radio. We’re going to quit if we don’t. And we had no other plan, and I always did. Todd, I said, what if that arena vote didn’t happen? I said, I said, we walked in and said, we’re just kidding. We’re going to keep working. So our promotions department put a vote for the arenas to vote for Todd and Tyler. And we put we put those things.

They were like yard signs all over, all over town. And we just co-opted that whole bit. And that was huge. Although it was such a whim, you know, our promotions partner got behind it pretty quick, but it’s such a whim that we just we wanted to be, although we were anti establishment, anti Huskers, anti Nebraska politics and all that stuff, we were still for the city. Yeah. And I thought that was I think yeah.

For the people we were still, I still, I still feel that way. I still think the town is a cool town. It’s grown so much in the 30 years I’ve been here and, and the people were cool, you know? So I think that you can still be both. You can slay the slay the sacred cows because they forgive you for not liking football or that kind of stuff. If you they know you’re stand for them. You want to be just a dude, you know.

Matt Tompkins: And I think, man, making you always trying to make the news or making by the news, what that means is not necessarily like traditional news necessarily, but but just even for for businesses to do things that help them stand out as that one in a million, because you want to make that connection. There’s this argument that I know we’ve had here in the in the studio about being is it better to be best or best known? And, you know, being best known is is going to win pretty much every time.

So you have to be known for something, right? Yeah. You want to be the best, but you have to be best known. And well, you guys were best known for certain specific things were going back to that kind of formula of like, you know, you have to be known for one in a million. What makes you unique and like, Oh, those are the guys that did this. Oh, those are the guys that are make fun of the Huskers. And you know.

Mike Tyler: There’s a double edged sword, too, when it comes to that, because you still get people that like I listen to those guys. Well, I don’t listen to them because they do this well, that’s one maybe 5% of what we do. Yeah, but it becomes that thing. Politics, the Huskers, things like that. It becomes that thing in people’s brain until they turn it on and go, Well, they mentioned it there. Well, I didn’t like that, but I like the rest of this stuff. So that’s a problem too. Yeah, it’s a double edge, you know.

Matt Tompkins: It is You kind of get typecast on.

Mike Tyler: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can be And that’s and that’s just that just comes with the territory though, you know.

Matt Tompkins: And Lorne Michaels has a great I was listening to interview interview he did once he was like on Marc Maron’s podcast and he said, I was talking about how how the people who criticize his show and they say, well, it’s Saturday Night Live, it sucks. And it’s not what it used to be, Right. They’ve been saying for since it’s been on the air. And he said, it’s not my job to make a show that’s 90 minutes of great show. It’s my job to make a show where there’s one thing people take away and they talk about Monday morning at the water cooler.

Mike Tyler: And that great line.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah.

Mike Tyler: I mean that’s that’s radio true Yeah you’ve done that to but we don’t know what that is but it’s it’s that but it’s also different in radio because that’s a skit show in radio and you should do your show too. That’s the thing you did word skit I mean you put.

Matt Tompkins: On that’s what it’s called. It was a skit.

Mike Tyler: I know, but I hate that term because I’m sure there’s a lot of work for you. I know it was. Yeah. But no, I mean, the it might be certain things with certain people. Like, we’ll get those emails. Hey man, when Nick said that or push a dad or you were. Todd said that or the call that made my day. But that could be something different for somebody else. So that’s all that matters. Something sticks out.

Matt Tompkins: And that’s like that’s how I mean, radio in our market, it’s based off of diary ratings, which is all recall, which is remembering and writing it down. And but really with recall of anything, if you ask somebody, okay and this applies to businesses which I’ll I’ll get to that in a second. But like you think if I ask anybody like who’s your favorite morning show on the radio and they’ll tell you, and then you ask somebody who’s who’s your favorite late night talk show? I love Stephen Colbert. Oh, yeah. When was the last time you watched him, Right? Well, I don’t even remember. It could have been two years.

And they didn’t even watch it on television. They just watched a clip on social media. But it’s something that stuck with them and they recalled it. And for a business, that’s what we mean by you have to be known for that one thing. You have to stand out and it has to be genuine. It can’t be, you know, we’re going to be the the business that does this when we don’t really believe in that. It’s got to be something that you’re actually passionate.

Mike Tyler: Right. Right. Well, you know, we do that within the show. You know, we turn down things we don’t want to do all the time. Guest You know, just certain ways we don’t I mean, and we’ve been our boss has been very cool, especially the whole time. They’ve been pretty cool. We had some run ins back in the early days, but they never tell us what to do. They don’t book our guests for us. We do all that. They never tell us, you know, maybe little too heavy on that. We haven’t done that in years with us because they just they they trust us where we’re going with it. You know, they might not agree with everything we do, but they trust us that we’re not going to cross certain lines, lose the license, things like.

Matt Tompkins: That. So the last thing I want to ask you here is with with building the literal named Empire. So as you expand it in the markets and you are kind of looking to because you started doing this, this is quite a while. I mean, people oh.

Mike Tyler: Six we went into Wichita, Lincoln, Springfield. Yeah, originally that was. And how many.

Matt Tompkins: Markets are.

Mike Tyler: You in? Now we’re in about still about six or seven. But the here’s the thing. You know, this been everything we’ve been on a bunch of different stations and the station just changed formats so we can forget what we were on once we were on a San Francisco on an AM station for about a year, which was crazy because we would have to stay on a little late because they won another live hour we were on in Montana just so we let that to Ben’s town or syndicator now.

But I’ll tell you what’s changed and what you’re on the on the forefront is the podcasting part of it because we although we don’t do a separate podcast, they repurpose Repurpose. Yes. Yeah. And that’s and it’s changed everything in our business because nobody has to wake up at four in the morning to hear us. They can listen all day long and and a lot of people do that. And originally I thought, well, why am I waking up at five in the morning? I still think that I should I could do this any time. But that’s expanded the audience. Huge. Yeah. They listen all they listen to anytime they want with the radio. And it’s for our purposes of what we did for providing content on the show made it huge podcasting.

Matt Tompkins: Oh yeah. Yeah. And to, to circle back. I mean what made podcasting great or makes is making it great today. Same thing that make radio great. It’s personality based, right? You know, it’s podcasts. They are specific target audience. So the people that listen to your podcast, they’re the same people that listen on the radio. It’s just now there’s you can reach more of them And.

Mike Tyler: You mentioned I’m sorry, the syndication part. What was weird about that in the beginning is we were afraid and we joke about this. Now we just we just say Empire City instead of Omaha and like 0607 because we we said we don’t want to act like we’re from Omaha.

Not that we’re afraid of Omaha. We just didn’t want going into these markets, not what’s Omaha, where’s it that blah, blah, blah. But then it became too phony. It’s like, Yeah, so you can still do a show at Wichita. We’ve been kicking butt in there in Wichita for years now, and they love us. They don’t. They know we don’t live there. Yeah, they know. I mean, and you know what? And if I didn’t live in Omaha, they wouldn’t know that either. I mean, they just it doesn’t matter anymore. Yeah, it really doesn’t matter, except for if you out and into appearances and things like that.

Matt Tompkins: With the radio stations flipping formats, people don’t know how, how, how.

Mike Tyler: That went. You went through a bunch.

Matt Tompkins: Oh my God. Yeah.

Mike Tyler: You know what, By the way, I’ll give you a compliment here, because every time you were somewhere, I heard you were somewhere because people liked your humor. They really did. I never thought you were given the right platform.

Matt Tompkins: No, I don’t either. I mean, like, the closest they got was like we thought we were going to give. Get that? Because we always wanted, like, a platform similar to yours. Yeah. No, it was like that kind of rock audiences where it fit the best and we were on was 96, won the Brew and we were on for eight months and we were doing this show and I remember we had this new your typical kind of corporate manager guy who just didn’t get human beings. I don’t think.

Mike Tyler: In general there’s a lot of.

Matt Tompkins: Them. So he would every day he’d critique us on this. Why did you do that? Because it was funny. I don’t know why. Why wouldn’t we do that? And then I’ll never forget that.

Mike Tyler: Why do they do that at all? When I hear that.

Matt Tompkins: We were at the well, was that the old you guys used to do that for years to the Memorial Day?

Mike Tyler: Bash Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt Tompkins: Or Labor Day. Bash Sorry. So it was like it was Labor Day. Bash We’re down there at the it was in at the it was at the Anchor Inn, I think. And it was we’re surrounded by bikers or rock CROWD. That’s it. They’re playing the rock music on the radio. We did our last call in. We get a phone call from our manager and he says, Hey, you guys just. Like, you know, we’re changing formats and we’re going to be 96 one Kiss FM now. And don’t worry, though. Big things in store. And I said, Well, are we still on the air? He said, Well, we’ll talk about it soon. We’ll talk about it soon. I’m got to call.

Mike Tyler: Things down there at that.

Matt Tompkins: Event. And then they flip the music. So we’re standing there.

Mike Tyler: Flipped it while you were live. Yes. At the end, the.

Matt Tompkins: Night after our remote finished, they flipped it and all of a sudden Justin Bieber music starts playing right away and all these people start coming up, going, What the hell is this like? And I’m like, I like, yeah, it.

Mike Tyler: Was that has got to be that guy’s around whoever he was. That’s got to be something that is bad programming.

Matt Tompkins: Oh, he was.

Mike Tyler: When you were doing a live event.

Matt Tompkins: I mean, his name was Rad. So I mean, it’s kind of self-explanatory, I think.

Mike Tyler: What a nightmare.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, it was. It was not fun. But I appreciate you coming on and sharing the insight here today. And I think there’s a lot to take away. I mean, like with the the growth that you’ve seen, the longevity, longevity that you’ve had and the success, I mean, you can’t deny any of it.

Mike Tyler: And that’s that’s the point. I mean, it’s a point and you mentioned earlier one more piggyback on what you mentioned about the best or best known. I think what you need to do, though, in any in any situation, you’re taking this to business. If somebody does have a strength and you mentioned that if you’ve got a manager pushing down and not letting that person be who they are, it’s just that’s a bad manager. Yeah, bad.

Matt Tompkins: Manager. It is. You’re right. You’re right. And there’s too many of those in any industry.

Mike Tyler: Oh, yeah.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, yeah.

Mike Tyler: Thanks, Matt.

Matt Tompkins: Thanks for joining us today on the Omaha podcast. Subscribe. So you never miss an episode. You can check out all the details and resources for you in the show notes, and we’ll see you next time.

Is the Omaha podcast where Omaha.

Matt Tompkins: Successful entrepreneurs help your business grow.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: Did you know that every day there are millions of entrepreneurs who don’t have a business plan. Many don’t even know what a business plan is. In fact, I’m not just a spokesperson here today. I, too, didn’t know what a business plan was. Hello, and welcome back to the Omaha podcast, where Omaha’s most successful entrepreneurs help you grow your business. I’m your host, Matt Tompkins of Two Brothers Creative. And in this episode, we will learn exactly what a business plan is, how to create one, and why it’s important to create one, even if your business has been open for years.

The Nebraska Business Development Center is back on the podcast to help you and maybe me craft a winning business plan for free. They say that a goal without a plan is just a wish. So what is a business without a plan? Is it kind of like that? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it really happen? Is it that type of situation? Where are you really a business? If you don’t have a plan, we are going to find out. Today we are joined by yet another member of the amazing team over at the Nebraska Small Business Development Center. Here we have Tony Schulz. Hello, Tony. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

Tony Schultz: Well, Matt, how’s it going today?

Matt Tompkins: And you are? I’m good. I’m excited for this because we’re going to talk about business plans today on the on the podcast we had Cathy on and she I feel like she opened this whole new world that many of us didn’t even know existed with the Nebraska Business Development Center, all the different resources and personnel and experts, a lot of it doesn’t cost you anything. It’s the basic stuff you can get. There is no no cost. It’s fully confidential. And I do believe her when she says it’s the best kept secret in the state of Nebraska.

Tony Schultz: It really is. That’s that’s why we do these outreach things like this, podcasts and events and things like that. People just don’t know about us. So and we want to get the word out in the services are free, no cost confidential. So why not take advantage of them? There’s no reason not to.

Matt Tompkins: I mean, there are legitimate services. We are going to do some episodes about how to secure government contracts, funding for your business idea, a lot of different types of funding. If if you are if you hit certain qualifications, you can get different types of funding that maybe other business owners entrepreneurs can’t.

But we wanted to start with a business plan and today talk about how to create a business plan because that’s that’s a step that I think most people just either don’t know exists or they just skip entirely. And that step one, it really is like, what’s your plan? What’s your idea? How are you going to help people with this idea? I didn’t even know about business plans being such an integral part of a successful business, you know, until we had Cathy on and then she’s telling me about this, I’m like,

Wait a minute, I’m like years into my business already and we’re going to get to that. We will help people who are years in. But let’s just start with the basic premise What is a business plan?

Tony Schultz: Yeah, so I like to if I’m going to build a skyscraper, I’m going to go out and I’m going to build this skyscraper. I’m going to get the metal together and the glass together and I’m going to get some cement. And am I going to just throw everything together? Probably not, because the skyscraper is going to fall over. It’s going to crush a car or two, maybe other people. It’s not going to be good.

Matt Tompkins: I think the same person built my my tree house in the yard.

Tony Schultz: Is a line just to fall on the ground.

Matt Tompkins: And that person was me just, you know. So yeah, so.

Tony Schultz: So if you’d had an architectural drawings and engineering some schematics, maybe the tree house wouldn’t have fallen.

Matt Tompkins: Over. Maybe a few less beers involved.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, Probably make a difference to better chance. Yeah, but. But yeah, I like in a business plan to really having those those architectural drawings, those schematics for a skyscraper. You want that foundation, you want that plan before you dive into it. Because if you just build it, a lot of times that stability is not there, that foundation is not there. And that’s what the business plan is going to do.

Matt Tompkins: And really, you see this in pretty much every other facet of our everyday lives. A plumber doesn’t come in and just guess where he’s going to drill a hole, you know, I mean, maybe there’s some do, I don’t know. Again, probably more in my wheelhouse of the capabilities there if they’re just drilling holes in the in the wall. But you need to know what you’re doing.

You need to have a plan. And, you know, that’s one of my favorite quotes. You know, if a goal without a plan is just a wish, you’re just wishing, you’re just dreaming, which is fine. But it’s it’s never going to come to fruition if you don’t put down actionable things that you can do. You can’t decide what to do until you know what you need to do. Right? So we talk about a business plan just being the blueprint, basically the basic blueprint. So how do people like banks, lenders, investors look at a business plan?

How does that impact their decision to fund a new idea from an entrepreneur, perhaps their first time? Like, how much does this really impact it? Because I think a lot of people maybe don’t think it has that big of an impact. And correct me if I’m wrong, but it probably does, I’m guessing.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, Yeah. If you if you go to any lender, any any bank out there, they’re going to want to see a business plan. And the reason is they want to see are they going to get their money back? If I’m going to loan you money, I’m not just going to hand you money and go, Hey, here’s 20 bucks. See you later. I hope I see you again sometime you return it. Probably not going to mean you don’t.

Matt Tompkins: Have to pay to come on the.

Tony Schultz: Show. Yeah, well, I take your money, I slip to you a couple of bucks earlier, but, you know, whatever. But yeah, so, I mean, that’s really the point is they want paid back. They want their investment back. The same with any kind of an. Vester So they want to know the money they’re putting into the business makes sense. They’re going to want to see, does the entrepreneur know what they’re doing? Have they done their research? Do they have the experience to do this business?

Do they have the background, things like that? And really that’s what the business plan does, is it sells the idea that this can actually work. So that’s the whole idea.

Matt Tompkins: And it’s selling it in a way that I think is more measurable. Know, you can correct me if I’m wrong here, but a tangible, measurable way to show that this is a legitimate idea that will work or has a good chance of strong chance of working because it’s entrepreneurs, myself included, we get very passionate. We kind of you know, I think Joe is who brought this up on an earlier episode said, you know, entrepreneurs, they jump off the cliff and then they build the airplane on the way down.

And that’s very true. That’s very accurate. We’re kind of a kooky bunch. We just take the risks, we dream big. But the problem the problem isn’t selling the big idea. It isn’t getting people excited. It’s okay. But now you need more than just enthusiasm. You need money, you need funding to actually make this thing happen. And those people, they want the data. So it’s the the the the sales pitch, if you will. And then there’s the data, the numbers, the facts to back it up.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, and that’s exactly right, because every business starts with a problem in the marketplace. If there’s not a problem in the marketplace, there really there really isn’t a business. You have to have that solution to that problem. So it starts there. What’s the problem? What’s the solution? And if there isn’t any, start over. Find something else. Because. Because you’re not going very far. Yeah, but that’s where it really begins. And then researching it. Who are my customers? Where are they at?

Are they interested in my product or my service? You know, is there a market out there and building off of that and seeing what it looks like and then figuring out what are my peers doing? So if I’m opening a coffee store, I can say, Hey, I want to make $5 Million in my first year in my coffee store. But when you go to the bank and the bank looks at that and goes, this is an accurate for for the marketplace.

What we can do at the Nebraska Business Development Center is we can do benchmarking. So if you come in and say, my coffee store is going to do 5 million the first year, we’re going to look at it and go, okay, what do we do? Omaha metro area coffee stores do for for revenue and we can pull up that data. We can also look at the expenses to the whole idea is to prepare you. So when you get in front of the bank, they’re going to benchmark your numbers anyway. So we want to get ahead of that. We want to have you prepared. So when you’re going in with numbers, you’re building your business plan. Those numbers are accurate for the marketplace. So that’s really what it’s all about.

Matt Tompkins: It’s looking at your ugly baby and just admitting, okay, maybe my baby is a little ugly, but he’s still got a whole life. He can grow up to be a very handsome George Clooney type. Maybe, or maybe just settle for a matt Tompkins type and just, you know, just be a local George Clooney esque. I don’t know why I’m comparing myself to George Clooney. Nobody’s going to buy that. I guess what I’m getting at is you have to admit the reality that you’re seeing because the bank is going to see it, too. The investors are going to see it, too. And it’s easy to just look away from that baby with your finances, especially.

I don’t want to reconcile my books. We just did a whole episode about why businesses fail in the first year, and a lot of it is just ignoring the basic things the, as Jeremy Aspin put it, to quote him, the boring shit, you know, it’s just the things that you don’t really want to do. But they’re not fun. They’re maybe not as cool or sexy to do, but they are the most important. And this is one of them, right?

Tony Schultz: It really is. And you don’t have to be an expert in writing business plans. You don’t have to have ever written a business plan before. The fact is, you can come to a Nebraska business development center, other community partners out there and get the steps to go through it.

And what I always say is when you’re writing a business plan, start with the easiest thing first. What do you know? You probably know the operations of the business. You probably have an idea who your customer is. We can do some market research on that, but starting with the easy stuff kind of gets the momentum going. So you don’t want to just sit down and start writing because you’re going to hit that roadblock and be like, This is boring. I don’t like it. Throw it in the garbage and try to go do fun stuff.

Matt Tompkins: So I think like just start a Google doc. That’s what I usually do with I mean, podcasts that we produce for clients here. It follows the same model as a business because you should treat your podcast as a business and that’s how it will be set up for success. Yep. If you don’t, it’s going to be really challenging to find that success. So we do the same exercises. Ideal listener, Ideal customer Who is your customer persona? Be very specific with that age sex. People want to say, you know, a person who’s 20 to 60 years old and man or woman, two, maybe four kids and like, would you describe yourself that way? Like, I’m mad. I’m, you know, maybe 20 to 50 years old and maybe 2 to 4 kids. I don’t really know. I don’t keep track of them.

But those basic things there, they’re really crucial components and. It’s not like it’s a super complicated thing. You actually know a lot more than you probably give yourself credit for. So as you’re saying, put that Google doc together and just start putting it together. Here’s who I think this ideal customer is. Here’s what I want to get out of the business. Here’s what here’s what my role is. Here are the other roles. I’m going to need the other people and team members, the seats that I’m going to have to fill, the processes, the procedures. How are you going to actually get your customer from here to this transformed place of the grand destination or the grand vision you have for them and what they’re going to accomplish?

That’s all things I think you have already in most people’s minds. It’s already there. It’s just getting it down in on paper, but on a Google doc or some form and then come to you at the Nebraska Business Development Center and then you’re the experts in putting it all together. Right? Bring all the ingredients to you and you make grandma’s apple pie so that I don’t screw it up.

Tony Schultz: Yeah. And we provide one on one free consulting. So it’s sitting down on a zoom call or even one on one or offices and going and saying, What’s your business idea? You tell me the business idea. We go through the business plan structure, talk about the different sections the bank wants to see, talk about the different areas. And then as you build it, we’re going to provide feedback. We’re going to help you polish it up. So at the end of the day, we want you bankable. We want you to be able to go in with a business plan and financial projections, hand them to a banker, be able to answer all those questions. A lot of people say, Hey, will you write the business plan for me? No, because it’s not my.

Matt Tompkins: Business and you don’t know.

Tony Schultz: Yeah. And how are you going to answer the lender’s questions or the investors questions if you didn’t build a business plan, if you paid someone else to do it. So that’s that’s a tricky part.

Matt Tompkins: You’re like ghostwriters with books. I think there’s a different term now. They change the term like when they just write the book anonymously and the famous person gets all the credit. I mean, it kind of it’s unfortunate for you because you deserve a lot of the credit. I don’t think you have to stay anonymous necessarily, but it’s similar in that they are the expert at what they do.

And you’re the expert with the idea and the experience and everything you bring to the table for this business idea. And I know that we probably have a lot of people who have already, just in the last 10 minutes or so listening, have Googled business plan template and or have maybe even already even downloaded it. Like I’m sure a lot of resources is Canva. Other places have these types of templates.

Why go with you guys over that? Because I think that’s the tendency is, well, I have to go down there, I have to schedule a zoom or whatever it might be. It’s going to take time. And yeah, they say it’s free, but is it really free? And people are skeptical. Sure. So they’re going to try and do it themselves with a free PDF that they downloaded. How is that going to backfire?

Tony Schultz: Yes. So if they get it online, I mean, that’s okay to start off. But the form that we have and we have connections with the lenders. So that’s the big thing is we know the lenders, we know what they want. So when they come in, we can show them, hey, this is the information the lender wants to see. If you pull something off of Google, whatever, whatever, whatever it could be, anything. Yeah. And we have literally seen financial projection templates that people have put together, their projections. We’ve gone through the formulas don’t match. Nothing adds up. The cash flows aren’t right. I mean, everything is absolutely.

Matt Tompkins: That was a question that you saw, was it?

Tony Schultz: I’m not going to name names or anything, but but good. It definitely was. We’re not naming me. Yeah, but yeah, that’s something that we see all the time is they try to pull it off the Internet, they put it together in the forms, not even right. So. So why waste time doing that? Just reach out to us. We’ll get you the forms, We’ll help you through the process. And it just makes life a lot easier.

Matt Tompkins: And, you know, and I. I did this similar thing just the other day with it was a proposal for a new account, and it was putting all my thoughts together in the Google doc and then organizing it based off of kind of the templates that I’ve used and put together and kind of tried and true.

And then the last step is then yes, you can go to Canva or Photoshop or download a template that fits your style, your creative vision, and plug this information in there and dress it up. So it does look you want to look professional, you want to look polished and legitimate. And I would say like, you know how they say showing up is kind of half, half the half the job, Right. Is just showing up and being present, you know, showing up and looking professional with your business plan, having a business plan, period, is that half the the battle right there alone?

Tony Schultz: It is really half the battle, because if you do that, we’ve had so many clients that have gone to the lender and the lender says, no, I’m not going to do the loan. Well, they didn’t even have a business plan, didn’t present any projections. And the fact is, if you’re prepared we talked about Boy Scouts before, you know, being prepared like a Boy Scout. When you go in, you’ve got all the tools in front of you. So when you present it to the banker, you have a much better chance at a yes in a business plan. Doesn’t have to be a 30 page document. It doesn’t have. Have to be a.

Matt Tompkins: Little.

Tony Schultz: Difficult. I mean, you can have if it’s a basic business, you might have 7 to 10 pages and it’s all information you already know. You just got to get it down on the paper, the front pages of the logo. The second page is just your table of contents. So and so there’s two pages out the door. Yeah, you don’t have to worry about anything.

Matt Tompkins: And then you could have a conclusion page and then a headshot.

Tony Schultz: So yeah, exactly.

Matt Tompkins: Now we’re down to eight pages.

Tony Schultz: That’s that’s man, you can dial it down. So, you know, we get some clients that they add some fluff in there. The bank doesn’t care about the flood. They don’t want to know the basics of what are the business. And a lot of bankers, there’s an executive session section.

There’s literally a summary of kind of key points out of the other sections. They’ll look at the executive section of the business plan and they’ll look at your financial projections. If they don’t like that, it’s going in the trash can. So those areas, the rest of it is all kind of just kind of the icing on the cake sort of thing, that if they have a specific area that they want to look at, they’ll jump to it. But building out those areas is so important. But if you have that ahead of time, you’re ahead of the game. You’ve got a better chance.

Matt Tompkins: And there is a certain degree of the adage of who you know, it’s all on who you know and the networking and relationships. That is a big part of it because, you know, there are a lot of business plans that I would guess are pretty close or it could go either way. It doesn’t look like it’s a bad investment, but it doesn’t look like it’s a guaranteed investment for that return either. And then that’s when that trust factor comes in. So if you are working with an organization like the Nebraska Business Development Center, which long name amazing results.

Tony Schultz: Nbc, you just go in.

Matt Tompkins: Bdc for sure. Bdc, I know. I always think I’m going to get the acronym like screwed up in my head. I don’t know. I put too much pressure on myself.

Tony Schultz: There a lot of letters.

Matt Tompkins: On my way in B C No, no, but the credibility that you lend to any business, anybody walking off the street who’s never done this before has no relationships or connections with these banks. It is a pretty low chance that if it is close, they’re going to say, Yeah, let’s go with this complete unknown wild card here, let’s go with Matt. Or would they be much more likely to say, Wait, Matt’s with the BDC and Och, well they’re legit. They wouldn’t be here in essence vouching for them with his business plan if they didn’t believe in this person. And so there has to be some value to that as well.

Tony Schultz: So yeah, it goes back to the point. There’s a section of the business plan where we talk about listing your your community partners or the people you’re working with, and it could be your banker, your accountant, your insurance agent, your lawyer. We call it the bail team. So if you put it in order, they’ll be going to bail you out of trouble.

Matt Tompkins: Oh, I have a different bail team.

Tony Schultz: Okay, well, yeah, that might be different, but. But anyway, the idea is they list in BDC on there, so the the lender knows they’re working with, with BDC. Now we can’t guarantee that’s going to be a successful business. We’re never going to call the banker and advocate for that client because it’s the client’s business, but we’re going to make sure that client’s as prepared as they can be when they go in front of the bank. The other piece that is you make a really good point. If you and I are walking down the street and I meet you for the first time, you say, Hey, Tony, lend me 20 bucks. Probably not going to lend you the money.

Matt Tompkins: But if I hang out the hard way.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, yeah. But if I’ve hung out with you and I know you and you say, Hey, I need a 20 spot, can you lend it to me? I’m probably going to lend it to you. Don’t make the first conversation with your lender where you’re asking for money. You have that conversation ahead of time. Let them know, Hey, I’m going to be coming to you for for a loan. This is my business idea. This is what I’m putting together. These are the people I’m working out in the ecosystem. Have that be the first conversation? Don’t be the first one where you’re asking for money, so it just doesn’t work.

Matt Tompkins: We’re going to be doing some some episodes about each of these different laws rules practicum to follow for marketing, which is marketing is relationships. It’s just the human experience, really. Yeah. The example you gave there is some really good things and I wanted to hit on that in regards specifically to the business plan here to keep it simple clarity, brevity, simplicity.

Those are what you want to lean on the hardest and don’t lean harder on creativity. If you try and lean too hard on the creativity and you don’t cover this, the simplicity, brevity and and just getting to the point short, concise. If you’re too cool for the room, it’s not going to work. It just isn’t. Now you can be creative and be cool in the room that you create within that structure. But you know, marketing and business, it is a science as far as what works. It is not an art, it is a science. Now there’s art in that science, Absolutely. And creativity is really cool to see how people incorporate it, make it their own. But most people miss that that step. So with your business plan, the tendency I write way too long emails my wife tells me all the time.

Matt Tompkins: She’s like, She even bought me a book. It’s just called Brevity. I had to write shorter emails. Yeah, my kind of book. But. But yeah, you want to be just short, concise. You don’t want the. What is it? The deal are too long. Didn’t read from your investors so be simple to the point and then you also you mentioned the the first impression you know how you present yourself. You can never change your first impression once it is entered. A person’s mind does not change.

Doesn’t matter how much money you spend or how hard you try, you will always be known as that first impression. And so keep that in mind. It’s important, you know, don’t like obsess over it where it freaks you out and you’re like having panic attacks like, Oh my God, But you have to have to give it some the respect that it deserves because you’re doing a presentation, you have the data, you have everything you worked on. But there are a lot of other components in here you need to really factor in and consider.

Tony Schultz: That’s right. And and you’re exactly right. I mean, the fluff, the little extras, things like that, not important. Get to the facts. Why is this business going to be successful? How are you going to be able to pay the bank back? How are you going to be able to pay the investors back?

Matt Tompkins: Wait, wait, wait. You have to pay them back. I thought it was like a gift.

Tony Schultz: Yeah. No.

Matt Tompkins: No. Well, that explains why they’re calling me.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The banks aren’t into the grant, so, you know, that’s. But.

Matt Tompkins: But again, shameless plug. That’s another area. There are a lot of other areas for grants, for funding for government contracts we’re going to get into at the Nebraska Business Development Center. And I want everybody to know this isn’t like a paid advertisement or anything.

We just kind of stumbled upon this hidden gem in the state of Nebraska, Nebraska’s best kept business secret. Yep. And it is. I’m a small business owner and I’m a few years into my my second run. My first run didn’t go so well because I did everything wrong. And to know that all these things are available and that they’re, for the most part, free and confidential, and there’s a place that business owners can go to and not feel judged, be able to ask the questions they may be embarrassed to ask out loud at their networking group, which we’ll get into that later, too, because hopefully we can shatter some of those the shame and guilt that we put on ourselves.

But man, that’s that’s what it’s all about. So we are really passionate about what you’re doing as well because it’s truly beneficial to the state, to small business owners. And we’ve talked so far in this episode about what you do when you are starting out with an idea and you haven’t started your business yet. I wanted to wrap up with a completely hypothetical scenario.

All right. Definitely not a real person. Let’s just say this person is Caucasian, male, 41 years old, looks more like he’s 31 years old, let’s be honest. Married in Omaha, Nebraska. Let’s say he has a as a production company or something in the media, maybe a podcast or something. And let’s say he’s, you know, a couple of years, one month, a few weeks into his second run at the business ownership experience, and he didn’t put together a business plan. What does this person need to do as far as a business plan? Is it the same process? Is it different? And then why do they need to do it at this point?

Tony Schultz: So that’s a really good question. Usually on questions, I don’t get as much detail as that. It’s interesting how much detail there was, So I really it was the more hypothetical. Yeah, I don’t know, for hypothetical was excellent detail.

Matt Tompkins: I’m the specific person. Yeah. As I mentioned, you want to be detailed and specific, right. We’ll call this guy. We’ll call him. I don’t know. Not Tom. How about Tom P kittens? There we go.

Tony Schultz: Tom Pickens That’s.

Matt Tompkins: A good definitely not.

Tony Schultz: Tompkins Yeah. Tom Pickens Okay. Okay. All right. So I would say if your artery in the business, things are going well, things are going great. A lot of people are focused on operational things, which is great. The part the business plan comes into at that point is what’s my next step? What’s my future look like? So do I want to buy a land in a building to put my business in, or do I want to go out and add locations? Do I want to expand things like that? And that’s where the bank’s going to want to see that business plan.

The investors want to see it. If you’re operating along okay right now, things are fine. You’re happy. There’s no reason to go through an exercise you don’t have to go through. But if you’re looking to the future, like, what’s my next step? What’s what’s the next horizon? What’s the next thing I want to do? Start thinking about that strategic planning piece of that business plan. And that’s where where it comes into play, because, again, the banks are going to want to see it. The investors are going to want to see it.

The other piece is if you’ve written a business plan, don’t throw it up on the shelf and let it sit there and collect dust. Look at it annually, check it out. What’s working? What’s not working? How do we evaluate who our customer is? What do we do differently?

Matt Tompkins: Make it part of your your strategic planning sessions for the quarter or the year, which is important to do that. I mean, we’re doing that right now, going through the whole process again of like fine tuning. All right, who is our ideal? Customer persona. And we’re it’s always the process of evolving and changing. So, yeah, you do. It never ends. It’s not like it’s just, all right, we’re good for eternity, you know? Yeah. But the risk is real if you, you know, there’s that Silicon Valley expression of, you know, grow or die.

I don’t know if we need to be that extreme or vote or die. Let’s just have nobody die. Let’s just say that, you know, your business can really start to plateau and flounder pretty quickly if you aren’t bringing in new business. And so if you want to bring in new business, you’re going to need new resources, new ideas, new personnel, perhaps new physical space, a lot of different digital assets you’ll need. So how are you going to accomplish that? You may not need to take out a loan, but a business plan not only tells the banks what you need, it tells you what you need. And that is a, I think, a step that most people don’t even think about. Or if they do, they skip it because they think, well, that’s not that important right?

Tony Schultz: Yeah. And the piece of that is look at your competitors. They’re not sitting there doing the same thing. They’re not sitting there stable and not thinking about it. So to stay competitive, you have to be changing. You have to be adjusting. You have to be adapting. Look at the time we had COVID, how many businesses it adapted during that had to adapt, had no choice. But I guarantee you, a lot of people that didn’t have kind of an emergency operations plan or emergency plan in place thought, what if this happens? What are we going to do? So being thinking about that all the time is really important.

Matt Tompkins: So and we were a company literally born out of the situation as a result of the pandemic that changed how we interact with video and podcasting and all these different marketing tools. So your I mean, it changes fast, It changes quick. And if you’re not prepared, it can just you can drown in it really fast.

And the stress level that I went through this this past summer over a three week period proved to me just how quickly things can turn. Just I mean, just letting off of the the gas for a couple of weeks and you can see immediate impacts that can scare the living shit out of you, just terrify you and put you in situations where that’s where a lot of businesses fail. That’s why 75% of businesses do not make it past the 15 year mark. You know, half of all Nebraska businesses fail and gets like 52% in the first five years. I mean, that is there’s are some staggering truths right there. This is how you avoid being on the wrong side of that percentage and starts with this and exploring all the other resources at the Nebraska Business Development Center, the Nbtc.

Matt Tompkins: That’s right. I need like a hat. Like a there you go. One of the, you know, the NB DC although it might get confused with like CSI Miami or something, so but we’ll see We can we, we’ll work something up for you. Tony Schultz you are the state director for the CDC and we have a whole bunch of different resources you provided there in the show notes. You don’t have to go anywhere. Just scroll down and click on them. Everything from a template for a business plan to some of the other suggestions and resources you have on your website. And there’s so many other resources to not just the business plan.

This is just one small component important. I will I will give you that, Tony, but it’s just one small thing. There is so many other resources. Every business in the state should know about this and take advantage of this. And I hope this episode has just blown your mind and change your life forever.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, and I think the part I’d add is it’s not just business plans, like you said, it’s financial projections, it’s market analysis. If you’re going in and look in a new location, you want market analysis on that, reach out to us. We do free market analysis. You want to see, are my customers living in that area? What are the household incomes look like? What are my competitors look like in that area? Those are great things, great resources that we have. We have a new tool and I shouldn’t say new because it’s actually it’s it’s birthday. I think this coming week is called Source Link Nebraska. Okay. So you get on source link Nebraska, you can type in your zip code, you can type in what area of assistance you need. It’s no cost, low cost resources that are out there throughout the entire state of Nebraska. So check it out. You need help with social media.

You type in social media, type in your zip code. It will print off and show you won’t print off old school, but it’ll show you on the screen what the resource partners look like. Yeah, you can download it. Yeah, that’s what I’m looking for.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, that’s really cool. Yeah, I’m familiar with that a little bit. And we do have listeners and Hastings and Red Cloud and Lincoln and Carney and all over the state of Nebraska, even all the way out in Seattle. I think there’s some like former Nebraskans just reminiscing out in Seattle in the rain. So thank you for listening. And once again, Tony, thank you so much for coming on. We’ll put your contact information in the show notes as well so people can get ahold of you directly. Thanks for what you’re doing and congratulations. The promotion to. Now you’re running the state, man. You know what’s next? Planet?

Tony Schultz: Planet Earth. Yeah, maybe.

Matt Tompkins: Maybe I better put together a plan.

Tony Schultz: Yeah, exactly. Better have a plan for that, right?

Matt Tompkins: Yeah. Hot podcast, where Omaha’s most successful entrepreneurs help your business grow.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: How would you like to know the secret to prospecting new business and not just any prospects, but a way to connect with new business leads that actually pan out? As a small business owner, you can’t afford to waste time or money and you need results.

Now, I can personally tell you that the answer is not in those Facebook ads we see with the rich guy on a private jet telling you that he has the secret to making a million in sales in just 30 days. If you buy his ten step program that comes on 20 different DVDs, which I now know I should have seen as a red flag right there, know today you’ll get the secrets for free. No strings attached.

If you Googled the definition of spam, you’ll get two options, either of which are very appealing. One is for a canned meat made mainly from ham. Mainly, I do not want to know what else they’re using. The other option, though, isn’t much better. Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent to a large group of people on the internet. The first email advertisement was sent back in 1978 and I’m pretty sure whoever received it was angry and put it in their junk folder.

Today, some 320 billion spam emails are sent every day. In fact, half of all global email traffic is spam and nobody likes spam, right? I mean, spam gives marketing a bad rap. So what are they doing wrong and how can you do it right? Today, we’re going to learn how to cast that large net, but do it in a way that is non spammy, if that’s even a word, so that you can deliver new business leads that turn into new customers. Jeff Beals, co host The Grow Omaha Radio Show and podcast, and he is an international sales coach, speaker and author who trains sales teams every day on how to prospect new business leads. So if we’re starting off at square one, Ground Zero, what’s the first thing we need when it comes to prospecting? New business leads?

Jeff Beals: First of all, it’s a mindset. I mean, as a business you have to be of the mindset that you are obsessed with those people who are not yet your customers, not yet your clients, and you can never have too many people in your pipeline, period. End of discussion. You can never have too many prospects because things happen over the course of time.

Current customers leave, hot leads don’t pan out. So that’s that’s one thing that I always get a little bit frustrated with. For instance, I worked with a manufacturer once. I do a lot of sales training for manufacturing companies and the head of sales said The operations people are breathing down my neck. They’re frustrated because they say we’re producing too much business and that we need to slow back because they can’t keep up with all of it.

What do you think I should do? And you want to know my answer? I said you should bury the bastards because and no offense to the ops people, I don’t think they’re really bastards. But you should bury.

Matt Tompkins: And you’re not going to literally bury them. But no.

Jeff Beals: Bury them with business because and and some operations people and some CEOs might say, Jeff, that’s really irresponsible. But I’ll tell you what, the moment that manufacturer takes its foot off the gas pedal, you start a series of events which will lead to downtime and having to eliminate a shift.

Matt Tompkins: Note to self Do not mess with Jeff Beals. This guy takes his sales leads very seriously. All kidding aside, what Jeff is referring to is having a scarcity mindset. Having the wrong mindset. A scarcity mindset in sales may seem like foo foo philosophy,

but it is like poison in the veins of your business if you let it creep in. Scarcity mindset is limiting how big the pie is, and if someone else succeeds, then that must mean you automatically lose sales and business overall is not a zero sum game.

Having an abundance mindset is important for yourself and your team because it helps you focus on the bigger picture and helps leadership recognize your long term vision. Now, it has been a long time since that first email advertisement was sent back in 1978. So what does prospecting new business leads look like today?

Jeff Beals: Well, first of all, it’s the most important thing that anyone in sales does. And I always like to say that the reason sales people are paid on commission and many times even 100% commission, or at least they have bonuses, is because of prospecting. It’s not because you’re good at filling out contracts. It’s not good because you’re it’s not because you’re good at following up after the sale.

Matt Tompkins: It’s not my it’s not my good looks and my charm.

Jeff Beals: Or well, in your case, but in my case.

Matt Tompkins: I’m the.

Jeff Beals: Hell, isn’t it? You’re paying on commission because people don’t like to go approach strangers and ask them for business. And I always define prospecting as the act of interrupting someone’s day when they don’t expect to hear from you in order to provide them with something they need, but they might not yet know about. Yeah, well, interrupting someone’s days. Tough, because that triggers our natural fear of rejection and we all have it.

Unless you’re a sociopath. In which case sometimes I envy sociopaths. But unless you’re a sociopath, we all have that fear of rejection. And so the reason they’re paid on commission is because it’s not easy to get people to do that. And so prospecting is the single most important thing that you have to do, and you have to be willing to do it all of the time. Mad I always like to say that prospecting is like brushing your teeth. You don’t take a day off and hopefully you do it more than once a day.

Matt Tompkins: Yes, getting used to hearing the word no is not an easy thing to do, but you have to reframe it. I mean, how else could actors move forward when they’re rejected 99 times out of 100 auditions? And that’s probably being generous, you know, to have a Hall of Fame level batting average of 300, that means that you’re striking out. 70% of the time, a big part of really successful people is taking that failure and turning it into growth.

This is what separates elite athletes from the rest of the pack, and they’ve actually studied this. Elite athletes are able to accept it in the moment. They don’t waste any time on it. They don’t expend any emotional energy on it. They learn from it and they move on. They compartmentalize it appropriately. So what are some other techniques that are most effective at generating results?

Jeff Beals: One, you want to mix it up a bit. You know, just as a business likes to have multiple streams of income, a sales person wants multiple streams of prospects. And so you’re going to do some social media, you’re going to do some networking, you’re going to do some email prospecting, you’re going to do some telephone prospecting, and you’re going to do some office pop ins.

You can mix it all up. Now, this is the part that a lot of people listening are not going to like hearing today. And that is the telephone actually remains the number one prospecting tool despite all of the new technology we’ve had.

When you factor in effort and money put into it and results put out, so is showing up and meeting with someone in person a better form of prospecting in terms of results? Hell yes. But is it easier to get a hold of a lot of people on the phone than it is to meet everyone in person? Absolutely. No question. So believe it or not, the lonely old telephone, which is 140, 150 year old technology is still numero uno.

Matt Tompkins: Here’s something I never thought I’d say, but cold calling is cool. Oh, man. Who have I become? Yes, cold calling is cool because it can predict the future. So let’s say that my goal is to bring in ten new customers a month.

I start making cold calls and I find out that it takes about an average of 100 cold calls to bring in one new sale. So now I know that I need 1000 cold calls every month to bring in ten new sales. I can expand that from there. I can go from monthly to my quarterly goals and to my annual goals. And pretty quickly, I find out that if I make 50 cold calls a day,

I can reach my three year goal that just a few weeks ago seemed impossible. Now that is pretty cool. So now you’ve set your goals, but where do you go find these new business leads? What’s the next step?

Jeff Beals: First of all, you’re going to create a a social media online presence as fast as you humanly can. But frankly, that’s marketing, not sales. The social media stuff gets you credibility and burnishes the brand, and it also gives you access to leads, right? I mean, your connections on LinkedIn can be a lead generation source for your prospecting efforts.

But the problem is a lot of people will put too much emphasis on the social media for the prospect, and we can get into that a little bit more in a moment if you’d like, but but I think that’s the first thing you have to do is establish your brand. And that’s going to be heavily online, Right? And then as far as getting the leads, you think to yourself, okay, who exactly am I going to serve? And you have to know exactly who is in your business as target audience.

And you’re going to want to start to put together lead sheets of people who meet the criteria that would most benefit from the product or the service that you sell. And then I’m going to go back to that telephone again. Yes, I believe very heavily in the power of Zoom and other platforms like that. I use them almost every day in my life. But when I’m first initially going to reach out to a prospect for the first time, especially if I wanted a hit, a lot of prospects who don’t know me in a short period of time, I’m going to use the traditional telephone. Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: Even I mean, even a voicemail even. Oh, right.

Jeff Beals: If we had more time, I would get into the art of leaving a voicemail. I could do an hour class on voicemails. Voicemails are one of the greatest tools we have as prospectors, and 80% of sales professionals don’t even leave voicemails as dumbest thing they could possibly do a 30 to 40 second or less voicemail.

And the prospecting world is gold. And also you have to remember when you’re cold prospecting, it takes on average, let’s say you’re calling a decision maker, someone who makes significant decisions for a company or an organization.

It’s taking now between eight and 12 attempts on average to get a live interactive conversation, really with the decision maker scares people to death because no one wants to be a pest. We all have that fear of rejection.

Matt Tompkins: Rejection, right. That’s tough to.

Jeff Beals: Overcome, but you have to do it. And and we’re talking about cold people. All we’re trying to do is to get them to have a meeting with us, to get a live interactive conversation with us. Whether it’s in person or via technology is irrelevant.

Yeah, So, so so those would be the things that I would do. I would focus on my brand and start to establish online credibility as fast as possible.

I’d know exactly who I’m serving and I would chase those people as I generate my leads and then for the very first outreaches. Like I said earlier, people don’t want to hear this, but go telephone.

Matt Tompkins: Knowing who you’re serving, who your audience is, knowing who your ideal customer is. That is something we have come back to a number of times on the podcast because it’s perhaps one of the most important first steps to any aspect of your business, and it’s unfortunately something many people skip. When I coach podcasters when we’re starting out, I asked them, Who is your podcast for? Who is your ideal listener? The most common answer I get is, Well, everyone. I want everyone to listen. So my podcast is for everyone.

Business owners make this same mistake when we think too broadly and vague. Your business can’t be everything to everyone. You shouldn’t try to be everything to everyone. That’s an improbable task for any business except maybe Costco. I mean, seriously, you can go into Costco today and buy an inflatable boat, a diamond ring, a £72 wheel of cheese and a casket.

Yeah. You can buy caskets at Costco. Instead, try this. Describe your ideal customer with the same specific details as you would describe yourself. You wouldn’t describe yourself as a man or woman with 2 to 4 kids, married or single with a salary of 50 to 150000. Being specific and niching down is how to find and best serve your ideal customer and know don’t stress. We do not alienate people by niching down like we think we will. Instead, we’ll actually end up reaching the largest group of people when we focus on one ideal customer.

Jeff Beals: Yeah, you have to know exactly who you’re speaking to and then you have to really spend a lot of time working on your message. I always say the first thing you want to do, if you want to have a great message to that person you’re speaking to, is to have a good idea what it is that they truly value and care about without any ambiguity or assumption.

And then once I know that I want to craft messages that I think would really matter to them, use the example of your wife. She’s a crafter, right? But she also has a career. If I approached her talking about something that she’s passionate about in her case crafting, I have a lot more success If she’s never heard of me in getting a meeting or a conversation with her than if I start bombarding her with the features and benefits of the stuff that I sell or I make the critical error of.

Her name is Wendy. I say, Hey, Wendy. Jeff Beals from from Jeff Beals and Associates. We’re a sales consulting company. I’d love to stop by your office, pick your brain, take about 30 minutes of your time, and see if it’s a fit for me to work with you that’s useless and worthless and, frankly, selfish on my part because I’m asking to steal her time for.

Matt Tompkins: Making you instead of the person you’re trying to help.

Jeff Beals: But even if I’m even if the work she does has absolutely nothing with crafting, if I approach her from a crafting perspective for whatever reason, maybe I have expertise in that I’m going to have more success in getting that coveted interactive conversation with her than if I just start, as I like to say, vomiting features and benefits all over a poor, unsuspecting prospect.

Matt Tompkins: Know who your specific customer is and know what makes you unique. Why should they choose you over everyone else? What is that category that you’re going to be first in? Now, I mentioned email spam at the beginning of this episode, and email marketing is one of many options for marketing and sales. While everyone has their own opinion on what is the least effective way to prospect, new business leads from email marketing to no social media.

That’s the worst or cold calling. It doesn’t work. I think that this statement is the actual truth to settle all debates. There is no wrong tool for you to use. As much as I hate spam, there are extremely effective ways to execute mass email marketing campaigns.

The tool that is wrong for you may be what is best for someone else. So stop googling what is the best sales tool to get new business because it doesn’t exist? No, CRM is perfect for me. It might be HubSpot for Marj Jenkinson and our billing department. What works best for her is a notebook with stickers and color coded markers. Focus on what works best for you, what makes you unique, and how to reach your specific ideal customer in the best way possible.

Jeff Beals: Yeah, I would agree with that statement. You have to be very careful which tools you use because you are correct. Matt. There’s no bad prospecting tool, just bad execution. And frankly, there’s more bad execution of prospecting that I see than good execution. And one of the places where I see a lot of bad execution is in social media.

Social media is great. I’ve been I’ve been using social media for my sales training business since I started doing it in 2008, and I’ve had a lot of success with it. But you got to know what social. Social media is, and that is primarily a marketing and lead generation tool. So I use social media the way a company would use advertising. To me, it’s for brand and credibility. And then if I do a good job with branding and credibility, then I also have access to people through social media platforms to create my lead lists and all that.

Now, is it possible that sometimes I will put out a piece of content on social media and it will impress someone so much, resonate with them so much that they pick up the phone and schedule me for a 10,000 speech? Yeah, that’s happened. Could I live on it? Absolutely. No. Yeah. And so I think people sometimes get frustrated with social media because they don’t realize what its limitations are. If your only source of prospecting is going to be social media and most cases that’s going to fail unless you have a certain type of e commerce business in which that might work. But most people don’t. Most people use social media as a crutch or frankly, a copout.

Give you an example what I’m talking about, Matt. How many times do you get a LinkedIn invitation from someone who you don’t know and you get that little alarm that goes off in your head that they’re just going to try and sell me something and for whatever.

Matt Tompkins: Reason, book event invite. That’s why an only 10% of my friends, if that show up when I invite them to my my birthday party. But that’s a different issue.

Jeff Beals: It’s a personal.

Matt Tompkins: Problem, a different reason. But you’re right, though, it’s not personal.

Jeff Beals: But let me ask you this. So. So you get that right? How many times do you get that that email? Multiple times a day, probably. Right?

Matt Tompkins: Yeah. And you get.

Jeff Beals: A lot of them. Yeah. And sometimes you have a weak moment and you click accept. How long does it typically take after you click accept before someone is direct messaging you through LinkedIn, vomiting, features and benefits all over.

Matt Tompkins: This is a tip that I’ve found really helps. If you’re a small business owner and you’re doing your own social media marketing, we think that we have to be on every single social media platform all at once from the start. But when we do that, we severely limit our impact and results. So if you have one hour per day or even just 30 minutes each day to dedicate to marketing outreach on social media, I recommend that you don’t divide that up into seven different platforms because you’ll likely get overwhelmed and frustrated.

The quality of your outreach is going to suffer and odds are you’re just going to give up on most of those platforms, leaving them as just dead pages, you know, laying there not updated and not getting a response. If people message you on them, which is a bad look and it’s an easy way to lose brand equity with your business. So instead start with just one platform and spend all 60 minutes focused on that single platform. Pick the platform that you actually spend the most amount of time on, because that’s going to be the platform where you feel most natural and familiar, and it’s where you’ve already built up equity and credible authenticity. If it’s Facebook, find the Facebook groups where your ideal customer can be found and simply participate in their life.

Once you feel that you’re just crushing it on this primary channel, add a new channel and then take the same approach one platform at a time.

Jeff Beals: Oh, absolutely. Like in my case, yeah. Linkedin is my primary social media tool for my sales consulting and training business, but I always think about ways that I can say little things on Facebook which reinforce what I do. Because those 4000 some people I’m connected to on Facebook are a little more personal than the LinkedIn, But the people that have a little more or a lot of a personal relationship with you can be a big source of business.

I once back when I was doing commercial real estate brokerage many years ago, once found out about a major real estate purchase that a relative of mine made by reading the business paper, it didn’t use me. And when I talked to the relative about it, the relatives said, Oh, I forgot that you were in real estate. And so I ever since that day, I have always thought, okay, I need to make sure the people who are in my own backyard right under my nose, so to speak, remember me and what I do, because they’re the ones that should be giving me all of their business.

So Facebook is very, very important for for getting new business. But if it’s your sole tool, you’re probably going to be eating ramen noodles and going bankrupt.

Matt Tompkins: You have to know how it works. And that’s why Jeff Beales has an amazing TikTok channel where he does dance off competitions and dance challenges.

Jeff Beals: No shirt on.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah, well, I didn’t know that was the case. I’m glad. I’m not so glad I brought that up because people are going to like, search for that and it’s going to.

Jeff Beals: Actually, I don’t have a TikTok. I mean, I have all the other ones.

Matt Tompkins: A few final things to consider. Once you know who your ideal customer is and you know what platform they spend the most amount of time on, you also need to know how they use that platform. And don’t assume that one platform is only for one age demographic or only one type of use. In the US, many assume that TikTok is only for teenagers and yes, while 60% are between the age of 16 and 24. 30% are in that coveted 25 to 44 demo and growing.

And Tick Tock is also a growing source for where people get their news and information. So it’s not just Jeff Beal’s dance off videos all the time, although that would be pretty awesome. We appreciate you, Jeff Beals, Thank you so much for coming on the Omaha podcast. You can reach out to Jeff Beals directly in the show notes. We have the links to his podcast and radio show Grow Omaha, as well as his website Grow Omaha dot com. Or you can hire Jeff to coach up your sales team or come speak to your organization.

Thank you so much for joining us here today on the podcast. Hit Subscribe So You Never miss an episode.

The Omaha podcast is a production of Two Brothers Creative in association with 316 Strategy Group.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: How would you like to have a new client who always paid on time, always paid in full, always had regular steady work for you, and was legally required to give a certain percentage of their work to small businesses just like yours.

This client is real. It does exist, and this client is the United States government. Hello and welcome to the Omaha podcast Midwest Marketing Mindset, where small businesses get the big agency secrets of marketing for free so that you can feel proud of your marketing. I’m your host, Matt Tompkins of Two Brothers Creative. And in today’s episode, we’re going to learn how your business can get government contracts.

I remember our grandma. She always used to tell us, Don’t cheat, don’t lie, and don’t steal. When my brother Ben and I would ask her why, she would say, The government hates competition. Now I know it would be easy to fill this episode with bad political jokes, but we’ve seen far too many of them get elected. So I’ll stop. In this episode, we are actually joined by two government experts, Veronica Doga and Harold Sagas from the Nebraska Business Development Center. And they specialize in helping small businesses with government contracting.

Matt Tompkins: Now for me, the image that comes to mind when you say the government or is my Uncle Merv likes to call it the government, the image that comes to mind is that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, where you have the Ark of the Covenant, which is like one of the most cherished treasures in the history of the world. And it’s in this plain wooden box.

You can’t just you can’t distinguish it from the infinite number of other plain wooden boxes in this just endless storage facility. It’s being wheeled away by this this old guy in a cart. And I think the line is, you know, who’s going to be keeping an eye on this? We have top men. It’s just left open ended, mysterious. And yes, the government, it is bloated in many ways.

That’s the image that comes to mind for me. And it may have its legitimate issues. But in today’s episode, we want to focus on some of the big benefits for small businesses like yours and mine, specifically, because the government is actually one of the best clients that your business could ever hope for.

Veronica Doga: A lot of businesses don’t think about government contracting as a market, as just another channel to increase their sales, and that’s really what it is. It’s just not putting all of your eggs in one basket. It’s diversifying and government is on time and pays what they owe you, and that’s the stability that a business wants. In my mind, when when you said, you know, your little scene in my mind when I think government contracting, I think man in black. Okay, that’s my idea.

Matt Tompkins: So aliens are real. We’re you know, Harold kind of got the black look, gray suit, but he’s kind of got some black look going on today.

Veronica Doga: Yeah, Yeah, but but just to demystify a little bit, the government, it does buy everything that you can think of. Federal government is the largest, largest buyer in the world. It buys over a value of over $600 billion every year.

Matt Tompkins: So that’s where the government spends so much money on us with small businesses. The truth is that you are either in the conversation or you are not. And you have to ask yourself, is it worth it for your business to miss out on an entirely new market like this?

But getting government contracts, it isn’t easy or as easy as I may have been making it sound so far. No, it actually it does take some work. And you want trusted experts and advisors like Veronica and Harold at the Nebraska Business Development Center. So let’s go back to step one. What is the starting point?

Harold Sargus: The starting point is to make sure that government contracting is a part of your strategic plan. And I think one of the things people feel that you can’t make money if you do government work and that’s not true.

You can make profit. It doesn’t do the government any good. If you can’t, then no one would bid so you can make money. There is a learning curve, but once you’re in, once you get your first contract, the chances increase greatly that you’ll get another one and you’ll be and you’ll get another one. Now you have to provide value. You have to perform. The worst thing you can do is bid low to try to get it. You get.

Matt Tompkins: It now.

Harold Sargus: You’re stuck with it and you lose money on.

Matt Tompkins: It. Yeah. I want to jump in quick here because this is a mistake that I know I have made personally. I don’t know how many times and it can be crushing to your businesses growth. So don’t say yes to everything. No, your value set your value.

Commit to your value and hold out for the right thing to say yes to. Because I know I’ve done this where you say yes to everything, including super low bids. Not only is it going to cost you money, as Harold points out, it can set your business back years, if not.

Harold Sargus: Decades, and that can set you back a decade or more in the government market space. If you don’t perform, that blemish is on your record. It’ll be hard for you to get back in. Yeah, it’s different in the private.

Veronica Doga: Sector and it can take you out of business. Actually, there are. Are horror stories about small businesses that bid bid too low and they were losing money and they just went out of business because they were it was not sustainable for the business.

Matt Tompkins: Now, believe it or not, they actually made a movie about government contracts. Yes, they’ll they’ll make anything these days. It was actually a pretty good movie, entertaining. It’s a depiction of government contracting in the world of weapons. It’s called war dogs.

Yeah, War Dogs is a movie where two friends played by Jonah Hill and Miles Teller, discovered that anyone can apply to get government contracts and they get one receiving a US Army contract to supply ammunitions for the Afghan National Army. It’s worth, you know, just a little bit of money, $300 million. Now, the movie is highly dramatized. They add a lot of fictional elements to this, as Hollywood does. But Veronica points out that there is actually a very important lesson for businesses to take away from this movie.

Veronica Doga: I did enjoy the movie and I would actually recommend watching it. And that’s what you don’t want to do, because I did a really good example of what you do not want to do if you don’t want to go to jail, because that’s that’s what happened and you don’t want to go that path. If you are in the business of trying to play the government, yeah, it will bite you. Yeah, maybe not at the beginning, but eventually it will.

Matt Tompkins: Now we want to be very clear here. We are not encouraging you to try and scam the government. That usually doesn’t end well. In fact, it didn’t end well for the two guys, the two real guys that the movie War Dogs is based on. But what that movie did do for me at least, was it sparked the idea that big mega corporations, you know, the big ones like Boeing, they aren’t the only ones getting government contracts. Small businesses like yours and mine are eligible just the same.

Veronica Doga: We see so many businesses or startups that are coming through our door and they are asking us, what does the government buy? That’s what I want to sell and it does not work that way. You have to have a business, you have to have an idea, you have to have some kind of prior experience in in selling whatever you’re selling. And then that is when we can help businesses channel and actually focus on who is buying what they’re selling.

Harold Sargus: To be successful in the government space, you have to be successful whatever you’re doing now, architectural engineering, construction information services, whatever it is you do, real estate, Hey, I am successful. What I’m doing and the government does buy what I sell. I think I’m going to spend some time and dig a little bit deeper and find out is it the VA? Is it the Corps of Engineers? Who is the agency I should focus on?

Matt Tompkins: Every business should start out by knowing what specific problem they’re solving for their customers. If you can’t do that, you need to figure that step out first. When you do know what it is that you do, when you clearly know what problem you’re solving for your customers, you’ve been doing it and you know you’ve been doing it successfully and you know who your ideal customer is. Then you can find out, is there a government agency buying your product or services? And let me tell you, the government buys everything.

Our company two Brothers Creative, we produce video podcast, we produce videos for clients and we handle marketing for clients and the government contracts all of that. So talk to the Nbtc to find out if you’re ready and only when you’re ready.

Veronica Doga: Government is an obscure term a lot of people don’t know. You know, as we talked about, it’s the black box. Who do you call? Do you call your person here in Omaha representing that agency? Do you even know what agency you’re targeting? A lot of those questions are what pops up in in a business mind. And what we help with is give it a structure and focus. Who is the agency that you want to go after? And we do that by researching previous purchases by that particular agency or actually government-wide.

And then we’re narrowing it down to one or two agencies and then to one or to offices. Maybe if it’s a more local type of service or product that the business is selling and then setting them up to understand this agency’s goals, what are they trying to achieve? Why are they buying the services or products that the business is selling? And then giving them some maybe contacts to who to call, finding open opportunities currently that exists if they don’t exist currently.

Maybe what were previous in the past three years that were solicitations that were put out by that particular office or agency and really understanding your customer. So defining who is your customer at the government? How do they look like and what are they buying?

Matt Tompkins: Okay, so you need to be a real business. This sounds weird in business though. You need to be a real existing business, doing business and preferably doing it successfully. I don’t want to be just starting out and kind of learning your way through things because you don’t want to. You don’t want to burn this bridge with the government.

You don’t want to take the leap until you’re ready, because that is hard to undo with the government. They will see you as I don’t know, they’re not ready. No, thank you. And then ignore future bids from you. So you only want to do this when you are ready. And then there are other things you’ll need to be aware of that the NDDC will walk you through that. Harald shared with us things like registration and certification.

Harold Sargus: There’s a database that you have to be and it’s a minimal requirement. You have to the government needs to know that you’re a real business and you have a physical address. You upload, you put in some information and they verify that you exist and you have a physical address. It can be a two to 4 to 6 week process. It’s very it’s the very basic thing you have to do.

Matt Tompkins: Is done online then or.

Harold Sargus: It’s done online. And we help customers. We have instructions somebody can follow to do it themselves. We can help them do it. We can do it virtually in person at their office, at our office. We’re very flexible. There’s a hub zone certification. The government has identified certain areas of the cities throughout the country that are historically underutilized businesses that the government hasn’t worked with businesses in those areas much over the years.

So it’s map, it’s geography based. There’s a minority owned certification called ADA, a veteran owned or a service disabled veteran owned. We help with the certification process and what that does. The federal government puts aside percentage goals to do business with small business. So they’ll say only a veteran owned small business can apply, can, can bid. I’m sorry. So that shrinks your competition.

Matt Tompkins: And this next statement really sums up the fact that you should not have any hesitation to put yourself in the conversation. At the very least, if you’re thinking to yourself, I don’t have a chance at government contracts, I don’t have time to do that. I got to do all these other things. And, you know, there’s probably millions of people competing for these contracts. Why even try we take ourselves out of of the game before we even have a chance to play. Listen to the call that Harold described that they got just recently.

Harold Sargus: And I got to tell you. So just this morning, your last night, we got an email from a federal agency that said, hey, we had no small business show up to this walkthrough, this project that we need to know. Small business showed up. Can you help us? We’re going to reschedule it, put the word out. Here’s the industry that we’re looking for. So and I think that’s happened maybe three or four times in the last month. Different agencies are having they’re not getting small business to bid.

Matt Tompkins: If you don’t put yourself in the game, how on earth do you expect to have a chance at winning it? Government contracts, they aren’t handed out willy nilly like free Halloween candy. They’re not just handing it out. All right. You’ll have to earn these government contracts. And it’s no different than the work you’re already doing, the work you’re already earning for your business. This is just a brand new untapped market for you to consider for your business.

Veronica Doga: A lot of times, businesses will expect to just, you know, I’m going to get certified, I’m going to get into Sam. And then the opportunities were fall off into my lap and it will be great. It doesn’t happen that way. It’s just another market, right? Like we said, you have to market your business. You have to show what value you’re bringing to the table.

Government will not buy from you from your business just because you’re a woman owned or just because you’re a veteran owned or just because you’re small. These are very good certifications that you might have, and these are maybe some points you’ll get when they look at the competition. The set asides are great for that. It restricts the competition of the businesses that can bid for a particular opportunity. So that’s an advantage that you you can take advantage of. But it’s not going to just fall into your lap. And we’ve seen so many businesses that come to us and they say that they’ve done everything they could. They have everything, but nobody is knocking at their door. And it’s just not it doesn’t work this way.

Harold Sargus: The federal government’s a bureaucracy, and if you can’t deal with that, then maybe stay in the private sector. And we have these conversations. If somebody calls our office, we’re honest, we’re open. It’s all public information. If we will share what we have, we’ll tell them where else, where else to go to find more. And it is the government’s people. You know, there’s a purchasing agent, there’s a contract officer. Every federal agency has a small business liaison office, and that’s one of the things you’ll want to.

Matt Tompkins: Do, whether it’s federal, state, local, all governments contract work. It’s up to you if you want work for your business or not, maybe you don’t. I don’t know. It’s your business. You decide. We wrap things up with Harold and Veronica by talking about some of the industries that are actually really hot right now for government contracting work. That just sounds weird. These are the hot government contracts of the week. Okay, That sounded even worse. Sorry.

Veronica Doga: There are some industries that are very hot and that’s great business. That’s a great industry to be in right now. Construction, as you mentioned. But not everybody is in construction.

Harold Sargus: The infrastructure bill that came down.

Matt Tompkins: Yeah.

Veronica Doga: Yeah.

Matt Tompkins: So what are some of the hot industries right now?

Harold Sargus: Well, construction.

Veronica Doga: Construction is a big one and.

Harold Sargus: Anything related to it. So whether you’re concrete or metal.

Veronica Doga: Or and trades.

Harold Sargus: Drywall, trade.

Veronica Doga: For.

Matt Tompkins: Construction.

Harold Sargus: Architects, engineers. But the they eat, you know, the government buys.

Matt Tompkins: Food, you.

Harold Sargus: Know, the government buys clothes, they need beds, they need furniture, they need everything. Paper and information services.

Veronica Doga: I it is a big one, too. Cybersecurity-related activities. Everything is hackable. And there should be layers that protect not only the government but also the small businesses. And services in that area are are super hot right now as well. A lot of opportunities.

Harold Sargus: One thing that won’t happen in addition is we’re not your employee. We’d like to be, but we you know, we have to help all businesses and that come to us. So we will we will do as much as we can for you and get you to the point where you’re starting to take the initiative. We’re not your employee. We’d like to be again, but we can’t be that. So that’s one thing. Won’t be. Don’t expect us to be your part time staff.

Veronica Doga: So we will help a business guide them through the process, teach them how to do it. But we will not do it for them.

Matt Tompkins: They can teach you how to fish, but they won’t do the fishing for you. Man, I sound like a philosophy user. Thank you so much to the NRDC’s Veronica and Harold for joining us today on the podcast. You can contact them directly with all of the government contracting assistance that you could ask for in the show notes of this episode. Scroll down and we got the links for you there. Just click away and get yourself in the game.

In the Running for Government Contracts, the Omaha podcast Midwest Marketing Mindset is a production of Two Brothers Creative.

Thanks so much for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.

Full Written Transcript of The Episode

Matt Tompkins: My first love is radio. I started as an intern in radio and spent over 17 years in radio broadcasting. I have a nostalgic love for radio. I think we all have that nostalgic love for radio, television, print these old school advertising mediums. But the world is now digital. So where do these old school mediums like radio fit into your marketing strategy? Yes, there are some very easy ways to waste a lot of money in radio advertising, just like there’s a lot of easy ways to waste money on Facebook ads and Google ads just the same.

But there are a lot of secrets to radio advertising that are very effective and actually very affordable for small businesses. Today, we’re going to break down the secrets of radio advertising.Welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives You the small business owner, the big agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m Matt Tompkins of two Brothers Creative, where we believe every business deserves affordable and effective marketing. Now I want to preface this episode by saying that it is not a pro radio episode or an anti radio episode.

There are some very good, effective tips we’re going to get to here on the show that most small business owners don’t even know about. They don’t think about. And yes, we’re going to get to some very big mistakes you can make with spending your ad dollars in radio. Radio. It’s no different than any other platform, any other medium to advertise and promote your business, except for nostalgia. Radio has this nostalgic hook on us. We grew up listening to radio. Radio was massive for how many decades, right? Massive. The influence that it had on us sticks with us.

And so I have seen this this movie play out many times over where a small business owner with a small budget for advertising doesn’t really know where to spend the money. So they think, well. I grew up listening to radio. It was huge. I loved it. It has to still be huge, right? And they spend this money, they just buy some ads and it doesn’t work. They don’t see any results. And this isn’t unique to just radio. Business owners waste a lot of money on Facebook ads. Google ads. The reason why they don’t work most of the time here is because business owners don’t research or learn about these different mediums to see if they are the right ones to reach their target market.

Matt Tompkins: What makes radio different is that nostalgia that I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. We grew up with radio. We have an emotional attachment to radio. We have idolized in our minds what a radio star, a radio show looks like. It’s identity and that can blind us to the reality of what radio is today.

Radio today has changed just like every other advertising medium dramatically since the time when radio was huge and dominant back when we grew up listening to it. So in today’s episode, my 17 plus years in radio finally pay off because we’re going to give you the behind the scenes tips and techniques for radio advertising that are both affordable and effective. And we’re also going to talk about the big mistakes you want to avoid, the big mistakes that are far too common and can really destroy a small business and their overall annual marketing strategy.

But first, I think it’s important we talk about radio ratings and why you should care. What are radio ratings? Well, the ratings are what we use to determine the value of the radio advertisement. So how much you spend on a radio advertisement on any particular radio station, that price is determined by these radio ratings.

Matt Tompkins: Now, the radio ratings are this this formula. And there are two factors in this equation. First, you have time spent listening. So time spent listening is how long in a given week, how much time does a listener listen to that station? And the other factor is the cume. And the cume is the cumulative size of the audience.

So you may have a massive audience that tunes in and tunes out so they don’t have a very long time spent listening and they could actually rank lower even though they have a larger audience than a station with a small listening audience, a small cume and a very high time spent listening. But it’s those two things, those two factors that determine the ratings. How do they figure out how many people are listening to these radio stations? Well, in bigger markets, they have what are called people meters. And these are almost like little beepers that people take with them.

And they actually pick up the signal of the radio stations. And those are much more accurate than what most most markets like ours here in Omaha, Nebraska, have. In Omaha, we have a handwritten diary market now. What is a handwritten diary? Well, a handwritten radio diary. It’s basically it looks like a pamphlet, you know, like a brochure. It’s mailed to you and you’re actually sent five crisp $1 bills to do this. And so you get this in the mail, you’re paid to do it.

Matt Tompkins: And you open up this pamphlet and it folds out and it asks you which radio station do you listen to? And it’s Monday with the time breaks, you know, 7 a.m., 8 a.m., 9 a.m., 10 a.m. And you do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. You do this for about five days and then you mail it back in. And if you mail it back in, they’ll send you another ten crisp $1 bills. So now you’re pretty rich. I mean, you got 15 bucks in your pocket. It’s time to celebrate the problem or the challenge with handwritten diary.

Markets like ours is that we have no idea how accurate they actually are. We just don’t. Now, we are relying on a number of things here. We’re relying on a people to fill these out accurately and recall information accurately, which we know humans are notoriously not that great. At most people recall something, they’ll think, okay, you’re asking me what radio show I listen to at 9 a.m. on Monday, they’ll just recall a radio show that they remember and they didn’t necessarily listen to it. We see this with television ratings as well. When you ask people, what’s your favorite late night TV show? Oh, you know, Stephen Colbert, when was the last time you watched him? Oh, two, three years ago. I don’t know. And it may have been just a clip they saw online so people recall whatever pops into their head and they think, morning show, what morning show do I know? And they write that down.

Matt Tompkins: So recall. Hall can be very inaccurate. And then they have to do this for five days. Accurately. There are a lot of times I’ve seen these diaries where they just write down a station and then they just draw a line indicating that they listen to this station for 24, 48, 72 straight hours, and they are a loyal listener. There’s also the issue of accuracy in what you write down. So I have seen this as well in these radio diaries where let’s say you listen to, you know, my brother and I, we had a radio show back in the day and you say, I listened to the Matt and Ben Show and then they write down the wrong radio station call letters.

That diary doesn’t count even though they did listen to the radio show. It just doesn’t count. Let’s say that you don’t listen to the radio like many people in the morning, and instead you write down I listen to Pandora at 8 a.m. Pandora is not going to show up in those ratings because that diary doesn’t count. The assumption is that everybody in this market, in every market listens to a radio station. It’s just a matter of which station they listen to.

They also send out around 1200 or so of these handwritten diaries, which means that you have one single diary based on all those all that assumptions, the recall, the inaccuracy or accuracy, we don’t really know.

Matt Tompkins: One of those represents 8 to 12,000 peoples listening decisions. So the challenge, the problem with handwritten diary markets is that we do not know and we cannot prove how accurate these ratings are. That translates to you and your radio advertisement. We cannot tell you or prove how many people actually heard your ad over the traditional airwaves, the broadcast airwaves. That leads me into my first tip here of this episode.

And the first tip is be cautious and ask them to prove it. When you are spending money on commercials that play over the air. So over the broadcast air. In other words, when you’re sitting in your car, your antenna picks up the signal. That’s an over-the-air broadcast that’s traditional or terrestrial radio signal that we talk about. Be cautious and ask your representative there, your ad representative to prove it, because there are a lot of challenges that over-the-air broadcast in people’s vehicles face. Let’s just look at the human behavior and how we listen and what we’re doing in our car.

The challenge is that your radio advertisement is going to have to overcome. First is what do we do when commercials come on the radio? What is it that most people do? We hit the reset button. We change the channel. So right out of the gate, you’re losing a lot of people who are not going to hear your ad.

Matt Tompkins: Number two, your commercial is usually smashed or smooshed into like a 7 to 8 minute spot block. Now, a commercial is a spot.

We call it a spot block. It’s going to be in there in the middle, a 32nd ad in between, you know, 20 other 32nd ads. And that’s going to dilute how effective your ad is going to be. Our most people going to listen to a 7 or 8 minute commercial spot. Block And are they going to listen intently? Are they actually going to pick up the information in your ad? That’s the third element here.

They did a study recently. They found that a person has to read or hear a radio ad 36 times before they recall any of the information in it 36 times. So now they have to hear your ad, which we know we’re losing people when they change the channel. It’s in a middle of a 7 or 8 minute spot. Block So it’s going to be really difficult for them to hear.

That’s why they have to hear it 36 times. That’s a lot of times. Now, if you’re paying 150 to $200 per airing of that commercial, that’s a lot of money for people to finally start recalling the information, the message in your advertisement. Number four, we’re not paying attention to the radio when we’re driving, when we’re listening to the radio while we’re driving.

Matt Tompkins: Most people, unless you’re driving all by yourself, have other things going on. We have kids in the car. We have distractions. We’re paying attention to traffic. We’re changing the channel. We forgot to change it back.

There are a lot of distractions when you’re driving and that makes over-the-air broadcast. It just makes it hard again to get your message to your target market. And the last thing, number five here is that we as I mentioned in the beginning, there’s just no way to know accurately exactly how many people listen to a given radio station with these handwritten diary markets. We just don’t know. We can’t prove how many people did or did not hear your advertisement.

And that’s not saying that there aren’t a lot of people listening and that there aren’t a lot of people who would hear your ad, It’s just saying we don’t know. Radio is unique because every other every other advertising platform, every digital platform online, you can track precisely. I can see exactly how many people saw my Facebook ad, my Google ad, You can literally pay per click. You can’t do that in radio, at least not yet. There’s not a way for us to have a 100% or 90% margin of accuracy with these ratings. So what should you do? That leads me to tip number two, what to do instead, Spend your money on streaming ads, streaming ads or radio station broadcasts that you listen to on the Internet.

Matt Tompkins: Our trackable streaming numbers are tracked very accurately, just like any other digital data points. We get them, you can see them, you can prove them, and you can see exactly how many people are listening to a show, a radio station online, and how many people will hear your commercial. Now, there are a number of other reasons why streaming ads are legit, and they are a great way for you to market your business.

Number one, they are often much more affordable. They cost a lot less than the over-the-air radio advertisements. I remember back in the day when streaming stations were first coming into the scene becoming a thing and they were selling them for like $1. It was like a dollar holler hour or something like that. They just couldn’t get people to buy these. Now, obviously that’s changed. They don’t cost a dollar anymore.

They cost more than that, but they are much more affordable than over the air. And I believe from my perspective, they are much more effective. And let’s get to why they are more effective. Well, people don’t change the channel when a commercial comes on, when they’re listening to a streaming station, it’s a pain in the ass when you’re in your vehicle and you’re listening to a radio station and a commercial break comes on, it’s easy to just hit the button, hit the preset, jump to the other station and see if there’s music playing or whatever.

Matt Tompkins: So you don’t have to hear a dreaded commercial when you’re listening on online, on the Internet, you have to disconnect. Then you have to wait, wait, wait, reconnect. And you have to go through the whole pre-roll video and then find you connect and you log on and it’s just it’s not convenient. And so people are going to sit there and leave the station on, which means it’s a much higher chance of them actually hearing your advertisement. Now, another thing that is a big advantage for streaming ads is that the behavior of the people.

Is different than in the vehicle we talked about in the vehicle. There’s all these different distractions, right? The kids, the traffic, everything else. Most people who listen to streaming stations, they are sitting they are doing one thing. They’re usually working. They’re sitting at their desk. They’re doing one task. It’s similar to people listening to podcasts, which makes which is why that podcast are so effective for advertising, because you have their attention.

They aren’t distracted like they are when they’re in the vehicle. People listen to the entire commercial break, 70% more than over the air. So 70% of the people online listening to streaming stations are going to hear your commercial. They’re going to listen through. They’re going to say, you know what? I’m not going to change your channel.

Matt Tompkins: It’s a pain in the ass. I’ll listen through it. And they’re not doing anything else. They’re sitting at their desk, they’re working, they’re pretending to work. Whatever it is, they’re going to hear your ad and they’re going to actually process the information. People are more focused when they’re listening to a streaming signal. I will also add that a couple of the biggest audiences that you’ll find for listening to streaming broadcasts are Newstalk and Sports Talk.

Those are huge for online streaming listenership. Now, my tip number three here is one that a lot of business owners don’t even think about. But this tip works and it is using local radio talent. Now, I can say this since I spent 17 years working in local radio, we are cheap, we are very cheap, We aren’t paid much and we will take anything we can get.

We are very effective though, and here’s why. When you have someone do an endorsement or voice your commercials. That people have a real connection with, they’re going to be much more effective. Now, local radio talent is cheap. It sounds bad, but it’s true. But we are very effective. And you can have someone voice a live 62nd endorsement commercial once a day, and it’s only going to cost you around 100 bucks. It depends on the show. It depends on the show and the ratings. Some are like 200 bucks a week, but I think the average would probably be around $100 per week for them to do this and add this major value to your advertisements.

Matt Tompkins: They’ll also voice all of your other commercials as part of the deal. So it’s a really good deal. Use local radio talent. Now, the reason is people have a connection, so they listen to these people. It’s a morning show host and they have a connection with them. They listen to them every morning. They have an emotional attachment. And so when they start doing a local live endorsement commercial for your business, they’re going to listen to it.

They’re going to tune into it. You can also get them to voice all your other commercials and put those on the streaming broadcast to be even more effective, more potent. Another secret addition to working with local talent is you can actually request with these live endorsement commercials to have it be the first placement ad in a commercial spot.

Block So even if it’s a 7 or 8 minute spot block, you can request to have that ad since it’s an endorsement placed at the very front, which means people listening over the airwaves are much more likely to hear your commercial. It’s not going to sound like a commercial because you’re using a local radio talent that these people who listen to the show like they love. They don’t mind listening to them. They trust them.

Matt Tompkins: They trust them. My next tip here is to do your research, find the stations with the highest listener loyalty and the audiences who can actually afford your services. You want to find radio stations that have your target market in their listening audience. And a lot of times businesses make this mistake where they just see a nostalgic heritage radio station. Oh, I grew up listening to that station and they assume they’ve got a massive audience and maybe they do. Maybe they show them the ratings, which we talked about earlier.

Not very. We don’t know if they’re accurate. And they say, oh, yeah, we’ve got 40,000 people tuning in every week. Oh, my gosh, that’s great. Yes. Here, take my money. I want to run my ads. And then they don’t get any results and they wonder why. Well, we don’t they don’t know.

They didn’t do the research to find out. Even if that station has a massive audience, is it the audience for you, for your business? So find the stations who have high listener loyalty and that actually align with your target market. How do you do that? Well, some of the stations or formats that have the highest listener loyalty kind of nationwide, it’s same here in Omaha, Nebraska, would be country music stations, very popular across the country. News and sports talk stations. They don’t have massive audiences or that cume, but they have huge time spent listening and they will listen through those commercial blocks.

Matt Tompkins: They are very loyal listeners. And then you have Heritage popular morning shows across the country, those radio stations that just have massive shares in the ratings, they’re number one. They’ve been number one for 30 years. And they can really they could tell their audience or ask their audience to do anything and they’ll do it, which means if they ask him to, you know, go to your business, there’s a good chance that they will. Who do you want to avoid?

I don’t know if I’d say avoid, I would say maybe be wary of be cautious with top 40 stations, younger music stations. Music stations are tricky across the board because people are listening for the music. And if the wrong song comes on that they don’t like, they’re changing the station, right? They’re changing the station. So people are tuning in and tuning out.

You know, we’ve seen breaks where people that time spent listening, it’s only like 5 to 10 minutes. And so it’s really hard to get them to stick around through a commercial spot block if they’re just listening for the music. So I would just be cautious with the music stations and the music stations. If you do want to go that route, those are the stations. I would really encourage you to look at the streaming signal because everybody listening to the streaming broadcast for these popular music stations, they’re going to listen to those commercials because, again, it’s a pain in the butt to log off, log on, and they’re just going to they’re just going to sit through it and they’re going to hear your message.

Matt Tompkins: Go to a website for a radio station and look at their photos from past events. Go to a live event that a radio station is putting on and you’re going to meet and see the people who are the listeners for this station and that’s going to help you decide, Are these are these my people? Are these the people in your target market that you’re trying to reach? You need to know things like age, sex, these demographics, these data points.

They’re going to tell you if this is the right place to spend your advertising dollar. The tricky thing with radio is that with the ratings, we just don’t know. We just don’t know. You know, you go online to any other digital advertising platform and they can show you all these statistics, all these analytics you do know. You do get the full breakdown. A final quick bonus tip for you here before we wrap up the episode would be pre-roll videos.

What is a pre-roll video? Well, before people can start listening to a radio station streaming broadcast, they go to their website, they log on, they hit listen live. They have to see a pre-roll video. Now, these pre-roll videos are normally about 15 seconds.

Matt Tompkins: They are both audio and video. We’ve talked about the power of video in previous episodes. These are very effective because every single person who listens to that streaming broadcast has to see your pre-roll video. So pre-roll videos are very effective and you can see exactly how many people listened or viewed to that pre-roll video. So the bottom line for today’s episode is ask them to prove it. Ask them to prove it.

We can prove it in any other advertising medium. We can see the analytics. We can see the data. We can see exactly how many people saw or heard. Your ad set aside your nostalgia for radio because the radio we remember growing up, it’s not the same radio today. It’s evolved just like everything else.

I will say this we’ve talked about a lot of very effective and affordable tips for today’s radio, a lot of things for you as a small business owner to take advantage of. Now, a lot of affordable and effective ways to grow your business, but you have to follow the guidelines. You have to do your research and know what you’re getting into and not depend on nostalgia. Follow our guide, not your gut. Thanks so much for listening here today to Midwest Mindset.

We have a recap of all these tips in the show notes for you here today, and we’ll see you on the next episode.