TMBA 564: The Knowledge Gap vs The Efficiency Gap Revisited (Again)
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We talk quite a bit on this podcast about services businesses and the sorts of problems that they seek to solve for their customers.
You may recall that Eagan Heath joined us to share his thoughts about this back in 2018 on an episode titled "The Knowledge Gap vs. The Efficiency Gap Revisited".
In that episode, we spoke about whether it is better to serve your customers by filling a "knowledge gap" and teaching them why they need your services or to fill an "efficiency gap" by helping them optimize something that they are already doing.
Since then, Eagan and his team have decided to move on from filling "knowledge gaps" for local businesses in Wisconsin and to focus on servicing "efficiency gaps" by providing digital marketing services to eCommerce businesses with his new company Caravan Digital.
Eagan joins us this week to share the reasons he's chosen to change his approach to this philosophy and why he feels like the "efficiency gap" strategy has ultimately prevailed.
Listen to this week's show and learn:
Why Eagan originally tried to fill "knowledge gaps" with his business. (8:32)
How he came to the conclusion that the assisted living niche wasn't working. (15:22)
What Eagan's sales process looks like from start to finish. (22:18)
The risks associated with niching down your business. (30:29)
How much you should be thinking about the endgame. (42:11)
Mentioned in the episode:
Before the Exit - Our New Book
TMBA Masterminds
Partner With Us
The Dynamite Circle
Dynamite Jobs
Dynamite Deals
Tropical MBA on YouTube
Eagan Heath
Get Found Madison
Caravan Digital
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Venkatesh Rao
StrategicCoach.com
Sandler Training
You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar by David Sandler
Klaviyo
Alan Weiss
Jay Abraham
Basecamp
The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
Rob Walling
Enjoyed this podcast? Check out these:
TMBA443: The Knowledge Gap vs. The Efficiency Gap Revisited
TMBA548: The First 1,000 Days of Running an Agency
TMBA563: How Software With a Service (SwaS) Startups Can Succeed Big in Traditional Industries
This week's sponsor:
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Cheers,
Dan & Ian
Full Transcript
TMBA Ident
Dan: Welcome back to the podcast. We're so glad you joined us. I got the Bossman, in person.
Ian: Hey, yo.
Dan: On the couch with your cat, this is how we ought to pod more often.
Ian: Ideal setup for me, my friend, we are outside, screened in, no mosquitoes, cat on the lap.
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Dan: Of course, the TMBA podcast is one where we're focused on location independence, financial freedom, lifestyle, businesses, micro multinationals, if you're into any or all of that, this is your pod. And today just one example of somebody who's been able to do this. And I want to emphasise before we get into it, Bossman, I think you can agree we are not a guru show. We've never been, above all, especially at our in person events, we prioritise real lived experiences, sharing those experiences both success and failure in a non judgmental way. That's what resonates with me, rather than arguing over, ‘Who's right about what’, at the end of the day with entrepreneurship, the proofs in the pudding. And the only scorecard that matters is the one that you're keeping for yourself.
Ian: No one's ever kissed my ring. Maybe it's because I don't wear a ring, but uh, never even asked anybody to kiss my ring before.
Dan: That said, on today's pod Bossman, I do share quite a few of my own thoughts about business towards the end of the show. So if you're interested in that, stick around, and for the rest of you, it's just a warning. Because look, I like to toss around ideas and play with them and see how they inspire action. I'm not often right. And today's show might be an example of some of that. You just laughed there. Why are you laughing? I'm not often right?
Ian: Well, I just if you know you personally, you know that you say some pretty crazy stuff. And that you don't actually even believe it half the time you're just trying it on just trying it on? The truth is that it starts a conversation. And it's a segue into an idea, or maybe new ideas that come from it. So I think actually, that's like one of the things to know about Dan, like, after you've hung out with you for 10 years, like, man, some crazy stuff comes out of this guy's mouth, I don't even think he believes it. And when you ask you, you're like, ‘No, of course, I don't believe that. But I'm just trying it on’.
Dan: It's like this concept of lawyer brain versus judge brain. And you can define between the two, the lawyers’ idea is to give a beneficial reading, to make the best case for their side of the equation. I think that you know, one of the cool things about entrepreneurship is it gives you a chance to try an extreme idea and see what happens when you take up that perspective. But of course, you know, there are situations that require judgement as well. That's why it's great to have a production team behind this podcast, for example. So they can cut out some of the crazy things that we will occasionally say on this podcast. So let's get into it today, Ian, we are bringing back a past contributor, Bossman, someone who's very thoughtful and intellectual use the word just like me, he's into books, and we're going to talk a lot about those today, which I love. But also, just a few years ago, he was sitting listening to this pod, gainfully employed as you might be now or maybe not, maybe you're at home, facing some tough times due to COVID, and thinking, ‘I'm not in a great place here. And on this pod, they're talking about a potential way forward for me’. And today's guest has done it.
Eagan: I’m Eagan Heath. I own a digital marketing agency, basically do SEO, Google ads, Facebook ads. Now we do email automation and websites too. And we're looking at working specifically with e commerce businesses now as a new brand called Caravan Digital.
Dan: Now regular listeners may remember Eagan from Episode 443, which we titled ‘The Knowledge Gap versus The Efficiency Gap Revisited’ in May 2018. In that pod we talked about and the clue is in the title, whether it was better as a service to provide the knowledge to your clients, or the efficiency. Now Ian, this is one of these ideas I'm trying on and look if you really scrutinise the knowledge gap versus the efficiency gap. It kind of breaks down but it still gives me a helpful framework in terms of - if you're selling services to somebody, are you actually helping them do something they already do and understand the ROI on better, that would be filling an efficiency gap, versus coming to a company who doesn't really understand or employ the tactics that you use, say, you know, a brick and mortar business that doesn't have a website, for example, and coming to them and selling them on the knowledge, the power of digital marketing.Now, all sales processes have a little bit efficiency and a little bit of knowledge involved. So the dichotomy can break down over time. So if I had my judge hat on, I would say, ‘Well, maybe I retitle the episode’, but my lawyer hat says, ‘Hey, let's look into this idea a little bit and see if it sparks some positive action in some of the listeners here today’. As for Eagan, who at the time was trying to optimise filling Senior Living beds in facilities via his local Wisconsin marketing agency called ‘Get Found Madison’, his clients were firmly in the knowledge gap camp. Specifically, they were missing the digital knowledge they needed to fill those beds to capacity in the 21st century. So I was very interested and intrigued when Eagan ping me via an email the other day, and said, I quote, ‘After coming on the podcast to debate the knowledge versus efficiency gap with you. My team and I are moving into becoming an e commerce agency, rather than a digital agency with local e commerce and b2b clients. One day I asked my team, ‘Which of our clients see the best results?’, ‘Ecommerce’. And, ‘Which of those do we enjoy working with the most?’, Ecommerce’, and I thought to myself, who most understands the value of what we do? Ecommerce again. So we're launching a digital agency for ecommerce businesses. So I can focus on marketing and selling people on why they should work with us, instead of why they need our services, and why they should work with us. So that's the critical difference.Again, you're filling an efficiency gap. your ideal clients would already clearly understand why your services provide clear ROI. And back to Eagan here, sounds like a win for the efficiency gap. So before we get into this one, I just want to say shout out to Eagan for sharing the process and how we think through these things, not necessarily the capital A answer, or the judgement. And that's why I like to try, you know, again, back to this idea of trying on ideas. We're all running experiments every day as entrepreneurs. I like the fact that the relative non judgmental atmosphere of our community allows folks like Eagan to come to the show and share stories that are in progress.
Ian: So Dan, the reason I think Eagan’s process is cool here. There's no kisser ring, like I mentioned, there's no silver bullet, there's no one way is the right way. And you know, for me, personally, Dan, somebody can tell me the right way, and I won't believe them in five years later, I'll be like, ‘Oh, yeah, that's that. Yeah, you're right about that’. But I have to go through it myself, I have to feel the pain, I have to actually engage in the problems and fail, even if somebody tells me all the ways that I'm going to fail. I'm just stubborn like that.
Dan: You know, and there is value to guru simplification, someone comes on the show with confidence and says, ‘This is how you outsource this kind of work .. ‘, and I'm all about that. But I'm also all about the other side, which is the reality of the process and how it unfolds in our day to day lives.
Ian: Yeah, certainly take shortcuts when you can, but not everybody's open to hearing these shortcuts at the time me, especially like, you can tell me the truth. I just got it, I gotta know, for myself, I gotta I gotta go through it.
Dan: Alright, so without further ado, let's get into the episode, and explore these ideas further.
Music
Eagan: Last time you had me on I responded to your knowledge versus efficiency gap hypothesis, it's something along the lines of, it's actually better to make a business more efficient of something they're already doing and you can do it better, cheaper, faster, etc. I think you're saying that's probably better than you come in, and you know, SEO and they don't know anything about search engines and HTML and yada yada. You know, that was kind of my understanding of it. And maybe with recency bias, at the time, I had just had this major Senior Living client, and they had nine locations and we did SEO and Google ads and even Bing Ads, which killed it for them. Basically helped them grow their business in terms of fill up their, you know, assisted living units. And so I thought, ‘Wow, that was really special’. And this was, this was a 10 x client for us. I had been charging clients 500 bucks a month and this was one where we got for 5000 a month and it was hugely profitable for us and it was hugely profitable for them.So that, that win/win I was coming off of that thinking, ‘I'm ready to do this again’. Fast forward, this is my third year just yesterday, I spoke again at the Wisconsin ‘Assisted Living Association Conference’. And I've had very little interest since then. And I'm kind of going through the case study, I'm talking through what we did. I'm kind of like, ‘Who's ready’ at the end. And there's very little because that's not their world. That's not what they're living in. They don't necessarily understand the need. So my evolution is me going from ‘Okay, we're ‘Get Found Madison, we're kind of this local catch all agency for different kinds of companies’, where it's really like e-commerce, they know they need digital marketing. I don't need to sell them on that piece. I just need to sell them on we're a great agency to do it for you. There’s this example in Daniel Kahneman, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ about this woman, let's say this woman, Lisa, right. She went to a women's college and she's interested in women's issues. More likely to be a) banker, b) a banker and a feminist. And most people would actually say banker and a feminist because you're like, get these associations with went to a women's college, etc. But just logically, the fewer things that are in that end logic, that chain right, the more likely it is of no, it's more likely for someone to just be a banker, not a banker and a feminist. So the same story here for me is it's more likely for a business to understand that they need digital marketing, and then who should we do it with versus ‘Do I need to convince them they need digital marketing, and I'm the guy to do it’.
Dan: I think you summed it up really nicely. And I'm glad you brought up Kahneman because I believe that, as service entrepreneurs, the prospect of bringing our knowledge to the table and dominating it, I can imagine being at the table and you're like the only one who understands about digital marketing and they understand something completely different. And in your head, you're thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, if they just knew this, we would do what you said we would, we would kill it for their business’. And it is this excitement. And this differential of knowledge that I think drives a lot of service entrepreneurs to develop a sales process around that emotion, but the most disconcerting thing and exciting thing about business at the same time can be all the things that we don't know that are in our orbit of either ownership control or potential. Somehow tapping into those existing ancient rivers of cash flow, so to speak, that Venkatesh Rao talks about can be the most powerful thing. Although sitting at the e commerce company and talking about digital marketing, that conversation is going to be a lot different because they're saying, ‘Hey, we have something existing here. We might not need all the knowledge that you have necessarily, might not be as excited about it. There's something right underneath our feet here that is valuable’.
Eagan: Yeah, I feel myself vacillating a bit. Because one of the, one of the coaching programmes I'm in, I really like it’s called ‘Strategic Coach’, this guy, Dan Sullivan, who's got a lot of great podcasts. And he has a concept called ‘who not how’. And that one really gets me. You get to a point in your career, where it's like, ‘I'm not gonna learn this, like, I need to hire somebody who's gonna learn it, or I need to hire somebody who knows it’. And so I still believe in that I really believe in ‘who not how’ and I'm trying to embody it and bring on people who know email, who know Google Shopping who know the elements that I don't necessarily know personally, because there's value in that and here's power in that. So I still, in my heart of hearts, I still think like, ‘Boy, Senior Living companies sure could benefit and make a lot of money using the latest techniques and techniques in digital marketing. But do they know it?’ And that even gets back to Dan Kennedy and direct response marketing of - you got to bring out the pain? Have you got to speak in their terms of: are they having trouble recruiting staff? Yes. Are they having trouble filling their units? Sometimes? Yes, sometimes No. Am I even speaking to the person who cares about whether we're at 100% capacity or not? That is that is the hard work of they're at the very, very top of the funnel. They vaguely understand there's a problem. They don't even know what the solutions are, who the solutions providers are.
Dan: Can you talk about, you have this amazing client. How did things end up transpiring over the past year with them?
Eagan: So that one ended up, we didn't even do a full year with them, they got acquired. And part of what I said in that comment to your knowledge versus efficiency gap was, you know, these guys had a nice multiple on whatever sales they were doing at that point. They were more profitable because their units were more full. So that, I don't know what the final number was, but I'm sure that helped them sell the business for more. Right? So that was just a nine month engagement. And it was many years ago now. And the fact that I haven't had another one since then, is what makes me revisit this and think maybe I should look more at solving efficiency issues.
Dan: Now, what if Dan Kennedy comes to the table and says, ‘Hey, Eagan you know, you're just a bad sales guy. You go into this conference year after year. How hard is it really to exacerbate that pain and then get people into your funnel and get people converted into high paying clients?’
Eagan: Yeah, I think that's possible. I think there's still an opportunity for someone who can do it better, I will say, I think year two of three that I spoke at this conference, a guy from outside the industry who actually made his money in gambling, a very interesting character, reinvested and got into senior living in Milwaukee, like totally randomly, you know, and he came up to me after and he said, ‘One, I'm going to hire you. Two, I think you're in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. Like the folks in this industry are not thinking like this’, you know, he had he had seen it all he had a computer science background, he understood statistics deeply. And he's coming in from the outside saying, ‘I'm an outside of the industry, I get it. But I'm looking around the folks I know here like, this is not how they think about things, you're barking up the wrong tree’ basically.
Dan: That was amazing outside perspective to receive, how did you respond to it?
Eagan: I continued to try to market to that niche another year and I think yesterday my remote speech to the conference, that'll probably be my last one focusing on it . We've had a few projects here and there but no more big bites at 5000 a month. And it's like, I think that's where I've got this team now like we can execute, I need to be finding clients that can, you know, afford those kinds of fees and are ready to invest.
Dan: You mentioned that, within your team, you started to observe that certain clients were better than others. Where did these realisations percolate, where did you start to see this?
Eagan: This is a wave we're going back and forth on. I have one of my team members, Caroline, every month I have her export the data out of QuickBooks, export the data out of our timekeeping system and give me a spreadsheet on how profitable is each client. The thing that really captured my imagination, I was very fortunate in that first year to get that client like, I think there was a lot of luck involved with it. But that realisation that they paid more, and they got more value. It's not either or, like, I think when you're coming from, you know, another world of being an employee, working in nonprofit, working in government, teaching, whatever the idea that you could charge more and the person giving you the money is happier. That is a counterintuitive insight that I think most people don't realise and you really need to realise that after you've been in, you know, a business, I would say at the five year mark or wherever you're at, you know, to take it to the next level, like you've got to like, deeply absorb that insight and operationalize it and I'm in the middle of trying to figure out how to do that.
Dan: I would, off the cuff theorising, suspect that the curve of client satisfaction goes up radically how much more you charge, and that it reaches in any industry, any service, it reaches a point where it starts to fall back off again, and you start to go down. This is one of the things I disagree with in a lot of services coaching. There's this idea that ‘Oh, you keep pressing higher and higher’ in terms of how you charge, the sky is really the limit. And I suspect that there's a very strong limit and a lot of industries where that satisfaction starts to drop back off. Have you noticed anything like that?
Eagan: Hmm. I don't know if we've hit that yet. I'm still getting my head around it, but you've got knowledge you can plug in and operationalize into another business. If it's a multimillion dollar business or even bigger, you know, it's like, it's not hard for little changes of a couple percent to make them a lot of money year over year over year.
Dan: You just pointed that out too that. Part of the problem that this doesn't really work at the end of the day is that it's not a clear dichotomy that anytime you're working with a company that ultimately requires more efficiency, you absolutely must bring knowledge to the table. And that's a key critical element to any sales process, which is, you guys understand the ROI on the stuff, you know, but I want to get back to the questions. I suppose you were asking of the team, in that you noticed that the e commerce clients were doing better than your other clients? You talk a little bit about that.
Eagan: Yeah, and I think that's a 2020 thing too. Obviously, local businesses have been slammed in this. For some of our clients, their very best month of all time was April 2020, where other advertisers had pulled out of Facebook. So there was plenty of inventory. Lots of people were spending a lot of time on Facebook because we were on lockdown. And so just there, there was kind of that ‘moment in time’ opportunity. I think there's a longer term thing too where it's just like, life is not going back. Like there's no such thing as return to normal. And e commerce is just going to grow and grow and grow. And that's part of why I'm going in that in that direction too. Just the tail winds on this of the other folks who are, what they're now calling D to C, you know, direct to consumer, Facebook ad buyers. There's this, they're blowing up the twitterverse of sort of, there's not enough of us, like there's so much demand for people who can run profitable Facebook ads, that we can't even keep up and when I'm hearing that I'm going, ‘I want to go that way’.
Dan: So let's say I own a valet parking podiums business. I was on Facebook and there's this guy from ‘Caravan Digital’ named Eagan who sounds smart, gave me some tips about how maybe Instagram advertising could sell valet podiums for me. So I book a call, send you an email, whatever. I would really like to understand. How are you going to get to the point where I'm giving you X number of thousands of dollars a month? Bring me into that process a little bit as if it's as if I were a client.
Eagan: I'm gonna see if I can share screen, here we go.
Dan: So you would share a screen on a client call?
Eagan: I would. I usually do Zoom so I'm incompetent on Skype. Don't mind me.
Dan: I think everybody's I think Skype is the one that is incompetent. Okay, great. This is this is awesome.
Eagan: That's good. Can you see the Sandler sales summary? I can. Alright, so this is talked about in a book called, ‘You can't teach a kid to ride a bike at a seminar’, if you want to check it out by David Sandler who, you know, started this whole franchise of training, which I think is perfect for professional services. So there's a summary. And the idea is you're crossing off each compartment before you go through it. So I think we got seven. We have bonding and rapport, upfront contracts, pain, budget, decision, fulfilment, and post sale. So in bonding rapport, you're trying to understand their style, what they're about. How do they communicate? How do they like to be communicated to? And upfront contract is like, ‘What are we doing today? How much time we have, here's what I want to talk about. What do you want to talk about? What's our objective?’ And oftentimes in the first call, it's like, let's, let's determine if we're a potential fit. And if so, let's schedule another meeting later. And if not, it's totally good. You know, are you good telling me? No. And that's kind of like it throws people a little bit. You're like, why? Like, why are we going right to that, but it's like, we want to get away from high pressure, like used car sales. We want them to feel like totally comfortable basically.
Dan: It's like you're setting safe boundaries.
Eagan: Yeah, And then a very important part here is called ‘pain’. And you really get them talking about what sort of pain they have in their business. If there's not a pain, if like Facebook ads are a nice to have figured out, SEO is a nice to have, it's unlikely there will be a sale. You need to discover this and you need to dig in. So there's a lot to that. Budget is you got to ask, ‘Do you have a budget to solve this problem, even if it's a range?’ And a lot of times people want to know, ‘Well, what do you do? What are the options? What are the different things’ and it's like, I found it's really best to say, we have a variety of, you know, projects and retainer type packages. Oftentimes, it's best if I understand, you know, what's your budget range? So I know we can kind of be speaking, you know, in the right area, basically.
And so, to get that budget first before you're proposing a $100,000 product, that's really important. Decision - are there other decision makers who are involved with the sale oftentimes, there's a co owner or there's even an accountant or someone who's gonna bend their ear when you're out of the room. And what we want to do is have another meeting and get all those people in the room. And then fulfilment is actually the piece that people think about, which is sort of, in many other sales systems. That's the song and dance that we go up, we get, you know, we have a slide deck or ...
Dan: the slide deck.
Eagan: Yep. Yeah, that's right. And I gotta say, if you're doing Sandler sales process correctly, that's a very, very short step indeed, we already know that they have pain, and they want to solve it. We know what their budget is. And then we know who the decision makers are. So if we know that the pain is serious, they want to solve it. We may even ask one through 10. How important is this to your business? We know they have a budget for it. And then we know who the decision makers are, then we may present in some cases, they're like, ‘Okay, what's the cost? Let's get started’. This can be a very, very short conversation. And then lastly, is the post sell and the post sale is talking them through. You know, sometimes people want to back out later. I want to make sure is there anything that's going to happen that, you know, that could change your mind after this conversation? We don't want to have that conversation via email later.
Dan: Can you share with me how the specifics of how that might have worked in a recent service package for an e commerce company?
Eagan: Yeah. Shall I tell you what I got or didn't get.
Dan: Both.
Eagan: Yeah. On the ago for one we got this last year. That's one of our big clients now. They had another agency whose specialty was creating great videos and doing great design. But the agency was sort of doing that thing where they're like, Oh, yeah, ‘And we can do Facebook ads. And we can do Google’, you know, I think agencies always run into this - clients ask, ‘Can you do this and can you do that’? And you really want to be clear on, ‘No, we don't get it. This but we refer it out’ or ‘Yes, we have expertise in this’. And it's, it's easy to slip up and do stuff where it's like, ‘Yeah, I got someone who can do that. But are we really the best at it?’ You know?
Dan: And how do you decide then where the price point sits? Because at some point, you get down the submarine, and you have to put a price in front of this person. Is that based on your operational costs? Is it based on how much you think they're willing to spend? How do you zero in on what these packages are ultimately going to cost?
Eagan: Yeah, I wish I had a great answer for this. We try to work within the range of their budget. If the budget is too small, you may need to end the meaning of ‘Hey, you know what? Our packages start at 3000 plus a month. Sounds like that's not a good fit. Let me see if I can do with someone who you know a freelancer might be able to do this for you’. So part of sales. is about disqualifying those leads that we shouldn't be having the conversation. In terms of pricing, we've kind of landed on what's involved? Are we doing SEO? Are we doing Google ads? Are we doing email marketing, we need to switch them from another email system to Klaviyo . There's an element of what services are involved. So I think Alan Weiss, you know, ‘Million dollar consulting’ could still criticise me and say, you're still doing this a little bit based on your costs versus the potential value to them. Jay Abraham also talks about, there’s multiple things you're asking prospective customers to do, which is - it's not just it's not just pay the money. You're asking them to bear some form of risk too.
Dan: Absolutely. And certainly, there is platform risk. If you're asking for them to change a bunch of systems, now all of a sudden there could be multiple stakeholders in the decision to go with the agency.
Eagan: Yeah, yeah. That's right. So on long term contracts, we've kind of settled on retainers, and it's based on, you know how many services we're doing, which is basically what's the cost to me for us to fulfil that. And that's always a guessing game to some degree, because you get in there, there's things you didn't anticipate that end up being challenging, and we got to troubleshoot their Facebook ad account, we got to get their Google Shopping feed working. One thing I'm excited to get into with ‘Caravan Digital’ is pay for performance. And so we've got, you know, quote, unquote, competitor agencies that we're friendly with, and they're making a lot of their money on percent of sales percent of ad spend. So we're moving in that direction. And that gets back to that original piece of, ‘I want to be close to the marketplace. I want to live on the edge here a little bit in terms of, if we're not performing like, I'm underwater’. So we're figuring that out. And even if you're doing retainer pricing, there's still some percent of their sales that they are paying you. And so you should still know that percentage,
Dan: One concept that's related to, you know, knowledge gap, efficiency gap, making sales and things is this idea that's been rightly criticised on the show. We call it ‘niching until it hurts’. And it's essentially this idea of, for example, a few weeks ago, we had an episode with Laurence Taylor, who suggested that, you know, we were selling Salesforce implementations like to all different kinds of companies. And so we had different decks and we had different proposals and, and it wasn't until we said, ‘We're just doing this for insurance companies’, that things really clicked for them and they were able to move faster, get higher dollar clients and stuff. Do you have a perspective on this idea of when you do decide to solve an efficiency gap for companies that appreciate ROI on your services that you're just going to niche into one narrow silo of the overall potential market?
Eagan: Yeah, I wonder, again with the recency bias with me on here right before this call, I was on a sales call with somebody sells you know, stylish maternity clothing and had a great call, went through the Sandler summary and thought we were looking pretty good. And she said, you know, ‘Honestly, I'm looking for somebody with experience in apparel. So I think I'm going to go to this other agency, I'll let you know if that doesn't work out’. Even that was like this moment of thought. I followed my process, thought we were doing good, but I should have done more of, ‘Who else are you talking to and what's important to you?’ So that one is very recent, that's within the last hour recent but it certainly makes me wonder if ecommerce itself is even too broad and then, do we niche further I think in the coming years? We'll figure that out.
Dan: Interesting. Do you feel like deciding that, ‘Hey, we're just going to be an agency for e commerce companies?’ Is there a risk in that when you just make the decision like that? You know, you set up a new brand. You had an established brand and a wonderful reputation. What scares you about making that change?
Eagan: Thanks for asking that, some of our biggest clients are not ecommerce. And so as word gets out to them, what are they going to think? We still got this legacy agency, like we've still got these clients that are paying us a lot of money to do their marketing. And they're not ecommerce, you know. Are they going to say? What's the future? How do we fit in and right now the plan is ‘Get Found Madison’ stands and we're launching a new brand and, you know, we'll figure it out as we need to have, will there be separate teams someday? Will one company become the other? I'm trying to just keep moving forward and figure that out as we go. I think the big fear is like, ‘What do old clients say?’ And also just, I feel like I'm starting from scratch. You know, I'm an SEO guy. I've been building up my domain writing an Ahrefs on ‘Get Found Madison’ for years, like we're, you know, ranking pretty well in ‘Caravan digital.com’, it's like, ‘Do I have the energy to do this again?’ I gotta find it somewhere.
Dan: The energy thing is a very real question. We've often posited over the years that maybe running an agency actually requires more from the founder than many other business models. Have you ever reflected on that?
Eagan: Yeah. And that's kind of that's what I really want to ask you about of productized services aside if they can be like, how do you decide whether you're a service or, or a product entrepreneur? How do you decide like, I don't know. And the only thing I can say now is like, ‘I've got more experience now as a service entrepreneur’. So like, everything, you know, every nail I see, like, I'm using that hammer on and basically, but it just makes me wonder, from what you've said in the past, like, Is there more scale? Is there more sellable potential, you know, is there less scope creep when it's just a product one and done? I think you've said always customers never clients. I don't know if you stick to that now, but I know you've said in the past, right?
Dan: Yeah, certainly we do have clients now, highly highly filtered ones, but it's not the end game idea of what we're doing. We're doing it to money a product problem, if that makes sense? I think clients are an excellent way to learn about an addressable market. Like what's going on. Like there was an episode a few weeks back now with John Solorzano. He's very smart guy. And he runs an agency that continues to niche down into, essentially now they're getting into more helping Shopify implementation. So he's like a white label for big agencies that do like everything for big Shopify brands. By taking on those clients, you know, John is learning a great deal about the sorts of software implementations that ecommerce companies are using to make a lot of money on the Shopify platform.And I think the end game for him is to ultimately have a product of his own in that space. And you can learn about it by taking money to solve those problems. And essentially, that's why we've decided to take money, we charge right now about $5,000 to place a high level person in a company. And the only reason we charge $5,000 to do that is, well we want to get paid to learn about what it takes to do that. And if you were to say to me, hey, Dan, like, you know, you're not going to develop software or tools that solve that problem. You're going to just charge $5,000 for placements for the rest of your life. I would say, ‘I'm just not going to do it’. You know if that were a rule.
Eagan: Why?
Dan: Because I'm not impressed by the upside that I've seen about building agencies and services businesses, because all of the end game scenarios, as they're painted, and the examples that I see aren't ones that I want, except for the ones that ultimately use it to build a product platform tool, something like that.
Eagan: Can I ask selling is business an important consideration in that when you talk about the exit?
Dan: I would say, selling the business is just a symptom of the value of the asset. So when you look at agency valuations, they're typically not that impressive, although that would be the one example that I'd really be interested to hear more about, which is like agencies built for exit. And I've heard stories like that, but not seen a lot of personal examples. Typically, what I'll see is disappointing exits, you've got a founder who's just crushed the Sandler system for 15 years or similar one and essentially has built up too much trust, if that makes sense.
Eagan: It’s tied to that person.
Dan: Yeah. And I, you know, I have one formative entrepreneurial experience where we were kind of in an acquisition or mood and my first apprenticeship or protege ship or whatever, and it was in 2006 timeframe and we did cycle through a lot of agencies that we felt like. ‘Oh, man, their list would be great for us’. And I remember sitting across the table from a lot of founders that were in their 50s and 60s and just thinking like, ‘This guy really hopes like he's gonna get out of this thing’, you know, and it's not that great of an outcome in terms of like the multiple and the optionality. So what I'm getting at is - I had an instinct about your first question, which is related to a lot of the thinking that people have been sending to me about the thousand day principle, which is like, so why would you start a services business over a product business? And I think the answer is something like because you don't have enough resources.And that the hidden story behind the story of 1000 day product journeys is that there's an enormous amount of resources gathered from something, whether it's savings, rich parents, investor, secret fringe information. It could be anything in one of 50 categories that represents an edge. But applying that and having it gather forces into something that can be as powerful as a product or a platform takes a lot longer than people might suspect. And that's sort of the inspiration behind why I harp on the three year thing all the time, which is like, if I really painstakingly detailed all the things that took for us to get something as simple as a valet podium to the marketplace people might instead just start a services business because it just takes so so so long. And then the process of starting a SwaS or a service or freelancing consulting and then trying to find the moment at which you break off into platform or partnership or product. It can be often very hard. because now you're serving two masters, it can also be the absolute right thing to do is many cases on the internet have shown us like 37signals is the kind of first public example on the web of a design agency, who realised that what design agencies really need are project management tools. And then they developed the project management tool using the money from their clients.
Let's take it back to Dan Kennedy. The likelihood that you have the psychological wherewithal to, to persuade somebody on a telephone call is like very, very high. Now to abstract that experience to then make it work from one to many, as you said, is very low. The drop off between those two things is huge. Over the last 10 years, I've seen very few people who managed to be able to turn what intuitively works in them, they know how to do it, versus product it, literally productize it like, I want you to take your sales process such that you never are a part of it. That jump basically never happens. Now, if you think that's difficult, at least my personal experience suggests that it is. Now you take it to the next level, which is like, what you do to make value in the world now turn that into something you never have to do. That, to me is essentially a kind of an end game of entrepreneurship, which is systems and value thinking combined.
Eagan: I guess what I'm trying to puzzle over is like, as I take on this new venture, like I'm pretty much going in on services, but I'd like taking a pause and I'm just like, do I need to think more seriously about e commerce and products? Are they different kinds of entrepreneurs? I understand clients, I understand now at least the idea of growing a team, mentoring people doing all that, like, I just like, get the value of it. I don't totally understand products as a consumer either. Like, I like books. Over the years, I've enjoyed buying video games, I used to enjoy buying albums, you know, like, that's kind of the full list. I don't totally understand consumerism in a sense. So the services almost seem more tangible to me. And the exit is stuff that I'm not necessarily thinking about maybe I should be of, I'm kind of on this ‘Dan Sullivan Strategic Coach train’ where he says build into it, build your company into a self managing company. So the value is getting delivered by other people ‘who not how’ and then you won't have a reason to sell it.
Dan: I think that, you know, that's very possible. Alot of times the kind of services entrepreneurs that I read about, that have the kinds of outcomes that would be appealing to me. They have a very strong pedigree, whether it's an industry pedigree, or an educational one, or a wealth, one. So I've kind of been locked out of those outcomes, because of my background and who I know and how long it takes to get to know those kinds of people or those industries, essentially I'm being very vague right now because my personal experience is a little bit limited. One thing that occurred to me when we asked about the difference between services and product entrepreneurs is I would say, I was gonna say product entrepreneurs are the lucky ones. And I mean that in two ways. I mean, first off, you have to be lucky to have a product work. But then also you get exposed to luck in a kind of a way that is a little bit more, the gearing is a little bit lower on a services business. And it's often why I talk about what I see as the difficulty of running a services business in that often when I meet an entrepreneur has been running one for a very long time they possess the greatest range of entrepreneurial skills, because I think it's truly difficult to run an agency that says say it has 40 employees. Like when I was working in an agency that had 40 employees, we had to be like bad asses, we had to know about all different kinds of things. And we had to perform at a very high level. And we did and I learned a tonne from all that.But we also didn't really get exposed to the kind of luck that a lot of product and platform entrepreneurs get exposed to. Even if, for example, we landed a whale, which would be about the luckiest thing that, you know, can happen to a high level agency. It wasn't something we could enjoy as like profit or learning or something, it ultimately became something we had to manage again as now we got to manage this whale you know, and so whereas with a product you can just have, you know, I have many friends now, but one close friend who, you know, COVID hit and all of a sudden interest in his best selling product doubled overnight. And that doubled overnight became money in his personal bank account, which is like the opportunity for him to not work for a decade, the opportunity for him to come up with another product, to become a scratch golfer, whatever comes up, whereas the luck associated with services businesses is often not immediately realised in the same way.
Eagan: I've heard you say endgame quite a bit. It's kind of what we're talking about. I feel like I'm thinking about that less. I'm being less clear on that. Do you think I'm wrong to be or maybe people could be constituted differently. Am I wrong not to think about that?
Dan: Well, you're wrong not to think of it because it's low cost to think of it. It's interesting. And it will force you to do some like precedent case analysis that I think could be truly valuable. What you don't want to do is constrain your thinking so much that you think you know the outcomes to everything. But what I found, especially when I was working in agency days, is that we were subject to a lot of ‘wish thinking’, like, because we had so much infrastructure and sticks in the fire and things that we felt that there was something good around the corner all the time, and I don't know why that particular group felt like that. We were very entrepreneurial and stuff. But actually, there never really was. And it wouldn't have been that hard for us to decide, like, I remember holding a million dollar check from a client. And we could have reverse engineered what that would have done for the business in advance, and realise that it maybe wasn't the Saviour that we were hoping it was going to be. The most positive end game thinking that we ever did. And this is basically forced thinking to the whole podcast, which is we took the infrastructure of our services business and said the end game here, we don't like them. The best end game we can achieve is take the operation and use part of it to build a product business.
Eagan: And the reasons were - then we're exposed more potential upside potential in We can scale we can sell, is that right?
Dan: We can get rich and not work that hard. Relatively speaking to how rich we get. So that's I think the you know, I guess like the one of the really amazing end games for like a high level powered agency is that you end up on the board of the agency, you founded. And you kind of talk to the high level clients, you do the charity, golf thing and all that. That's a decent outcome, but with a product business, you know, we've highlighted multiple stories here. If you get lucky, you could sell it for eight figures or you could sell it for multi seven figures because you've externalised all the market knowledge into the product itself. It's a lot easier to have other people run the operation then, like I said, if it's true that agency entrepreneurs do ultimately have to develop more skills and so will the people who take those skills, take those operations over. So I think the reason people start services businesses is essentially, because they're easy to start, and it becomes a hamster wheel. And every year, we would know what our costs were. And we would know how many proposals we need to put out in order to meet our cost barrier. And we keep pushing every month in order to hopefully make good money ourselves at the end of the year. And then the next year, it all started over again. Even when we got the million dollar check, it was like all started over again. Now our costs have inflated to meet million dollar clients. So now we need to get two million dollar clients this year. And it felt like a job so now I've run product companies and it's not like they don't feel like a job too look it's, it's all difficult. It's all hard. I don't think the questions really ever end.
Eagan: Based on what you're saying, my concern is I'm not dreaming big enough, or I'm not getting specific and planning and doing all that stuff I don't want to do. But also trying to go back to my original motivation, my original motivation was freedom, and not necessarily those numbers and then you get you've talked about in the past of, you know, $50,000 a year working for yourself can be better than 100 plus thousand working for somebody else, you know, like that, that really stuck with me. Wherever I'm at, like, I'm still in that mode of - as long as I'm autonomous as long as I'm enjoying what I'm doing. That's what matters. I'm not thinking like what's the end date? And what's the ultimate outcome? I'm not doing that for whatever reason. On the planning thing of just like that's what my coaches tell me you know, like you got to plan you got to do this and like, part of me wonders like it's my company like, if the consequences I don't want make as much money but I don't have to plan I might be okay with it.
Dan: I think on the one hand, I want to criticise it and say oh, Of course, they would say that like, that's what coaches do, right? A coach has a role. On the other hand, I have noticed the power of it, especially in services, businesses. And in a services business, I remember we would always set these like really high expectations for ourselves, and we would somehow attract them, we would meet them, you know, and it made me realise two things - one the power of potentially doing that, and number two, how much this all depended on us, which was disappointing at the same time, you know, so that's not a system that I would want to live with for the rest of my life, which is making sure that somehow like, emotionally everybody in this organisation is like connected to this and we're constantly you know, it's just not what emotionally I guess appeals to me. I'd rather be a little bit more clever, a little I'm always attracted to those who've sort of hacked reality in a more clever way and look at how many sales are happening because of nobody’s emotion because of nobody's hard driven work, but that somehow over years that's been crystallised into systems. Whether that system is a funnel or a product or a platform that ultimately serves people without that ongoing energy.
Eagan: That's pretty interesting. Something I've been thinking about is just how many people there are in the world. You have the opportunity to reach hundreds of millions or billions like that's something real to think about as an entrepreneur of how do I provide a little bit of value to a lot of those people versus we've got 10 or 20 clients, that's, I am intrigued by that piece of it.
Dan: Personally, I think it makes a tonne of sense for you to work with e commerce entrepreneurs, especially because a lot of times now you're going to be dealing with founders I suspect more than with maybe bigger clients. And as a founder yourself there's a lot more opportunity there too that might be tangential to the deal. Benefits and asset value will be of great a great deal of value to you as well.
Eagan: I'm kind of thinking of the hedgehog and the fox or e commerce for some reason feels like the hedgehog you're digging in, you know something really well a very specific product for a very specific person in need. Versus I enjoy the jumping aroun’ piece of consulting and seeing different industries and knowing the people that are giving me money and developing relationships and learning all kinds of things about different things, niches or industries. So I'm wondering based on how I'm constituted or how I am like, Where do I plug in? I feel like that's a question for entrepreneurs, don't you?
Dan: I agree, founder fit 100%.
Eagan: That's something, that value creation piece, it's something I did not understand in my bones when I was making the leap from having a salary job to being an entrepreneur. You used to get paid because you waited a certain amount of time and they sent me a salary because you didn't do too bad a job. That tells you how good of an employee I was, you know? Like, that was the motivation like I did not understand why other people were working hard and what their incentives were. I did my job, I did okay with the clients I had when I was an employee, but I couldn't wrap my mind around the motivation system.
And then that piece of, ‘Okay, I need to go out and support myself. How do I, you know, make a few thousand dollars a month so I can live in Bali’ or whatever it is, like, listen to you guys thinking that's the goal. But once I got into it, I was just like, I just need to think about, ‘How do I become valuable to other people, and how do we deliver that?’ And the rest really follows and that's, that's really that first step I think I kind of want to know the people that are getting that value. Maybe I want them to thank me or something. Maybe I've got some personality trait about that. I need those words of affirmation. That's my love language or something. Yeah. versus there's anonymous people everywhere buying my products and they're getting a little bit of value out of it. It feels different to me.
Dan: Understood, I can understand why I feel different. I mean, I like to have answers, but on the other hand, really, I'm still learning every day and it is a process that you have to continually be involved in. Very few of us become an entrepreneur and make so much money, that then we just sit around, you know, reading books for the rest of our lives. Ultimately, it is a career that requires you to show up at your desk and work every day. So for those things that are already or coming to a desk and showing up at work every day is their curiosity warranted?
Eagan: Oh, yeah, definitely. And I think for me, you know, everybody's got a different risk tolerance, but something I got out of Taleb’s ‘The Black Swan’ was like, limit that downside, open up the upside as much as you can. And so for me, that meant saving up so I had a year's runway to start the business. And that's that's just what worked for me. And I definitely encourage other people who are curious about it to try it.
Dan: And appreciate you also, you know, part of the reason we started speaking, Eagan is that you just shared your critique of the things you heard on the TMBA, and then you shared your knowledge and feedback. And it's been a productive conversation, one where ultimately we're left with more questions, hopefully more interesting questions than answers. And the answer is really what we're going to do at our desks with our business because the podcast is fun and games, we can sit here and say, whatever you want and it's a lot of fun. But it's that tinkering and experimentation with our business to see what reality has in store for us ultimately,
Eagan: Hear, hear thanks for having me back.
Dan: Yeah, we appreciate it Eagan thank you.
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Dan: A big shout out to Eagan for dropping by the show. Bossman, you know how much I enjoy talking with Eagan about business stuff, about books. Also, great hang this guy, what a great hang. He came to DC Austin last year. And for those of you who have run an e commerce store to go check out, ‘Caravan Digital’, give the guy a call, what could possibly go wrong? Get an eagle in the horn. I mean, if you got ideas about how we can move things forward, or if he can help your business, what a great connection to be able to make. So big thanks Eagan.
And I thought maybe we could share some of some of our thoughts on the topic here today while I got you in front of me. This idea of efficiency gap versus knowledge gap. Is this just an example of a theory that doesn't relate to reality and we're just trying to make sense of this complicated world, is it isn't useful to you at all?
Ian: It's real. I think I can relate this to what we're doing over at Dynamite Jobs right now. And one of the services and we'll get into products versus services. But one of the services that we're selling is a recruiting product.
Dan: Yeah, $4650
Ian: I'm still confused, is it a service or a product.
Dan: It’s a productized service.
Ian: It’s a productized service, we go out and we find you the best candidates and we act as a representative of your company, we find a cultural fit. And we find somebody that's willing to work for your salary and somebody that has the right skill sets for you. And we proactively go out and find this person and bring them to you. Through selling this service to many different companies now over the past couple months, I'll tell you which one I enjoy more efficiency versus knowledge. 100% efficiency, because it's people that already understand the problem, they're already executing on the problem, they might be doing poorly, or there might be some gaps in there. But it's somebody that's already going in the trajectory that we're going in.
Dan: Yes, and that's the idea. And again, theoretically, this theory might break down. And it might not work in your business or even be true. But it doesn't mean that you can't try it on for a little bit and see how it goes. Because one of the things we've noticed is like you'd think intuitively, and this is where the idea came from. Intuitively, if you come to two different companies, and one has an HR person and something of an HR process in place, and Company B has no HR to speak of. Sometimes as a service provider, you're tempted to think that company B is going to be the great client because you're like, ‘They don't have HR, I do HR’.
Ian: Nope.
Dan: And then you get them on the phone and whoever runs the company says, ‘Oh my god, I had no idea there was so many opportunities in HR, this is amazing’. And you're like, ‘It is amazing. I've chosen this business, I do all these services. I am in fact an expert. Look at my YouTube channel about this stuff’. So in other words, at the beginning, Company B can seem great because they hear about all your knowledge and they think it's so great. But here's the thing, the difference between theory and reality, reality is complicated. It's gonna take a long time for Company B to understand how HR works, to understand how to properly value your service, to make it sustainable in a way that they're actually proving ROI with your services. Now, Company A yeah, they have an HR person but that means that they value it, they already understand the value that you deliver.
Ian: Yep. And so you can go into Company A and you can deliver a better product a lot of times is what we can do. We can show them things that they didn't know are possible. And then, you know, it becomes a matter of like, ‘Okay, how do we hang on?’ Right? How do we hang on to this? Because a lot of people are nervous in the efficiency gap space that like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna do this for them, they're gonna see how I do it, and then my value is gonna disappear’. Yeah. Right, because it was an efficiency now they understand the efficiency that you provide. But I think there's a lot more to service, a good service at least, that you can hold on to that efficiency value for a long time. You know, for us, for example, if you're doing the math, to hire even a decent recruiter, you'd have to hire like somewhere like 40 plus people a year, to start to make sense of spending that kind of money for each individual hire that we're providing. It would take a long time for most of the companies that we're working with to get to the point where they would need an internal recruiter.
Dan: Yeah. So a fan of the efficiency gap, so to speak?
Ian: A big fan of the efficiency gap. The knowledge gap thing for me, Dan is like, it's like pushing a boulder up a hill, a lot of times. It's like, oh, God, I get on the phone with somebody and they don't know anything about this stuff, that's my least favourite conversation. ‘Yes, I'll educate you on how this stuff works. Yes, we'll have a conversation. But the chance that you're ready to do what I'm offering today is like four years down the road’. So like, ‘Okay, cool. Give me a call in like three years when you're ready to like, take advantage of the situation’.
Dan: And again, it's not just about people's attitudes, it's about their actions. And that's, I think, what this distinction can help you to tap into a little bit because, again, if you go down to the person who owns the local gym, and you sit there and you talk to them about Instagram and SEO, they know this stuff exists right in the world, you present yourself as an expert who's done it for another gym or whatever, they're going to get jacked. Of course, they're going to get jacked. You do not want to, typically speaking, I've seen a lot worse results when service providers sell their services as a business opportunity instead of selling it as a critical part of optimising current business practices.
Ian: This is radio, I'm just shaking my head the whole time, while you're saying this, because you know, this idea that you're going to go down to the local gym, I think it's absolutely true. Everybody's so jacked are like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I can't wait to get on Google Local Business and SEO and all this stuff’. The problem is that they don't have a benchmark because they haven't engaged in this before. No matter how good you are, the results probably aren't going to be good enough, or they're not going to be exactly what they need. The price point isn’t gonna be right. I think engaging with somebody that's like, even once paid for this type of service before whether it's good, bad or other is leap years ahead of somebody that hasn't. So if you are going to sell in the knowledge space, and they have bought a similar product before, I think you're way better off. Because you just spend so much time educating them. And a lot of times I think, teaching them what they don't need to be taught and what they're not actually interested in solving problems in their businesses.
Dan: We got to hose you down, we got to hose you down.
Ian: I can't do it. It's a trap. And you know, here's the other thing Dan, let me just mention this. The knowledge gap sales, it's always glorified in the movies, in the books and all this stuff. It's like, the swagger person comes into the business and they say, like, ‘Oh, you can improve this’, or ‘Oh, this really needs help’. And then everybody cheers him out of the office, once they fix all their problems now works, not how it works at all.
Dan: One more point on this issue that Eagan and I touched on briefly - products versus services. I've gotten some emails over the past few weeks, you know, we highlight a lot of services entrepreneurs on the show. And people kind of say, ‘Well, you know, aren't you guys product guys?’ or ‘Why did you do a service at DJ’. And just to clarify, you know, I am a big believer in the multiplicity of ideas and pads and ways to find success. So, although I personally in my career, have made the choice to only engage in services that have a clear end game in a product, I totally believe in the opportunity to start a services business. So you know, I really do believe these are personal choices. And at the end of the day, it's not rocket science to go out there and find precedent cases of the types of businesses you're building. And the types of outcomes you want to achieve relative to the resources you currently have, your skill set your interest, whatever that is. I think it's on everybody to choose. So again, I'm not going to sit here and say, This is the path necessarily, although I'd be happy to make an argument for one versus the other. And in my own personal case, the only reason I want to I'm interested in doing DJ services right now is I feel like it's a moneyed way to educate ourselves about an eventual platform and product there.
Dan: Many of you listening to the show know that we used to work for a company together that did client work. And when we first started our product business, a lot of it was because we're so sick of doing client work and starting from the beginning. So it was like, wouldn't it be cool to just make a product one time, sit down for 100 hours, make a product and then just sell it for forever. That was kind of like an amazing idea for us because we're so entrenched in this client work. And we did it. And it was amazing. And we're like, this is all we're ever going to do. And then here comes DJ. And the lowest barrier to entry into Dynamite Jobs was selling services, which is what we're doing now, basically, and we're doing it so we can get educated so we can make a product. So the end game is still a product. On this podcast a million times people have come on here and had successful services business and never wanted to move on to products. I want to move on to products. That's where I want to be because I understand the virtues of it. And we've been there before, not to say we're necessarily going to get there very fast or not to say we're going to be successful when we get there. But I think it's an interesting way to stair step your way into it. That being said, there's a lot of smart people that disagree with me, you know, I was looking at Rob Wallings’ tweets the other day, Tiny Seed, he started multiple SaaS companies, like Drip. And he said, he believes that the best way to start a SaaS company is not with an audience. We've kind of started the opposite way around. But he said something like, you know, the 30 or 50, whatever it was people that applied to Tiny Seed, like only two of them had audiences. And he believes that that's the way forward. So I don't know, maybe we're going to this thing ass backwards. But I'm certainly learning a lot about the industry, about the clients, about the customers. And hopefully we can turn it into a product.
Dan: Well stick around and find out what happens good, bad or otherwise. And thank you today for being our audience. Thanks again to Eagan for stopping by the show and a big shout out to LMNT for salting our Aqua. That's it for today. We'll be back next Thursday morning am Eastern Standard Time.TMBA Ident[/bg_collapse]