SPEAKER_02 0:01

Everybody's got them back to don't worry about them. You make your business do the best that you can do. The right kind of people who are gonna be loyal, who are gonna spend a good money with you, gonna pay you on the time. Those kind of customers they care about how you care about them.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Hey Moxie family, I am excited to introduce you to one of my favorite people and one of our only, I think, um double podcast guests. So I praise that we uh invited you back and we're excited to chat with you again. This is um my friend Mark, who runs um his own business and his uh I think I read from your website you've been doing this for three decades, which is absolute four decades. You gotta update your your about us page. Four decades, which which I love. So I would love if you would to start. I want to hear about what did you want to be? Like if you can think back to when you were young, what did you want to be? And has that led it all into now kind of what you've done as your your career and your business has evolved over the last you know few decades here?

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Yeah, okay. So when I was 16, just before I left school, because I left school, bang on 16, uh, like you could do in England at the time. Um, I wanted to be in computers. Um, I wanted to run uh either be like uh an IT director or run my own business. Um, I had aspirations for that, but knew that I had a long way to go before that would happen because back in 1986, uh computers had only been out, what say properly five, ten years or something like that. There was no internet then, there was nothing. Um, even spreadsheets were based on a program called Lotus 123, I think. So um I stepped out into the the big world of um what's the word for it now? Uh I worked for my local council, so the town hall, um uh went straight into an apprenticeship there for two years in computer studies, and I was doing a part-time course at college at the same time, and then evolved into um using the computers, so I was on the the old the old-fashioned mainframes for anybody who can remember those who's old enough. And then I moved into um when I was just coming up for 20, I moved into call center technology. Um, so I ran uh a call, a couple of call centres, not the staff, but the actual technology, the phone system and you know, routing calls in bath and outbound. And I did that for about um 20 years at different um different angles, different sides. So um going through financial services mainly, um, so loans, insurances, and things like that. Um, they all have big call centres, people would ring in or and that. And then eventually um got to 2008 and the credit crunch came um over here, over there. Um by that time I'd reached the heights of being an IT director for a financial services firm. So I'd been there for three years at that level. So within 20 years of me leaving school, I was already where I wanted to be. Um, really happy, cruising along, nice, you know, nice holidays, all these sort of nice things. And literally within I would say 30 days, the rug was completely pulled, as it did back in 2008. Those who are not old enough to remember it properly, take a look because Lehman Brothers, I think, in the States was the start of it, it had a knock-on effect in the UK, and we literally got a phone call from our biggest supplier of money. We used to lend somebody else's money, and they said, that's it, done, no notice, nothing, that's it. Don't don't lend any more money at all, and that was it. We had to we had uh three and a half thousand staff in the call center, and we had to let them all go. And we went down to about 10 staff um because it was it shrunk that quickly, and then they closed it. So I thought, you know what? Um I've built myself up, I'd built all this reputation, it was just in tatters, and I wasn't I was not in control of it, I was at risk all the time. So I decided to myself back in 2008, I'm gonna build a website company, and and that's what I did. Started to build a website company, run that as I still do today, um, but it's evolved, it's evolved from hand-coded websites into uh Joomla, if anybody remembers Joomla at all, then onto uh WordPress, and now we're all building in Claude. Uh still been a little bit of WordPress, but we're still we're all building in Claude code these days. And uh where I am today, uh I've got myself three businesses, so I run not just run this company, I run another one that I won a ton of awards for, which uh which is my what my last podcast was about. Uh, and I've started a new company as well because the evolution of the reason I see it now is that websites, and this is where I like to be in control, I've seen that websites are gonna die ultimately because people can just go to Claude and build one now um relatively quickly. You don't need you, you know, to do one properly, you do need somebody, but my some of my customer base, which are um small plumbing companies, people like that, um, one-man bands, as they might know if you know them, like it's one-man bands over there, but single owner businesses, they can just get somebody to do it for them. The kids are pretty tech savvy these days as well, so it's like, oh, I've got my son to build it for me, it's great. And I'm like, okay. So we've evolved into um looking at what we call database reactivation services using some uh automation through text messages and some other bits and pieces. But the bit I like about that is I'm in control of that. I made that decision three years ago to move away from what I'm doing, not completely, but to just like merge across. Um, so now that side of the business represents probably about 30% of the company's revenue where two years ago it didn't exist. And I think that within the next by the end of this decade, I won't be building websites anymore. I will be using a lot of automation to turn help people turn their businesses around in terms of the customer relationship management using it properly and better than what they can do today.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

I I think it's so incredible just the arc that you shared in that story of kind of the theme where you you learn and you iterate and you're always kind of on on this leading edge of like, okay, I can see that this thing is coming. Do you feel like that in your life? Where like how have you so effectively been able to say, like, oh, this is, you know, this is what's coming, and I need to be, you know, like my what I'm doing needs to morph into this new thing.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

Yeah. So it's it's talking to your customers a lot and listening to them is the first thing, and listening to your prospects um and looking at your business. I mean, the thing for me is there's a big saying that I say to a lot of business people is you should be working on your business, not in your business, because you need people to be in your business. And you should be like I have a personal dashboard that I look at every day and it tells me where my numbers are in terms of like leads, sales, where my production pipeline is up to, how much money I've got coming through that way, and I can see it. And what we do is we track trends within that's that throughput. And if we can see, and we've seen for some time now that we're not winning as many website business website deals. Um, so the difference we've had is we're now winning higher-end ones, more complicated websites, but we might only win two or three of them a month. Where if I go back three years ago, I was closing simple websites at the rate of two or three a day, and it's just completely changed over that time. And you see it fall off, and you think, well, why is it changing? And you look and you listen to your customers and you talk to them, and they say, Mike said to you before, I've got one guy who said his son built the website for him in Claude or Chat GPT or something on his own. And I'm like, Okay, that's that's a threat to my business, but it's also an opportunity as well. You you can't see it always like as negative. It's like, right, this is an opportunity for me to learn from that. But what you what you've got to do is you've got to morph your business, like you say. You've got to think about listen, listen to your customers. That's really important because your customers will tell you which way to go. The your customers, your your customers, your competitors, and the customers that you lose are the ones that are the best ones to learn from as well. Why did they go? Why didn't you win them? If they will give you that feedback and give you that time, give them give them your ears, listen to them because they'll tell you where you went wrong, what you didn't do, or why they didn't buy from you. And then use that as feedback and go, right, what do I do to change my business? How can I make it better than what it is? And if it means you've got to reinvent your business a little bit, don't reinvent the wheel straight away, morph into it, test it. We're currently testing two other systems at the moment that we're looking at to bring to our customer base, but we might not be ready for them until probably um September, October. One of them will probably we won't do it. We'll work, we'll go it, run it, might not be profitable to us. We might offer it to a few of our VIP customers and say, What do you think? And if they all come back and say, No, it's not gonna fly that, then we won't bother with it. And we have a good relationship with probably about 30 of our customers that we can't actually have those open conversations with them. So if you've got those type of customers, have a dialogue with them, have a chat with them, see, you know, say to them, if I could offer you X, what would you what how what would that be worth to you? And then see what they say.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

I I do want to, you know, you've mentioned you've got, you know, these three businesses, you're you're you know, you've got this this kind of wide client base. And so we've had this chat a little bit before, but I want to get your thoughts on, you know, I won't, I won't, um, I'll paraphrase a little bit that you have said, like getting one small niche is is not the way that you go and approach your business. So talk about how you have sort of looked at like this person, like this customer still fits into my client base, even if they're not like part of, you know, you you've cast a wide net. And I'd love for you to talk about that decision.

SPEAKER_02 11:20

Yeah. So a lot of people talk about niching or niching down on a particular market, um, which I think there's nothing wrong with that. The problem that you've got again there is you're putting putting all your eggs in one basket. So if you niche down, um, for example, let's say you decide to approach the restaurants within a certain county or town, and that town has a big downturn, and all those restaurants close, your your market's gone. It's just obliterated, and that can happen very, very, very quickly. And the thing for me is when I talk to people who say, Well, I've I've got a company that specializes in my industry, and I say, That's really good, but they will come with industry prejudices or industry habits. What we do is we think outside the box. So we might come to a sports shop, or we may to be talking to a uh an accountancy firm that we've never done accountancy firms, for example, that's one we don't do. And I would say to them, well, you know, we can bring our years of experience of working in these other industries and bring those ideas to to your business and use that. So keeping your nest your net cast wide gets you away from that problem where if you are if you back the wrong niche, you you know, even if you back the right niche now, in three years' time, that niche might not be there, and that's the reason that we do that. We need we don't niche down into anything particularly, which is a slight disadvantage against a company that specialise in that industry. But if you've had a quality conversation with the business owner or the business decision makers, that shouldn't be a problem. That shouldn't be a factor in that. There should be more bought into what you can bring to the table. Not I'd rather go with him down the road because he did my competitor's website, for example.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

I I so appreciate the like the perspective on that. Um, I do want to get to, you know, you've got so much experience, and I love the things that you've shared so far. Uh give us a quick hit for the best piece of advice you could give to a business owner in, you know, in 10 seconds or less. I won't, I won't time you.

SPEAKER_02 13:49

Okay. So the best the best advice I could give to a business owner is know your numbers, know where those numbers are coming from, and keep your eye on them every single day. Simple. There is an old saying in the UK, and I think they might have an equivalent in the States, but if you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves. So might be in your case, if you look after the pennies, the dollars will look after themselves. So if you're focused on the numbers, everything else will just look after itself. Because you'll because you'll know with the numbers where your business is going wrong, and you'll know quickly. But you've got to get your head out of the business and look at it.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

Such such good advice to make time, you know, in your business to do those really important things because it's so easy, I think, especially, you know, if you feel like you're hustling and you're just kind of doing the work, you're going along, it's so hard to kind of look up like you were just saying. And what an important piece of advice to say, like, okay, we're we're looking at what's happening in your business and using that to like make really great and informed decisions. I love that. Well, is uh we've talked about a lot of things. Um, what is there anything else that you feel like, okay, if I was maybe going back to your earlier self or just other, you know, small business owners, entrepreneurs, freelancers that you have had an opportunity to talk to, if you had one thing that you could say to them, what is something that you hope that they would hear from you from, you know, these these years of experience that you've already shared with us?

SPEAKER_02 15:34

All right. So one of the biggest perspectives I give to people is quite a lot of businesses are only as good as the last sale, if unless they've got a subscription business. And even that, they're only as good as the last subscription that signed up or as good as the last cancellation. But what I would say is one of the biggest things to sell is to what they call sell the sizzle. And I don't know if you've ever heard that saying before. So you're selling the future, not the features. So for me, when I talk to a business owner about, let's say I'm just gonna sell them a website, I'm not gonna tell them it's WordPress and it's mobile friendly and it loads fast. What I'm gonna say to someone is it's gonna grow his business, it's gonna increase his conversion rates by 15% from what it is at the moment. His customers are gonna become more loyal and order from him because the order system is quick and easy. To pull that into a psychology piece, now this is a bit, now this might sound quite British, but when we go to fairs and places, and it's probably the same in I think in New York they have them, they have the like the streets, the street food vendors. So you've got the guys on the corner doing the hot dogs, we have burger vans over here. What is the one thing that they're always cooking? Do you know? Onions, onions.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

Oh, okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:00

So do you know why they're always cooking onions, right? Okay, so if you're at home tonight, right, put some onions in a pan and start to fry them and see how long it is before somebody in your house will come to your kitchen and say, What are you cooking? Okay, now what they've now those onions, okay, that's marketing. Okay, they will spend, they will just throw those onions in the bin. They won't give them to you. You'll see if you go to these burger stores in the in England, they've got this big griddle, and there's onions in the corner burnt to hell, and they just cook them till they burn. Because what they want is the smell, and what they'll do is that smell brings you. So, what they've done is they've sold the future to you. They've sold you this. I can sense, I'm gonna eat, I can picture in my head, I'm gonna eat it. So by the time you get to the get to the counter, it's not a question of whether you're gonna buy or not, it's whether you're gonna have a double cheeseburger or a triple cheeseburger. It's done, and that's what you've got to think about with the way that you appeal to people is you need to sell them a future. Let them think about, and and the same for when how how they're gonna feel about what they get from you and how that's gonna impact positively on their business. And that's that's the simple thing, and that is you're not outdoing your competition, you're not, you know. Um, I think there's things to avoid, which is slagging off your competition or being, you know, I'm trying to think of the right word, so being negative about your competition, um, being anti-other things, you know, I don't like this, I don't want to do that. Like, don't matter, you know. And the other big piece of advice I give to anybody who's got competitors, don't worry about them. Don't just ignore them, doesn't matter. Just focus on you. You do the best, you make your business do the best that you can do, and it'll be fine. Your competitors are there, okay. The right kind of people, now, if you want to get the right people who are gonna be loyal, who are gonna spend good money with you, gonna pay you on time, those type of customers, they care about how you care about them, not how you slag off the competition and say they're bad or you're dissing people, because they'll just say, right, well, I'll treat you the same way. Or people that buy from you, from you dissing the competition aren't loyal people. Simple as that. They will, the minute the competition offers them something better, or the competition tells them how bad you are, what that what's that customer gonna do? It's gonna go to them. Yeah, you're not winning loyal customers. It's another that's another sort of nuggets I can give you from many, many years' experience.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

Well, Mark, thank you so much. Uh so many great pieces of advice. You so appreciate your time and thanks so much for coming back to to the Moxie podcast.

SPEAKER_02 19:49

Oh no, you both you're very welcome. It's been it's been fun.