Marketing that Doesn’t Suck and Makes Some People Hate You: WPF Interviews Nick Palmisciano and Albert Chou of Diesel Jack Media
March 26, 2021
By Matt Miner, MBA, CFP®
You can’t finish unless you start
That’s the message as I interview Nick Palmisciano and Albert Chou about their new project, Diesel Jack Media, an agency that doesn’t suck. Also, to make the right people like you, you’re going to make some people hate you. Diesel Jack promises to help you do that.
Nick and Albert showcase another marketing tenet: Be memorable! For example, if earn your living in the diabetic sock business, has your agency helped you tell the story to your customers that your product is not bulletproof, and can’t withstand a flamethrower? Those were just two pieces of the campaign for the Diabetic Sock Club.
This episode had so much wisdom that if I had a creative writer on payroll, I’d provide an amazing 4000-word article to go along with it. Instead, I’ve created a bullet point list (future outline for my creative writer?) from the show. For now, listen to the episode to get all the goodness. I’ll report back here if I get the writer lined up.
Bullet Points that Should be an Article - Warning! Links below rated PG-13. Recommended for People who Like to Laugh
Albert: tech industry hires people without experience. Once he got started, he focused on learning technology as fast as he could.
Nick is the child of immigrants whose parents gave him the playbook for life. Then (with all respect to his parents) he ripped up the book and found work he loves, first at RangerUp and now at Diesel Jack Media.
Nick didn’t want to “mark time and then die.”
Albert cultivates self-awareness. He decided he’s “Not really a #1 guy [the CEO].” And he’s ok being a number 2. He’s better at scaling and making things more efficient than being the one employees complain to when they’re unhappy.
Trinkets and Trash at John Deere: Sometimes adding $193M in revenue doesn’t matter to the people in charge (with shout out to Ms Molly Reddish, of Marist College, whose svelte title there is “Assistant Dean and Lecturer of Fashion.” I sent Molly a LinkedIn and hope to know her better soon as a #futureguest?).
Diesel Jack Media: Our creative is what wins the day. Spend a few minutes on their site, or just watch this video.
As an agency, tell a story everyone else isn’t telling.
Don’t miss the Ranger Up Workout Video, charmingly filmed in the Sarah P. Duke Gardens. Do Nick and Albert know what they’re about as marketers? Acid test: You may hate the video. If you do, that’s OK. Ranger Up wasn’t talking to you.
#GoodMarketing: Fly pedals kickstarter vid.
Wu Tang Financial – This “business” doesn’t exist, but Albert checked it out (to make sure it didn’t exist). Albert cites this as a successful video, because it made him take action. It could have been a link in the chain of good marketing that “educates you on a product and leads to conversion.” Because “Clicks don’t matter. You gotta get a lift in sales.”
Diesel Jack uses comedy to show a problem and qualify or disqualify a viewer. Then, they make the pitch in a quasi-serious way while still entertaining the viewer, their client’s prospect. They’re always making content focused on conversion.
Make fast, try fast, test fast mode is the ‘only thing that works'“ in 2020.
2020 is going to be a shift-year. Trends of all kinds accelerated this year. Nick predicts work-life-balance will be both better and worse as a result of working from home.
Nick and Albert educate us that E-commerce, rather than democratizing the product marketplace, poured fuel on the fire of business concentration. Isn’t this bizarre? We used to be willing to go all over town to hunt down and acquire a product. Now we can’t be troubled to point our browser anywhere but Amazon.com.
Retailing your B2C product on Amazon or Walmart is a problem for small shops because of competitive rip-offs and intense margin pressure. Diesel Jack helps small brands figure out how to get direct distribution to their customers.
“When I ask somebody, ‘Who is your customer and what do you want to stand for?’ And they start saying things like, ‘Oh, you know, my customer is everybody cause my product’s so great.’ Look, if you’re going to be milquetoast, please stop. Don’t even start this…you’re going to fail. We use the term “You have to make somebody hate you.” If you don’t, then why wouldn’t I go to Amazon? Why wouldn’t I go to Walmart? [Amazon and Walmart are] always going to be more efficient than you. Their shipping is going to be cheaper or free. Everything else you need is consolidated there. To get someone to buy from you as a small shop you have to stand for something. You have to [say] something meaningful. And so if you’re not willing to do that, to take that risk, to piss off some people, while endearing yourself to others, you’re not going to last. And that’s what we excel at, and that’s what we have fun doing.” Nick Palmisciano at 40:00, edited.
One key to successful entrepreneurship is to not care about stuff.
Once you get to a certain point with money, the work you’re doing is what brings happiness, not the money.
When you’re not worried about making money and instead are worried about the process (of serving customers, of operating a great business), you actually make more money. Albert Chou.
People who have expensive tastes have a hard time with entrepreneurship.
Believe that no one cares about YOU. Make decisions in your life based on what you like, not what other people think.
Be maniacally focused on the customer. You’ll probably win.
Judge yourself harder than you judge other people.
You can only control what you can control - your own performance. Take responsibility for everything that happens. The good and the bad. If you don’t embrace your failures and take responsibility for them, you can never truly own your successes.
Hope is always a terrible plan.
Never make a decision where trusting an outside element could lead to your failure. Cultivate the attitude that “this is my fault and we’re going to fix it.”
Your boss / owner doesn’t care what the story is [why something’s not working]. S/he cares about results. And not being bothered too often.
Resources
Inc.com article, Jake Burton Carpenter: The King of Snowboards | How Jake Burton Carpenter created an industry -- and an Olympic sport
The Great Game of Business, by Jack Stack
Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
The Obstacle is the Way, by Ryan Holiday
The Book of Five Rings, by Miyamoto Musashi
Preview of the March 31, 2021 Show – First Own your Failures, Then Own Your Success – Radical Personal Responsibility
Next week’s show features a story I’ve never told because until recently it felt too painful and raw. It’s the story of my exit from the dealership equipment business in 2018, and what I learned the only time someone else ever chose the timing of my departure from a job.
I hated going through that, but I learned some things too, most of which I don’t expect to benefit from personally in the future as I am now virtually unemployable. Still, since Work Pants Finance is all about learning from the experience of others, I’d like you to benefit from my pain in case you or someone you love goes through something similar. If you’ve already gone through this experience and are hunting your next thing, don’t miss Mary Beck White-Sutton’s interview on getting hired for work you love.
Show Transcript
[00:00:00] Matt Miner: You can't finish unless you start. That's the key message from today's show as I interview Nick Palmisciano and Albert Chou about their new project: Diesel Jack Media, an agency that doesn’t suck. Also, to make the right people like you, you’re going to make some people hate you. Nick and Albert also showcase another marketing tenet: Be memorable. For example, if you're listening to this show and you earn your living in the diabetic sock business, has your agency ever demonstrated to your customers that your product isn't bulletproof nor is it able to withstand a flamethrower?
My guests today help their client tell that story in a wildly successful ad campaign. Hey, and welcome to the Work Pants Finance podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I'm Matt Miner, your money guide. Work Pants Finance exists to help you plan to fund the life you love. It's the show for MBAs, entrepreneurs, and other professionals who want their financial plan to work as hard as they do.
Now here's your money guide quick tip: Whether you're selling socks, services, or your time as an employee, know who you're trying to serve and by implication, who you're not trying to serve. This is the first step in getting the right people to like you and to take some risk to make the right people like you a lot, there will be some others who can't stand your message and that's okay. If you try to make everybody happy, you'll make nobody happy, so make the people who matter happy, whether family, friends, or clients and everybody else can go pound sand.
My guests today are serial entrepreneurs, Nick Palmisciano and Albert Chou. I brought them on the show to talk about their latest venture, Diesel Jack Media. You won't want to miss any of the conversation. Be sure to stick around to the end for a potent reminder that foundational beliefs matter more than tactics. Today's episode is Marketing that Doesn’t Suck and Makes Some People Hate You: Interview with Nick Palmisciano and Albert Chou of Diesel Jack Media. You can read more at lifemeetsmoney.com/22.
All my guests have interesting lives. Nick Palmisciano and Albert Chou of Diesel Jack Media, you guys both fit that description. I wonder if you could tell my listeners a little bit of your history, how you got here and what you're doing today with Diesel Jack and with your other endeavors.
[00:02:22] Albert Chou: Yes. My name's Albert. How did I get here? Well, it's a long story, but I think I always like to start with who I was and then how I got here. Who I was, was this idiot kid who just didn't really do well in school and because of that, I didn't have any discernible skill when I came out of college. I had to start from the bottom of the workforce. Ultimately, that somehow found the tech industry, the tech industry has this way of hiring people that don't really have experience. That's how I got my break, because I was a loser [chuckles] and not doing well in life, I just worked really hard. I just took the opportunity to embrace learning technology as fast as I could.
My first technology I had to learn was the Oracle financials Peoplesoft HR software, Oracle customer care and billing stuff which is how utility companies bill and read meters. Nothing exciting, but it was a way to pay bills. I was hired to teach other people how to use these products so I had to teach myself. That's really how I got into a world of technology which ultimately led me into different technology startups, which is actually how I met Nick. Nick was one of my customers. I'm going to punt it to Nick, so you guys can hear his story. I think it's a little bit better than mine, just being an idiot who just had to figure things out.
[00:03:39] Matt: All right, take it away, Nick.
[00:03:41] Nick Palmisciano: I think my story is almost the opposite of Albert but we ended up in the same place. I'm the child of immigrants and I'm very fortunate my parents are pretty industrious people. They watched other successful people and gave my brother and I the playbook for life. I went to West Point and then I was in the army for six years. I did pretty well in the army then I went to Duke University, then I got hired by a fortune 100 company. I was making a lot of money for a young guy.
Basically, that's like the the American playbook, right? You go to a good school, you do well, you have an early successful experience, then you go to business school and you make money and, yay, you did it. What I found out was, I basically got to that fortune 100 job and it was a great company and as you know, I just hated my life. It's the first time in my life where I hated it.
I had been through some stuff, I'd deployed in the military and been miserable. When I was in the army I was like, "This is great," as soon as I leave though, I'm going to do something that puts me in a comfortable position where I make money and live an easier life because this is kind of a hard life. Because I was bored with my life, I wanted to do something else, I started a hobby. That hobby was a company called Ranger Up.
I had no vision, at the time, of making this the thing that I wanted to do. I was making more money than anybody in my family had ever made at this point, I had been promoted a couple times and life was pretty good. The hobby started getting attention from people that were in the military and I was getting these emails from Iraq and Afghanistan, people telling me like how great it was. I started putting more and more time into the hobby.
At some point my life was basically, I'd show up at work at 8:00 AM, I'd leave work at 6:00 PM, come home, eat dinner, hang out with my ex and then from 8:30 to 9:00 PM or so, until two in the morning, I worked on Ranger Up. I did that for a couple of years and got pretty worn on it and then found out I was getting a promotion at Deere. It was going to be a lot more money.
I thought about it over the weekend, I came in on Monday and I told my boss that I was going to quit. Basically, what I arrived at is, I already made too much money from what I considered a minimal contribution. If I took this next job, it'd be another fairly easy job for even more money and there'd be no breaking that cycle, my whole life would end up being this corporate game that I watch so many other people play. I knew I would just kind of mark time and then die.
I jumped full time into my hobby, which was Ranger Up, almost bankrupted myself, thankfully didn't. That's kicked off, I think this is my fourteenth year of entrepreneurship. That's a successful, eight figure company. We had a venture event two years ago, where we no longer, in the North Carolina office, have to deal with any shipping or products or anything, which is amazing.
That freed up a bunch of time for me to start thinking about what do I really love and what I really like about the entrepreneurial process is helping people and solving problems. Albert and I sat down and I basically laid out, "This is where I'm at, this is what I'd like to do, you know, what do you think?" And he was like, "Well, what I think is that I should join you in this endeavor and we should go after it." In February-- our timing, of course, is impeccable.
[00:07:28] Albert: [laughs]
[00:07:29] Nick: In February we kicked up Diesel Jack Media.
[00:07:31] Albert: Our first meeting was around January 20th.
[00:07:34] Nick: We moved fast. We talked about this January 20th and, I think, February 17th we filed for incorporation. March 1st we kicked off, actually taking on clients. This is super fun, it's growing at a really great rate and we're going from our initial challenge of, "How do we turn this into a profitable endeavor that is something meaningful for us?" To, "Oh crap, we need to hire people," because we're scaling at a good clip. That's my story, it was long winded but Italian, it's what we do.
[00:08:10] Matt: I think that's perfect, Nick. I just continue to follow you around, if not into the product marketing and digital media space, it just took me until I was 38 to make my entrepreneurial jump, but it's been great.
[00:08:22] Albert: You're never too late.
[00:08:24] Matt: Yes. Albert, from getting to know you just a little bit, you've been both a founder and an employee in startups. I wonder how you reflect on differences and similarities in those two roles.
[00:08:36] Albert: You find out really fast what you're actually good at. Let's call it ranks. The top person's going to be your CEO, second person in charge, your number twos. I found out the hard way that I'm not really a number one guy. One of the things I found out for myself really quickly was that actually, because my buying habits are different, one of the mistakes I think you can fall into is thinking there's a big market that wants exactly what you're interested in and wants to talk like you talk and does things that you're interested in.
I found out the hard way, through starting a dog toy company, as well as an app company, that that's not necessarily true. What I found was every company I was at, where I was maybe a number two in charge, where I could help scale operate, make things more efficient, I was actually better at that. I came to the conclusion, later on, that I was okay with being a number two because what's the point of being a number one of a company that's worth nothing?
I sold my app company. The dog toy company was a miserable failure, but the software companies I was a part of, they all grew. The services companies I was a part of, they all grew. It was just more coming to a self realization, later on, that I was just better at scaling an existing operation than heading an existing product market fit. Of course, every founder is going to tell you that you need people like this, otherwise you can't grow yourself. You're dead in the water. Bezos has I think his most famous crew. The S-team. I don't know what the S stands for. I forget. It's got like 16 people at Amazon he trusts very, very much so and they call themselves the S-team.
I'm pretty confident there's a reason why he's got 16 of them. He could not do this without someone else's input. The biggest thing I learned though from starting those endeavors is the role of the CEO is actually quite miserable. The idea that you're just going to be working on ideas is such a fallacy like dealing with admin, accounting, having people come and tell you that they're not happy. I'm like just roll my eyes and just be like, "Can you please just do the work?" [laughs]
Sometimes you're just better off being who you are. Making sure customers get the services and products they want, making sure that they're happy, making sure that they get a good product experience, making sure you're getting feedback on the product experience so that you can as a business improve the product experience. That's what I'm best at. That's why I think well with Nick because I was like, I wasn't going to do something on my own either anyways, because all the other stuff I don't want to deal with. That's what I learned.
[00:11:03] Matt: Self-awareness is always key. I've got to follow up there and then, Nick, I have one for you as well, but Albert, as you've worked in a number of startups, whether as founder or CEO or as the number two guy as you've just described, have you worked as both a straight-up employee and an owner or have you always been at least a partial owner in the firm?
[00:11:23] Albert: Well, in the beginning, certainly I was just an employee of different organizations. I've always gravitated towards smaller organizations though, because like what Nick just mentioned your impacts are more noticeable. If I implement a program and it adds $1 million of revenue to a business that's $5 million, we just grew 20%, that's huge. For Nick to grow Deere 20%, that's not happening by himself. It's a company that's generating billions of dollars in cash. Any single program he does, the CFO probably didn't even know what happened. It's a rounding error at most.
[00:11:56] Nick: Perfect example is when I worked in corporate brand licensing, one of the big projects that I was on was working with this woman, her name's Molly Reddish. She was in machine. She and I, just a two-person band grew John Deere's apparel business from $7 million a year to $200 million a year in 18 months. We were referred to as Trinkets and Trash. I'm not joking. It was a one bullet on a slide to the president and his comment was, "Huh. Let's be careful and make sure that doesn't go too far." He was more worried about are we hurting the Deere brand by having too much apparel out there? We added $193 million of top line. He didn't care at all.
[00:12:47] Matt: That's a great story, Nick. I think it illustrates the fun part about working in much smaller organizations.
[00:12:54] Nick: I landed John Deere toys on the David Letterman show by writing a ridiculous letter to David Letterman and sending a crate of toys to be donated. Our toy sales spiked. It was great for us. I got reprimanded because I didn't go through corporate PR to do that. I just did it on my own. To be fair, they were probably right to do that, but I'm sitting here going like, "Man, this sucks."
[00:13:20] Matt: There was a completely different experience for me. The first software company that I was a part of had an ownership stake in, it was called XPion. It was in social media management software. Other big software companies like it today are Sprinklr, Hootsuite. A lot of different people use them, but it was totally different. When I first got my first big agency account and I got to come back and tell my boss, "Hey, the entire Bravo Entertainment, all the Housewives of Orange County, Housewives of Atlanta, they're all coming on board." At $500 a month a piece which would have taken the account to-- It was like $10,000 a month. That was a monster win for us. We can hang this and sell it to anybody, anyone in entertainment. The original question was would you learn the differences?
I think the biggest things I've learned is working in small companies is just more fun. Everything you do makes a bigger impact. Every time I've been a part of a startup as it's grown, that excitement is always been there. I think I've never really wanted to go anywhere else, but a small company, even though our customers were big companies and I could see inside and out how they were operating.
I think it'd be a good time, Nick, just to ask and Albert feel free to chime in at any point, what does Diesel Jack Media do? What did you guys found this company to do? Whether the timing was perfect or not. Although I think it sounds like it's worked out great.
[00:14:38] Albert: Timing definitely could have been better. [laughs] Let's not kid ourselves here. It would have been awesome if there was not a pandemic happening.
[00:14:46] Nick: As an example, the first month when we kicked off, we had four other people in addition to the clients we ended up signing that were like, "Oh yes, we're 100% on board." Then everything closed out and they were like, "We're going to have to pause on that." We went from thinking we were going to have twice as many clients day one to half, but at the same time, we've refined a lot because it's harder to get clients, it's harder to deliver for them, harder to shoot film when you can't go to lots of places.
Interestingly Ranger Up, about the time that I quit Deere was another crisis where there was that the economy was tanking. Starting a company when everything's bad just means that we're going to be more prepared when things open back up again and we're fortunate that things have gone really well. Anyway, what does Diesel Jack Media do? The easiest way to explain it is, think about every agency you've ever worked with. You have a problem you want to scale, you're trying to get attention brought to your business. You're not sure what to do. You hire an agency for Facebook advertising or Google advertising or doing your organic social or whatever. You hire that agency and they give you a PowerPoint presentation about what they're going to do.
Then months go by and they're running some stuff but you're looking at your top line sales and nothing's really changed, but they're telling you that they made you $100,000 extra and you're like, "Did I lose $100,000 somewhere because I haven't grown? What exactly is happening?" You're trapped in this year-long contract. At some point, the year's over, and then about a month out they start to care about you again and they're like, "Oh, we're going to do this. We're going to do that. We're going to really scale you." You're sitting there going, "I don't know how to do this, but I don't think that they really did anything for me, but what do I do if I don't go with them? Will I actually lose this $100,000?"
We don't do that because we lived through that. Each of us, Albert and I, and the other people that are involved in this company, we've all hired agencies that just sucked. Because they sucked, we had to teach ourselves how to do this. We had to build staff that could do it because you have to succeed in those areas and we got really good at it. If you were a company that wants to scale, we have a roadmap. I'll let Albert walk through the roadmap, but we have a structure for how to grow your business but the biggest thing is our creative is what wins the day.
Anybody can run Facebook ads if they're trained. Anybody can run Google ads if they're trained. We come at things with a very different approach. An example that I like to give is we represent a company that sells diabetic socks. That's not the easiest product to differentiate. You can differentiate on quality and they have excellent quality, but every diabetic sock company sells on quality-
[00:17:41] Albert: And medical benefit.
[00:17:42] Nick: -and medical benefit and all those things. What we decided to do instead was make an ad campaign about all the things you can't do with diabetic socks. For example, diabetic socks are not bulletproof. We dump three magazines into a pair of diabetic socks and tons of holes in them. The whole ad was just they're not bulletproof. Hugely successful ad. Another one, literally me wearing a fire-retardant glove and Albert on a flamethrower. He hits me with a flamethrower and we burn the diabetic sock. They're not fireproof. They've had incredible success. We're not going to talk about details, but this is the most successful ad campaign that this company has ever had.
We've repeated that over and over again with many customers and they're all really shocked with the results because they've worked with other agencies, many of which they've paid more for that have delivered nothing. We typically make a huge impact on a business, especially if they're not running their own ads already in the first 30 days. It's super fun to see an entrepreneur get excited about their business that has been stagnant for a year or two years. That's been at a plateau and we can turn it around in 30, 60, 90 days.
[00:18:55] Albert: Content is the actual tool that gets sales. Most agencies don't come at it from a content creative perspective. They come at it from this, "I got this algorithm. I got a buying formula. I got all kinds of AI, ML." Whatever they want to talk about. Done enough focus groups to know everything. I'll use a couple of examples to paint this picture. It's true in sales, it's true in marketing. It's true in anything that requires messaging. When I was at one of the tech firms, we hired an outsourced SDR company. It's an agency service. Their job was to create copy, email, campaigns, flows to get us leads and bookings. Pretty simple.
[00:19:34] Nick: Whenever anybody talks about algorithms, Albert and I immediately have the same comment and that's, "F**k your algorithm. There's no f**king way that you and your bachelor of science degree in marketing from wherever is going to be taking out the PhDs from MIT and Caltech that work for Facebook and Google. You're not out geeking these guys." When you talk about, "Oh, we've got a proprietary algorithm," literally go f**k yourself. It's all about creative.
[00:20:02] Albert: Exactly. This SDR booking service, they were supposed to be using AI ML, analyzing your language, all kinds of stuff. We were getting like a steady flow of bookings. Then one day our bookings went through the roof. What happened? Did they come up with something? No, it was like, we changed our message. We literally just changed our message and came at it with a different way. That's what won the day. We sent it like a confidential email, so it would be like, "Matt, I have the email of your website visitors. Let me know if you want them." That was the email.
Point being though, is it wasn't some magical formula that figured out how to send email to people. It was literally because we changed the creative and this happens over and over again. In bigger cases that aren't our customers, think about Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Shave Club's most probably famous example. Mike Dubin, when he started that company, he had $5,000. He had two choices, buy razors, or make a commercial. He chose to make a commercial because he was like, "I don't know. Maybe I can sell razors, maybe I can't."
He makes his warehouse commercial. It becomes an epic commercial, and of course, everyone knows, or if you haven't seen it, go check it out. It's got like 26 million views or whatever. He makes his commercial and he gets 10,000 orders in the first month. He now has a next problem. How do I fill these orders, because I don't have any razors actually? We see it again, Squatty Potty’s, another example. They were doing like 2 to 3 million, I think, in sales for three years. Then they worked with an agency that instead of talking about this medical benefit of the Squatty Potty, let's talk about how that's actually where rainbow soft serve comes from, which is unicorn poop, and because we can help unicorns poop more, then we can actually provide the world with more rainbow soft serve. Now that sounds insane. Why would you ever want to sell that way? Except because no one else sells that way, it becomes more memorable. That story can repeat itself over and over again, different brands doing different things that get noticeable attention because people can remember it.
I remember reading once about like, "Why was the iMac white?" Steve jobs said, "because the other computers are black." If you just don't look like everything else, right out the gate, you can get a little more attention. Now, that doesn't mean marketing will solve all your problems. Your product and services still have to be very, very good, but if you're looking for attention, which marketers typically are, then you need to tell a story that someone else isn't telling. Otherwise you just look like everything else.
[00:22:15] Matt: I couldn't agree more, and in fact, I wrote down as I was listening to Nick. One of the things, Nick, that I've admired about you in the past and, Albert, it sounds like the same for you, which is probably why you guys got together, you guys have this habit of being interesting, which is marketing axiom number one, but you're also willing to be ridiculous. Would you tell us some stories of being ridiculous and memorable? Just because I think it would be good stuff. Maybe one or two.
[00:22:41] Nick: I'll start with the video that really started resonating for everybody, with Ranger Up, was called the Ranger Up workout video. The idea was that at the time everybody in the military was perceived as being very serious. In the movies, on social media, there was almost like this rule that anytime you talked about the military, you had to like, "Ooh." Like it was some Holy endeavor and that wasn't anybody that I knew. Everybody that I knew from the military was a ridiculous person because we have to make comedy out of miserable situations like, "Oh, you're outside. You've been outside for 21 days straight. It's raining. Lightning just hit a tree near you. It's 30 degrees."
If you don't have a sense of humor, you're going to off yourself. It's a bad situation. Everybody develops this messed up sense of humor. We did this video where it starts off and it looks like it's going to be real tough. Then next thing you know, we're in these short shorts and it's the most ridiculous homoerotic, over the top workout video you're ever going to see. It was great because a lot of people loved it, but enough people hated it because they felt like it was disrespecting the military a little bit. It was absolutely the perfect video, and we've just kept that going ever since.
That right there, was the beginning of everything that we do now. Diesel Jack, we've been so busy, just existing word of mouth stuff, that we haven't actually advertised our services at all.
[00:24:17] Albert: We took the playbook of the top hedge funds and made our website crappy because we didn't have enough time to make it look good, so we were like, "Oh, just make it look bad." [laughs] If you look at some of the top hedge funds, like Sutter Hill ventures is a good one. They just made a couple of billion off the snowflake IPO. Go look at their website. It literally just says SHB. It says nothing else. There's not even like a contact us button. Appaloosa management is my favorite. It's like missing a picture. You know how that website with the missing picture icon shows up.
Appaloosa's like, basically if you don't know who we are, no one cares. We took the position. If Diesel Jack can't dedicate enough time, because like Nick said, we were so busy scaling up. We didn't have quite enough revenues to support our head count. We were really lean to start. Then it's just probably better to not make an over the top website. If you're a middle grade thing, everyone knows you suck. If you definitely put effort and you're in the middle, that's the best they can do. That's bad. It's almost better to give this delusion. I don't have time for my website because I'm too busy being good for my customers.
[00:25:19] Nick: Our new video that's about to drop. We're literally finishing up animation right now. It's that over the top, involves everything from adults in chicken costumes, me wearing a tux landing on the skid of a helicopter, riding a horse while dressed as George Washington, climbing into a spaceship and taking off into orbit. It is patently absurd. We wanted to make it, because there is literally no marketing company right now doing anything remotely like that. It's always two guys, that are business casual, but trying to be cool, talking about how they're going to scale you better than everyone else, and we don't want that. We want a video that just gets views on its own because that's what we're telling you that we're going to provide. If we can't do it, then why would you hire us?
j[00:26:12] Matt: I hope that that link will be available before this show comes out so that I can include it when I release the episode. You've got a date on that Nick?
[00:26:18] Nick: Probably 10 days out.
[00:26:19] Matt: I think that's going to work just fine.
[00:26:22] Albert: Being from the tech world, I adopted this philosophy that you should just, in tech they call it shipping. Shipping code. If it wants to pass QA, ship it. I've developed a reputation at the company whenever the creative's like, "What do you think?" I'm like, "Ship it." I've never said like, "Oh, let's hold it back. Let's add some color." I was like, "Not just ship it and see what happens."
[00:26:42] Matt: I finished the animations.
j[00:26:44] Albert: I'm like, "No, let's ship it. Let's see what happens."
[00:26:48] Matt: All right. I wanted to ask you. I think you guys are both good guys to ask about this. What is excellent marketing?
[00:26:54] Albert: Something you can remember. Marketing has to be memorable. I think very few people actually convert the moment they see anything. If you were thinking about you're watching television or you're watching a movie and there's that pre-roll thing going on, or I guess we don't go to movies anymore. Everything has to be memorable. If you think about it and you want to see it, or you wish you saw it, or you even think you want to check it out later, then you've done your job and it doesn't have to be over the top. What me and Nick always talk about is, it has to just look different from whatever your competitors look like.
When I think to the different products that I've seen, I always think to myself, that's usually a utility use case. I want to see more like, "Oh, that's interesting." I want to see what this product does. There's two that are super memorable to me. The first one is fly pedals, which is clipless conversion pedals. They just saw a little video of how easy it was to turn your clip-in pedals to platform pedals, which made it super easy to get around. I only had clip pedals. I just had kids, which means I'm bike-riding my kids, which means they suck, so I had to get on and off my bike all the time.
Having clip in pedals is not useful. It caught my eye and I was like, "Oh, that's a really interesting use case." The other one was a commercial for product that didn't exist. But I actually looked it up because I wanted to know if it was real, and that's Wu Tang Financial. Dave Chappelle, when they start talking about diversifying your bonds, I was like, "Wait a second. Is this real, because I want to know if it is real. I want to see if I can put some money in with Wu Tang Financial, because this just looks fascinating to me." That's a little bit of influencer marketing.
I have to know who the Wu Tang Clan is, but it's also so different from everything you've ever said, because some of my friends are in Wall Street. I always thought about like, if you created, you wouldn't call it Rockstar now because Rockstar energy's out. Rockstar financial where it's like, this is a fun for people who have come into a ton of money and don't know how to invest it, and don't want to send it in with a suit. They want to work with people like them. I feel like that would work. I don't know.
[00:28:48] Matt: My guest who's coming out next week, is the founder of rockstarfinance.com, although it was a blog and he sold it.
[00:28:54] Albert: One of the top sports agencies in the world right now is Klutch with a K. It makes sense. If you were selling hip hop culture, who are the players. I would gravitate towards that versus you know, Palm Ashana and associates. Why am I trying to go with that? [laughs]
[00:29:09] Matt: I don't know that I'd invest money with that guy either. Nick, how about you? Anything to add on what great marketing is?
[00:29:16] Nick: Yes, at the end of the day, great marketing cuts through the noise, educates you on a product and leads to conversion. Conversion is what matters. That's one of the things a good agency is going to do, is iterate because we always come at a problem with a comedic attack and a serious attack, different brands convert differently, depending on what that looks like. If you're not iterating with the intention of getting conversion, then you're not winning. Whenever an agency comes back and they're like, "Hey, look at all these clicks, we got here, or look how many people viewed your video?" "Who cares?"
That's good. It's good in the short term, but if over a period of time, you're not seeing a significant lift in sales, then you're failing. What we like to do is we like to use comedy to show a problem and also qualify or disqualify the viewer. If you don't have that problem, then you're not interested in watching the rest of this video, which is what we want, because we don't want to waste time with people that aren't going to be customers. Then we want to make the pitch that they need this in a quasi serious way while still entertaining them.
If they watch that video all the way through that means they're interested, they might not click right there. We have a very successful YouTube advertising program for example. People don't usually buy off of that YouTube advertisement, but our retargeting ads off of that audience has insane conversion. That's one of the things that you need to think about is you need to hit people from different ways, educate people, entertain people, get them interested in the brand, leading to conversion.
A lot of agencies they're either good at, "Hey, I can make this funny video that gets views," or they're good at, "I can run the analytics that run an advertising campaign." Because we did this for years with Ranger Up and with some other brands and with our film projects, we're very good at creating interest and then connecting that interest to conversion.
[00:31:19] Matt: That's a great way to describe the process and even super low tech, I'll just reflect briefly on my own experiences. When I'll put some content out there and we'll get certain levels of interaction in terms of comments and likes, I don't expect someone to buy my services off of the content, but if I then turn around and send a direct message to the people who interacted with the content and invite them to schedule time, I get excellent results with that. That's a manual retargeting campaign. I appreciate you saying that, Nick.
[00:31:50] Nick: Yes, of course.
[00:31:51] Matt: I want to ask, you've both used new media and social media, a lot to reach customers very successfully. If you could reflect on how 2020 is different than it was 10 or 15 years ago because I feel like the world has changed a lot on the internet.
[00:32:07] Albert: 2008 was the first year Facebook released the pages product. Advertising didn't come until much later.
[00:32:14] Nick: I was there.
[00:32:16] Albert: Yes, same here. I remember the first day interviewing at XPion and they're like, “What do you know about social media?” I was like, "Nothing. I know absolutely nothing. People seem to like it a lot so it seems like a good place to be." The way I would describe it as it's just like anything else, your competition's gotten better and this is a 100% of what's happening. There's more competitors. There's more creators. People are getting better. Algorithmically, the platforms themselves are trying to figure out what to show, what not to show. They can't afford to run you off with boring content that you're not going to be interested in. That's a fact.
The competition just keeps changing and it's going to continue to change and so what you're going to see is there's always going to be these waves of evolution of what works. Right now, for example, TikTok’s all the rage, President Trump wants to kick TikTok out of America. This was supposed to be done by 9/15. Tiktok's still here, like is China mauling us? It doesn't matter. All the creators are now there. The Malio family or whatever, they're now worth $20 million because she's the top Tiktoker.
That's never going to stop. There's always going to be something new that she'll always give me something different. What you're seeing is there's so much optionality when it comes to content availability like cord cutting people are like, "Oh, they're going to cut back on channels." Now, it seems like there's even more channels than ever. There's more channels and ever more shows and ever more optionality.
It's just really hard to know what's coming next. Really, if you're not in this make fast, try fast, test fast mode, you'll always be playing catch-up. There's no way to say you're going to do anything. If you're the type of business that wants to plan in idea stage for three months and then go to script phase from-- you're going to plan a whole year, like you're making a movie or something, you'll never get anywhere because by the time this thing releases everything you've known-- it runs the risk of having it cycle past or whatever the case might be.
Probably the velocity of change it's actually been consistent and so that's why the modern marketplace looks so different than it did then. Not because anything fundamentally is new or whatever, but this velocity of change has never stopped and it just keeps going.
[00:34:18] Matt: Yes. Anything to add, Nick,?
[00:34:20] Nick: Yes. I think 2020 is going to be a really important year in our country's history in terms of how it's completely changed the way people look at business. I do not think you're going to see companies invest the same amount in commercial real estate that they have in the past. I think people are going to cut back a lot. I think work-life balance is going to be better and worse as a result because I think we're the perfect example.
We still have our offices and that's going to stay in place, but on a regular day there's only three or four of us in the office and everybody else is working from home and we've been very effective doing this. Some of our employees, just very candidly, they are more productive when they're at their house. Other employees are more productive when they're here. It blurs the lines a little bit, in terms of--
It's seven o'clock, some people don't mind working because they're home. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I do think that we're seeing that this is a very flexible option that's good for a lot of people. I don't see it just going away even when the world opens back up again. I think that's going to open the door for stay-at-home parents to work more. I think that's going to open the door for more flexible schedules.
I think the country is just completely different. It also takes away a lot of excuses to not be productive going forward. I think we fundamentally changed and I think the companies that embrace that are going to do very well and I think the companies that try to shoehorn everything into the old way are going to fade.
[00:35:57] Matt: Yes. It seems like 2020 in a lot of ways has been an accelerator of trends that already existed. Whether it was in different types of hospitality, businesses, I don't think Golden Corral was the great growth story of the future, but 2020 was the end of the road. There's any number of things like that.
[00:36:17] Albert: Are buffets coming back? Maybe not, maybe not. I don't know people, even if you told me Coronavirus has gone tomorrow, I didn't like being at a buffet before and now I'm like, Oh, I don't want to be around people.
[00:36:27] Nick: I will say though, when I graduated ranger school, basically a couple of months of starving, I lost 55 pounds. Me and my ranger buddy and a couple of other guys stopped right outside the gate of Fort Benning at Golden Corral, ate until we threw up and then ate some more. It'll always have a special place in my heart.
[00:36:46] Matt: Yes. They did not make money on you that day.
[00:36:48] Nick: They did not. Just the amount of soft serve alone.
[00:36:52] Matt: Yes. Well, I think the best part is all of the secondhand chocolate fountains of yum that have come available on eBay. I have one upstairs and one downstairs in my house. [laughs]
[00:37:00] Albert: What? Been getting greedy, man, you've causing the chocolate fountain shortage over here.
[00:37:07] Matt: Albert, were you going to say something?
[00:37:09] Albert: Right now, a lot of our customers are in the D2C space. They sell direct to customer. They're not, well, they're really trying to go through retailers and then what you're seeing the small retailer is just getting eviscerated, any small mom and pop shop. All of the power is consolidating just to a couple logistic giants, mainly because it's too hard to get your products. This love of e-commerce is proven one thing, in my opinion, as much as we say e-commerce is going to flatten things, it's actually consolidated, meaning all competitors are level, it's actually not because people don't want to go to 100 sites to buy the products and services they need.
Amazon becomes or walmart.com and target.com who have now are trying to figure out last mile logistics, how to get these products direct to your house, they're consolidating all the buying power because as a family, you don't want to go pick up soap from one site, pick up another thing from another site. Our clients, a lot of our clients who are in the D2C space, they have a problem and the problem is is that if they go and retail their products at the giants, those giants, they don't care about any individual brand. They know, for example, that if you have a soap brand, but this other soap brand converts at a higher level, even if someone searches your brand, they could list another brand over you because it's going to convert.
If you ever look at like amazon.com, for example, every catalog, every department, every product, there's no alphabetization in that business. There's none. It's all based on like what's most likely to sell. Of course they over-index their basics products. Amazon products list first. If I'm a brand and I'm, let's say, a designer and Nick can talk to the world of knockoffs, which has been the bane of his existence, if I'm in the design business and I design apparel, well, the reality is if I merchandise my products on one of those marketplaces and I do well, the likelihood of my competition will copy a knock off my crap, my designs is extremely high and sell their craft directly to customer. My stuff's awesome, but anyone can then buy a printer where the printer can print my design, print my cuts, whatever list them, take all my keywords. Maybe pay a little bit more and willing to take a little bit less on the margin, Amazon or Walmart, they're going to keep their margin.
You're in this place, when you're a D2C brand where you have to say to yourself, do I rely on these marketplaces to move my products for me when they have no allegiance or loyalty to me, or do I try to figure out how to get it to direct to the customer? You're going to see this challenge because a lot of brands, they're really good at making their products, but if they're not good at telling your story, you're not good at distributing that product to a customer and you don't want to list on marketplace, that's where our business can actually thrive.
In a way, the pandemic ends up helping us a little, because more brands have to figure out a way to get direct distribution because if they don't figure this out, they're just going to get swallowed up, lost, shuffled off with the others.
[00:40:01] Nick: Yes, for years I've been telling people. Anytime somebody came to me for advice. If you're going to be milk toast, when you ask somebody, "Who is your customer, what do you want to stand for?" They start saying things like, "Oh, my customer's everybody because my product's so great," please stop. Don't even start this because you're going to fail. We use the term internally, actually externally now. You have to make somebody hate you because if you don't, then why wouldn't I go to Amazon? Why wouldn't I go to Walmart?
They are always going to be more efficient than you, their shipping is going to be cheaper or free. Everything else that you need is consolidated there, so to get somebody to buy from you as a small shop, you have to stand for something. You have to have something meaningful, so if you're not willing to do that, take that risk, piss off some people while endearing yourself to others, you're not going to last. That's what we excel at and that's what we have fun doing
[00:40:57] Albert: I got to piggyback off that because, I'll give you example. They're not a client yet. I hope they are, but we met someone who's launching a new alcohol beverage and we said, “Well, who's supposed to drink this?” Because you can't tell me everyone is supposed to drink this. Every alcohol brand has its niche. If you think about the popular brands, MC ultra is, I don't know. They try to sell to people that care about carbs. [laughs] Guinness sells to the people that like the older pubs, like they like a lot of the history.
Their commercials usually have a little piece of history in them. If you're thinking about selling alcohol or whatever it is you're selling, you have to say, who's supposed to drink it, and there has to be a group or cohort or people that look like that. That's not to say that that's always your market, but that's who we're going to start with. Then the other way to think of it is, who do you not like, that's where the hatred comes in. Like, who do you not want to drink your product? Because disqualifying is just as good as qualifying. You can say, this is not for you. You say, "I'm going against white claw. I don't want to be associated with seltzers. Seltzers are soft, they're not manly." They're not-- Well, I was like, “That's fine.” It's perfect. You can make fun of that. This is a seltzer drinker, this is my drinker. We think of it in those terms. Someone has to think this brand's a little off-putting because then that person needs to be the person you're not selling to. You needed to qualify or disqualify people very fast. This is for you.
[00:42:18] Matt: Today's show is brought to you by, Diesel Jack Media, creating content that doesn't suck.
Nick, you actually mentioned it earlier, and also in the Ranger Up bio that you published. You say that you almost went bankrupt when you were founding the company. I'm just going to take from that, that you used some debt in that founding. I guess, as a show that's about personal finance, how do you reflect on that decision then and now? Would you do anything different?
[00:42:49] Nick: Probably not. I say that because, being an entrepreneur for this long and being able to do a lot of cool things, I have a lot of high wealth friends and mentors. People that have always had money always like to say things like, "Never marry your business with your private finances," that 100% is the smart thing to do. I don't do it now, but it's unrealistic for the average person not to do that. When you go into business, if you are not already wealthy, you have to take risks. Now, you don't want to do that foolishly, you don't want to put your whole family on the line for something that might not work. At some point, you're going to have to expose yourself or you're just going to have to move a lot slower and not look for the same growth.
In my youth, I probably took too much risk, but I also would not have accelerated the business to the level that I did if I hadn't. A good rule of thumb is you don't want to put yourself in a position where if the business fails, your whole life falls apart, but if you're already in a comfortable situation and you're trying to start a new business, it may not be realistic for you to think you're going to get to continue living that way in the first few years.
Let's say you're already a successful person and you're making 100, 200 grand a year or something and you want to start your own business and you are starting with zero income and like, "Oh, I hate my job and I don't want to do this." You're going to have to live small. You're going to have to -- Maybe you can't live in the same place. Maybe you have to downgrade your cars. Whatever it is that you like to do, go out drinking, travel, whatever maybe, that goes away. You're going to have to suffer unless you have money. If you have money, then like all of this stuff is moot.
If your a kid that's graduating college and your parents are like, "Congratulations on graduating college. Here's $250,000 of seed money," none of these things apply to you, but if you're a regular person that has to do this yourself, your ass is going to have to be on the line, even to get investors because I know personally. I'm not going to give you money if I know that you can't be hurt by this because I watched a lot of young entrepreneurs. There are about this modern entrepreneur vision, which is bullshit. This whole -- You see the memes on social media like a dude at the beach and it says, entrepreneurship is living 5 years like no one will, so that you can live the rest of your life like no one else can. Five years? Come on, man. It is a grind. It is a very hard journey. You have to enjoy that journey.
You can't be sitting here going if I just get to 2 million, 5 million, 10 million, then I'll be successful. Because whenever you hit that thing, you'll find out you have more problems, more risk, more challenges, not less. When you go into entrepreneurship if you're not already a high wealth individual that essentially can't lose because your parents are rich, then there is a real chance you're going to fail and lose your savings and lose your home and lose your car, lose the things that other people define as success. I think one of the best ways to be successful entrepreneur is to not care about those things and not care what other people think and really embrace suffering as a journey. Once you're comfortable with that, then anything is possible. You can't be broken if none of the things most people care about matter to you.
[00:46:31] Albert: When it comes to capitalization, like you were talking about how much debt would you take on that, I would say, it's inversely proportional. You need more debt based upon how much it costs you personally to make the product or service. That's how much debt you need. Basically, if you're a guy or a girl, and you're thinking about developing a software company and you can't code software, then you're going to need a lot of money. Because, I promise you whatever you build sucks. Then it's going to need changes. I had two businesses fail for me because I personally finance them, but I was under-capitalized. Now, could I have gone and got more money?
Maybe, but I think at that time I realized I could see the writing on the wall that I shouldn't ask for it because it wasn't going to work. Both cases, it was for products and services that actually couldn't make on my own. Therefore, I needed money to keep investing in it. I'll give you an idea. When I got my, I would call almost break. [laughs] When I had my own dog toy company it was called Dog Nasty, named after the punk band, Dag Nasty. I had the buyer at pet supermarkets plus or whatever. It's like a franchise retail pet store.
The person told me, he's like, “I love it, but there's one problem.” He says, “I want to change the Master carton.” The master carton is actually how it's packaged. I've already bought 5,000 of these and they're already packed, and he says, "I need it to be hang-tag style." I made mine in box-style. It was like, it takes up too much shelf space. I want it hang tags. He told me the price. Of course, it was way lower than I thought it was going to be.
Then I thought to myself, "Not only do I have to meet this price, I have to unpack every single one of my existing toys, repack it." Then I also have, he wanted a guarantee that I would take back X number of unsold units. I had to make a decision at that point, like, "Will I do that?" The other time was when I actually paid people to make an app for me. The app was fine. It was generating revenue, but it costs me much to make changes.
In software is a never ending grind because your features are never done. You're never done. There's no such thing as done in software. It just never stops coding. New releases, new products, new features, new adjustable. More compatibility requirements, like a new browser is going to come out and your software is going to suck on it. You're going to find out the hard way that that happens. I couldn't afford to keep maintaining it, so I could forecast and see like the cash was never going to justify the expense of keeping it up.
I called it quits on both of those, or I sold the assets to both of those. That's how much debt you need. You need enough capital financing to accommodate your ability to make or change your products. If you're going into like consulting where you don't have to, it costs nothing to change your products and services, you don't need to take on money. If you're going into something you can actually do. Like, I know a woman, she does custom clutches and pulses, but she can sew. She doesn't have this problem. Thread is cheap. She can change her bags whenever she needs to. The more you cannot actually change your-- I keep saying change because, I think the big fallacy entrepreneurs have, and Nick's been there, he knows this, he talks about all the time, is in your mind, you think someone wants your product and service.
You put it to market, you're going to find out the hard way that that's not exactly what people want. Nick talks about the days of him coming up with designs and thinking, “This is going to move tons of units, pre-ordering.” It sits on the shelf for what, years?
[00:49:35] Nick: Years.
[00:49:35] Albert: Years. Just capital, just eating up.
[00:49:37] Nick: Yes, and one of the things that entrepreneurs, new entrepreneurs are terrible about is they have a vision that everything's going to happen quickly. That comes from the fact that we as a society like to highlight the true, like 0.001% exceptions, like Facebook, it blew up, Microsoft, it blew up. Even like with the Microsoft, there were many years of grinding before it blew up. Entrepreneurs have a vision of where they want to end up and they're trying to get to where they see the end state as quickly as possible. Some of them are trying to finance that from day one.
I had a guy call me recently that was a friend of a friend. He was like, "Hey, thanks for taking this call. Here's what I want to do. I think I need $3 million to do this." I just start asking questions like, "Hey. Have you ever had a successful business before?" "No." "Have you ever run a business before?" "No."
[00:50:41] Albert: "Can you make what you say you're tryna make?"
[00:50:43] Nick: All of these things. I said, "Hey, why don't you start with just this one part of it that you've mentioned because this is virtually free. You can probably test this concept for 20 grand and see if that resonates and if it does, then scale it," and he was insulted. He was like, "I don't think you see my vision. I want to do all of these things." I was like, "No. I see it. Outside of a family member that is worth a billion dollars. I don't know where you're going to get $3 million for this because there are competitors in the space. I don't see a clear path to profitability unless this really kicks off." I outlined these things for him. "If you can build this first piece, that it's going to be easy to finance step 2, which will then make it easier to find--" I laid out this path. The guy was very offended. He was like, "Man, I thought you'd understand. You're an entrepreneur."
It's like, "Hey, dude. I was filling T-shirt orders out of a spare bedroom by myself at 2:00 AM." You don't get to fast forward to the end without any work or without putting in your own money and time. I see that a lot. You'd be surprised at how many people will take your time and then be offended by the advice that you give. It's one of the reasons why I take fewer and fewer of those calls because it becomes not worth my time. It's this generation of entrepreneurs defined by probably people that are like 35 and under, in particular, seem to have this, but it's not just them. It's also the guys that have retired from their first job and are now 60 and want to do this new thing. They think because they had this career that somebody should just give them 3 million bucks and like it's really wild.
[00:52:29] Albert: That mentality is probably coming from the headlines though, because you will hear about-- Especially in software, but more recently CPGs started getting it where like companies like Away, Warby Parker, they get big financing deals to keep expanding their operations. I think the person who that thinks the way Nick's describing doesn't realize that by the time these guy's get finance, they're already selling products, they already have products used. Like they usually have a reason for capitalization. Like they're saying, "Hey, listen I need-- I can't make enough." In the case of Dollar Shave Club, right? It's a total different conversation if I come to Nick and say, "Hey, I made a commercial. I got ten thousand people who said they want. They've given me money because they want razors every month and I don't have any money for razors." [laughs] It's a different conversation, right? Nick's like, "Oh, let's fill these orders."
[00:53:15] Nick: Let's find a way to fill these orders and then put a bunch of money behind that video.
[00:53:19] Albert: Right. Warby Parker went, "Hey, guess what? I can build a website where people are designing their own glasses." It's like, "Oh, what's the problem?" "Oh, no, I don't actually-- Can't make any glasses." They have like [laughs] all these glasses that people want. Just totally different stories. It's true in software, too. I remember reading this thing about the Airbnb guys. They had this like really crude site, it looked terrible. They were the ones actually taking the photos of the rooms that were available on Airbnb. So, it wasn't even the hosts that were doing it. Like they were going to their house to take the pictures because they had to make it look like something.
When they came for money-- I remember the story in VC World was-- Because in the beginning it really was like rent your couch, I'm gonna rent a stranger's couch. You could imagine all the rich people that will be seeing this like, "Why would anyone do this? Nobody's gonna do this." Except that they already knew that they were selling the rooms. No, no, you're wrong. I'm already selling rooms. So to Nick's point, it's in tech, it's in every line of business. Unless you're actually actively selling, probably the problem is usually fulfilling.
Like if you know how to sell it, but you can't fulfill it, I think you're going to get money. That's the easy part, but if you can't sell, can't make, and you're not fulfilling, then you don't have a business at all. You're just saying stuff. [laughs]
[00:54:36] Nick: You're just saying stuff. That's great. I'm going to remember that one.
[00:54:40] Matt: In all seriousness, like selling and making are the key, and while there are definitely people who may be experience success faster, most of the overnight success stories are about people who labored in obscurity for 10 years, maybe went broke and then after putting in those hours and that money, have some results to show.
[00:55:02] Albert: Jeff Bezos is probably the most ruthless-- You name whoever you want to name by numbers, he's the most successful, right? Everyone knows that the guy was on his knees packing orders in his house in Seattle when Amazon first started, right? Before it was anything, it was him. They have a legendary story where he was like, "Man, what we need is knee pads, because we're on our hands and knee's packing orders all the time." When one of his colleagues turned to him and said, like, "Jeff, what we need is packing tables," and he's like, "Oh." [laughs]
[00:55:30] Matt: Isn't Amazon a technology company now?
[00:55:33] Albert: At the time, there was Jeff Bezos asking like, "Hey, can we get knee pads?" and someone's introducing him to the concept of packing tables. So for every business, if someone came and said like, "I wanna be a competitor to Amazon," I don't even think you recognize that even Amazon didn't even know what it was going to be. It started off as "We're going to sell books online." To Nick's point, whether you're young or old, I guess new, if you're going to start something new, but you have no evidence that you can do this in any direction, like you can't make it and you can't sell it, probably no one's going to give you money, because you're just telling stories.
[00:56:05] Nick: With Ranger Up, it was so hard to get the company started. It was so hard to figure out the formula. All of these things were super hard because I had no experience, nobody in the organization had any experience. It was like 'learn as you do.' Whereas with Diesel Jack Media, we started in March. We're already a substantial firm. We haven't had any failures yet, and it's not because we're some amazing people. It's because Albert and I and Susan, the rest of the crew all have a lot of experience, not just in marketing, but also in business.
Albert has been the number one or number two in a bunch of companies. I've been a CEO now for 14, almost 15 years, movies, a consulting firm, Ranger Up. All of that experience going for money to finance this was the easiest thing I've ever done. Literally I had people upset that I didn't ask them because now I'm a known quantity, Albert's a known quantity. Everybody believes, "Hey, whatever you're doing is going to work." That was not the case 14 years ago. It was like, "So let me get this straight. You're quitting this fortune 100 company to peddle T-shirts on the internet? That's cool, man. I'm going to sit this one out."
[00:57:24] Albert: The true story though is if you had a sales figure number or you were actually doing something better, faster, cheaper like on the make side, you would have had a different reaction, you know what I mean?
[00:57:33] Nick: I didn't even know how to ask for money though. I was actually embarrassed. The first time I needed money because we were growing so fast, I was embarrassed to go to the bank. I was like, "Man, I need a loan because we're growing too quickly." I felt like I had failed and little did I know that like every inventory business has this problem and everybody needs financing, but I thought, "Oh, a failure. I mismanaged something because somehow I should have had more money," but we grew like 8x in a year. It was like this is a problem
[00:58:01] Matt: I appreciate it guys. So, this is a show about life and money. I just wonder if you guys would be willing to reflect on what you love, about where you are today in life, work, and money?
[00:58:13] Nick: This will get philosophical, but when I was very young, when I was in the military, when I got out of the military, when I was at Duke, I thought like a lot of Americans do that money and happiness were the same thing. They are not. Now that doesn't mean that if you don't make enough money to feed your family, then that is a problem. That is 100% connected to happiness. Once you get to a certain point, the work that you're doing has a lot to do with whether or not you're happy.
I've seen that a few times over the years where I was making a lot of money, I was financially comfortable, but I felt like there was no purpose to my life. I was very unhappy as a human being. Whatever it is that you're doing, unless you're one of those unique people that derives happiness from the number in the bank account, I think it's important that the work that you do brings you some measure of happiness. I do not advise people to go into entrepreneurship, especially as the CEO, in order to make money.
I think you have to do it for more than just that. Because the odds are that you're not going to make a lot of money. If you do, it's going to come after many years of making far less money than you could have in corporate world. Your goals in entrepreneurship should certainly be about you want to hit certain revenue goals, but there should be other goals. One of the things that Albert in particular is great at doing is setting up goals that are about efficiency or improving movement or things that are-- There's no end to it.
How efficiently can we make a million dollars versus making a million dollars? How efficiently can we create a video versus just creating a video? It's not that people get fired up by inefficiency, but it develops a culture of improving the journey and going through a journey which creates a culture of constant improvement and success versus "Let's get to a million bucks." We can get to a million bucks by selling a million 1-dollar-items. Getting to a million dollars is not a challenging thing anymore. How do we get there? How does getting there set us up for 2 million, 5 million, 10 million, 100 million.
Interestingly, when you're not worried about making money and you're worried about the process, you actually make more money. So, think about the process and think about what makes you happy. In most cases, that's going to derive to more success for you than the other way around.
[01:00:51] Albert: Well, inevitably, if you're spending all your time focusing on how to make something better, then you will have a superior product. You dedicate your whole life to making the world's best ice cream and you happen to get there, you're going to win. That's like, it'll be tough to lose if you actually have the world's best ice cream. I think back to, for myself, who was I when I was a kid and there's a part of that in me, that's never really changed.
Grew up in the punk rock scene, like you don't need material things. I still feel like that way now. I joke with Nick all the time, but did I buy Milan from my kids? No, I didn't $30. [laughs] You know what I mean? I was, that's a little rich. I've always just been cheaper. It was just personal philosophy. I quickly recognized that I feel like at a young age, what actually makes me happy, what truly brought me joy. A lot of people buy a lot of things to fill a void in themselves. I'm not sure what it is, but I'll give you example. I know people in my neighborhood who constantly talk about remodeling their house. I'm like, what are you talking about? I don't even hang wall art up because it costs too much. I've never bought a piece of art, Matt, never done it.
[01:01:56] Matt: All right. It's good to know what you like.
[01:01:58] Albert: Once if you can focus on satisfying the things that you need money for. You have your family, and you've got to feed them, there's no question, that comes first. If you have just a few things that make you super happy, you should certainly spend your money and time and energy on that because life is short. Then from there, the rest is that margin of free play that lets you experiment making things that you're actually interested in making or doing things you're actually interested in doing.
If I had very expensive tastes, I wouldn't have taken a job that went from six figures to-- The biggest, most drastic pay cut I took was from 150 to 70. I elected to take that pay cut because I was no longer interested in working for a private equity backed business that had acquired us. It wasn't interesting anymore. You think about things like that, but it was not because I didn't need money. It was because actually mathematically at 70, we wouldn't be hurt for a period of time because I wasn't spending money on things I didn't need. You know what I mean?
It afforded me this flexibility to chase things I was more interested in, kind of like what Nick's talking about. If you can afford yourself the opportunity to chase things you're more interested in, you'll end up having a more fulfilling life. Work is part of life. The idea that work-life balance are two separate things is just-- I don't believe that. Work is your life. This idea that you do work and then you go home and play, it doesn't make sense to me. Work should be play.
Now I get it, work doesn't always feel like play, but then you should work on things that you're actually interested in. It starts with living lean. People with expensive tastes ultimately have a really hard time succeeding because you're always needing cash to offset you. One last thing, we go back to Bezos. It's a prime example. He was already in hedge funds. The guy's making tons of money. He drives a Honda Accord. He moves to Seattle because he thinks more people in tech work there compared to New York because of its proximity to Microsoft, and he buys a two-bedroom modest house in the burbs. Let's be clear, if he wanted money, which he has more of than anyone in the world today, he would've just stayed being in a hedge fund. What's wrong with that? The guy was probably clearing two, three million a year.
[01:03:59] Matt: Didn't do it for the money. No, I can relate to everything that you said and that's how we've managed this transition in our family, is just super low overhead, paid off house, wife with modest tastes. That's the ticket around here.
[01:04:12] Nick: I think one of the big things that every adult needs to find in their life as quickly as possible is, anytime I speak, I talk about this, no one cares about you. I'm dead serious. You have to believe that and understand it, and once you do, at first it's depressing but then it's incredibly freeing. People live their lives, most people live their entire lives thinking that there's a bunch of people that really care about their existence and talk about them and they make decisions in their life based on what they think other people want for them, or judge them on.
I personally don't care at all what anybody thinks about me. There's a small group of friends and family, but even with them, like my parents didn't think it was a good idea to start Ranger Up. They were like, "We worked our whole lives so that you'd have these opportunities and here you are, and you're leaving this great job," you know, they didn't tell me not to do it, they're very supportive amazing parents, but they weren't like, "Great call, Nick."
If I sat around and thought, "Oh man, all my business school friends are going to think I didn't succeed enough because I'm renting a couple rooms out of the house instead of living in a half million-dollar, million-dollar home," or whatever, then, starting Ranger Up would have been impossible. If I worried about that stuff, it would be really impossible. Once you realize know one cares about you, then you stop worrying about it, and you can do anything. I don't care what I drive, I don't care what you think about what I drive. I don't care where I live, I don't care what you think about where I live.
The only things I care about, and this is only because I have children, "Are my kids happy enough? Do they have a great childhood?" That's my number one priority. After that, I need nothing. I drove the same Honda for 11 years, and then I bought a Jeep that somebody had returned because they decided they needed a 4-door. I've driven that for 6 years and will drive that until the wheels falls off and then I would buy another--
I don't buy fancy clothes, none of that matters to me. I've got my kids, my wife, and my work. The only other thing that I buy are movies, occasionally, and wine. That's it. That's all I've got. Everything else is just noise. "Oh, you should have this because you're--" I don't need that. I don't want a Lamborghini. I don't want-- I don't want any of that stuff. I want to live a low key life and succeed at all of the things I go after, do rewarding work.
[01:06:46] Matt: I love it. I have to tell you, I haven't talked about my car on this show, but I bought out my Chevy work truck trim pickup when I left the John Deere dealership to go do this other thing. My son, my youngest son now has a commercial lawn care contract at our church. He and I mow that grass together.
[01:07:05] Albert: Is he paying you?
[01:07:06] Matt: Is he paying me? We split what we make. We're 50/50 partners in that business.
[01:07:10] Albert: Yes, teach them.
[01:07:12] Matt: We accumulate all the capital together. He's a 50% owner and all the equipment and that's how that works. When we buy gas, he pays for half of it. Anyway, when we come through my neighborhood, in my work truck with the mowers in the back, I know that my neighbors who don't know me personally, all assume that I'm there to do landscaping work in my neighborhood and I get tickled about that. All right. Well, I wanted to ask you guys, what is one piece of advice that you've benefited from in your life that you'd like to share today?
[01:07:38] Albert: I'll just put this in the realm of business because it wasn't a single person that gave us advice for him, but it's just something I learned from being in business. Then I've also worked with some people that embody the spirit. If you're maniacally focused on the customer, you'll probably win. It's hard to lose. It's really, really hard to lose when you're legitimately concerned "Does my customer have this? Did my product do what I said it does?" If you think that way, you'll probably win, especially in a services business, if you truly care about customers.
When you think about all the complaints that happen against businesses, it usually starts at some level of not caring, like people getting mad that they didn't get what they paid for and you're not refunding their money. That's not good. Then as far as life last week, I actually learned this from, sounds corny, watching my dad because he didn't have these things. He ultimately died when I was pretty young, but everyone should have a hobby that doesn't require money that you know, that you can rely on that's going to make you happy all the time.
My dad, unfortunately, he died. He had like no hobbies, unless watching TV was a hobby, because he did that. He was just a sad, bummed out guy. His plan was always when I retire, I'll have more fun. He didn't ever get the chance to retire because he died early. From his death bed, he was like, "Man, you should definitely do of what you're doing." If anyone's ever had a deathbed conversation, it's-- I don’t know, it's memorable.
[01:09:00] Matt: Memorable, and usually cuts through the baloney.
[01:09:03] Nick: Tough to follow Albert after that one. He's 100% right with that. I would add, it's incredibly important to judge yourself harder than you judge other people. You can only control what you can control and when it comes to work and anything, you can really only control your own performance. You can tell other people, "This is what I need from you," and all that, but you have to take responsibility for everything that happens, the good and the bad. If you don't embrace your failures and take responsibility for them, then you could never really truly own your successes and it's incredibly important that you do.
It's a problem that more people than you think have. As soon as somebody starts with excuses, "This didn't happen because of this, this didn't happen because of that," even when something happens, and it was somewhat out of my control, there was a way that I could've solved it. I've had bad business partners, for example, in the past. I had a vendor with Ranger Up that almost destroyed my whole company. This was, I don't know, six years ago. It was catastrophic. I'm talking about millions of dollars in revenue lost. It was a bad, bad situation.
My initial reaction was anger towards these guys, like, just unrequited anger. I just wanted them to be destroyed. Then I calmed down, worked through the problem. What was the root cause? Did they not perform as a vendor? They didn't, but it wasn't because they weren't trying. It was because we were the biggest customer they've ever had, they were super excited about the opportunity to do business with us. They overpromised and I really wanted this relationship to work, so instead of saying, "Hey, we're going to give you the opportunity to first do 20% of our business and see how it goes. then 30, then 50, and slowly moved to full production," I used hope as a plan, which is always a terrible plan, because they said, "We can handle this, no problem," I gave them the business.
I could say, yes, it's their fault for saying they could handle it and then not handling it, but I knew better. I wanted something to happen, so I always think about that whenever I'm planning anything else, "What happens if these people don't deliver? What is the result? Am I going to fail my business? Am I going to fail one of my customers?" I now never make any decisions where trusting an outside element could result in the failure of my company or failure for one of my clients.
You can only do that when you take full responsibility. No client cares why something isn't delivered, no company cares why something didn't happen, no customer cares-- It didn't happen. No matter what happened, even if I teed everything up and somehow 14 people failed in a row, which resulted in my failure, it's still my failure. "I take full responsibility, this is my fault and we're going to fix it." A lot of people can't do that. They have to tell you, this happened and that happened, and then this-- When I'm on the other side of that conversation, I never care what the story is, so I never expect other people to care what the story is.
[01:12:35] Albert: I'm going to bring that story to life for Nick. When I was working at one of the software companies, we worked with the company that was the agency for Subway when it came out that their lead spokesperson was a child sex criminal. They took it upon themselves to come up with new commercials and campaigns right out the gate because they knew, everything we've ever done with them is now dead. I promise you, they would have lost that business if they had come to me, "Going to do a change order."
It's not their fault, but it's like, this is a very bad event. Their business is materially affected. It couldn't get more catastrophic. They, as a business, had to make a call, "Do we squeeze another dollar out of our customer? Do we eat it?" They chose to eat it and they continued to beat the agency record. Do you know what I mean? You have to make these decisions, like what Nick was talking about. If it's out of your control, you have got to somehow make it so that it is in your control to solve a problem. I've seen that played out really well.
[01:13:30] Matt: The Ethics of Radical Responsibility. I appreciate you laying that out so clearly, Nick. One of the things that I noticed a lot is that leaders are readers, and I wonder if you guys could share any books that have meant a lot to you over time or that you are reading right now and particularly enjoying or benefiting from?
[01:13:46] Albert: Unfortunately, I don't read. [laughs]
[01:13:49] Matt: That makes that one easy.
[01:13:53] Albert: I read pieces, I would say, short stories, articles around people. I read one recently. I just liked seeing how much he'd gone through. It was about Jake Carpenter who is the creator of Burton Snowboards. I'm not a snowboarder. He died recently and they put together a long piece of all the things he had done and invented in industry. We're talking about maniacally focused. This guy lived, breathed, died his business. If you follow Burton or know anything about it, this guy is also super sharp. He owns everything, soup to nuts. Never took on a dollar. It's pretty crazy. I like reading stories like that where I find out how people turn their life's passion into something for themselves. I don't know if I have actual books I like reading.
[01:14:37] Nick: Yes, you do. You've got that book that you're always telling us about, that we've modeled much of our company about.
[01:14:44] Albert: The Great Game of Business is something that was taught to me, that I like quite a bit. It's by Jack Stack. They started a company called SRC Remanufacturing. They took it over. It was $50 million in debt. It was definitely going to go under, and he had to figure out a way to save this company. They built this business called The Great Game of Business. Anyway, this company does like half of billion in revenue now. Really fastening stuff, but it's about, similar to Ray Dalio, Radical Transparency. They opened up the books. They let everyone see what's happening. He had a core philosophy that business owners make better business decisions.
If you want your organization from top to bottom to make better decisions, you've got to treat them all as business owners. What's one thing a business owner always does? They know the numbers. The Great Game of Business is highly recommended for anyone who wants to run it.
[01:15:29] Matt: Great. I appreciate that very much. Nick, how about you?
[01:15:32] Nick: I always recommend two books to people. I hate business books, I don't like to read them. I've tried many times. I read the Great Book of Business just because Albert really was passionate about it. I always recommend Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I've been recommending it for years. I read it for the first time when I was 11. I didn't understand it then, but my dad liked it so I wanted to be like Dad and I read it a lot. Now, it's extremely meaningful for me. Anytime my life is [beep], I read Meditations. Anytime my life is going great, I read Meditations. I probably read it a couple of times a year. I think it's just really cool that this guy was the most powerful dude on the planet.
The book wasn't meant for anybody. It was for himself. It was his own personal diary. Never meant to see the light of day. It's just basically him reminding himself not to think too highly of himself, not to get cocky, to treat people well. Incredibly powerful book. I also recommend The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday. I like all of Ryan's books. He's a friend. I met him at a speaking event years ago. The Obstacle Is The Way is truly like a stellar work of stoicism and examples of modern-day stoics mixed with the ancient stoics. Very powerful, very applicable to business without being a cheesy business book where some CEO just tells you how great he is.
Yes, just for fun, I really enjoy Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings. My godfather gave me that book when I started Judo, also at the age of 11. That and the accompanying historic fiction, Musashi, have been a constant part of my life since then.
[01:17:13] Matt: All right. I would call that a lot of philosophy. Even though Meditations is kind of a memoir or whatever, but it's loaded with philosophy.
[01:17:21] Nick: I think philosophy is more valuable to a person than any kind of business book because business books tend to teach tactics, and tactics always change. In our lifetimes, the world has changed faster than it ever has in the history of mankind, even faster than during the industrial age. Philosophy is center's view and gives you a way of thinking about life in a way of approaching life which is very malleable and allows you to attack problems for many different ways whereas tactics expire.
[01:17:53] Matt: Up to this point, you guys have a double distinction, the first is that this is the only three-way podcast that I have recorded so far and I think it's gone pretty well. I really enjoyed it. The second is that this is now, by a factor of two, and we're not quite done yet, the longest recording that I have done so far as well. I think that we have a lot of good stuff in here.
[01:18:14] Albert: Two-parter. [laughs]
[01:18:14] Matt: Yes, that's right. Well, it could be or I may do it all at once. I haven't decided yet. I do know exactly what I am going to do for my follow-on show to this one and I am excited about it. It's going to be on Radical Responsibility. I wanted to ask you guys is there anything else, anything that I haven't asked or that we haven't managed to cover in 95 minutes that you would like to share with my audience today?
[01:18:33] Nick: I think Albert hit it a little bit, not a little bit, he hit it a lot, but I'm going to hit it again. Life is very short and if there's something you want to do, do it. I have never, at any point in my life, been able to predict five years into the future. I've done a lot of weird, crazy stuff and it's all been very defining. It's all been invaluable. I've done everything that you can imagine, I have done. I hope that the next 10 years look very much like the last 10 years in that I've done a lot more crazy stuff that I never would have expected.
You can't do that if you're waiting around or if you're throwing your hands up saying, "Well, I'm too old for this," or "I'm too old for that," or "My degree is in this. Even though I like this other thing, I can't do it." Every experience, every success, every failure is another thing that you now know. It's another iteration. If there's something you want to do and you're willing to sacrifice for that thing, start doing it. Just start doing it because fast forward five years, you're going to know a lot more than you did five years previous whereas if you just sit there and go, "I'm too old. I'm 40. I'm too old. I'm 30. I'm too old."
[01:19:45] Matt: The timing's not right."
[01:19:47] Nick: "The timing's not right." As an example, I had a very comfortable life doing Ranger Up. It was hard jumping from being full-time Ranger Up to being Diesel Jack Media for a lot of reasons, including the fact that Ranger Up, in many ways, defined me. This is going to be by far the biggest thing I've ever done. This is going to be the most satisfying thing I've ever done. Our trajectory is insane. Instantly, the second I started doing this, I felt like a great weight was lifted and that my life was changing in a positive way, not because my previous life was bad, but just because it was time for something different, time for a new challenge. You got to keep doing that or else, time just goes by and you can't get it back.
[01:20:33] Matt: I love it, appreciate it, Nick. With that then, how would you like people to follow up, and who are the people that should follow up with you guys if they want to get in touch? Since we've talked about making people hate you and disqualifying people, here's your chance.
[01:20:47] Albert: I'll start with this, who's our best customer? First things first, you have to want to do something a little different. It doesn't mean you have to shoot bullets into a sock, it doesn't mean you have to, do something as crazy as another brand. You just have to want to do something different and you know you needed something different because you're not having enough attention. The other thing we would prefer you have, is some experience with agencies, because we have found that people who have had an agency love us, and then people who haven't had an agency, they might experience us, and think that they need something else and I don't know.
If you've had an agency, we would prefer to hear from you, so if you have a project or service that you're selling and you've had an agency before and you're trying to just get attention in today's modern environment, then you have got to be willing to try something new, you want to sound a little different from your competitors. If you come to us as an accounting firm and say, "Hey, I want to talk about family and loyalty," and things like that, "I don't want to ruffle any feathers," well, you're going to sound like every other accounting firm, I don't know what to tell you.
[01:21:44] Nick: I'll push back a little bit on out. I agree with Albert. It is fun to get people that have worked with other agencies, but I'm not saying that if you've never-- We'll take you even if you haven't worked with an agency. What ends up happening, though, is people that have worked with an agency are blown away because we legitimately care. I know that sounds super cheesy, but we actually care. If we can't help you, we actually don't want you as a client because we don't want to just take your money. We want to make you way more money than we're taking.
We have souls. We want to feel good about what we do. We want you to be successful. People that come from other agencies are used to a very different experience. So when they give us a chance begrudgingly because like, "Oh, I've been hurt before," and then we just deliver, that's super fun for us, whereas people that haven't had an agency don't realize how much they're getting and they look at paying for a service as, "This is a big expense," where it isn't. When you compare the results, what other agencies charge for similar work, we're very good at what we do.
[01:22:50] Matt: Awesome, I just appreciate so much you guys being together with me today. I think you've served up so much wisdom from so much experience, and I hope that you gentlemen both have a terrific afternoon at Diesel Jack Media.
[01:23:03] Nick: Thanks, Matt. Appreciate it
[01:23:05] Albert: Thanks, Matt.
[01:23:07] Matt: This is a long episode, also I'm scrambling to hit my publication deadline, now there are many great takeaways and lessons learned from the show, but I'd like to emphasize just three. First, you can't finish unless you start, so get going. Nothing else is as limited as your time. Second, good marketing will attract the people you want and repel the people you don't want, or in Diesel Jack's words, "Good marketing will make some people hate you." Third, good marketing is memorable while focusing the attention on what's being marketed and not on the marketing piece itself.
Next week's show examines radical personal responsibility, in a story I've never told because until recently it just felt too painful. It is the story of my departure from the dealership equipment business in 2018, and what I learned the only time someone else ever chose the timing of my departure from a job. Until then, this is Matt Miner encouraging you to plan to fund the life you love.
Matt Miner is a fee-only, fiduciary financial advisor and Founder & CEO of Miner Wealth Management, a North Carolina Registered Investment Advisor where Matt provides personalized, unconflicted, advice to clients for a fee. He’s also my dad, so please be nice when you talk to him! Matt is a Certified Financial Planner Professional and holds a Series 65 securities license. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Finance from Arizona State University, and his MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Work Pants Finance is Matt's financial media business where he talks about work, entrepreneurship, kids and money, taxes, investing, and other personal finance topics. WorkPantsFinance.com exists to share wisdom and provide general financial information. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice. You are an individual and probably need personal advice for your specific situation. You should consider building relationships with helpful, caring, and competent professionals who understand your unique context and can provide advice that is tailored to your needs.
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