How to Deal with Online Complaints w/ YEXT Vice President of Industry Insights Duane Forrester

Show Notes

How do you deal with online complaints and manage your online reputation in today’s world of digital marketing and social media. Duane Forrester (The Vice President of Industry Insights of Yext) shares how to stay on top of your Google Map, Bing Map, Yahoo Map, Mapquest, Yelp!, FourSquare, and other online listings for $20 per month or less.

On today’s show we are interviewing Duane Forrester the Vice President of Industry Insights for YEXT who is allowing us to interview him just 1.5 miles from the heart of the southern California wildfires, thus there is a little background noise from time to time:

  1. How to deal with online complaints?
  2. Why consumers today prefer to read online reviews over recommendations from family and friends?
  3. How to stay on top of your Google Map, Bing Map, Yahoo Map, Mapquest, Yelp!, FourSquare and other online listings for $20 per month or less?
  4. Why as a business owner today you have to stay on top of your online reputation and online reviews?
  5. Why as a business or organizational leader must accept that people are talking about you either way and why it’s a wise decision to participate in this online conversation?

Learn how to take your digital marketing to the next level.

Broadcasting outdoors in Camarillo, California (wildfires)

  1. On today’s show, we are interviewing Duane Forrester who is the Vice President of Industry Insights for Yext.com, which is one of the leading Digital Knowledge Management (DKM) platforms on the planet. Essentially, Yext.com’s mission is to give companies control over their brand experiences across the digital universe of maps, apps, search engines, voice assistants, and other intelligent services that drive consumer discovery, decision, and action. Today, thousands of businesses including brands like Taco Bell, Rite Aid, and OXI Fresh use the Yext.com’s Knowledge Engine. Duane, welcome on to the Thrivetime Show, how are you sir?
  2. Duane, an audience of hundreds of thousands of listeners is comprised primarily of small business owners and aspiring small business owners, so I’m going to ask you questions today that I know they would ask you.
  3. Duane Forrester, how does Yext.com work and how does it save business owners both time and money?
    1. It’s all about being found by consumers, when and where consumers feel it’s important to be found.
    2. In order to appear, you have to cover all the basics, SEO, making sure your website loads quickly, making sure your website is mobile friendly.
    3. YEXT is a single point to manage all the data about your business (hours, phone number, website, and all data) on all of the different platforms.
    4. Keeps all of your sites and data accurate on all platforms, everywhere. A platform like this turns on marking up your structured data which allows you to rise in search engines. Amazon Alexa uses their database to return search results.
  4. Duane, prior to becoming the Vice President of Industry Insights for Yext you accumulated 20+ years of experience in both the search and social media marketing world’s can you share with us about your career and the kinds of jobs you had during the previous 20 years?
  5. Duane Forrester, once upon a time, rumor has it that wrote a book called How To Make Money With Your Blog and Turn Clicks Into Customers, through McGraw-Hill, what inspired you to write this book?
  6. Duane, back in the day you also worked in marketing & public relations with Caesar’s Palace can you share with us about your time there and what your day to day role was with Caesars Palace?
  7. Duane, you worked 9 years with Microsoft and Bing where you helped to run their Webmaster Tools program, as well as the SEO program at MSN, I’d love to hear about your time with MSN?
  8. Duane Forrester, I understand that you also once worked with the “Father of SEO” and the author of Search Engine for Dummies, Bruce Clay. What was your role with Bruce?
    1. VP of Operations
  9. What does it cost?
    1. Standalone Self-Service Model – 10’s of Dollars Per Month
    2. ACTION ITEM – Go through the Demo with YEXT
  10. How can YEXT help my business to get more customers?
  11. After working with many companies, big and small, what is the quality or characteristic that you see as a consistent trait for success?
    1. The focus on the customer – Constantly asking yourself “what can I do to improve the experience?”
  12. On a personal level, if you could go back in time and educate a younger version of yourself when you were first starting your career, what is the single best piece of advice that you would give your younger self?
  13. You a very intentional and purposeful person, I’d love if you would share with the listeners what the first 4 hours of your typical days look like?
    1. Wake up at 5 AM.
    2. The first hours of every day involve devouring new information.
    3. The next hour equals prioritizing information people need.

 

Business Coach | Ask Clay & Z Anything

Audio Transcription

As a small business owner or the leader of any organization, managing your online reputation can absolutely be a massive task. And on today’s show, Duane Forrester, the vice president of industry insights for Yext, explains to us how to stay on top of your google map, listing your bing map, listing your yahoo map, listing your map quest, listing your yelp, listing, your Foursquare listing, and all of the other online listings for just $20 per month. And he conducted today’s entire interview well, physically being located within just two miles of the devastating southern California fires. But Duane Forrester said, you know what, I committed to do the interview, so I’m going to make it happen. So thrive nation, I apologize for any audio snafoos, but now without any further ado, here we go.

On today’s show we are interviewing Duane Forrester, who’s the vice president of industry insights for a company called yext, what yext, which is one of the leading digital management companies platforms on the planet. Essentially yext mission is to give companies control over their, their brand experiences, their, their, their, their canines, and integrate experiences across the digital universe of maps apps, search engines, voices assistant, a voice assistance, and other intelligence services that drive consumer discovery, decision and action. Today. Yext works with thousands of businesses, including brands like Taco Bell. Never heard of it. A rite aid. I don’t know what that is. Oxi fresh. I’m not sure they all use the yext knowledge engine. Dwayne, welcome to the thrive time show. How are you, sir?

I’m incredible. Thank you very much. Um, what you guys heard in the background. I, I happened to be working for my home today. That was one of my dogs, a dog that knows seo, was belting out some advice there. Um, hopefully she’ll, uh, she’ll keep her chatter to herself for the rest of today. What is your dog’s name? Uh, I have two rescues. One is emily, and the other is tabby. Not what kind of dogs are they? With the DNA testing. We got done their purchase. Wah Wah part Pekinese. Yeah, they’re, they’re fierce. They’re massive dogs. They tip the scales at a Gargantuan 12 pounds a piece and you know, like somebody breaks in the house, you just start throwing dogs at them.

That’s funny. Funny story here. Before we get into our real interview, I was on ancestry.com and I discovered that I am a man bear pig and I’m actually late to year two dogs. I was going to say you’re related to a 12. Oh Wow. That’s my family tree doesn’t work. It doesn’t work a lot. Okay, so we can take it. So, so Dwayne, uh, people are saying out there, what the heck is yext? What, what is the x? How can it help the average plumber, the average home builder, how could it help them? Okay. So here’s the

way this works. If you are a, let’s say you’re a small business and whether you’re a small business or an enterprise business, this generally is the same talk track. It’s just a matter of scale. So, uh, you want people coming through your door. In order to have that happen today, you have to be well represented on mobile devices, for example, in a growing number of cases on voice enabled devices like an Amazon product or a google product, a Microsoft product, and so on. Now facebook has a, has devices as well. Um, and the reason this is really important, gang, is that consumers today demand those experiences. If you’ve paid any attention, even if you paid no attention and you’ve jumped into digital marketing at any point along the curve, you’ve heard things like mobile friendly. And the reason that those things are important is because that’s what today’s consumers expect.

So if you’re a plumber, the person you will most likely be going to service today is a new homeowner who happens to be a millennial. They get all of their information on their mobile device. If the information about your business does not populate correctly or is inaccurate, they will immediately turn to the next result. So what we do as a platform is we help the business ensure that the data is accurate and is accurate everywhere, hundreds of locations across the web, including being, including Google, including all of the biggest names and small names you’ve never heard of. And so we help that business manage all that data. You know, for a small business, a one off location, know that’s less of a less of a hurdle. But if you are a midsize company, let’s say you’ve got a, I don’t know, three or four locations in a city, um, you know, it could be a couple hours of your time every month to try to manage all that data and keep it accurate and keep it up to date.

Maybe you want to get that time back. A platform like x allows you to take that time back. Plus it kind of does some other cool stuff. Like if you’re involved with digital marketing, you have a website, you’ve probably come across the concept of marking up your data or structured data. Most people at this point immediately close their eyes glaze over because they say, oh wait, I have to go into my code and I have to make changes. Oh, that’s crazy. I don’t want to do that. I pay a guy to do that. Blah, blah, blah. You know, platform like this enables you to turn that on and does it in the background for you. So, and you know, I’m not saying by any stretch of the imagination are we the only solution out there, but I am saying that this is the world that the business in a habit today, and so they have to be playing at that level.

Our platform is one of those systems that allows you to rise up to that level today. And if you want to look at things like voice assistance, you know, the adoption rate on those things as exploded. We’re talking like triple digit adoptions a year over year right now and yext, our database of local business information powers the back end. If you ask Alexa anything about a local business, she’s getting that information from our database right now, that partnership we lit up back in April and that will only expand. It will continue to grow bigger. Amazon will source more locations for information. It will become more important as consumers want these things in their lives because here’s a little hidden gem. If you’re a plumber in the next five years, you’re going to go into someone’s house and you’re going to learn. The real secret behind all of this technology to Amazon has partnerships with companies that build homes and communities so you can have Alexa embedded in the structure of the home as it’s being built. So we’re talking microphones and speakers embedded in the walls and the ceilings. You can talk to your home. Your home becomes the connected device. This is huge, so so that’s the reality of what businesses are looking at moving forward. It’s a very complex place. Our platform is hopefully trying to allow you to at least manage that complexity in one location. Make it a little bit easier.

So dwayne, you’ve now relocated to the outside of your home. We’re now broadcasting from the outside of your home and beautiful a Rio of California and clay stairs. Here you are a a, a business consultant. You work with a lot of businesses and I would say that probably half of the people who listened to our broadcast are saying, I don’t know what he’s talking. So clay says, I want you to ask any questions all over my house. I’m freaking out over any questions you want to ask about what he just said. Oh Kate. All right.

I can start you off clay. Yeah, sure. Helped me out because I want to take you down off that ledge. Okay? I’m going to talk you down off this freaking out a little bit here. So it’s a little bit worried, right? But all these microphones just, you know, Alexa is already freaking me out in my house. Okay. So then all of a sudden when all of a sudden she starts talking, it’s like, what the heck? But she only started talking because somebody invited her to talk. So here’s the way this works for me, and you may, you may push back on that statement, okay? You may say no, but, but here’s the way this all works. These systems are, uh, the, the actual object itself, the Amazon Alexa is a pretty dumb little piece of plastic and rubber until it connects to the cloud. That’s where it’s brain lives, until when it’s only capable of one very specific and simple task which is hearing its own.

And so it’s listening for a pattern that matches, hey Alexa, or hey computer or hey, Amazon, whatever wake word you’ve chosen for it. The default is, Hey Alexis. So that’s what most people have when it hears that pattern or it here’s something that’s very similar to that pattern. It lights up and then it tries to fill in the blank. So if you were in the middle of a conversation, you know, talking to your kids about the importance of rotating the tires on the car while they’re driving it, and you said something that sounded like, Hey Alexa, the system would come in and then it would start talking to you about tires on a car or did you want to buy tires or this kind of thing, and then you’re really confused and you’re like, okay, you’re creeping me out. Like what? What are you doing?

Right? Yes, that’s, that’s the edge of the envelope. That’s where we’re still got the machine learning as a little bit of learning left to do. That’s what that. What you’re seeing actually manifest there in the real world. These devices are recording anything. They’re not listening. They’re on standby, and then when they hear the pattern that matches their name, they light up. They connect to the cloud. They take the information that you were just asking them the question you just asked them and they put that in the cloud and then the skills, the services that Amazon has built on the back end, we suddenly go into work and they say, oh, hang on a second, let me go ahead and answer that question for it, and then it brings back that answer. The magic here is not that this happens. The magic is that it happens in like a second. So from you asking the device and saying, you know, Hey Alexa, what time is it? New York City from the moment you say that till the moment it gives you back an answer. The magic is that that’s a vote one second of time.

So it seems like you’re having a conversation during the listeners out there. We, we work with a Marshall, the average person we work with as a small business owner probably between 50, I would say 150 employees is sort of our niche right there. And we work with. We work with a lot of outlining and age demographic there. I was going to say, wow, wow. Sort of impressive people. Got some new clients, a lot of people who are in Asia, they’re part of the Asian Yoda. No, but we interviewed, we work with a lot of business owners that are, are, you know, they have about 50 employees. That’s kind of the average and a lot of them listened to the show because they want to know specifically how do I grow my company. So when I have done is I’ve outlined some questions, uh, Marshall has written down some questions that we want to ask you because our listeners are always going to say, okay, how does [inaudible] work and how does it save me as a business owner both time and money or how does it make me as a business owner both more money or more time freedom.

So I would just, I’d like to ask you this, how does Yext help business owners make more money or to save more time or how does it help a business owner grow, get more business? Okay.

So today’s business environment is all about being found by consumers where and when the consumer feels it’s important to themselves. So we, we

have not lived in a world for at least a decade now where if you build it, they will come. It is no longer that world and far too many business owners still feel that that’s the reality that will have a website. So if people go searching, they will find me. And then that brings me into, I need to rank. Well, that’s really not the paradigm for today’s consumers. The consumer is at any given moment trying to solve a problem. I have a leaky faucet. I need a copy of my key for my parents who were visiting for the front door. I am trying to order a product, whatever it happens to be, those consumers are searching in that moment for the solution that matches their needs immediately. In order for you to appear for these people, you have to cover all the business, uh, all the basics of the usual work around digital marketing.

So this is search engine optimization. This is making sure that your website loads quickly. Making sure it’s mobile friendly, all of this technical stuff, and this is the stuff that every day that small business gets a phone call from some consultant pitching them for 29, $99 a month. I’ll manage it all for you. The reality is you can pay them, you could pay anybody, you can do it yourself, it doesn’t really matter. It has to be done. So you’ve got to do that. Um, what [inaudible] does is it allows you a single point to manage all of the data about your website, or I’m sorry about your business, your physical business. So we’re talking name, address, phone number, hours of operation, a pricing models, um, products that are available, hours of operation. Do I want to cut you off real quick cause I want to. Yes sir.

An example, Oxi fresh is one of the brands I work with, the founder of Oxi fresh. Jonathan Barnett is a dear friend of mine. I’ve helped him grow his business over the years. There’s now 385 oxi fresh franchisees. Right? And what happens is, is there’s 385 map google maps. Yep, fear in 85 of them. And so google maps, yes, but there’s also like a big map, you know there’s a yahoo dusting and you have a listing on Yelp, foursquare, foursquare, and facebook. Facebook. Now Amazon can answer location based questions for businesses. Mapquest is even a thing as just a few more. This is like, there’s so many. And so we used what you used to have to do is a franchisee could call Nancy boop, boop, boop. You’d say, thank you for calling the Oxi fresh. How can we help you? And they say, yeah, I’m not hearing you know, I’m not here in Missouri in Jefferson city and I need to update my map. And you go, which one? They say bing, yelp, Google map quest, yelp, foursquare, and you go, okay. And now you know, as the person who answered the phone as a, as a franchisee supporter, your job, now the rest of the day is going to be to log in with all different passwords and update all of those listings. Is that what we’re talking about here?

Yeah. So, so what you just described is the very real hell for that marketing employee at that head office and what you just described is like the reality of every franchise model that exists today and I worked with a lot of these companies and it’s, it’s wash, rinse, repeat. It’s the same thing, insert the brand here and you know, and, and not going to take anything away from this. You can go out and you can do all this by hand and that marketing person’s job is to answer the phone, listen to that Franchisee in Missouri or Mississippi and say, okay, here are a series of questions I’m going to ask you to make sure I capture everything from you. So I do this once on your behalf. And they go through, you know, every question that there is and the franchisees a little bit frustrated because they’re just trying to say, look, I only need my holiday hours change for this Monday because it’s a local holiday.

That’s it. Everything else is the same. But the marketing employee has a process. They have to check every one of these things to ensure that the process goes through and that the work is correct because they’re probably not going to do this by hand. They’re going to hand it to someone else who then takes that spreadsheet of information about the one location in Missouri and then goes into the systems, goes into google logs, in updates, it comes into being logs in, updates. It takes the text from the girlfriend who just broke up with them by the way their day is spent doing this. Exactly. And, and, and, and in some cases these people are then quoted on this how much throughput they have. Um, there is a time component to each one of these things. So sometimes they won’t get them all done and they’ll skip pieces.

Like all of that is eliminated using the ux platform. It’s a single location log in and then you get to manage all of it. So if you only have to update those holiday hours in Missouri, not only can you actually only go to the one location and make that one individual chains, you can actually tell the system to remember that on a recurring yearly basis for that one location so that next year there is no phone call, it’s automatic and you can even go so far as to talk to the virtual assistant that’s available through text and you can tell it from the store level so the Franchisee can send the message to the system. My hours of operation are changing this weekend for the holiday. The system will ask it. Is this your location? Yes. Which hours of operation? We’re going to be closed at noon this Monday. Okay, great. And the system will automatically update. So now that employee at the head office, they’re seeing the flow of updates happen because the Franchisee is managing it. The franchisee makes a mistake. You’re a marketing person at the head office has the ability to override that and fix it, but the Franchisee also feels empowered because, well, I don’t have to call somebody and ask them to go do it. It might take three, four days to get it done. I can get done near real time.

Like that’s the power of these systems today and in particular what we’ve built with our product at yext. Now, if two questions for you, um, question number one is how close are the California wildfires to you right now? Uh, last Thursday. What? A mile and a half from my house. So, um, is it smoking right now? Is how spooky isn’t it?

In fact, I’m, I’m, I’m outside right now. I’m looking, I see bright blue skies. There’s not a, you cannot smell smoke in the area. Uh, we’re actually looking pretty good right now, but I think that’s mostly because of the fires moved down the coast where the Malibu area and um, they’re just not a lot left to burn here. So. So yeah, we’re safe for the moment.

Okay. Switching gears here, I just was curious because it’s know if you see it in the news, I mean you can go to right there near near where it’s out here when you’re, it couldn’t be closer. You have a quite a legendary career and I want to kind of mine into that and then Marshall is going to interrogate you about this. Okay. Because you are a, you know, prior to becoming the vice president of industry insights for Yext, you’ve accumulated 20 plus years of experience in both search and social media marketing. Could you share with us about your career and the kinds of jobs you’ve had over the previous 20 years? Holy Crap. I feel old now. Say it like that. Look good though. You look good. I’m looking at your picture here on skype. I mean it’s beautiful.

Do you have at that photo is 15 years old?

Oh yeah, yeah. Well you’re probably looking bad.

No, I’m all decrepit. Right? No. So, um, so yeah, it’s uh, to me and I think this is always the way it is to me. It’s been a very straight line in my career, uh, yet when I share it with other people are like, holy cow, that’s amazing. Um, you know, I grew up in the hospitality industry. My parents ran a motel for 16 years, so I grew up in a small business and um, you know, went to university for that, came out and started working for Caesar’s palace in Canada. Um, worked in marketing and PR for them for a little while. Then got into online gambling. Um, was partway through that career, wrote a book, a marketing or a Microsoft called, had a program at MSN. They wanted me to take over their digital marketing. So took that, moved to the US. Um, you know, ran one of the oldest digital agencies after leaving Microsoft.

I was there for about nine years and I launched and built a web master tools for being, um, left there, took over, uh, an agency, one of the oldest agencies and digital marketing here in southern California. And then transitioned over to Yext. And I’ll tell you, one of the reasons that I brought my career here is, is the concept of scale. And when I sat down with these guys and looked at the product pipeline and what they were forecast to do and build over the coming two years, it was frankly exciting. I was as a product guy from Microsoft. I was looking at it going, hell yeah, this is important. And it’s been amazing the last two years.

Did you work with Bruce the truth? Clay, the author of searching for dummies?

Yes sir. I did. I was BP of operations. They’re really. And you were there for a long time. Where’d you know? Actually it was only about. Oh, not quite a year and a half.

Year and a half. Okay. So Bruce, I mean search engine for dummies is a legendary book. What was it like working directly with the father of Scl?

Bruce Bruce, that I have had a friendship for almost 20 years. And so to us it was completely natural, you know, it was very straightforward. I knew the team on the ground, you know, I knew the space. What was exciting to me was I had run in host teams before, but I had never worked at an agency. And so going into that space and seeing how that operation thrives and what you have to do and the decisions you have to make and how to structure time and how to manage client workload and expectations. That was eyeopening for me. That was just incredible. And um, and so it was, it was really, really, um, uh, I consider it a high point in my career. And uh, and part of the reason though I got I got lured away was a, the concept of scale. You know, when I, when I worked at webmaster tools, that thing, I mean, you know, I, I, in the first year we added a million new accounts that’s a million new webmaster account setup. I businesses all around the world. And that kind of scale is, you know, you don’t soon forget the feel of that. Being able to work with that many people and solve problems at that level. And yext allow me to get right back into that concept of scale. And I’ve been excited ever since.

Marshall, we have a lot of business owners who work with and a lot of times they come in, we sit down with a small business owner and help them grow their company. A lot of times they’re going to ask you, you know, what does it cost? How does it help me grow? Absolutely. Questions. Would you have for Duane Forrester, the man who right now is decided to do this interview while fighting. Well personally being involved in California while rush, he’s cutting brush. He’s sacrificing his body to be here with us.

Got The Garden Hose Picture for you gentlemen in my left hand. I have my laptop and my right hand. I have my garden hose. Oh, that’s. Oh, that’s good.

Sandals in southern California. What question do you have for this? So we, we have so many business owners that are like, okay, I get it. You’ve worked with Caesar’s palace, you’ve worked with being, you’ve worked with Microsoft, you’ve worked with MSN, a number of different businesses. And I get it. I need to do it as well. How much is this going to cost me though? Because it sounds these businesses are crazy and the tools that you’re creating, they must be worth millions of millions of dollars. And so, so what does it cost to, to, to either utilize these tools or even employ the use of, of yaks for my, uh, for my own business.

Well, I’m going to give you a part of an answer and then I’m going to deflate the balloon a little bit. Okay. Um, so the of the answer is we are at this stage a fairly large company. We are a global company with offices in New York, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo. Um, and uh, I think it was a year ago, April. We had our IPO and that was very successful. So, you know, it was, it, it’s, it’s a very fast, rapidly growing company over the last decade. Um, and so what we’ve managed to do in that sense then is evolve the product offering that we have. So there is a completely standalone self service model that any business can come in. And indeed, this is where a lot of small businesses start with us, is simply coming in to the self service model. There’s a demo you can go through where you will self identify whether you should get handholding and you actually, or if you actually know everything that you’re doing and then you can just simply light up the system, put in your credit card. Now if you’ve got. Now this is where I get to deflate the balloon a little bit because I don’t have an actual number to answer the cost.

Oh, come on the flood gate. Yeah, mean it’s a patriots fan. I’m Kevin and fan. I’m kind of a fan of that. I wish we wouldn’t have gotten, gotten continue.

No, no. But there’s, there’s a reason for that, right? The reason is that, um, for the most part, a lot of what we do when we do it at the enterprise scale, there is no set number. So there’s a lot of flexibility in there based on volume and based on which resources you’re going to have access to and so on. And so on the other side of it, that flexibility exists. But it’s, it’s much smaller. Um, I will, I encourage everyone go through the demo process, answer the questions that are there. Yes. You’re going to end up on our mail list. Yes. We’re probably going to email you a couple times asking you if you want to continue to move forward, but we are a business. This is how we grow and if at that point you’re looking at it and saying, I think this is valuable for me, then you should just go ahead and do this. The actual cost, it’s not going to be a whole lot. I can tell you that. I don’t know what the actual number is, unfortunately.

Is it thousands? No, I’m not a local business owner and I have like three locations. Am I going to spend a thousand dollars a month?

Yeah. If you’re a local business and you’ve got three locations, you should be thinking in tens of dollars a month, not hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars.

Oh, that’s what it should be. This you’re saying for, you know, for a tens of dollars per month, I might be able to efficiently keep, keep control of, and stay on top of my listings.

Yes. And there’s a couple of reasons that you need to, or a couple of things you need to think about this, right? So if you’re asking the question about cost, you also then has to be asking the question about efficiencies, which we’ve talked a little bit about. And so then you have to be calculating for yourself. If I’m not spending five hours doing this, I’m only spending one hour doing this, what are those other four hours represent my business? What else could I be doing that allows me to grow revenue to, you know, increase customer, whatever it is, there’s that side of the equation. Um, and then there’s also the um, uh, the side where it’s strictly about, um, you know, how am I investing in the future of what I want to do and does this put me on a path to enable those future things? So whenever I get into these conversations where we’re talking about dollars and cents, there is the conversation that a straightforward, it’s going to cost $45 a month and here you go, whatever the number is. And the reality is that with that comes the equation of time, time saved, and then you can reinvest in another area. And that will often pay for itself in a small business.

Clay stairs. I’ve got a question. Uh, just the applicability man did. No one’s gonna use that word came up. Sorry about that. But, uh, the, the applicable notice of this product of yext. I’m just thinking of a handful of clients that I’ve got home builders that are, uh, you know, they probably have three people, three employees, and then they’re dealing with a bunch of, a bunch of subcontractors. And uh, as we as coaches bring to them the concept of their online presence, uh, their, their heads are spinning a little bit with the idea of online presence. How can I, as a coach, introduced this idea in the need for the next product to them so that it could be something that they could use and make their world better.

So I think what’s really important in this example is that folks understand how today’s consumers are actually looking for information. Yeah, I like that concept. I liked that a lot. Right? And what they’re not doing is they’re not turning to their family and friends immediately what they’re trying to find his third party independent recommendations. So essentially they’re going online and then they want to read reviews.

Oh, I have to interrupt or interject real quick because I want to make sure that the listeners understand this. Duane Forrester before we can tell you people today are not going to their family and friends. Then you might say, that is harsh. I would never under any circumstance, ever asked my extended family for input on any aspect of life at all, under any circumstance. I wouldn’t ask them for a good restaurant, a good movie. I wouldn’t ask about anything because frankly what they’re going to do is no matter how bad the service is, if they know a guy, if they know a guy, there you go, well, I know a guy, you know, he, uh, his name’s Boswell. He does a lot of work on knock on, you know, in installation. He’s a good guy. And I’m like, but does, is the quality good? As an example, recently my wife and I decided to put a pool in our backyard and I reached out to quote unquote friends because not because I reached out to them as much as they, they heard I was doing this.

They said, I know a guy. And I said, okay, great. Who Do you recommend? And every time they go, well, this guy, that guy. Then I asked this guy, looked. I looked at him in the face. I said, hey buddy, I’ve known this guy forever from church. I said, did the company, does this company do a good job? And he goes, well, I mean, they’ve had a few complaints, but who has it now? I’m like, would you use them to put a pool in your own backyard? Oh no, but he’s a guy I know and people always do that kind of stuff, but the object, the objectivity of thousands of Google reviews or whatever reviews aggregated together is profound. Please continue. Dwayne. I just wanted to tee that up and break that down,

but I think that’s the critical point, right? Like, like I know throughout my life, anytime I asked my dad, how do I do this? Like he’ll hop on an airplane, fly across the continent, come into my living room and then show me how to do it. And I’m like, no dad, that’s not what I want. I didn’t want the entire kitchen taken apart to fix the washer and the leaky faucet. Thanks pops. You know, and it’s like, it’s like, don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that you did this, but what you did was soaked up four days of my time when I could have paid a guy for two hours of his time and then I would have gotten three and a half days of my life back. Like, and, and this is the reality though, right? Consumers today, they’re going online, they’re looking for people along with that.

They’re seeing reviews on them. So you’re this contractor, um, let’s take the subcontractors out of the equation because quite frankly, as the consumer, if I’m hiring you, I don’t give a rat’s butt about your relationship with subcontractors. All I care about is me and you have an agreement that you will do this work for this price at this time. That’s exactly. Get her done on time, on budget. There we go. Um, and so the subcontractors are effectively how you will live and die. And the incentive then on the contractor is to have good relationships with good people, to weed out the dereck and keep the good. That makes total sense. But as the contractor, you have to be able to position yourself and there’s like all of these places like Angie’s list and all these different services where people will recommend to these local people.

And this is the new, I’ve got a guy economy. It’s not about actually your neighbor knowing someone. It’s about a third party website that has collected reviews from third party people who you’ll never know who have actually used that service and then said he does great work, but he smells really bad or he smells fantastic, but his work is terrible. Like as a consumer, I get on a sliding scale. I get to look at that and say, you know what? I really don’t care. I can share my host out afterwards, but I want the best quality work done. I’m going to hire the stinky guy who does great work, but I want that as the consumer. I need to know those things, and so as that business owner, you have to be plugged in. You have to be doing all of this digital marketing you to be showing up in

these places of whether it’s a review site, the rating site you’re showing up there anyhow as a business. Good point. Difference is, and this is the way I like to phrase this, people are talking about you. You can choose to be a part of the conversation or not. For my money, I want to be in every conversation possible because I want to know what they’re saying and I want to steer the conversation in a positive way and that’s where review management comes in and becomes so important. And, um, there’s a book out there called Hug your haters and the basis of this is somebody was a bad review. You jump on that and you find out what the problem is. You don’t ignore it because you ignore it. You don’t have the chance to change them. And nine times out of 10, if you can change their mind, you will create a raving fan out of that.

Not just mild fan, but because you dove in and you corrected the problem for them. They look at that and say, but this is way more than I ever expected. You’re amazing. Thank you. Your biggest fan. So I have an example of this. Um, we have a system at one of my company’s called elephant in the room. It’s a men’s grooming lounge that were refranchising. We’ve been doing this for seven years. The guy today came in for his haircut. True Story. He came in for his haircut and he’s pretty high up. He’s white collar guy. He drove in for about 20 miles away because he loves the experience. This is his fifth time getting his hair cut and our downtown location. We had a young lady today who had somebody in her family pass, or at least she claims I don’t know yet, and she did not show up to work, didn’t show up to.

I didn’t call it, didn’t text, just no show. Then after the event, you know, texts a couple hours later, hey, I’m at a funeral, so I don’t know who dies and has a funeral the same day. You get what I’m saying? I don’t know. I don’t know the whole deal. You shouldn’t. People efficient. Right. But what happened is the customer shows up for their haircut and nobody called them. No one notified them and let them know we can’t get you in today. Yep. Standard policy is if somebody can’t come in, they need to call previous to 8:00 AM. We send it in a replacement. We knock it out, but no one showed up last minute. It was a weird deal. Okay, so long story short, this guy shows up for a haircut. He’s very, he’s very upset, and he actually did the high, the high water mark of the high road.

In my opinion. He did the right thing. He took, um, transparency to what I would consider the high water mark. This is what you should do, in my opinion, for frustrated with a business owner. You should call them, talk to them, whatever voice your concerns before writing a review. That’s my prayer. You know, he didn’t and he was pretty irate. And so it got to me and as the owner of these three specific men’s grooming stores, I called the guy. This guy said, hey, l a s t as our system law. Listen, answer, satisfied, trust. I said, hey, could you tell me what happened? He goes, you pissed me off. I said, okay, could you tell me why, how I pissed you off? What else would I do? What I do? He goes, I drove all the way in for 20 minutes for a high end men’s grooming experience because I like you guys.

And then you didn’t even call me to tell if you just would have called me and said that this person wasn’t showing up, then I would have been fine with it. He didn’t call and I said, you know what, from my perspective, I want you to notice what happened. Somebody didn’t come to work today and I didn’t even know about it. The only reason I know about it because you called me. This person just didn’t show up. If you’re me as an owner, how would you want me to answer you? And he goes, I just think it’s totally any use to fund word. He goes, Isley is totally booked up and I just think you as an owner need to understand. He starts calming down. You need to understand that I would have liked to call. And I said, I want you to know I didn’t know until right now.

So I’m asking you what should I do? He goes, well, just call him is huge man. And he kind of calms down and I so s satisfy. So what do I need to do to satisfy? He goes, no, I don’t. I don’t want anything for it. I’m not a handout guide. Just wanted to tell you how pissed off I was and I said, I appreciate you for telling me. So typically for guys like you, if we ever make a mistake, I make a refund. Why don’t I give you your next three haircuts free and he goes, can’t take it man. I said, what about to you just can’t do it as here’s the deal. I’m going to argue with you right now. I’m giving you two. You can’t reject it. Come on, you’re taking the two. He goes, all right, I’ll take the two, but I feel like I should be.

He goes, but how about this? Give me your cell phone number and I’ll text you feedback so you know if it’s getting better. I said, all right, fine. This guy is a huge fan. I mean, he texted me afterwards, brother, thank you for calling me, man. It’s good to see people actually care. You know, so las t listen, answer, satisfied, trust. And if you’re not on top of that conversation will go on online and complaint. And if somebody does complain online, Dwayne, what’s the best way to respond? Can you educate our listeners out there? You know, what do you do when you get online is good.

Yeah. No, you, you dive on that grenade, right? Um, and so, so this is, and this is what’s really important about this. This is why the world that a small business lives in today is so complex and it’s difficult. I mean, I, I frankly don’t know how small business owners do it. There’s so much to cover. It’s easy for me to say here’s a platform like mine because it simplifies managing reviews and responding to them. Managing your data and making sure it’s accurate and updated. Like it’s easy for me to say that it’s very self serving. But businesses need solutions like this because of exactly this moment. So somebody leaves a scathing review. What do you do? You try to engage that person in the location they are at, respond directly to them because in some instances, whether you can fix the problem or not isn’t the issue.

If consumers see that you are attempting to take action and you were attempting to make it right, being seen to take an action as often as powerful as taking the action, and so the next consumer in line looks at that and says, wow, that person was really pissed off. Oh look, the owner come in. They seem reasonable. They reached out, but then the consumer never responded to them. Well, you know, the consumer is being unrealistic. Now suddenly the dynamic has shifted in favor of the business in that, in that moment, and if that conversation actually lights up and that person started to complain and then you’ve got on top of that and said, you know, what was the problem? Well, you know, the problem was that, you know, I ordered soup and they brought me bread. You know, oh, okay, well, you know, you should talk to our staff about that and make sure they know the difference between soup and bread.

Like all of these kinds of. The consumer then diffuses and says, wait, you’re listening to me. That’s all I want. And you then become the outlet for every business that the consumer has ever been frustrated with who has never listened to them. You become the one that listened. So of all those businesses that had the opportunity to listen and engage with that consumer and lost that opportunity, you get to reap the benefits of it from that consumer emotionally. So here’s, here’s one thing I’m going to give you this because this idea came into my head when we were talking and I was listening to your story about, um, the baldman getting hair cuts, which I think is fantastic, you know, because in my mind when you were telling that story, the gentleman is bald and so, you know, that just makes it funnier that you’re giving him haircuts.

So this is, this is how I’m approaching this, right? Because I, I get into these conversations with people sometimes too, right? Where he was a customer service failure, and then they start saying things to me like, well, we’ll give you this for free. We’ll give you this for free. It’s like, no, no, I don’t want a relationship based on that. I just want quality when I show up, that’s all, nothing more, nothing less. And so what I ended up doing is as I talked to a business and I say, I’ll tell you what, I’m not really interested in the Freebie, but why don’t you give me five free haircuts for people I know, give me the ability to give good experiences to other people and I am going to judge you based on the feedback of my friends. So if you really are that good, you’ll take my five friends and give them haircuts and I’m only going to hear great things about their experiences.

I get to be a hero as the customer because I get to get my friends is experience. You as the business owner, whether you give five to one guy or five dude, five individually as you don’t care, you know it’s, it’s, it’s all the same. It’s a numbers thing on your end and you have that opportunity then to convert that person who is complaining into a champion of yours because they are going to go to their friends and say, Hey, I had a bad experience. They gave me these coupons, I can’t use them, so I have to pass them on to you. Why don’t you go ahead this experience, tell me what you think about it. The owner and I are connected now, so if you have a bad experience, I’m going to rail on him. If you have a great experience, I’ll let them know and so suddenly you have the opportunity to turn that moment that was a negative into a net positive and create a champion in that person who takes action to actually share your business and drive more foot traffic. Marshall Morris, I got a question for you. You’re a Dwayne and you’ve worked with a number of different businesses. It works for, you know, several huge companies. We’re talking Microsoft here.

People will hear about them eventually and you’ve had a numerous clients that are small business owners as well. And so the question that I hear that I want to ask you is what is the consistent trait or characteristic that you’ve seen consistently across big business, small business that is allowed businesses to become successful? Is there a consistent trait where the character trait of the owner, a character trait of the owner or how they operate their business that allows them to be successful? Because I think there’s a, a lot of opportunity to do great, you know, uh, amongst businesses with poor customer service and there’s a lot of opportunity to do phenomenally. So from your perspective, is there a, a moment where you see a business operating a certain way where you’re like, oh man, they’re going to make it. They’re going to do phenomenally well. Is there, is there a characteristic or a single trait that you see? Absolutely.

We do this at Jakks, but we do this because when you started it was two guys and those two guys had a very particular focus. And today that focus is still what we hue towards. All of the company has to skew in this direction and it’s not unique to us. It’s not by any means something that is proprietary or that we invented or anything. In fact, it’s something so simple that we all claim we want it. We all claim we deliver it. And yet we all almost invariably at some point fail to live up to the standard and it’s the focus on the customer. It’s the consistent asking yourself, what can I do today that improves the customer’s experience? What does that look like? And what that means is you have to have the ability to absorb information from your customers. Sometimes it’s subconscious information.

When I walk into a sandwich shop and I walk up to the counter and there were people standing around there and no one acknowledges me, I can see they’re busy. I can see they’re making sandwiches for other patrons who I see waiting in line. I understand it’s lunchtime and you’re busy. What I don’t understand is that you fail to acknowledge my existence when I came into your business by acknowledging me. You just bought yourself five minutes of my time while I’ll stand there and wait silent. Like by not acknowledging me by the time I’m two minutes in, I’m thinking I’m just gonna go somewhere else because these guys don’t care about them. So it’s the simplistic things that focus on the customer. That’s what it is. You know when I’ve worked at, as you guys have mentioned, a lot of different companies, right, and you know you hear things like a maniacal focus on customer a and customer needs and things like that.

I’m not a fan of any statements that are totalitarian in their nature. I am. However, a big fan of the concept of just used sense. If you buy something and you have that object, you bought it for a reason. Now that object will do one thing for you, but then that one thing allows you to do something else. So if you think through the path of these concepts, you can think if a customer comes into me and they want a haircut with me, what else might be useful and interesting to them while I men shop shaving? So maybe I should have this material or this product or this experience. And so by thinking down that path, by truly thinking about what the customer’s journey looks like, where they are going, or where they may be going, you suddenly look like a much smarter and much more informed decision for that because you seem to be predicting what they want. It’s fairly straightforward and every single time you get a positive review on something, you thank the person. If you get a review from somebody that is negative, you don’t that will you thank them for their feedback, but then you dig in and you ask them if they’re willing to help you solve this problem. So it doesn’t happen again. You have to be empathetic. That’s ultimately what this comes down to. And every day, and it’s exhausting. That’s being a small business.

They got to ask you this real quick because I’m sure you’ve never seen this, that yes, I’m sure I’m sure I live in an alternative universe of parallel universe. Submit a physical existence. But you know how like I’m someone who works for you, they don’t greet the customer when they walk in there, right? So you warn them, you talk to them, you write them up, you do the things, you can coach them, you teach them, you preach, you hear, realize basically this is captain sarcasm. Oh, we need to fire him. Okay, so you fire the employee. So then they pose as a customer. They’re not a customer. Right? Right. Or a competitor poses as a customer and they’re not a customer. It’s all. Give you an example. We had a lady about two years ago, two and a half. It’s far enough in the past where I can talk about it.

So two and a half years in the past, she, uh, for one of my companies did not get promoted. Now the head of our call center, Marshall Vouch for me on this, the head of our call center, her name is what? The elephant room daisy. And she is of what background? Ethnicity? Latino. Right? So she is Latino, but the person who got fired right was also Latino. So she writes, well, you know what, this particular business, you cannot be promoted and the shoe or a basically white, the guy’s a bigot. So she post that, right? Yup. So right away she posts that. Well, that’s her statement. That’s her perspective. That’s your truth. That’s her, whatever. You know what I mean? And so I wrote up there, hey, as the ahead of this particular business, I appreciate everyone’s feedback. However many people on our team who are in leadership positions.

In fact, Jason, uh, this is skin white. It’s not white. Okay? So he’s like the second in command and then a daisy who is the head of the call center, she’s Latino, right? Um, and I think we know that that’s not really the thing, but it didn’t matter, but that people had already started being outraged, sharing, commenting. I talked to my attorney, he reaches out to the person, cease and desist please. This person has nothing to lose. Right? So they continue just adding more and more. And I have got to a place, I’m 38, my dad died of Lou Gehrig’s disease two years ago, and frankly between you and me, I don’t care. But I did respond and let them know the truth. But it was like at that point, it’s like we’re out for a witch hunt. I didn’t lose sleep. I did not get stressed.

I can honestly tell you I went to sleep, had a great night, but many people do get stressed out about this kind of stuff. What advice would you say, what advice would you have for somebody out there who has somebody online, we’ll call them, be the trolls of the Internet, who is writing false bogus information about their company, a competitor, a, an employee that was needed to be terminated Cetera, and they feel like they have to have the last word because it’s not true and they just can’t sleep because they’re so frustrated. Duane Forrester, what should they do?

They should take a step back and realize that the only thing they’re doing is perpetuating that conversation. Got It. So this is. This is the same concept is if someone is engaging you that you don’t want to engage on a personal level. I’m Kunal monk music. So you can coach us through it. I’m just picking up some monk coaches through. Here we go. Even if you tell that person, I’m not interested in communicating with you, and then they call you the following week and you answer the call and say, I’m not interested and this goes on for five or six weeks that you’ve done is typically voc herself, a future engagement with that person. A small business owner realize that this is the product of somebody who’s upset with circumstances that they don’t like. It’s valid that they are upset well as it’s valid that they were separated from the business because you obviously had good reason to do so.

The facts do not support reality. There will always be people who will choose to believe this story and people who will not believe the story. You can’t really change that and that’s not the battle you need to fight. It’s going to take up cycles of your time. It’s going to waste resources. That’s the reality. What you do is you do exactly what you guys were doing. You catalog the information, you show that it’s accurate, factually inaccurate. You hand it to a lawyer, you write the cease and desist and you send that off to them and at that point then you can actually contact the business where these reviews are showing and you can say, we have a valid cease and desist against this person. Here are the circumstances of it. We request that you remove that review because it is false and defamatory and in a lot of instances the company will take the action and just remove it and get rid of it because they don’t want to be a part of perpetuating thing. That’s a problem. I have a funny story real quick. If it’s okay. I want to share this with you. Certainly my good friend

Jonathan Barnett, I’m not going to read his cell phone number out there, but he is the founder of Oxi fresh and his number is seven, two zero, eight, four one blah blah blah, blah, blah blah. Okay, but the point is when you text his number, that’s John, but what happened is years ago he updated his phone number and somehow I had on my phone a different number, so it’s one digit off. There’s one digit that’s off, so in my phone I had my friend Jonathan Barnett listed, but the phone number was off by one number, so I text this guy is text. I said, Jonathan, I’ll be at the airport in Denver at 10:00. If you could please have someone pick me up, that’d be great. And this guy texts back. It’s so funny. He texts back, listen to your buddy and this is so fun. I can hear this guy.

He’s like, I don’t know who Jonathan Barnett is, but I am not Jonathan Barnett and I’m so tired of you texting me and I’ve only texted back one time. Okay, so because I understand how this works. You said, yeah, you can’t eat if you keep responding. He doesn’t end the conversation and I’m having a good time with this because I’m at the airport waiting. Oh, it’s fine. It’s my big brother and big sister. So I texted back, I text, I don’t know who arnold is, but tell him to bring the peanut butter. It’s going to get weird. So I get a text back and it’s like, listen, here, you son of it. He’s like texting, everything stopped texting, my wife sitting next to me like, stop it and I text back. I’m like, you tell us in a way that it’s gone too far and he better not be telling his baby’s daddy what’s going on because it’s getting deep and I’d go, I’m just texting crazy random things and this guy’s like, listen, here I will. And he just, he cannot stop. It’s okay. Even to this day, I’m not kidding. Every thanksgiving it’s coming up soon. Every thanksgiving I will sit there and I will text this person who refuses to block me and I will say, did you bring the ham? And this person will go off and this has been like four years running and he could see somebody who can not in the conversation. And it is awesome. It is my number one thing I’m thankful for every year. I love it.

So, so let’s take this. Let’s take this example from the realm of reality into a cartoon world, right? Yes. Because, because that’s essentially what we’re seeing play out here. Okay. But what we’re really seeing is we’re seeing a personality type that thrives on confrontation for on negative engagement and they feel the need to right a wrong. Right. And so it’s like, look, as a business owner, you have to ask yourself, do I have time for that? Like is this the fight that I have to pick or is my landlord talking about subdividing the space next to me and you know, putting it a dog massage parlor that’s going to be a challenge for my customers or my landlord thinking about raising the rent or the utility bill going up? Or is there a heavy storm on the way? Do I need to somehow stop my storefront from flooding?

Is One of my suppliers been impacted by the price of steel? And suddenly one of my core products is doubling in cost. These are the things that should be occupying your time as a small business owner. Not a random employee who left for a reason and decided to stir up some crap because then the bigger longer term view of things, that’s a small thing and you can manage that. And just to be crystal clear, right, if you’re going to talk about reviews and ratings and all these things, ain’t nobody coming out of this with a five star on an infinite number of reviews. Never going to happen. So nobody should be thinking that way. You are always going to be a four point something if you are exceptional, so you don’t worry about the randos that go a little bit crazy. That’s not, that’s not an area to put your time or focus.

Marshall Morris, I give you the floor for a final question that I have one more question for our guest today, Mr Duane Forrester. What’s your hot three? Final four? I got a question for you is how important, um, you know, on the show and with our coaching program at our conferences, we talk a lot about the growth mindset and I see that you’ve been able to be successful among a number of large companies and help small companies as well. Small businesses grow over a long period of time. How important is the growth mindset for all of our listeners and in order to be successful in business?

All right. We might need some music for this because I’m going to say this, Whoa, and it is going to be deep. It is going to be profound and it is going to resonate to you. Let me get my magic. I got it here then. Then you’re going to say to me, wait, I’ve heard that before. Here we go, so this is not new, but here’s the reality. The Concept of growth. This is not a new one. We are all aware of it. In fact, it has been said, if we’re not growing, we’re dying. Please keep this in mind that you focus on their business day to day.

That’s, that’s the truth guys. If you’re not growing, you’re going backwards. That’s the reality. So if you’re not growing your die right, green and growing or ripe and rotten, stagnant, whatever it is, here’s the reality. The reality is in today’s world, data is helping consumers make more informed choices. That data needs to be fresh and it needs to be accurate. Anytime a business pops up into reality from nowhere, and the last time I checked, there were somewhere around 11 to 13 million new businesses started in America every year, so that’s a lot of new businesses starting up. I can almost guarantee you, if you’re listening to the show, a new competitor has started up against you. The reality is if those guys are doing their job and they are, they should be, which is keeping their data fresh, keeping it accurate, and keeping it in front of these, these search engines at all of these data systems, your job got harder, so if you’re not growing, that means they’re getting ahead of you. That means they will end up ranking you. They will be the spoken to answer. They will get the. They will be what consumers get as a recommendation. You will be hoping your neighbors know a guy and that guy happens to be you. That is not a solid business plan in today’s environment.

Marsha, what was that link you sent me over? It’s keep your data fresh with massengill, right? Yeah, that’s right. Keep your data fresh. Thank you. Thank you. I wasn’t sure why you said that. Doing okay. Final question I have here for you they’re doing is, uh, you know, business owners out there, they look at to kind kinda like you. You’ve had massive success, uh, and they probably want to know, hey, how do you spend the first four hours of your day? How do you spin on a daily basis? What’s your routine? How do you spend the first four hours of each day?

So first I would say at least hour to 90 minutes is new information. Um, I am scouring my news feeds. I am checking out to see what’s new, either direct to the things I’m working on or tangentially related. Um, I want to know what the big movers and shakers in my industry are up to, what press releases have happened, what’s going on with their product cycles, all of that kind of information. Um, the next hour I am prioritizing anything that I have to return to somebody throughout my day because I do not want to be a blocker. I want to make sure that people have what they need to go off and do what they need to do, so that’s what about two and a half hours of my day at some point in there. Probably have breakfast enough because that’s always nice. What time are you waking up? What time do you wake up? I’m usually up anywhere between five and six in the morning. Got Add up, take the dogs out, grab a bite to eat, hit the computer and start talking to New York, London everywhere else and after that it’s really just heads down on whatever projects are on my plate and that could be writing articles. That could be writing a book that could be planning a keynote for a conference I’m speaking at. It could be managing my travel schedule, it could be being on client calls. All of those things.

You wake up at five though. You wake up at five. Yeah. Just want to throw this out here for you. I call this the high five at five club. I’ve interviewed so many millionaires, top level successful people, New York Times, best selling authors, and everybody is waking up at 5:00 AM, [inaudible] everybody. I don’t have people. I would love to say, Oh, I interviewed this guy and he says, for life balance, he wakes up at six or seven. I don’t hear it. Every single time. Marshall, every time they wake up all the time, everyday, easy early. Sometimes it’s even earlier, but it’s always five, 5:30. No one says I wake up at nine. We don’t have it. No, no, don’t get whoever said are already where they want to be. You know, they’ve sort of dropped the mic like I’m done. Boom, you know. But I used to wake up at five.

So my concept of life balance is, um, my hobby is actually building guitars and that is so far removed from what I do as a daily job that it forces me to use other skills and talents and it creates a zen moment for me. So I will spend two or three hours in the evening instead of watching television. Oh, my workshop, creating something with my hands. And, and that’s, that’s how I find the balance

on behalf of a slash and Steven Tyler who could not be here with aerosmith today. I just want to say a big shout out, big, big gut attribute to your guitar making. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s awesome.

Totally. Thank you. I mean, I’m in my workshop right now and I’ve got the boys from home rush. They’re all over the shop.

Do you like aerosmith? Did you like Harold? Yeah, very much. Very much. A fun little story for you. I was working in the landscaping industry for a company called sunrise landscaping, and my boss, mark phyliss said, click lark. I’m like 18, 17. He says, Hey, I’m going to piece out for lunch today, whatever, if you can answer my phone, if it rings, get it. Boom. So I get a phone call and this guy goes, hey, this is steve. What’s up man? Hey, we’re going to be there tonight. And I didn’t know who he was, you know, I’m like, okay. And he’s very energetic, you know, Steve will be there tonight. So I said, hey, mark, a guy named Steve called you missed a call. He said he’s going to be there tonight after the concert, whatever, and I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know.

The long story short, he says, well, you want to hang out tonight? He and Johnny are coming to town. I said, who’s johnny? So Johnny, Steve. Anyway, he was not interested in educating me. We had 50 employees, 60 employees. I go home, drive back to Cokato, Minnesota rural town. Come back the next morning to meet my landscaping boss. Get there at 5:00 AM every morning. Everyone’s drunk, passed out beer cans everywhere and I go, dude, you guys, what did you do last night? Because rob was like a 50 year old man. He goes, will steve and Johnny came over. It was Johnny Lang and Steven Tyler and all of aerosmith was in his backyard. I guess he knew them him through some relationship and I totally had no idea that I was missing out on hanging out with Johnny Lang and aerosmith. True Story.

Okay. At this point we need to insert the music from the whammy game show because wow, I am. I am stunned that you passed on that

I had no idea who he was. He said, Steven, you know, he didn’t say Steven. Tyler didn’t say aerosmith. You just said Steve and then Johnny. And I’m like, I don’t know who these people are. I don’t let him know what concerts were. I’m like 17, 18.

Yeah. Can’t afford this. I’m putting this on you. Yeah, I’m saying as a 17, 18 year old guy of a certain age. Yeah. Like there should have been like a default switch that went off and I was a bad person. Well, yeah. Okay. I believe this.

Now, Dwayne, everybody out there wants to learn more about yext. Is there an action step you’d recommend? What steps should all the listeners take out there?

So, uh, take a look at the website. We’ve got a phone number on there for folks to contact if they got questions. We’ve got a demo space that can go in and learn more about this. Um, if folks just want to reach out to me directly, I’m, if you type my name in the search engine, I’m the first three pages. I’m easy to find on twitter everywhere, so feel free to get ahold of me. I’m at Duane Forrester on twitter and I’m happy to engage with folks.

Wayne like to end every show with the boom, which around here stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum. Essentially Marshall kind of. We can role play here. I would say three, two, one. Boom on Dwayne. Are you ready to bring the boom? I am ready. Here we go without any further. I do want,

if you are like most humans that I know when you see two gas stations and one sells gas for a little bit less and they’re next to each other, you might go for the one that sells gas for less money. It, it, it makes sense, you know, every little bit can help. I don’t really agree with that. I like to spend as much money as I possibly can on fossil fuels or just something I’m into. But here’s what’s weird though. Sometimes we save a few pennies here and there and ignore opportunities to save huge money. I’m talking about life changing money. If you switch today as an example to medicare for your healthcare, it could be a massive savings for you and your family. The typical savings for a family is about $500 a month. I repeat $500 a month. Ah, so. Okay. I have a quick question.

So when you said you could save like $500 a month, I mean, are you talking about actually being able to save $500 a month? Yes, that’s why I said the number. You could actually save $500 a month. Just think about that for a second. What would you do with all that extra money thrivers you can be buying a flat screen every single month. That’s 12 flat screens a year. $6,000 per year or 12 flat screens per year. Well, I have been trying to save up for 12 flat screens and this seems to be the most SCO reasonable prudent way to do it. And yes, people love it. They love it because it works. It’s believers who share each other’s health care costs. Now with over 400,000 people, a k, eight members of Medicare. Again, with over 400,000 members. There’s proof it works and it’s growing like crazy. It will be like having a seven foot tall third grader in your family. It’s like growing like a weed. It is. Taking off. Find out how much you could save and why Medicare is so popular. Go to [inaudible] dot com, forward slash clay. That’s Medicare m, e, D, I share.com forward slash clay, or call them at eight, four, four, two, five. Share for more info. That’s eight, four, four, two, five. Share.

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