Only 1% of Brands Are Ready for AI Search... Are You?

I had a roofing company and one bad review basically killed his entire business when he came to us. I'm predicting the traffic that websites will get 50% of that traffic is going to be AI bots. You need to start thinking about okay what are the bots looking for? How are they going to consume the data? As a business you need to be on social media as well. You can't not have a presence. That is being looked at by the search. That is being looked at by customers. There's nothing worse than trying to find a company and you land on their Facebook page and it's a the last post was 3 years ago. You wonder, are these people even in business? Very, very, very important. You're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Ferrar and Kevin King. Mr. Ferrar, another week, another episode. What's up, man? Yeah, it's more like another week, another dollar. Another week, another dollar. Uh, just just Oh, that Canadian dollar doesn't go very far, though. So, that's Yeah, that's a whole 25 cents another quarter in US terms. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah, I know. Every time I pay somebody in Canada, it's like I'm like, "Okay, they pay them 400 bucks or whatever and it turns into like 780 or something in in Canadian or some crazy I'm exaggerating, but some crazy amount." I'm like, "All right." And no wonder your cigars are so damn expensive up there. No, no, that's the government. 100% the government. What did you tell me one time like a $20 cigar here is like 90 bucks or something? 90 US dollars. Not 90 Canadian dollars, but 90 or something like Okay, so here's a quick story before we get into our guest, but uh during CO uh I ran out of cigars, so I ordered from Canada, and there's a reason why I don't order from Canada. So I had uh six cigars, same cigars that I usually smoke down in the States, and they're usually around total for those cigars were about 65, maybe $65. I could get a sample pack for less. and uh $465 later. What? Mhm. What? That's like 7.5 times or something. Oh, it's crazy. Yeah. Well, you remember when we went to Montreal, you know, those prices are just nuts. And it doesn't matter. I'm glad you were paying. You didn't see I I put in the expense slip. So, Oh, it's on there. Okay. We end up ended up paying that. I see. I see. Uh, you snuck that one in. I see. All right. Oh, here. I thought you were a good guy. Thought you No, not so much. Just old. Old old and wise. We got an old and wise uh person today. Not old. That's the wrong word, but I think you could say experienced experienced and wise person on on the podcast today. Right. Some somebody that you know. Yeah. So, like I could say like he's old. Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. Yeah. Yeah. I I've known known him for years, but uh I can't wait to talk to him. But uh let's see. I think we could just uh bring in bring him right on. What do you think? I I I think if you know how to hit the button, we can do it. Let me get you a little I'm going to get you a little bumper sticker. It says I can hit the button. You can put on the back of your rand Land Rover. I I'll give you a bumper sticker. Howdy, Peter. Oh, did I hear you guys calling me old? No, he was I took it back. I took it back. Yeah, Norm went on, didn't he? Yeah. How you doing? Uh, I'm doing great. How are you? Good. You know, uh, we normally get at least once a year to meet up. Yeah, we do. And that's over at our buddy Collins uh, boat party, but he's not having it this year, unfortunately. So, no. Apparently he's uh Yeah, he's Oh, we could crash his vacation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which you know what is Wait, wait, Norm, you said he's not doing the boat party this year in December. No. Oh, yeah. Decided to take a year off and and good for him. That's a lot of Yeah. Well, he said that Kevin came last time and caused a whole bunch of crap, so he's canceling it. I remember. I remember. I was about everything. I was like this. What is this garbage thing? All right. So, you've got a really great background and I remember you as a uh the coup from Hostopia. Yeah. And then you went on to do a bunch of different things. You want to get into it with us? Yeah, absolutely. So, um you know, I've been a tech entrepreneur forever, but that doesn't make me old. Um, I started I started my career, my entrepreneurial ship before even Hostopia with um my own company. I had an idea and Young took out all the equity out of my house, let it ride, and struck a deal with a company called Best Buy here in Canada. and they would essentially take back anything and everything that a customer would bring back to them as far as returns and they were scrapping a lot of the stuff because whatever they could return to a vendor they would scrap. So I ended up striking a deal where I would buy all of their equ anything and everything from hardware perspective. Um and I would pay them 8 cents on the retail dollar which came out to you know if you look at from a wholesale perspective they were probably recovering around 12 to 15% instead of scrapping it. Mhm. The deal um wasn't manifested. It was you need to take it all. That was the deal and why I got it so low. Um left a six figure paying job at a utility here in Canada where I started during university and worked my way up. I was in you know mentorship for management etc etc. But, you know, been an entrepreneur from even a young age, right? Like all these little small businesses that I would start and just ways to make money. But this I just had a great feeling about. So, I did it. Took out, like I said, the equity out of my house, got the deal, and sure enough, here comes the first load. This is in the year 2000 around there. Yeah. 2000. Mhm. And big tractor trailer pulls up to my house cuz I have nowhere to keep the stuff. Um, and my plan was I'll just put it in the garage and then, you know, from there I'll eBay it and open up the truck, look inside, and it's full of windows for 95. Like Windows for Dummies 95. What? Yeah, the book. Oh yeah, the book. The book. They used to sell the book and they had a ton of them there. I I was devastated. I had to cut a check for like 20 some odd thousand. I had to buy it. Um I thought, "Okay, let's turn lemons into lemonade. uh I could at least, you know, give it away to charity and get, you know, some form of a write off, etc. I couldn't even get rid of it to a charity. No one wanted it, right? Like you're Windows is in the whole different phase. Like it's in, you know, millennium at that point. So, not only did I have to pay $20,000 to buy all of this, then I had to pay money to dispose of it. Yeah. second load comes around and well I had I had signed up. Okay. Okay. It was a three-year deal and I was taking everything Canada, coast to coast, anything and everything that they could not return to vendors got shipped to me. They'd save it all up at the depot and then, you know, once they had a tractor trailer load full, they'd ship it off to me. Sometimes it could be weeks, right? Um, next load comes and it's a bunch of P, you know, patch cables and power cables and, you know, all kinds of stuff that again, you know, like couldn't even make my money back. And and, you know, I'm at the point where, okay, if things don't start turning around soon, I'm actually going to lose my house. And it was just me and my dog at the time. So it wouldn't have been the end of the world, but still, right? It was everything I had worked for, the down payment, blah blah blah. And third shipment comes. I open it up. It's an 18wheeler full of PlayStation twos. Oo. Yep. PlayStation twos. in the box. They all came as a package with a game and, you know, a controller. And I'm looking through them and every single one had a reason why it couldn't uh get returned. And and it was consistent. Can't read disc. Can't read disc. Can't read disc. So, I thought, okay, well, if the main units are garbage, at what I paid to buy them, I actually might be able to double my money just by selling the game and the controller as an extra controller on eBay. And that was my original plan. And then I took a unit, you know, tried tried it, sure enough, wouldn't read any discs. Wouldn't read the disc. I tried, you know, a couple of units. They were all the same. And I thought, you know, there's this electronics repair shop near my house. I went there um and just said look to the guy, you know, small one op one soloreneur, you know, oneman operation. I just said, look, can you take a look at this and see what might be happening and how much will it cost to fix it? Cuz I thought, hey, if I could fix it. At that time, PlayStation 2, the demand was so high. It was retailing for $3.99 Canadian in the stores. That's a 100 bucks US. Yeah, exactly. Um, people were lining up for these things and, you know, they'd take them and then they'd sell them on eBay for twice as much, doubling their money. Like, it was just it was mayhem for those. Um, so as I'm driving back to my house, I get a call from that electronics guy and he says, "Come pick it up. It's fixed." What? I'm like, "What was it?" He's like, "Oh." He's like, "Bad design. The way they designed these, there was dust on the laser." I'm like, "What?" So I went back and he's explaining it to me. He's like, "Look at this. They've got a fan like on a computer at the back that's constantly running. People are buying them, throw them on the carpet in front of their TV on the ground and they're playing. And that little fan is not only sucking in air, there's no filter to stop the dust. This was the early version of PS2 and they'd get full of dust and then stop reading. So, he's like, "All I did was just spray it with air and uh there we go." I'm like, "Oh my gosh." So, I'm like, "How many can you do?" I've got a truckload. Yeah. Thousands. Literally thousands. He's like, "Bring them all to me and I'll be able to work on them and I'll call you when they're ready." So anyways, long story short, I ended up not only making my money back on that load, I made quite a bit of money on top of them. And that was basically me by myself listing them on eBay. Open box shop was the company. Hey, Norm, you'll love this man. I talked to a seller the other day doing 50k a month, but when I asked them what their actual profit was, they just kind of stared at me. Are you serious? That's kind of like driving blindfolded. Exactly, man. I told them you got to check out Sellerboard, this cool profit tool that's built just for Amazon sellers. It tracks everything like fees, PPC, refunds, promos, even changing cogs during using FIFO. Aha. But does it do FBM shipping costs, too? Sure does. That way you can keep your quarter 4 chaos totally under control and know your numbers because not only does it do that, but it makes your PPC bids. It forecasts inventory. It sends review requests and even helps you get reimbursements from Amazon. Now, that's like having a CFO in your back pocket. You know what? It's just $15 a month, but you got to go to sellerboard.com/misfits. sellerboard.com/misfits. And if you do that, they'll even throw in a free two-month trial. So, you want me to say go to sellerboard.com misfits and get your number straight before your accountant loses it? Exactly. All right. That's a great marketing or opportunity story. So, was it just on eBay that you were selling these or did you try to sell them elsewhere back then? eBay was one of the first marketplaces of of this kind. Um, you know, and people were quitting their full-time jobs because they were, you know, starting eBay accounts and selling on eBay, etc. And, um, it was a great platform at the time. I ended up I ended up getting so big I had to I had a big I all they were like call centers, but I called them posting centers. And I ended up having one up in Stoville. like I went outside of the city to get to get just to be able to afford it, right? Um and yet good talent in the smaller towns I found I got good talent and I had 24/7 operation, right? It was posting stations. People would come in, they take their, you know, we would put them in these bundles of electronics. They would test it, take a picture of it, do the description, post it. next and they were responsible to also handle inquiries and everything else. And it was three shifts round the clock we were doing this. um had some great success and then uh the company Future Shop called me up and said, "Look, Best Buy, uh is acquiring us and they're going to be opening up competing stores in in the same region. So essentially, our footprint's going to double. Whether someone decides to buy a TV from Future Shop or they go down the street to Best Buy, it's all going to be the same other company. Um, would you be interested in extending this to Best Buy? I'm like, absolutely. And man, oh man, it just took off. I couldn't even keep up. um we couldn't keep up and with electronics especially hardware like the more it's like I had storage spaces rented everywhere and it was just mayhem and the problem is every month that goes by you're losing money on the value of those product right it's just that's that's hardware right so I ended up starting to wholesale it out so I started Ed looking at who would want a tractor trailer load full of electronics that may or may not work. There's zero guarantee. Um, and I came across the idea of, you know, electronic refurbishers. So, these guys exist because a lot of the manufacturers would use them to refurbish electronics and then they sell them off as refurbished electronics, right? B-grade, whatever. they'd go to flea markets and all these other um retailers. So, long story short, I ended up setting up an entire network of um refurbishers, one real big one down in uh Chicago, and they started fighting for for my product. They were just doing so well with it. These guys were set up to test it, refurb it, they would, you know, wrap it. They It would be basically brand new. Um, the one guy in Chicago wanted my my deal, right? He wanted all of it. And I kept saying, "No, I can't. I can't give you everything. I can't, you know, I need to diversify. I can't have a one customer. And if you decide you don't want it this month, etc., etc., Right. Um, and then one day he calls me and he says, "Go to your fax machine." Again, this is when we used faxes, but go to your He's old. He's old, Norm. Remember? Ah, that's that's a giveaway. I don't remember fax machine. Oh, there we go. In the stone age, we use these things called fax machines. He said, "Go to your fax machine. Go to my fax machine." and here's a check, you know, made out to me for a large sum of money. And he's like, I'm just going to buy the company from you. I'm like, sorry, I can't. Even though it was a lot of money, if my my first real big business, right? I'm like, this is my livelihood. I like, what would I do without it? And um he kept sending faxes to the point where I said yes, I sold it. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I did very very well. And um it's it's it's it's one of those things that you know, first time you ever make money. Like I don't come from, you know, a family of wealth or money. And you know for me it was wow I am you know and I I don't know can I disclose numbers here like it doesn't matter to me it's all public anyways but like it was 10 million bucks right so $10 million to me was wow I have hit the motherload and you know the the sports cars started to ride the boats the traveling around and I'm a single little guy at this point. And the girls started to arrive too. The girls started to arrive. The nightclubs, the bottle ser like it was insanity. And I went nuts spending money like it was nothing. Um, and then at the end of the first year, my accountant came to me and said, "You need to cut a check for about $4.2 $2 million to the government for taxes. I'm like, what do you mean? Yeah. He's like, uh, you you know, you had to pay. I'm like, yeah, I know, but it's a business. I I am not paying the same amount as I would as if I was, you know, just uh an employee. Like, can't we write things off? And like I again, I was so green and so naive. And uh lesson learned. Um, I didn't structure the company properly. I had set it up as a sole proprietor. It wasn't an actual corporation. And the tax rates were different. I got hit hard. And then I was like, "Wow, what do I do now? I don't have any money." Oh, no. Or or not, I don't have any money, but I had gone through it all. I don't have five or$4 million that I should have had. Yeah. Exactly right. So, you know, Peter, one of the things that uh I love about uh your stories and especially this is one of the reasons why I wanted you on the podcast is you've got some great branding and marketing stories. And the one that I know the best is this little company that started out called Hostopia. Yeah. And then it ended up selling over to Deluxe Corp. Uh, can you tell that story because it's phenomenal and I mean it's it was I believe the world's largest hosting company from nothing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember I'm old. I remember Hosttopia. Back in the days before uh Google even existed. So Hosttopia I did not start. Colin um Colin who is a mutual friend of Norm and I, he actually started it. But that's when I came across Hostopia was right after I had to pay that big tax bill and I thought geez I need to get involved into something here or open and I didn't have any ideas at the time and I came across Hostopia. It was a small Canadian company that was providing hosting to you know resellers primarily uh digital designers and you know I think revenues were about 3 million at the time about there and I joined as uh chief operating officer and we took we took Hostopia. We had a great ride. We had a fabulous team. Like, you know, the the the the executive team, we all just meshed. We all worked well together. Colin was our leader at the time and he just did a fabulous job. But we took that company from a little known Canadian company that was doing 3 million to we were a global provider to telecom and service providers. We were about 35 million in annual revenue. We had an office in the UK. We had an office in You were traveling. I was I was on the road all the time Monday to Friday and um we ended up going public. We ended up having a very successful IPO. We had raised about 30 million at the time and we were executing on our plan and you know we were going to go out and not just you know grow in additional regions but we were going to acquire etc etc and then here comes this company we'd never heard of called Deluxe Corporation. The check guys. The check guys. Yeah. I had none of us had heard of them. We were all Canadian, right? uh they're huge down in in the states. But anyhow, turns out they're Yeah. Fortune 500 company. They're, you know, the largest wholesale check provider to banks. Mhm. Uh we were the largest wholesale provider to telecoms for small business, you know, website building and marketing and they felt we were a great fit. Long story short, we sold it 124 million. Um, I ended up staying on as president of the company. I one of us had to stay on and I was the chosen one, I guess. Um, but you know, listen, we had a great run. I doubled that company within two years. I doubled that company from 30 to $60 million. We went, we went, you know, we went down hard. We basically had 90% market share in Canada from coast to coast. Any telco provider, not just the big three, but even all the smaller guys, the videorons, the the ISPs, everybody was reselling our product. We then went down and really expanded in the states. We our big one was AT&T. We won AT&T. That was a huge deal for us. Um then expanded into Latin America. Like I've got stories down there where we met with Carlos Slim who owns American Mobile. And um um it was actually Carlos Slim's brother. I believe it wasn't actually Carlos Slim. It was a Slim family member or somebody. And I'll tell you like it it just it was surreal. And then, you know, him inviting us to go out to have a a celebratory lunch with them cuz they decided they were going to sell our product exclusively and, you know, the army's blocking off streets and the entire restaurant is closed down for just us. It was just unbelievable times and had a ton of fun like just growing it and and you know we we strongly believed in the product and ourselves and what we could do for the telecoms and that resonated right Norm you said it was a branding thing so what did you do was it branding that took it from 30 to 60 or you did some sort of innovative uh strategy there can you can you maybe explain the number of a number of innovative things. The big one was when we would go into let's say AT&T or um you know any other telecom or ISP they were all reselling somebody's solution right like if you were selling internet you were selling web hosting it just they went hand in hand but when we went in um the biggest what we found was you know the biggest concern for these telecoms was if we come from, you know, if we move our hosting customers from our current provider to you, is there going to be downtime when we migrate them over? Is there going to be outages? What's how's the customer um experience going to change, etc., etc. So we came up with a everybody thought we were thats, but when we sat down and worked out the numbers, it was like, you know, like why don't we offer a migration guarantee? I remember that. Yeah. Like why don't we offer a migration guarantee? And it's like oh my, you know, everybody was like, well, all it takes is one wrong thing to go wrong and we could be spending a ton of money. I said about like, okay, what how much is a hosting customer worth to them? 10 bucks a month times 12 months, 120 bucks. Okay, so let's work out some scenarios. Let's look at our past performance. Let's look at, you know, do do are there migration blips? 100%. Always, right? There's always a migration blip, but it's how you, you know, it's it's obviously how you deal with it and manage through it. But we started offering this migration guarantee saying, "Look, if we lose your customer, we're going to cut you a check for that customer because then you'll be able to go out and get another customer and replenish them, right?" And then that took the stress away from them as far as wow, okay, if we do move over to these guys, these guys are actually going to live up to everything they say and contractually will cut us a check. And you know that that alone created a buzz in the industry from a branding perspective that you know we were always known as the the brand that nobody knew about because we were a white labeled provider. So our software would always be branded whatever the telco provider was, right? We were always the brand behind the brand. Um but within the industry that that move alone, not only did our did our competitors all think we were absolutely nuts and we were going to go bankrupt, but that spread very quickly within the service providers, the Telos, the ISPs to the point where people would be calling us saying like we weren't even having to call them, you know, they'd be calling us saying, you know, we heard that you've got a great product and that you know my friend so and so who used to work for me here but is now at this place and said it was a great experience and you guys lived up to it. You cut a check for any customers that you lost but now they're growing twice as fast because the product's excellent. So I get I don't know Norm is that kind of what you're alluding to? Yeah, that was exactly what it was. you you shook up the industry at the time like 30 minutes and free for pizza and uh yeah it was just nobody could believe it and in fact Peter I don't know if you remember this I don't think you you knew this but uh my company Creative Sparks or Perfusion one of those two um had a contract with Deluxe doing their websites and their branding for all their small with all their small mediumsiz companies. Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. I'm serious. I did not know that, Norm. They're out of Minneapolis, right? Or Minnesota. Minneapolis. Yeah. This one is in Midland in in uh in Canada. Oh, Nebs. The old Nebs. They bought Nebs in Midland. Right. Right. So, I was doing that for Nebs. They bought Nebs. Yeah. Oh my. What a small world, man. Now, today, Peter, you're doing some small business stuff or something, right? Um, well, I've always done I've always done small business, right? Like even with Hostopia, our software was designed to help small business $10 a month people. Yeah. Yeah. Get get themselves online, right? Um, but you know what I'm doing now is it's it's the evolution, right? It it's it's been many many years. It's like when we when we were doing Hostopia, the big thing was if you got yourself online that if you had a website, that gave you an edge because if someone didn't look in the yellow pages and decided to look on their computer on this thing called a web browser, um, you would come up because you had a website and your competitor didn't. What's up everybody? your good old buddies Norm and Kevin here and I've got an Amazon creative team that I want to introduce you to. That's right Kevin. It's called the house of AMZ and it's the leading provider in combining marketing and branding with laser focus on Amazon. Hey, Norm. They do a lot of really cool stuff if you haven't seen what they do, like full listing graphics, premium A+ content, storefront design, branding, photography, renderings, packaging design, and a whole lot of other stuff that Amazon sellers need. Yeah. And guess what? They have 9 years active in this space. So, you can skip the guesswork, trust the experts, there's no fees, there's no retainers, you pay per project. So, if you want to take your product to the next level, check out houseofamz. That's houseofamz.com. House of AMZ. Like it was that early, like the AOL days, right? That AOL. Yeah. That we were part of it. So, and you know, everything evolves, right? And now you know having a website that's having a you know a domain and a website like that's a basic foundation. If you don't even have that then yeah people do that now before even following a DBA. It's like getact website set up is it's the first thing you do when you start a new business practically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you change you said something to me just a few months ago, Peter, that we talked about Kevin and I have talked about before, but you said in a very short period of time, if if I understand correctly, you see that websites are just going to be a thing of the past like people and remember we were talking about that Facebook uh dog walking service and Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, things things are changing and they're changing very very quickly. Now, you know, you need to have an online presence, right? But the thing is a website is going to change specifically the way it's being used today, right? So, a small business these days realistically, like you know that that dog walker that we talked about, you know, like you could start a dog walking service and not even have a website and just market yourself on Facebook in a certain geographic location that you serve. And that can work, right? it it it you don't necessarily need it, but AI is coming in. It's coming in quickly. Generative generative, you know, like chat, the way we know it, chat, GPT, and everything else. That's that's going to change the way we use the internet, the way we shop, the way we find and discover. And it's the website isn't going to be the let me let me rephrase it. The the the traffic I'm predicting the traffic that websites will get 50% of that traffic is going to be AI bots. Agents. Yeah. Agents and bots. And yeah, the website's going to go the way of a brochure. It's going to be a brochure for the for the AI. Yeah, instead of people going to the website and interacting a lot with the website, they still may. They're going to be the website is what's feeding the AI. Um, well, that's just it, right? Like the websites can never die. Like AI needs to be taught. It it it needs information and right now it has surfed the entire internet and continues to consume anything on the internet through websites. They have been able to actually now take it and start using YouTube where because YouTube's all unstructured data and AI can't consume unstructured data. So, in order to to to to consume video off of YouTube, um they actually are using AI to to basically transcribe videos and then consume it and learn from it. So, you're going to start to see AI where it's pointing you to video, not just a website anymore. Well, Gemini, which is Google's, is their number one or number two source for training their AI is YouTube right now because it's also it's also in house. But then you look at OpenAI um it's Wikipedia uh and Reddit Perplexity um it's it's um uh Google actually um and so yeah, it's it's interesting what's what's going on there. So, h how are you what are you doing in that that realm or how are you playing with with with this or how does this affect what you're doing? Oh, it affects us in a big way. So, with MoPro, what we do now, um we've built an entire AI platform that helps a small business right from the foundation of, you know, getting yourself a good website that's optimized. But, um you know, that like I said, that's the foundation, right? There's social media. You need to be as a business. You need to be on social media as well. You can't not have a presence. That is being looked at by the SERs. That is being looked at by customers. There's nothing worse than trying to find a you know a company and you land on their Facebook page and it's a something that has been set up and the last post was three years ago. You wonder are these people even in business? Right. Mhm. Um, so you know you need to be active on social media. Content marketing is going to become even more important in websites than ever. But the way you structure content for what's now, you know, being coined as GEO, so generative engine optimization. So you need to you you need to start thinking about, okay, what are the bots looking for? How are they going to consume the data? What do I need to be putting on this person's website to try to get the bots to essentially reference this person's website? Because you're getting summaries now. You're getting AI summaries, but they're still, you know, they're still providing the links of where they got the information, but you're getting the entire summary. And then you drill in to a specific topic if you want by by the link. So geo is starting to become and that's where we're focusing a lot of our efforts on like we're doing you know everything from website domain uh domainbased email um social channels and posting on social channels and using AI to create you know content to help you post on social channels like we've done all of the work that a small business needs to do as of today And you know, reviews is still king, believe it or not. Um, reviews is probably the most important thing a small business can focus on improving. So, the the reviews are a non-negotiable, right? You got to have them. But what what are the other non-negotiables? You know, you the reviews are a non-negotiable, but you you also need to work the reviews and a lot of people aren't, right? So, they'll get reviews and they'll only respond as a business to a negative review. And you know, as you're talking about like Yelp and Google and that type of thing, right? Yeah. Gmail and everything else, right? Like that is how getting found is 50% of the equation. Like getting yourself to be found by somebody is 50% of the equation. Then getting them to select you because it's all about choice online, right? Regardless of of of uh where you get found, it's going to come down to your reviews, how you treated someone who didn't like your, you know, um service and gave you a negative review. Like we all always click. Like it's great to see, oh, love you. I love you. But I'm always I don't know about you guys, but I'm always clicking. Let me see how they handle, you know, what did they what did where what did they screw up? And then how did the company fix it? because that says a lot about a company. Yeah, I do that with like hotels and stuff. When I'm looking at a place, I'm looking at reviews uh on hotels. I don't even look at the positive ones. I look at the negative ones and sometimes the negative ones like um it's something silly, you know, they gave them one star because the guy dropped a plate in the restaurant or something and made a loud noise and they had a headache or some stupid thing. Um, but then but I al also always look at how often do they actually respond and how what is the sincerity of that response? Is just a can response or is it actually someone that's actually you know obviously read it and it's responding to that particular thing and that will often make a difference where where I go is and you can see how much they care. Um that's is the key right? It is having a reviews strategy is paramount. And you know by having a review strategy, I mean having the tools and systems in place to be able for you to make it um a simple way to ask for a review. And and just to help everybody understand, we specialize and who we focus our target on, our target customer is um you know, small business generally, you know, 10 employees or less that serve a they're they're a service business and they serve a you know a local footprint. So, this is a local uh repair computer repair guy, computer repair, auto repair, uh roofing, landscaping, doctors, um restaurants, and a lot of these guys, you know, like I, you know, I had somebody who, you know, came out to fix my air conditioner actually, and you know, their strategy was asking the service rep after he fixed my air conditioner. to ask me to if I liked his work to leave a great review for him. Okay. And he laughed. And I'm just sitting there thinking, man, oh man, I need to call this company because you have now Okay, great. You fixed it. That's what I paid you for, but now you're asking more from me and you're not making it simple. Okay. So, where do you want me to leave a review for you? You know, the guy's like, "Just, can you leave me a positive review?" Okay. Where do you want it? On Google, my business, on Yelp, on, you know, am I supposed to now start searching to find where you, you know, you have reviews and do I leave a like it just that doesn't work. You know, 90% of us will go out of our way to leave a review when the service is terrible, right? You've had a bad experience or something that's just beyond expectations, like just wow. They wowed you. But if it's great, good or great, most people aren't going out of their way unless you make it easy for them to do so. How do you do that? Well, we've we've got a we've got a system that we've, you know, basically tie in. We can tie into anything from uh a CRM, booking systems to uh accounting, you name it, right? But what is the main trigger? We work with the small business. What is the trigger? When do you want to send a text message to the customer? And the text message just a simple, thank you so much. Here is your invoice or receipt or thank you for spending money with us. We appreciate it. Click here. Please, you know, leave us a review. And I'm sure, you know, we're not the only ones that are doing this. I'm sure you guys have gotten them from other companies. But you know within our within our suite of product that's you know one of them like we try to provide tools where and automate where it makes sense right like reviews I actually have people in North America I don't even outsource it right I have people in North America that are responding to reviews because if you outsource it I find I there's always some form of a language gap or barrier that people can pick up on and Yes, sir. Yeah. You know, like and I'm all for outsourcing, but you outsource where it makes sense. you know, your your where you're trying to create your uh brand and you know, how you treat your customers and where people are going to be looking and making a decision of whether they want to spend money with you. You don't want to outsource that out to, you know, an offshore. So, you know, I've got guys in North America and and we pay them very well, but they do a fabulous job. They look at all of our customers reviews. We've got systems that we've built out and it prioritizes and cues up. You know, we need to respond to all of these and how do we respond and we'll bring in the small business when whenever there's a red flag or a negative to help us respond to it. There's a lot of strategy. So, you know, I I and Norm you said what's the the other non-negotiables? Like I just I wanted to really help everybody understand how important reviews are. I had a roofing company and one bad review basically killed his entire business when he came to us and he he didn't know that this review was even out there. He just said the phone has stopped ringing. My current marketing company sucks. Um they're not doing it their job. I'm like well that doesn't make sense. It's like if you were happy with them 3 months ago and now you're telling me they suck. Well, what's changed? And when we dove into it, we're like, do you know that you've got this really nasty review over here? And sure enough, yeah, it's one of the places that people go to to to, you know, evaluate a contractor. So, very very very important. Hey, what's up everybody? Kevin and Norm here with a quick word from one of our sponsors, 8Fig. Let me tell you about a platform that's changing the game for Amazon sellers. That's right, it's called 8FIG. On average, sellers working with 8ig grow up to 400% in less than a year. 8FIG offers both funding and free tools for e-commerce growth and cash flow management. And here's how it works. 8ig provides flexible data-driven funding tailored to your exact needs. You know, they can fund anywhere from up to $50,000 all the way up to 10 million. 8FIG gives you free tools to forecast demand, manage inventory, and analyze cash flow. Visit 8fig.co, that's 8fig.co, to learn more, or check the link in the show notes below. Just mention marketing misfits and get 25% off your cost. That's 8fig.co 8fig.co. See you on the other side. What about what about comments? I mean, you have the reviews that are sitting on Google or Yelp or maybe your own your own website or whatever, but then comments. I just saw this happen just yesterday uh where someone in the the space that that uh that Norm and I play in a lot, the Amazon space. Yeah. one of the big companies made a big change in their affiliate program and it really upset a lot a lot of people and it became a dog pile where these one guy commented and it there was one chain in one WhatsApp group that was 200 plus posts long of people just dogping and going back and forth and it it's dam it's extremely damaging very and I mean I've had it happen on a webinar where I'm hosting a webinar and one person comes into the chat and and uh post something negative and then other people just kind of you know in in today's internet world people just like to to me to it and even if they don't truly believe it they just pile on. So what do what do you do in those regards or in in that situation? It's easier to do like easier to do the reviews where you can just go post the comment but how do you how do you help your clients mitigate the damages that can be done there when some someone's posting on social? You know, that's a tricky one because on certain platforms you can delete, you can block people, you can even stop with com or or stop comments altogether. But you don't want to do that, especially like it's it's also damaging if someone sees a negative comment and then the next day you've gone and deleted it. It's like you're hiding something. It's like you're hiding something and then they'll call you out on that. Like it's you you just got to deal with it, right? And you've got to be as forthright with them. Like that that specific situation is a whole different service, Kevin. Like that is where you you're basically a moderator on boards, right? like you're looking for people who are negative on on um you know whether it's on Reddit, whether it's on some you know Snapchat or um you know where whatever the the the forum is. You need someone who's going to moderate those things. And there's tools that there's tools that look for brand mentions like that that scour uh and will alert you that say hey um you know if you're John's uh auto repair in Dearbornne Michigan it'll it'll look for like someone posting about John's auto repair in Dearborn Michigan and then you can go in there and you can uh you might not have known about it otherwise. We would do that with Hootsweet back in the day. What's that? We did that back in the late 90s with Hootsweet. Oh, really? Yeah. I think Hootsweet started in the late 90s if not in the early 2000s. I remember sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they they would Yeah. Like we we do the search. we you know it's get you know getting and knowing about it is one thing but then managing it is the the the harder part right and and that's why you said like you said earlier AI is the whole website thing is changing AI one of their all these AI one of their big signals and how they rank you or how they show you as the answer is social and it is reviews and so Because one of their rationale of that is that that's what the people really think cuz I can say anything on my website. I can put anything on the website. But when it goes goes to the real people, that's more of a truth. That's why they they favor Kora or Reddit or some of these post or these these sites that that are doing that. That's so managing that is going to become an it's more like you said earlier this is reviews and by extension social comments are critical uh in this new world of uh of AI search and everything that's going on 100%. like and you know without getting in or trying to sound like you know a salesy pitch here like I really am not but you know if you were to look at our websites and where we've evolved with websites like we you know you don't even come close like our vision of websites and and what is working versus what's in the market these days is night and day right like testimonials right they you I I I can't tell you how many customers customers have websites and they have one or two or three hardcoded testimonials that are there. Everybody knows that's BS that you've, you know, talked to this customer and either asked them, you know, can I say this about you or, you know, you even made up like I I've got I've had companies who have come to us and I'm like, well, can we go back to this customer and get a video or h they don't really exist. I'm like, what do you mean? I didn't want to post my real customers on my website. Well, you know what? like everybody knows that that's what's happening. We we actually take a direct feed from all of your reviews and that's your testimonial and they're being streamed live on your website as they come in. You know, we're bringing your social channels. Every time you update your social channel, you're updating your website. We're like the website almost becomes like the centralized portal. of your entire online presence of everything that's going on. It's the aggregate aggregator. Yeah. I've dealt with uh small mediumsiz businesses in multiple businesses. Yeah. And uh they could be pains in the butt. Oh yeah. So you're specializing in dealing with small businesses, roofers, insurance guys. Yeah. How do you do it? because I have no hair left on my head because of stupid complaints just drove me crazy. It's tough. It, you know, you're right, Norm. It's tough. But I also get it, right? I personally am an entrepreneur. You're an entrepreneur. And and you know, I think we get it versus someone who has never been an entrepreneur, but yet is trying to serve these these customers. They have they have limited budgets. They're trying to maximize every penny to try to, you know, sometimes not even grow their business. It's make enough money to continue the business, right? Um, but you're right there. They expect the world. Um, we've got systems that we've built out and it's the only way that we could get through it. Like obviously we're very clear with what we'll do and how we will do it. Um, they're engaged throughout the entire process, but you know, with us it's a subscription, right? like you're paying starts at like 199 bucks a month and you're getting basically a marketing agency to build your website and get your citations listed everywhere. We will we'll post on your social media. We'll work on your content. But, you know, again, it's it's a lot of it is automation that we've built for ourselves to help us in order to provide that level of service. Hey, Kevin King and Norm Ferrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player. Or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm? Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast? Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say. I'll I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair, too. We'll just You can go back and forth with one another. Yikes. But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the marketing misfits. Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm. What's the difference between automation and AI? A lot of people interchange those. Yeah. You know what? That's a good point, right? Like AI AI agents are basically automation, you know. Um we've we've you know we've done a lot of work around our own our own like you know AI is only as good as the information that's been fed and you know there's a lot of domainspecific information and you know things on how to do things and what works what doesn't work in our industry that is our own experience and not necessarily something that everybody is doing. And we've, you know, we've we've implemented a lot of those through automation. We, you know, we do say it's AI or we've trained the AI. Um, but it's our own it's our own little ecosystem. So, it could be like when you're talking about automation just The easiest thing is a trigger. And I think that trigger is within a workflow that either you might have to get a spreadsheet done. So you create a you create a workflow within make or within Zapier to trigger or do something. So the AI gets to a certain point and then you finish it off finish the workflow off with X Y or Z. And that could be multiple trigger points. 100%. Is that correct? Yeah, 100%. And you know even um you know websites these days like you know we build custom websites for our customers but we're using our AI site builder that actually builds 80% of it and then we'll come in as humans with our creativity and we will trust me there's a lot of things that a like someone who's going to go out and just like AI isn't there yet where it can build you a a website that's actually it'll build you a website. Is it going to work for you? No. Right. Is is it going to is it going to convince a customer to come and do business with you and someone you know goes on Google and you come up on GMBB on that, you know, that beautiful little map. You're not going to convince anybody to do business with you. It's not there yet. It will get there. But, you know, that's where the training comes in from our perspective is we're training our own AI. Every time we make changes, it feeds back into, well, you didn't do this, so we had to do this. And that's how you continually train it. So, we're coming to close to the end of the podcast, but I have two other kind of branding stories I want you to talk about. Okay. One is, and this is kind of cool, you've got a car club. Yeah. Pretty good car club. The way that you've positioned yourself, you've got guys like Ferrari or Maserati or Rolls-Royce dropping off their cars and saying, "Hey, car club." Yeah. Take these and tell us tell us what you think of it. That's pretty cool. Like I could start a car club. Reviews, Norm. Remember, that's unnegotiable when they need reviews. Right. Right. and we will give them reviews your Ferrari. I I can start a car club and I can't even get a beat up, you know, 1950s cigar club. Cigar club for you. Yeah. So, yeah, you know, it's look, you know, it's all around communities, right? like marketing, being able to find communities that you can market your business into the right communities and and yeah, we've got I was telling Norm like we've got, you know, locally here, you know, I'm part of this club that we started that, you know, 350 400 members and we've got a club, you know, an actual club um clubhouse. We can go there and hang out. We can work on our cars. We can wash on our cars. There's like a lounge area. It's just a fun environment. And a lot of the guys who are part of the club are dieh hard car nuts. Mhm. And the car nuts are, you know, a lot of them are buying the Porsches, the Ferraris, the, you know, the Lamborghini, like you name it, right? All kinds of stuff. And it's just it's amazing to see that we'll actually get, you know, car dealers who will drop off like, you know, hey, we've got um a Range Rover. Like that was actually just last week, right? Like they came and dropped off, you know, a Range Rover for us. And it's like, hey, you know, drive it and hope they're hoping they'll get a sale out of it, but also reviews on the car. All right, last story. There was some branding and I don't know how you thought this was brilliant. You know, I I've never seen somebody in the marketing field do this before. You came up with this branding campaign where you're a DJ on the side. You're a DJ. You know, you uh you in there, aren't you? Uh-huh. Where you were streaming, you were streaming live. Oh my god. And you fell asleep. Oh my. And your video went viral. Like it went crazy. So then after that, you had this huge community based on you falling asleep. Uhhuh. So yeah. Okay. I'm turning red. Um, you know, listen. Hey, some you know I always say it, you know, like I I there's a big element of sometimes luck or something will happen that you didn't plan. And I'd love to say that I strategically planned out what happened. So for everybody out there during co I've been a DJ my whole life. Like a I remix songs and it's just it's a passion of mine. It's a it's a hobby. It's a passion. It's the way I relax. And during co uh friends of mine had said, "Hey, there's this new platform, Tik Tok. Why don't you get on there and we can all meet on Tik Tok?" Cuz we tried doing it through Zoom and the sound wasn't good. And then anyways, long story short, I set up an account and I went live on Tik Tok and all of a sudden, cuz my friends were like, "Who's going to know that you're on?" like it's just going to be us and we'll all just kind of, you know, hang out in the in the chat. I'm like, "Okay." And I did. And I'm DJing and having some fun and I'm, you know, drinking my wine and cheersing people on the screen. And next thing you know, like we start getting people joining in because you can't restrict it. And people were finding us. I'm like, "This is kind of neat." And I'm getting people who are starting to follow me now. and like okay that's kind of cool and then you just kept doing it kept doing it for a couple of weeks and again in the middle of co I it's like midnight or something I can't sleep I'm like I'm just going to you know go live and I'm going to go DJ to get my mind off things and I thought I'll hit the live and I'm having a glass of wine and I'm DJing and I ended up just falling asleep like on the camera. And the problem is like I've got sleep apnea. So I snore really badly when I'm sleeping and I just my chair and I'm snoring and all of a sudden I went viral like it went nuts. I had Yeah, like something insane. I was sleeping so I don't know the exact numbers, but people were telling me like it was nuts. Like everybody was pinging everybody else. You got to see this. You got to They were recording me and then putting it on their live or their posts. And um anyways, I went from basically, you know, 100 200 people to 100,000 followers. Wow. Yeah. Wow. And then it's like I started a trend. Then I would be on TikTok and I'm scrolling through and here's some guy in his bed and he's just sleeping. It's like a little meme. I was going to say, are you kidding me? Like these guys are now so it's like I started a trend. I got a call the next day from a local Toronto radio station who heard about this. and not call actually they pinged me on Tik Tok but then they had said said you know let's get on a call we want to talk to you about this this is hilarious and and I like oh my my poor wife was like I cannot believe this but you know it it helped even though yes people followed me cuz they thought I was some crazy guy who passed out is he alive or you know listen to his snoring That propelled me as a tick tock DJ celebrity to a whole different sphere because now these people were all following me. Every time I'd go on, they would get notified that I'm on. I would have a 100,000 people all at the same time trying to connect on my channel. Tik Tok at the time didn't have the infrastructure to support it. like so you know people would get cut off and cut out and it was just it was it was a funny funny time. So Kevin time there'll be about two minutes of Peter sleeping and snoring. We'll insert it here. You know we'll have to let the editor know. Use that Yeah. use as the hook at the beginning. Yeah. Exactly. either with my sleep apnea. Everything happens for a reason. And and like I said, sometimes it's luck and sometimes you think it you you couldn't even think something like that through. And like I'd love to say, "Oh yeah, I'm a marketing genius and I you know, like no, I it's the truth. I fell asleep and I woke up with 100,000 followers. All right, we are past the top of the hour. Peter, how do people get a hold of you? Um, go to my website, mopro.com. Um, you can uh my LinkedIn peter costinu or look up mopro. You'll find me there. Um, that's probably the best way. All right. Very good. So, at the end of every podcast, we ask our misfit, do they know a misfit? To be quite frank, um, nothing that comes to mind right away, but I'll certainly get back to you guys if I do. Very good. I think you do, but we'll leave it at that. You've already you've already um had one of the misfits on, but Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, it's that time. Thank you for uh coming on today. Yeah. Thank you, Peter. Appreciate it, man. Thanks for the good fun. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's great. Great show. I love your show. Thanks. Appreciate it. I'm just going to remove you now if I can do my job. Done. A P A What happened? What happened? What happened? Oh, you were doing a Peter impression. Oh. Oh. Oh, I fell asleep. Yeah, I fell asleep. I was trying I was trying to help the podcast. No, I was trying to get some more some more viewers and listeners. You interrupted it. You you ruined it. I'm sorry. Sleep. So, Peter is an awesome guy and he's he's ultra brilliant as well. No, that Yeah, really really cool conversation. Really fun. Um, you know, we always have fun on on this uh podcast. We do. And so, if you want to join in the fun, how do they do that? uh they can go to marketingmisfits.co or even better if you want to go to YouTube and go to marketingmisfits podcast. But if you only want the shorts, if you want to take out those little nuggets, uh you can. We just set this up. It's marketing misfits clips and those are 3 minutes or less videos. And also our new Tik Tok channel, which is uh it's actually doing quite well. So, we just started it um a few weeks ago and we're getting some good response. We don't have 100,000 followers. You can, you know, follow us. I was trying I was trying to get us that by We do know a way now. We do know we know what to do. We know what to do. That That's Yeah. And so you guys know what to do too is to hit that follow button or to subscribe to this channel if you if you like the Misfits podcast. And be sure to check out our other episodes. We talked a little bit about AI and how that's changing stuff here. We've done quite a few episodes. So, check down in the uh directory there uh of the listing on the on the channel and you can see several of the others that we've done with uh AI if that's something that you're you're interested in. But worlds are changing. Uh but it's still still a place to have a lot of fun if if you approach it with the right uh right attitude. All right, everybody. All right, we'll see you next. Take care. [Music]