Episode 23: The Power Of Storytelling And Recreating The Marketing Strategy For Barber Shops

Episode Transcript

Garrett: Welcome to Episode 23.

Brady: It sounds good. I like it.

Garrett: Yeah, I got the producers nodding their head.

Brady: Okay, cool.

Garrett: Excited to chat with you all. We had our executive offsite last week.

Brady: Yep.

Garrett: Brady, how do you think it went?

Brady: I thought it went great. This is the third time we’ve done it.

Garrett: Yeah, third time we have-

Brady: Well, sorry. Executive offsite, we’ve been doing for a while.

Garrett: About three, four years, five years.

Brady: This is the third time we start flying out everyone who was hired within that trimester, whether it be last year, years prior.

Garrett: Yeah. We run our business on trimesters, not quarters. It’s way smarter. You should do it too. You finally have time to actually do things, instead of when you have quarters, you spend a month planning, a month doing, and then another month building your next deck, which is a copy of your last one because you didn’t get anything done.

Brady: Yep. And all of our clients are on the quarterly schedule, so the agency is pretty dang busy when quarters are wrapping up.

Garrett: In other words, agencies are external- facing businesses. While our teams are doing QBR and quarterly business reviews for our customers, they’re not also trying to do a quarterly business review for directive. So we’re on a different cadence. Works great. If you’ve been with us for more than a year, we will fly you out. Newport Beach, nice hotel, full experience. It’s pretty dope. Essentially, based on your start date, we do it three times a year. So if you start in T1, you come out, I think, T2 technically?

Brady: Yep.

Garrett: So it’s like the trimester following because it’s after your 12 months. So, it went well. I mean, I was hosting so I like the think it went well, but I mean…

Brady: Yeah, no, it was good. And it’s fun because this is the third one and so I got to meet a lot of people who have been here for over a year, I just have never met them in- person.

Garrett: Dude. Is that the case like 99% of the time now?

Brady: Yeah. But I think when we do T1 again-

Garrett: That’s true.

Brady: Next year there’s going to be a lot of people that I saw in the last T1 and so-

Garrett: I always forget who that was. It’s so wild. That was only 12 months ago.

Brady: Yeah. And we’ve hired a ton of people last year, so I’m still going to see new faces.

Garrett: We’ve hired so much. I think we’ve hired 30- plus people in the last probably 60 days.

Brady: Oh yeah.

Garrett: Geez.

Brady: And it’s going to be like we have people in Canada, Mexico City.

Garrett: Latin America.

Brady: EMEA, so I’d be able to meet those people in- person.

Garrett: We’re hiring paid and SEO people in EMEA right now too. I was just talking to Katie about it.

Brady: Okay.

Garrett: So we’re hiring in the UK. Went well though. I hosted everybody at my house. That was pretty fun. A lot of pono magic.

Brady: Yeah. And I’m local to here, so it’s fun, people coming in who have never been, some never been to California, and with that, never been to the Newport Beach area.

Garrett: Never been to’90s Night. How’d you like’90s Night?

Brady: I did not go to’90s Night. Are you kidding me? I’ve been.

Garrett: He told me his GPS took him to… There was a detour.

Brady: Yeah. I mean, I had to-

Garrett: Were laying in his bed.

Brady: I had a colleague staying with me. He lives in San Diego.

Garrett: A colleague? Now Drew’s a Colleague?

Brady: For the podcast, people don’t know who he is. He’s a colleague.

Garrett: Yeah, a colleague.

Brady: He’s a good friend of mine too. And so his goal was to get home by 10:00 PM-

Garrett: That night?

Brady: On Friday night.

Garrett: Oof.

Brady: And so the second we heard people were leaving the restaurant, not going straight to a bar, they were going back to the hotel and then going out, we got lost on the way to the bar and ended up at my house.

Garrett: I fully, in this case, respect and understand it because-

Brady: Appreciate that.

Garrett: It was pure willpower that I was operating on. I had my Oura Ring.

Brady: I don’t know how you did it.

Garrett: You know how he do the Oura Rings?

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: And my readiness score Saturday Morning…

Brady: 70?

Garrett: It was like 26.

Brady: Oh, that’s terrible.

Garrett: No, I mean, I was dead. I had a full- body hangover. Barely drank. I drove everybody. I had like one drink every couple hours and just died.

Brady: Yeah, no, it was a lot. I was losing my voice. Just loud restaurants, talking. I don’t hear well and so I just shout at people. I’m sure they hear just fine. So I’m just screaming the whole time.

Garrett: Dude, my body shut down at dinner. I ordered a drink. I didn’t touch it. I couldn’t. My body was just like, ” You are done, dude.” And then I rallied and I went to The Goat.

Brady: It’s crazy. I wasn’t going to drink at that last dinner but they had some guava cocktail.

Garrett: I heard their cocktails were good.

Brady: Yeah, it was good. It wasn’t as guava- y as I’d like, but what are you going to do?

Garrett: Nothing ever is.

Brady: It was no guava and Coors Light. It was no manmosa. But it was good.

Garrett: And then we went to’90s Night and’90s Night was-

Brady: Did you make it? So do you made it to’90s Night?

Garrett: And I made it to the intermission.

Brady: What? Oh, like the band taking a break?

Garrett: ’90sNight has an intermission. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I said goodbye to everybody. They’re like, ” You’re leaving?” And I was just like, “Bro, I can’t believe I made it this long.”

Brady: I heard people made it till 2: 00 AM.

Garrett: Oh. I don’t doubt it.

Brady: Machines.

Garrett: But I was a hero, okay? That was pure… I was running on pure effort. That was willpower. That was like Michael Jordan on his flu game. I was out there just surviving.

Brady: The adrenaline kicking in.

Garrett: Oh my God.

Brady: No, man. I got lost.

Garrett: You did get lost.

Brady: I got lost. Ended up in my driveway. It happens.

Garrett: Ended up in your bed, relaxing, hanging out with your wife.

Brady: Should have used the Google Maps.

Garrett: Were you okay on Saturday though or were you just…

Brady: Yeah, I was okay. I mean, I was-

Garrett: I couldn’t talk.

Brady: I probably went to bed. Yeah, my voice was shot.

Garrett: Yeah. But you weren’t thinking, ( Singing)?

Brady: No, no. I had never made it that far in the night.

Garrett: And I was whispering most of it, like doing the fake, you know seeing the…

Brady: Yeah. People think you’re just screaming it.

Garrett: Yeah, yeah. He had it, and I was part of it. Trust me, I wanted to sing, but then I did download Fallout Boy Essentials on the way home and I was just, ( Singing). I was just doing the whole thing. It was great.

Brady: You were going down swinging.

Garrett: Oh, I went down swinging. Anything else this weekend?

Brady: Saw family, had some cousins in town from Vegas. They saw my sister’s son for the first time. He’s like two and a half now, so that was fun for them to be able to meet him. And then really didn’t do anything on Monday, which was nice. I finally gave myself that full day of nothing that I should have had when we had over a week off in late December, but didn’t give myself that. So Monday was wife had work, and I just-

Garrett: Ah, that’s the best.

Brady: Did nothing.

Garrett: You’re just there at the house.

Brady: I left to get Jersey Mike’s.

Garrett: King of the Castle.

Brady: That’s about it.

Garrett: 99 Fire?

Brady: Yep. Got the 99.

Garrett: If you guys don’t know, Jersey Mike’s, greatest sandwich ever made the 99 Fire.

Brady: It’s like a combination of two cheese steaks, I think.

Garrett: The numbers add up to 99.

Brady: It has Chipotle mayo and then extra jack cheese is kind of the-

Garrett: And jalapenos.

Brady: Jalapenos, mushrooms. Steak, obviously.

Garrett: It’s the greatest bad sandwich ever made.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: Because it is bad. I went back and had it and I was like, ” This is garbage.”

Brady: Oh, I felt terrible.

Garrett: It’s a garbage can sandwich.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: But it’s the best garbage can sandwich.

Brady: Yeah, I felt terrible after.

Garrett: Yeah. It’s like Islands burgers. I don’t know why, I love Islands burgers. I have never felt more fat.

Brady: They’re pretty big.

Garrett: Is that what it is? I don’t know what it is, but I can eat any burger and then if I have an Islands burger, I’m pretty much just eating cholesterol.

Brady: Yeah, I’m with you.

Garrett: Yeah, it sucks.

Brady: It’s a big burger.

Garrett: Well, we’re back in the studio.

Brady: Back in the studio. It’s an off- day. It’s Wednesday right now. Normally we record on Mondays.

Garrett: Bro, we never take a week off. We take a lot of days off, but we never take a week off but I feel like we always get it done. Except for that last week.

Brady: Yeah. I mean, we’ve taken some off recently, but it’s good because we talked about it. We were like what, eight episodes ahead?

Garrett: Yeah, I don’t want to be like-

Brady: In terms of recording or posting schedule?

Garrett: Well yeah, because I was like, ” The world needs more Kanye,” and then he went all-

Brady: And then Kanye goes out and does all this stuff.

Garrett: Yeah, I mean, now he’s going to drop.

Brady: And then the episode drops.

Garrett: Yeah. The episode drops six months later when Kanye’s like Mr. Hitler guy, and I didn’t know he was going to turn into Hitler guy. I mean, could you say I could have guessed? Yeah. Yeah, I could have guessed. But I still think he’s a great artist. I’m trying to separate the man from the artist, you know what I mean? It’s been tough though.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: He didn’t really help me on that one.

Brady: No, but that’s where that eight- week gap in recording an episode and it getting posted can really come back to get ya.

Garrett: Yeah. People are like, ” Do you want to cancel it?” I’m like, ” No, we’re going to keep that take.” We’re going to keep the world needs more Kanye take.

Brady: Pretty sure we talked about Andrew Tate, right? And this was, once again, eight weeks ago. He gets arrested for sex trafficking.

Garrett: Oh yeah.

Brady: And then clip of us talking about him drops like a week later.

Garrett: Oh yeah, then our clip team starts posting the clips. Yeah.

Brady: I saw it on LinkedIn or Facebook, TikTok.

Garrett: Honestly, if you’re on this podcast, you might be in legal trouble at some point in the next six weeks.

Brady: Yeah, we’re really foreshadowing here that stuff’s about to go down in your life.

Garrett: Yeah. You’re six weeks away from trouble, my friend.

Brady: But we’re now, I think, three to four weeks. So we’ve closed the gap a little bit, which I like.

Garrett: I do like that.

Brady: Because I think there’s going to be weeks where we can’t do it.

Garrett: Well, I mean, I’ve seen your vacation schedule.

Brady: That’s what I was kind of alluding to.

Garrett: Brady’s the last week of work for the year’s coming up in the next month or so.

Brady: Yeah. Summertime is coming up pretty quickly here.

Garrett: He’s moving permanently to Hawaii.

Brady: Yeah. We expanded into EMEA and I learned about their holiday schedule and culture there and I’m trying to adapt a little bit.

Garrett: Reconnect with your European roots.

Brady: Yep.

Garrett: Dude, it’s so wild when you go there. It’s like you’re in Spain and they just shut the restaurant down for three months because they’re on holiday. Why not have someone run it? They’re like, ” Well no, if we’re not here, it doesn’t run.” It’s very much family like that. If the family’s on vacation, the restaurant’s closed. They don’t hire Mikey or Susie to run it. No, restaurant’s closed. Crazy.

Brady: Very Spanish names there, Mikey and Susie.

Garrett: Yeah, it was that or I do the Mexican accent and I decided maybe not.

Brady: Yeah, yeah. That’s good.

Garrett: My wife hates when I do that.

Brady: Yeah. Because she’s Costa Rican, right?

Garrett: Because she’s Costa Rican. She speaks Spanish.

Brady: Very well.

Garrett: But then I’ll do my grew up playing soccer with the Hispanic community voice. She doesn’t find that as funny as I do. But we got some advertising jealousy today.

Brady: Yeah. Are you going? You’re on the screen right now, so I assume you’re going first. And I see a McDonald’s ad, which I’m always a fan of.

Garrett: I’m not going to do that one first, no.

Brady: Okay.

Garrett: We’re going to do that later.

Brady: Nevermind. There’s no McDonald’s ad. No one knows.

Garrett: No, yeah. No one knows. Okay. So yeah, go full- screen, scroll down. So I’m going to talk about this. It’s not really an ad.

Brady: Okay. Because I’ve seen this guy, so I was curious. I’m like, ” I haven’t really seen him with an ad placement.”

Garrett: Not an ad, but it’s an ad.

Brady: All right.

Garrett: Okay. So I want to first use your favorite artist of all time, as an example: Cardi B.

Brady: Of course, yeah. Thank you.

Garrett: I got that correct, right?

Brady: 100%.

Garrett: Okay, good. And people think I’m joking. I’m not joking. Cardi B is kind of your girl.

Brady: Okay. I don’t know.

Garrett: But Brady’s a big fan of Cardi B’s marketing.

Brady: I will listen to Cardi B.

Garrett: And her marketing. And what I think, back in the day, she was on a reality show, right?

Brady: I don’t know.

Garrett: I think that’s Cardi B. Okay. So I’m pretty sure Cardi B and her story, I’m going to… I can’t wait to see the comments on this one.

Brady: No, this is good. This is how we have to do it to get comments. You start saying random stuff.

Garrett: From what I remember, from actually literally talking with you, which is why I thought I was going to bring this up and now it’s not going the way I wanted.

Brady: How long ago was this conversation?

Garrett: We’ve known each other for 12 years, dude.

Brady: I haven’t listened to Cardi B in half a decade.

Garrett: This was over half a decade ago though.

Brady: Okay.

Garrett: Back when you were totally into her, she came on and was like, ” Who’s Nikki? I’m Cardi.”

Brady: Yeah, yeah.

Garrett: Yeah. This was like Cardi’s the new queen. And you were talking about how she was on a reality show, and she would respond to all the comments, did all her own social, and she kind of made herself into a music star without actually having a background in music. And I think she was a stripper.

Brady: Okay.

Garrett: You’re the one who told me all this.

Brady: Scarlet’s nodding and I do, I think she’s-

Garrett: Am I right, Scarlet?

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: She was a stripper on reality TV show and then she built a music career out of it.

Brady: I don’t remember the reality TV show. I know she was a stripper though.

Garrett: No, yeah. So you told me all this, ironically like eight years ago, because Cardi was your girl. It was a while ago.

Brady: Cardi is Quavo’s, her and Quavo-

Garrett: She was with you before Quavo.

Brady: Were they together?

Garrett: Together? I think recently, maybe, but she was with you before that. You know what I mean?

Brady: Okay, yeah, yeah.

Garrett: This is more recent.

Brady: No, I used to play it at home a lot.

Garrett: Yeah, there was a lot of Cardi. Okay?

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: And that’s fine. I like Cardi. But I thought how she did it was very stereotypical for how you would do it back then. Reality TV was big. Not that it’s not big now, but there was ways you did it. I think SoundCloud, things like that. Now, it is far more about social media and less about the streaming platform. So back then, it was a lot of SoundCloud rappers. Remember that?

Brady: Oh yeah. And she would, I really liked, she would go on her Instagram.

Garrett: See? Now he’s pretending like he remembers. Oh yeah, yeah. This is all you, dude.

Brady: Yeah, no it’s clicking. It’s clicking, it’s clicking. She would go on her Instagram and just talk to her fans and talk about the drama.

Garrett: BSing. And she was… Yeah.

Brady: It was hilarious. She’d go live. I’d watch it. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Garrett: I’m literally, it’s a podcast we do together, I’m bringing up stories you told me, bro.

Brady: I know, man. Five years ago though, that’s tough.

Garrett: God. I need you to keep it together for us here.

Brady: I don’t really have the file cabinets organized too well up there, especially the Cardi B one.

Garrett: But that’s how they used to do it. And I was thinking, how do they do it now? We used to have SoundCloud rappers. Now we have TikTok rappers. And what I wanted to show was how I see the top creators, whether it’s music, whatever it is, I mean, in our case, marketing, sales, whoever, how you can build a differentiated, hyper- engaging personalized brand in what’s the new music video? You know like back in the day, like( singing) whatever. Rebecca Black?

Brady: Of course.

Garrett: That was how you did it back then. Yeah. You did a dope- ass music video. That’s what you did. Now, TikTok, social. And I think this dude-

Brady: Okay, I see the angle now.

Garrett: Is the goat of the new TikTok- first style music video, and he’s actually legit, really talented, but the storytelling of how he releases his songs in an engaging, shareable format to gain traction is genius to me. I wish I was a thousandth as good as this guy is at social media. So, let’s watch.

Speaker 1: Yo. Yo. Yo. What is he doing? Oh, yeah. So he was telling me that if you cut a carrot a certain way, you can play it like a flute.

Speaker 2: He really thinks that’s going to work?

Speaker 1: Apparently it’s a thing. Just ignore him. Ready?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Do me a favor. Pull up that… Pull up that one session with…

Garrett: That beat.

Brady: It’s good.

Garrett: It’s

Garrett: completely unique, creative and different. Yeah. He’s obviously the producer. He’s obviously the rapper.

Brady: He’s not looking to get like, ” Oh, go to my Spotify and listen to my full song.” I think this is his game.

Garrett: Yeah, no, he has all of a sudden too I’ve seen him. Those songs are going viral on other people’s TikToks. So people are like… That’s what’s so genius is if you think about SoundCloud and all these platforms, and even Apple Music or Spotify, theoretically you want to make, even Instagram, all socials, you want to make it to the explore. You want to make it to the point where you are a part of the cultural conversation in that moment. Spotify, maybe you’re most streamed. Apple Music, you’re trending. TikTok, everyone’s using your music for their clips. And I think it’s just genius how he keeps it inside the platform. And yeah, I think it’s a total… That’s why I saw this guy, TikTok rappers are genius and I’ve already been following this guy, but I was like, yeah, I didn’t actually see it from that angle. And you can actually start to see, okay, they’re actually doing full storytelling with the concept.

Brady: Yeah. I think is Freddie Mac another one? Have you seen his stuff where he has people give him each a word and then he does a freestyle connecting all those words and he does it on the-

Garrett: No, but I’m sure it’s the same kind of concepts.

Brady: I think he did it on Omegle, right? So I saw one, it was like four kids from Ohio. They each give him a word and he just freestyles for them.

Garrett: Oh, okay.

Brady: For three minutes straight.

Garrett: That’s sick.

Brady: It’s similar to this, right? He’s a rapper but that’s his-

Garrett: But that’s interactive to..

Brady: Yeah. That’s kind of his style of…

Garrett: Well, because you have to make the… The content now has to be viral enough, if that makes sense, to work. I don’t think you can just… I think if this guy just did the song, like a music video style, he’d be another guy trying to make it.

Brady: Yeah. Definitely. And people wouldn’t recognize… I feel like it’s a great way of showing his talent.

Garrett: And he keeps doing these styles because I’ve seen his other videos. I’ve been following this guy for a while. He’s so good. I’m like, ” Dang, this guy.” I wish I could… Because his whole storytelling of the three different personas and they walk in, the cuts are clean.

Brady: Yeah. Every one’s different. I’ve seen a few of his.

Garrett: Yeah. And they’re good.

Brady: Yeah. Even the guy on the, him, but the carrot flute whispering the next line to rhyme with it? It was just so funny and clever.

Garrett: Yeah, it’s genius. Very clever, very talented. I just thought, what a great example for our audience to show what creativity does when trying to do something different. He didn’t try to do… This is my point I always try to tell people with marketing. He didn’t try to do a better music video. He did an entirely different music video.

Brady: Yeah. He found white space in the game.

Garrett: Correct. And that’s what makes him him instead of another version of someone else. And that’s pretty dope. Now, speaking of people doing things entirely different, let’s go to the next tab, Scarlet. It’s a McDonald’s ad.

Brady: I love it.

Garrett: Have you seen it?

Brady: I’m loving it.

Garrett: Oh, you are. Have you seen this one yet?

Brady: I have not. I don’t think so.

Garrett: All right.

Brady: I

Brady: love it. I love the eyebrows at the end, the integration of red and yellow throughout it in a very subtle way.

Garrett: I hate that I’m never going to be able to see someone’s eyebrows and not think about McDonald’s.

Brady: Sounds like a personal problem. I think I’m going to be able to move on from that.

Garrett: Yeah, have you thought about this?

Brady: Yeah, maybe. I think I’m always thinking about McDonald’s. That was really good.

Garrett: It’s great. It’s great. But I love the little tweet on it is like, ” New McDonald’s advert. No bada ba ba ba.” Right?

Brady: Yep.

Garrett: And then no food or restaurant. And it was a director. I don’t know who Edgar Wright is. Maybe I’m just… I’m uncultured, obviously. Edgar Wright.

Brady: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know the commercial directors too well.

Garrett: When you do it in all caps, it makes me feel like he’s important. Will you search Edgar Wright for us? Let’s just see because they’re like acting like, “It was directed by Edgar Wright. Oh my god. Edgar Wright.” I’m an idiot so that doesn’t mean anything. Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz. Oh, I did like hot fuzz. Okay. Big- time director.

Brady: Yeah. So not just like a commercial director.

Garrett: No, no. He is a big- time director. English bloke.

Brady: Can’t believe you didn’t know who he was.

Garrett: Well, I mean, with such classics as Last Night in Soho, Baby Driver, Shaun of the Dead, and others.

Brady: It’s a lot, yeah.

Garrett: Yeah. I did like Hot Fuzz though.

Brady: I don’t think I’ve seen any of these.

Garrett: They’re very… They’re British comedies, comedy stuff. It’s a different style. But what a killer ad.

Brady: It was really good.

Garrett: Do you think it’s better the fact that they didn’t have any food at a restaurant?

Brady: Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of like remember the, ” Can I get a…” That’s what I liked that ad is they never said a food item.

Garrett: That’s true.

Brady: So it’s kind of like their style of advert. But yeah, not showing any food. Starting with just a sticky note and just the recognition.

Garrett: I loved how they connected the arches to eyebrows and I wonder who was-

Brady: Yeah, I didn’t see that coming.

Garrett: I don’t know who was so high that they connected arches to eyebrows. But I can see arches in your eyebrows now.

Brady: Yeah. Because you don’t connect it till they mess with the logo and they cut it out and do the-

Garrett: Correct. And then I went, ” Oh my God,” and then you can’t stop thinking about it. Like right now, I can just see arches. You’re looking like a french fry to me.

Brady: Thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment.

Garrett: A McDonald’s french fry.

Brady: As long as you didn’t say I look like a Big Mac, I’m with you.

Garrett: A Double Quarter Pounder.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: Oh, man. Well, okay. Any other thoughts on this?

Brady: I just want to ask, have you gotten the McDonald’s app?

Garrett: No, I’m not a big fast food app guy.

Brady: So my brother- in- law got me on the app this weekend.

Garrett: Oh no. That’s what Brady needs.

Brady: It’s crazy. I haven’t used it yet.

Garrett: This means you’re working out more?

Brady: Yeah. Yeah. I’m saving money. It’s a different-

Garrett: Talk about how you do that.

Brady: It’s financial fitness, I guess.

Garrett: Okay. Financial fitness? Okay. Great, Brady. How are you saving money?

Brady: Rewards and deals. Free large fry with a minimum purchase of$ 1.

Garrett: Okay.

Brady: 30% off Quarter Pounder, free Double Cheeseburger.

Garrett: These are all each time you can use them or are they one-time?

Brady: So I think you can use one deal per order, but the deals are always cycling and then it’s a really clean app. You collect points and then you can use your points to buy items.

Garrett: Oh no, that’s not good for you Brady.

Brady: Well, my brother-in-law-

Garrett: Because if you can win this points game…

Brady: My brother- in- law, who’s a doctor, yet is still like, ” McDonald’s is my vice,” he’s like, ” If you get McDonald’s at least once a month, once every two months, it’s worth getting the app.”

Garrett: Get the app.

Brady: So I haven’t used the app, but I downloaded it. I was very impressed.

Garrett: Myra loves the fries. Myra loves their fries and I know it’s her guilty pleasure to pretend like I think she’s getting them for the kids, but then she eats some of the fries too.

Brady: Yeah. So you could get a small fry, which is probably $1 something, and then get a free large fry with it on the app. So you can get a large fry and a small fry for$1. 29. I think large fries are normally$ 3. 50.

Garrett: My kids would love that. They’re just chomping on those.

Brady: Just saying, the app, it impressed me.

Garrett: The app.

Brady: Because he’s talked about it a couple of times. Like dude, it’s just a McDonald’s app.

Garrett: Do they do lottery style? Because I would like it more if it was a slot machine style, so every time you went you could check in and then the slot machine would go.

Brady: No.

Garrett: Because that would be clever, if it was more-

Brady: Yeah. It changes. When I saw it on Sunday…

Garrett: Was it gamified in how it changes? Do do you unveil? Because I would want to-

Brady: It was sponsored. It was a Chargers deal for a free Big Mac with an order over $1.

Garrett: Okay, now I like that. So I like the in- app advertising.

Brady: It was right after they lost that game.

Garrett: Chargers chargered. I didn’t text my brother. He’s a hardcore fan.

Brady: Oh, man.

Garrett: I wanted to so bad because I was talking so much to trash around how the Chargers are always going to be the Chargers. They’re always going to be a little brother franchise till they get their own stadium. And then they proved me so right and it felt so good.

Brady: Who beat them? Was it Jacksonville?

Garrett: Jaguars. After they were down like 27-0.

Brady: My uncle called it. First Jacksonville touchdown, he’s like, ” They’re going to come back and win this game.”

Garrett: Okay. So it was my first time. Myra, I was talking up Trevor Lawrence, I’m like, ” He’s great. He had a rough season. Urban Meyer was grabbing butts. Tough situation. Got to watch this guy. He’s great.” He threw four picks in a row after I said that. But then-

Brady: So you were the-

Garrett: I turned off the game. I opened up my app four hours later, they won and I didn’t know what happened. I was blown away.

Brady: I watched most of it.

Garrett: It was wild.

Brady: It was impressive.

Garrett: Well, good to talk about that. I just wish they would unlock… Okay, so FIFA Ultimate Team, the app, the game I play, the one video game I’ve played for the last five years, you unlock packs.

Brady: Yeah, it’s like a lottery.

Garrett: And you open a pack and you never know who the player is. I wish on McDonald’s, you would unlock your offer each day because I could see people opening up the McDonald’s app each day and seeing what the offer was, and if it was a good enough one, they’d go in.

Brady: It would be cool for that to be an option to use your points on as a mystery package where you don’t know what item you’re going to get, but you know it’s going to be the best deal.

Garrett: A doper one, yeah.

Brady: Because maybe-

Garrett: Here’s what I would do. They do this with FIFA. This is what you’re going to like. So they have this thing called Pack Luck. And I don’t think it’s luck at all. I think they know how much you’re willing to spend on FIFA points you need to buy to get the packs and they drip you in just enough to get a good card often enough that you keep buying the points. And what I found is if, let’s say I don’t play for two weeks, I log back in and I open a pack.

Brady: It’s going to give you something good?

Garrett: It usually gives me something really good to get me back into playing the game. So my point is, if you had location services on, in order to unlock the item, you had to enable location services on your phone and they knew when you had been to McDonald’s or not recently or it’s based off of app usage.

Brady: Yeah, they just have your order history in the app.

Garrett: I would set it up. So I would give you more compelling offers if you haven’t been recently than if you go all the time.

Brady: Yeah. Make it dynamic to your order history.

Garrett: Correct because that’s what FIFA does. I guarantee they get me sucked back into the game by giving me a dope card when I haven’t played in a while. You can do the same thing with them and be like, “you get three fries if you come back,” and then all of a sudden people are coming back.

Brady: Yeah. And in the bonus pack, because it’s all to make more money in the end of the day, so they could even look into what you usually order and make sure they don’t give you that so that even when you use the credits, you’re also buying other things.

Garrett: Yes, exactly. Now you’re seeing. I bet you they’re doing something similar. I bet you they have something in the backend that’s similar.

Brady: Yeah. I haven’t seen soda on it yet. Probably because the margin’s so good on it. Even though they’ve been doing a dollar any size for a while.

Garrett: What a crazy concept, right?

Brady: Yeah. I mean, the math behind these apps and the psychology behind it, it’d be very interesting to-

Garrett: Well and the scale of volume you must have to be able to still make a margin on something so cheap is nuts.

Brady: Oh, yeah. I mean, the volume is massive.

Garrett: All right. Well, enough McDonald’s.

Brady: Great company though. Love McDonald’s. It’s a real estate company actually, it’s not a food company they say.

Garrett: Oh, wow! Let’s pull on that string.

Brady: Yeah, that’s what I hear. That’s what I hear.

Garrett: Yeah, okay.

Brady: I don’t know. There’s always a headline that says that on the finance Instagram page.

Garrett: No, there always is.

Brady: “McDonald’s is a real estate company. You’re not a food company.”

Garrett: Did you watch Founder or whatever that one was?

Brady: No.

Garrett: Oh, you’ve got to watch that movie.

Brady: I’ve heard it’s good.

Garrett: It was good. It’s all about how they’re a real estate company now. That’s why.

Brady: Okay. So people watch that and then they post it on Instagram and I see it.

Garrett: Correct. Yeah, that’s how it gets done. That’s how it happens. All right, let’s see yours. What do you got for us?

Brady: I have a vintage 2006 Apple ad.

Garrett: Oh, that is real. Wow. That’s almost older than us.

Brady: All right.

Garrett: We’re so old now. All right, let’s see what you got.

Justin Long: Hello. I’m a Mac.

Garrett: I remember this one.

Speaker 4: And I’m a PC.

Garrett: These are my favorites.

Justin Long: Gesundheit. You okay?

Speaker 4: No, I’m not okay. I have that virus that’s going around.

Justin Long: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4: In fact, you better stay back because this one’s a doozy.

Justin Long: That’s okay. I’ll be fine.

Speaker 4: No, no. Do not be a hero. Last year there were 114, 000 known viruses for PCs.

Justin Long: PCs, not Macs. So just grab this.

Speaker 4: I think I got to crash.

Justin Long: Hey, if you feel like that’ll help. Good.

Garrett: Yes.

Brady: So there’s 2006 Mac for you right there.

Garrett: Well, do they do one on the blue screen ever? I think they do something on the blue screen.

Brady: So it’s a whole get a Mac is the theme, and so even restarting-

Garrett: Show me a couple more. I want to see a couple more.

Brady: No, I was watching these all night.

Garrett: Can we get a Mac search? Search, ” Get a Mac” on YouTube for me, Scarlet. I want to see all these.

Brady: Yeah, that restarting one up there is one.

Garrett: Oh, there we go. Top 15. Let’s watch all 15.

Brady: I’m down.

Justin Long: Hello, I’m a Mac.

Speaker 4: And I’m a PC.

Justin Long: Well, after five years, Vistas finally here.

Speaker 4: Whoopee for the whole entire world.

Justin Long: What’s wrong?

Speaker 4: What isn’t wrong? I mean, my new operating system arrives. I’ve had nothing but problems. I had to buy a new graphics card, get new memory. Now I can’t even use some of my software and peripherals. I mean, let’s face it, this party’s a bust.

Speaker 5: We should do this again sometimes.

Speaker 4: Sure. Are you free in another five years?

Speaker 5: Ooh. I have an all- day meeting in five years. How about five years and a day?

Speaker 4: I got a strategy session that day. What about five years and two days?

Justin Long: Hello. I’m a Mac.

Speaker 4: And I’m a PC.

Justin Long: Whoa. Whoa. What happened to you, PC?

Speaker 4: Kids happened. I was bought for a home. Now I have to make movies and blogs and listen to music every night. I’m crying myself to sleep mode.

Justin Long: I’m sorry about that.

Speaker 4: You were made to stimulate 10- year- old brains with your high- life jazz. All I want to do is balance their checkbooks.

Justin Long: I don’t think 10- year- olds have checkbooks.

Speaker 4: No checkbooks, no inboxes, no employers. Just wild imaginations. Oh, I have to go listen to some emo. Ugh.

Garrett: Okay. You can pause, Scarlet. Okay.

Brady: So this started a war. I was looking into it and Microsoft responded with ads that they gave people a $1, 000 budget and if they find a computer under$ 1, 000, they give it to them for free. And the lady starts at the Mac store and says there was only one under $1,000. It’s a 13- inch screen. And then she makes it to Best Buy or something and shops all these HPs and finds one for$ 600 bucks that has everything she needs. So it started this kind of-

Garrett: Yeah, if you’re a peasant…

Brady: That’s the saying, yeah. And then they did one with more of a global, ” I teach my kids on PC” and it was like a school somewhere in Africa, and this other group of people talking about how they use PCs. So they did this global scale on how the world uses PC, but it was them trying to counter this campaign, which I thought was-

Garrett: That doesn’t sound nearly as funny or as engaging as this campaign.

Brady: No, this was brilliant. I know we’ve talked about it before, just the production too is the brilliance. It’s just a white studio background.

Garrett: What was he in? Because he was in something in 2006 that was big.

Brady: I do recognize him.

Garrett: Scarlet, do you know?

Brady: The Get a Mac actor? Yeah. I don’t know. Is he from a raunchy comedy?

Garrett: Yes. I’m just trying to remember which one. I think he was-

Brady: Justin? No, no.

Speaker 6: Justin Long.

Brady: Justin Long? Okay.

Speaker 6: He was in Accepted.

Garrett: Yep, Accepted was great. What else? Maybe go to his inaudible.

Brady: Is that when they made that college? Is that Accepted?

Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah.

Brady: Okay.

Speaker 6: He was in that.

Brady: That’s probably the movie I recognize.

Garrett: Accepted, Dodgeball.

Brady: Oh, he’s in Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Garrett: Wait, is there a crossover now with… Okay. No, that’s not. He’s Just Not That Into You.

Brady: Yeah, I saw. I thought I recognized movies from that.

Garrett: I know! I was like, ” Oh my God!” He’s Just Not That Into You, is that a favorite of yours? No?

Brady: Oh yeah, Dodgeball. He’s the younger guy in Dodgeball.

Garrett: He’s 44? We’re so old, dude.

Brady: Never seen Die Hard.

Garrett: Okay.

Brady: So he is a big actor.

Garrett: Yeah. I mean, he was with Drew Barrymore. That’s all you got to know.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: Okay. So I think what’s great about it is how applicable it is, and what I mean by that is if you’re Apple, you’re in an exceptionally consolidated market. You have two options: Windows, Mac. PC, Mac, those are your two options. I wish more of our customers or clients had the confidence in their own products when in super consolidated spaces to do the same. But the only way you can do this ad is if you’re so confident… Well, you’ve got to be confident in two things. You got to be confident that when someone does buy a computer, these are their two options. You have to be very confident that everyone already knows who both of you are. And you have to be very confident that you’re better so you can just make the other person appear worse.

Brady: Yep.

Garrett: That’s important because I think a lot of our customers are in consolidated markets with maybe more than one competitor. Maybe there’s two or three, but not much more. And they don’t have the confidence to say they’re better and in a humorous way that is, frankly, inaudible

Brady: And then they call out the fact that they use Microsoft Suite, just fine on Mac. They even call out, they have one about the charger, how if someone trips over the charger, it’s a magnet so it just pops out. And the PC guy talks about how he tripped over and his computer fell off the table. They just dive into so many areas. And it seemed like Microsoft, they only had price or not Microsoft. PCs.

Garrett: They do. By the way, that’s still all they have. And they have the weird feature that went out of date. So historically, the value of Mac, and same with PC as well as Android, was you can do anything. And customers are like, ” Well, I only want to do these five things and I just want it to be really easy and fun.” And people are like, ” No, no, no. You can do everything.” And I think the problem with PC is still like that. You can make your PC anything. You can make your Android phone anything, but it’s not nearly as good at the things you always do. Like the trackpad. Have you ever used a trackpad on a PC?

Brady: No.

Garrett: Your finger, it’s like going across sticky sandpaper. It doesn’t work. All the tactile things of Apple and the product design that make it so addictive to using and make us so loyal as customers, PC doesn’t have any of that. All they have is power, customization and price, which I guess is good. But I remember my PC back in the day always had that blue screen. It was always breaking down.

Brady: Well, that’s why I resonated with this because that was around the timeframe where I think I went from a Dell to a Mac and what I had to sacrifice was really gaming. Mac still isn’t great at gaming, but I remember the blue screen, viruses happening and just having that perception of Macs don’t get viruses.

Garrett: Yeah, that was such a great ad.

Brady: And it could have been from that campaign. It may have just been a general perception.

Garrett: No, that was a common fact. At our age, when we’re going through, it was like, ” Macs don’t have viruses.”

Brady: Exactly.

Garrett: Sure, you’re going to have to learn a new operating system and they don’t work the same. Remember how scared our parents were of a MacBook? They could never figure one out. My parents use it all now. Do yours?

Brady: Yep, yeah.

Garrett: Yeah, even our parents.

Brady: They have iPads, iMacs.

Garrett: But remember back in the day, they were like, “I don’t know if they’ll have Word and Excel. What about my Outlook?”

Brady: Quicken.

Garrett: Yeah, Quicken. And what about, “It doesn’t right click. Did you know it doesn’t right click?” You’re like, ” Yeah, it does.” And they’re like, ” What do you mean?” And you show them and they’re like, ” Oh my God.” But remember how different? It was a big cost of switching.

Brady: Definitely.

Garrett: And so it’s a brilliant ad because I feel like this is when they were taking serious market share.

Brady: And it’s for the general consumer too, like PC does still have gaming.

Garrett: And they did botch the Vista rollout. I remember that.

Brady: I don’t really remember that.

Garrett: When they had Windows XP and Windows 10 and Windows Vista, all these things and none of them really went great. So I love it, man. That was a good one.

Brady: Thank you. Thank you.

Garrett: All right. Brady, teach us. Educate us.

Brady: Yeah. This should be a quick one, but it’s an interesting one. I remember finding this and it was news to me that it was going on, and there’s kind of a general lesson tied to it. And so as you know, but maybe the audience doesn’t, a lot of our clients invest in directories.

Garrett: Review sites.

Brady: Third- party review sites similar to a Yelp, TripAdvisor, but for software products.

Garrett: Oh, wow.

Brady: Yes. And they often rank well organically, but these directories also pay for ads.

Garrett: Yeah, like in Capterra right there.

Brady: Because what happens on them is when, and we are going to click it, when we click that Capterra ad, Google’s going to make money. Capterra’s pockets to Google’s pockets. If we start clicking on the visit website buttons, Capterra is then making money. And so it’s worth it to them to pay Google a little bit of money to then have people click their visit website buttons, which are all sponsored for them to make that money back in process.

Garrett: So this is what we like to call little cost- per- click arbitrage.

Brady: Yes.

Garrett: So what we’re saying, if I can maybe repeat this back to you so I’m getting this correctly here, is let’s say Capterra spends$ 10 to advertise on best gift card software, and then they charge each of these vendors$ 7 a click.

Brady: Yeah. Fivestar could be at$10, Zinrelo could be at$ 9. It’s all just a bid war to get these spots.

Garrett: And so theoretically, if you were to click on two and they have data that says on average you click on three, they could be making almost$ 6 for every click they spend on Google. That’s pretty smart.

Brady: Yep. Very similar to, I know I’ve probably even said it on the podcast before, but the Yahoo Facebook ads.

Garrett: You have talked about that.

Brady: Oh my gosh.

Garrett: That always gets you going.

Brady: So they were advertising, ” Check out the new used cars for 2020″ on Facebook. You click on that ad, they pay Facebook for that click. It then goes to the Yahoo search engine where people are doing ads like Subaru and Toyota. And then when the users click those, Yahoo’s making way more money back.

Garrett: They charge like $40 a click.

Brady: Because search engine cost per click is way higher than social.

Garrett: Is that illegal at all?

Brady: So I did-

Garrett: Because it’s a good little moneymaking scheme.

Brady: I’ve done a few LinkedIn, Twitter posts about it, and most people agree it’s unethical.

Garrett: Unethical? Yes.

Brady: Because Subaru is bidding on the search engine for search intent, not for someone to click-

Garrett: From a social intent.

Brady: A clickbait ad on Facebook. It’s like a preloaded-

Garrett: It’s kind of brilliant thought.

Brady: Oh, it’s brilliant. It’s a cash machine.

Garrett: If you start missing your quarterly earnings, you can just turn that cash machine on.

Brady: It is a cash machine.

Garrett: Imagine if you did it for personal injury lawyers.

Brady: Oh my gosh.

Garrett: You know what I’m saying? Facebook ads for personal injury.

Brady: “Always be prepared. Check out your local personal injury lawyers.”

Garrett: “Haveyou sneezed or fallen or even breathed in the last 36 months? You could be inclined for millions. Click here.” They click and they’re charging$ 170 a click to the PI lawyers.

Brady: Well, not even that because that pre- qualifies it. You could say, ” Always be prepared. You should know your local personal injury lawyers.” The ad could just be that, so no injuries, no intent, but they’re like, ” Oh yeah, I should probably see who’s in my area.” They click on the Facebook ad, then it goes to the personal injury lawyer near me where it can cost up to $ 600 bucks in LA for a click. That would be…

Garrett: That’s true advertising platform evil.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: So what’s your point here, just to tell us about it?

Brady: That wasn’t even it.

Garrett: Okay.

Brady: So we looked up gift card software, best gift card software.

Garrett: Yeah, we did.

Brady: We clicked on the ad that said, ” Best gift card software.” If you scroll up a little bit, you’ll see compare products, features, ratings, gift card management software for your organization.

Garrett: Well, these are helpful because you can tell if they have all the greens or all the greens.

Brady: So what’s funny, look at Fivestars. Gift card management, they don’t even do it. Why would they be number one in gift card software if they don’t even do it. Look at the URL. This isn’t a gift card management software page. This is their customer loyalty software page. So what Capterra did-

Garrett: Oof. Their advertising’s got that broad match stuff from Google.

Brady: Well, no, they dynamically change the text on the page based on the search.

Garrett: Also, it’s using DKI on the…

Brady: Yeah, so this is their customer loyalty software page, but they’re getting money by showing it for gift card software. They’re changing the text. So the user thinks this is a gift card software and Fivestars is getting screwed.

Garrett: Screwed, yep.

Brady: Because Fivestars is actually bidding on customer loyalty software. That’s the directory they want to be in. That’s what they do. And Capterra is doing a pretty cheeky move here.

Garrett: A little SCM compare. That’s all their moneymaking folder or they just screw all their advertisers.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: I bet you could see all the people they screw through that root folder, SCM comparing. You could see all the ancillary… You know what I’m saying? Categories.

Brady: Yeah. The reason why I found this was because I was looking for directories for a prospect that does gift card software. Okay. So they’re an API. They fuel a bunch of the consumer- facing gift card platforms like the Postals and the Sendosos. They’re an API behind the scenes. And so I was trying to find a directory for them. And so I found this and the reason why I caught it because I was like, ” Oh cool, there’s a directory for it.”

Garrett: Well, you know get Fivestars because we’ve recommended them back when we did local SMB stuff.

Brady: Yeah. But I was like, ” Oh cool, I found one.”

Garrett: Well, they don’t do gift card management. This is the very first thing too. There’s an X in it, ironically.

Brady: Yes.

Garrett: Of like…

Brady: Well, that’s why they’re getting screwed.

Garrett: Oh yeah. They’re the definition of getting screwed.

Brady: But for the prospect, I was like, ” Wait, this actually might not work because this isn’t the gift card software page. It’s just a customer loyalty page.” So I don’t even-

Garrett: Correct. Do they have a gift card page?

Brady: No.

Garrett: Geez.

Brady: They haven’t built it.

Garrett: Well, so essentially, let’s go back one more because I want to see how they got to this point. So hit back. They’re using DKI.

Brady: Top 10 gift card management software.

Garrett: Yeah. But at some point, is this really Capterra’s fault? Here’s what could be happening. You can scroll up a little more for me. Scroll. See, it says, ” Best gift card software.” Google, and I’ve seen this. Now, I don’t look at it as much as you do anymore, but what I found when I’m coaching some of these agency guys, I’m trying to help them, none of them ever look at their search term reports. I mean, I do the same. I’ve been doing it forever. You just look at search term report, filter by cost, filter by conversion, see what’s up. Right? Well, Google, and you can correct me if I’m wrong here, they kind of got rid of phrase and everything’s broad and I’m not like saying-

Brady: Yeah, close variant matching.

Garrett: Yeah, but not synonym broad.

Brady: Took out a lot of control.

Garrett: Closely similarly related, categorically broad.

Brady: Yes.

Garrett: Just like this. Gift cards are similar to loyalty management, so we could advertise on it. So my question is, what if Capterra isn’t purposely managing advertising on this? So what they’re doing is they’re just embracing Google’s broad and then categorically using DKIs to have that gift card management software pops up to match that query.

Brady: Yeah. But it’s not an exact match, so I know that’s not a DKI.

Garrett: Because they’re using-

Brady: And then the page changes with-

Garrett: You’re saying the MGMT makes it non- DKI because you know it’s not? Because someone had to manually type that in to squeeze the word in because they ran out of characters?

Brady: Yeah. So, you can tell it’s intentional.

Garrett: Dang.

Brady: So, essentially-

Garrett: Not cool, Capterra. Gartner, you own them.

Brady: Like Fivestar, they’re the ones-

Garrett: They’re getting screwed.

Brady: Getting screwed because the other ones do offer gift card management, so it’s not the worst thing in the world for them.

Garrett: Dang, Detective Brady’s putting people on blast today.

Brady: So the lesson is…

Garrett: Yeah, what’s the lesson, Brady?

Brady: And this is the biggest strength I think in advertising, I mean even SEO digital in general, is you got to understand the realities of what’s actually going on. Because Fivestar thinks, oh yeah, it’s the customer loyalty page. That’s what I do. All this traffic is coming from that. The reality is Capterra is actually pointing a lot of gift card intent traffic to that customer loyalty page, masking it as these are all gift card solutions. So then the user thinks, ” Oh, they’re not going to see that grayed out checkbox under gift card management. They’re going to think Fivestar is the best at this.” They don’t even do it. Fivestar’s then paying Capterra.

Garrett: And now Capterra doesn’t work, even though just that category that you’re driving 90% of your traffic to doesn’t work.

Brady: Well, because most of the traffic probably is still customer loyalty. So this is probably just getting masked, right? It’s not like nothing’s ever working for them, so they might not even identify it as a problem.

Garrett: And the way you discover these things, that’s what I’ve always said, is you’ve got to walk a mile in your customer’s shoes. You got to go to the SERP, the search engine results page and do the searches yourself. Actually search as if you’re your customer and ask yourself the most simple question in the world: would I actually hire us for this? Where am I not showing up? Where am I showing up incorrectly? Where do I need to start showing up? What can I do? Are there other places to advertise? Oh, these new sites rank. Oh, do they have GDN? Oh, I could launch a display ad. There’s so much that you can learn and be creative as a marketer if you just go to the search engine results page and act like your customer.

Brady: Oh, it tells you, just even the search engine results page, how the algorithm runs, tells you a ton of information.

Garrett: Yeah, like what type of content ranks?

Brady: Yeah. You’ll look up, a lot of people go after their competitor names, but in the software world, a lot of just the end user of that software uses Google to login. And you can find out if that’s the case if you Google the software name and the login page-

Garrett: Yep, a wildcard.

Brady: Is a featured snippet or it’s ranked very high even though it doesn’t have rankable content on it, that is Google telling you, ” Well, most of the time when my users look this up, they actually go to the login page. So I chose to rank it.”

Garrett: Which is why when we do competitor ads, we set login as a negative. Well, and we also set other things more as positive signs, like pricing, alternatives, reviews.

Brady: Yep, pricing, alternatives, comparisons. Yeah, making sure we know they’re in the market. I saw one this week, just real quick. They’re a HubSpot phone integration. So they’re a phone recording software. They integrate with HubSpot. So one of their queries that wasn’t converting was HubSpot call center. And so I googled HubSpot call center and-

Garrett: It’s HubSpots number?

Brady: Well, people often ask or also asked that feature in Google, it was, ” Does HubSpot have 24-7 support? How to contact HubSpot?” And so Google having that feature told me, ” Okay. A lot of people who look this up aren’t looking for a call center solution that works with HubSpot. They’re looking for HubSpot support.”

Garrett: If they’re searching call center software for HubSpot is different than call center HubSpot.

Brady: Yeah, HubSpot call center, I think, was the search term. So yeah, even yes, you can’t watch the users searching that, but the way Google shows content, it tells you a lot about the intent.

Garrett: I love it.

Brady: So yeah, it’s just finding the realities of things. And this is a fun one. It kind of surprised me.

Garrett: I love it. You just got to live in the SERP. That’s my big takeaway from this is live in the SERP, be your prospect, be your customer, and then do your marketing from there.

Brady: Yep.

Garrett: Now, market this.

Brady: All right. Do you see where the inspiration was for this week?

Garrett: I mean, it looks pretty good.

Brady: That’s a pretty fresh haircut, man.

Garrett: So we’re talking barbershops, fam. We’re talking barbershops. Now, I am passionate about barbershops and you don’t know that about me.

Brady: And I am not, so this is going to be good.

Garrett: Okay. Because I always love when you’re sitting at the barbershop, I’m not a huge talker.

Brady: Same.

Garrett: You just want to sit there and be quiet. But eventually, I have to wonder what they’re doing with all their empty chairs. Have you ever been in one of these barbershops? There’s always so many empty chairs.

Brady: Yeah. I mean, the reason why… I was going to try to grow up my hair and then we had the executive offsite.

Garrett: Dude, I kind of want to see you flow, Brady.

Brady: I do too. My uncle’s doing it. Yeah, it looks like hockey hair.

Garrett: Is it sick?

Brady: It’s pretty cool. And he’s all insecure about it.

Garrett: What about the awkward phase because the awkward phase is tough.

Brady: Well, that’s what I was in.

Garrett: Does yours go back naturally?

Brady: I have very straight hair.

Garrett: Yeah, see, mine’s so straight.

Brady: I’ve been brushing it back so it looks perfect on Zoom.

Garrett: Pretty good flow.

Brady: It looks clean on Zoom, but in- person it’s like, ” What is he doing with his hair?” So I was at that stage and the executive offsite was coming up and I was meeting people in- person, so I went to the barber on Tuesday.

Garrett: You gave up?

Brady: And I cut it.

Garrett: And what happened at the barber? What was so inspiring at this barber visit that you’re like, “Garrett, we got to talk about this on the podcast”?

Brady: Well, I’ve had multiple experiences. So I used to go to Today Barber when I lived here, close to here in Costa Mesa, and it was like $ 11 bucks, all- cash Vietnamese barber shop.

Garrett: In what, 1999? It hasn’t been$11-

Brady: No, three years ago, four years ago.

Garrett: What is it now? It ain’t$ 11.

Brady: Probably $15.

Garrett: Oh, wow. Okay. What did you pay on this haircut though?

Brady: Now I pay$ 25 cash and I tip$ 5, so$ 30.

Garrett: Is this one of the spots that still has the circles?

Brady: No, it’s called King’s Barber. I think it’s a chain. Okay. It’s right down the street from my house next to that pub by my house on El Cortez.

Garrett: Do they barbers hourly or on tips based on commission of the chair?

Brady: I haven’t asked.

Garrett: I’ve gotten deep into this barber game.

Brady: But I feel like there’s so many different experiences. I’ve heard of people paying more money, but there’s a mini fridge, you get a beer. Today Barber always had basketball on the main TV and they would often turn your chairs so you could check out the game. This one doesn’t have any TVs. Most people are chatting it up. I sometimes talk to them. I kind of let them start conversations. I’m kind of with you.

Garrett: Is it like a Mexican barbershop? Like a Latin barbershop? Or is it just like…

Brady: No, no.

Garrett: I feel like there’s Mexican barbershops and there’s like Asian barbershops these days. And now there’s the new white hipstery$70 a haircut barbershop.

Brady: This one’s very hipstery but still$ 25. This one guy has the crazy curly mustache kind of hipster.

Garrett: Okay, curly, curly mustache and a motorcycle that they were working on in the window type thing?

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: Okay. I know what you’re talking about.

Brady: Yeah. They have all this vintage metal decor going on in there.

Garrett: No, they have all these different types of barbershops. I love them all. I’ve tried the salon barbershops. And to me, a salon barbershop means they wash your hair before or after. That’s like the salon barbershop. You’ve got the stereotypical Asian barbershop that I used to go to when I was a kid where you kind of pull a ticket. You know what I’m talking about, the ticket ones?

Brady: I know like the DMV ticket, old school?

Garrett: Yeah, yeah. It’s like a chop shop. You kind of go in, it’s like$ 8, $ 10 haircuts, and they just go real quick and you’re in and out in 10 minutes. That’s where my mom would take me.

Brady: Yeah, that was kind of like the Vietnamese one I went to.

Garrett: Okay, there you go. Yeah. And then you have the somewhat gangster Cholo- type style Mexican one that I used to go to in Azusa when we lived in Azusa all the time. And that’s when I kind of fell in love with those. And that’s kind of where I go. My current barber’s all tatted up. He’s got the low riders outside and they always have the stuff. They’re like, ” Hey, you want a beer?” And then they got the TVs. So I’ve been going to those spots for a while.

Brady: So those spots to me are too intimidating.

Garrett: You get scared?

Brady: I’m not scared. I just-

Garrett: No. I mean, I’m just asking.

Brady: Not scared, yeah.

Garrett: I’m not scared. You’re scared!

Brady: Dude, you’re scared.

Garrett: You’re scared.

Brady: No, but I just feel like I’m not into my haircut enough to go to them. I’m not getting fades.

Garrett: They are there. That’s where you go to get the fades, see?

Brady: My guys are like, ” What do you want?” I’m like, ” Two here. I want it long enough up here for it to sit down.” ” What do you want on the back?” ” Square, rounded corners.” ” How much you off the top?” ” This much.”

Garrett: You don’t hit them with a taper? You don’t even want the taper?

Brady: Nah, I don’t even hit the taper.

Garrett: Jeez.

Brady: They did the straight razor though on the neck with the oil or whatever.

Garrett: You don’t do the beard thing either, so that makes it cheaper.

Brady: I obviously don’t do the beard thing.

Garrett: Because the beard thing makes it pricey.

Brady: No, I’ve never experienced.

Garrett: They charge like $ 35 for the hair, $ 25 for the beard. They take a while on the beard. They take 30 minutes on the beard. It blows your mind. So I love barbershops and I’ve always loved asking them about their business model. Anytime I go somewhere-

Brady: Yeah, so I’m curious to learn about this.

Garrett: Okay. So what I’ve found is there’s two different ways of how they’re doing it. So you got Floyd 99. Do you know Floyd’s? The chain, it was on 17th Street. You see it on the right when you turn right to get onto Ravine Ave?

Brady: Yes, yes.

Garrett: Now you know where I’m going?

Brady: Yes, yes.

Garrett: It’s shut down now. But Floyd’s blew up, really popular, did really well. And now they’ve kind of gone downhill when they moved to hourly. So it used to be a lot of the way the game works is there’s an owner of the shop and then you get a chair and then they’re your customers and you pay a cut.

Brady: Your chair is almost your own business kind of thing.

Garrett: Correct. And you pay rent on your chair and then that rent goes there and then you can keep everything after you’ve paid your rent off. That’s kind of how they do it. So essentially, you rent a chair. Now, other places now are having everyone just be hourly because essentially I think what they found is Brady doesn’t do nothing for the shop because Brady’s not a hustler and Brady doesn’t bring in his own customers, and so the shop’s doing all the marketing. Why should we be giving Brady all the profits? We should keep all the profits if we’re doing all the marketing and we’ll just pay Brady hourly. What do you think that did to the quality of haircuts and quality of barbers?

Brady: They stopped caring.

Garrett: And where do you think all the top barbers went? Do you think they kept?

Brady: They left.

Garrett: They left. And that’s what happen to Floyd’s. Same thing happens everywhere.

Brady: You think that’s what a Super Cuts is, is that model?

Garrett: Well, no. I think the one people who have a little bit of… You know Sport Cuts are Sport Clips?

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: I think what they did is they just got beautiful women to massage your hair and tell you how strong and good- looking you are and you get a terrible haircut, but our egos were-

Brady: I was wondering why my roommates went there instead of Today Barber.

Garrett: Yeah. Our egos are way more important than our haircuts and I think they figured that psychology out.

Brady: Interesting.

Garrett: So yeah, it’s just beautiful women cutting hair at Sport Clips. It’s all women cutting hair, not like the traditional barbershop dudes thing.

Brady: Yeah. That’s one business model.

Garrett: Yeah. With the sports on and then they do like… They’re like cheap Equinox. You get a eucalyptus towel, a massage, a hair massage. I mean, if I have to pay$ 15 and you play with my hair for five minutes, I might be sold. You kind of get what I’m saying? So that was kind of their marketing tactic, which is a little cheeky. I personally have always liked the barber shops where it’s independently owned and the people cutting your hair are either the owner of the shop, which is usually who I like to have my cut my hair. I like the guy who runs the shop to cut my hair. So I’ll talk to you about my latest conversation with this guy. So I was talking with him, Alfred, two weeks ago when I got my hair cut. Yeah, two weeks ago. And I was curious because he’s got six chairs in his… He’s got a strip mall, really cheap, probably$3, 000 a month rent, $2, 000 a month rent. I can’t remember. It’s$ 2 to $ 3k a month in rent where I live in Orange. It’s not the world’s greatest area. Affordable strip mall, class C. Alberto’s Tacos is in the parking lot next door, 24-7 drive-thru. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen it a thousand times?

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: Okay. So he’s in there, he’s got six chairs, he’s got a business partner. Him and his business partner, they’re always busy. And then what they’re having a hard time with is the same problem as all blue collar industries. So my dad had this problem, Tanner’s dad has this problem. Anybody who’s really good in this industry and who’s driven usually opens up their own shop. So it’s hard to get good barbers that are reliable and have their own book of business because they still got to pay for the chair. They got to have enough customers to pay for the chair. And so I always wanted to know because if I was in this game, I’d have to be Floyd’s. I got to dream big, I got to hit a home run. I can’t just have my little barbershop and I cut great hair. I got to make it the biggest barbershop in the world. That’s how I’m wired. So I was trying to ask him, in my head I’m like, ” Okay, if I were you,” in my head, it’s kind of how I do it. I’m like, “How would I make this the biggest barbershop in the world?” His primary issue is supply, not demand. So what he has a hard time with is keeping good barbers for extended periods of time and that he doesn’t really make any money because they just got to pay the chair. So let’s say you have six chairs, rent’s $ 3k. What’s that math, $ 500 bucks per chair?

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: Right? Okay. So he makes$ 500 bucks or he could do five haircuts.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: It’s hard for him to want to deal with the crap of managing you and everything else when he only makes another$ 500. So how would you scale up one? I think you’d have to change the billing mechanism. Maybe make a cut of each. What if you took 15% of each guys’ haircut?

Brady: Yeah. I think taking a cut of the cut is what I was thinking when you were talking about the two extremes on taking a percentage versus hourly. I would up the percentage. I think it kind of reminds me of how tech companies are holding on to developers. It’s just like, how are they making it hard to leave that spot? So I think running the marketing for them, so I don’t know if it’s an admin or…

Garrett: Okay, you’re going to like this. I asked him, “Okay, do you spend on marketing?” He was like, ” Yeah, man, but it’s so expensive.” And I was like, ” Okay, what is it?” He was like, ” Yeah man, we were doing$ 300 bucks a month on Yelp, but it was just pricey.” I think there’s a lack of vision in the industry too because if you just spend$1, 000 bucks on Google my business ads, $ 1, 000 bucks on Yelp, and then$1, 000 bucks on your YouTube content, and then every repeat customer once every six months, you asked for a photo? You would have unlimited social content and unlimited transactional barbershop near me rankings. If I bought that barbershop, I could fill all six chairs up in a week. That’s how much demand there is and how low the threshold is of top barbers. But here’s where he’s saying he has a hard time. He has a hard time getting the people. So my idea was to build an apprenticeship program. Find top performing students in the high school maybe who are in the performing arts programs, social sciences, or what is that called when you do artsy stuff? Liberal arts.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: Liberal arts school. People who are going to go liberal arts school, you could offer him apprenticeship. There used to be this dude off Bristol. Remember off Bristol here? He would do all the salon school guy or what’s his? Do you know what I’m talking about? The famous haircut school.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: I forget his name. Will you search this for me?

Brady: It’s something Guy.

Garrett: It is, right?

Brady: But it’s not Guy Fieri even though he has the best hair in the business.

Garrett: No, it’s like men haircut school. Paul Mitchell. Not Guy. Paul Mitchell. My bad. It’s on, see, on Bristol. So Paul Mitchell, I would take a page out of Paul’s book and I would essentially, same thing I tell the plumber guy, like plumbers, drywallers, contractors, you need to build an apprenticeship program at the high school level so guys come out of high school and choose to not go to college because maybe that’s not for them, and they go into cutting hair or doing drywall or electrical. They can still make a ton of money in a way better life. But I think if you were to get younger people who are driven and talented instead of sometimes maybe some of the people you do get who end up being barbers who were rejected by other parts of society, it can sometimes feel like, people who are just passionate about hair, super talented, and then you put them on a two- year contract. It’s a two- year apprenticeship. Afterwards, you could even theoretically have an investment business where you’ll give them a small loan to start their own barbershop. It’s not a bad idea, like a two- year apprenticeship program. And then I’ll help you with to fund your$ 100,000 or $50,000 or $25,000 to start your company and you got to pay it back to me in two years or something. It wouldn’t be a bad idea. You could be like the Godfather. Like the Joe Rogan of comedians and podcasts, you could be for barbers.

Brady: Yeah. But do you think in terms of location- wise, how many barbershops can you have in a location when it gets to too many?

Garrett: There’s barbershops on every corner, bro.

Brady: Yeah. I was just thinking, I mean, if the demand’s not high, don’t you just raise your price?

Garrett: Okay. That’s where I went to. So great question. That’s why I told him the other way. So I said there’s two options. We were talking about it. I was like, ” There’s two ways for you to make money.” This is really random that you… By the way, this was not planned. Brady was like, ” What if we did a barbershop?” And I was, ” Dope,” but I didn’t tell him-

Brady: It’s because I recently got my haircut.

Garrett: I was like, ” All right, dope. Let’s try that one this time.” So I did the same thing. I said, ” Well, the other route I’ve seen some guys go,” because we were talking about how you’re going to grow the business, all this stuff. And I like to talk about this kind of stuff. So I was like, ” Well, the other route you could go is you could raise your rates.” And one of the other guys was like, ” Yeah, the guy who cut Steve Harvey’s hair makes like$ 400k a year.” And I was like, ” Okay, well it’s a little harder to be the guy who cut Steve Harvey’s hair.”

Brady: That mustache is probably insured for$ 5 million or something.

Garrett: Great mustache.

Brady: Great mustache.

Garrett: I think it helps with the timing. No, but the point of it all was okay, what if you went up market because you can only have so many hours in a day. The constraint these guys have is they can only do so many cuts in a day and they have too much demand, but they don’t make a ton of money sending their demand to you. They make most of their money just cutting their own hair. And then they have other chairs, but they don’t really make their money on the chairs. They make their money on their own chair, but they don’t raise their rates because I think they’re scared of people leaving. The same reason why everybody… I think they don’t want-

Brady: Customer retention, that’s tough when you raise your rates at a barbershop from even$ 25 to $35. Right? The one I’m going to-

Garrett: Well, let’s say in this case, Julio, you’ve been cutting Julio’s hair for four years. You know Julio doesn’t have a ton of money, but you like Julio, you’ve cut his hair forever. But some of these guys would feel inappropriate pricing Julio out of a haircut.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: That’s why I said just do it for new customers.

Brady: Well, that’s tough too. Where it’s like, ” How much do I owe you again? You, it’s$25. You is $ 35.”

Garrett: Well no, I would have all my prices be the new prices, but I would grandfather in the OGs. I wouldn’t have two public prices. I would’ve one price. It’s$ 100 bucks haircut. There’s still, I think you just got to puff your chest out sometimes and know that you’re the best at cutting hair because I think people would pay for it. Okay. So a lady who did this is over at what’s called PRESS Men’s Hair in Bristol. You didn’t know how passionate I am about the barber game.

Brady: I did not know.

Garrett: Okay. So there’s a lady off Bristol who works at a place called PRESS Men’s Hair. Her name’s Van.

Brady: Okay.

Garrett: Pull this up, actually. I’ll show you. So I like what she’s done because I think it’s the healthiest way to do it if you’re not going to go swing to… If you want a single location. How do you make more money as a single location barber? So they do this whole men’s salon thing, which is kind of like, it’s not really a barbershop. It’s all ladies who are more like a traditional salon, but for men, which is kind of interesting. They don’t really pull it off in the sense that it’s obviously done by what women think men want instead of what men want, which is kind of interesting. It’s like if we try to do a women’s store and it was us thinking like, ” Oh, this is what women want,” and we just totally messed it up. They kind of come off somewhat different like that. But there’s Van. Right? See, Van? Now here’s what I love about her. You try to hire Van. So go to her rates, watch this. So if you go to book a haircut, you’ll like this. So this is one way he could do it. So go to the top. Yeah. Book. There you go. So see how it has Marina and their names? What is a man wave?

Brady: I think that was in the hero image.

Garrett: Dude, they’re making up new hair techniques.

Brady: New hair technique, perform.

Garrett: Now notice Van’s prices versus everyone else’s. Look at the bottom left. $ 395! Van cleans up. Okay, go click haircuts on the top.

Brady: I mean, even the other ones are$ 250 for a man wave.

Garrett: I know, but let’s just go to haircuts because I don’t know what a man wave is. So watch, look at the prices. Marina$ 68, Tiffany$ 58, Van$ 110 and she does it in 30.

Brady: Shit.

Garrett: So that’s what I’m saying. Van’s got it figured out. She’s making up. Don’t be better. Be different. She’s like, “You want different?”

Brady: She invented the man wave.

Garrett: The man wave! Okay Van, shout out you because you’re like a genius.

Brady: That’s impressive.

Garrett: With how do you make more money without opening up another location? Play on men’s insecurities, so solve men’s balding.

Brady: Yeah. I mean, I went to a place.

Garrett: Are you balding? Is this?

Brady: No.

Garrett: I thought you weren’t. Okay. Where we going with this?

Brady: Like three to four years ago, I thought I had alopecia.

Garrett: What’s that?

Brady: It’s an autoimmune disease.

Garrett: Holes, you get holes in your hair?

Brady: Well, yeah. It’s an autoimmune disease that where you can’t… My dad has it.

Garrett: Okay. Oh. So you’re like, “Uh oh.”

Brady: I mean, I don’t have much facial hair, but I had a patch here and then I had a patch right here. And so I was growing my hair out. I couldn’t go to Today Barber anymore because they just give me the normal two here, four here and cut the top. So I went to the place in the center by the office where Stacks is, and I tried it out and I mean, they were doing the eucalyptus towels. They washed the hair and everything.

Garrett: There you go.

Brady: But to me, it was way too expensive.

Garrett: That’s okay. That I had the same issue.

Brady: I would live with the bald spot, which it grew back.

Garrett: So I never got a haircut from Van because I was like, “$110?” And she was always booked out. Watch, try to book her. I don’t think you can get on Van’s appointments anytime soon here, dude.

Brady: You can have a guest?

Garrett: Like Van doesn’t have no cutes.

Brady: Yeah, it’s 18th right now.

Garrett: You can’t get a cut anytime soon with Van. That’s what I was trying to explain. So this is the other way you go as a barbershop. I like this one because it’s all dynamic pricing based. They still centrally control it through the booking mechanism. My guy, I call or text, it’s like old school.

Brady: Oh, I just walk up, put my name on a piece of paper and put my phone number and I either drive home or chill in the parking lot.

Garrett: This is the Vietnamese spot?

Brady: No, this is the one by my house now.

Garrett: Okay. But same idea, right?

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: So I feel like if I were those people, I would get to essentially controlled booking, I would take a percent of each of my barbers, and if they wanted to make more money, I’d allow them to raise their rates. I like the rate. I like the allowing rate freedom at the cut level.

Brady: Yeah. That’s an interesting concept.

Garrett: You see what I’m saying?

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: Because then me as the founder, let’s say I’m Van and I’ve earned it, and the thing is Van obviously has dudes with enough money that she’s cut for long enough that they pay her prices.

Brady: Yeah. It’s interesting though. At my place, you can say who you want and I put any, so if people have different rates, I’m at the point where it’s like, ” Give me the cheapest.”

Garrett: I was an any guy, but then this one guy was cutting my hair and he just kept standing way too close and putting his junk on my leg while he was trying to cut my hair. And I was like, ” I’m done with that.” That was it. I was like, ” Excuse me.”

Brady: So anyone but is your-

Garrett: Yeah. I never said anything, but that guy was never back there again.

Brady: Interesting.

Garrett: He was high. I could tell you he was just completely high and he wasn’t all there. And I’d tell him what I wanted and then he’d forget immediately. And he kept asking and he was fidgeting and he was way too close to me. Just completely just on one. I came back two weeks later and I went back to my normal guy and I was like, ” I will wait.” And he was no longer working there. And I was like, ” What happened to him?” And he was like, ” Yeah, it didn’t really work out.” I was like, ” Okay, at least this guy saw what I saw.”

Brady: Yeah, it’s not just me. Interesting.

Garrett: Yeah, I didn’t say anything to anyone. I was like, ” Well, that was awkward.” You’re way too close to my physical space for cutting my hair and I do not like this right now.

Brady: Yeah. See, I’m already just trying to sit there and be silent the whole time.

Garrett: Ignore everyone and get it done. Are you a phone guy? Are you on your phone?

Brady: No.

Garrett: I’m not either because I got my hands trapped.

Brady: Yeah, you’re in a reverse cape.

Garrett: Yeah, I’m in the reverse cape.

Brady: How are you on your phone?

Garrett: I know. I’ve never understood the guys who can be on the phone.

Brady: No. I mean, I talk it up a little bit, but it’s if they’re starting conversations.

Garrett: What about products? I think products are big. I asked him where he makes his margin. So I kept the conversation going and I asked him, ” Hey, where do you make the money?” He said most of the money… So I asked him, how do you make your money here? Off my own haircuts and the product. He makes no money on the chairs because they’re just paying him for the rent and he already… $ 500 bucks is great.

Brady: Yeah. So a cut on products for the barbers would be good.

Garrett: So well, you want… Okay, so let’s say Jimmy’s cutting cuts for us. So you and I are the owners. We’re 50/ 50 and Jimmy’s our new barber. He is on the third chair. We take 15% of all of his cuts, but he doesn’t have to pay for the chair. So that would give us upside to grow with Jimmy, he’s on a two- year contract. It’s part of an apprenticeship. And then he’s got the opportunity, if he’s in good standing with us, to receive a loan if we have the capital to start his own shop. So we had that going on and now at the end of the cut, one of our customers, we’re both busy. We say, ” Hey, go to Jimmy.” Jimmy does the cut. At the end, he’s like, ” You want product?” They say yes. He puts product in and he gives them a little pitch. ” This is one of my favorites. It’s all coconut oil, blah blah blah. Do you want me to get you one at checkout?” And the guy goes, ” Yeah.” So he buys, let’s say, a $ 20 thing of gel. Do we give a cut to Jimmy for being the sales guy on that?

Brady: I think so. I mean, it’s cool how he’s brought in as a separate person to consult on product. It’s like the fancy wine person at restaurants. What’s their title?

Garrett: Oh, you’re saying we have a product. No, no. I’m saying Jimmy’s just the third chair. He just does a cut and at the end he asks if you want product, you say yes, and then he pitches you on the product that he put in your hair.

Brady: Yeah, but if a barber uses it then and, ” Hey Jimmy, come over here. This guy has questions on product,” that would be an interesting play.

Garrett: Oh!

Brady: Because I think there’s an opportunity with the product and you could just train your barbers on this. Just ask them, are you happy with a product you’re using? Do you want another look? Because I think it’s tough to know. For me, I didn’t want shiny, I didn’t want gel and it stiff, but I didn’t know what to do. And fortunately, my cousin was a hair stylist, so she’s like, ” Oh, Kevin Murphy, this type, it will be a matte finish. You can mold it how you want. It’ll look natural.” I was like, ” Oh, perfect.” There’s no way I would’ve figured that out myself. I was using the Axe stuff before and it was too shiny.

Garrett: No, I get what you’re saying. So you’re saying we need a hair sommelier who teaches?

Brady: Yeah. I mean, the cost of that probably isn’t worth it. I think you can just train barbers to ask those questions, like are you happy with your product? Is there any type of style you wish you could?

Garrett: Well, there’s a couple of things, the way we could monetize this person because there’s three things you need in a barbershop and there’s three things that men would pay more for. If you had a beautiful woman who did the appointment taking and setting, so ban the phone, swept the floor, and wash the hair. And to your point, the fourth, did product recommendations.

Brady: In a barber shop with a female doing the consulting on the product?

Garrett: Way smarter than if we had Sal, like Big Boy Sal come over. “I like to use…” You don’t really trust him that much.

Brady: Yeah, he’s a big bald guy. “And this product.”

Garrett: Yeah. We don’t trust him. But you get the beautiful woman who’s like, ” Oh, I love when the hair’s like this.” Brad’s like, ” Yeah, me too.” He doesn’t know. You’re going to just buy whatever she says.

Brady: Yeah, that stuff, it looks greasy because it’s shiny. You should go, matte. It looks more natural.

Garrett: Yeah, it’ll look way better on you, especially with your jawline. And you’re like, “Oh yeah, it does look better on me with this jawline.”

Brady: This putty goes great with your jawline.

Garrett: Yeah, exactly. And you’re like, “Okay. Yeah.” I think that would be a great idea.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: Instead of the old barber dude being like, ” You want a beer?” She’d be like, ” Would you like a beer?” And you’re like, ” Yeah, I would like a beer.” I feel like we could do better that way.

Brady: Yeah. I think social content too.

Garrett: I think social content would be huge.

Brady: Because if your shop is the one running that type of marketing, that’s where it’s hard to leave. And I think there’s some cool clips that could happen. I see one where you ask why they’re there for their cut. There’s always a story there. For me, it’s weddings or executive retreats.

Garrett: I have something way better for you.

Brady: Let’s hear it.

Garrett: You want to see it? I can’t remember their name. Pull this up. I saw this one.

Brady: Is this the guy who does it on the street?

Garrett: No.

Brady: And just offers people haircuts?

Garrett: No.

Brady: Sounds cool.

Garrett: Imagine if Boston Dynamics got into the haircut game.

Brady: Oh, gosh.

Garrett: So I’ve got something for you. So go to a men’s haircut, Orange County, perfect cut every time or something like that. So they have a whole database where they store your haircut and they use this tech, I think it’s Kempt. I think it’s Kempt. K- E- M- P- T. Kempt Men’s Hair. I think this is one of them. I was trying to find new haircut spot. I can’t remember.

Brady: It’s on the map.

Garrett: It’s on the map. Yeah. Sorry, scroll down. I think that’s it. Yeah, search. No? Yeah, there it is. Keep going down. Oh, yeah. See, that’s what I meant with the motorcycle. I did not know about their motorcycle, but I knew it would have one. Ah, okay. For services, made services. Let me see.

Brady: Is it a gallery? Because you said it’s like an archive of photos.

Garrett: I’m trying to remember what it is. Click services for me. Oh, there it is. Cool. Scroll. Let’s see what we got scrolling.

Brady: $55.

Garrett: Three packs, they’re doing some packages. Okay, I can’t remember. But what it is essentially is they have a facial scanning, head scanning software. And you go into this spot, it’s in Orange County, I can’t remember the name of it right now. And they fully scan your head and your facial structure and then they give you recommendations on how you should do your hair. There it is! There it is. Danckut’s.

Brady: Danckut’s.

Garrett: That’s it. The world’s most advanced haircut engineering. This is what I’m talking about. You didn’t know I was this deep in the haircut game.

Brady: Geez.

Garrett: I’ve been like, look, yes, keep going down. So let’s watch this real quick because we could do… I want to see this. We could do something similar potentially.

Speaker 7: That particular guy came in wanting something that just blew my mind. The picture is, it really was incredible. I was like, ” I didn’t know hair could be cut like this.” And at the time, I just was like, I can’t do this. And I attempted it and it just went terribly. And that was the point when I realized the fact that we don’t have some sort of system-

Garrett: See the head-mapping system?

Speaker 7: In place to make sure that sort of the general idea of this is what a haircut is and this is how it should look, right? That there’s no system in place to make sure that people are guaranteed that. And it seems pretty simple. One of the most important systems that we have developed as human beings in our history is a checklist. Just a basic, simple checklist. You do this, check, you do this, check, and you just go down the list. 20, 30 years ago, we had the general surgeon. Now you have the guys and women that only operate on tumors on pituitary glands, very specific procedures. And so if the most important industry in the world is following these checklists, following these procedures and following hyper- specialization, one could determine that that is what you should do as well for your company. What I first took a look at are, okay, so what are the variables and what are the consistencies? We all have roughly the exact same skull. Now, there are some differences in the head, just like there are differences of sizes in human beings, but everybody’s got a mastoid process, and almost everybody’s got a zygomatic process, a temporalis muscle, a parietal bone. And so since there is a consistency…

Garrett: This is the craziest thing, man. Okay, you can turn it off. I think people can watch this on their own time and they’ll get it. But it’s wild.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: This is all form Orange County. I don’t know what kind of ecosystem we have in the barber shop community, but my point being is there is always innovation in every industry. I’ve always been some wildly… It’s so weird that you were like, ” Let’s talk barbershops” because I’ve been weirdly intrigued by barber shops. You had no idea I had so much knowledge of barbershops.

Brady: I’m just sitting back here.

Garrett: But it’s a very interesting thing. And I think if we did have a much simpler way of categorizing people’s head shape and then providing recommendations around what they could do with their hair, I felt that could make us stand out too. Like, ” Oh yeah. Well, usually guys who come in like this, we usually recommend one of these three styles. What do you think about this?” Why? And then you tell them, ” Oh well, because of X, Y, and Z.” And they go, ” Oh, that’s interesting.”

Brady: And here’s what it would look like.

Garrett: And now they have more confidence because my hair, this is the type of hair I should be having.

Brady: Yeah. It’s the cut for them.

Garrett: Correct. Exactly! And then their chest is a little broader. Their spine’s a little taller and then they tell everyone that they got the greatest haircut of all time. But what do you think?

Brady: Yeah. No, I did not know all this about barbershops.

Garrett: It’s crazy.

Brady: But it sounds like we need to work on barber retention. We need to find a-

Garrett: Well, barber supply. We need need talented barbers to join us and we need them to last for two years. Like The Alliance from Reid Hoffman, we need them to last two years. What do they get for lasting two years? They get, let’s say, help and support, a capital for their very first barbershop. And then we get to build our legacy in the community. So we got that.

Brady: Yeah. Supply and demand, just that cost. What’s the threshold there? How is marketing supporting that journey?

Garrett: A percent of each of their cuts, but we also supply all the marketing and the facility, and we don’t charge rent.

Brady: Yeah, the more we do for them, the higher our cut can be while still retaining the barbers.

Garrett: Well, and there’s no upfront costs because we’re only taking a percent of what you make.

Brady: Yeah. I think, I mean, renting the chair, I kind of like the pressure on that where it’s like, ” Shoot, I’m being charged$ 500 every month no matter what.”

Garrett: You could probably rent the chair and take a cut.

Brady: Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.

Garrett: Little, little. You want to double dip?

Brady: Yeah. I just like the pressure for the barber like, ” I’m renting this thing$ 500 every month. I got to make sure I have clients,” versus if it’s just a cut, it’s like, ” Sure, I’m not making that much money, but I’m not paying that much money either.”

Garrett: Do you think the laziness could take over there?

Brady: I don’t know. I like the pressure of the chair.

Garrett: I like that. I like that. You give them a little fixed cost. Okay, so they have little fixed cost. They have a little variable cost, but they can raise their rates. They can make their rates as expensive as they want too, but they still got to pay for their chair and we still take the same cut.

Brady: Yep.

Garrett: I think that’s fair. And then…

Brady: I like the smart mirror. I think there’s something there where… Because I don’t-

Garrett: Smart mirror, what do you mean by smart mirror? Did we not pull on that thread? Come on, break it down for me.

Brady: So there’s mirrors where it’s like a TV or a mirror, and so when you’re talking about mocking up haircuts, you could have a camera built into it where you’re seeing it in the mirror.

Garrett: It seems expensive though, dude. We’re charging$ 50 bucks a haircut over here.

Brady: Yeah. But it probably, in the longer term, pays itself off in profits. Because the mirror’s like, once you got those mirrors in, I mean, you’re using them every single day.

Garrett: I want it to recommend products as well for your head type.

Brady: Yeah. It could what it would look like if you use one product versus another.

Garrett: Recommended a haircut and associated products because the margin’s on the products.

Brady: Because I notice most barbers, they don’t use the mirror. They turn you the opposite way.

Garrett: Well, yeah. They always do that. Yeah, they always flip you around and you watch the TV over there and at the end, they give you the thing and be like, “Is it straight?” And I can barely figure out how to work the thing. And I’m like, ” Yeah, sure.”

Brady: So the smart mirror, I mean, you could have the game on it too because it’s technically a TV and a mirror.

Garrett: And then you turn the mirror on at the end?

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: I like where your head’s at there. It’s a little pricey, but I get it. A little creative.

Brady: I don’t know how much it costs.

Garrett: And then you like my receptionist, floor sweeper, products.

Brady: Yeah, product person. Social media too.

Garrett: Social media, hair washing. I think that would hit. My current shop has the guns.

Brady: Whoa.

Garrett: The massage guns.

Brady: Like Theraguns?

Garrett: Theraguns. And they give you a Theragun massage at the end.

Brady: I did not. Yeah, I’ve never had that.

Garrett: I think that’d be nice. Little shoulders.

Brady: I like the straight razor.

Garrett: Straight. Well yeah, you have to. That’s a barbershop.

Brady: Yeah. This is the first one I’ve been to that has that.

Garrett: Wait. Really?

Brady: So I was like, ” Yeah, this is legit.”

Garrett: Okay, no. That’s why that’s I’m going to the barbershop because I like the straight razor on the fade.

Brady: Okay. They just do the neck. That’s how they do the neck cleanup.

Garrett: Oh yeah. They should be doing all of it for you.

Brady: No, no.

Garrett: Yeah. Yeah. That’s straight razor. Okay. That’s what makes it a barbershop is a straight razor.

Brady: Then I’m going to a barbershop, guys.

Garrett: There you go. Okay. I feel like this business is a pretty big success. Now we just do a little advertising, do some social content.

Brady: Yeah. I think you could find a good social similar to that rapper. Right? He has a system. I think there’s a lot of storytelling.

Garrett: I think we could do monthly events, bring in a local artist like a musician or a DJ, and we just do customer appreciation nights and then we’ve got like 15% off all products. Something like that. I think there’s ways to do it where you could be a part of the community.

Brady: Yeah. Hang out in the shop. Sign up to get a cut. Maybe prices are more, gives back to the community though.

Garrett: Yeah. Half of them all go back to the local Catholic Church or something like that in the neighborhood.

Brady: You get new clients from it, so even if you’re donating all of that, that day you got 20 new clients for the long run.

Garrett: Maybe we sponsor the local high school football team, do all their cuts for the big homecoming night. We do all their cuts and then they tell all their buddies, we got local customers.

Brady: Business cards, discount on first cut.

Garrett: We’re good at this barbershop game. I mean, we can’t cut hair, but I feel like we’re pretty good.

Brady: Yeah. It’s just one of those industries where they were never trained on marketing yet they have to run a business.

Garrett: And it’s all foot traffic.

Brady: It reminds me of dentistry and optometry. It’s like they’re running their own business.

Garrett: Technical craft.

Brady: They did not go to school for marketing.

Garrett: No. Or business.

Brady: Or business. They went to school for everything else.

Garrett: They know how to clean teeth. They know how to cut hair.

Brady: Yeah. They have to run their business, grow clientele. So it’s just one of those situations where you could step in as a marketer.

Garrett: Do all right.

Brady: Yeah.

Garrett: Well, it’s been fun, Brady. I think we’ve pretty much revolutionized haircuts.

Brady: I think so. I mean, I want to look more into this. I’m going to finish that.

Garrett: I know you’re going to go there, by the way.

Brady: I’m going to finish that video.

Garrett: I know you are!

Brady: That thing went deep.

Garrett: I know you are.

Brady: Once he did the anatomy of the skull, I’m like, ” All right.”

Garrett: Once I started showing this to you, I knew you were a Danckut’s guy. Immediately. So thank you, everyone. Episode 23, like, subscribe, follow along and have a great day.

Brady: See you next week.