Let's keep talking about other ways we can make money besides traditional services. Personally, I'm a huge fan of maintenance agreements. In my experience, they are easy to sell, provide opportunities to keep the team busy when things slow down, and frequently turn into new business opportunities. So keep your peepers on the page and let's get going!
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Gene: What's happening, my friend?
Carl: See the new title card?
Gene: Yeah, you got a new sponsor.
Carl: We got Parallax, right? We've had Parallax for a long time. Parallax, fricking awesome. If you're running your shop, you need Parallax to take a look at how you can be running it better, smoother, better insights in the future. Gene, this is an infomercial.
Gene: Go for it.
Carl: Look, just get Parallax.com. Okay. But we got Punch List, right? Punch List, which I mentioned before, coming on as a new sponsor, you got the card out there. And I got some news about Punch List. You know what happened? It's free now.
Gene: I saw that.
Carl: So there you go.
Gene: Yeah, man.
Carl: What's going on, Gene Crawford? How are you, sir?
Gene: Doing good, doing good. I'm in a different thing, studio-
Carl: You are.
Gene: It's closed today. We're doing some construction in that location. It was a little loud so I had to-
Carl: You're doing some construction or construction's going on? Because when you told me on the phone, you were like, "These jerks are just..." And I was like, "I don't think he hired those people."
Gene: They're loud. They're very loud.
Carl: Is that what happened?
Gene: Yeah. They're very loud.
Carl: Gene, have you ever considered construction as an alternative revenue source for period three?
Gene: I considered washing cars.
Carl: Actually, your margin may be higher.
Gene: I think it is.
Carl: Yeah. It's easier to overcome a negative margin. And the sky's the limit, so that's what this episode's going to be about is alternative revenue streams. We've been talking a lot about the bad stuff, about how we can't hire people, or good people are leaving, blah, blah, blah. [inaudible 00:02:01] Let's move on from that, says the guy who doesn't run a shop anymore. Just act like it doesn't happen and it'll still happen, but at least nobody will bug you while you're drinking on the toilet.
Carl: Okay. But alternative revenue sources, this was something that came up in the community a couple of weeks back. It was the newsletter that we did. You know what? I think it's a good, great thing to do right now. If you are struggling to get your regular stuff done, what can you do that can be recurring revenue? What can you do with the current team that's not overly disruptive? And talking with some people in the community, looking at those conversations, we came up with a list of some stuff.
Gene: Go for it.
Carl: Oh no, that's it. I know you read the newsletter like it were a newsletter, but one that a friend wrote. So I'm going to say, let's start off with packaging current services, right?
Gene: Right.
Carl: Things that you do anyway, but you just put a nice little bow on it.
Gene: [crosstalk 00:03:09] We did that at the shop. Thank you. I'm forgetting.
Carl: You're welcome.
Gene: It's taken a while. Honestly, it's taken about two years, but we started doing that about two years ago, because let's face it. You build a website for somebody. I don't care how much content management you give them. I mean, there's a certain size business that they're going to do their own thing. I mean, we're not talking about...
Carl: Not an internal team. This is a smaller company, and more than likely, the owner or a right hand is going to take [crosstalk 00:03:46].
Gene: 20 to 30, $40,000 website, right? They're going to call you. They're going to be like, "Put my blog post on my page for me. I forgot." It's going to happen. And also, let's say it's a WordPress site or whatever. There's shit you're going to have to do on that thing constantly. And you don't want to be like, "Well, I got to up update all this crap. Can you approve five hours?" I mean, that's just a waste of time. So we start a package that we call it white label service, whatever you want to call it. Was it white label? No.
Carl: White gloves. If it's white label. You're going to act like somebody else is doing it, which also isn't a bad plan if you're not very good at your job. No, no, no. We'll still do the work. We just want to tell people you did it.
Gene: Yeah, right. No, white glove. So it's white glove service. I think it's the wrong term there. And it's slowly, I mean, we're small, there's only three of us, but it covers our payroll.
Carl: Well, that's awesome, man. So maintenance plans are definitely one of those. And there was somebody in the community, I can't remember who shared this, but they said that they basically started giving the first month of the maintenance plan for free. When somebody sign, they would say, "Hey, if you sign today," but they would just basically say, "Hey, and we do have a maintenance program. We know that can be at the beginning of a relationship, you're not really sure. Oh, is that what I want? But we're going to go ahead and give you one month of that, just so you can see what it's like." And I think they said they had a 60%, 70% conversion rate after that.
Gene: We've never had anyone turn it down.
Carl: No. And I'll tell you, the other thing about maintenance plans that I think are great, if you are part of a team that's a little bit bigger or growing, maintenance plans, maintenance work can be a great place to put somebody who's just starting out so you can kind see what kind of chops they have, right? Yeah, you interviewed them, you saw the work they did. But when you do work in a web shop, there are other people involved all the time. And you don't know who was there that said, "This, this, and this need to be changed," or, "Oh my goodness. Did you see what you did here?" So putting them on maintenance, I think, is always a good way to go. And just like you said, we would do maintenance, but hosting was required. We wouldn't maintain anything in an environment that we weren't in charge of.
Gene: No, that's not going to happen.
Carl: For $2 million a month. Anyway.
Gene: I mean, if they need something, we do it on a cost basis. If we are working on somebody's something that they've got somewhere else, just because yeah, you can't control it. You don't know what's going to happen.
Carl: You can't get the patches you might need to get for the server software. There's all kinds of stuff that can happen when you're not in control of it. And I will say that at one point for engine, maybe 30% of our annual revenue was coming from hosting a maintenance. Now, when we got into a situation where we were a little flatter and we were kind of a democracy, the emphasis on the crazy, everybody decided they didn't like the maintenance anymore and they wanted to get rid of it. And I don't think they understood the impact it had. That was our annual retreat. That was, so many choice says we could make to say no to projects were because we had that rolling with 30%.
Gene: Yeah. It's a creative or someone whose focus is building new things. They're not going to care about maintaining the things they built. They just aren't.
Carl: Exactly. And we never did either, but you know what they do care about? And I've this before, they care about their paycheck. When you can say, "Hey, no worries. We'll cut that, but everybody's going to take a 30% pay cut to make up for the fact that we're no longer doing that. That cool? Cool with that?"
Gene: Mm-mm (negative).
Carl: No, we're not. For those of you listening, we just made really funny faces. So check out the YouTube, and we're going to be right around seven minutes and 35 seconds, we made really funny faces.
Gene: Yeah. Carl's just, yeah. But yeah. But those types of people shouldn't be. They've got a role to play. And like you said, it's good for the newbs to get in on that. And most of the time, maintenance work is not mission critical or super time sensitive. Three days to do something. That's plenty of time.
Carl: And I'll say this. The important thing when you roll out a maintenance plan for somebody is to have a very clear line as to what is maintenance and what is new?
Gene: Right, because they'll try to sneak that shit in there.
Carl: Well, yes. And they don't really know, and sometimes you kind of want to... But the other thing that a maintenance plan is great for. So we had the episode on retainers and go back and listen to that, because if you allow people to roll over hours, that's not a retainer, okay? That's just paying in advance. That's all that is, which is still cool, but when you have a maintenance plan, it's also an opportunity for you to do things you want to do on somebody else's dime that benefits them.
Carl: But to be able to call a client and say, "Hey, there's a new technology we're kind of interested in. We want to rebuild this functionality on your site using that technology. Normally that would be a new cost, that wouldn't be covered under maintenance. But if you're cool with it, we'd like to do this. And these are the benefits you'll see. And then we'll be able to share with people that we're doing this now." And they almost always say yes, because also make sure you're never working on a live site. I only say that because, hey, I'm Carl.
Gene: Hey, we're all guilty. We've all done it.
Carl: But yeah, I think that's the biggest one, right? Maintenance and hosting, and those types of things that they're going to call you to do anyway. And to your point, you can lead a client to a CMS, but you can't get them to make changes.
Gene: Well, now, I know I'm interjecting here, but one of the problem, one of not problems, one of the things we just worked on, we have a client who's an agency. And they did this for their clients who were municipalities or whatever. And what do you call them? Energy provide. They provide, what is that called?
Carl: The utility?
Gene: Yeah. Thank you. God. They're like utilities.
Carl: I'll be here the whole next 20 minutes.
Gene: So all these utilities that they work with, and they were basically doing the same stuff for them, right? So you market utilities the same way in every city, right?
Carl: Pretty much. I mean, you've got a dedicated footprint. It's not like [crosstalk 00:10:11], occasionally you might have multiple, but most of the time, yeah. It's monopoly.
Gene: So they started selling kind of marketing, what we're talking about maintenance, but marketing. So they would sell them a big billboard design, and then they would put these little packages together about, "Well, here's what we'll change over the next year," or whatever. So they sort of systematized all that. And then they turned it into an actual service, this is what we built for them, a site where their clients can log in and get pre-made stuff. Kind of like pre-made stock imagery stuff. So they were able to sort of take that in their world, what equates to maintenance in our world, they were able to actually turn it into a business. And they're kicking ass with it.
Carl: I think that's awesome.
Gene: So they profitized it.
Carl: Yeah. We had an idea at engine that we never launched, but we played around with it enough to give it a name and secure a URL, because again, hi, I'm Carl. But it was workhorse interactive. We do all the stuff your other shop doesn't want to. And the idea was just, we'll get young, hungry, cutting their teeth people. We'll pay them a fair wage, we weren't looking to rip people off, but these are the people who just want the work, not the people to your point, who are like, "I never want to do that work." And then, we would sell that to the other agencies and just say, "Hey, if you want us to handle your maintenance agreement for you, you go ahead and sell it. We'll take this percentage. We'll give you that."
Carl: I really think that could have worked. And I do see a couple of shops like that now that are out there. I have no idea how well they're doing, but I always thought, "That's not a bad plan." That actually, there's a lot of things besides just maintenance and hosting, obviously, under the package services side.
Gene: Right.
Carl: Were you going to talk more then?
Gene: I was going to.
Carl: You looked really excited.
Gene: I have things to say, but go ahead.
Carl: No, my therapist told me to stop cutting you off.
Gene: So let me get this straight. My name comes up when you're talking to your therapist?
Carl: Only when I lie to you about being in therapy. And I was in therapy, and it was awesome. And he said he didn't need friends, he needed customers, and he told me to go away. But one of the things we did, we tried packaging an express service that we called Engine Express. So at the time, most of our projects were probably in the 15 to 20,000, three week turnaround. You get a limited say in what we do. But when we did Engine Express, we thought, "You know what? We're going to do a four page site with basic branding. They get two choices and it's going to be $5,000."
Carl: Now realize this was in the mid 2000s, and we thought, "Man, we could rock 10 of these things in a month. That's going to help out a lot." It was shit. It was horrible. You know why? Because the people who bought that were the people who would buy a 5,000 packaged website where they don't get to say a lot. And we didn't want to work with them. So that's the other side, right? Make sure that you're actually packaging something that you want to do. Especially because if you don't want to do it, it's going to sell like hot cakes. I don't even know if hot cakes sell well.
Gene: They're pretty good.
Carl: Are they? Okay.
Gene: Yeah. Hot donuts. So we make sure, I mean, I just said we do this maintenance, whatever, it's paying our payroll. We only sell that to our clients.
Carl: I think that's the key. Yeah.
Gene: And it's sort of an exhaust, we're sort of selling the exhaust, I think maybe is a term, but it's shit they're going to want this stuff done over the next couple of years anyway. And it's stuff that we do every month and sometimes, let's say it's a $20,000 WordPress website. It's really hard to justify a 800 to $1,000 a month hosting fee, because they're like, "What the hell are we hosting here? It's a fricking WordPress site." And so they go shopping for that. And GoDaddy's what, $8 bucks a month or something? And they go, "Well, why are you better?" And you're like, "Well, I'm kind of not."
Carl: Because you can't call GoDaddy and tell them there's a problem. [crosstalk 00:14:25] We'll call you and tell you we fixed the problem before you even knew it existed, because if you're down for six hours and somebody comes a knocking, how much money could you lose? Is it worth $8 bucks a month to lose a few thousand?
Gene: It's going to happen.
Carl: Every time.
Gene: Yep.
Carl: Every time.
Gene: Yeah. So we've also started, which is not, we don't do any SEO work or marketing or anything like that. But we started looking at their stats for them and giving them a report. Anybody can set up Google and then they're looking at it, doing whatever. But once every quarter, one of us will sort of look at their stuff and be like, "Hey, these pages are performing well, you should probably update this, because remember this looks like shit, and you said you'd come back to it or whatever." And if that thing is bigger than the monthly maintenance, then you got some more work to do, which can feed somebody who's new to the team too. It can really feed them really well. It could keep them really busy.
Carl: Well, and it gives you a chance every time you learn something new to review the existing project and say, "Let's try this, let's do this." Also, I'll say research, discoveries, all that kind of stuff, that's another common thing that people package. We've had that conversation before. Don't call it discovery, call it definition. Discovery sounds kind of hippie juice. But when it comes to research, this was one that we packaged that worked really well where we just package competitive research. And we were able to show what a report looked like, redacted, right? We're not showing. But the thing was, we didn't have to redact as much because we weren't talking about a client, we were talking about one of their competitors. So to be able to have somebody who's just trying to figure out, is what they're doing working? And then you just do usability test on a customer that you don't have. Sit some people down and have them try to accomplish something for an automotive group that you don't work with for retail.
Gene: You remember. We've been in the industry long enough. We remember when Basecamp was 37 signals. And we remember when they used to be a design shop, right?
Carl: Back when I believed in Sandy Clause.
Gene: Yeah. And they actually did that. They would do a usability review of FedEx or whatever. And that shit got a lot of traction for them.
Carl: Yeah. Well, and that was also, let's just say it, that was confusion marketing too, because a lot of people thought, "They redesigned FedEx," right? Which I appreciated, and also ripped off. We started doing that stuff too, because we all did whatever they did, but I will say that when we did the usability testing, it wasn't saying we redesigned it. It was saying, we sat 40 people down. These are the things they can do, can't do. This is what they like, this is what they don't care for. And what was great was it could save a potential customer, if we were going to work with them, a 60, $70,000 feature that they thought their competitor had that everybody loved, because they then find out people hate that. People don't use that. And you just liked it because you didn't have it. You thought, "Oh, they just launched that thing. They're promoting that thing. We should have that thing." The reality is nobody wants it. Yeah. So package services. That's a good way to go, Gene.
Gene: I think it is. Yeah. How about something completely different?
Carl: All right, Monty Python. What do you got?
Gene: Well, I mean, we're talking about sort of reselling or figuring out how to sell things we do in a different way or whatever, basically. How about doing something completely different, like turning your office into a cowork?
Carl: You know what? That was a popular thing. Now, when we went distributed, we did have people that wanted to come in and start working there. Again, it felt like a whole different level of something we weren't familiar with, so we didn't do it. But you did it, right? So how did that work out?
Gene: We did. Well, we now have two locations and they're nothing but coworks, so I think it can work out. It just depends on where you are and how you approach it.
Carl: So what were the benefits of doing that?
Gene: Well, right now, we reap the benefits in that SoCo itself has a lot of people who work in there that do the same things that we do, but on a smaller scale, they're all freelancers. I mean, we've had a couple of companies rent large portions of it, and for those, they're sort of insulated, they're doing their own thing or whatever. They're not necessarily competition, but they're not going to freelance with us. But the most part, freelancers, writers, videographers, front end guys, developers, which creates a really good network for us to staff out projects to the point where two years ago, three years ago, we were like, "Why do we even have employees? They're basically doing the work." Our employees hang out.
Carl: Was this in an all office meeting, you pulled everybody together and say, "Hey, I appreciate everybody being here. We're trying to figure out why are you here?"
Gene: No. No, not at all. Not at all.
Carl: Well, and it's also an event space, right?
Gene: Yep. Yeah. I mean, you sort of rent it out to the local community for events and stuff. It works out. Works out really well.
Carl: So how does that work for you in terms of your revenue? How does it enhance your revenue?
Gene: Well, it's turned into a completely separate business.
Carl: Have to, yeah.
Gene: It's a completely different business. It has its own employees and management and stuff like that. But in terms of period three, we work directly with the members of the community. I mean, since COVID, everybody's been kind distributed or whatever, because this is how shit is now. But it's like having a team that's literally all sitting together in the office, but they're freelancers or whatever. And they work together and it all kind of works because of the close proximity. It removes a lot of the anxiety from staffing a project with nothing but contractors, because they're all there together. They all know each other. They go to the same meetups, and it's pretty-
Carl: So it's a separate company, but you own the other company?
Gene: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Carl: I love that smile. You're like, "Mm-hmm (affirmative)." So when you look at it that way, then, in terms of the time required for you to manage it and the revenue that comes back to you personally or to that team, is it worth it? I mean, you're obviously happy about it, but it's worth it. So this gets to diversifying, right? Totally launching something that's not digital services, that's not building a digital product, that's all of that stuff. I think that's amazing if you can do it. I mean, if you look at Dusty Gulleson from eResources, he owns buildings. He buys the buildings that his businesses are going to be in. That's kind of amazing.
Gene: That's an asset. And that's one of the big problems with a services company, is there are no assets, your employees are your assets, right? So in order to get more money, you have to have more time, which means more people. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's just a different set of problems than owning a building.
Carl: And that's a whole nother episode because there are other ways you can raise your rates. A lot of people are worried about that, but you can totally do it.
Gene: I'll talk about this. we've got the cowork, but I also own a gym. And one of the things that the future still isn't here yet, right? I don't know what the fuck that is. [crosstalk 00:22:05].
Carl: You're a multi-preneur.
Gene: Thank you. I don't know what the next couple of years are going to look like. I mean the gym could just die because no one goes there because COVID, and everybody's scared. I mean, it can happen. But when COVID first hit, we had to figure out what to do because all the members were like, "I'm canceling for a year, or I'm canceling until there's a vaccine," or whatever. And we didn't know. We were like, "Fuck, there goes all the revenue."
Carl: Can you put it on pause for me? That was the question that everybody was getting. Can we just pause this until COVID's over?
Gene: Yeah. And that happened at the cowork.
Carl: Two years later.
Gene: Mm-hmm (affirmative). so what we did was we immediately shifted at the gym from in person classes to digital classes. So we didn't do, everybody probably saw all the little live streams, and you're watching some dude on Instagram live do a workout and you're supposed to do it with him. Early on, I was like, "No one wants to watch us workout." But what we'll do is we'll program it, program the workout, we'll record one of the coaches talking you through it, demonstrate the movements, how to do it properly, safely. And then we also distributed some of our equipment. Some people didn't have equipment, so we rented out our kettle bells, we rented out-
Carl: That's smart.
Gene: Some of the stuff. So they had this digital connection to us, and then they had some of the equipment if they needed it. And so they were able to get our services every day. And we just stepped up the coaching game. We checked in with them more often. Whereas if we check in with you once every two weeks, we checked in with you every other day to make sure you were doing it, for the people that want. Not everybody wants that.
Carl: So it's a heavier lift in terms of your involvement.
Gene: Yeah.
Carl: But it also built a bridge until people were comfortable to come back in.
Gene: But this right now, the gym's back open. Classes, they're not as full as they were. They're a fourth full, but we have still maintained. We've reduced the amount of digital services that we provide now. We just write the workout and send it to them and check in with them. But we actually have some clients that came in, they just do digital, and that's all they still do. So we have a handful of these remote clients that we coach, which is a little weird, but that's a thing where we're like, "Could that be a whole business?"
Carl: That's a huge upside. It could be a huge upside, right? I know a lot of physical trainers, that sounded wrong. I know a lot of personal trainers have made that move years before COVID or whatever just to be able to sell more, because to your point, right? They could only make as much money as they could charge for their time. But now if they can find a way to distribute their time to build once and repeat, right? Build one, sell many, that whole model, that's really interesting. I think that plays out for shops as well. If you start looking at education, there there's a real uptick in people doing boot camps and calling them boot camps, because master classes, they tried to call them, and it didn't. "We'll go to boot camps." But selling six weeks of education of something that they've learned. How to do something, or best practices in a role or that sort of stuff. The bureau's working on something for 2022 that's going to be a little more elaborate. But this idea of packaging your knowledge and selling it gets to that build one, sell many kind of mindset.
Gene: Yeah. We have a member in SoCo that for years, they did search engine marketing, but now they make these customized classes on how to do search engine marketing and they sell that to people, which I thought was like, "Wow, that's much better than doing all this search engine marketing."
Carl: Well, and also, if you teach somebody else to do it, and then they go and do it, and I'm not saying this is right. It takes a level of liability away from you too. We had the episode where we talked about getting sued. You may still end up with some sort of backlash if something happens. But the reality is, you're also constantly keeping an eye on what's next so that you can update for the next class and maybe every third or fourth cycle, somebody comes back through.
Gene: That's right. I will say, I mean, you had events or whatever on the agenda for this too, but I've not run any events or produced any events or whatever in four or five years, almost. I don't know, somewhere in there.
Carl: Some would argue you never have.
Gene: I would too. I would say that I've definitely lost a step in keeping up with, I don't know how much fucking difference this makes for the industry, but who's who and what they're doing, right? Because there's people coming up with new shit all the time. I'm probably three months behind in whatever, but where I was used to be, people would tell me before they released their stuff, you know what I mean? So that was definitely competitive advantage that I don't have anymore. But whatever. Six one way, half a dozen the other. Most clients don't really need the most current shit anyway.
Carl: Oh wow. That was a defeatist mentality. I like that one.
Gene: I think everybody would agree.
Carl: Oh hell, don't add more weight. It's just going to get sloppy anyway. No, I'll say this. And events and products are two of the things on the list, and we're not going to get to both of them, but we'll bring this back next week. But with events, one thing I want to say is that it's all lot of work. People say they want to do it. They don't realize it's a lot of work. And I put this in the newsletter. I have no data to back this up, but I'm going to act like it's a fact. I think the reason most events you don't see a third time is because the person's thought, "It's not worth it. I didn't know I was going to catch hell from certain people. I didn't know speakers were going to be so hard to wrangle. I didn't know that the content or that that person was going to say that thing on stage, and now I'm catching the backlash."
Gene: You mean putting a giant Facebook logo in flames when Facebook is your biggest sponsor?
Carl: After Carl told them, "Yeah, that would be cool."
Gene: Who did that? When did that happen?
Carl: Converged, Florida. And I said, "I don't want to be a part of an event where they're not allowed to do that." And Facebook left halfway through. Okay. So also you may have a partner that you're working with that's a total jerk who's just going to sabotage your every move. [crosstalk 00:28:18]. I know you did, but just to say with events, you have to have a goal. You have to have a purpose and you have to make sure that you believe in that purpose with enough passion that you're going to see it through, because it's going to take three years before you really start to see it come back. There are people who have been doing this. You know what? I'll say, Christina [inaudible 00:28:37]. It's an amazing event. I'm sure that she is now established if she wasn't already, right? As content strategy's guiding light. But that event supplements what she does so much, it's got to, right? In terms of her business, in terms of all that, and to your point, it probably should be a separate business if it isn't, I don't know.
Gene: She's smart. It probably is.
Carl: Absolutely, right? And then you look at a lot of e-com shops who have their own e-com workshops and things like that just trying to attract those clients. So is your event going to be for prospects? Is it going to be for the industry? Because you know what? People want to work with people who are doing cool stuff. And so that's a great way for the talent shortage to start doing stuff. But when you decide you're going to do it, you have got to talk to the people that you think are going to come. And this gets back to something you were saying earlier, being out of it.
Carl: One of the things that we've done at the bureau that I wish we had done it before, but we were going too fast, we couldn't think about it was, I look at the people who are in the space that we want to put on an event for. Normally around content or a role. And I ask them, "Where do you go to find out the answers to questions that you have?" And you know what? It'll be a podcast. It'll be a newsletter. It'll be a blog. It'll be a publication. And all those publications and blogs and newsletters and whatever, they have people. It may be another event, right? I appreciate people who look at other events and bring those speakers to their event. A lot of people will say, "Oh, that's poaching speakers." I think it's poaching speakers if they were going to be in front of this audience, right? It's actually sharing an audience. I normally try to find fresh faces, but sometimes there are people who are established that are going to give you credibility if they say yes.
Gene: Yeah. I mean, that's how that works.
Carl: Yeah. But I think events, and the last newsletter, definitely I went a little bit deeper on this. I could write a whole pamphlet, not just a newsletter, Gene, a pamphlet, it's many page.
Gene: A zine? Could you make a zine?
Carl: I could make an e-zine.
Gene: Yeah. There you go.
Carl: An e-zine. But yeah. So events, I think, can be really good, but you'll see so many people who don't realize the time it's going to take, the disruption to their team. The cultural challenges. Period three was small and you did converge and everybody got to be a part of it and it made enough money, I'm assuming, that it was worth your while and everybody was able to see the benefit down the road. What I'll say is that if you are a shop of 20 or 30 people and you carve out a team of five to put on an event, you're going to have 15 people that get sick of hearing about all the cool stuff. And they're going to be thinking, "You know what? I'm paying for them to do that. I'm working hard so that they can talk about the cheesecake tray that they're going to roll out and everybody's going to love them."
Gene: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And they go on stage and take a bow.
Carl: Yeah. And meanwhile, have you ever been to an event where they go, "And I'd like to thank all the people back at the shop doing my job for me."
Gene: Yeah, no. Nope.
Carl: No. I think it might be part of the reason [inaudible 00:31:52] broke up, honestly, right? There were a lot of things, but one was, I was traveling all over the world on stages talking about how cool we were, and I wasn't even there.
Gene: You don't even know who we are anymore.
Carl: I mean, honestly, when I look back on it, I wish I had done better. I wish I had treated the team better. I mean, I wasn't a jerk, but it's just one of those things where I was pulling in a lot of work and just kind of mailing the work over and saying, "Hey, I'll be in town in two months. Romania is awesome." So, yeah. But Gene, I know we're coming to the end. We'll hit products next week. Maybe circle around events a little bit more.
Gene: Because I've got a ton of failures in trying to create products.
Carl: So many product failures because we were all told it was easy. It's not. But you know what? I do have a hot take, Gene. I don't know. I want to show off my whole shirt.
Gene: That's a good shirt.
Carl: I don't know.
Gene: Hero for hire.
Carl: That's right. Luke Cage. Him and Jessica, man. What a pair. Hot take.
Gene: Hot take.
Carl: I don't know the first time I heard this. It may have been even way back in high school or something, but the grass is always greener where you water it.
Gene: That's good.
Carl: Well, and it's true, right? The grass is always greener on the other side of the street. Whatever. Just saying that-
Gene: That's because your neighbor has the sprinkler system installed.
Carl: Until you get over there and you go, "Oh, look at these brown patches," but I just want to say, when you start looking at packaging services, you start looking at alternate revenue sources, all this kind of stuff. If you put a lot of effort into it, it's going to be successful. So ask yourself, when you're looking at your digital services, the stuff you're doing now, are you putting the right amount of attention into it? Are you giving it the love it needs? Or have you fallen out of love with it? Because a lot of times we've been doing something for so often and then it just comes around again. We're like, "I'm burned out on this." And you decide to do something new and it seems really successful. That's because you're giving it attention. So Gene, the grass is always greener where you water it.
Gene: That's a good one.
Carl: That's a t-shirt.
Gene: That is a t-shirt. All right.
Carl: It's a long one.
Gene: It's all right.
Carl: Bye, everybody. I froze.
