[00:02] Hey. Hey guys, what's up? Welcome back to another episode of the Smart Flip with me and Matt. And today we have Tony from my repair app.

[00:10] Before we get started on the podcast, guys, just want to make sure that you guys have all the resources that you need to succeed in this business. If you check in the YouTube description below or on Spotify and Apple, it should have them there as well.

[00:23] Number one, we have the guide to flipping phones and electronics. You can grab that in our Facebook group. It's, it's nothing held back phone flipping on Facebook. There's about 15,000 members in there.

[00:34] Other resellers just like you definitely join the community.

[00:37] Then we also have our ebook, Tech flips to profit. You can get it for free on the audio feed of the podcast, episode 11.

[00:46] And then if you want, you know, the PDF version and bonuses and things like that, you can buy it for $4.95 in one of the description links below. Below.

[00:57] But with that being said, this is the Smart Flip and let's get started.

[01:02] So guys, today we have Tony from my repair app. Now, Tony, I, I've seen Tony quite a few for quite a few months actually.

[01:11] And I felt like I should just reach out because what he's. Well, I actually, it actually came across my feed the other day. He helped one of our clients with his, his repair shop and I was like, hey, I know that person and that person is very reputable.

[01:28] So I figured I'd reach out to him. And we got to talking and we got on the phone and we had a great conversation. So. And we found out that we hit the industry from two different sides of the coin.

[01:39] But you know, we have a lot of commonality there. So Tony, dude, how'd you get into the industry and what led up to my repair app? The creation of that.

[01:52] Yeah, definitely. First of all, yeah, Chris, thanks so much for having me on here, man. Yeah, that, that conversation by the way. Yeah, that we hit that time limit real quick.

[01:59] And Chris, like by the way, I got another call coming up,

[02:03] so. Yeah, that was a, that was a good, good, good indicator of, you know, like minded. Yeah. So my background. So prior to the repair industry I was, I did various sales jobs.

[02:13] So it's kind of like a, you could, you could say a sales professional. My previous job I did a little bit of digital marketing was sales for a digital marketing firm.

[02:21] But prior to that it was a litany of sales job. But most reputable one was a call center where we were selling at and T and five other insurance Internet companies.

[02:33] As well as DirecTV. And that taught. That taught me a lot, because that job was tough because we were selling to people who didn't want our product. Essentially, like, if you live in a city where you only have AT&T and you're like, trying to call Verizon,

[02:46] they thought they were calling Verizon, they would call our department instead. And we're like, hey, thanks for calling about Verizon. And so you're trying to sell them the product that they're trying to get away from.

[02:55] And so that taught us how to listen and really just uncover people's needs. And so while I was working at the digital marketing firm, I ran into this guy who owned my first shop that is now ran into him through a mutual friend.

[03:08] They were eating at Qoba and just met him. And I'm like, what do you do for a living? And he's like, I have a repair shop, own my own business.

[03:15] And I'm like, man, this guy's like three years younger than me, has his own business, and I'm at a job that I don't really like right now. And I was a little jealous.

[03:22] Like, that's so cool. And so working at a digital marketing firm, I offered some assistance because he was kind of complaining about business being slow. And so a couple months of talking,

[03:32] he didn't want to put in the work. And it's a very common theme that I've learned over the last seven years that not a lot of people want to put in the work.

[03:40] He's like, oh, it's slow. I'm like, did you do this? Can you try this? Can you try that? Didn't want to do it and started talking about being burned out.

[03:47] And he's like, I don't know, man. Maybe I'm just going to sell the business. And I'm sitting there like, I did the math already, because I'm like, well, based on your area, how many people are there, your competitors, and what you're earning, I'm like, yeah, you haven't even scratched a surface of what you could be doing.

[04:02] And so I had no idea about how to do phone repair. I've done a couple computer repairs back in the day or like computer builds, but never, never fixed a phone in my life.

[04:11] And I just told him, how about I buy your business?

[04:14] And. But I didn't have any money. I. I would like. I just paid off all my credit card debt. So I was paid off 20 grand worth of debt, but I had no money to my name.

[04:22] And so I Borrowed a thousand dollars from a friend, gave him a thousand dollars deposit, and was paying him 5 bucks, 500 bucks a month for his business.

[04:30] I watched him fix one iPhone, six screen, watch one video on how to fix phones,

[04:36] and the rest was history. And just started fixing phones. I mean, it was, it came natural. My first repair took me like 35 minutes. And I was like, oh, this isn't too bad.

[04:44] And so I guess I had a natural affinity to it. So we just did that and I just kind of grew the business, just did the basics, made sure, you know, paid attention to what was coming into the door where people were asking for, made sure we had parts in stock,

[04:56] accessories, and really put a emphasis on accessories, smart screen protectors and cases. Because, I mean, if they broke their device, I figured, hey, they should protect it. And those are high margin products.

[05:06] And they bought it, right? It makes sense. They come in with a broken phone and they're like, hey, how do I prevent this from happening again? I'm like, all right, buy this case for 20 bucks.

[05:13] And okay. And so over the years,

[05:17] started, you know, getting better, got busy, and actually, at one point I peaked at. I did about roughly $70,000 in revenue in one month by myself.

[05:27] And that nearly killed me.

[05:31] It was, it was rough. Yeah, it was.

[05:33] Most days I was at the shop 12 hours a day, 13 hours a day. And I realized, yeah, I need, I need help. So I hired a couple people and then partnered with someone else to open up a couple or to open some stores together.

[05:46] And so we have a few stores that we own, and so we've been owning them for a few years. And long story short, I wanted to grow more and have more stores, but I started to kind of feel like maybe there was more out there.

[05:59] I wasn't 100 satisfied with the potential.

[06:03] And,

[06:04] you know, I felt like my skill set was better served almost like on a training environment, because I'm, I'm good at training, I think. And so we did a little bit of consulting for a little bit, only to realize that the training can only go so far when people's systems are broken.

[06:20] I wanna back up on that. You said you did a little bit of training. You told me you consulted hundreds of repair shops.

[06:28] I mean, a little bit.

[06:30] Yeah, I,

[06:32] I try to be, I try to be not, not, not like a false humble. But I just, you know, some people may not believe it, but I just basically spent like nine months just speaking to as many shops as I could.

[06:42] So, you know, officially we spoke with hundreds of stores, officially,

[06:47] consulted was about 70 to 80, depending on how you look at it. Because some we. I just didn't charge them because I did. I didn't. I felt bad.

[06:55] Ultimately, everyone had the same problem. Nobody was almost. Nobody was handling the intake process correctly. They were answering the phone very poorly. You know, it's like, the easiest thing to make money on is phone calls.

[07:06] People always, like, smiling. Where I'm gonna go with this?

[07:10] Matt's like, this. This. I've heard this before. I mean,

[07:14] still true to this day, like, everybody you see on the repair groups are going, hey, then we're not slower today. Blah, blah, blah. You know, who do you do for marketing?

[07:22] Who do you use for marketing? Who can help marketing? And then you ask a basic question of, like, what are you doing to drive sales now?

[07:30] And the answer is always a little incomplete. But then more so if you were to call their store and pretend to be a customer and say, hey, how much do you fix my iPhone 11?

[07:40] My experience was over 90, probably even 95% of the time. It was abysmal. It was embarrassingly bad. It was, oh, how much to fix this phone? Yeah, 129.

[07:52] Yep.

[07:53] Anything else? Okay, bye.

[07:55] Like, that was the conversation. Like. And that was the majority of every conversation I encountered when I called Mystery Shop stores, and I just went, well, there you go. There's your problem.

[08:06] You're.

[08:06] You're.

[08:07] You have more people call you than walk into your store. So your number one lead generator, you're just hissing in the wind. You're not even trying.

[08:15] Yep.

[08:15] You're not giving them any value. You're just like, oh, here's my price. And all they're gonna. The customer's gonna go is say, cool, thanks.

[08:22] Let me see what this guy charges. And if you're not the cheapest, then you didn't get the sale. So, like, you built no value. You gave them no reason to come to you.

[08:31] And so that kind of became, you know, an indicator for me that, hey, we can. We can help people more. So we did a little scripting, but again, came down to systems.

[08:41] That's where we realized, you know, that wasn't the biggest issue. The biggest issue was effectively their point of sale, because that's where you spend most of your time on as a.

[08:50] Either if you work, no matter what you do in the store, own the store, you're a technician, you're a salesperson, you spend a significant portion of your time on your point of sale.

[08:58] Yeah.

[08:59] And so, you know, any training material, anything that has to do with the business, the more of it that's consolidated into the point of sale. That has to do with customer interaction, inventory management, things of that nature.

[09:13] It really helps because, again, that's what they're on. Right. Whereas if I'm having to reference some other website, I'm probably. I might forget to click on that website. Right. So some people may even have, like, SOPs on a.

[09:26] On a Google sheet or a script on a Google sheet or whatever.

[09:31] Now you're depending on the employee to remember to click on that, to open that up. Whereas the point of sale is always open.

[09:36] Yeah, we're actually.

[09:37] That's kind of like where we now.

[09:38] Realize about mailing out, like, a booklet, like a literal. Like, because we have SOPs.

[09:45] God, I don't even know how many math. Like, it's ridiculous how many SOPs we have for certain things. Like, I'm getting to the point now where I'm thinking about just printing it all out.

[09:54] When somebody joins, just mail it. Like, that way they can just bring it with them, you know, like, maybe. I don't know. But then you, you know.

[10:02] No, I mean, it's not a bad idea. I mean, you know, you can't. Yeah. I don't think you can consolidate everything, but there's a lot that you can. And SOPs are underrated.

[10:12] And, I mean, dude,

[10:15] the amount of people that I started flipping.

[10:19] I remember I bought the first course I bought. I printed everything out, like, and I put it in a binder. I took that seriously.

[10:26] I didn't know that you.

[10:27] Oh, yeah. I never tell that story, now that I think about it. Like.

[10:30] Yeah, like, no.

[10:31] Dave had, like. Like all these things that were just like, here's what you do. Here's how it works here, blah, blah, blah. Right. And I was like, okay, I need to, like, print this stuff out.

[10:41] And I bought a binder specifically to put them in the binder. And. Yeah, it was, you know. I mean.

[10:48] Yeah.

[10:50] I think it's interesting, Tony, that you're talking about how.

[10:55] How totally lost stores are in the art of conversation. Just simply, like, how to build, you know, rapport. How to do that, even in a natural sense. You know, Forget St.

[11:07] Forget SOPs. Like, how. How do you just talk to people, right? And. And be cordial and present good customer service and, like, seem like a business that people will want to give their money to.

[11:16] Right. Fascinating.

[11:18] A hundred percent. I mean, I think you're 100% right. Right. I think a lot of us. A lot of people in the industry are. So they put the cart before the horse.

[11:28] 100% right. They're talking about, maybe they're talking about SOPs, maybe they're talking about additional marketing spend and how much money they have to spend on marketing. And maybe I need to do this and that.

[11:37] But then when it comes down to just simply the customer interaction, they overlook that. And the number one excuse I get is, well, I'm a technician or I hire technicians, they're introverted, blah, blah, blah.

[11:48] They're not salespeople. You don't have to be a salesperson to just greet a customer, go, hello, welcome. How are you today? Right, like, what, what, what, what brings you in today?

[11:57] Oh my goodness, your phone broke. So sorry to hear that. Like, it doesn't require a salesperson to show some empathy. And, and I tell everyone in our stores, I don't care what your position is, you are a salesperson at some in some shape form.

[12:08] You are a salesperson because you are selling us. You're selling our brand, our company. You're representing us. You answer that phone if someone's calling, whether to inquire about a repair, the price or the status of a repair or anything, directions to the shop.

[12:23] You are representing the brand. You're representing the business. You're a salesperson. Not in the sense of selling them, but again, you are selling the company. Right. Like, hey, we are reputable.

[12:33] You can trust us. We're not stupid. We're not going to disrespect you. We know what we're doing. And I feel like too many people in the industry use the whole label technician as a crutch.

[12:42] Oh, I'm a tech. Doesn't mean you can't speak to humans. And if you can't, you need to learn because you need to. You have to be able to speak. And there's unlimited amount of free content on the Internet to learn how to speak.

[12:55] Yeah. You know, there's no excuse to.

[12:56] In today's world, truly, I would say.

[12:59] That human interaction is both the doorway and the exit to this process. It's like before all of that goes down, you gotta know how to step into conversation with people, facilitate their needs, do it with a smile, make them feel gold, you know, make them feel great.

[13:14] You know, give them a quality service at a great price or a quality product at a great price, and then help them feel good about what happened so that they return.

[13:22] And you know, if you look at this beyond, I think a means that is simply transactional. You don't win just the moment, you win a customer for life and that is how you run a business.

[13:34] And so I really love the approach that you've taken here. Just to interject that quickly.

[13:39] Well, I appreciate that.

[13:40] I go back to something you said. A lot of people put the cart before the horse, right? Like, a lot of people are aiming for automation when all they need to do is answer the phone.

[13:50] Like, oh, my gosh, like that.

[13:52] Like, we talked about that briefly.

[13:53] Yeah, yeah, like, but like, I was literally, we were doing a training on marketing yesterday and it was a training over AI for. And how to. How to implement that into, you know, reselling.

[14:04] And there's many ways you can do it, but the main ways that I recommended doing it is to increase your communication skills. That, like, was the biggest part. It was like, look, you don't really need a.

[14:16] Like, okay, for example, I get phone calls now and half of them are AI agents. Right. I immediately hang up. I do not give a flying **** about what they're going to say now, you know,

[14:29] just because, like, I know the pause is too long in between, you know,

[14:35] But I like to use AI and systems to expound upon the knowledge that somebody already has. Right, Correct.

[14:46] So that's the way it should be.

[14:48] That's the way it should be. Right. Like, you don't want to completely get rid of human interaction because honestly, for everybody listening, that's where all of your money's going to come.

[14:58] The fact that you will get on the phone with a customer could be the reason they sell a device to you or get the device repaired by you is because you're the only human that actually answered the phone.

[15:08] Like, yes, that's a real thing now. Like half of the companies or even, like, even if you miss a phone call.

[15:15] Automation does help here where, like, if you miss a phone call for whatever reason, having that automatic text back is incredibly important, you know? Yeah, it's like that, like what you said there is very powerful.

[15:28] The point of contact or the point of sale is the most. And exactly what Matt said, it's the door in and the door out. Like, it determines everything about your business.

[15:38] And most people,

[15:40] they just want to be a tech or they just want to work in the back, or they just want to do things through mess.

[15:44] Put my head down and turn screws. Yeah, but that's not, that's not the business anymore. You know, maybe eight years ago, sure, that was the business, right? You could have. You could do that and you could make a good living turning screws.

[15:56] Today, customers have options.

[15:59] There are way more techs today than there were eight years ago. You know, you have almost every community college, every technical college teaching phone repair. Yeah. You know, and then you have industry specific companies that are teaching other people to make become techs.

[16:12] And then you have in, you know, these influencers on all sorts of social media, making videos, getting millions of views. Here's how to fix phones. Yeah, you know, it's not exactly, it's not hard.

[16:22] This is not a hard job. You're taking screws out and you're popping them back in. Like it's not really like I would say the majority of repairs that walk in through your door are going to be easy.

[16:32] Unless again, you are one of the rarer people that specialize in data recovery. Sure. But for the majority of mom and pop shops or any kind of repair shop that has a brick and mortar business, the majority of your business is usually straightforward.

[16:45] It's take screen off. Right. Take screen off, take screws out, pop off the bracket, replace,

[16:52] do it again in reverse. And you, you know, most screen, screen swaps you can do in less than 15 minutes. So it's not difficult. But so I think people are.

[17:01] So maybe they're stuck in the past. And again, it's not the same for everybody. But the fact is customers have options. And so the reason why you have companies like Chick Fil A where they have outstanding customer service.

[17:12] Right. My pleasure. And this and that. And they really change the landscape. They're not open on Sundays. They're not open 24 7. They're open limited hours and they'll produce more profit than a McDonald's that's open 24 7.

[17:25] Where you walk up to the drive through, they're like, what do you want?

[17:28] Yeah, you know, and, and then I'll have your total out the window. Like completely different vibe. Right. I don't want to go there. But like if, if I'm looking at McDonald's and chick fil A, instinctively their customer.

[17:39] My customer service experience with Chick Fil A draws me there because I know I'm not going to have to deal with some idiot who is like, wait, what? No ketchup.

[17:47] Extra ketchup. Got it. Like it really that's, that's kind of like it. It puts a picture in your mind of how you view that brand. And so for instance, my main not indicator driver, I suppose of this has always been like our main competitor at our largest location has not renovated their store since they opened.

[18:06] It is. They're still using,

[18:08] you know, these china accessories with non branded with you know, plastic sleeves. And you Know, half the light bulbs genuinely should have been replaced five years ago. It looks shady, but they're located directly across the street from the high school.

[18:22] You can walk there within 30 seconds. So just location alone is what kept them alive. However,

[18:27] we have customers pretty much on a daily basis saying, hey, we live right down the street from there. But we walked in. Not a great experience. The guy didn't greet us really weird, didn't get a good vibe.

[18:39] Checked out Google. You guys have way more reviews than them. They're better reviews. This place looks nice. We saw the pictures. We heard good things about you.

[18:46] That alone drives people in the business. And then when you back that up with a proper greeting. Hello, we'll be right with you. Maintaining eye contact. Just the basic most things.

[18:58] We'll average, you know, 600 to a thousand bucks a month in tips without even asking for tips.

[19:04] That's so good.

[19:05] It's like tip or no tip. Yeah, it's like tip or no tip. And they're like, yeah.

[19:09] And we receive reviews unsolicited, where you have other people who are like, oh, how do I bribe people for reviews? I'm like, no, just do a good job.

[19:17] And it's. Oh, man. It's just, you know, and, and, and then they'll do the whole thing. Oh, I got a one star. Let's do you know, everyone reported and deleted.

[19:25] No man up to unless. Again, unless it's like straight up ridiculous. But yeah, unless for the most part, man up to it and own it. And that's actually going to give you more 5 stars and more business if you address it correctly instead of ignoring it.

[19:39] But you want to, you know, really, you're not responding to the one star. You are letting everyone that reads that review know that, hey, we are a reputable business if and when we make mistakes, because we will, we man up to them, we own up to them and we will make it right.

[19:53] We're a professional place of business. Yeah. So it all kind of comes down to customer service. Right. I think at the from the highest level to the most basic.

[20:02] And I think if shops more people just realize that they can folk. They can focus more on just making sure their customers are treated well and are respected.

[20:12] You'll instantly see a. You'll make more money that day.

[20:16] Yeah.

[20:17] With zero new investment. Right. You're not having to buy new inventory, throw another grand in marketing. It's like, man, you're bleeding anyway. You know, like we had one client just not to go up too much on a tangent, but when we Were consulting.

[20:29] We had one guy who was telling me, man, our phone's ringing off the hook, but business is so slow, I don't know what's going on. And so I'm like, well, how many phone calls?

[20:38] Right? Cause like, everyone said they're busy. Where do you get like five phone calls, 10 phone calls? I'm like, look at your history. Last 30 days, right? What have you done in the last eight, 30 days?

[20:48] I believe he. This was like two years ago, so I don't remember exactly, but I believe he said it was roughly around 800 phone calls inbound in one month.

[20:55] And it's.

[20:55] I'm like, you're getting. Yeah, you're getting 30 plus and six days a week. And you're getting 30 phone calls a day. Yeah. Like, how many repairs are you doing? We're averaging five.

[21:07] Like, where are the other 25 customers a day going? And mind you, these are inbound calls. These are not, you know, them calling out, these people calling them the store.

[21:15] So I'm like, okay, so maybe not all of them are new customers, but five out of 30 seems weird. So I did a, you know, a test phone call. I called the store, and my goodness, right?

[21:25] It was the 129. That's the price. And then pause. And they waited for me to say something.

[21:30] And I was like, okay, is that the best you guys can do? Yep.

[21:33] Okay, thanks so much. Yep. Okay, bye.

[21:36] So cordial.

[21:36] That was the whole conversation. Yeah. I was like, man, you guys are just bleeding leads. And so basically I gave him a little script that I created, and 30 days later I checked back in with them and.

[21:46] Because I implemented that. But also the script also includes book an appointment in your point of sale. I don't care why they're calling, get their name, get their phone number, get their email, Create a customer profile in your point of sale and write down any notes from that call.

[22:00] And then that gives you something to follow up with 30 days later. Just phone repair. Like just the phone repair category, right? Not any other type of repair, no accessories, just phone repair.

[22:11] They saw an increase of $8,300.

[22:15] That's high margin. 80% margin.

[22:17] Yeah.

[22:20] Yeah. You lost $75,000 in profit. If you were to, you know, extrapolate over the last month, a year, because you guys weren't just asking a few follow up questions. That's the insanity of it, is a few follow up questions can change your life.

[22:34] Okay, so I gotta take this moment for everybody listening and say, like, did you hear that? Run it back. Because what, what Tony's sharing is that it's not just what you do, it's how you do it.

[22:45] And if all these other phone shops out there, I kind of think of them as like places where you can go get an oil change, get your freaking oil changed.

[22:52] Anywhere you can get a glass repair on phone done. Like I could pick three spots within a two mile distance from my house.

[22:59] It's at a gas station.

[23:01] Yeah, but like the why affects the what. If you have like there's a depth to how you're willing to treat people and that's pronounced, and people catch that on the front and the back end of your business, then people will gladly pay you, pay you a higher premium to do the same kind of work.

[23:19] And yeah, while the store down the street struggling, you could be crushing it because I mean that, that's an insane increase in margin there. That's fantastic.

[23:27] Yeah, we're actually so all of our locations, no matter what city they're in, we are the most expensive in our city and for good reason. Number one, if you Google phone repair near me in that vicinity, we're number one on Google because we have the most amount of reviews and the highest rated.

[23:40] But also, of course, you know, good SEO goes a long way too. But because we're ranked 1, we know, I know that when they search ***** pair near me, I'm the first option.

[23:50] They're going to call me first. So I don't have to compete with anyone on price. I have to compete on value and urgency and I get them in the door.

[23:59] Right. So like, hey, how do I get this customer to come in without.

[24:01] Yeah, something you said there was very powerful. You don't have to compete on price.

[24:06] Right. Like, so this is something I see in the buyback industry a lot. Like a lot of these other guys, like I'm in Houston, Texas. Houston, huge hub for buybacks.

[24:16] Massive. Lots of them, Right.

[24:20] They're almost all competing on price.

[24:23] Like they're paying the highest amount, like you know, scraping by with them, 20, $30 profits, you know, but that like, that's how they have to compete. But like if somebody calls me, they have a good experience on the phone, I ask them what else they might have to sell,

[24:37] you know, and things like that. I just like, I'm always like, how do you become more valuable to the customer? I want the customer to look at me like an atm like that.

[24:46] They cash out almost at any point or any day.

[24:49] If they need money, call Chris.

[24:50] Exactly. That's what I want them to Think. Right. And that could be six months from now. Right. So my. My conversations are usually like, hey, this is Chris with Bell Electronics.

[24:58] How can I help you? You know, and, you know, they're like, I want to sell this and that and everything else. I'm like, all right, cool. Let me grab a price for you.

[25:04] How's your day going? You know, And I just. You start a conversation, you be a real person, you know, like.

[25:10] Right.

[25:10] It can be something simple. Like, you know, man, look at that weather we're having today. It's nice day outside now. Like, whatever.

[25:16] Small talk. People underestimate it. Yeah.

[25:19] For real. Like, and, like, at the end of it, it's always like, hey, you know, like, even if we didn't close them on price. Right. Like, like, oh, well, you know, we weren't.

[25:29] We weren't able to come to an agreement on price for your 12 Pro Max. But we do buy, you know, MacBooks, iPad, smartwatches, cameras, VR headsets, and game consoles. Do you have anything else that you might be looking to sell?

[25:41] And bam.

[25:43] I can't tell you how many times they have sold me something else and then sold me the original item on top of that.

[25:50] I can concur. So we've actually. We don't put as much of an emphasis on buybacks as you guys probably do, obviously, but we do buy back. And, yeah, I can tell you the amount of people.

[26:00] You know, one thing I. I've learned over the years, a lot of people feel like they have to buy everything from every customer.

[26:07] Yeah.

[26:07] No matter the margin. And I am okay saying no if it's not up to my margin. I. Our instructions are, you know, we have a script for apologies. We can't pay this much, blah, blah, for whatever reason.

[26:22] And, you know, because we want to. We say we want to resell it in our store, has to be X condition. We back it up with a warranty that costs money.

[26:30] Blah, blah, blah.

[26:32] People, people. The assumption has been, if you say that these people will never sell you anything ever again,

[26:38] I honestly think almost everyone that we've ever not bought something from because we did exactly what you said. What you just said is like, hey, we also buy XYZ. We buy MacBooks.

[26:48] We buy gaming console. We buy and sell and repair xyz. We're not ending our relationship on this one transaction. Right. And I think that's one thing that shops have to understand.

[26:56] People in general have to understand. You are a multifaceted person. You're a multifaceted organization. Your business is not just One thing, you are not just buying and selling one device.

[27:05] You can buy, sell, trade, repair, virtually anything if you want to. And if your customers know you do that as well as, let's say you offer insurance or you resell insurance products.

[27:17] We tell people, regardless if they're calling us or emailing us or they're in our store, hey, just want to let you know, we also do xyz. We buy, sell, fix, repair these types of devices, and we also offer insurance for as little as five bucks a month, blah, blah,

[27:31] blah.

[27:32] And I've had people call us, laugh in our face about a repair price, saying, no way. Would never pay that. Come in the store within two to three months and say, hey, I remember when I called you to get my phone fixed.

[27:43] It was way too expensive. I decided to buy another one. But you said something about insurance, can I buy that?

[27:50] And I planted the seed. And people underestimate planting the seed. Yes, obviously you're not going to have 100% conversion rate. Even if you have a single digit conversion rate. It doesn't matter if you have to educate your customers what it is you do 100% of the time.

[28:03] Yeah, we call it the pitch rate. We, I measure the pitch rate.

[28:07] If your pitch rate is below 90%, where's my note? You're on thin ice.

[28:12] That was good.

[28:13] You're on thin ice. Because I don't care if, ooh, that wasn't your best pitch.

[28:19] Right. Like, oh, man, you, you didn't say as well as you could have. Your tonality wasn't quite as good. You kind of screwed up here. I don't care. You tried and you're going to do better next time.

[28:30] But if you're not, if you're not trying, if you're not pitching, you know, there's a famous athlete. It says something about you missing every single opportunity you didn't take. Yeah.

[28:41] You know, fill in the blank. And it's the same concept here. Hey, if you didn't pitch it, like, oh, why didn't you sell a screen protector? Oh, why didn't you, you know, why did, why did that customer walk out of here not knowing the extent, the full extent of what it is that we do as a business?

[28:54] You know why? And it's one thing when you have an employee you're probably underpaying due, I can understand because, A, they're underpaid. B, you probably are using a little shameless plug here, a point of sale where they don't have a metric dashboard where they can see the performance at A live at a live.

[29:14] But then you're also not training them. But then also,

[29:18] like, you mix all these things in. It's like, I can understand an underpaid employee doing that. But you, as the owner, you have zero, zero excuses as to why your customers are walking out of your store not knowing the full breadth of what your business is all about.

[29:34] You can't sit there in the groups and go, oh, I'm so slow. Does anyone else feeling slow this time of year when you are not giving your 110? And if you're not,

[29:43] you're like. And some people look at it like, well, Tony, why are you like. Like, I've had it happen. People have heard me say this kind of stuff and they're like, why are you, like, so upset?

[29:50] Or why are you so passionate? Or why are you talking that way? I'm like, because your life is in your hands. No one else is going to change your.

[29:58] Yeah, come on, bro.

[29:59] Your efforts, right? These are your efforts. You know, like, I'm not going to go in there. Like, you're not going to go into your client's place of business and be like, all right, let me do your buybacks for you.

[30:07] Yeah.

[30:08] No, like, you're. The buck stops with you. You can, you can only do so much. But then if you're not doing what you can do. Yeah, agree.

[30:16] So you said something there. I love the term pitch rate. Like, I love that.

[30:21] Yeah, we both did. Great turn.

[30:25] I say that because, like,

[30:28] I, I have something that I tell my students and I learned it from Billie Jean. So Billie Jean is marketing. He's a. He's a marketing genius. He's really good at what he.

[30:36] Yep, yep. Yeah, I ran into him a few years ago.

[30:38] Yeah, he's smart. He's a cool dude, too. But he said something a long time ago and it was. He was talking in the sense of marketing and getting services that way, but it applies to buybacks, repairs, almost anything.

[30:49] He said the amount of offers that you make in a given day determines how much money you're gonna make that day.

[30:55] I was like, so that reminded me when you said pitch rate, like, if you're getting. Whether you're doing reach outs on Marketplace or you're getting inbound leads, like, if you're making up to 25 offers a day, like, you're going to get something, especially in the buybacks, like, you're selling people money.

[31:13] Like, come on, like, people need it, you know?

[31:16] Yeah.

[31:16] That's what I love about the buyback space too, is like, you. It. It's a lot easier to sell somebody money than it is to take it from them. Right.

[31:24] Yeah. Your output determines your input.

[31:26] Exactly. Yeah. And, like, I get people that are.

[31:29] Famous, Alex, from what he said that.

[31:31] Exactly. Right.

[31:31] So I'm not taking credit for that. Yeah, yeah.

[31:34] Like, I get people that I'll take.

[31:35] Credit for pitch rate, but nothing else. Yeah.

[31:38] Yeah. I'm gonna quote you.

[31:39] Yeah. It's great, actually, to be fair. I, I, I, I, I, I. I've always known of that. I've always done that. But I never called it a pitch rate until I actually spoke with Eric over at ***** City Parts.

[31:51] Actually, we were at CES in Vegas last week.

[31:53] Nice.

[31:53] And he was talking about pitch rate, and I was like, yes. I'm like, that's what it's called. Yeah. Like, light bulb moment. Like, there it went.

[32:03] Spread that love around.

[32:05] Yeah. It finally made sense.

[32:08] That's incredibly powerful. Like,

[32:11] just. Because if you have enough conversations in any business on. Every. Every single day, like, it blows my mind. Like, we. So we've worked with a bunch of repair shops at this point that want to add.

[32:22] Yeah.

[32:22] Into their. Into their stuff. But one thing we've just kind of noticed overall with most of them is,

[32:30] well, number one, the thing that they say was burnout. Like, I'm doing too many things. And I'm like, all right, well, dial it down. Do the things you're best at.

[32:37] Like, if you want to add buybacks in, you have to. Number one, you have to. You have to talk to enough people on a given day to make that work.

[32:45] Yeah.

[32:46] Honestly, I'll say. I'll. I'll even say this. Like, some brand new people that we work with sometimes end up doing 10 times better than half the repair shops we've worked with.

[32:54] That's true. Absolutely. Because I believe shop owners already have these preconceived notions of how buybacks are supposed to work and things.

[33:02] When we rise, times have changed, right? Yeah. Ten years ago, five years ago. Different.

[33:07] Yeah.

[33:07] Like, so they kind of assume it's the same.

[33:09] Yeah. So, like, we'll have these brand new people come in that never flipped the phone in their life, you know, and six months later, they're doing seven, eight grand in profit per month and just killing these repairs.

[33:21] And that's more money than a lot of shops make.

[33:24] Exactly.

[33:24] That's. That's kind of the sad part. It's like they don't have nearly the headache, nearly the overhead, but again,

[33:31] not to cut you off, but it kind of goes Back to. I do want to mention this because if anyone's listening and is internally cussing me out when I said that we don't have to compete on price,

[33:41] please, like, I'm not saying we never do. I'm just saying because of our status on Google, because we are the first person that they call, we can. We can afford the luxury of not focusing on price first.

[33:52] Our priority is quality. We have it in stock. We can get you in today. And I have. My script really encourages them to come in as soon as possible. Right.

[34:01] Build an appointment. Again, comes down to, like you said, Matt, the rapport. Right. You develop that rapport. And that's why I love. That's one of the reasons why we created my repair app.

[34:10] The way we created it is where creating a ticket takes less. Way less than a minute. So there's no excuse of. Why didn't you take this customer's information and put it into your system to follow up?

[34:20] Oh, it takes too long. It takes like five minutes. No, it takes 12 seconds. And so there's. By the time you answer the phone, like, if your point of sale is open, just click on, you know, a new transaction.

[34:30] And as you're talking to them, you can at least create new customer. You know their phone number. It's on the call. Id. Put that in.

[34:37] Hey.

[34:37] Yeah, I can totally help you with that. My name is Tony.

[34:40] What's yours? Whatever. Like, it doesn't have to be, you know, again, it's. It's come down to the pitch rate. You will get better with time. And so if you at least try, then it's like, oh, yeah, my name is John.

[34:51] All right, John. Yeah, well, we can definitely take care of that for you today. How long has that been an issue? And what happens is they. Their walls come down because you're not selling my.

[35:00] One of my favorite. Yeah. So this is. This is. This is one that always kind of helps me. I try to get it like this. Like when you walk into a mall and you walk through a kiosk and these ladies walk by and they're like, lotion.

[35:12] Yeah, lotion.

[35:14] It just like, every part of my being just wants to run away. I'm like, stop. I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to buy your lotion. You're annoying.

[35:22] And. But if I walk into a store with my wife and then we walk by a lotion aisle and something looks nice, I'm like, let me take a look. It's not that I didn't like the lotion I didn't like her approach.

[35:33] I don't. So what I've come to learn over the years is people love to shop, but they hate to be sold.

[35:39] Yeah.

[35:40] And so you really want that conversation on the phone to not be a sales pitch. You're just asking questions.

[35:47] How did it break? When did it break? Oh, no. How long has it been? You're not, you don't sound like a salesman, but you are uncovering their needs. You are getting them to talk about themselves, which people love.

[35:58] They love talking about themselves. Why do you think I came on the podcast? Right. I love talking. Like, that's just how we are as humans. Like, we love to talk.

[36:04] We love attention for the most part. And so when you get that customer talking about their day, talking about how it broke, it really helps solidify they can trust you.

[36:13] And they kind of like you already just by you having a conversation versus oh yeah, the price is 129. Click. You developed no relationship. They. You mean nothing to them.

[36:23] Whereas if you were able to get them to laugh and feel some sort of an emotion,

[36:28] there's a connection. You're, You're. There's a. Immediately they kind of like you.

[36:32] Yeah.

[36:32] And I think people really undervalue. That is a key part of developing relationships and just really driving business to your business.

[36:39] Yeah. I love how when you're. And when you're, you know, just kind with people like that, it only takes like one small spark to really, like, build enough relational equity to get into a deal, close a deal, and win a recurring customer.

[36:53] I, I also would like to go back to something you said maybe, may, maybe a few minutes ago, but like, you talked about, people question or ask, you know, oh, why is Tony so passionate?

[37:03] And I, I feel like, you know, people would probably say that to Chris as well. Like, Chris, why do you. Why are you always working on new stuff? You know, Chris has always got his hands on the, like the.

[37:11] Under the hood of some process of this and how it functions and flows. But I would say to that and to everybody listening to this,

[37:20] if you're going to say, why is somebody so passionate? I would say, why are you not? Like, if somebody, if you're, if you're going to criticize people for caring so much, why do you care so little?

[37:29] And that's what I'm amazed at, is like, you know, indifference is almost the ultimate insult to somebody else. And if that's how you feel about your business, it's also the ultimate insult to your business.

[37:38] Like, how can you not care when this affects you, like, directly and like your livelihood, that feels absolutely.

[37:46] People kind of say, you know, they'll try to blame it on burnout. And, and maybe it is a burnout. You know, I think everyone experiences burnout. And, and the solution to burnout is not the same for everybody.

[37:55] But I think one clear one, which again, I'm going to **** off a lot of people, is raise your prices.

[38:01] You know, you're probably burning out because you're working your *** off. You're working really, really hard, and you're not really making much of anything. And well, we can't afford to make a bet.

[38:09] You can, because some people will, when they inquire about price, will just pay you what you're asking.

[38:17] They will, some won't. You know, there'll be plenty. Maybe there'll be a lot that are like, ah, but the thing is, you can always negotiate down. You cannot negotiate up.

[38:26] Right. So if I. Let's say so, for instance, people are going to freak out of me here. So I'm not going to say the exact number because people will freak out.

[38:32] We charge more than 120 bucks for an iPhone 11 screen repair. But how can you. The part cost us 17. It takes eight minutes to do the repair. Sure.

[38:41] Nice.

[38:42] We charge more than that. But. And so, but the thing is, it's like not every single one of my customers will pay 120. Correct. Because sometimes someone's going to be like, oh my gosh, well, the guy down the street's doing it for 80.

[38:54] I'm not going to go down to 80 or nor am I going to go below 80. I will stay within a hundred dollar range. I will not go down to my competitor's price point.

[39:02] Our script, what it does, is we talk about the reasons as to why we are where we are and why they are where they are.

[39:08] More than likely, all of our competitors use a lower quality screen than us. Maybe on an iPhone 11, maybe not. Right. But if it's an iPhone 13 and they're like, oh, well, they quoted me 90 bucks.

[39:18] Yeah, it's an LCD. So my guys are equipped to explain the differences between an OLED and a soft OLED versus a hard OLED versus an lcd, but it definitely helps.

[39:27] And we can also back up our brand when we say, hey, by the way, in addition to that, we actually also have Apple genuine in stock.

[39:35] So I can offer you Apple genuine. I wouldn't because it's so darn expensive. So I don't think it's worth your time. However, this Goes into the spiel or I'm not gonna go over here.

[39:44] But that really gives you legitimacy where you can say those types of things versus your, your first and only pitch is LCD rock, rock bottom pricing. And then you're like, oh man, I didn't make any money because, you know, we're not charging enough.

[39:57] Like, well, what if 1 out of 10 of your customers or 2 out of 10 of your customers were, would be happy to pay 50 bucks more because they didn't care about the cost, they just wanted it fixed that day, you know, So I think it's okay to be a little bit higher and you can go down again.

[40:14] Some markets, maybe you can't do that, right? You're hyper, hyper competitive because you got 20 competitors on the same block. But I would say a majority of shops in America, you do not have a competitor every quarter mile in every direction.

[40:28] You can afford to have some flexibility in your price point. And then the repair is just one. Right? Like you said, Chris, we're talking about all these other services you have to offer.

[40:36] You have buybacks, you have repairs, sales and accessories.

[40:42] I think, you know, again, too many people just don't set, they don't add on. Yeah, right. So if it's like, if it's just a repair or just a buyback, they're like, this is it.

[40:51] Like, let me hurry up and finish this transaction and go on to the next one. Well, what if that customer, like, like Chris said, right. What if that customer has something else that I can buy from them?

[40:59] Or what if this customer is willing to pay me 20 bucks or 30 bucks for this case for the screen protector? Like, I can't know if I don't pitch it.

[41:07] Yeah.

[41:07] So that's where the pitch rate comes into play. Like, yeah, you might get nine no's, you might get nine yeses. But if you don't ever ask and yeah, you're gonna 100 get 0 of everything.

[41:16] Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, it's one of those things. Like the other day I had, I had three leads come in from Google. And on all three of them, I just simply asked, you know, hey, like, I closed them on the first thing, right?

[41:31] They were happy with that. And I was like, hey, you know, we buy this, this, this and that. Do you have anything else that you might be looking to sell now?

[41:37] One of them, their first, the first thing they brought to me was two Samsung watches. That was the first two items they wanted to sell. And I'm like, look, this thing is only selling for, like, 60 bucks on eBay.

[41:47] The best I can do for it is 20. Then, number one, I'm incredibly honest with them.

[41:52] Yeah, honesty go the long way.

[41:54] And then they were like, well, I also have a OnePlus phone. Do you buy those? And I was like, yeah, absolutely. How much are you looking to get for it? She's like, $200.

[42:02] I'm just like, oh, yeah, absolutely.

[42:08] Yeah, I made, like, 250 on it. It was one.

[42:11] Yeah, there we go.

[42:12] The Eco ATM was offering, like, 150. Um, and then. And then she was like, I have these. These OnePlus earbuds and stuff like that. And I'm like, cool. Like, I'll. I'll buy this too.

[42:23] I became incredibly valuable to that customer. Uh, she, like, initial transaction was she was gonna get, like, 60 bucks for her first two things, right? But it ended up.

[42:32] That's the money man now.

[42:33] Yeah. It ended up being over $300 to her. You know, like, is very valuable to people. Um, I mean, the next guy was. He wanted to sell me an iPad. And then he showed up, and he also had a.

[42:47] He had a Nintendo Switch, and then he also had an Oculus Quest. And he's like, I want to sell these too. I'm like, cool, Nice. You know, like, yeah, that stuff goes a long way.

[42:56] Just, like,

[42:57] just offering what you do, you know? Like, even if you're on a repair, you can also be at the end of the conversation. Hey, we also do buybacks. Like, if you want to bring anything to the store, we can take a look at it and give you an.

[43:08] Offer in person, broken or not, right?

[43:11] Yeah, because some people take a broken device, right? We all know they throw it in their drawer and it sits there for six years until they finally one day take it to a recycling center and take a whole box of them.

[43:24] And, yeah, I mean, do people will take five bucks for something that you might flip for 100, you know? And again, another thing I would say in. In addition to that.

[43:34] Right. I think people need to look at how do I maximize each transaction in an ethical way. Right. Where I'm not shoving things down my customer's throat that they don't need.

[43:43] So sometimes when I talk about maximizing transactions, people are like, oh, you're just trying to steal everything. No, I'm trying to make sure, first of all, I'm delivering as much value.

[43:50] All I'm talking about when I say that I am letting my customer know we are capable and offer all of this stuff, does any of that pique Your interest. Oh, it does.

[43:59] Cool. You're not shoving it down the throat. You're just educating them on what you do. Because people usually when they meet up with you, they only know what they know about you from what they needed at that moment.

[44:09] But it's good to just be in their mind. Hey, we also do X, Y, Z. So, like what we always talk, we always talk about insurance products. So we have insurance integrated into my repair apps.

[44:17] It makes it really easy to sell. I'm like, look, they may not buy it today, but they will need it eventually. Because especially if they're in a repair shop, like, hey, you just spent 300 bucks getting this fixed.

[44:26] Next time we can fix it for a fraction of that with our, you know, low cost insurance.

[44:31] And some say yes, some say no, but again, come down to pitch rate.

[44:34] Oh, crazy.

[44:35] I think with buyback, you can probably do the same thing.

[44:38] You could probably do that business, right? Like, oh, yeah, that's important for you guys to survive as well. Yeah.

[44:44] It's all about building that ecosystem. Right. And I think for buybacks, you can build your own ecosystem as well. I mean, buying is one thing. And I think you could probably still pitch insurance as well because it's like, hey, this device is broken that you're selling me.

[44:58] You never got to fix. Why? It gets all about asking questions. Why didn't you get it fixed? Oh, it's too expensive. I got corded. 400 bucks. Oh, well, hey, just to let you know, this new model that you upgraded to, it actually costs more to fix.

[45:10] Not trying to scare you, but like, I saw the part cost. Oh my gosh, it's crazy. These newer devices are getting fancier and fancier. They cost more and more to fix.

[45:18] That's actually why we partnered with X company. We do offer low cost insurance for a fraction of what, like Verizon sells. If you want, I can kind of tell you a little more about it.

[45:26] Yeah, that's it. Leave it alone. And if they're interested. They're not. They are. If they're not, they're not. But you can't just go in there and start selling. It's asking questions.

[45:35] Why didn't you fix it? Well, why is it broken? How did it break? So whether you're a repair shop or you're a flipper, like asking your customers questions, why are you selling this?

[45:43] Why did you not get this fixed? You really want your customer to talk more than you, right? I mean, this is sales one on one. It's like, hey, I need to uncover Their needs.

[45:52] And in that moment, the customer may think that whatever they brought you is their only need. But what if they have more? Because they don't know all the other things that you have to offer.

[46:00] So just ask questions. And it just.

[46:03] In our line of business, I find it. Sorry, go ahead, Tony. I missed that.

[46:07] No, no, I'll mention. It's. It's transformed my business. And everyone that I've ever taught to do that, it's changed their life dramatically. Like, overnight. I mean, that day. Right. The next conversation you have, you can make an extra hundred bucks.

[46:21] And so if you're experiencing burnout. Well, an extra couple hundred bucks a day,

[46:25] that might cure your.

[46:27] Yeah.

[46:27] Probably cure your burnout at a minimum. Yeah. Give you some money to go on vacation, you know, and not stress so much about. Oh, I can't afford to shut my shop down.

[46:35] Well, first of all, take a break. Get rejuvenated with us with this extra money.

[46:40] Build.

[46:41] Take that time to build systems and processes and talking about a point of sale. But then. But then hire people.

[46:47] Yeah.

[46:48] So that way you don't have to shut your shop down so you can go on vacation.

[46:50] Yeah.

[46:51] And. But you can do that when you charge more. And if you. I mean, so anyway. Yes. It all comes full circle. Right. So.

[46:57] Well, an extra a hundred bucks. I hate it when people minimize those kind of base hits. It's like you don't understand. That's how businesses are built. Right.

[47:05] That's a whole mortgage.

[47:06] Yeah, you know, that's. That's a mortgage. And in some states, that's significantly more than a mortgage. Like where I live. Maybe not, but. But if you live in a town where there's 17,000 people, almost guarantee that's your mortgage, your car payment, your electricity.

[47:21] Imagine not having to worry about that. Like, that's a. That's a lot.

[47:25] That's nice.

[47:25] One thing I want to talk about is tracking, because a lot of people in this space don't track anything. And they don't know where their business is at. They don't know what's going on in their business at all.

[47:39] Um, like one of the. And this is one thing we. I think, for. For us in the buyback space, I think we're the only ones that teach. Most of this is like, what's your percentage of people that show up?

[47:50] What's the cost per meetup? What's. You know what. What's your lead to meetup ratio on Google Ads, like these little bitty things? You know that the response is, what's that they swing the biggest, like the, the smallest hinges swing the biggest doors.

[48:04] Right. Like a lot of people don't realize this. Like, and Hormozi talks about it all the time. He's like, if you don't track, you don't care. Right? So, and he's right.

[48:14] If you, if you're not tracking what's going on in your business by the, by certain metrics, you certainly just don't care.

[48:21] So talk a little bit about that.

[48:23] Based on what you've done with my repair app as a dashboard, you got next level.

[48:29] Yeah, well, I mean to start it with, I mean super high level, we, we just track way more KPIs than anybody else. Way more. But also I think it's, we're, we're, I mean again, one thing I like to always mention is like we're like 9 months old and we're already tracking like 80 KPIs.

[48:44] By the end of this year we're going to be way above 100.

[48:47] And the best part about all of that is it's all built out of the box. Number one, we don't use any third party software for this. We built everything in house.

[48:55] We have some of the most talented engineers out there. Our first hire and who's with us today? It came from Samsung Knox. Just to kind of give you an idea of the caliber guys we brought on, we only have senior level developers.

[49:08] We don't have any junior mid. There's nothing, only senior guys. And so we built everything from scratch because we didn't want to be dependent on another company for data.

[49:19] Because I also don't want, not just that, I don't want my users to have to build their own reporting system. So it's all built out. All they have to do is create the customer, take their name, right, Create the customer profile, add the device that they're working on, create the repair,

[49:36] add the part. That's it. The reports are built themselves.

[49:40] That's awesome.

[49:40] Everything is tracked automatically down to employee attendance.

[49:44] You can set the goals and what you want them to achieve. So. And it's, it is incredible for numerous reasons. I mean number one, as an owner you need to know what you're doing.

[49:54] You need to know where you're from, what, right. Like, I mean fundamental, like just high level. Like you need to know what's going on. And so it's not enough to just know revenue.

[50:04] Oh, year over year, we're up, we're down. Like that doesn't tell you anything. Yeah, tells you a little bit. But like, what happened, right? You need to know why those numbers came to where they are.

[50:14] So as far as from new customers, returning customers, you know, amount per transaction and then the type of transaction, right? What are your margins now? What were your margins then?

[50:26] Why are they that way? Are you guys charging more or are the parts more expensive? Are they less? What's the repair time? All these things are so valuable for an owner to know.

[50:36] Where do I go from here? Where can I improve upon? And then that's one thing for the store level, but then we break it down by employee. And so the employees also get their own dashboard or they can see their performance, but it's like, it's gamified,

[50:50] it's interactive. And so at any given moment, they can see where they're performing, but also they can see what their pay is. So an owner can actually set it up where they can.

[50:59] It'll just, you know, show all their metrics and it'll show.

[51:04] This is kind of crazy month to date. First of all, payroll, rather. Sorry, that pay period, hours worked,

[51:11] what their hourly wages. So it'll calculate, hey, if you make x, you know, 15 bucks an hour, you work 40 hours, cool. This is your pay. And then if you, if you're our store that accepts tips, it'll show their individual amounts collected in tips, which, by the way, if you don't collect tips,

[51:25] please do.

[51:27] And, and then we have a commission calculator built in. So it'll actually. You set the parameters, right? I want my guys. I want to pay my guys 10 of the gross margin or gross profit on a accessory sale or net.

[51:39] You can go up on gross or net, or let's say you just, you pay a flat rate, $1, $5, $10. You set the parameters.

[51:46] From now on, the system tracks everything. And so there's a month to date or payroll to date, commission calculator. And then it just basically at the bottom says total hours work, you make 15 bucks an hour after tips, commission, the bonuses you made 21.73 month to date or payroll to date.

[52:05] And so at any given moment, they can see exactly what they've earned. And that's motivational to an employee to know, right? Because otherwise, otherwise I don't want to have to ask my boss, hey, how much am I making?

[52:16] Yeah, it's always going to be a shred of disbelief, hey,

[52:21] how do I know that that's what I earned,

[52:25] right? How do I know this guy isn't holding back? And I'm not saying there's even any employees that think that, but maybe even subconsciously. Right. Whereas if you can show them, like, hey, we are as transparent as possible, I think that goes a long way with employees to know they can trust you.

[52:40] At a minimum, you are. You're an outlier in the industry. You're one of the few that can show your people, hey, we're very transparent. We have a great policy, blah, blah, blah.

[52:48] But this also allows you to improve your performance. And so we track everything that we can possibly track. And because otherwise, if you're not tracking it, you're really just taking stuff, throwing it on a wall and hoping something sticks.

[53:01] Yeah, right.

[53:01] And you have no sense of direction of, hey, how do we go from here?

[53:04] Right?

[53:04] Because I've seen all the time in the repair groups, people go, oh, how do you guys do this year versus last year or this month versus last month? And the only thing people typically, not always, but typically compare just gross revenue.

[53:16] Yeah, I know. Which means nothing.

[53:18] We're up or down. Yeah. And they make. And then like, and then there's like a hundred comments. We were like, oh, yeah, bro, it's so slow. Oh, and then it's Apple's fault.

[53:26] And then all of a sudden it just becomes this complain fest. Or everyone's just whining and it's like, are you guys, are we middle schoolers or are we business people trying to understand why are our numbers different?

[53:39] And like, if you can't identify why and what they are, that's a problem. If you're POS. You're paying 100 plus bucks a month for or even 20 buc a month or doesn't give you that information, fire them.

[53:50] It's an embarrassing. It's an embarrassment. There's companies out there, been around for a decade making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month,

[53:57] and they don't provide that data when they have the data.

[54:00] And it's just like you're, You're. You're really restricting these shops from growing. And so my whole passion is like, I really want to give the. What I would call the mom and pops of the world the same set of tools or similar sets of tools that the big guys have where they can analyze their business without having to pay exorbitant amounts of money to know where their business is and where they can take it.

[54:23] And so that's what we've done. And it's worked out really well. And we're not gonna pause here. We're only constantly growing that. And in fact, we two weeks ago just hired another engineer who literally his background is data.

[54:37] He's a data specialist. And so our hope is we're just gonna continue to blow that out of the water where it just gets more intense to the point where, you know, as I post more and more about the dashboards and the metrics that we track, I think people will start questioning.

[54:52] I don't even know what that means. And, and, you know, but, but hopefully they'll see the value in it. My, my, my, my struggle is portraying, you know, like, this is why it's important.

[55:01] This is what you get out of tracking this. Because it's one thing to track it, but the owners need to know, why am I tracking this? What can I do with this information?

[55:09] And so that's what we've done. That's what we do in our videos, that's what we do in our, in our, in our community group. So everyone who's in who. Part of, who's a part of my prep is we talk about, this is what you can do with that data.

[55:19] This is what it does for you.

[55:21] And so I think that's, that's key, right? You can track it, but then you also need to understand now, how do I interpret this?

[55:27] Yeah, no, yeah. I mean, that's a big part of it too is like, how do I interpret it? That's the one thing we do is like, I have, I have key metrics that I keep track of for my business, and one of the biggest ones is like, lead to meetup ratio.

[55:41] Like, you know, stuff like that. Did you close the lead?

[55:45] What's your cost per meetup? Right, that's important.

[55:49] Like, like right now my cost per meetup is $8 per person that like, I'm spending $8 to meet each person, which is insane, by the way. Like, that's crazy.

[56:00] But most of it's also coming from Google.

[56:02] So I can only imagine, by the way, I can only imagine though, like, how many people are watching or listening and they're just like,

[56:09] have zero idea how much they're spending per lead per meetup. And, and then you know what, they're probably subsequently the same person who might be someone who's complaining about how they're not making any money.

[56:21] And like, how am I not making money? I'm, I'm making a hundred bucks a flip. Well, you might be spending 50 bucks to get a hundred dollars.

[56:28] Exactly.

[56:29] You don't even know. And yeah, and that's the thing, right? It's like at a minimum, once you know that data, then you can at least you understand how do I pivot.

[56:36] Like, where do I go from here? Like, where do I go versus? If you don't know the data, then yeah. I mean, you can't possibly. You're flying blind.

[56:44] I also want to be clear. Something like. Like a lot of you listening to this, you're using Facebook ads and you're probably thinking, I'm talking about cost per message. I'm not.

[56:53] That's a completely different metric. That is just lead. That's the first point of entry for a lead. I am talking about the cost that it takes me to actually meet up.

[57:03] With a person, shake their hand and buy something from them. Yeah.

[57:07] Like, I'm meeting, like, talking to them kind of thing. Like, it's. It cost me $8 to meet somebody right now, which is nothing.

[57:15] Which doesn't sound insane to me. Yeah, it sounds really cheap when you're.

[57:19] It's incredible.

[57:19] If you're making. Yeah. If you're making 20 bucks, a flip, sure, it's expensive. But yeah. I mean, again, if that. If you can maintain that number. Hypothetically. I don't. I'm not an expert in that.

[57:30] But if you can maintain that number and then if you can just ramp up your volume.

[57:34] Yep.

[57:34] Yeah.

[57:35] And you can replicate that, especially with employees. Like, dude.

[57:39] Yep.

[57:40] You know exactly how you can grow.

[57:42] Yeah. I mean, once you know the metrics, you can just scale the thing. The numbers.

[57:48] Yeah. And I think that's why also from when you go to the repair business, the repair side, that is a.

[57:53] I would say arguably a top two reason why the overwhelming majority of the industry are mom and pop, solo operators, or they have one store, and I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but a lot of people that I speak to want to grow in some way, shape or form,

[58:08] whether it's more stores or they want to have a business where I want my store to be open six days, seven days a week, but I don't want to work six days a week.

[58:15] I want to work four days a week. But there's a reason why a majority do not. And it's because, again, they don't know their data. So they don't know, when can I even hire?

[58:24] When can I afford to hire? When you know, when can I afford to do X? How can I afford to do X? Well, you can't if you don't know your numbers.

[58:32] Yeah.

[58:32] And so, you know, someone's going to be listening to me, like, ah, whatever. Like, yeah, we'll see you back in five years. You know, just take it from someone who's been.

[58:40] Yeah.

[58:40] Maybe I haven't been doing this for as long as you. Seven years. But, like, hey, it's. I've learned. And, you know, we've made our fair share of mistakes. Not to say we haven't.

[58:48] We still do. But at least when you have the information in front of you, you can. You can move forward in a. With some semblance of sanity, I would say.

[58:58] Yep. I like to think of it like, you know, in a business, you can accept noble failure, but repeatable failure means that you're not tracking your metrics.

[59:07] That's so true, man.

[59:09] That's the new tagline on the website.

[59:11] It's like you keep hitting the iceberg over and over again every single month because you just don't know where it's at.

[59:15] You're just not turning.

[59:16] Yeah.

[59:18] You put it in reverse and you go back and forward again. You're not even turning.

[59:21] Exactly.

[59:22] Gosh, that's a good one. Yeah.

[59:23] I mean, it's true, though. Like, you were the Titanic and you didn't know where the icebergs were, which is your data. You just. In dark with lights off.

[59:36] And then you put it in reverse, Terry. And we're right back forward again. And just like, bam. And then you keep on colliding. And you're wondering, why are you colliding?

[59:44] Yeah.

[59:45] And why am I in business for 10 years and I still don't. I still.

[59:47] Why am I.

[59:47] Why have I tried. Yeah.

[59:49] Why am I thinking again?

[59:50] Why am I thinking.

[59:51] Yeah. Why do I keep sinking every time?

[59:54] Like, what?

[59:56] It's.

[59:56] It's very.

[59:57] Yeah.

[59:58] Yeah. And some people, you know, I've had this conversation with some people where they kind of take it the wrong way. Like, well, I don't want to be a millionaire.

[01:00:03] I don't want to get rich. I'm like, I'm not talking about getting rich. It's about building a business where, again, you don't have to. Right. It's probably a lie. First of all, you.

[01:00:10] If someone offered you $10 million, you would not say, if you had more.

[01:00:14] Money in the bank account, you'd be happier. I mean, just kind of say it like it's a real thing.

[01:00:17] Yeah. You have less stress. You would stop worrying about it. You know, I think poor people.

[01:00:22] Or I would say poor people think about and talk about money more than rich people. Yeah.

[01:00:26] And so, you know, because you want it. And. But even if you didn't want to get rich, let's say you were genuine about that. You want to not work six, seven, Days a week and be worried about, hey, can I afford my rent?

[01:00:38] You know, you would love to work four days a week and have enough to go by and give all your employees a two dollar raise. Like if you can't sit there and give your employees a raise of two bucks,

[01:00:50] maybe you should. Yeah, take a look, take a look at what's going on. And hey, how do I do this where I can build a better business for my employees, not so I can become rich.

[01:00:59] If you don't want to be rich, how do you make your employees life better?

[01:01:03] And so there's all these different reasons.

[01:01:05] I love that.

[01:01:06] What is your recommendation on almost like payment structure with employees? Because, like, because we do it based on a lot of commit. Like for example, I hire a lot of people that have been kind of in the space on a commission basis for buybacks.

[01:01:22] Like they go out and they find the thing, they close it, they send it to me and it's a 20% commission and 30% on upsells. Um, so like, what is your kind of like recommendation on that to shop owners if there's like any commission based type of stuff there?

[01:01:37] Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's, it's, it should be,

[01:01:41] it's going to be different for everybody, of course, but what we like to do is a base rate. Right. So let's say you have no experience. Again, your results may vary depending on what city you're in.

[01:01:53] Right. If you're literally in, you have a shop in Manhattan. Yeah, good luck paying, you know, 15 bucks an hour. But where we are most of the time, we can pay anywhere from 12 to 16 an hour, depending on which city.

[01:02:04] And then we offer, obviously they get tips and then commission. So we would pay 10% of any accessories.

[01:02:12] All accessories sold, they get 10% of the gross. Not even profit. We just go up top line.

[01:02:17] But also we put a limit as far as how much they can discount. So if they discount beyond 10% for us personally, they forfeit their commission.

[01:02:25] And so it really incentivizes them to sell value. It reminds them I need to sell value, not price because otherwise they're just gonna, oh yeah, I'll give you 25% off.

[01:02:32] I got my commission anyway.

[01:02:34] I want them to sell value. And then on device sales they get a flat rate depending on the device. You know, it's five, ten bucks. We're working on switching it all up because we're hoping next month in my repair.

[01:02:46] Well, in my repair. But I don't, I can't unfortunately use my repair up in my stores because we're a franchise location, which Burksmeader. Not. I can't even tell you. That's crazy.

[01:02:56] But what I want to do and we're going to do for our users next month is we're adding a, what's called like an accelerator or a tiered commission structure. This is what I recommend everybody, because this is what the wireless carriers do.

[01:03:08] And it works really well in retail, is for X amount of products sold, you get 3% and then 5%, 7% and you work your way up to 20%. And 20% has to be like some crazy, impossible goal.

[01:03:21] But the thing is, it's really difficult for you to in good conscience and good faith make any sort of a commission structure like that. If you don't know your numbers, you need to know your baseline.

[01:03:31] Like, hey, over the last year,

[01:03:33] how do we typically do? And then also like, is that good or were we just kind of sucking or were we excellent? So you really need to understand your business.

[01:03:41] So that way you can give a proper commission structure. But I like it where personally what I would love to do is I would do something along the lines of if you sell less than $2,000 in accessories, you get 5% for every 500 bucks.

[01:03:54] Beyond that, I'm going to add a couple percent.

[01:03:56] Nice.

[01:03:57] And then just, you know, go all the way up to 20. Again, depends on the store's volume. Right. If you're a store, you have 30 people walking in a day. Yeah.

[01:04:04] You're gonna have to raise your, you know, you have to raise the, the, the, the parameters. But. Yeah, but if you're seeing three customers a day. Yeah. You might have to lower the volume a little bit.

[01:04:14] The expectation can be a little less. But overall it's, it's based off the conversion rate. Right. So if you're like, usually. So, like, if you're converting at 90%, great. I'm gonna reward the heck out of you.

[01:04:25] Yeah. But if you're converting in the single digits.

[01:04:28] Yeah.

[01:04:29] Either I really screwed up or we need to have a real chat.

[01:04:33] Well, this is, this has been, this is good. Dude, I know you got another call you gotta do, but,

[01:04:39] dude, is there anything you, like, throw out to the people that are kind of just like a lot of people that watch this podcast are either phone flippers or they're just beginning in the industry and things like that?

[01:04:50] Sure. And a lot of them are dabbling in either phone repair or flipping. Is there anything you would kind of like, any information or, or tips you would give to these, these beginner level type of people.

[01:05:03] Yeah.

[01:05:05] Tap into that type of stuff.

[01:05:07] Yeah. Shameless. Plug once more. Last one. Promise. So my repair app, we do actually have a free system as well. So it's really meant for like beginners or rather just if you're.

[01:05:18] Maybe you're not doing crazy volume. So a little bit of a limited product, but you still get customer intake as well as inventory management. All of that good stuff you get, you get all the beautiful things.

[01:05:31] We do have an active community in our Facebook as well as Discord filled with hundreds of repair shops. You can join our Discord, you can join our Facebook group. And there's a lot of people that give away a ton of information.

[01:05:43] I mean, a lot. There, there's one, there was one conversation the other week where someone wrote something so long it took me. I was like five minutes in and I was still reading and I was like, my gosh.

[01:05:52] But it was a, it was a detailed breakdown. I mean, extreme. Extremely detailed. His entire marketing strategy. So we have a really, really good community. It's obviously free to join.

[01:06:02] And, and the nice part about using the system, even if you don't do repairs, is a, it can help you possibly do repair, but it's a good way of tracking all your inventory.

[01:06:10] Right. You can put in your cost of goods, you can put in your sales price. It's easy to track your profits.

[01:06:16] Just. It's good to know your numbers and it doesn't cost anything. But ultimately, I would join our Discord if you're interested in even doing phone repair, because you're going to be surrounded by people who have been in this business for a while who are very successful and they're open books,

[01:06:32] they're very happy to share and there's a massive amount of content on there.

[01:06:37] Nice. That's awesome.

[01:06:39] So that's kind of, you know, gatekeeper.

[01:06:41] We'll put your link and stuff in the first comment and everything in description and all that.

[01:06:46] Perfect.

[01:06:47] That way people can check it out. But dude, this has been a great conversation. I think this is.

[01:06:51] Yeah, Ben, thank you.

[01:06:52] Yeah, yeah, we'll have to, we'll have to do this.

[01:06:54] Appreciate you having me on just because.

[01:06:56] Like, like I said, we're hitting the industry from two. Two sides of the same coin here. One is buybacks, one is repairs.

[01:07:02] Yeah.

[01:07:03] You know, we could talk all day about metrics.

[01:07:06] Oh, gosh, that, that, that's something. Yeah, I could talk days.

[01:07:10] I agree.

[01:07:11] But it's, you know, but in, in a good way. For real.

[01:07:15] Well, dude, appreciate having you on the smart flip once again, guys, make sure to check out the Facebook group, the ebook and all that stuff. It's all in the description and stuff below.

[01:07:25] Free stuff and all that good stuff.

[01:07:28] But we'll be next week with another podcast. Appreciate you, all of you guys watching. I know. Or listening. I know a lot of you guys are doing this while you're driving around picking up phones and stuff, so appreciate you guys listening and see you guys next week.

[01:07:41] Yeah, see you. Thanks so much, guys.