Jeremy Weisz 17:17
I want to get a little granular with this, because I love direct mail, because this applies to online, right? Dan, I mean, all the traditional advertising, direct mail, direct responses, well, actually, the same stuff as you.
Mark Sibilia 17:31
Yeah, digital media is the killer of direct mail actually.
Dan Sibilia 17:37
There’s a lot to learn from the strategy of direct mail to be applied to digital media techniques. Absolutely, the theory is still consistent.
Jeremy Weisz 17:48
What was on? Tell me, like, obviously, you printed this, you mailed it, and then you’ve basically through your clients’ customers, figured out, okay, here’s like, really the best, most efficient way to drop these things to get the best results. But were you designing? I’m assuming you were designing the full flyer. What were the elements? Because they were talking direct response, they have to still pick up the phone and order a pizza. So talk about the elements on there that you found to be important. Obviously, beautiful pictures that are so delicious you just want to pluck it off the page, but what else is on there to drive phone calls?
Mark Sibilia 18:24
Huge menu engineering. Go ahead, talk about that Dan.
Dan Sibilia 18:28
Yeah. So, as Mark said, menu engineering is an art and a science that we apply to the designing of a menu or a flyer or anything that your eye looks at. To be honest, it can be the same theories can be applied. And it’s a combination of color theory, it’s a combination of pricing theory. It’s a combination of positioning and placement that subconsciously guides the person looking at the piece to the products and items that you want to, what do you want them to order? So for some of our clients, we start our process with them at a very kind of fundamental menu engineering standpoint, where we look at their cost of goods, like what it costs them to actually make an item on their menu, what they’re selling it for, what the margin is on that product.
We find out who the best sellers are, who the dogs are, who the Lost leaders are, all these kinds of things, and then we can actually use that information to arrange the menu in a way that encourages people to order the most profitable items. There’s a variety of techniques to do that, where things are located on the page, whether or not items have boxes around them or they have descriptions or prices with dollar signs or without dollar signs.
Jeremy Weisz 19:54
Like we’re looking at this here. Dan, right now, if people are listening, there is a video component, right? So I don’t know what we’re looking at, we have uncles favorites, right? A favorite, which is obviously this sticks out, then my eye immediately goes to this steak and blue, right? Exactly. That’s what you’re talking about.
Dan Sibilia 20:15
Yeah, yeah. That is one element. So highlighting a particular product in a menu is a huge power play to drive people to that particular product. With these guys, Uncle Mario’s here, this was a new product that they were launching. They wanted to draw attention to it. They wanted to get the volumes up so that they could order more supplies from their vendors, get better rates on it. And this was part of the launch program for them. Designing with this intention in mind.
Jeremy Weisz 20:46
Yeah, and you could see some offers here, which is, deliver with love, free delivery on orders. They have kind of an offer there, but I always want to go to restaurants do this like I’ll look at, oh, what are the signature dishes that I should know about. And some restaurants don’t include that, right? That helps me as a consumer. It also helps them as well.
Dan Sibilia 21:08
Yeah, for sure, and honestly, some of the smallest things, things that you maybe we even wouldn’t consider, can have a huge impact psychologically on someone’s purchasing behavior, things like the color of the price, things like whether to include decimal places. Everyone’s familiar with the 99 trick of ending prices in the 99 but it goes well beyond that, and there’s a whole art and a science to it.
Jeremy Weisz 21:37
Yeah, I’m just pulling this up. So here, it seems like you have a couple ways for people to interact with it as well. Talk about that because, obviously, there’s a phone number, there’s also a QR code that you have here. There’s also a text as well.
Dan Sibilia 21:57
Absolutely. So we want as marketers to make it as easy as possible for someone to engage with a brand in their preferred method. So that could be through their website, that could be through their phone, through text messaging, that could be through picking up the phone and giving them a telephone call. So we have to try to make all those channels available to them. Obviously, we need to test and measure the effectiveness of those channels versus the investment required to support and sustain them, but where the opportunity presents itself, giving the customers the choice of how they want to engage with the brand can really go a long way to making the experience really great for the customer.
That’s one of the things that we can control as an agency outside of the business, right? We don’t tell our customers like we can bring them to your door. You can get them through the door, but you need to make them fall in love with you once you’re there. And by providing them with all these tools, all these kinds of vectors for people to engage with the brand, we’re trying to make that experience of getting to the door as easy and as nice as possible for people.
Jeremy Weisz 23:09
So Mark, Big Dave, was huge for you. Okay, it seemed like you were swamped when that happened. Did that? Then take over? How did you handle all the volume? Did you go, listen, we’re just going all in on this, and we’re going to not do the other stuff. What happened at that point because obviously, there’s a capacity you have a certain amount of printing. What happened when you start to get that influx?
Mark Sibilia 23:40
So, the bottleneck in the beginning was the design and the creative process. Because when we promised mouthwatering photography and we really promised them, we needed to deliver on the promise, the bottleneck was so we had a number of artists come in and basically train them and explain to them manual engineering. We had them take courses. So, then we would, and then we would do the design, send them the proof. They make changes, come back, but once so, so we kind of adopted a systematic way to, so first of all, as far as limitations, we have no limits, because Toronto is probably one of the largest cities in the world for having print equipment. And as a print broker, I never owned machines. I never wanted to own machines.
So what we would do is we would buy the paper by the truckloads. We streamlined it to one weight of paper, 70 pounds. Streamlined it to two sizes, and then basically did a monthly run. So we have a monthly run. So you had to put your order by the first, you had to approve your art by the 15 and then it would be going to press, and you would receive your order by the last week or the first of the following month. If you didn’t approve it, then you got pushed to the next month. And that kind of taught our clients to be more vigilant depending on their deadline. And then we could use three or four different printers, and what we would do is we would do group runs. So we would get orders for 30, 40, different orders per month, and then we would put it all, we would put, like, six flyers on the same sheet, and then run it. So that gave us the economies of scale, increased our profitability and made it possible to basically scale up.
Jeremy Weisz 25:45
I want to highlight one thing you just said there, you immediately went to bottleneck, which is interesting. One of my favorite books, Ellie Goldratt The Goal. And I actually — someone just told me, the co-author, Jeff Cox wrote another book, Velocity, which talks about which I’m listening to now in audible, which talks about identifying the bottlenecks. How has that helped your business? Obviously, we see it in this instance. Are there other instances where you’re like, was that natural to you? Or going in, identifying bottlenecks.
Mark Sibilia 26:22
Well, it’s the reality, right? If somebody says, hey, I sent you the information three weeks ago and I didn’t get my proof bottleneck, right? So, we just kept adding, we got up as high as 10 artists at one point when Prince was really pushing through. But again, we’re designing flyers when, you know, we’re not designing, you know, spaceships. So, we kind of got into the rhythm. We had our photography, we had our content, and it was basically, making good designs using beautiful photos. And at the beginning of this process, we had a number of designs that we put online that you could choose whether you want a contemporary or traditional. You’d have a horse and carriage in an old Italian city walking through the cobblestone. That was more the traditional look, right? So we had this, so they would say, well, we want contemporary. And then basically that would give my designers some sort of direction of which to go, so we don’t have to go back and forth so many times.
Jeremy Weisz 27:36
So I could see the niche, right? You really took a gamble thinking about it, it’s like, if I’m your business partner, like, wait, you want to a booth. Are not cheap. You want to hire these world-class people. You want to get a booth at a pizza show. We have zero clients in this, and no experience in this. It’s pretty amazing. So I could see how you got in the niche part, right? And then that led a little bit to services, which is, the printing, the mailing. Talk about the evolution from there of the different services. Obviously, you got more food industry, food companies, restaurants. We talk about mailing, printing. Talk about more as you added more services.
Mark Sibilia 28:25
Well, around 2005 the digital world started, you know, coming through. And people were starting to think digitally. Email marketing started. And that’s when we had Daniel come in and, you know, help us with offering different digital services. And the transition went to now, okay, you’ve done printing for us now we can also do your digital marketing through it. And then basically, Dan took it from there and offered, you know, these services to our clients.
Jeremy Weisz 29:04
What did that look like? So when we talk digital, you know, a lot of things are flying around in people’s heads. Is this paid talk a little bit more that about the digital piece?
Dan Sibilia 29:14
Sure. So when I started working with MPP, I was one of those 10 graphic designers that Mark had so I was there in the trenches.
Jeremy Weisz 29:25
What were you doing, Dan, just before we go a little bit further on this, how did that happen? Because I’m sure, we were talking before we record. You could have been like, listen, that’s cool. You could do your own thing. I’m doing this computer thing. I’m going to do my thing over here. What was the conversation like to come into the company in the first place? He owed us money.
Dan Sibilia 29:49
I borrowed some money from my parents, because I wanted to go and be a ski bum for a year. And I moved after university, I moved out to Whistler British Columbia, and I was there for 18 months, and when I came back to the city, had to work it off. And I’ve been working it off ever since.
Jeremy Weisz 30:13
Okay, so you’re like, he’s like, listen, I get his money. He’s like, great, get to work and do this graphic design thing.
Dan Sibilia 30:19
That’s right, I always had a background in design and graphic design, that was where my interest lie, and marketing and advertising was a natural fit for me. So, I would have got the same job somewhere else, doing the same stuff. Luckily, I had that opportunity available to me. So I worked as a graphic designer, designing those menus and flyers. And then, as Mark said, gradually, in the early 2000s customers that we were building flyers for and doing mailing programs for, they started coming to us with more requests. Hey, you guys made this amazing-looking flyer for us. Our website sucks. Can you do the same kind of thing for a website? And I’m like, sure. Let’s do it. Let’s build a website.
Jeremy Weisz 31:03
At that point, what were you building websites with? You know, I know, like now it’s much, much easier. Just from a technology standpoint, I’m saying from a design standpoint. But, you know, there’s WordPress, what we’re using at that point.
Dan Sibilia 31:18
So at the time, we’re building websites in straight HTML, tables based HTML. But that was the era of Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash, if you guys remember that stuff, and so we did some work in Flash. I remember Flash-based timeline animations were the bane of my existence for a couple of years there, thank God that they’ve retired that software.
Jeremy Weisz 31:44
So websites, I can, I can see that they’re like, this is beautiful. Let’s clean up our site. Or maybe they don’t even have a site. And they’re like, didn’t have so websites, what was another thing that evolved?
Dan Sibilia 31:58
Yeah, and then, and then, very quickly, social media came into play. We got a lot of requests from our customers being like, what is this social media thing? How can I use it for my business? And we started to develop an approach that focused on managing. I should step back for just a quick second at around that time, we realized that now that we’re doing the menus, now they’re doing mailing campaign, now that we’re doing the websites for them, we were already into a little bit of email marketing for them at the time. We really needed to present our services in a more strategic way. Up until now, we’ve kind of been like a piecemeal…
Jeremy Weisz 32:44
Just requesting. They’re like, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? And you’re just doing it now. You’re like, we need to come in with a plan. When someone comes to us.
Dan Sibilia 32:53
Exactly so really, that was when our big transition shifted from kind of just being like a production partner right into more of the traditional advertising agency, more marketing group model, right? Where clients would come to us and we would work with them to determine, okay, what do we need to do to achieve this goal of yours, right? Okay, well, there’s print and direct mail and there’s digital services on top of it, Google search, email marketing, social media management, and then it’s kind of just expanded and expanded from there on out. Now we offer a full suite of solutions, and it goes just beyond like print and direct mail in the traditional side, outdoor radio and TV, other kinds of broadcast medias. So really, we’re equipped right now to operate, and we have been operating for the past 15 years as a real full-service agency.
Jeremy Weisz 33:52
I want to talk about some milestones. So obviously, Big Dave was a milestone in my mind. Big shout out to Big Dave. Uber Eats seems like a big milestone, too. So how did that happen?
Mark Sibilia 34:07
They reached out to us. They reached out to you. They try. That’s a really interesting story. We got a call from the Vice President of Marketing. So I don’t know if you know, but Uber uses Toronto to identify markets. They use it as a test market. The reason being is because Toronto is very multi-ethnic city. We have little Portugal, Little India, little Brazil, little this, little that. And they use it like when they offered ride-sharing they started in Toronto to see how that would work. So the Caicos said, my God, we’re trying to go into restaurants. We’re telling them, hey, you know what, we’re going to give you, the clients, we’re going to place orders, we’re going to pick it up, and we want 30% and most customers said, here’s the door. I don’t make 30% How do I give you 30% right?
So they came to us as, what are we doing wrong? I said, well, sign the contract and I’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong. So, and the key word was, can you produce 25 to 30% more food with your current infrastructure? And they all said, absolutely. Because the food industry, inherently, is busy during dinner hours, so five o’clock to seven o’clock. And they said, great. So if we bring you clients that you don’t have and we pick it up, you have a number of benefits. You don’t have to hire a driver who’s going to sit there from four o’clock to five o’clock and from seven o’clock to nine o’clock, where they deliver one delivery an hour. So now you’re paying salary. Now you’re paying liability insurance. Now you have all these costs. The driver calls in, says, my alternator went. You got to send him $200 because you can’t fix his car. So I said to them, the way to do it is to say to them, look, what’s your food cost? Well, your food cost is 30% average. Average food cost 30%.
Well, if you bring your client and we deliver it, and you basically make 70% in every order we make. So give us 30, and you keep 40. Well, so they try to, there’s the place, there’s a region in Toronto, like a neighborhood called Etobicoke. They tried for six months to start it, and they couldn’t. We started it out in two weeks. We actually set up a call center model for them. We created the pitch. We sent teams of two people at a time to sign up restaurants, and we signed like 250 restaurants in two weeks. And they said, great. Can you show us how to now take it city to city? So Daniel and my other son, who is a data scientist, did he owe you money too? No, he just graduated Schulich — Schulich Business School, which is the largest business school, and he took a course for data scientists. He’s like a physicist and a genius.
And he came to work with me because we were working on the technology to profile presses. And so he was there, and Daniel and him came in, and they figured out a way to aggregate the best 2500 restaurants that would be most likely to use Uber Eats, and they traunch it into four different segments. And obviously the top segment was, you have great food that is deliverable, you don’t deliver. So that would be the top tier. And we just basically did free photography. We try to sign them like a no-brainer. That was a no-brainer offer and then just with one push of a button, we were able to identify the best restaurants for UberEATS in every city, and they basically copied our sales center that we created for them in Atlanta, in Florida, in different centers. And we just kept doing like, 10 cities a month.
Jeremy Weisz 38:17
They should have given you stock or something.
Mark Sibilia 38:20
You know what I could say all I should have asked for is not between a half-million dollar contract. All I should have asked for is .001% of sales, and then it would be over.
Jeremy Weisz 38:30
You get a penny for every, no. A couple things I just want to highlight there, because it’s really interesting, just a statement you made with sign the contract, and I’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong. I love that statement, because I’m sure a lot of agencies just kind of go into that’s your kind of proprietary knowledge that you built up over decades. And there’s a value in that. And some people may have been like, here it is, and they kind of run in another direction.
Mark Sibilia 39:00
That’s a selling proposition, right? Yeah, selling proposition to the restaurants.
Jeremy Weisz 39:05
But I like that for any business listening, like, use that statement from now on, right? It’s like, listen, I’ll tell you wrong. Just sign the contract. The other thing is really the offer and positioning there, you really refine the offer and positioning from like, it’s like, it was almost similar offer, but it wasn’t really positioned the correct way for someone to say yes, and then you kind of built out this no brainer situation. And then the other thing is segmenting, segmenting the list to really get, hone in on the most biggest success needle movers, I guess. So I want to talk about, everything is like, oh, we got everything. Mark touches, turns to gold, you know, blah, blah, blah, but then COVID hits. So talk about, there were some high points and then some low points.
Mark Sibilia 40:01
Yes, that was the shocking. First of all, it affected everybody emotionally, because so many people dying. My restaurant friends, which we’ve been working, usually, our customers never leave us. Once they come to us, they never leave because we provide such an incredible service with great quality. And we really know how to help them out. They used to call us and say, Mark, I think I’m going to go bankrupt. I can’t afford the rent. Because at one point, restaurant had to literally close and send everybody home for months. And that was a horrible time for us, because we lost 80% of our business overnight. I think from March 20 to June, we lost like 80% of our business, and that was a horrible thing. And the only thing that kept us in business, really, is all the government-assisted programs that said, don’t fire your people. Will pay you 75% of their salary. Just keep going. And our landlord was very kind to us, and he hacked our rent in half.
We have 5,000 square feet, and he hacked our rent, and he helped us with that. And so it was one of those times when you didn’t know what’s going to happen, and all of a sudden, the most difficult time is when the government shut off the funding, and all of a sudden, I had a payroll of 20 people, 22 people at the time, and no income. So unfortunately, we had to let some people go. We had to condense our graphic design department. We had to condense, we really try to become efficient and get rid of redundancy. And then basically started building up the business. In fact, during that time, we started another company called Graphika Print Solutions. And management decided that we need to broaden our services, not just to restaurants, but to, you know, other industries. And that’s when we got Messer, which is the $70 billion gas company, and Bosch Canada and Caesar stone, and we went out to different industries to really focus on the print, because that’s what we were strong at.
And I said, until restaurants come back and start thinking about digital marketing and all that, let’s go to where we are very strong in and understand. And Graphika has gradually grown from zero to, you know, a million and a half dollars in sales this year. So, we’re about 70-80% there is before COVID.
Jeremy Weisz 42:54
It’s a little bit, actually blessing in disguise. But, like, it caused you to diversify a little bit and have this and innovate, maybe not even innovate, but innovate off of what your strength was, exactly. I know we’re right at time here, but I have one last question for both of you. Thank you for your time. This has been hugely valuable. I’m gonna have to re-listen to this. There’s a lot of gems that are in this my last question is, and before I ask it, I just want to point people to MPP Marketing Group. You’ve seen it on the screen. If you’re watching the video, you can check them out. If you know of someone in the food space or restaurant send them their way, or we’re talking about the print stuff as well. Last question is about mentors, and it could be distant mentors, I mean, like books, resources, or it could be personal from a business standpoint. So I’d love to hear each of your from a mentor perspective, whether it’s one-on-one mentor in business or and or resources books that are some of your favorites.
Mark Sibilia 44:02
Dan you want to go first?
Dan Sibilia 44:06
Yeah. I mean, I have to say Mark is my mentor. I have learned more about business from this man than I’ve learned from anybody else in my life. And you know, it’s been great to work with him on a daily basis for the past 17 years.
Jeremy Weisz 44:23
What’s something that sticks out is there like a mantra or something that he’s constantly repeating?
Dan Sibilia 44:32
Mark wants us to treat our customers like family and to really go out and go above and beyond for them and make them feel like we actually care, we actually care about their business. They’re not customers to us. They’re true partners of ours. And I think that’s something that’s really stuck with me. And I don’t look at my customers as, disposable Customer A versus disposable Customer B. This is Bob from there. Yes, and he’s got a wife and kids, and he likes to do this. And we have a great relationship with our customers, and the relationship-building, part of it, I think, is something that I really learned from Mark, for sure.
Jeremy Weisz 45:14
What about any I don’t there’s resources from, like, a book standpoint, or anything else on that front that you’ve learned from throughout the years. If not, that’s fine too.
Dan Sibilia 45:25
Yeah. I mean, I was just gonna say I don’t read a lot of business literature. I mean, I try to keep, I keep up with the trade magnet, with my trade, with my industry, right? Industry publications, but not so much on the.
Jeremy Weisz 45:43
Mark. What about you?
Mark Sibilia 45:44
So, you know the big four O hit, you know the big four O, when, when I, when I went through some difficult, you know, familiar, I got the worst and really searching for life to what is life all about? And my niece introduced me to Kabbalah. I don’t know if you know what Kabbalah is, and I started taking some courses to really identify who do I want to be, what type of person I want to be in life. And I’ve learned a very simple, simple mantra, which is, always care about the other person. Always put yourself in the other person’s position and act that way. How would you like to be treated, and how would you like to be talked to, and how would you like to be looked at? And basically, Kabbalah is, don’t look for gratitude of the self alone, always look for what teach you do for other people.
And I think that was really a turning point in my life where I knew that, where all of a sudden you get this energy from not hearing about yourself, because when you’re going through a very difficult personal time and divorce and three kids, is a horrible process to go through, and you’re really trying to find a way to find yourself in all this chaos. And who do you want to be for the rest of your life, and all of a sudden you say, it’s not about you take yourself out of the picture and put everybody around you top of mind, care about them, and the universe will take care of you. And that was really, that year when I joined Kabbalah, it’s really funny. If you want to talk about a milestone, I met a gentleman which actually led me to Kincaid.
But he just patented a process for art called brush strokes, where he prints it on PVC, and he creates a form of the brush strokes in 800 degrees, and he makes it look like original art. And somebody introduced me to him, somebody from the Kabbalah Center introduced me to him. And he needed catalogs. He had a big contract with American Express, and he looked at me as the mentor, the 70-year-old man all of a sudden. And I said, what is it that I did, and he said to me, just who you are, just the way you speak to me, just the way you approach anything that I come to you. And that year after almost going bankrupt through my divorce, I made a million and a half dollars in that year from that gentleman, which was really a way to say all you have to do is be kind, be passionate and care about other people. And that’s the mantra that MPP is, if you reach us, we want to know you. We want to know your goals.
We want to know your challenges. We want to know what it is that you want out of your business more than just money. It’s not just about the money. And we try to take our clients through this process of understanding life and why do you make pizzas? Why do you make stones? What? What is it that you do for people that will enrich your life? That’s basically it.
Jeremy Weisz 49:21
Amazing. Yeah, there was a guy, Mark, David Guillam. It was through he’s, I know, you know, yeah. So he’s got Mary Roos, number one, one of the top liquid vitamin brands. And we were running a group of E-commerce, top e-commerce professionals, because we were doing the podcast for a show called prosper show e-commerce. David was in the room, met him, and then later on, I realized he’s one of the top, I don’t know one of the leading Kabbalah teachers in the world. Actually, he is. So you know him.
Mark Sibilia 49:55
Oh, I know him personally and I’ve known and I’ve taken. Some of his courses. He’s, you should go to Kabbalah.com and listen to some of his, he’s got Kabbalah one, Kabbalah two, Cabal three. And it’s like a level of consciousness beyond belief, beyond belief.
Jeremy Weisz 50:14
He had this, like, separate whole, I mean, I only knew him because of the e-commerce thing, but this separate whole life and person, everything in the Kabbalah world.
Mark Sibilia 50:26
His whole life was devoted to Kabbalah, and the business takes care of itself.
Jeremy Weisz 50:31
So, first of all, thank you both. This was fantastic. Everyone can check out more episodes of the podcast. They can check out MPPmarketinggroup.com, and we’ll see everyone next time. Dan, Mark, thanks so much.
Dan Sibilia 50:44
Thanks, everybody.
