Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:00
Yeah, I can understand if you’re watching the video piece, if you’re listening. I’ve been showing a little bit about the saw, you know, strategize and then the optimize part portion advertise and then the report. How have you found as far as your frequency of meeting with the clients? Right. How often are you going through. Because I’m sure this is a rinse and repeat, but I’m not sure. Like what’s the cycle of this look like. And maybe it’s different for each brand where you have to kind of strategize and then.
Rob Cromer: 14:31
It’s different for each brand. I think the constant from call it strategy at 10,000ft and picking it apart is an h1, h2. So the first six months, the last six months of each year. right? Two separate periods where typically the first part of the year, especially in marketplaces like Amazon, is a lot around tinkering and working through kind of the optimizations of the listings and the launching of new products. Because when you look at kind of the way the the year is set up from marketplaces, you’ve got just taking let’s just stick with Amazon in Q1, you have prime spring or whatever they call it, this at this point. And there’s one high velocity event. So HVEs or what Amazon calls their high velocity events. And when you get into H2 or the second half of the year, you’ve got Prime Day, which is, you know, advertised all over and everybody knows what Prime Day is at this point. Then you run into the next holiday, which is prime fall.
Then you run into the next one, which is Black Friday, followed by Cyber Monday and the holidays. So we take a lot of learnings from the first half of the year and put those into action and strategy around what the holidays and the promotions around the high velocity events are going to be. And in terms of kind of the day to day work, we meet with clients on a consistent schedule of biweekly calls. So we talk to brands for about an hour every two weeks about the upcoming, the call outs, the numbers, all the things that matter. And from that call, we will schedule one offs, whether that be with their fulfillment team or their creative team around different initiatives that we’re putting forward or we’re working on at any given time. So we meet with our clients a lot.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:28
Yeah, I’m going to we’ll go through some examples. I’m looking here Caraway. I mean the I’m not sure is it Nama. It’s really cool.
Rob Cromer: 16:38
Awesome. It’s the coolest juicer you’ve ever seen. You instead of having to, like, cut things into little pieces, and having that loud buzzing sound in your kitchen gnome allows you to basically just throw a whole piece of fruit in there, and then it grinds it up and turns it into this beautiful juice. They’ve also got the ability, like cool milkers, so you can just literally put nuts into a machine and it turns it into nut milk. It’s very cool. And they Dan is the CEO of that company and I think the.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:07
Spigot version, I wish I would have known about this before I got my other juicer, because this one looks cooler. And also.
Rob Cromer: 17:16
I think I could probably talk to Dan and see if we can get you a friends and family discount there because once you start using a juicer, it’s hard to go back to anything else.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:26
I love the the spigot piece as well on there.
Rob Cromer: 17:29
Yeah, it’s really cool.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:32
So we’ll get into some examples. But I’m curious, you know, before we hit record, we were talking about at this point in time, you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday is coming up, but it’s always coming up and people are always prepping for it. They’re probably prepping for it six months in advance or more. So what are some of the mistakes you see with people getting ready for, you know, Q4 in e-commerce, like you were saying, the Super Bowl, what are some of the mistakes you see these brands making?
Rob Cromer: 18:00
I think the biggest mistake we see brands make is they think that they can plan for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, right before Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And in reality, the planning starts months in advance. Just thinking through the fulfillment aspect of it, right? We need to think through production cycles, make sure that we have demand forecasts and kind of an understanding of what we think we’re going to sell through. And that requires us already thinking through promotional strategies and what we’re going to be able to sell in that period of time.
And then we’re preparing and sending into Amazon well in advance before the holiday comes up as Amazon ends up really putting cut off dates.So if Black Friday, Cyber Monday this year starts, I think it’s November 20th, right? It’s coming up, right? Actually, it’s next week. Black Friday, Cyber Monday starts November 20th. The cut off can be a month or two in advance for them to guarantee your inventory availability. So we’re sending things in well in advance of Black Friday Cyber Monday holiday. But at the same time we have to take storage fees into account.
So when you send things in in advance, if they’re just sitting there getting dusty on the shelves, Amazon’s charging you storage fees for it. So we’re thinking through the sell through rate of what’s happening at the current time. We’re sending inventory in. And basically it’s like a big math formula of what can be done and sent in in the right cadence ahead of the cut off dates to both protect against storage fees but protect against out of stock for those holiday events.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:39
I’ve even seen. You know, they even have restrictions. I mean, storage restrictions too. Like, even if a brand sells a lot, sometimes Amazon will restrict what you can send in too, right?
Rob Cromer: 19:51
Yeah. You know, we saw that really start to become a thing in Covid. Everybody went from sending anything you want whenever you want to Amazon to them putting massive restrictions on it. And we’ve always said from the beginning when we started this, I think 6 or 7 years ago, we don’t really want brands to be Amazon only. We think that there’s an inherent risk when the customer isn’t yours, right. Amazon is basically renting space and you pay a referral fee for that space along with other fees. And you know, the fees are what the fees are. And I don’t think that we need to dive into the argument for or against them, but what it means is you’re always at risk because it’s somebody else’s customer, or you’re always at risk because it’s somebody else’s Fulfillment center.
So all of a sudden you can be cut off and not be able to send inventory in. Or they could find something on your listing that might get the listing suspended and you have to appeal it. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong on the platform if you don’t have the right partner behind you can be the difference between making and breaking a company. And so we’re big proponents in helping brands think through an omnichannel approach. So how are we selling a DTC site or are we on other marketplaces. What does retail look like for them? And are we trying to get in store with Nordstrom or, you know, target or all these different places that brands have multiple sources of customer bases rather than all the eggs in Amazon?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:24
I know that you are Amazon first, but you do help with these other platforms. I’m curious, what are some of the criteria that you would think about to recommend a brand go, You know, you should check out Walmart.com at this point.
Rob Cromer: 21:39
Sure. So we’re Amazon first in that we have to be working with a brand for six months on Amazon before we’ll take on other marketplaces. The reason for that is today, Amazon is just the largest marketplace by a huge multiple. And so a lot of the work that we can do on Amazon can be replicated and save cost on other marketplaces. There are brands that do really well on Walmart, and there are brands that do really well on target, but those brands will be 10% of what they do on Amazon, typically from what we see.
So a lot of times, what informs the secondary marketplace strategy is a brand might be trying to get in-store at Walmart, and by being a third party seller on their marketplace, they can start to work with their in-store teams and their different reps, and show that there is demand from the Walmart customer for these products and it helps them get on shelf. Other times it’s, hey, we want to test out a product A over here, product B over here, and we want to see how the market reacts in different customer bases react.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:57
How did you get to this e-commerce world? Because like when I look at Adcade and what you do, it’s a lot different. How’d you land on what Aisle³ does?
Rob Cromer: 23:10
Well, an investor from arcade about eight years ago told me to start looking at Amazon, and he said that there’s at the time, I think Amazon was only doing around 2 or $3 billion in ad sales a year. I think they just did 17 billion in sales on ad sales last quarter. So it was a much different place. And he knew that Rob really liked working with founders, and we really like having businesses and places where we can feel the impact immediately. And there aren’t many places that are so complicated that founders who are typically very capable themselves, can’t figure it out.
Amazon is one of those places. There’s we say all the time that Amazon is about doing everything right all of the time, and everything is a lot of things. And he pointed out to me, his name is Stu Coleman, actually, and he pointed out to me that this was one of those environments that was underserved and was going to be where everybody needed to be soon. And so we started really digging into it. We found that, you know, software for Amazon wasn’t necessarily the thing. Amazon doesn’t provide a lot of data, right. You can scrape from Amazon just about as much data as they will provide for you via APIs.
And so that means that other than the tools that Amazon gives you, if you really dive into the tool sets that are available for Amazon, like third party tools that people have built, they’re not that impressive. It kind of pushed us into the direction of services. We liked agency. We like the ability to help. It’s less about kind of creating a product and then sitting back and watching that product work or not. This is much more about tweaking a product that is people first and, you know, the rest is kind of history.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:15
I’m curious, you know, Rob, the evolution of your customer client who’s a fit now. Like, do they are they not on Amazon at all. And they just have a big retail presence or big online presence. Are they up and coming on Amazon. We’re typically brands at when they engage with you.
Rob Cromer: 25:38
First and foremost, they typically have product market fit. So we don’t work with two specific kind of Amazon sellers. The first are resellers. So people that buy somebody else’s, you know, another brand’s product at a low price. And they compete on bidding price wars on Amazon to get that product out the door. There’s nothing to that other than just bid isolation. The second is the guy who finds, you know, a shipping container of tongue scrapers and throws them, throws a label on them and calls it his brand. There’s a lot of those kind of people, and I think those guys are really good at figuring out and hacking the Amazon systems and kind of using different tactics that agencies don’t use to get to the top. We work with brands that have product market fit. They have an understanding of who their customer is.
They’ve been on Amazon or they’re not on Amazon. We’re not selective of like we only launch brands or we only take on brands that are already there. I think we’re good at both and both require different kinds of strategy, but they’re funded. If they’re VC backed, like in they’re in the VC space, they’re funded, they’re ready to to double down on marketing and they’re looking to do something big. Right. This is if the channel works. So Lalo is a great example of a brand like this. Lalo, before they started working with us, we’re a really big name in the baby space. Like they’re an amazing brand that does really, really cool things. I have two children myself and they eat, breathe, sleep Lalo.
But they were a big DTC site, right? Lots of people came to DTC to see their website to there to buy products, and they still do. But Lalo, like most DTC brands, started to realize like, hey, we’re losing out to customers because people are looking for us on Amazon and we’re not there. And other Chinese sellers basically have created lookalike products, and they’re cannibalizing sales from us that we’ve already worked through on the top of the funnel. And you can look in the back end of Amazon and see brand search, right. Like AirPods is typically the most searched thing on Amazon, those kind of major brands. Lalo is in the top, I think at the time 75 or 50,000 searches on Amazon.
So people were looking for it and they came to us and we started looking at what the assortment should be on Amazon and how to launch. And, you know, there’s a lot of delicacy, delicacy a lot, a lot that you need to be delicate about in terms of, you know, what can DTC own and what can be exclusive to their direct consumer site and what can Amazon have. And that was three years ago. And today they’re in target. In store. In target they’re on Amazon. You know they’re in Nordstrom. They’re all over the place. And most parents have in their house now. And I think they’re a great archetype of the kind of brand that we’re really good at working with. Michael, their CMO, is also really smart, dude.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:51
Yeah. It’s cool. I mean, I could see because people trust him. They already have their credit card in Amazon, they trust Amazon. They know they can get shipping very quickly. So people search there. They’ll probably research a company and then just try and buy it on Amazon. Even if they’re on someone’s website, I imagine. How do you determine what products, you know, they’re not going to, you know, basically offer all of the products. And I’m assuming do you recommend they go FBA like Fulfillment by Amazon with the products?
Rob Cromer: 29:20
Your research is really good. I’m actually really impressed by your knowledge of Amazon here. This is great. So yes I think.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:29
They could launch all of their products. Do you know FBM like if you’re someone’s fulfilling by a merchant, they could just put it up there and fulfill. But I know the rankings are not going to be as high if Amazon has it in their fulfillment center. That probably helps with the algorithm. So I’m wondering how you choose the products and do you recommend all of those products do FBA?
Rob Cromer: 29:51
Sure. So there’s two main differences between FBA and FBM. The first being who ships it if it’s fulfilled by Amazon. Amazon is the actual shipper of the product, and that’s like the prime boxes we all get in the mail and FBM. It’s being shipped through the, you know, the people or the fulfillment of their website, basically of their DTC site. The second big one is fulfilled by merchants typically takes, you know, five plus days like you would buying from anybody’s dot com to get and FBA is prime.
It’s that get it, you know, dependent depending on the product and where you where you’re located, it could be anywhere between five hours and two days. And I think when people shop on Amazon, they’re shopping for Prime eligible products, whatever that product might be. They’re looking for high chairs and they come up against two high chairs. And maybe they’re not looking for Lalo, but they’re looking for high chairs and they’ve never heard of Lalo. And now you’re up against, you know, brand A and Lalo.
So they’re typically going to default to the product that is, you know, beyond all the other things, reviews and all these different parts that you can count on. They’re going to go for the one that they can get in two days, because that’s why you’re a prime member. And if you’re not FBA, you’re going to lose out on an extraordinary amount of sales because somebody else is. And that’s part of the fee structure of Amazon. It’s how they make money. But when it comes to figuring out assortment, like the high chair is expensive to fulfill, it’s a heavy, large product. Right? And there’s.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:27
I wouldn’t want to fulfill those things. Yeah, exactly.
Rob Cromer: 31:29
You wouldn’t want to ship those things. So you take in the storage fees into account as well. Right. You have to send it to the fulfillment centers. It sits in the fulfillment centers. That costs money before it gets shipped out as well. And we do a lot of analysis around what those costs are. We have another big one on Amazon. When you launch a new product, is there the only way to get verified true reviews via Amazon’s program is something called Amazon Vine. And that is a back end group of people that Amazon invites to review products so you can enroll a product in vine and 30 ish.
People will take your product. They they can click and get your product for free, and they’ll leave a verified review. And they are very serious reviewers. They don’t mess around. They will give you one star. They don’t care if it’s free and it’s it’s a good program, but you cannot be part of the vine program unless you are FBA. So there are products that we sell that are that for for brands that are FBM only. And they were FBA just to be part of the vine program. So it’s you know, there’s a thousand factors that go into all of these different decisions. And that is the, the everything, right? All the time. That’s part of the everything right. It’s so many details across so many different functions.
You know, creative catalog performance, marketing, fulfillment, ops strategy, all of those things have their own waterfall of features and problems that come with them that you have to be able to service. And I think the way we’ve been lucky enough to do it is, you know, one, we’re we’ve made a full time W2 only agency. So everybody here at Aisle³ is based in the US. They’re full time. They have health insurance benefits. They’re part of the team. We don’t outsource it. We don’t bring in contractors. And it makes a big difference in our ability to understand the nuances of the partners we work with and those brands, and create a better system for them.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:45
Rob, I want to get into product market fit and specifically, I don’t know if anything really emphasizes that more than salt does. So I want to talk about salt. But before we get to it, you mentioned this when you started Aisle³. Did you bootstrap this? Like how did you start it?
Because obviously growing a company, growing staff, you know, W2 health insurance, these are not inexpensive things. Obviously it adds to culture. Did you decide early on we’re going to grow by just Natural growth or did you raise money? What did you do with Aisle³?
Rob Cromer: 34:27
So kind of back to the point of building profitable companies. We decided from day one that Aisle³ needed to be profitable, and that would require thinking through hiring, thinking through all these different data points of how to build a company different than that of a VC backed company. So by making the decision to be profitable, we decided to not go that VC route and take venture money. That also gave us the ability and optionality to build a business the way we want. If we were venture backed at this point in our company or PE backed.
If you look at agencies that have given away 51 or more percent of their company, which is a lot of them, they are outsourced. There is no PE backed company that is going to have a full W-2 team, and there’s a lot of sacrifices you have to make that dilutes product when you don’t have the ability to. Be be beholden and to care for the team that you’re building, right? Like the team of Aisle³ is everything on Aisle³. We are not a business if it’s not for the people that work in this company and the day to day work that happens for the brands that we work with isn’t because of me.
I’m not the smart one. At Aisle³. We hire much smarter people than us, and we allow them to do the things that they do best within the systems that we’ve created for them. We have, you know, we’re particular about the way the work gets done, but we allow them to do the work that they can do. And it, I think was a good. I know it was a good decision in hindsight, and it was a little tougher in the beginning because you weren’t flooded with a lot of venture money to go do whatever you wanted to do with. We didn’t buy ten TVs day one like you.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:30
Would as you.
Rob Cromer: 36:32
You got funded.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:32
I’m curious, what did the initial team look like? Were you just growing organically as you brought customers on? You would hire accordingly.
Rob Cromer: 36:42
So the original team was myself, Rob Prentice, who’s now our CMO, and Riley Corr, who is our chief product officer, performance officer, CPO. Riley. It’s basically a family business. Rob and I have known each other for 25 years. Riley, if you can follow this thread is Rob’s wife’s best friend’s little brother. So Rob was at a dinner Rob and I had been talking about. And this is complicated because two Rob’s and now Riley a lot of hours, but Rob was at a dinner talking to people about this business that him and I were talking about, about Aisle³, and at the dinner was Riley, and he was listening to Rob talk about Amazon and like our thoughts on it. And Riley was the Amazon guy at a much, much larger holding company level agency called essence. And Riley chimed in and had a bunch of opinions. And Rob came back to me that night, calls me up after dinner, and he goes, you’re not going to you’re not going to believe this.
I think I found the guy we should start this with. And Riley is arguably top 3 to 5 smartest people on Amazon in the world. He is an amazing knowledge base that is able to scale his knowledge and pass it down to the team and create lots of playbooks and SOPs that allow people to to understand the world the way he does. And it started with the three of us and our first hire outside of that was Darianne, and Darianne was a designer. So the one thing the three of us couldn’t do is design. And today Darianne is, you know, she actually just got promoted to director of Creative and Catalog. So she’s moving out of just design and kind of heading a whole team.
And then the next hire was Ricky. I think this actually that page you’re going through is in order of how people came on the team. And Ricky was our first performance marketer, and now he’s the director of agency operations and performance for our team. And, you know, we’ve been lucky enough that really the attrition on our team is, is basically non-existent. And the people were building with are the people that are helping us grow the agency. As we get bigger, they’re moving into new roles. And, you know, we’re betting on them to be able to come up with new solutions and make the offering even better.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:13
From when you start the agency. At what point do you get the first customer?
Rob Cromer: 39:21
It was pretty quick. Our first customer actually sold. He sold something called dick pillows. Literally. He would put what he called dicks like penises on pillows, and he embroidered them and sold them on Amazon. And he was a friend of a friend. And he was, like, selling a lot of pillows, believe it or not, like an exorbitant amount of penis pillows. And then he would also find like the latest meme, and he would slap that meme on a pillow.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:52
And it was this selling on Amazon, selling on Amazon, selling on Amazon, on Amazon.
Rob Cromer: 39:57
This was, you know, the Amazon was a different place. Oh, years ago.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:00
Your wife was like, wait, you had this Adcade software VC back and now.
Rob Cromer: 40:07
You’re selling penis pillows?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:08
Yeah, exactly.
Rob Cromer: 40:10
You know, somebody on our team is gonna listen to this and be like, I can’t believe you told the world that our first.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:15
You got to start somewhere.
Rob Cromer: 40:16
Yeah. Our first like our first call it household name client was actually Ripple Foods. Ripple sells milk. Literally. Like. Soybean like soy p p milk.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:33
Oh, yeah, I’ve had it.
Rob Cromer: 40:34
Yeah, yeah, it’s an alternative milk. And I soy milk. And we were just talking peanut pillows. So you’re probably like, what kind of what kind of milk?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:40
I mean, they have it at the grocery stores and yeah, they’re everywhere.
Rob Cromer: 40:44
And we launched them on Amazon. Worked with them for years.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:46
Yeah, yeah.
Rob Cromer: 40:47
And we scaled them into the millions. And they were the first brand that gave us the credibility of like, okay, these guys, these these guys know what they’re doing. And then from there, you know more brands came knocking and the network grew. And today I think.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:04
How did you get Ripple? Because that’s a pretty big company. Here’s here’s Ripple by the way if you want to see it.
Rob Cromer: 41:10
Yeah that’s Ripple. We got Ripple through. A friend who ran another agency. His name was. His. His name is Kyle Heller, who I haven’t said hi to in a long time, but Kyle introduced us to the head of sales for the Northeast at Ripple, and we met them at Expo West. This was, I guess, six years ago, and we basically were like, hey, we’re pretty new agency. We’re pretty convinced that our product, like our strategy is going to work and we’ll work our ass off for you, and you’re going to be our tentpole client and we’re going to, you know.
I think we probably obfuscated a little bit of how green we were, but we told them we were going to, you know, do the best work ever and they’re going to get a deal on it. And we did, and it worked out right. Like they they scaled massively. They are one of the largest alternative milk brands in the country and gave us the data points. We needed to be able to go to other brands. And now I think Aisle³ is one of the best agencies for the niche that we work in. We’re, you know, boutique for a reason. We like a great you know, in your intro you talk about how we just won adweek’s fastest growing agencies.
We did that by going deep, not wide. So part of our model is we take a percentage of sales on the back end of the brands we work with. Our goal is to basically be 2 to 3% of total sales. So you have to be confident that we can grow brands to a really high clip, right? Like half a million a month or more in sales. And that allows this model to work. And we are able to do that by kind of keeping the right kind of focus on brands that can grow. And instead of adding, we’re not an agency of hundreds of brands, like there’s a lot of agencies out there. You know, we don’t need to call them out.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:14
You really are kind of a model and really kind of be a true partner to these.
Rob Cromer: 43:18
Be a true partner. You know, if we’ve done the job right, they think of us as their team straight up. And, you know, instead of just throwing more brands into our thing, like we tell brands all the time, you’re not ready to work with us. We’re not the right partner. We are confident enough to do that because we know that when we find the right match, that we will work with them for a long time. We’re not typically the first agency somebody hired. We’re the agency you talk to after you fired your first agency that said they’d do everything and didn’t. And that gives us the ability to scale a system and create longer relationships and make brands bigger versus make the agency bigger through more brands.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:04
Rob, first of all, I have one last question. Thanks for sharing the journey. Yeah, check out Aisle3.com to learn more. I’m just curious some of your favorite resources? Those resources could be mentors you learn from distant mentors you learn from meaning. Books. Podcasts. What are some of your favorite resources out there for you and your in your business journey?
Rob Cromer: 44:32
So one we have internally in our company, we use an offshoot of EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. We use Steve Preda’s. It’s called Summit. So I think he’s a big mentor and resource in how to continue to build a company that is goal oriented, accountable, and kind of has a North Star to follow. I think LinkedIn is actually a really interesting place to find voices.
It’s kind of like I’ve never really been into LinkedIn in the past several months. I’ve gotten more into it. And I think that there’s a lot of interesting things being said there. I like Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up a lot as well. I don’t know if you know Jerry Colonna. I think the way they think about the founders’ mindsets really interesting. They’re much less against the hustle mentality. But at the same time, I respect Gary V’s like view on it. I think he’s probably the smartest marketer in the world right now. He is obviously opinionated, but he seems to have a really good finger on the pulse, and I trust where he kind of sees the future of marketing going. And then I like to read books. I don’t read non-fiction or I don’t read fiction, I only read non-fiction, and I just have bookshelves full of like.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:54
What are your favorites?
Rob Cromer: 45:55
I’m gonna get up because I can look at you like.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:59
You know, as you’re doing that. I think, like.
Rob Cromer: 46:01
Atomic Habits is awesome. Meditations. Marcus Aurelius is really, really good. Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain. Actually, I’m gonna bring this one over because this one’s really cool for a lot of people. I think founders in general have a tough time. I don’t know if you have a hard stop, but I also have a question for you before we leave. But Tiago Forte has this process called a Second Brain. And really it’s it’s projects, areas, resources and archives. It’s a way to take all of the information we bring in in today’s world, which is extensive online, offline, everywhere, and organize it into a way that you can basically catalogue. Catalogue. Catalogue your life into what’s like a Dewey Decimal System, Dewey Decimal system. And I have crazy ADHD, and it’s been something that I’ve always my whole life been trying to work out systems that allow me to stay organized.
And this has been in basically 40 years, the only system that I’ve stuck with. And if you can get him on your podcast, he’s, I think, a really interesting person. He’s also got great opinions on AI and how to use AI, not to like, build the next billion dollar thing, but how to use AI to to amplify the stuff that you’re doing or help you be more productive in your day to day life. And I kind of like that. I like that view of AI better. Like, how do we actually use it versus talk about what it’s going to be and how it’s going to change the world? So yeah, that’s my shout out. I’m gonna give Tiago Forte a big shout out today.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 47:39
Well, it’s funny you say that. Rob. So I had the Founder of Delphi AI. If people want to check that out, it’s where he helps people clone themselves essentially. So you can go in and ask questions. And so I actually did interview with Dara, the Founder, his clone, his video clone. And then I had him on to talk about the software, but I then I had the Co-founder of HubSpot, AI clone, so I just and just to mention that the only reason I heard of him is because Tiago Forte, he’s on Delphi. And so I was like looking through his profile so people can actually interact with him on an actual call on Delphi AI. So shout out there.
Rob Cromer: 48:24
But that’s awesome.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:25
Well, this has been great.
Rob Cromer: 48:26
Rob, my last question for you. Well, maybe my only question I got to ask you. So you guys are big into gifting. What’s a great gift for people to give clients this holiday season?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:37
You know what? I don’t like sending gifts around the holiday season, to be honest with you, because it’s so crowded and so usually we send gifts on off times a year, right? So I’d rather personally send them in January when people aren’t getting anything. And so I actually try not to send anything around the holiday to referral partners or clients. Now, sometimes your campaign kind of goes out, you know, and we have kind of, you know, my philosophy is.
You know, since I put on auto pilot, we’re sending smaller, more frequent gifts. And some people would totally disagree with this philosophy. Rob, which is I like sending.
I like getting food, so I send food. Now, some people would say, do not send food because they eat it and it goes away. But if I’m sending you, you know, 3 or 4 gifts a year, then I just keep sending you things. Now for really like referral partners that are are great and we’ll send one off things in addition to the campaign of gifts. Right. And so one off things are obviously a little bit more personal. So I’ve sent people like find out their favorite sports team and then had the whole like every like a signed picture of their favorite sports team and announce it to them.
Rob Cromer: 50:03
It’s awesome.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:04
Right. And so like very. And it could be inexpensive actually. One of the talks that I gave at this high level mastermind was about strategic gifting. And one of the examples I give, and this was not me, but actually a software company came up to me after the talk and said, Jeremy, I have to tell you this story. And they spent $10. Okay. They found out they got a $1 million client from a $10 gift. Okay. Wow. And the CEO, they found out the CEO’s wife liked goats. So they found a goat. Like one of those, you know, keychain racks that you just hang your keys on in the house. Sent her a goat keychain rack that was $10, and the person in the CEO ended up calling. They’ve been trying to reach out for months. The CEO ended up calling like, okay, my wife said, I have to call you. You sent her this awesome goat keychain.
Rob Cromer: 51:06
That’s really great.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 51:07
And so it doesn’t have to be super expensive either. But like you said, kind of thoughtful. But I like the ongoing campaign to be in place in addition to one off thoughtful gifts, because those tend to happen once in a while. And I like a system and a process to make sure it’s happening, so.
Rob Cromer: 51:25
I like that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 51:26
Yeah.
Rob Cromer: 51:26
Harry & David Gourmet Food Gifts.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 51:30
All those who send food. You know, it’s it’s always amazing. But I want to give a shout out to Aisle3.com and more episodes of the podcast. Rob, thanks so much.
Rob Cromer: 51:41
Thanks so much for having me on. It was great to chat with you today.
