Ryan Millman

@0:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Hello everyone and welcome to the Shades of Entrepreneurship. This is your host, Mr. Flores. Today I'm here with the CEO and Co-Founder of Undigital Ryan Millman Ryan. How are we doing? 

@0:19 - Ryan - UnDigital

I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me. 

@0:21 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah. Thank you for calling in. Ryan is actually calling in from Maryland. So just a quick throw away from Portland.

What I mean quick, I mean across the entire country, but I've been out to the DC area folks. If you have not been out to the DMV, please check out the DMV, please check it out.

It is a gorgeous place, but enough about Maryland and the East Coast, Ryan, give us a little background.

@0:45 - Ryan - UnDigital

Who is Ryan Millman? Yeah. Yeah. Well, my story starts, gosh, it's sort of a young kid. I was always into athletics, was not into school.

And so along the way, I think my parents were quite concerned about me. Didn't do very good in my schoolwork, guy into college, went out to school in Arizona, beautiful college.

I was getting in back of class, not paying attention to what the teachers were saying, but instead dreaming up ideas and sort of sketching out business models of potential companies I could come up with to sort of go out on my own and become an entrepreneur.

And so, you know, the fabric of, you know, I'd say my career has always been around, you know, the funny part is that education was not a very important part of my childhood, but education has kind of become a staple and a hallmark for me as I've been able to grow my businesses.

Became a student of learnings and really dove into every book, every podcast out there, you know, to figure out how I really created a successful company, started my first company when I was 21.

At the time, the surgeons were hot bod and likeos, so very early days, was really excited, it took me several years to get the first company,

going subsequently. I've started many companies, started five companies, got about 300 overall employees in the organization. High level, we were able to build a company from just a couple thousand dollars to fifty million dollars a year in annual revenues and get to work on some really fun things.

@2:18 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That is pretty phenomenal. think that's probably most entrepreneurs dream is to be able to scale their business to a fifty million dollar reoccurring revenue.

I know that would definitely be one of my aspirations, certainly. Now, let's talk a little bit about Undigital. It's actually really cool because essentially you're kind of helping support small businesses think about branding.

@2:39 - Ryan - UnDigital

So tell us a little bit about what Undigital is. Yeah, digital really exciting. We own several e-commerce companies and I've got about 100,000 square feet of fulfillment space where we ship out all these orders and e-commerce is massive industry.

There's 40 billion packages a year that are getting shipped out worldwide. And the marketer to me, you know, we know what marketing best practices look like in marketing.

It's all about relevancy You know the relevancy of the message getting the right message to the right customer wherever they are if you think about the package Going out to a customer.

That is a touch point. It's a very important touch point in e-commerce But the touch point has not had marketing best practices right at best e-commerce brands maybe they could pre-print a whole bunch of things and drop the same leaflet or insert or collateral into the Package so everyone gets something that's really not relevant Has little benefit And so the light bulb moment was for me being in our own fulfillment centers and just seeing all those packages and saying wow like We can do better like there's a better way.

How do we get a Personalized you know communication personalized collateral inside each and every package and I just got obsessed with this idea And I remember just in the last 10 or 15 years I'd always have an idea around marketing technology and I said gosh wouldn't this be great and I just never got

to it, and somebody else eventually would come out with it, which was fantastic. This idea I couldn't kick, it wasn't available, I couldn't find it.

I said, we're going to build this, and I hired all the best engineers I could find, invested a lot of money to do this really for our own brands.

But essentially what we invented is what we call in package personalization. It's an automated way to go ahead and drop in at our fulfillment center, very curated, very personalized collateral in each and every user's package.

Our platform where all of our ads and all of our campaigns get created is very much like Facebook ads for packages.

So we have all this logic that lives on our front end software. We're running all these different campaigns. We have a full analytics suite, so we can track the conversion rate of every campaign.

And so we get the A-B test and get the conversion rate optimized this channel to drive success. I'll give you couple examples, for your listeners to better understand what kinds of things can be done.

You know, targeting your first time customers, right, they're very different than your repeat or your most loyal customers. We'll do things like testing version A, version B.

our best welcome message this could be in what looks like a handwritten note it could be a graphical marketing piece if somebody orders from us and they're not in our loyalty program we might want to say you know hey Gabriel you know you're not you're not going on for a loyalty program these are all the benefits maybe you are in the loyalty program and we'll let you know hey you've got five hundred twenty two point you're twenty dollars away from our platinum status we can give specific product information so hey thanks for the moisturizing cream here's how you apply it because you have dry skin these are the other products we know you're going to love there's really no limit it's taking that customer data looking at that customer and serving up very helpful it could be informational but certainly content that helps drive that next action man i love this because one of the things we kind of talked about pretty consistently on the show is the marketing funnel right in the the importance of that and essentially folks what this is and i really love this concept because you know you're you're doing some marketing segmentations for your customers hey who's currently on the loyalty program versus not and you know you're saving this in a

@6:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And then utilizing that data, right, to then curate a package for them. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are under the impression that, you know, customized packaging is actually really expensive and very difficult to do.

Is that true or not?

@6:15 - Ryan - UnDigital

Well, when we first started looking at it, we actually started looking at the actual packaging itself, right? think about the box, the corrugate and printing.

And that is kind of expensive. And we said, how can we do this in a way that is both economical and truly one to one marketing?

And so we're printing paper collateral. it is gorgeous. You're gorgeously printed full color marketing collateral. It's thick. It's you know, tactile feels good.

It can be in the format of a brochure. It could be an individual insert. It could be what looks like a handwritten note.

And so it's an economical way to do this at scale. And it's an automated process for us. You mentioned the data.

So, you know, brands connect their CRM to us automatically. So you have Shopify, we have an app that takes about five minutes.

Your data flows in and then you get to create all of this. different logic that that lives in the individual platform.

In your fulfillment center, at the time you're fulfilling, let's say, Sarah's order, you know, a little call comes in digital in the background and says, Hey, we're filling Sarah's order, Sarah's first time customer or not in the loyalty program, order these products, you know, we take all this data about Sarah, there could be 50 other data points, and we're instantly serving at that moment, the right collateral for Sarah, and it just pops out for the operator gets included in the box, and then we're tracking Sarah's future behaviors, right?

So it's very easy to set up and establish, and customers love it. mean, it's got their name on it, they open their package, it's 100% open rate, and you know, when you give something that's personalized to a customer, number one is put small on their face, it makes them feel connected to your brand, but when you're giving them specific tips and helpful information and guiding them along and curating on the products, it's amazing.

What I didn't realize when I started this company, my goal was like, let's just connect with our customers, let's make them feel special, let's give them personalized information.

The lift and reorder rates was so much greater than I had anticipated. dissipate our average brands get between a 7 and 10% increase in reorder rates.

So it's a very profitable channel and it just keeps getting better as you use the data that comes into our dashboards, the analytics data to just keep making campaigns better and better.

@8:14 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, it's it's very interesting because you mentioned, you know, the customized packaging that got to tell you folks, I receive, you know, snail mail pretty consistently here at the house.

And one thing I always get is this credit card offer. And I know it's always a credit card offer, but the package they send it in is almost like it plors me to open it because it's so customized and it has my name and it's kind of looks like a handwritten.

I still know it today in credit card and offer, I still open it just because the packaging is so alluring, you know, it's very interesting how that psyche does kind of play a little bit of a role in whether or not you're gonna open your mail.

@8:50 - Ryan - UnDigital

Well, you know, I think this I look, marketing works is one of the biggest industries and obviously there's so many channels.

I'm a proponent of all channels, but the goal is to find incrementality, meaning we need to find incremental revenue.

So we need to make sure every dollar we're spending is truly additive. And that's one of the great things that I love about our channel is in the past, you know, we really didn't have tracking tools to look at things like pre-printing flyers and putting them into packages with Undigital.

Not only are we fully personalized, but we are measuring everything. And what we love to do is we love to run holdout groups in the early days.

So let's look at sending a portion of your customers with fully personalized messaging inside, and then we will hold out a group.

And so we can actually deliver back to the brands and the C suite of the brands. Hey, look at the step change.

Look at the lift of people, you know, the spend that we're getting, the increase in reorder rates, the increase in LTV.

You know, it's significant. And what's also really interesting to me is, you know, so many brands have gotten really mature in some of these other channels.

So if you've been at Facebook for a while or Google Search or Google Shopping, you know, you're trying to sort of like squeeze out little incremental wins.

Happaging is blue ocean. Like you plug in a personalization system by Undigital. And like, you're going from zero to a hundred, because most brands, you know, the inventor.

So most brands, you know, are still not, you know, using personalization and package. just so many brands out there.

@10:10 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So it's just a great opportunity to turn on something really new and to drive a pretty big outcome from it.

Yeah, and you know, one of things you mentioned too, is you like to leverage all of the different platforms.

And one of the things you're also talking about is, you know, essentially acquiring all of this data, right? Now with that said, what are some different avenues, you know, entrepreneurs can look at to capture this piece of this customer information outside of a newsletter and blog?

@10:42 - Ryan - UnDigital

Yeah, well, a lot of the information, so because we're e-commerce based, you know, the information is flowing in from the order itself.

So your customer place is in order. We know what they ordered, we know what their AOV is. Some of our customers might tag them with certain personas.

Obviously we have first name to personalize with first name. You're capturing loyalty information if you have a loyalty program.

Are they signed in for your SMS program or not? They have an interaction with customer service, you know, we do a lot of things that are, you know, it doesn't always have to be a Direct response the very marketing heavy piece.

In fact, the best marketing is really just authentic marketing It's it's feeling like you're talking to a person not a brand So what a lot of our customers do is they'll do things like, you know, if you had an interaction with customer service Customer service will actually type in a note into the CRM It'll flow into the on digital platform and you'll actually get a note.

Let's say let's say you had an issue with your order And it was a it was a late ship, but you had to talk to a customer service agent We'll actually put out what looks like a handwritten note.

It's pretty much indistinguishable. It's printed But the note might be from that agent saying hey, you know, Julie. I'm so sorry for the delay I'm glad we were able to resolve those great speaking with you, you know from the agent, right?

So it's it's just an authentic way to wow this brand really cares It's a meaningful moment putting a smile on a customer's face even if it's small that's marketing goal, right?

It connects in their brain, you're sort of creating this image, and you're making this connection, and that's powerful. I think the biggest driver of success in e-commerce, in my opinion, and I talk a lot about this, is the idea of customers loving your brand.

Now, if you think about the landscape of all your customers, you're going to have some customers that have bad interaction, and they're your detractors.

You're going to have a lot of customers that like you and had a fine experience, but maybe not noteworthy.

And then you're going to have a small amount of customers that love you. You know, that is the goal.

That is the worst so much. So the real question is, how do we get more customers from liking us to loving us, right?

And what is customer love? Customer love is the combination of great products and great experience, right? Think about any dinner you've gone to.

We've had thousands of dinners, like the few that you actually remember, it's those two things. It's both a great product, great food, plus an interesting experience.

Maybe a story, maybe a waiter told you something that stuck with you, right? And so, you know, it's the same in e-commerce.

commerce. We come in on the experiential side and it just has such an impact because all of the commerce brands out there, you're competing with so many other customers.

Those little things, those little touches are the difference to get those customers to be, you know, patrons of you when they have so many choices.

Those little things add up and I don't think enough brands actually focus on a budget around just this idea of customer love.

We all focus on acquisition budget and, you know, we're focusing on getting customers through the funnel and great things and they're important, but gosh, there's nothing more important than figuring out what do we need to do to get more of these customers that like us to love us.

@13:37 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Customer love is what builds market share and maximizes profits for all brands. Yeah, you brought up a lot of great points there, right?

You know, one of the things you're talking about the restaurants, you know, we've all been to a phenomenal restaurant and a great experience and we've probably all had RSVP at, you know, nice four star restaurant, but I got to tell you folks, your brand and your marketing starts the very beginning of that.

a customer interaction. for example, if I have a 730 reservation and I don't get sit down until 8 p.m., don't care how good that food is, I'm probably never going to go back to that restaurant, right?

Because the service wasn't there. What we consider valuable is our time as well. know, historically, I would say, Nordstrom, their brand was always known for being willing to take anything back, right?

You can return anything to Nordstrom. can take a tire back, right? And that's really where that loyalty, as Ryan was mentioning, how you become kind of someone that's engaged with the brand to becoming loyal to the brand.

Because at the end of the day, you're not just trying to find someone that's willing to reach in their back pocket, pull out their wallet, and pay you.

You want that, yes. But you also want them to share that product on the line, right? Share it on the social media, just talk about that product in a way that, hey, this is why it was valuable to me because that's free marketing, free advertisement, and that's what you create a loyal brand, right?

When you have individuals engaging with you on your on your website, on your social channels, and you're not engaging.

back, you're losing a loyal consumer because they probably feel you don't care about them. Another thing Ryan said was that just sitting in time, just in general, if I go to any place and I'm waiting in line, now good customer service, if the individual that's sitting at the concierge or person at the front desk looks around and says, give me one moment, I'm helping this individual, they just bought themselves five more minutes of time simply by acknowledging me, by acknowledging me that I'm sitting there waiting and they acknowledge that that right there will actually ease a lot of individual stress because now they feel seen and cared for and about right and that's again going back to that customer service piece creating that loyal customer.

It really does start with the frontline employees and it's a top down approach. Your leadership has to really be involved and ingrained into the customer experience and making sure that that customer experience is flawless because that is actually the brand right at the end of the day.

Hey, that's what they're going to remember the brand as completely agree.

@16:04 - Ryan - UnDigital

mean, everything is customer experience, every interaction, every touch point, your website, how you answer the phone, what's the inflection in the operator's voice, right?

can say the same thing in different ways. Um, you can greet them in different, you can say the same words, but, you know, it doesn't sound on the old jury or optimistic or positive or monotone.

So, you know, everything is marketing, right? Everything is an opportunity. And us as, um, as entrepreneurs, you know, the goal is continuous improvement, right?

Like we're, it's hard starting a company. It's hard, you know, having all these touch points. Take what your baseline today.

And obviously, you know, we have to continue to go there. We have to continue to go to the North Star, which is improvement to betterment.

And if you don't know what that is, it looks like find the people that are doing it the best.

And there's no shame in figuring out what they've done, right? There's so many people that have written the rules of the road for us.

And that's what I did in the early days. You know, I started, um, you know, some of industries I started, I didn't really have the knowledge.

And I said, hey, who's doing it the best? Let me learn from them. Let me see what that looks like.

And eventually, you you can start innovating. coming up with new things, you don't have to, you know, invent everything, right?

A lot of stuff is out there and a lot of there's lot of knowledge. We have more knowledge available to us than we ever have.

But the goal is to continuously improve. I think one of the tangible things that businesses can do today and going back to this idea, you know, you know, we're offering services.

Again, we've got customers that are enjoying our service at different levels. Maybe you don't really know what you need to do to sort of improve.

There's nothing more powerful than, I'd say, surveying the customers that like you, right? The ones that hate, you know, are not happy.

You know, you're not going to get them to come back. You've already got this group of customers that are really loyal.

Those loyal customers are probably a significant portion of your revenue. Let's look at this biggest swap here, right? How do we get more of these customers in the middle?

Let them tell you, you know, let's really figure out what are the things that we're missing? Maybe it's a service offering.

Maybe it's product offering. Maybe it's ship times or shipping costs or whatever it might be, right? You know, that is really valuable feedback because that helps in

and form sort of what your roadmap can be. If you ask the right phrasing questions to that group of people, you know, they tell you that, yeah, they like you, they give you an okay score.

Hey, what are the things that we can do that would make you love us? Or get us to a nine or get us to a 10.

And as you start to combine those survey scores and really see what those items are, it's great discovery for your team to start to take some of those items, get them on the roadmap, get them in place and start to win over more customers in a very healthy way.

@18:27 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, engaging your employees early during that conversation also is a very smart idea. know, my former directors have a saying, if you're not getting comparatively better, you're getting competitively worse.

So, you know, always look to see what's changed in the market. Now, Ryan, you mentioned it, you know, starting the business is difficult, but you also mentioned you started on digital because you had created so many other businesses.

@18:52 - Ryan - UnDigital

So let's take a step back. What was your first entrepreneurial endeavor? And why did you decide to get into entrepreneurship?

Yeah, I was just obsessed. for the idea. I didn't, I didn't want to work for anybody else. I just didn't see myself doing that.

And I was a kid growing up selling baseball cards to shows. I always sort of just kind of had that bug.

My first business was, I started in 1999. And at the time, digital camera, the first digital camera just came out.

was a Casio 3 megapixel camera. You know, I remember buying it and going to a restaurant and everybody in the restaurant was like, what is that?

People were staring as I was taking pictures and looking at the back of the screen. It seemed silly today, but it was so novel.

And I got the idea to take pictures at college events and get them on the internet. Nobody had their picture on the internet at 99, right?

Again, hop out and let us wear the search engines. You know, there was some text on the internet. It was very new.

And so I figured out how to write some bash actions to take these photos, turn them into thumbnails, get them posted to a web page, hand it out cards, got people from University Arizona to go to the website.

It just became such. an instant hit. were telling their friends all over the country, hey, take a look at, you know, I'm online with this girl I'm dating, or this guy I'm dating, or my friends, and you know, seeing pictures and having people directed to webpage where they could view them was really, really interesting.

Quickly expanded to about 20 colleges, started figuring out how to sell the pictures, had to add revenue because everyone in 99 had to add revenue, scaled to 40, 50 colleges, and then to turn that into actually doing the annual portraits for fraternity and sororities.

So we went from sort of part pictures for fraternities and sororities and college events to these annual portraits. The fraternities and sororities are pretty much in every college, and every year they take portraits, create products kind of pivoted into that business after few years.

And we actually still do that at about 600 colleges every year. We have hundreds of photographers that travel around and take all these different photographs.

you know, the business took several years before I actually found, you know, footing. It was exciting. I was like, we're going to figure this out.

There were good days and bad days. Business is like one day, you know, got the dopamine, you're like, this was a great day.

the next day can be like, Oh, God, what am I doing here? Like, is this going to work? But you've got to have more optimism than not.

And as soon as I got that business going, I'm really good footing. I had an early employee who end up, I said, Hey, you're now in charge.

I'm going to the next company. And I just kind of kept looking at tangential and other opportunities with bigger markets and kind of just getting into new things, bringing in good people.

Me personally, I'm not the kind of person I don't really love being in a medium or larger business where you become mature.

it's a lot of HR and admin. I like the puzzle that hasn't been figured out.

@21:38 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I like kind of getting things going and solving for for opportunities. You know, one of the things people though, no, is you essentially, you mentioned, you know, you started this little photo business, and then you started getting under the brands.

So you essentially start with a $5,000 startup. Yeah. So multiple brands generating millions of revenue.

@22:01 - Ryan - UnDigital

Well, the way that I did it was really being in the weeds of every dollar spent, I mean, I didn't have access to capital, I never even thought about raising capital, I didn't think I was fundable, it was never something I thought about, and frankly, I never really wanted to be responsible for anybody else.

I didn't care how hard I would work, and fortunately, being sort of at college age, I didn't have a family.

And so, I loved every day because I learned so, so much, how to make a website, you know, but every dollar had to be meaningful, right?

And so, I had to really, you know, I started my advertising budget with 50 bucks, and that 50 bucks turned into a couple really great accounts, and I went to $100, and then I went to a couple thousand dollars, and then, obviously, eventually, today, have seven figures in advertising budgets across our businesses, but it was very calculated, and I think one of the big misconceptions, and people always think this, like, oh man, I'm not as risky as you, I'm like the least risky person, you know, if I put a hundred dollars in a slot machine and lose it, like, I'm pissed, and, you know, I don't like to gamble.

And so, really, it's really... Understanding what's happening at the root level and so I think when you think about your company and and what your core companies are I think almost all businesses especially in e-commerce like you have to be good at marketing so marketing is something I had to learn I never outsourced and say hey, here's some money go figure this out and I'm gonna hope that you know what you're doing I literally studied became student of the game.

So going back to the education I just I love learning But you know I was passionate about this as opposed to sort of a traditional schooling and every day I read a little bit before I tried to find a nugget but I did the work You know I went into Google AdWords.

I tried to figure out, you know all the best ways to drive the channel and I got it Go and got the engines working.

It's all about building profitable engines and marketing and scaling your dollars appropriately So, you know when you have a little bit of money, you can only grow so much But we started to get we started to get some movement right we started to use what we had the few thousand dollars It turns into more as the cash flow comes in it does get easier But it took years and years and years to get you know really get to like a decent point

And as we got more chips, we able to sort of make bigger investments, but the thesis never changed. The investments never got more risky.

They were just bigger dollars. But they had bigger return profiles, bigger opportunities. So things kind of get sweeter as you go.

But early days are super hard and the best advice is you just got to get through it. You got to get through it with optimism.

got to bring optimism to your entire team. You can't do anything with pessimism. And you got to rally your team, say, hey, we're going to go there.

We're going to figure this out. We're going to give it all we have. But you've got to do it in a pragmatic way.

@24:30 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah. I really left what you said in regards to going out and just reading and listening to a bunch of podcasts.

folks, there's a lot of free education out there from a business acronym perspective that is available to you at the tip of your fingers.

In fact, no other time than right now have we had probably more information in our front pocket, right, in our phone than ever any other time before.

As Ryan was saying, he used to take actual photos and then go and upload them with thumbnails. now, you know, you take a photo on your phone is automatically on your computer, right?

So, so you know, take advantage of the education that we have available and Ryan, one of the things you also mentioned was funding.

What key lessons did you learn from funding and growing your privately owned businesses?

@25:12 - Ryan - UnDigital

Well, I think the main thing for me was it was just diligence. I mean, you know, again, it was all privately funded.

was very, it wasn't a lot of funding there. But, you know, I'd say this, you know, I had to hire people when I couldn't even pay myself and, you know, it was early days and, you know, these are the sacrifices you make and, you know, it's just kind of par for the course.

And so, you know, as the entrepreneur, I mean, you know, the tough times are on you and certainly if you can make it to the other side, the sweeter times, you know, become your victories for sure.

And so I'd say, you know, that's what the entrepreneurship journey is about. It's obviously about getting to the other side and building value.

I think some of the biggest lessons, though, are the journey was incredible. And obviously, I've been able to have a lot of success in my career.

But looking back at those early days and, you know, there was nothing more exciting than that and sometimes you don't really always realize it while you're going through it.

The you start to gain an unfair knowledge advantage. That is the biggest that is you can bank that on your balance sheet your life personal balance sheet forever.

And I think whether you make it to the other side and venture number one or you don't that journey is so valuable to you and your long term ability to drive success.

And I think, you know, taking a step back, trying to breathe and recognizing that is super helpful, but there's no replacement for putting in the work.

I put a lot of hard work in those early days. I have a family now. I think I work a lot smarter.

You know, I focus on, you know, really important things. And I realized when I'm not doing something important. Hey, I can take a break, you know, I used to feel like I could never take a break.

I'd feel bad if I went out to do something that was for a personal day. I think one thing I'd like to share sort of with the group because I think this is sort of a topic that doesn't get taught.

talked about enough is that, you know, all of us have good days and bad days, and there's our mental struggle that so many have, and it's completely normal.

If every day you're just everything's perfect, gosh, I'd like to meet that individual. It's really discussed, but entrepreneurship is a really difficult, you know, path.

And I think one of the things really helpful is to have this conversation with your entire team. lot of times us as the entrepreneur, we take it all on, and we don't want our team to feel like anything's ever wrong.

I actually like to take the opposite approach and just say like, hey, it's okay to tell me when you're having a bad day, because I'm going to have bad days too, right?

More times than not, we're going to be optimistic and we're going to solve problems together, but it's not always going to be good.

It's a roller coaster. That is part of the ride. I think we need to be able to be public about that with our teams, have our teams support us.

Don't feel like, you know, everything is on you and you're the only person that's sort of, you know, having a rough day.

It's very hard to internalize that. So definitely have outlets. Believe me, there's other... Others around you that are going through it, other entrepreneurs.

I'm sure people in your company are dealing with tough times. Startups are hard and they take a lot of people, lot of grit and determination.

@28:08 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

But you're definitely not in it alone. Yeah, you know, that's a great point. And I think that's a that's to kind of the entrepreneurs in general, because there are some long lonely nights in entrepreneurship.

now with that said, let's talk about the importance of resilience and adaptability in entrepreneurship.

@28:27 - Ryan - UnDigital

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, you know, for me, I can speak for me and I'd say this, you know, a lot of times, and I think we're all familiar with sort of like the MVP, this sort of idea of like creating something, of seeing if it can flourish.

I've lived my whole career by that. And out of all the different industries and different businesses I got into, so much of the outsized value that I created was in like, hmm, let me try this little thing here and I'm wondering if this could be turned into something.

And I remember even having people at my own company be like, oh, Ryan, you're wasting your time. let me see if I can do this.

I created some. some products that I thought I could get into major retailers and drugstore chains and I was like playing with them and I'm not an engineer.

so I was like, yeah, I think there's something here. I brought it to an engineer. said, make me like, just make this look decent.

March my way into Walgreens. And now, you know, we have products in every drugstore in the country. And so you never know what's going to become something else, something.

So you constantly change is sort of the only constant, like everything you're doing is about an evolution. And you've got to be able to sort of go with the times, right?

And so I think that's been a core part of our DNA. And my DNA is to always look around seeing what's next.

And you know, a lot of the things that you started doing, like they might not be the thing that's going to sort of drive your long term success.

And that's okay. think the ability, you know, there's obviously a great quote out there that some of you might have heard.

mean, there's really two things that drive top line revenue for for any business and it's innovation and marketing. And those are the two things.

All the other parts of our business are costs. structures, right? accounting, our customer servers, our manufacturing, our operations. And so, you know, if you can sort of incorporate those two things as part of your DNA, you know, marketing and innovation, there's so much opportunity.

That's where all the top line comes in. So I would say never stop innovating, thinking through ideas, you know, want to be pragmatic about how much time and effort we put in, hence the MVP.

But for me, that, you know, that kind of change has has been a really major contributor to the overall growth and success of businesses I've been associated with.

@30:31 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Nice. Now, I'm going to ask a bit of a bit of a deep question. What would you say is one of the biggest mistakes you made as an entrepreneur?

@30:40 - Ryan - UnDigital

Well, that's easy for me. You know, I was, I acquired some, some products, they were acting in the photo space, they were, I found some amazing products that were innovative and inventive.

And I said, wow, I want to, I want to buy this company. I want to be the sole rights.

I want to manufacture these. They were brand new. Nobody Adam. And I was just like, this is going to be I think this could be big.

I went out to local shows and that with executives that like all the major companies, the Kodaks, the Fuji's, all the companies that would ultimately distribute this product for me and they're like, Ryan, this is a home run.

This is an amazing product. We've never seen anything like it. So what did I do next? I went ahead and I started building out this factory to get ready for to make this product, right?

Spent a ton of money. There's actually seven figures we invested. All right, world, here we are. We've got the product and people didn't want to buy it.

Everyone said they wanted to buy it, but people who actually weren't putting down their credit card, various reasons. I'm sitting here scratching my head, well, I got this whole factory ready to go.

That sort of the departure from the MVP model is you're scaling the business prior to actually people paying for it.

As excited as we get as entrepreneurs to come up with an idea where it makes so much sense in our head, are going to want this.

Are people going to pay for it? Let's get a small number of people to pay for something. Let's get the feedback loop going.

Let's iterate the product. Let's Let's bring back the right product to the market that more people are willing to pay for.

Let's get a working revenue model that makes sense and let's scale appropriately. So for me, it was definitely scaling in advance.

We were actually able to take that particular company, pivot to other products and actually drive outside success, but it took a while and it was a lesson that I've always learned and will not make again in the future.

@32:22 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

So a valuable lesson for sure. You know, folks that are out there that think that, you know, I don't need to go through this process.

I don't need to find an MVP. I got to tell you, Mac, their first product they came out with was a complete flop, their computer.

It was actually way ahead of its times. Nobody knew they needed this concept and, you know, they came out with this massive computer and it failed.

And then they went back and they realized, okay, they're, they, we basically created a Ferrari when people are actually just asking for a bike right now, right?

And so they kind of went back to the drawing board and it took them several, almost a decade before they came out with a successful product.

So again, even the most successful companies go through this process and they have these moments, right? Now, Ryan, we went through one of the, you know, the mistake, what would you consider one of your biggest successes as an entrepreneur?

@33:14 - Ryan - UnDigital

Gosh, that's a great question. You know, done a lot of really interesting things. think for me, it's assembling the right team.

the end of the day, it's all people. So, you know, there's process and there's people, you need great people to help ensure a great process.

I'm very fortunate. I've got a great president who runs several of the divisions that we have, St. Barbara's Kramer.

Shout out to him. He's been with me, gosh, almost since the beginning. And, you know, it's hard for me to do what I do without people like him.

And everybody listening here, if you are working with somebody, if you have employees, you are probably going to say people is the most challenging part.

It is, because you're dealing with different personality types. How do you, as a leader, know, how are you affected with each person?

How do you get the best outcome? How does each person need to be communicated with. And it's not perfect.

It's a fluid situation. There's people that are moving around, you're getting new people in, you have new hires. I think we've been really fortunate to have a really core team that's been with us for a long time, that's really believed in the vision, that's really helped make sure that the idea of customer love, we're not coming to work every day to do something okay.

We're going to spend 40, 50, 60 hours a week. Let's be great, let's try and be better than the rest and let's put our best foot forward.

You can't be successful ultimately without people that have that shared vision and mindset. So I'd say above all, that's the thing that really drives and makes everything work.

And I think in addition to that, it's just this continued thirst for innovation, for ideation, for MVPs, we're seeing where we can build value across any of the businesses or ideas we come up with.

And they don't all work, but we've had a lot of great wins and it's built, know, a really great company.

company, and a lot of industries. so, you know, I'd say that would be the feedback I would share.

@35:05 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, you know, folks, you got to have you got to make sure you have the right people on the bus.

Like, at the end of the day, Starbucks coffee isn't the greatest folks, but sometimes and usually isn't always. And so when I order my Starbucks, I don't want it to be correct sometimes or usually I want it to be correct always.

And again, Starbucks isn't the greatest coffee in the world. I'll be completely transparent and say that. But with that said, I keep going back because of their service, I love being able to order on my app and it's there and it's consistently made correctly, you know, pretty consistently.

I can't complain. But you know, also again, hiring the right people is so important, as Ryan was saying, because you know, I think I mentioned this on the previous show.

There's three type of people in the workplace, right? There's the engaged employee, there's the RIP employee and there's the cave employee.

So the engaged employee, we all love, right? come to work every day, they're engaged, they go a little bit beyond they try to do more, right?

Those are the people like you like Ryan mentioned is president, right? that he currently has. Then you have the RIP employee, the retired in place employee.

I don't mind those folks, right? Because I can actually engage an individual who's retired in place to kind of come and do the bare minimum every day.

And that's okay. But the ones that are very difficult are the cave employees. They're constantly against virtually everything. They hate the parking, they hate the employees, they hate their staff, they hate that they have to come to work.

And the reason those individuals are so difficult is because when you hire a new employee, it's the cave employees that will actually be the ones training them sometimes.

And what are they training them on? Right? They're training on how much they hate the job, how much they hate their coworkers and all these other things.

So making sure you have the right people on the bus is just as important. And as Ryan said, it kind of comes from the top down.

You know, Ryan is engaging his staff and saying, Hey, these are the issues we're going through. And this is what I'm personally going through as well.

And this is trying to our kind of continue to scale this business. And it all kind of depends on all of us.

We're a team. And I do believe in engaging employees at a very early stage within the marketing process or strategy process, they then buy into that, right?

Because they feel the ownership of this process. And now they kind of feel like, well, I need to be successful because I helped plan this marketing.

I helped plan this strategy or outreach or sales, right? And so really just engaging them early and often is really going to create a foster, a foster to kind of a culture of, you know, centric approaching to your business, right?

@37:31 - Ryan - UnDigital

And that's really kind of important when you're thinking of building a brand. Yeah, absolutely. know, one simple test I like to do when I'm interviewing people is this idea of, you know, could you sit next to this person on a cross-country flight, right?

And, you know, that everyone has to have charisma, but, you know, you kind of get a vibe. you know, somebody might be skilled, but to your point, if they're a cave employee, if they're a detractor, if, you know, they see things in a more negative light, that sort of takes all creativity.

creativity away. And a lot of times, yes, if we're doing a task, we might not need creativity. Maybe we're sitting at a cubicle or an office and we're like, we're doing something in front of us.

But a lot of things when you're building a company require creative thinking. And you know, it's really hard to think creatively with negative energy.

You know, and so, you know, I think having positivity, optimism, it's almost a prerequisite for early days growth, because you're sort of building something that's very difficult.

And if you don't think you can build it, you're not going to build it, right? If you can see yourself at the end of that finish line, you're going to get to the finish line.

You have to believe it. You've got to dream it. You've got to be excited about it. And you need other people that can be excited too.

It doesn't mean that you have to have, you know, enthusiasm for things that are unrealistic. It's great to put yourself around other people who have different differences of opinion, but sort of a shared value set, right?

shared beliefs and I think shared, know, optimism.

@38:58 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yes, I completely agree. Now, Ryan. You got a lot of folks, a lot of entrepreneurs is kind of either in the beginning, middle or ending of their entrepreneurial journey listening and also folks just interested in entrepreneurship.

know, you've been doing this for some time. You're very successful.

@39:13 - Ryan - UnDigital

What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneur? Yeah. Well, I talked to lot of entrepreneurs and I, you know, everyone I talked to would like to see their businesses bigger, right, or more successful, and I don't know what stage you're at.

I don't think there's any entrepreneur in the world that wouldn't want to see that. And I think one of the easiest things that entrepreneurs can do today is obviously, you know, we all need to define who we serve, but break it down obviously little bit further.

Who is your ideal customer called an ICP? Who is the core customer that gets the most benefit from what you do?

And I guarantee from as any company, there are a lot more of those customers out there that, you know, when we market correctly and when we find those customers, there is so much more opportunity to drive your business.

So, you know, if your core audience are, you know, tailors. You know, and you you've got tailors in, you know, the Northeast, know, um, do you know who all the tailors are Ross across the rest of the country.

There are tools today that you can find used whether it's a zoom info or Apollo where you can go in and say, Hey, I want to I want to find everyone who's a tailor.

You can get their emails. You can drop them into drip marketing, you know, automated outbound emails. You know, it's amazing how many people don't have the engines going, you know, Figure out what the universe of your ICPs are, get all of their information and find ways to message them.

It's such an easy way to grow. And I think most people just wait for their phones to ring or maybe they have a little bit of search engine marketing.

You have to be proactive. know, the world is not going to come to you. You have to bend the world to your own reality and you've got to go out there and be very proactive.

But start with who is your ICP and identify all of them, get their contact information, figure out how to message them, advertise them.

You know, it's very easy to grow when you deliver the right message that ICP. So we want to be narrow.

We don't want to be like, oh, everyone's a customer, but let's deliver them the right message wherever they are, but certainly start with discovery.

I think that's just an easy way to get your business moving in the right direction.

@41:12 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That's very true. In fact, I literally just had a conversation with my colleague just the other day and one of the things I was encouraging, she's new to the role.

One thing I was encouraging to do, I was like, okay, here's how we break down the state from a market perspective.

We have 33 counties, that's too many counties. So we broke it down to patient service areas. So within these zip codes, this is where these zip codes primarily go, receive patient care for.

Now with these patient service areas, what I want you to do is I want you to go and identify all the pediatric clinics within those areas.

So now once we understand that, okay, now we understand, okay, who's the market, then what we'll do is we'll actually put some payers mixed into it.

So again, some of our insurance products are actually competitors, so we know they're not going to come to my system.

So I exclude them from a market. Now I have the true market size. Okay, now, now again, going back to your

point, I'm essentially creating the, I create my customer profile, right? So now I know who it is, and then, then I begin to, okay, what am I trying to grow?

Am I trying to grow cardiovascular care, cancer care, melanoma, what is it that I'm trying to grow? And then going back to that customer profile, okay, who fits within this mold?

Okay, 50% of all Caucasian living on the coast? Okay, that's my melanoma patients, right? Some people think in Oregon, it's always, you know, rainy, that's true, but the overcast actually creates a lot more EV rays.

So you actually get a lot more melanoma here in this coastal region. And so again, just understanding your market, understanding what it is that you're trying to accomplish as well within that market is very important.

That's the discovery stage. And once you kind of get to that point, then you begin to understand, okay, what do your customers consider valuable?

Because again, you can't create value, your customers already know what's valuable to them. You're just trying to amplify that value in a way that brings them back to becoming a loyal customer.

And then once you've identified that, as Ryan mentioned, then you Now you have a loyal customer, and then continually, repetitively being consistent on what you're doing and your value proposition is important, because again, if you're not consistent, no matter how good you're branding or how good anything is, it's consistency is the one that truly is gonna win over a lot of your customers.

And Ryan mentioned it too, even if you screw up, it's okay, because if you screw up, that's a good opportunity for you to reach back out to that customer, build again, that personal relationship, talk about the trust and talk about how you're gonna correct that issue, acknowledging that the issue was a made and you're gonna correct it.

That goes a long, long way, especially using Ryan's services and having some note that looks like a handwritten note going back to that customer, addressing that issue.

@43:47 - Ryan - UnDigital

think for me personally, would certainly take me back, and I would be like, this is a really good company I wanna continue to work with.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

@43:58 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Sorry, my phone just started. ring right in the middle of this conversation, folks.

@44:02 - Ryan - UnDigital

So Ryan, is there any last words you have to say? I think we hit a lot of great topics, you know.

I think there's a lot of opportunity. We live in an incredible place with so much. The market is so big, you know, it's great for entrepreneurs.

You can go out there and get a piece, right? Figure out what greatness looks like. Do your best to say we're going to be great and have that positive mindset.

@44:25 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Find those customers and get those customers to love you, right? That's really the key to driving long term success.

Yes, yes, and get the customers to love you. And in fact, listeners, if you love the Shades of Entrepreneurship, you can actually visit the Shades of E.com to subscribe to the newsletter or you can visit us on the social site at the Shades of E on pretty much all the social channels.

And again, if you're so inclined, if you love us so much, please, I would highly encourage you to become one of our patrons for $5 a month to help support the show, the marketing, bring individuals like Ryan, so you can talk about some of the phenomenal things that he's doing.

Because again, This is a free education for you folks that are listening a really good opportunity to kind of expand your education, entrepreneurial education and really begin to think about what is it that you want to do?

Maybe you need to scratch that entrepreneurial itch because remember, you know, our economy is built on the back of small businesses like you.

And so in order for us to continue to succeed, we need more small businesses to continue to succeed. So Ryan, again, thank you so much for being on the show.

So again, folks, Ryan's information will be on the newsletter the week before the episode airs, the week the episode airs and the week the episode airs.

will also be a dedicated blog post with the transcription of our conversation as well as the audio for those that were looking for it.