March 18, 2025 • 47 mins
Are you looking for innovative ideas to market your business using technology? In this special episode, Louie Sharp, an international speaker, best-selling author, and accelerated business growth consultant, interviews Mike Potts, a successful entrepreneur. Mike transformed his career from cruise ship pianist to co-founder of a nationwide company, growing from two performers to a robust network of 720 employees. From humble beginnings, the Felix And Fingers company has grown into the highest-reviewed dueling piano entertainment in the world.
In this episode, Mike details how you can implement AI tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek for business strategy, marketing campaigns, and metrics analysis. He also describes how AI can serve as a strategic thought partner for your business. Discover why it’s important to know the exact cost to acquire a client. Plus, Mike shares how he continues to grow his business using various employee benefits such as profit sharing, 401K, health insurance, and company trips.
Two books discussed in this episode:
🌟 Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter Book by Greg McKeown and Liz Wiseman
🌟 The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It Book by Michael E. Gerber
Louie’s Leadership & Love Nugs (podcast time stamps)
- Use AI tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek for business strategy, marketing campaigns, and metrics analysis (17:44)
- Employ AI as a strategic thought partner (18:15)
- Maintain regular quarterly sales meetings with team reviews and include guest speakers (33:54)
- Build company culture through profit sharing, benefits, and team events (34:34)
- Know exact client acquisition costs and maintain clear metrics to optimize marketing expenses; being 5-10% better than competition can lead to winning the majority of leads (41:22)
#LeadershipandLove #marketingstrategy #targetedmarketing #marketing #technology #ChatGPT #DeepSeek #Felix&Fingers #Organizationalculture #Thegiftedleader #LouieSharp #Podcast
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Welcome to the Leadership and Love Podcast.
We will cover leadership, mindset, personal development,
and sales and marketing.
You'll experience thought-provoking conversations with both
nationally and internationally recognized leaders.
Our goal is to inspire you and deliver actionable items
that you can implement that will help you accelerate your
(00:22):
growth.
Get ready to discover the magic and the power when you lead
with love.
So welcome back, everybody,
to another episode of Leadership and Love.
I'm your host, Louie Sharp.
And today, I'm very,
very excited because we have with us a very amazing person,
(00:44):
but also a dear friend of mine.
His dad and I actually went to high school together.
And Mike, when he was in high school and then in college,
he would sit in with some bands that I had as a saxophone
player.
Mike has a jazz saxophone major from Roosevelt University.
And then he's done a bunch of amazing things.
(01:05):
At one point after college, he wanted to go see the world.
So what he did was he became the piano player on cruise
ships.
And then he would go to different areas like the Caribbean,
the Mediterranean.
And that's how he kind of saw the world while he was being
paid to play music.
And then after he was done with that,
he started a thing called Dueling Pianos with him and just
(01:26):
another guy.
And I'll let Mike tell you that story of who that guy was.
And the first time I saw him doing a dueling pianos gig,
he was making more money than my band had ever made and
just him and another guy.
And today, his dueling pianos company, Felix & Fingers,
is actually a national brand, and he's nationwide.
(01:49):
And so Mike, thanks for being here today.
Yeah, Louie.
Good to be here.
Yeah,
is there anything you'd like to add to your introduction or
something I left out?
Yeah you know that's right.
Yeah, I went to school for jazz saxophone, went on ships.
I saw 45 different countries in about three years.
It was just incredible.
And then I came back and realized that no one would pay me
(02:10):
any money to play saxophone.
So I started playing piano a lot more and gigging a lot
more with piano that brought me into Dueling Pianos and now
Felix and Fingers and everything that we're doing.
Another little behind the stories thing is Mike and I are
accountability partners,
and I'm truly grateful for that relationship as well
because he's he's a couple years younger than me,
and he's got the wisdom of the internet technology,
(02:34):
the digital age.
So what I'd like to start with first Mike is,
can you tell the audience what you did or your strategy for
marketing and sales to turn Felix and Fingers into this
nation nationwide brand and be nationwide literally.
When it started for just you and if I remember correctly,
(02:55):
it was from somebody from American Idol right? A singer
from American Idol?
Right, so yeah, if we go back to end of 2010,
that's when I met my original Dueling Pianos partner.
His name is Dave Radford and he was on American Idol.
He was like the top 10 male finalists of the same season
that Daughtry was on.
So met him at a gig.
(03:16):
We were doing background jazz music was really what Felix
and Fingers was before we were even called Felix and
Fingers.
Then we started playing jazz music at a venue in Lake
Geneva, Wisconsin called the Baker House.
And that venue wanted us to learn Dueling Pianos.
So that's how it went from like background jazz to an
opportunity to learn Dueling Pianos.
And then we figured out that was a pretty large market for
(03:37):
Dooling Pianos and started to really lean into that as an
art form.
So yeah, marketing, jeez, like where to begin?
There's a ton of stuff about marketing there.
We started out in the beginning where so much of our
marketing was really based on word of mouth and just really
starting to get reviews.
That was our entire marketing scheme was we had our
(03:59):
aggregator websites, like we did a lot of weddings.
So being on websites like Dinnott or WeddingWire where
everyone goes to find their wedding entertainment,
we would be on those sites and do everything we could to
get a lot of reviews on those sites.
That gave us reputation.
That meant we had a lot of leads and those sites were
generating a ton of work for us.
As we started to grow into more and more locations,
(04:21):
thankfully those reviews would go with us.
So it made scalability much,
much easier because if we had 20 reviews in Chicago,
if we opened up a new location,
those same 20 reviews would follow us elsewhere on some of
these sites.
So that helped a lot.
At this point, I think we have 450 reviews on the Knots.
So it's like,
we really leaned into that and because we have that many
(04:41):
reviews,
it's really hard for other companies to compete with the
reputation that we currently have and allows us to charge a
lot more for our services, which is great.
As we continue to grow,
then I had to lean into other advertising platforms that we
had more control over.
So the Knot, WeddingWire,
those were really great when we started,
(05:01):
but as happens with businesses,
there's an ebb and flow to having an advertising platform
that you don't have control over.
So whereas they, up until about 2020,
were delivering a ton of leads to us,
we were seeing literally one 10th,
like 10% of those leads two years later and had to get out
of those platforms.
So then that really drove me more into a lot of SEO work
(05:25):
and a lot of PPC marketing.
So Google ads, Bing ads, Facebook ads,
as a way to drive a lot of traffic to the website and make
sure that they get to our landing page and convert those to
leads.
So what was your messaging around that marketing to really
substantiate or more importantly even separate Felix and F
ingers from the crowd?
(05:45):
And you said something, so again for the audience members,
Mike was dropping a golden nugget, the power of reviews.
If you're not asking for reviews in your company,
start today.
You can do that by sending them a text after you've
completed it.
You can do it.
I know one of the things that Mike, and now Mike no longer,
and you can maybe talk about this on another episode,
(06:08):
but Mike no longer does gigs.
He hasn't done gigs for years,
but he's got processes in place.
So when they finish a gig,
his people are asking and getting videos on the location
for reviews and testimonials and those kinds of things.
So if you're not doing that,
you need to start immediately because that's how you built
your brand.
And like Mike said,
he's built his to the point where he can charge more than
(06:30):
the competition because he's just so well known,
and they truly do deliver on their promises.
But what I'd like you to talk about Mike is what did you do
as you've grown it from two guys,
and literally now you're a multi-million dollar
corporation, right?
And so at that point,
what did you do in your marketing messaging to separate you
(06:52):
from the crowd?
So,
how I was taught to approach marketing is that with your
messaging,
you really want to lean into it so that when someone sees
your message, they see your ad,
they feel like you're literally reading from their journal,
like their personal diary, what are their pain points?
What are the things that they're trying to solve?
So that then when they see your message that says, hey,
(07:16):
like, are you having a hard time finding a vendor?
Or are the prices unclear for finding wedding vendors?
Or is it, are you stressed out about this?
Like, if they see that message, and they feel like, oh,
this, this message speaks to me,
this is exactly how I've been feeling,
then that's going to grab their attention and drive them to
your website.
So as I talk to my team, if they come to the website,
(07:38):
that's, that's the pre-sale for us.
And for anyone, it's like,
that's the first step of a sale is the pre-sale when people
are going to your website, in my case,
they're looking at our videos,
they're looking at our messaging, looking at our pictures,
looking at our reviews,
by the time they filled out our form,
and that's gone in and gotten to any of our sales reps,
they've already made a major decision about liking us,
(08:00):
like they've gotten to know, like, and trust.
And now they're just picking up the phone with us to verify
whether or not what they think about us is true.
At that point, it's our gig to lose.
But we want to make sure that that messaging really leans
into what are their pain points so that they see that and
they feel like, okay, this is connecting with me,
as opposed to something that says,
best dueling pianos in the world or funnest events ever.
(08:22):
Like that's, it's so generic that way.
We really want to create a user story that goes from,
from the ad to a landing page that is also specific to
their use case,
if we can send someone who's looking for weddings to a
wedding specific landing page, and even better,
a wedding specific landing page in, let's say, Chicagoland,
if it's a bride and groom in Chicago land,
(08:44):
then we'll have a page for them for Chicago weddings.
If they're in Dallas,
we'll have a page for Dallas weddings.
If they're in New York,
you'll say New York corporate events.
We want to make sure that they know that we do exactly what
it is they're looking for.
So Mike, man, I love you.
So he just touched on two things that I would like you to
reiterate One of them is is he said he's built this
(09:06):
experience Experiential on his website.
He's got video.
He's got content.
He's got reviews, testimonials,
so he touched on what we all know people want to do
business with people They know like and trust and he's
built that on his website I highly recommend you go to his
website and check it out to see what you can copy.
Because nobody needs to reinvent the wheel.
(09:27):
The other thing that Mike talked about is it is the pain.
One of the things that's really important in marketing is
the tech talk about people's pain when I when I consult
businesses One of the things I talk about is your unique
selling proposition and I'd spell unique YOU And your
unique selling proposition is the solution to their pain.
So, Mike,
(09:48):
can you talk a little bit about what you did to find to
research and find the pain back in the day for target
markets? Because you've also he gets paid thousands and
thousands of dollars to do corporate events.
He does weddings.
He does private parties.
He does all kinds of things.
But what'd you do back in the day to find that pain for
(10:08):
that specific target market?
And what do you do today?
So yeah.
I was taught that people will buy for one of two reasons.
It's to either get away and solve their pain or to lean in
towards pleasure.
It's like, it's one of those two reasons.
They're trying to get away from pain or get towards
pleasure.
So I will create campaigns with different headlines,
(10:29):
different descriptions that are either like, yeah,
resolving the pain, like,
are you stressed out about this or getting them to
pleasure.
Like, do you want to have a great memorable wedding,
for example?
So back in the day, yeah,
I would test a whole bunch of campaigns that way,
have different Google A-B tests going on.
And what's been great is now I've been leaning into more of
(10:50):
like the P-MAX campaigns with Google,
which is going to be much more AI enabled so that you can
just go into that campaign,
list a whole bunch of headlines and then let Google do its
magic.
We used to have Google campaigns that were search campaigns
and display campaigns and YouTube campaigns and every
different campaign type to have a ton of control over
exactly who it was showing to.
(11:12):
We would limit our audience, limit our times,
limit like the demographics and the ages.
We really tried to hone that in.
And then what was so funny was when we just went to like a P
-MAX campaign that was AI enabled,
that just let Google do its thing,
find the audience for you and test all the different
headlines.
That was when we started to see a lot more leads come in.
(11:32):
So like technology has come a long,
long way to allow Google to do what they do best.
And that's find your leads.
And so can you kind of break that down a little bit for
people in normal language?
So how are these programs working and what's happening and
how you've,
because there was a time when you were doing this manually,
(11:52):
right?
You were calling people or you were trying to do research.
You were,
you were calling your clients up and doing those kinds of
things to find out what their pain was,
but in today's world, you can literally,
literally do that at the touch of a finger.
And for those of you, and I, and I, and I,
I'd like you to morph this conversation again,
kind of describe in layman's terms, what,
(12:14):
what you were doing, and also now how you've,
you've maximized and continue to maximize Chat GPT? And
for, and a little side note, Mike is,
is taking me kicking and screaming and literally dragging
me into Chat GPT,
but he's been showing me some things and it's just
fascinating how much that, that particular tool.
(12:36):
And like you said, Mike,
it's the best employee you could hire,
but can you talk about that in a little more layman's terms
and then how you've let that morph into Chat GPT as well?
Sure.
So, I mean,
if I break down PMAX and what it takes to have a successful
PMAX campaign, and that's literally what it's called, PMAX.
It's a Google PMAX campaign.
And that is going to take the search ads.
(12:58):
So if you go into Google and you search for it,
in my case, Dueling Pianos, that's what makes us show up.
It takes the search ads, combines those with display ads.
So display ads are going to be any time you're on a website
and you see like a banner on the side or on the top,
that's the Google display network.
That's one of many networks,
but the GDN Google display network is the biggest one.
(13:18):
So it will put my content there.
It will have the YouTube ads.
So if you're on YouTube and you see an ad coming in the
middle of your video or at the beginning of the video that
you're watching, this is how you are able to achieve that.
PMAX works really well.
If you give it a ton of headlines,
you give it a ton of descriptions that it can just rotate
through and figure out what gets the most eyes,
(13:40):
what gets the most clicks.
It optimizes everything for you.
You're going to have to give it logos, give it pictures,
give it any type of like still advertising so that it can
start doing that in the display network.
You have to give it videos so that it can throw that out to
YouTube and any of the other Google properties that might
be showing videos.
And that way it can use all of your assets together in a
(14:02):
much more aggregated cumulative approach to figure out what
does and does not work for you.
So now instead of the old way of really trying to AB test
and optimize everything down, which I mean, to be fair,
one of the things that I noticed was when we were a smaller
company and honestly still,
I feel like we're maybe too small to really see the
(14:22):
benefits of like,
if I improve something by 1% in my advertising, sure,
that's going to be helpful,
but it's not like I'm Apple computers and we're doing
trillions of dollars of revenue and 1% is like billions of
dollars.
So I saw myself,
and I see a lot of other entrepreneurs doing this as well,
where you get laser focused on the optimization and you're
(14:44):
trying to get just a little bit more of a result out of
what you're going for and you end up just distracting
yourself for very little return.
Louie, I told you the metaphor, maybe you remember this,
it's the sailboat metaphor.
Do you remember that when we talked about that?
I do.
I love this,
and it just kind of blew my mind. And if you're a sailing
(15:04):
aficionado, I'm sorry if I have these numbers wrong,
but this is how it was taught to me, was the question is,
if you're in a sailboat and the wind is behind you,
like it's right,
like dead smack behind you and it's blowing you at 15 miles
per hour, how fast can your boat go?
You would think, okay,
maybe you can go like 12 miles per hour, 13 miles per hour,
(15:24):
14 miles per hour.
Like it's going to go a little bit slower than the wind,
certainly not faster than the wind because it's blowing you
and maybe you can throw some weight off the boat and it'll
go faster.
Maybe you can sand down the hull and it'll go faster.
You can do all of these things to optimize to get you
closer to 15 miles per hour.
However,
if you turn the boat so that you're about 35 degrees to the
(15:47):
wind, you can't go 15 miles per hour.
You can actually do three times that speed.
So sometimes as an entrepreneur,
when you're focused on optimizing,
all you're doing is getting closer to like that ceiling
that you're at when what you should be doing is turning the
boat and then that's when you get your 3x return or your
(16:08):
10x return.
So it's a balance between figuring out when to optimize
versus when you should just be turning the boat to better
harness the wind that's behind you.
So Mike, I love the genius that you use.
And one of the things I like to share with people is this
is the power of target markets, right?
One of the things Mike's talking about is that you can
(16:30):
optimize this target market but at some point you get
what's called diminishing returns, right?
You've done as much as you can and you might squeeze
another couple percentage points out of it but that's not
gonna give you exponential growth.
And I'd like to challenge you to think about that 30,
35 degree angle turn as what's another target market where
(16:51):
you could go, again, be laser focused.
It's one of the things I love to talk about,
be laser focused on that target market.
Mike,
one of the things I'd like you to share with the audience
because again,
you've been very instrumental and very patient teaching me.
How can people, entrepreneurs specifically,
really start to maximize chat GPT to grow their company,
(17:14):
to increase their sales.
And I'd like you to share some of the things that you're
doing because you truly are at the forefront and your
competition is like miles behind you, right?
And you're constantly changing at breakneck speed.
So at this point,
I don't know that anybody's ever gonna catch you but how
are you maximizing chat GPT to help you automate?
(17:35):
And there's nobody I know in business that's automated more
things better and more efficiently than Mike has.
So Mike, if you'd talk about that a little bit, please.
Great.
We could spend an hour on this,
and you wouldn't have to say a word, Louie.
I have so much stuff I could talk about here,
so I'll do my best to consolidate some things.
(17:55):
So chat GPT is the most incredible resource available right
now.
And it's funny because the landscape is changing so
quickly,
like I've been messing around with Deep Seek recently
because that's all over the news is like the Chinese
alternative, that is better than chat GPT,
and I agree now that I've been using it.
There's a lot of things that make that better than chat GPT
(18:18):
so I'm sure there's going to be a competition and a back
and forth between the two.
But generally speaking, chat GPT.
Yeah, it can automate a lot of stuff,
it can help a lot of stuff.
I use it first and foremost as a thought partner like a
strategic thought partner like you can use it say hey yeah
write my emails and we'll send you or write you an email
and then you can copy and paste it.
(18:39):
And that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with doing that.
But there's another level that entrepreneurs can get to
with chat GPT,
where you really use it as a thought partner as a strategic
coach as someone who can challenge your thinking and give
you ideas that maybe wouldn't otherwise have on your own.
So that's where it's been phenomenal.
So for example, if we go back to advertising,
(19:02):
we have campaigns,
instead of just saying like we're a dueling pianos company
so I'm going to put out a dueling piano campaign.
I put out a dueling pianist campaign I put out a wedding
campaign I put out a corporate campaign.
So I go into chat GPT and I'm like,
I have these three campaigns.
Here's my business.
Here's where I'm located.
What other campaigns might you recommend.
And then now we have like a fundraising campaign and LGBTQ
(19:24):
campaign and a campaign for Indian weddings and a campaign
for retirement parties,
and all of these are different PMAX campaigns inside of
Google, and it's coming from chat GPT.
Then I'll ask, hey, where else can I buy leads from.
So,
then we started advertising in on Pinterest on Tick Tock on
Reddit on Quora on x.com,
(19:46):
or what was Twitter so all of those are are places that you
can actually go to buy eyeballs for your website or for
your product.
Now,
our results with the other with the lesser known ones the
lesser used ones weren't necessarily spectacular,
but to be able to try it and see if x is our target
clientele or not.
It doesn't cost that much money throw $100 into it see if
(20:09):
they're hitting your metrics or not,
and make a decision from there.
So that's a really nice use case is just to use it to help
you figure out where there might be some gaps in your
strategy.
I recently started using Deep Seek for all of my metrics. C
hat GPT is terrible with math.
So in case you didn't know like don't have it do math
(20:29):
because chat GPT the way it's set up is it is predictive
text.
So, the way it was explained to me, and I love this is,
Louie, if I were to say the word old.
What do you think is the next word to follow old.
People.
Old people, great, it can be old people old man old maid,
old dog, old whatever.
(20:52):
What if I said, Old McDonald,
what's the next word to follow.
Had a farm or had.
Yeah, had a farm.
So because I gave you more information, Old McDonald,
you know statistically speaking that the most likely word
that follows old McDonald is had a farm.
(21:14):
That's how chat GPT works is the more data you can give it,
the more you can explain about what you're looking for,
then the more it can take all of that data and figure out
how to give you feedback on what it is you're looking for.
So if I'm using chat GPT,
my prompts are almost always like, hey,
I am a 39 year old entrepreneur living in Crystal Lake,
(21:37):
Illinois.
I have a dueling pianos company.
Now I've done this so many times I didn't know exactly who
I am and it has that memory.
So it just kind of skips those steps,
but I'll tell it all of those details.
If I'm looking for, let's say a movie to watch with my son.
I'm 39, here's where I live.
I have an eight year old son.
Here's what we like to do.
Show me something that is a underrated movie.
(21:57):
Give me 10 recommendations and then help me pick from
there.
Or one step further, Louie,
the exercise that we did on our phone call on Monday,
which I think is such a cheat code for chat GPT,
is when you ask it something, it's like, hey,
I'm trying to plan out this advertising strategy.
Here's my company.
Here's what I'm trying to achieve.
I love to ask after you give it the context, say,
(22:21):
first of all, you have to give it a job.
So act as a business coach.
Act as an attorney.
Act as a CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Act as a COO or CTO.
So act as this and ask me up to five questions,
one question at a time,
to gain additional context about this scenario,
(22:45):
however you want to phrase that.
And then what will happen is chat GPT will ask you one
question at a time.
If it doesn't, then you stop it and you say, hey, no,
I need one question at a time.
And it'll say, yup, sorry.
Yeah, let me ask you one question.
It'll ask you the first question you'll answer.
It'll ask you the next question you'll answer.
And it'll go on for however many questions you wanted it to
ask.
And then it'll say, great, I got all the details I need.
(23:07):
Here's my recommendation for you.
Being able to do that is such a cheat code to get better
answers out of it.
And if you want to take that even one step further than
that is if you haven't tried putting it on the speaker mode
where you can actually talk to it,
you can have a conversation with it.
So as an entrepreneur who is supposed to be a visionary and
(23:28):
have ideas for the company,
if I can go outside and go for a walk for an hour,
put on my headphones, open up chat GPT,
and literally have a conversation with it the same way I'm
having a conversation with you, Louie,
it's unbelievable what kind of ideas can be generated from
that.
And anytime it says something good, I say, hey, cool,
that was a great idea.
Please note that down so that when I get to the end of my
(23:51):
walk, that you can remind me about that idea.
I conclude the walk an hour later and I say, hey, chat GPT,
what were all those important points that I asked you to
remember?
And it'll give me all of the points.
And then maybe I'll open up the app and I'll copy and paste
that into a document.
And I know exactly what it is that I got out of that
conversation.
(24:12):
So, Mike, thank you very much for the detail in that.
And to his point, what we were talking about,
so we have an accountability call every Monday morning.
And Mike, like I said, he said, Louie right now, he said,
right now I want you to do this.
And so I did exactly what he just said.
He walked me through it.
And I asked Chat GPT through Mike's coaching to ask me the
(24:35):
five questions one at a time.
And then I asked it for about information for this podcast.
And it was unbelievable, Mike,
it was just unbelievable the amount of information and spot
on, right?
But to your point, based on what you just said, and again,
how you coach me, I put a bunch of information in.
(24:56):
I said, hey, I'm an international speaker.
I'm writing a book.
My podcast is called Leadership and Love.
And my target market is this.
And then I asked it to ask five questions.
It asked me five more questions.
And then I said, what are some great topics?
And after it asked those five questions,
it just gave me this list of 10 great topics,
great ways to promote it.
(25:16):
It was unbelievable.
I mean, jaw-droppingly unbelievable.
So I played back what Mike just said a couple of times,
but while you're playing that back, get on a computer,
get on an app.
I actually downloaded it on my phone as well and do exactly
what he's telling you, because just to his point,
you've hired for the price of your time, a strategic coach,
(25:41):
a marketing specialist, whatever you wanna call it.
And now they're working for you and they're on your
payroll.
And Mike uses it every day and he's getting me to the habit
of doing the same thing.
I've been using it for my clients,
but now I've really turned it on myself.
So Mike, thanks very much for sharing that.
The next thing I'd like to talk about is you do some very
(26:03):
unique things.
I love your heart.
I've loved your passion for music.
I've loved playing music with you through the years,
but I love your heart and I love the things that we talk
about in our accountability calls,
where you're talking about the things that you do for your
team.
So what I'd like you to share with people,
and I've said this in a previous episode,
(26:24):
nobody does anything great by themselves.
You haven't built Felix and Fingers to be a nationwide
brand and a nationwide company by yourself.
What are the things that you do to really take care of your
people?
Sure.
And yeah, Felix and Fingers,
we started out as just two people, myself and Dave,
at this point in our network.
So we built a back end network to organize all of our
(26:48):
performers, we have,
I think it's 720 people in the network at this point that
we work with.
So yeah,
we've grown from two to 720 and I think a major reason
behind that is because of the culture that we're trying to
set up.
So, first of all, yeah,
being able to surround myself with a great team like that
sounds very trite like it's just age old advice like it
(27:10):
surround yourself with great people.
I do really trust my team,
and I remember being at a time earlier in the company's
history where it's like, I would hear CEOs talk about like,
oh yeah, I have a great team.
I trust and do stuff.
And I thought I was building a great team and then I found
myself like saying those words but not really believing it
because I just still felt like as the entrepreneur I was
(27:33):
doing all the work, L
ike if I had stepped away that everything would collapse.
And that was very much like an immature leader on my part
that was just a much earlier stage in the growth of the
company.
At this point, now that I have someone who is like our CTO,
Greg,
he's been with me for what 12 years at this point he does
(27:53):
all of our back end web stuff.
Our CEO, COO, Bri, the sales team, some of the sales team,
people have been here for 10, 11, 12 years.
Being able to trust that team has been essential to me
being able to separate myself from the business and start
working on the processes to really allow them to find their
(28:14):
own success.
Louie, we've talked about it before where it's like,
you need to set up a company where your world is so big
that anyone can come into it,
and their world can fit inside of it.
That they believe that they can achieve absolutely all
their goals and all of their dreams by joining into your
world and committing to that.
(28:34):
So that's been my biggest priority is how can we make the
FNF world, our community,
our ecosystem so big and so filled with opportunities that
the ambitious people can absolutely rise through the
company.
Everyone on the team, so my CTO,
he was a player for the company,
and we moved him out of being a player to being a full time
(28:57):
web developer for us.
He does all of our automations.
That was a beautiful opportunity that we had just from
recruiting internally.
Our COO is the same story.
It's like she's a player for us in California,
but she was so strong as a player and then so strong in
other roles that we eventually moved her all the way up to
COO.
Being able to give people those opportunities to invest
(29:19):
into them and to allow them to achieve things that they
didn't necessarily think that they could achieve on their
own has been such an incredible experience.
I just got done reading Multipliers.
Have you read that book yet, Louie?
No, not yet.
Good.
Liz Wakeman, I think is her name.
And it's how are we as entrepreneurs,
how are we multipliers versus accidental diminishers?
(29:41):
There's so many times as an entrepreneur that you want to
be the hero.
There's a problem happening.
So you swoop in and you save the day or you're going to
just drop idea after idea after idea so you can be the
visionary and it's just overwhelming your team.
Or you're putting in so many extra hours that now the team
just sees you doing all this work,
and we think that maybe they'll inspire the team to work
(30:02):
harder, but in fact, it has the opposite effect.
Where the team sees you way out in front and they actually
pull back because they're like, oh, Louis will get it,
or Mike will get it.
It's been an incredible book.
So I recommend that to any entrepreneur at this point,
now that I read it because I found so many accidental
diminisher qualities in myself,
where I thought I was doing good work,
(30:23):
I thought I was doing the right thing,
but I was actually holding my team back.
I'm from a culture like growing up in a culture where like,
if something's hard, work harder.
If something's not working, put more hours in.
Louie, you know my dad, he works his butt off all the time.
He's never known a 40 hour week because it's always been a
(30:44):
50, 60, 70, 80 hour week.
My brother's the same way.
And I've now adopted the mindset that if I am working
harder to get something done, if I'm putting in more hours,
that's actually the laziest choice I could be making.
So I've been trying to rewire my options.
Say that again, Mike.
That's golden.
Say that again, please.
(31:05):
Yeah,
to work harder to put in more hours is as an entrepreneur,
the laziest choice that you can make.
And Gary Keller says it as well it's like if you're working
more than 40 hours per week you're cheating.
You're cheating anyone can put in more hours and not pay
themselves for those hours.
So instead challenge yourself to make the better decisions,
so that your company can grow, your team can grow,
(31:28):
your profits can grow with you not having to do the extra
hours and sacrifice your family time, your personal time,
and everything else that really your job is supposed to be
the vehicle to help you achieve.
Yeah,
so for for you listening or maybe even watching Mike's
just...this is the mother lode right here.
(31:48):
I can tell you it's the power of processes.
If you've noticed on and listened to any of the other
episodes, e
verybody talks about a book or something that they're
reading or the power of reading.
Mike and I share books back and forth all the time.
But one of the things he just touched on is if you're
running yourself ragged, it's the wrong plan.
It's the wrong strategy. And at some point you're going to
(32:10):
burn out, And I love what you said, Mike,
I love your mindset around the ability.
I do the same thing I've actually offered people and some
of them I've spawned them I just spawned one of my
employees out into the world as a new business owner as an
entrepreneur, right?
That was kind of his goal and and so there he could have
gone higher up in our our culture and our company,
(32:34):
but he really wanted to be an entrepreneur.
So, I helped him launch his own business,
connected him to a bunch of people in my network, a
nd I really think as leaders that's our job is to grow
leaders underneath us and and to your...
and I love your...your big vision and again what Mike
touched on that.
I want you to take away is you should be thinking big.
(32:54):
As big as possible. At some point.
I think Mike's going to come to me and say, Hey Louie,
you know I I'm going overseas,
and he's going to turn this thing called Felix and Fingers
from a national company into a global company Because he's
he's built the processes in the systems.
Just like a Mcdonald's.
I think the record for Mcdonald's, M
ike is only two or three Mcdonald's worldwide have ever
(33:15):
failed failed, right?
It's the it's the power.
Yeah, it's the power of that process,
and you've built that process.
I'd also like to tell you have you talked for a couple
minutes now about you you are doing some really cool things
for your employees that are are very powerful, n
ot only for that culture,
but also to tie them to the company.
(33:37):
And and build this team that you've built and again that
you can count on for it to really run with your hands off
the wheel.
Can you tell us about a couple things that that you you're
doing like your team to Colorado and your profit sharing
those kinds of things?
Yeah, and this was actually really interesting.
So we do a quarterly sales meet.
(33:59):
So every quarter I get the sales team together,
and we do a meeting to review what the goals are,
like how we did the last quarter,
maybe learn a couple of new things,
bring in a guest speaker, Louie, you've spoke for that.
And it's a really nice meeting.
At the end of the meeting,
we always send out a survey to everyone and we ask them
like, hey, how did the meeting go?
And most recently we started asking some cultural questions
like, hey, are you feeling fulfilled?
(34:21):
Are you feeling challenged?
Are you feeling like management listens to you?
And one of the questions had asked for recommendations for
how we can like improve culture.
And almost every single person said more in-person events.
Now, my business is unique in that it's fully virtual.
Like we don't have a brick and mortar.
We don't need a brick and mortar.
(34:41):
As a dueling pianos company,
we don't have a bar that we perform at.
We go to weddings, we go to corporate events,
we go to fundraisers, we might go to bars,
but no matter what, our players show up at a gig,
they load in, they play the show,
and then they load out and they go home at the end of the
night.
So it's not the typical dueling piano bar where it's like
five nights, six nights a week,
and it's the same venue and you never move gear.
(35:02):
Our model is that it's a mobile type show.
So our entire team is virtual.
Some of the people live in Chicago.
We have sales reps, as Louie said, across the country.
And then I also have virtual assistants who live in the
Philippines who are phenomenal.
They're absolutely unbelievable.
But to that point, being virtual,
it's hard to connect people.
(35:24):
It's hard to help people feel like they're part of a team.
So last year I took the team to Mexico.
So if someone hit certain metrics, certain KPIs,
if they were like a full-time employee in the company,
like we have so many people who work for the company,
I had to have some sort of qualifiers for who can and can't
go, because I can't bring 700 people to Mexico with me.
(35:47):
But we took maybe it was like 12,
13 people plus their spouses.
So like probably 25 people in total to Mexico last year.
This year we'll all go to Colorado, which is great,
because especially being across the country,
like the people in Chicago never get to see the people in
LA.
So that's really huge for us because we work together all
the time.
(36:08):
The other thing that we just started doing this past year
was a profit sharing program.
So last year we were profitable.
And I told the company, if we hit certain numbers,
certain margins,
then there would be a percentage of that that went back to
the team.
And I spent a lot of time trying to figure out a good,
equitable way to split up the profit sharing because we
have kind of three different layers of employees with this
(36:31):
company.
So we have the office staff.
We have the sales staff where they're predominantly
commission-based and then we have our performers.
The office staff gets profit sharing based on maybe the
level of their responsibility as an office member.
The sales staff gets profit sharing based on the number of
sales they do,
and the players get profit sharing based on the number of
(36:52):
shows that they've done.
So our top two players did 133 and 131 gigs last year,
respectively.
So they get more of the profit sharing than someone who did
maybe only 25 gigs last year.
So yeah,
we took a percentage and just built out a portal on our
website so that any person on the team can see what their
numbers are, see how they're doing,
(37:13):
how many gigs they've done,
because in my industry as a dueling piano company,
there are, jeez, in Chicago, Chicago alone,
there's probably at least a dozen other dueling piano
companies who do exactly what we do.
So any of those dozen companies could hire anyone from our
team.
So what can we do to make our company look better?
Like obviously we could try to pay people more,
(37:34):
but how else could we make this a better company for those
people to join?
So profit sharing was a big part of that,
is this way they can feel more invested and not so much
like a higher gun just going out and doing another dueling
piano show.
So they have full visibility.
There's a great story from Emith, and you've read Emith,
right?
Emith revisited it.
(37:54):
Yes.
Where they talk about like motivating an employee and this
guy just can't be motivated and the manager is just
scratching his head, can't figure it out,
and then he goes to a bowling alley and the employee's
there,
and he's bowling and he knocks over the pins and he's
hooting and he's hollering and he's having a great time.
He's like, holy cow,
I've never seen this side of this guy before.
What's the difference?
What's going on?
(38:15):
And he came to realize that the difference was, well,
when the employee lets go with the ball and it rolls down
and it hits the pins and he hits 10 pins,
he knows immediately he achieved his goal.
He was excited.
If you were to put a curtain in front of the pins,
bowling becomes a lot less fun.
And so many of these companies, so many of our companies,
like we put a curtain in front of the pins,
(38:36):
we put a curtain in front of the numbers,
we put a curtain in front of what all the benefits are,
and the employees aren't motivated because they can't
connect it.
They can't really feel those wins and experience those wins
if they don't understand where the pins are.
Mike, God bless you brother, that's powerful stuff.
And one of the things for our audience and our listeners,
(38:57):
I want you to understand that Mike took the time to figure
all this out.
You need to know your numbers as a business owner,
but he took the time to figure and he's tracking.
He's tracking, he said it a couple of times, KPIs,
key performance indicators.
He's tracking his key performance indicators for the
company and for the individuals.
You notice he knew exact numbers on his two top performers.
(39:19):
One of the things I love as a guitar player and a musician
myself,
I love that he's taken people that thought they could never
make a living playing piano or doing this kind of
entertainment.
And they've got a job with benefits, with profit sharing,
with trips to all these kind of different places.
401K. Health insurance.
(39:40):
Yeah,
that was a big part of making sure we can attract the right
people.
Right.
And so, and by doing that,
he said earlier in the conversation that he's got a team
that he can trust.
I'm blessed in the same way.
Right now,
I've got a couple of companies that are running without me,
and I'm here talking to Mike.
So there's great value in this.
And again,
(40:00):
I'd highly recommend you replay this a couple of different
times,
but you want to know your numbers and you want to be able
to be, to tie that back to the team because I think,
I love that bowling analogy, Mike.
It's great that I don't think leaders are often clear
enough and communicate often enough.
Hey, this is the goal.
(40:21):
This is where we're headed,
and this is what's in it for everybody.
I want to share a quick story with you, Mike,
that I don't know I've ever told you before,
but the reason why I started Sharp Auto Body almost 44
years ago now was I was working at a body shop in Arlington
Heights, and the shop owner sat the entire company down.
I think it was 14 or 15 of us at the time and said,
(40:43):
I can't afford to give anybody a raise,
but I need to make $50,000 more for me this year.
I immediately, I immediately stood up and said, I'm done.
And everybody else was looking at me like,
what are you doing?
Louie, where are you going?
I said, did you hear what he just said?
There's no win in this game for us.
He wins, we lose.
We just get to work harder.
He makes more money.
I love your heart.
I love that you care about your people.
(41:05):
I love the way you communicate with them with quarterly
meetings with your sales team,
that you're giving them benefits,
and you're adding all this extra value because it's why
you're going to be global sooner than later.
Is there anything you'd like to add before we go?
Uh, when you were talking about the metrics, yeah, I,
(41:25):
Louie, like, you know, when we talk on Mondays, it's like,
I have all my numbers, like two, like as I love numbers.
It's, um, the more complicated, like your company gets, uh,
this was an analogy that I heard.
It's like, when you have a very small company,
it's kind of like riding a tricycle.
You don't need all that many gauges,
but as the company starts to grow and become more,
(41:46):
more complex,
and then you're getting closer to like flying a fighter jet
and you get an airplane and it has a ton of gauges
everywhere.
Now you would never expect a pilot of a fighter jet to,
to fly a jet without all those gauges.
They need those gauges.
They need to know those gauges.
So for me, it's like, yeah, I know those numbers.
And if we circle back to advertising,
like a big breakthrough I had was figuring out what is the
(42:10):
most I can pay to acquire a client.
If I know that number and I know that number extremely
clearly,
that's what allows me to go into Google ads or any type of
PPC platform and optimize for that number.
So if I'm spending less than that number,
I can spend more and get more leads because Louie mentioned
there's a law of diminishing returns.
(42:31):
Like with Google ads, it will saturate your target market,
and it gets substantially like exponentially more expensive
to find leads above and beyond your target market.
So if you know what your cost is to acquire a client,
then you can really lean into that.
And something that I learned from just really listening to
a lot of Russell Brunson stuff with ClickFunnels is he
(42:53):
said, when it comes to advertising, the person,
the company who can spend the most to acquire a client is
the company that wins.
So what needs to be true about your model that you can
outspend your competition,
that you're able to bring all of those leads into your
ecosystem.
That's the thing where it's a winner take all.
(43:14):
You don't have to be a million times better than
competition.
You need to be 5% 10% better than the competition,
and you'll win the majority of your leads.
Yeah, I love the analogy, you know,
the horse that wins the horse race,
it wins a million dollars.
He doesn't have to win, but more than a nose.
Yeah.
Right.
It's the same.
It's the same kind of strategy, Mike,
that you've just had great stuff.
(43:35):
Again,
I would highly recommend our listeners to go back and
listen to this specific episode a couple of times,
especially around how to maximize chat GPT.
And again, what Mike was just talking about,
he knows exactly how much he can spend to get a new client.
And if you don't know that number,
you need to know that number.
And I would challenge you and ask you this.
(43:57):
Mike has a specific number that he has for his marketing
budget annually.
Do you know what your number?
Do you even have a marketing budget?
And if you don't, then start one,
because that's how you can grow your company and knowing
the cost of a new client.
And then what does that what's your average client?
What's that sale going to be?
Because Mike knows all those numbers,
(44:18):
and that's how you calculate how much you can spend on that
client.
You know,
if I can interject because I've loved this as a hack,
as a trick, like as an entrepreneur,
when you're like figuring out marketing and where you can
spend money, it just feels always so nebulous.
Like you can put an ad here and they'll charge you this
random amount of money.
And it's, it's hard to know what's working and justifying.
(44:39):
That's a whole other conversation is,
is your tracking robust enough that you know exactly where
your leads are coming from?
Like that's a different conversation and very,
very important.
But if I can go to a new advertising medium and have a
phone call with sale rep and they're like, well, hey,
you can do this package for X or this package for Y.
I say, here's my number.
I need to acquire a lead for a hundred dollars.
(45:01):
If you can get me a lead for a hundred dollars or less,
I have infinite budget for you because my model allows me
to buy leads for a hundred dollars or less.
If you can sell me a lead for 101 dollars,
I'm not interested.
And then it puts it back onto that sale rep to come back to
you with solutions.
They know exactly what their expectations are and what they
(45:21):
need to do to help you win.
And almost every single time I sit down in a meeting with
any of these advertising agencies,and I say, H
ere's the number I need, they thank me.
And they're like, oh my God,
I wish more people understood what their numbers were
because now we can actually work with you to figure out a
solution to reach that number.
It gives them a very,
very clear metric to either live or die by.
(45:45):
Yeah, again, that's brilliant stuff.
And one of the things that Mike mentioned, and maybe again,
on another episode, I'd love to have you on again,
and we can talk about how critical it is to track where
your clients are coming from, how they're finding you,
because that gives you a great indication and a gauge.
But again, Mike, thank you very much.
How can people reach out to you?
(46:05):
And again, before I let Mike tell us that, keep in mind,
he does corporate events, he does weddings,
he does special parties, and he's across the country.
So, Mike,
how can people reach out and learn more about you or
connect with you?
Yeah,
of course the website is felixandfingers.com so you can
check out our videos there you can reach out on any of the
(46:27):
forums, events,
events@felixandfingers.com is the main lead line.
My name is Mike,
so you can always send me something directly at mike@
felixandfingers.com.
And then we're obviously on all the social so whether
that's Facebook or Instagram those are the main two that
you'll find us on, but feel free to reach out anytime.
(46:48):
Yeah, Mike, thanks again so much for being a guest today.
And for those of you,
I'm also gonna put his contact information in the meeting
notes.
So please feel free to reach out to him.
He's just a wealth of information.
And I can tell you, I've seen his gigs,
his teams that go out and do the dueling pianos and it's
just a riot, it's a hoot.
And so thanks again, Mike, for taking the time.
(47:10):
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Louie.
Thanks again for joining us and listening to this episode
of Leadership and Love.
I would like to challenge you to ask yourself what's one
thing that you heard today that you can implement
immediately to improve your leadership and accelerate your
growth.
If you've gotten value out of this episode or learned
(47:31):
something that you can implement today,
we'd ask that you please share it with those that you care
about.
Our goal is to create more leaders who are leading with
love.
Welcome to the Leadership and Love Podcast.
We will cover leadership, mindset, personal development,
and sales and marketing.
You'll experience thought-provoking conversations with both
nationally and internationally recognized leaders.
Our goal is to inspire you and deliver actionable items
that you can implement that will help you accelerate your
(00:22):
growth.
Get ready to discover the magic and the power when you lead
with love.
So welcome back, everybody,
to another episode of Leadership and Love.
I'm your host, Louie Sharp.
And today, I'm very,
very excited because we have with us a very amazing person,
(00:44):
but also a dear friend of mine.
His dad and I actually went to high school together.
And Mike, when he was in high school and then in college,
he would sit in with some bands that I had as a saxophone
player.
Mike has a jazz saxophone major from Roosevelt University.
And then he's done a bunch of amazing things.
(01:05):
At one point after college, he wanted to go see the world.
So what he did was he became the piano player on cruise
ships.
And then he would go to different areas like the Caribbean,
the Mediterranean.
And that's how he kind of saw the world while he was being
paid to play music.
And then after he was done with that,
he started a thing called Dueling Pianos with him and just
(01:26):
another guy.
And I'll let Mike tell you that story of who that guy was.
And the first time I saw him doing a dueling pianos gig,
he was making more money than my band had ever made and
just him and another guy.
And today, his dueling pianos company, Felix & Fingers,
is actually a national brand, and he's nationwide.
(01:49):
And so Mike, thanks for being here today.
Yeah, Louie.
Good to be here.
Yeah,
is there anything you'd like to add to your introduction or
something I left out?
Yeah you know that's right.
Yeah, I went to school for jazz saxophone, went on ships.
I saw 45 different countries in about three years.
It was just incredible.
And then I came back and realized that no one would pay me
(02:10):
any money to play saxophone.
So I started playing piano a lot more and gigging a lot
more with piano that brought me into Dueling Pianos and now
Felix and Fingers and everything that we're doing.
Another little behind the stories thing is Mike and I are
accountability partners,
and I'm truly grateful for that relationship as well
because he's he's a couple years younger than me,
and he's got the wisdom of the internet technology,
(02:34):
the digital age.
So what I'd like to start with first Mike is,
can you tell the audience what you did or your strategy for
marketing and sales to turn Felix and Fingers into this
nation nationwide brand and be nationwide literally.
When it started for just you and if I remember correctly,
(02:55):
it was from somebody from American Idol right? A singer
from American Idol?
Right, so yeah, if we go back to end of 2010,
that's when I met my original Dueling Pianos partner.
His name is Dave Radford and he was on American Idol.
He was like the top 10 male finalists of the same season
that Daughtry was on.
So met him at a gig.
(03:16):
We were doing background jazz music was really what Felix
and Fingers was before we were even called Felix and
Fingers.
Then we started playing jazz music at a venue in Lake
Geneva, Wisconsin called the Baker House.
And that venue wanted us to learn Dueling Pianos.
So that's how it went from like background jazz to an
opportunity to learn Dueling Pianos.
And then we figured out that was a pretty large market for
(03:37):
Dooling Pianos and started to really lean into that as an
art form.
So yeah, marketing, jeez, like where to begin?
There's a ton of stuff about marketing there.
We started out in the beginning where so much of our
marketing was really based on word of mouth and just really
starting to get reviews.
That was our entire marketing scheme was we had our
(03:59):
aggregator websites, like we did a lot of weddings.
So being on websites like Dinnott or WeddingWire where
everyone goes to find their wedding entertainment,
we would be on those sites and do everything we could to
get a lot of reviews on those sites.
That gave us reputation.
That meant we had a lot of leads and those sites were
generating a ton of work for us.
As we started to grow into more and more locations,
(04:21):
thankfully those reviews would go with us.
So it made scalability much,
much easier because if we had 20 reviews in Chicago,
if we opened up a new location,
those same 20 reviews would follow us elsewhere on some of
these sites.
So that helped a lot.
At this point, I think we have 450 reviews on the Knots.
So it's like,
we really leaned into that and because we have that many
(04:41):
reviews,
it's really hard for other companies to compete with the
reputation that we currently have and allows us to charge a
lot more for our services, which is great.
As we continue to grow,
then I had to lean into other advertising platforms that we
had more control over.
So the Knot, WeddingWire,
those were really great when we started,
(05:01):
but as happens with businesses,
there's an ebb and flow to having an advertising platform
that you don't have control over.
So whereas they, up until about 2020,
were delivering a ton of leads to us,
we were seeing literally one 10th,
like 10% of those leads two years later and had to get out
of those platforms.
So then that really drove me more into a lot of SEO work
(05:25):
and a lot of PPC marketing.
So Google ads, Bing ads, Facebook ads,
as a way to drive a lot of traffic to the website and make
sure that they get to our landing page and convert those to
leads.
So what was your messaging around that marketing to really
substantiate or more importantly even separate Felix and F
ingers from the crowd?
(05:45):
And you said something, so again for the audience members,
Mike was dropping a golden nugget, the power of reviews.
If you're not asking for reviews in your company,
start today.
You can do that by sending them a text after you've
completed it.
You can do it.
I know one of the things that Mike, and now Mike no longer,
and you can maybe talk about this on another episode,
(06:08):
but Mike no longer does gigs.
He hasn't done gigs for years,
but he's got processes in place.
So when they finish a gig,
his people are asking and getting videos on the location
for reviews and testimonials and those kinds of things.
So if you're not doing that,
you need to start immediately because that's how you built
your brand.
And like Mike said,
he's built his to the point where he can charge more than
(06:30):
the competition because he's just so well known,
and they truly do deliver on their promises.
But what I'd like you to talk about Mike is what did you do
as you've grown it from two guys,
and literally now you're a multi-million dollar
corporation, right?
And so at that point,
what did you do in your marketing messaging to separate you
(06:52):
from the crowd?
So,
how I was taught to approach marketing is that with your
messaging,
you really want to lean into it so that when someone sees
your message, they see your ad,
they feel like you're literally reading from their journal,
like their personal diary, what are their pain points?
What are the things that they're trying to solve?
So that then when they see your message that says, hey,
(07:16):
like, are you having a hard time finding a vendor?
Or are the prices unclear for finding wedding vendors?
Or is it, are you stressed out about this?
Like, if they see that message, and they feel like, oh,
this, this message speaks to me,
this is exactly how I've been feeling,
then that's going to grab their attention and drive them to
your website.
So as I talk to my team, if they come to the website,
(07:38):
that's, that's the pre-sale for us.
And for anyone, it's like,
that's the first step of a sale is the pre-sale when people
are going to your website, in my case,
they're looking at our videos,
they're looking at our messaging, looking at our pictures,
looking at our reviews,
by the time they filled out our form,
and that's gone in and gotten to any of our sales reps,
they've already made a major decision about liking us,
(08:00):
like they've gotten to know, like, and trust.
And now they're just picking up the phone with us to verify
whether or not what they think about us is true.
At that point, it's our gig to lose.
But we want to make sure that that messaging really leans
into what are their pain points so that they see that and
they feel like, okay, this is connecting with me,
as opposed to something that says,
best dueling pianos in the world or funnest events ever.
(08:22):
Like that's, it's so generic that way.
We really want to create a user story that goes from,
from the ad to a landing page that is also specific to
their use case,
if we can send someone who's looking for weddings to a
wedding specific landing page, and even better,
a wedding specific landing page in, let's say, Chicagoland,
if it's a bride and groom in Chicago land,
(08:44):
then we'll have a page for them for Chicago weddings.
If they're in Dallas,
we'll have a page for Dallas weddings.
If they're in New York,
you'll say New York corporate events.
We want to make sure that they know that we do exactly what
it is they're looking for.
So Mike, man, I love you.
So he just touched on two things that I would like you to
reiterate One of them is is he said he's built this
(09:06):
experience Experiential on his website.
He's got video.
He's got content.
He's got reviews, testimonials,
so he touched on what we all know people want to do
business with people They know like and trust and he's
built that on his website I highly recommend you go to his
website and check it out to see what you can copy.
Because nobody needs to reinvent the wheel.
(09:27):
The other thing that Mike talked about is it is the pain.
One of the things that's really important in marketing is
the tech talk about people's pain when I when I consult
businesses One of the things I talk about is your unique
selling proposition and I'd spell unique YOU And your
unique selling proposition is the solution to their pain.
So, Mike,
(09:48):
can you talk a little bit about what you did to find to
research and find the pain back in the day for target
markets? Because you've also he gets paid thousands and
thousands of dollars to do corporate events.
He does weddings.
He does private parties.
He does all kinds of things.
But what'd you do back in the day to find that pain for
(10:08):
that specific target market?
And what do you do today?
So yeah.
I was taught that people will buy for one of two reasons.
It's to either get away and solve their pain or to lean in
towards pleasure.
It's like, it's one of those two reasons.
They're trying to get away from pain or get towards
pleasure.
So I will create campaigns with different headlines,
(10:29):
different descriptions that are either like, yeah,
resolving the pain, like,
are you stressed out about this or getting them to
pleasure.
Like, do you want to have a great memorable wedding,
for example?
So back in the day, yeah,
I would test a whole bunch of campaigns that way,
have different Google A-B tests going on.
And what's been great is now I've been leaning into more of
(10:50):
like the P-MAX campaigns with Google,
which is going to be much more AI enabled so that you can
just go into that campaign,
list a whole bunch of headlines and then let Google do its
magic.
We used to have Google campaigns that were search campaigns
and display campaigns and YouTube campaigns and every
different campaign type to have a ton of control over
exactly who it was showing to.
(11:12):
We would limit our audience, limit our times,
limit like the demographics and the ages.
We really tried to hone that in.
And then what was so funny was when we just went to like a P
-MAX campaign that was AI enabled,
that just let Google do its thing,
find the audience for you and test all the different
headlines.
That was when we started to see a lot more leads come in.
(11:32):
So like technology has come a long,
long way to allow Google to do what they do best.
And that's find your leads.
And so can you kind of break that down a little bit for
people in normal language?
So how are these programs working and what's happening and
how you've,
because there was a time when you were doing this manually,
(11:52):
right?
You were calling people or you were trying to do research.
You were,
you were calling your clients up and doing those kinds of
things to find out what their pain was,
but in today's world, you can literally,
literally do that at the touch of a finger.
And for those of you, and I, and I, and I,
I'd like you to morph this conversation again,
kind of describe in layman's terms, what,
(12:14):
what you were doing, and also now how you've,
you've maximized and continue to maximize Chat GPT? And
for, and a little side note, Mike is,
is taking me kicking and screaming and literally dragging
me into Chat GPT,
but he's been showing me some things and it's just
fascinating how much that, that particular tool.
(12:36):
And like you said, Mike,
it's the best employee you could hire,
but can you talk about that in a little more layman's terms
and then how you've let that morph into Chat GPT as well?
Sure.
So, I mean,
if I break down PMAX and what it takes to have a successful
PMAX campaign, and that's literally what it's called, PMAX.
It's a Google PMAX campaign.
And that is going to take the search ads.
(12:58):
So if you go into Google and you search for it,
in my case, Dueling Pianos, that's what makes us show up.
It takes the search ads, combines those with display ads.
So display ads are going to be any time you're on a website
and you see like a banner on the side or on the top,
that's the Google display network.
That's one of many networks,
but the GDN Google display network is the biggest one.
(13:18):
So it will put my content there.
It will have the YouTube ads.
So if you're on YouTube and you see an ad coming in the
middle of your video or at the beginning of the video that
you're watching, this is how you are able to achieve that.
PMAX works really well.
If you give it a ton of headlines,
you give it a ton of descriptions that it can just rotate
through and figure out what gets the most eyes,
(13:40):
what gets the most clicks.
It optimizes everything for you.
You're going to have to give it logos, give it pictures,
give it any type of like still advertising so that it can
start doing that in the display network.
You have to give it videos so that it can throw that out to
YouTube and any of the other Google properties that might
be showing videos.
And that way it can use all of your assets together in a
(14:02):
much more aggregated cumulative approach to figure out what
does and does not work for you.
So now instead of the old way of really trying to AB test
and optimize everything down, which I mean, to be fair,
one of the things that I noticed was when we were a smaller
company and honestly still,
I feel like we're maybe too small to really see the
(14:22):
benefits of like,
if I improve something by 1% in my advertising, sure,
that's going to be helpful,
but it's not like I'm Apple computers and we're doing
trillions of dollars of revenue and 1% is like billions of
dollars.
So I saw myself,
and I see a lot of other entrepreneurs doing this as well,
where you get laser focused on the optimization and you're
(14:44):
trying to get just a little bit more of a result out of
what you're going for and you end up just distracting
yourself for very little return.
Louie, I told you the metaphor, maybe you remember this,
it's the sailboat metaphor.
Do you remember that when we talked about that?
I do.
I love this,
and it just kind of blew my mind. And if you're a sailing
(15:04):
aficionado, I'm sorry if I have these numbers wrong,
but this is how it was taught to me, was the question is,
if you're in a sailboat and the wind is behind you,
like it's right,
like dead smack behind you and it's blowing you at 15 miles
per hour, how fast can your boat go?
You would think, okay,
maybe you can go like 12 miles per hour, 13 miles per hour,
(15:24):
14 miles per hour.
Like it's going to go a little bit slower than the wind,
certainly not faster than the wind because it's blowing you
and maybe you can throw some weight off the boat and it'll
go faster.
Maybe you can sand down the hull and it'll go faster.
You can do all of these things to optimize to get you
closer to 15 miles per hour.
However,
if you turn the boat so that you're about 35 degrees to the
(15:47):
wind, you can't go 15 miles per hour.
You can actually do three times that speed.
So sometimes as an entrepreneur,
when you're focused on optimizing,
all you're doing is getting closer to like that ceiling
that you're at when what you should be doing is turning the
boat and then that's when you get your 3x return or your
(16:08):
10x return.
So it's a balance between figuring out when to optimize
versus when you should just be turning the boat to better
harness the wind that's behind you.
So Mike, I love the genius that you use.
And one of the things I like to share with people is this
is the power of target markets, right?
One of the things Mike's talking about is that you can
(16:30):
optimize this target market but at some point you get
what's called diminishing returns, right?
You've done as much as you can and you might squeeze
another couple percentage points out of it but that's not
gonna give you exponential growth.
And I'd like to challenge you to think about that 30,
35 degree angle turn as what's another target market where
(16:51):
you could go, again, be laser focused.
It's one of the things I love to talk about,
be laser focused on that target market.
Mike,
one of the things I'd like you to share with the audience
because again,
you've been very instrumental and very patient teaching me.
How can people, entrepreneurs specifically,
really start to maximize chat GPT to grow their company,
(17:14):
to increase their sales.
And I'd like you to share some of the things that you're
doing because you truly are at the forefront and your
competition is like miles behind you, right?
And you're constantly changing at breakneck speed.
So at this point,
I don't know that anybody's ever gonna catch you but how
are you maximizing chat GPT to help you automate?
(17:35):
And there's nobody I know in business that's automated more
things better and more efficiently than Mike has.
So Mike, if you'd talk about that a little bit, please.
Great.
We could spend an hour on this,
and you wouldn't have to say a word, Louie.
I have so much stuff I could talk about here,
so I'll do my best to consolidate some things.
(17:55):
So chat GPT is the most incredible resource available right
now.
And it's funny because the landscape is changing so
quickly,
like I've been messing around with Deep Seek recently
because that's all over the news is like the Chinese
alternative, that is better than chat GPT,
and I agree now that I've been using it.
There's a lot of things that make that better than chat GPT
(18:18):
so I'm sure there's going to be a competition and a back
and forth between the two.
But generally speaking, chat GPT.
Yeah, it can automate a lot of stuff,
it can help a lot of stuff.
I use it first and foremost as a thought partner like a
strategic thought partner like you can use it say hey yeah
write my emails and we'll send you or write you an email
and then you can copy and paste it.
(18:39):
And that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with doing that.
But there's another level that entrepreneurs can get to
with chat GPT,
where you really use it as a thought partner as a strategic
coach as someone who can challenge your thinking and give
you ideas that maybe wouldn't otherwise have on your own.
So that's where it's been phenomenal.
So for example, if we go back to advertising,
(19:02):
we have campaigns,
instead of just saying like we're a dueling pianos company
so I'm going to put out a dueling piano campaign.
I put out a dueling pianist campaign I put out a wedding
campaign I put out a corporate campaign.
So I go into chat GPT and I'm like,
I have these three campaigns.
Here's my business.
Here's where I'm located.
What other campaigns might you recommend.
And then now we have like a fundraising campaign and LGBTQ
(19:24):
campaign and a campaign for Indian weddings and a campaign
for retirement parties,
and all of these are different PMAX campaigns inside of
Google, and it's coming from chat GPT.
Then I'll ask, hey, where else can I buy leads from.
So,
then we started advertising in on Pinterest on Tick Tock on
Reddit on Quora on x.com,
(19:46):
or what was Twitter so all of those are are places that you
can actually go to buy eyeballs for your website or for
your product.
Now,
our results with the other with the lesser known ones the
lesser used ones weren't necessarily spectacular,
but to be able to try it and see if x is our target
clientele or not.
It doesn't cost that much money throw $100 into it see if
(20:09):
they're hitting your metrics or not,
and make a decision from there.
So that's a really nice use case is just to use it to help
you figure out where there might be some gaps in your
strategy.
I recently started using Deep Seek for all of my metrics. C
hat GPT is terrible with math.
So in case you didn't know like don't have it do math
(20:29):
because chat GPT the way it's set up is it is predictive
text.
So, the way it was explained to me, and I love this is,
Louie, if I were to say the word old.
What do you think is the next word to follow old.
People.
Old people, great, it can be old people old man old maid,
old dog, old whatever.
(20:52):
What if I said, Old McDonald,
what's the next word to follow.
Had a farm or had.
Yeah, had a farm.
So because I gave you more information, Old McDonald,
you know statistically speaking that the most likely word
that follows old McDonald is had a farm.
(21:14):
That's how chat GPT works is the more data you can give it,
the more you can explain about what you're looking for,
then the more it can take all of that data and figure out
how to give you feedback on what it is you're looking for.
So if I'm using chat GPT,
my prompts are almost always like, hey,
I am a 39 year old entrepreneur living in Crystal Lake,
(21:37):
Illinois.
I have a dueling pianos company.
Now I've done this so many times I didn't know exactly who
I am and it has that memory.
So it just kind of skips those steps,
but I'll tell it all of those details.
If I'm looking for, let's say a movie to watch with my son.
I'm 39, here's where I live.
I have an eight year old son.
Here's what we like to do.
Show me something that is a underrated movie.
(21:57):
Give me 10 recommendations and then help me pick from
there.
Or one step further, Louie,
the exercise that we did on our phone call on Monday,
which I think is such a cheat code for chat GPT,
is when you ask it something, it's like, hey,
I'm trying to plan out this advertising strategy.
Here's my company.
Here's what I'm trying to achieve.
I love to ask after you give it the context, say,
(22:21):
first of all, you have to give it a job.
So act as a business coach.
Act as an attorney.
Act as a CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Act as a COO or CTO.
So act as this and ask me up to five questions,
one question at a time,
to gain additional context about this scenario,
(22:45):
however you want to phrase that.
And then what will happen is chat GPT will ask you one
question at a time.
If it doesn't, then you stop it and you say, hey, no,
I need one question at a time.
And it'll say, yup, sorry.
Yeah, let me ask you one question.
It'll ask you the first question you'll answer.
It'll ask you the next question you'll answer.
And it'll go on for however many questions you wanted it to
ask.
And then it'll say, great, I got all the details I need.
(23:07):
Here's my recommendation for you.
Being able to do that is such a cheat code to get better
answers out of it.
And if you want to take that even one step further than
that is if you haven't tried putting it on the speaker mode
where you can actually talk to it,
you can have a conversation with it.
So as an entrepreneur who is supposed to be a visionary and
(23:28):
have ideas for the company,
if I can go outside and go for a walk for an hour,
put on my headphones, open up chat GPT,
and literally have a conversation with it the same way I'm
having a conversation with you, Louie,
it's unbelievable what kind of ideas can be generated from
that.
And anytime it says something good, I say, hey, cool,
that was a great idea.
Please note that down so that when I get to the end of my
(23:51):
walk, that you can remind me about that idea.
I conclude the walk an hour later and I say, hey, chat GPT,
what were all those important points that I asked you to
remember?
And it'll give me all of the points.
And then maybe I'll open up the app and I'll copy and paste
that into a document.
And I know exactly what it is that I got out of that
conversation.
(24:12):
So, Mike, thank you very much for the detail in that.
And to his point, what we were talking about,
so we have an accountability call every Monday morning.
And Mike, like I said, he said, Louie right now, he said,
right now I want you to do this.
And so I did exactly what he just said.
He walked me through it.
And I asked Chat GPT through Mike's coaching to ask me the
(24:35):
five questions one at a time.
And then I asked it for about information for this podcast.
And it was unbelievable, Mike,
it was just unbelievable the amount of information and spot
on, right?
But to your point, based on what you just said, and again,
how you coach me, I put a bunch of information in.
(24:56):
I said, hey, I'm an international speaker.
I'm writing a book.
My podcast is called Leadership and Love.
And my target market is this.
And then I asked it to ask five questions.
It asked me five more questions.
And then I said, what are some great topics?
And after it asked those five questions,
it just gave me this list of 10 great topics,
great ways to promote it.
(25:16):
It was unbelievable.
I mean, jaw-droppingly unbelievable.
So I played back what Mike just said a couple of times,
but while you're playing that back, get on a computer,
get on an app.
I actually downloaded it on my phone as well and do exactly
what he's telling you, because just to his point,
you've hired for the price of your time, a strategic coach,
(25:41):
a marketing specialist, whatever you wanna call it.
And now they're working for you and they're on your
payroll.
And Mike uses it every day and he's getting me to the habit
of doing the same thing.
I've been using it for my clients,
but now I've really turned it on myself.
So Mike, thanks very much for sharing that.
The next thing I'd like to talk about is you do some very
(26:03):
unique things.
I love your heart.
I've loved your passion for music.
I've loved playing music with you through the years,
but I love your heart and I love the things that we talk
about in our accountability calls,
where you're talking about the things that you do for your
team.
So what I'd like you to share with people,
and I've said this in a previous episode,
(26:24):
nobody does anything great by themselves.
You haven't built Felix and Fingers to be a nationwide
brand and a nationwide company by yourself.
What are the things that you do to really take care of your
people?
Sure.
And yeah, Felix and Fingers,
we started out as just two people, myself and Dave,
at this point in our network.
So we built a back end network to organize all of our
(26:48):
performers, we have,
I think it's 720 people in the network at this point that
we work with.
So yeah,
we've grown from two to 720 and I think a major reason
behind that is because of the culture that we're trying to
set up.
So, first of all, yeah,
being able to surround myself with a great team like that
sounds very trite like it's just age old advice like it
(27:10):
surround yourself with great people.
I do really trust my team,
and I remember being at a time earlier in the company's
history where it's like, I would hear CEOs talk about like,
oh yeah, I have a great team.
I trust and do stuff.
And I thought I was building a great team and then I found
myself like saying those words but not really believing it
because I just still felt like as the entrepreneur I was
(27:33):
doing all the work, L
ike if I had stepped away that everything would collapse.
And that was very much like an immature leader on my part
that was just a much earlier stage in the growth of the
company.
At this point, now that I have someone who is like our CTO,
Greg,
he's been with me for what 12 years at this point he does
(27:53):
all of our back end web stuff.
Our CEO, COO, Bri, the sales team, some of the sales team,
people have been here for 10, 11, 12 years.
Being able to trust that team has been essential to me
being able to separate myself from the business and start
working on the processes to really allow them to find their
(28:14):
own success.
Louie, we've talked about it before where it's like,
you need to set up a company where your world is so big
that anyone can come into it,
and their world can fit inside of it.
That they believe that they can achieve absolutely all
their goals and all of their dreams by joining into your
world and committing to that.
(28:34):
So that's been my biggest priority is how can we make the
FNF world, our community,
our ecosystem so big and so filled with opportunities that
the ambitious people can absolutely rise through the
company.
Everyone on the team, so my CTO,
he was a player for the company,
and we moved him out of being a player to being a full time
(28:57):
web developer for us.
He does all of our automations.
That was a beautiful opportunity that we had just from
recruiting internally.
Our COO is the same story.
It's like she's a player for us in California,
but she was so strong as a player and then so strong in
other roles that we eventually moved her all the way up to
COO.
Being able to give people those opportunities to invest
(29:19):
into them and to allow them to achieve things that they
didn't necessarily think that they could achieve on their
own has been such an incredible experience.
I just got done reading Multipliers.
Have you read that book yet, Louie?
No, not yet.
Good.
Liz Wakeman, I think is her name.
And it's how are we as entrepreneurs,
how are we multipliers versus accidental diminishers?
(29:41):
There's so many times as an entrepreneur that you want to
be the hero.
There's a problem happening.
So you swoop in and you save the day or you're going to
just drop idea after idea after idea so you can be the
visionary and it's just overwhelming your team.
Or you're putting in so many extra hours that now the team
just sees you doing all this work,
and we think that maybe they'll inspire the team to work
(30:02):
harder, but in fact, it has the opposite effect.
Where the team sees you way out in front and they actually
pull back because they're like, oh, Louis will get it,
or Mike will get it.
It's been an incredible book.
So I recommend that to any entrepreneur at this point,
now that I read it because I found so many accidental
diminisher qualities in myself,
where I thought I was doing good work,
(30:23):
I thought I was doing the right thing,
but I was actually holding my team back.
I'm from a culture like growing up in a culture where like,
if something's hard, work harder.
If something's not working, put more hours in.
Louie, you know my dad, he works his butt off all the time.
He's never known a 40 hour week because it's always been a
(30:44):
50, 60, 70, 80 hour week.
My brother's the same way.
And I've now adopted the mindset that if I am working
harder to get something done, if I'm putting in more hours,
that's actually the laziest choice I could be making.
So I've been trying to rewire my options.
Say that again, Mike.
That's golden.
Say that again, please.
(31:05):
Yeah,
to work harder to put in more hours is as an entrepreneur,
the laziest choice that you can make.
And Gary Keller says it as well it's like if you're working
more than 40 hours per week you're cheating.
You're cheating anyone can put in more hours and not pay
themselves for those hours.
So instead challenge yourself to make the better decisions,
so that your company can grow, your team can grow,
(31:28):
your profits can grow with you not having to do the extra
hours and sacrifice your family time, your personal time,
and everything else that really your job is supposed to be
the vehicle to help you achieve.
Yeah,
so for for you listening or maybe even watching Mike's
just...this is the mother lode right here.
(31:48):
I can tell you it's the power of processes.
If you've noticed on and listened to any of the other
episodes, e
verybody talks about a book or something that they're
reading or the power of reading.
Mike and I share books back and forth all the time.
But one of the things he just touched on is if you're
running yourself ragged, it's the wrong plan.
It's the wrong strategy. And at some point you're going to
(32:10):
burn out, And I love what you said, Mike,
I love your mindset around the ability.
I do the same thing I've actually offered people and some
of them I've spawned them I just spawned one of my
employees out into the world as a new business owner as an
entrepreneur, right?
That was kind of his goal and and so there he could have
gone higher up in our our culture and our company,
(32:34):
but he really wanted to be an entrepreneur.
So, I helped him launch his own business,
connected him to a bunch of people in my network, a
nd I really think as leaders that's our job is to grow
leaders underneath us and and to your...
and I love your...your big vision and again what Mike
touched on that.
I want you to take away is you should be thinking big.
(32:54):
As big as possible. At some point.
I think Mike's going to come to me and say, Hey Louie,
you know I I'm going overseas,
and he's going to turn this thing called Felix and Fingers
from a national company into a global company Because he's
he's built the processes in the systems.
Just like a Mcdonald's.
I think the record for Mcdonald's, M
ike is only two or three Mcdonald's worldwide have ever
(33:15):
failed failed, right?
It's the it's the power.
Yeah, it's the power of that process,
and you've built that process.
I'd also like to tell you have you talked for a couple
minutes now about you you are doing some really cool things
for your employees that are are very powerful, n
ot only for that culture,
but also to tie them to the company.
(33:37):
And and build this team that you've built and again that
you can count on for it to really run with your hands off
the wheel.
Can you tell us about a couple things that that you you're
doing like your team to Colorado and your profit sharing
those kinds of things?
Yeah, and this was actually really interesting.
So we do a quarterly sales meet.
(33:59):
So every quarter I get the sales team together,
and we do a meeting to review what the goals are,
like how we did the last quarter,
maybe learn a couple of new things,
bring in a guest speaker, Louie, you've spoke for that.
And it's a really nice meeting.
At the end of the meeting,
we always send out a survey to everyone and we ask them
like, hey, how did the meeting go?
And most recently we started asking some cultural questions
like, hey, are you feeling fulfilled?
(34:21):
Are you feeling challenged?
Are you feeling like management listens to you?
And one of the questions had asked for recommendations for
how we can like improve culture.
And almost every single person said more in-person events.
Now, my business is unique in that it's fully virtual.
Like we don't have a brick and mortar.
We don't need a brick and mortar.
(34:41):
As a dueling pianos company,
we don't have a bar that we perform at.
We go to weddings, we go to corporate events,
we go to fundraisers, we might go to bars,
but no matter what, our players show up at a gig,
they load in, they play the show,
and then they load out and they go home at the end of the
night.
So it's not the typical dueling piano bar where it's like
five nights, six nights a week,
and it's the same venue and you never move gear.
(35:02):
Our model is that it's a mobile type show.
So our entire team is virtual.
Some of the people live in Chicago.
We have sales reps, as Louie said, across the country.
And then I also have virtual assistants who live in the
Philippines who are phenomenal.
They're absolutely unbelievable.
But to that point, being virtual,
it's hard to connect people.
(35:24):
It's hard to help people feel like they're part of a team.
So last year I took the team to Mexico.
So if someone hit certain metrics, certain KPIs,
if they were like a full-time employee in the company,
like we have so many people who work for the company,
I had to have some sort of qualifiers for who can and can't
go, because I can't bring 700 people to Mexico with me.
(35:47):
But we took maybe it was like 12,
13 people plus their spouses.
So like probably 25 people in total to Mexico last year.
This year we'll all go to Colorado, which is great,
because especially being across the country,
like the people in Chicago never get to see the people in
LA.
So that's really huge for us because we work together all
the time.
(36:08):
The other thing that we just started doing this past year
was a profit sharing program.
So last year we were profitable.
And I told the company, if we hit certain numbers,
certain margins,
then there would be a percentage of that that went back to
the team.
And I spent a lot of time trying to figure out a good,
equitable way to split up the profit sharing because we
have kind of three different layers of employees with this
(36:31):
company.
So we have the office staff.
We have the sales staff where they're predominantly
commission-based and then we have our performers.
The office staff gets profit sharing based on maybe the
level of their responsibility as an office member.
The sales staff gets profit sharing based on the number of
sales they do,
and the players get profit sharing based on the number of
(36:52):
shows that they've done.
So our top two players did 133 and 131 gigs last year,
respectively.
So they get more of the profit sharing than someone who did
maybe only 25 gigs last year.
So yeah,
we took a percentage and just built out a portal on our
website so that any person on the team can see what their
numbers are, see how they're doing,
(37:13):
how many gigs they've done,
because in my industry as a dueling piano company,
there are, jeez, in Chicago, Chicago alone,
there's probably at least a dozen other dueling piano
companies who do exactly what we do.
So any of those dozen companies could hire anyone from our
team.
So what can we do to make our company look better?
Like obviously we could try to pay people more,
(37:34):
but how else could we make this a better company for those
people to join?
So profit sharing was a big part of that,
is this way they can feel more invested and not so much
like a higher gun just going out and doing another dueling
piano show.
So they have full visibility.
There's a great story from Emith, and you've read Emith,
right?
Emith revisited it.
(37:54):
Yes.
Where they talk about like motivating an employee and this
guy just can't be motivated and the manager is just
scratching his head, can't figure it out,
and then he goes to a bowling alley and the employee's
there,
and he's bowling and he knocks over the pins and he's
hooting and he's hollering and he's having a great time.
He's like, holy cow,
I've never seen this side of this guy before.
What's the difference?
What's going on?
(38:15):
And he came to realize that the difference was, well,
when the employee lets go with the ball and it rolls down
and it hits the pins and he hits 10 pins,
he knows immediately he achieved his goal.
He was excited.
If you were to put a curtain in front of the pins,
bowling becomes a lot less fun.
And so many of these companies, so many of our companies,
like we put a curtain in front of the pins,
(38:36):
we put a curtain in front of the numbers,
we put a curtain in front of what all the benefits are,
and the employees aren't motivated because they can't
connect it.
They can't really feel those wins and experience those wins
if they don't understand where the pins are.
Mike, God bless you brother, that's powerful stuff.
And one of the things for our audience and our listeners,
(38:57):
I want you to understand that Mike took the time to figure
all this out.
You need to know your numbers as a business owner,
but he took the time to figure and he's tracking.
He's tracking, he said it a couple of times, KPIs,
key performance indicators.
He's tracking his key performance indicators for the
company and for the individuals.
You notice he knew exact numbers on his two top performers.
(39:19):
One of the things I love as a guitar player and a musician
myself,
I love that he's taken people that thought they could never
make a living playing piano or doing this kind of
entertainment.
And they've got a job with benefits, with profit sharing,
with trips to all these kind of different places.
401K. Health insurance.
(39:40):
Yeah,
that was a big part of making sure we can attract the right
people.
Right.
And so, and by doing that,
he said earlier in the conversation that he's got a team
that he can trust.
I'm blessed in the same way.
Right now,
I've got a couple of companies that are running without me,
and I'm here talking to Mike.
So there's great value in this.
And again,
(40:00):
I'd highly recommend you replay this a couple of different
times,
but you want to know your numbers and you want to be able
to be, to tie that back to the team because I think,
I love that bowling analogy, Mike.
It's great that I don't think leaders are often clear
enough and communicate often enough.
Hey, this is the goal.
(40:21):
This is where we're headed,
and this is what's in it for everybody.
I want to share a quick story with you, Mike,
that I don't know I've ever told you before,
but the reason why I started Sharp Auto Body almost 44
years ago now was I was working at a body shop in Arlington
Heights, and the shop owner sat the entire company down.
I think it was 14 or 15 of us at the time and said,
(40:43):
I can't afford to give anybody a raise,
but I need to make $50,000 more for me this year.
I immediately, I immediately stood up and said, I'm done.
And everybody else was looking at me like,
what are you doing?
Louie, where are you going?
I said, did you hear what he just said?
There's no win in this game for us.
He wins, we lose.
We just get to work harder.
He makes more money.
I love your heart.
I love that you care about your people.
(41:05):
I love the way you communicate with them with quarterly
meetings with your sales team,
that you're giving them benefits,
and you're adding all this extra value because it's why
you're going to be global sooner than later.
Is there anything you'd like to add before we go?
Uh, when you were talking about the metrics, yeah, I,
(41:25):
Louie, like, you know, when we talk on Mondays, it's like,
I have all my numbers, like two, like as I love numbers.
It's, um, the more complicated, like your company gets, uh,
this was an analogy that I heard.
It's like, when you have a very small company,
it's kind of like riding a tricycle.
You don't need all that many gauges,
but as the company starts to grow and become more,
(41:46):
more complex,
and then you're getting closer to like flying a fighter jet
and you get an airplane and it has a ton of gauges
everywhere.
Now you would never expect a pilot of a fighter jet to,
to fly a jet without all those gauges.
They need those gauges.
They need to know those gauges.
So for me, it's like, yeah, I know those numbers.
And if we circle back to advertising,
like a big breakthrough I had was figuring out what is the
(42:10):
most I can pay to acquire a client.
If I know that number and I know that number extremely
clearly,
that's what allows me to go into Google ads or any type of
PPC platform and optimize for that number.
So if I'm spending less than that number,
I can spend more and get more leads because Louie mentioned
there's a law of diminishing returns.
(42:31):
Like with Google ads, it will saturate your target market,
and it gets substantially like exponentially more expensive
to find leads above and beyond your target market.
So if you know what your cost is to acquire a client,
then you can really lean into that.
And something that I learned from just really listening to
a lot of Russell Brunson stuff with ClickFunnels is he
(42:53):
said, when it comes to advertising, the person,
the company who can spend the most to acquire a client is
the company that wins.
So what needs to be true about your model that you can
outspend your competition,
that you're able to bring all of those leads into your
ecosystem.
That's the thing where it's a winner take all.
(43:14):
You don't have to be a million times better than
competition.
You need to be 5% 10% better than the competition,
and you'll win the majority of your leads.
Yeah, I love the analogy, you know,
the horse that wins the horse race,
it wins a million dollars.
He doesn't have to win, but more than a nose.
Yeah.
Right.
It's the same.
It's the same kind of strategy, Mike,
that you've just had great stuff.
(43:35):
Again,
I would highly recommend our listeners to go back and
listen to this specific episode a couple of times,
especially around how to maximize chat GPT.
And again, what Mike was just talking about,
he knows exactly how much he can spend to get a new client.
And if you don't know that number,
you need to know that number.
And I would challenge you and ask you this.
(43:57):
Mike has a specific number that he has for his marketing
budget annually.
Do you know what your number?
Do you even have a marketing budget?
And if you don't, then start one,
because that's how you can grow your company and knowing
the cost of a new client.
And then what does that what's your average client?
What's that sale going to be?
Because Mike knows all those numbers,
(44:18):
and that's how you calculate how much you can spend on that
client.
You know,
if I can interject because I've loved this as a hack,
as a trick, like as an entrepreneur,
when you're like figuring out marketing and where you can
spend money, it just feels always so nebulous.
Like you can put an ad here and they'll charge you this
random amount of money.
And it's, it's hard to know what's working and justifying.
(44:39):
That's a whole other conversation is,
is your tracking robust enough that you know exactly where
your leads are coming from?
Like that's a different conversation and very,
very important.
But if I can go to a new advertising medium and have a
phone call with sale rep and they're like, well, hey,
you can do this package for X or this package for Y.
I say, here's my number.
I need to acquire a lead for a hundred dollars.
(45:01):
If you can get me a lead for a hundred dollars or less,
I have infinite budget for you because my model allows me
to buy leads for a hundred dollars or less.
If you can sell me a lead for 101 dollars,
I'm not interested.
And then it puts it back onto that sale rep to come back to
you with solutions.
They know exactly what their expectations are and what they
(45:21):
need to do to help you win.
And almost every single time I sit down in a meeting with
any of these advertising agencies,and I say, H
ere's the number I need, they thank me.
And they're like, oh my God,
I wish more people understood what their numbers were
because now we can actually work with you to figure out a
solution to reach that number.
It gives them a very,
very clear metric to either live or die by.
(45:45):
Yeah, again, that's brilliant stuff.
And one of the things that Mike mentioned, and maybe again,
on another episode, I'd love to have you on again,
and we can talk about how critical it is to track where
your clients are coming from, how they're finding you,
because that gives you a great indication and a gauge.
But again, Mike, thank you very much.
How can people reach out to you?
(46:05):
And again, before I let Mike tell us that, keep in mind,
he does corporate events, he does weddings,
he does special parties, and he's across the country.
So, Mike,
how can people reach out and learn more about you or
connect with you?
Yeah,
of course the website is felixandfingers.com so you can
check out our videos there you can reach out on any of the
(46:27):
forums, events,
events@felixandfingers.com is the main lead line.
My name is Mike,
so you can always send me something directly at mike@
felixandfingers.com.
And then we're obviously on all the social so whether
that's Facebook or Instagram those are the main two that
you'll find us on, but feel free to reach out anytime.
(46:48):
Yeah, Mike, thanks again so much for being a guest today.
And for those of you,
I'm also gonna put his contact information in the meeting
notes.
So please feel free to reach out to him.
He's just a wealth of information.
And I can tell you, I've seen his gigs,
his teams that go out and do the dueling pianos and it's
just a riot, it's a hoot.
And so thanks again, Mike, for taking the time.
(47:10):
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Louie.
Thanks again for joining us and listening to this episode
of Leadership and Love.
I would like to challenge you to ask yourself what's one
thing that you heard today that you can implement
immediately to improve your leadership and accelerate your
growth.
If you've gotten value out of this episode or learned
(47:31):
something that you can implement today,
we'd ask that you please share it with those that you care
about.
Our goal is to create more leaders who are leading with
love.
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