Grow your retail business and blitz your competition by learning business strategies from outside the retail industry. Whether your just thinking about opening a boutique, or if you already have a successful retail store, Salena Knight will introduce you to business strategies not normally found in the retail environment.
Bringing Business to Retail
Dan Norris Talks About The RollerCoaster Ride of Success
bringing business to retail podcast episode one with Dan Norris. Welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast on SelenaNight.com. Stay ahead of the competition by opening your doors to business experts so you can learn, grow, and be inspired. Passionate about bringing business strategies to independent retailers. Please welcome your host Selena Knight. Hey there, Selena Knight here and thanks for tuning in today on our first ever podcast episode of the Bringing Business to Retail show. I'm really excited to have Dan Norris as our first guest. Dan is, amongst other things, the co-founder of WP Curve, a great resource for businesses that use WordPress for their website. He's had a rollercoaster journey throughout his business life and in this podcast he's going to walk us through these big points in his life where he had to make life-changing decisions. He tells us about his ups and downs to get to the place where he is now which, in my opinion, is truly kicking it out of the park. I brought Dan on because I find his story inspiring and throughout it all he's kept his followers updated with where he's at. I mean Dan writes a lot of content and he's never hidden behind this show reel that we see of other people's lives on Facebook, on Instagram, on Pinterest and all too often we compare ourselves to. So let's jump in and hear about Dan's adventures. On today's show we've got Dan Norris. He has a very interesting history as an entrepreneur. I first met Dan a few years ago when we worked on a challenge get to the front page of Google and I was lucky enough to be selected by Dan to work with him and his team and we did achieve that challenge. We did get to the front page of Google and in this time I've been following his career which has definitely had ups and downs and I've asked Dan on the show because I think that his story is quite inspiring even though he might tell you the opposite. It shows what can be achieved when you're back against the wall. His current venture which I think is absolutely rocking it is WP curve and it provides 24/7 access to the world's best developers for maintenance, support and small jobs for people with WordPress hosted websites and the great thing about it is you can just sign up for a monthly plan and they'll do a whole bunch of jobs for you or you can just order a one-off job and as a small business owner I think that's fantastic. I know I'm getting my website up and running at the moment and I've got a whole host of things that I'll be sending off to Dan in the new future to get it done and on top of all of that Dan was voted as Australia's top small business blogger by Australia's largest business magazine smarter business ideas in 2013. So before you tell us about WP curve can you tell us a little bit of the what I think is an interesting story behind the catalyst of WP curve being started up? Yes well thanks for your intro that was pretty epic you've obviously done this before. Only my second one thank you I just like to be well reformed. Yeah well I think so I guess when we worked together originally was when I was running my agency and I think a lot of people do the same thing that I did which was to go out and start the easiest business they can start and for me it was building websites for people and I didn't think too much about like the business I was in for six or seven years I just kept trying to improve that business and I was never really able to I was sort of able to make a little bit more revenue but never really able to make a profit and after seven years I after trying lots of different things I gave up and sold it for not very much just enough to give me a year to work on something else and I worked on a software app for that year and spent all of my money and didn't get any customers and within I think well I think I think the first six months I spent doing a lot of content and building the app and then the next six months I put up a payment button and didn't get many people applying and sort of tried to figure out what was going on tried to change things tried to build different apps try to work out how to get customers and then got to within two weeks of that money running out and kind of realized that I was screwed. Yeah and that's when I when I came up with the idea but I don't really like saying idea it's when I emailed my list and desperately asked them to sign up for a WordPress support service. And it worked though didn't it because straight away you already had people who were happy to sign up for that service. Yeah I had ten people sign up in the first week and I think I did a special deal I can't remember what it was but it was it's $69 at the moment I think it was like 59 or 49 or something and I ended up getting the exact same of monthly revenue that I had with the software business which was $476 a month so it had taken me a year to get to that with the software and then I got to that within a week with WP curve that's pretty funny. So just just to cut in there why do you think the other one didn't work do you think you just went and created a product but didn't actually see if anybody wanted it because you said that with WP curve you actually emailed the list how did you come up with that concept was it the fact that people were asking for that service or was it just another idea? Well I think for the first question yes I think I built something that people didn't want they didn't want enough to pay for it and the second question people weren't asking for that idea but I knew a lot of people had problems with websites and I knew that working with an agency was never a very good experience because I used to run one and it wasn't very good for the agency and it wasn't very good for the customer so I had a few ideas about different ways of going about it and I wanted to build something monthly recurring and something that was going to be a high growth type company not just an agency and so I kind of I'm not exactly sure how I got the idea of doing monthly unlimited I think I just thought that would be simple and I'd try it and people would understand it and I'd just see what happened but yeah now a lot of people are doing exactly what we're doing and doing like the monthly I'm on limited things and even even bigger companies so it seems fine now but at the time it seemed like most people told me it was a silly thing to do really yeah and yet you still went ahead yeah well I had no choice I kind of I was gonna have to get a job so I didn't really have a choice I was either just launch it and see what happens or start applying for jobs and I look for jobs and it just didn't look like there was a lot around so I thought I'd just have one last crack at it it's sometimes feel like feels like it's death when you're an entrepreneur isn't it if you have to go looking for a job I know that being a serial entrepreneur myself when you get to those downtime you sometimes think I'll go get a job but the actual concept seems so far and even after spending years in a corporate industry once you've worked for yourself it's it just seems like it's like like learning a whole new trade if you go back yeah plus you've you've always got a really weird mix of skills when you work for yourself and they're not really the sort of skills that translate well to employment so I didn't even really know what sort of job I would get if I did get a job I just ends up being like reasonably proficient at lots of different things but not particularly good at anything so I mean I didn't I just went to seek.com I really even know what to put in and I guess that's a problem too if you do end up going back I know that when I worked for the corporate sector and it takes a while to actually learn this but you think my whole life I did nothing but try and perfect the section that I was in like I don't know about you but I was constantly trying to find a better way to streamline something I think I invented so many processes for every organization I ever worked for that streamline everything but I'm sure the bosses probably hated it because it's made them look really really bad and now I think back on it I was like oh these were all the skills that I had but I never actually had a use for them yeah yeah it's really weird I think I mean there's probably like innovative companies and startups and things that would appreciate people who can do a whole bunch of different stuff but I don't know if any of those exist on the Gold Coast and I didn't really want to move to Brisbane back to Brisbane either which was gonna probably be likely so yeah decided to give it one more go and it's worked so tell us just quickly for those who don't know what the WP curve do yes so we just do monthly support and small jobs so we've got a team of developers is 31 of us now around the world and we we fix any problem that you can think of in WordPress that can be done in less than 30 minutes by a developer so it could be could be like configuring plugins and things or recommending plug-ins setting up things like analytics or Yoast or something or it could be fixing PHP problems or like realigning style sheets things like that and so you've now got 31 people and has it been 12 months since you started it's been about 16 17 months and how many people did you start with was it just you me and Andrew yeah I had I had one one guy in the Philippines that I'd work with me through this software and built all of that and then previously also with my agency when when I met you he was working with me then as well he's worked for me for years so 16 months you've gone from the three of you to 31 developers that that's pretty amazing yeah yeah a lot of it recently too because I was just looking at our like December 2013 report and we had five people then so so yeah so in just a couple of months he went from three to five which is that again pretty impressive and I can see by your if you haven't subscribed to the WP care newsletter I think you should just because I love what Dan writes so before this podcast he was actually quite nice to pretty much do all my research for me because he sent out a newsletter that talked about all his goals for 2014 what they'd achieved and what they're going to be doing in 2015 which is exactly what I asked him to come along and talk about today so being in terms of goals what do you do to set them do you sit down and do you plan what you're going to do for the next year because obviously from your newsletter I can see you've got you're pretty confident about what you're trying to achieve but have you always done that or do you think that that's something new that's actually helped you achieve those goals I mean to be honest I'm probably not not going to give you the answer you want here because I'm not much of a goal setter or a planner at all like last year in December last year we I think we had we were doing 10 grand a month and we set a goal to get to 20 grand a month for the end of 2014 and we end up getting to almost 60 grand a month I think so I kind of wonder whether there's any points getting goals at all but I don't know the goals help just get there or if it's well if nothing else the goals are great for actually helping you acknowledge what it was you want like I remember when I first opened my shop my biggest goal was to not have to work Saturdays because I was working in the shop myself and sort of 12 months you know I remember going back and doing looking over what I'd written when I first came in and I was like score I don't work today anymore this is fantastic like it was the most important thing to me when I first opened so yeah I guess I guess the good thing about writing it down is well they say if you committed to paper and put it out to the universe you've got a much better chance of it happening but the good thing is you can actually go back and like you said you can go well I only had five people this time last year and now I've got 31 and having it written down means you you can physically tick off what you've achieved and what you perhaps need to work on for the next year yeah well it's it's a it's also like a gratitude thing it's like I was actually really shocked winner because I went back and looked at that post to see because I'd forgotten about the goals I remember we said one goal to do one piece of content so excuse me do one piece of content every day for 2014 and when I know we didn't achieve that and so I thought we didn't do that well with our goals but then I checked what we put and actually Alex my co-founder filled me in and said oh we were you know we're aiming for 250 grand in annual revenue run rate this year and we just passed 660 I'm like whoa I didn't even I didn't even I need to give you a little clap for that that's awesome yeah so so then we so we kind of decided to be a bit more ambitious next year and I've got a bunch of other projects I'm working on as well and there's a bunch of stuff happened this year was completely surprising like my book for example and that's that's something that I'm gonna try and do more of next year because it's I wouldn't have even thought that that would result in revenue and lots of people reading it and lots of visits and things like that but because it has I'm including those sort of things in my plans for next year and you've sort of segueed on to two things I wanted to talk to you about one is right from the beginning and I guess one of the reasons I've always followed your progress is you're a complete content giver like you do not hold back on giving people information and I'm always wondered do you think it helps or hinders your business because I know that especially when you're starting up you're always trying to work out what can you give for free because A you want to share your information but of course B you want to build your list and you also want to be known as the expert I think a lot of the times people just like helping but at what point do you think it'll do you think there comes a point where people expect this stuff for free I don't think there should be any confusion around that because I think like I think a lot of people see themselves as bloggers and they're like well we'll write a bunch of blog posts and then we'll charge for some info product and then they're tossing out what to charge for and what not to charge for but I don't I don't see myself as a blogger I see myself as a business person and a person is using content marketing to build their business so to me the content is always free and the business is not and it's very simple great and the book the book calls the seven-day startup and it's had pretty good success I think you would have to admit tell us what it's about yeah so I started writing it just I was actually going to do like a free course just for my blog about like how to build a high growth company and a lot of the ideas are ideas that came out of me failing at my other company and making this one work and doing it quickly and as I wrote it it just kind of one thing led to another and it just escalated and eventually I had a formatter and an editor and it turned into a book and then we marketed it and then it started selling lots yeah yeah I mean I wrote it really quickly in like a couple of days originally and then the editor took ages to go through it and by the end we had the format and I built this big list of people to email about it and I had like 500 I actually don't know how many maybe three or four hundred people on a Facebook group to help me promote it and yeah so by the time I got to that stage I just I wanted to put a bit of effort into it and I still gave it away for free I put it on Amazon and the first week it it sort of shot up the free rankings and then when it went to paid which you have to do after a week it stayed in the rankings and it's continued to rank really well and so still selling now fantastic and you mentioned this earlier on with the smart passive income blog podcast that you were listening to and I'm a big fan of that one myself but do you think it's important to have that constant stream of passive income is for your company is that important or is this something that's just actually happened along the way I don't really believe in passive income I never have I I think it's nice that people are buying my book but I didn't really see it as passive and I don't really see it as something I can control either so it's just kind of a nice thing to have yeah again maybe not a popular answer but I prefer I prefer to build businesses that are providing ongoing value and requiring you to build a team and processes around that and I think the passive income stuff is a bit of a myth but is it I guess it's somewhat passive if you have the team I'm a bit of a firm believer of if you have to be in your business every single day it's just a job I know it's a it's a cliche but it's kind of true if it doesn't work without you then is it you know is it a sustainable model so if you've got these people working for you you've kind of got not the true essence of passive income but you've got a business model there that can be sustained if you're not there all the time and it sounds like you've definitely put that together yeah I don't think that's what passive income is maybe it is I just don't like the word nothing about the word passive that I like and it just doesn't resonate with me at all I don't even like the word resonates I don't even know why to said that but yeah I mean delegating and having systems and staff to look after things is obviously extremely important if you want a business that keeps growing and you want to do something other than working in your business every day but I'm still pretty active with WP curve I'm you know the person that people ask if something doesn't work and I have to managers that manage the team but I still do some of the content myself and I still check my emails and check the tickets and stuff like that so I don't I wouldn't see it as passive income I think it's just your job changes from being someone who's doing all the work to someone who's managing a team and then maybe someone who's overseeing a manager it just kind of changes just move up the ladder I think if I yeah I think if I was literally to not show up and Alex was to not show up I think things would fall apart because you do need an owner there to have kind of some if you want on the business right all these stuff that's happened and four hundred percent four hundred fifty percent revenue growth WP curve I'm just going to read out some of the stats I got from your newsletter yesterday over 700 customers the 31 developers 5,000 visits to your site the fact that you said that Andrew had to go back and pull up these goals for last year how do you measure success how do you how when are you going to feel or do you already feel like you've come so far that this is a success and this is where it's going this is this is the thing that is going to make you successful because you're out there talking you're writing a book you're a bestseller you've got a fantastic business you give out an amazing amount of content I would classify you as being extremely successful how do you measure your own success I don't know that's kind of a hard question to answer I think it depends I mean I know from there's probably a few ways to look at I know from like a revenue point of view I remember when we first started when we were doing 10 grand a month and we're still growing really quickly even from the first week I've known the whole time that what we're doing is going to is going to be good just because we're growing each month and I could see that happening each month and at 10 grand it wasn't a lot but if you grow at 10 grand a month and so if you start at 10 grand a month and grow at 10 to 15 percent a month then you end up at 60 grand a month after a year so the I think like the growth of the business is something I've been paying attention to in terms of personally successful I'm not exactly sure where you cut off from unsuccessful to successful probably haven't yet maybe next year I think it all depends I mean it's I think I've been pretty fortunate but I don't think I'd regard myself as successful just yet and I don't just one of your big goals or it was on your agenda and it finally happened this year was for you and Andrew your co-founder of WP codes to me I'm sorry yeah to clarify that so Andrew is our lead developer he I started the business when Andrew was working with me Alex came on board about two months later and became the co-founder right okay sorry got those two lots of people who work for WP curve has a a a name and how did you meet Alex how did you how did you find him to come on board with this idea that you had in your head yeah well I mean at that point we had a business it was only me and Andrew we had maybe 20 or 30 customers and I think I've written one of my monthly reports and he was replying in the comments and suggested that we have a talk he just moved to the US and he could see that I needed someone on that side of the world because it was a 24/7 business and he volunteered to work for me for free and after a couple of months we kind of we did it grown so quickly and we started building the team we were just making decisions together so we just kind of decided to go in together and you finally got to meeting this year yeah just a couple of months ago I think we we went for about 15 months or something without meeting each other like if you I'm not very good at I mean I travel a lot but I don't really like long flights so I was sort of not that keen to go to the US and it didn't really work with the schedule of other stuff I had on so I sort of put it off but then we're like we need to do this so we met halfway in Hawaii and yeah that was cool and we're gonna we're gonna see each other next year a couple of times as well I think. Nice what we haven't mentioned so far is not only do you have WP curve you've also started a brewery and you've been correct me if I'm wrong working on another app called Hello with Five yep and you wrote a book and you got the business how do how do you keep it all together and tell us a little bit how do you get started on a brewery apart from the fact that that's just a guy's dream yeah it's not a brewery yet because we don't have anywhere to make beer we just make beer at other people's breweries so it's more of a brewing company it's called Black Hops so you can check out the site of Black Hops.com.au and if you're in Brisbane it's on tap at various bars at the moment we didn't sell any outside of Brisbane we just sold it in sorry outside of Queensland we just we brewed 14 kegs for our first batch and then we sold all of those in Queensland before we brewed them and hopefully next year we'll do a bunch more and sell them down like we've had a lot of people request like I came from interstate so if we can get more make more beer then I'm sure we'll be able to sell more interstate. So how does one go about selling beer to somebody before you've even made it and if you have no be making experience? Well we do we've got we've got me and my mate who is really into the craft beer scene and and our other mate who's a brewer at one of the breweries so he knew how to make the beer we knew how to give him ideas for the beer only how to do all the online stuff I started doing content we created a brand and created a website and did labels to make it look like we actually did a batch like a pilot batch and did proper labels and gave it out to like a lot of the guys on Instagram and the beer bloggers and stuff and it just really again it just escalated it just like we had people writing about us and asking when we're bringing our beers out and we're like Jesus Christ we just only made this one home brew and then yes so then we decided to brew a batch at a brewery up in Queensland and that just all yeah we just sold that very quickly because there's a lot of sort of hype around it but it's not a lot of beer it's only 14 kegs so we we have more beer than than people wanted so that was that made it pretty easy. It's I have to say it seems like you're almost at the point where everything you touch is turning to gold but it I know you can't live your life you can't compare yourself to other people show rules show reels but I'm just so impressed with where you're at tell us about the app hello a fine yeah well hello for us it's sort of started as a live chat app and we I made Luke who I work within we work in a co-working place called Watso on the Gold Coast and we met here and actually we've got beer in our office as well it's not to be able to see that we've got beer on tap in our office. I'll tell everyone that makes me smile makes Luke smile as well he's sitting next to me giggling. I'm sure you're making all of our listen as well. So it was a live chat app and then we we've added some interesting features we're not yet sure whether people need them but we know that our competitors don't offer them and so we're kind of experimenting with those but but one of them is the ability for people to SMS a mobile number and that goes into the chat system so people can chat with you via your website or they can send an SMS and then your whole team can be in there so you can chat amongst yourselves your whole team can have the app on their mobile or on their desktop and chat amongst yourselves then when a customer comes on anyone on the team can see the chat and respond to the chat and yeah we only launched it launched a week ago we've already got paid customers we've got a bunch of free sign-ups and we got a bunch of local tech press which was cool. That's great I just know that in our retail stores we have a live chat for the website as well but the problem also happens as you just said there is if the person who is logged in is not there for want for whatever reason there isn't anybody else actually to take the call so that that's great to be able to have anybody pick up the live chat that's I think you're on to a winner there. Having the team in them gives us some interesting things we can do like we've got a on the mobile as team only mode so if you're out of the office you can still be available for your team to message you but then customers won't see you online so they'll just send send a normal message but they won't expect you to reply straight away so there's a bunch of stuff we're doing it's really early days after a week of launching it's a sort of thing that's going to take a while to take off but there's a free plan for just a normal live chat service so if people listen I want to give that a go then then feel free to give it a go and let me know what you think. We'll pop that in the show notes so how do you keep all of this running because you've got a family as well you've got all these projects how do you keep it running apart the beer on the cat yeah it's a lot of beer I don't know I don't know I mean WP curve we've been really good with systems so so I mean while I have to kind of be accessible to the team I don't like have to do day-to-day work as such so we've got systems for everything even like hiring like when when the response times get low the team knows that they have to hire someone they know how to go out and find people and run tests to test their skills and score them and make hiring decisions or everything all of that kind of stuff is streamlined and because we use these tools that let us chat non-stop all day we're we're always really accessible. That's great systems are one of the great things that we have to get you back to talk about systems but did you start those I'm a firm believer of writing those systems it's one of the things I wish somebody had told me when I first opened my shots was write everything down from the minute you open your doors write everything down because when you go to hire someone all of a sudden you've got you know potentially years of knowledge in your head that nobody else knows so did you do did you do the systems right from the start? Yeah I mean I think I've I've always ever since we started we've been growing at 10 to 15 percent a month which means every single month we've got at least three or four new people we've got you know 20 to a hundred new customers so I just I knew the whole time that I just couldn't do everything myself and I never intended to so we've been pretty good I mean we've been good at solving problems when we have them so we didn't go out and invest in big systems when we didn't need to but at the same time we we yeah I'm pretty good with writing processes and we've got like a good admin management team we've got I think sort of three assistants one in the US and two in the Philippines and me and Alex and a project manager and we sort of started putting all of that in place as soon as it was obvious that we needed it and we've got processes for everything recruitment and I've got a content guy as well Kyle who does all of our content and he's got processes for absolutely everything and he's writing the processes so yeah we use Google Docs religiously and it's just originally it was me doing it and now it's just me kind of overseeing it and that the team doing it yeah and do you agree that if you hadn't have put those systems in place right at the beginning this exponential growth that your experience maybe wouldn't have happened but also if it had happened it all could have come tumbling down in a heap no I don't I don't really believe in putting things together at the beginning I believe in doing things yourself and then once you've got a handle on them and then once our growth has been very predictable so it hasn't been like all of a sudden we just exploded it's been very very consistent so if I was to say which recruitment at the start I would just do it all myself and then when I knew it was going to become too much I would know three or four months out that it was going to become too much me and we'd have to find someone to do it so then I would start working out if we needed a system for it I don't really think putting like the idea of putting stuff together at the start and like solving problems you don't have is a very good idea because most of this stuff can be most of this stuff can be dealt with quickly at the time like an example would be a help desk system for for the first six months we just use Gmail that was the only system we had for supporting clients and then when that became an issue we upgraded to help scout and that took us you know a day and a half and then eventually we're going to build we're in the process of building our own system now because we know we're going to out grow help scout but we didn't start doing that from day one because we didn't have that problem at day one if I spent all my time trying to solve problems I didn't have then we wouldn't be doing what we should be doing which is providing a good service to people so that that sort of brings us back to this planning that you tell me that you don't do and the goal setting that you don't do is do you and Alex and your team sit down and work out what it is you're going to be working on in the next month or the next quarter or the next year you're just saying obviously you've got to the point where you are able to predict because business is quite consistent what you're going to need you know in the next month or the next quarter so you can work on it yeah I think that's got more to do with how you design your business and that's what that's what the book is mainly about is it's encouraging people to not not just go out and start a business where they're working for themselves but but create a startup which is fundamentally different to a business it's something that is designed to grow and it's designed to bring in consistent growing revenue which is not the normal experience for someone starting a business and if you've got that situation where you've got that consistency and that on ongoing growth then you can you can afford to have more flexibility around what you do and you can more accurately predict what's going to happen and when problems are going to arise so I think if you don't have that then things are very different but if you structure your business in that way then you have a lot of you have access to a lot of things you don't otherwise have access to like for example with hiring we we can hire like like we don't need to check when we can afford to hire because we know a month from now we're going to easily be able to cover another another salary but the main thing we need to check is whether or not we need to hire because our service is not fast enough so like if our response times go from eight hours to twelve hours then we'll hire again whereas with the normal business a hiring decision would not be as simple as that it would be like can we afford to hire like how do we do it how long does it take whereas if you structure your business like a startup then it's it's consistent I mean you can kind of predict when you're going to need someone and when you're going to be able to afford them so you can actually solve problems quite efficiently so I think that's a key thing is I don't I wouldn't say I wouldn't call it planning I would just call it being able to reasonably accurately predict where you are next month and being able to solve problems very quickly kind of forecasting maybe well in the book I have a little spreadsheet that I use we still use it now it's free up on my side if you go if you Google seven-day startup resources there's a huge page with all sorts of downloads and things that I gave away free for the book and you don't need to buy the book to get it you can just get the downloads and there's a like a little spreadsheet that I use to estimate your the current costs and estimate the current revenue and the monthly growth and so it predicts like where you're going to be you know next month the month after it takes us two seconds to update it when when we want to and that's I don't know I suppose you could call it forecasting or planning it's more like having a live understanding of where you are right now and where you will be if you keep growing at the current rate and that that's really I think that's really important we'll definitely link to all those resources on the show notes so do you find do you get together with your team on a weekly basis or do you just kind of it sounds like you're all kind of just go with the flow whatever happens happens but it seems so organized so how do you keep organized when you've got a team of people around the world and your co-founder on the other side of the world yeah so we how mean we we use systems like software for that kind of stuff we use Slack for team communications so all the team are in there and it's it's just it's kind of like Skype it's kind of like hello if I just like the whole team we're in there we're chatting all day every day on that and sharing documents and images and things like that and we use Google Docs for all of our processes we've got team management type procedures Alex works with Julie Julie sees assistant on things like team one-on-ones and culture type things and like buying people birthday presents and all like they're like the companies do they have a weekly call with the team I stick more to like messaging online and then we're also going to do an event next year where we all get together but so far we haven't actually met in person of the me meeting Alex you have to put that on your goal list we're getting towards the end of the time I'd just like to finish off with one question because we talked about retail is when you go into a store a retail store what makes you go wow I'd really go back there again it's a very difficult question I saw that and I thought I better think of something but I didn't I don't I don't shop very often are you an online shop what makes you go back to a website well I mean I think the I don't know what sort of other questions he answers to you get to this question I like the Apple stores I don't know why I think a lot of the time and this is I guess my passion is it's about the experience you have when you go there and that's often made up of so many little things that you may not even appreciate what's going on you know the layout of the store but I think it's just yeah but what a lot of people say is I just like it when I walk in there and as a retailer if I hear somebody say that to me I just love coming in here every time I come in here I feel so relaxed yeah you really you really achieved what you you've set out to achieve but it's interesting as an online purchaser someone who does a lot of online shopping what makes you go back to a store again I think I'm a very heavily influenced by design so if I like I just bought a $2,000 skateboard and I think I think I bought it because I got a really nice website but that's the experience and I can imagine that not only did they have I don't know you skateboard but they probably had gorgeous pictures and a great description yeah and an easy an easy cart to use and it arrived all boxed up nicely in a you know a reasonable time frame well that's kind of a long story they don't sell them here so I had to I had to do a bit of a workaround to get it but I think like I think the design thing translates like if I go into the Apple store then I mean I don't go in there because I know I'll just spend all my money and the same thing with online like if I see something if I see a like a website online where I'm thinking about buying something if it's really if it's really averagely designed I just I just won't even I just I just won't buy stuff and I don't know if that's a that's a common thing but I know if I see a site that's really really well executed and really well designed and really good images like product images it probably all translate to physical as well it's just like like that the show the profit have you watched that show no awesome show you should watch it I'll have to go the profit he does um it's like a Gordon Ramsay's kitchen makeovers but it's just for businesses and a lot of profit like PRO if I don't know PHIT like profit as in money but I think it's like a play on words right but a lot of his businesses are retail and and he just goes in and renovates these businesses and it's always a big part well his big thing is people product and process but it's a lot of it is like the way the products display the design of the stores and the removing clutter like that's a big thing online and I do with websites is just remove stuff that you don't need and hit the same with the physical stores like he puts his before and after photos up on Twitter and he like the biggest change you'll notice is that he would just he would just remove 90% of the stuff that's in the store and so when you go in there you kind of you just kind of feel comfortable and your attention is is diverted to the couple of things that you're most likely to buy which is again probably something that you should do online as well as offline yeah again this is my big passion is taking the overwhelm out of shopping I know a couple of stores that I just literally can't walk in there because my brain hurts too much yeah when I walk in it there's just too many things assailing me the music and the lights and there's stuff piled up all the way to the ceiling and I just can't concentrate in that kind of environment so it's really it's really important that you mention that online and whilst we focus on retail a lot of our retailers do have online stores so that's something to be keeping in the front of mind when you design your website is you don't need six side bars and top headers and things down the side and things flushing and bells wiggling because all that does is make people like you and I run away yeah I'm curious how do you answer that question if someone asked you that mine is usually have a really really big thing against people not acknowledging and in fact it's in our stores it's actually written into our process that you have to greet someone within 30 seconds and we have small vertex so that's quite easily accessible so that's that the service thing is a is really weird that the one thing I've noticed the most about Hawaii which I assume is the same as the rest of the US is the service is amazing and the service is amazing and as much as people will probably throw stones at me the difference is in the US and that's my only experience really shopping is they have a base wage and then the commission base so it's in their best interest to actually help you and the thing is you walk in the door and they will say hi my name is Selena and I'm here to help you and they follow you to and while some people might find it a bit stalkerish I know that because I often go shopping with my my daughter I love it if you could just go get me a different size or a different color like the fact that I have to put all my clothes back on pick it all up get my bag get my kid walk back out hop back in line to get back to another change room I'm prepared to pay a little bit more for that and in Australia because we if you're not aware in Australia you just have a set wage and a lot of people don't work on commission basis there is no incentive to be good to your customers if you don't own the business well there isn't a sense of if the owner of the business cares about it I mean the people who work in companies only do what's expected of them and yeah I think if the owner of the business really does care about whether people are nice to customers then their staff will be nice to customers and they'll hire people that are going to be nice to customers I can't believe some of the people that end up in retail in Australia it just blows my mind I don't understand why someone who is just unhappy and doesn't want to be nice or someone would even work in retail so and and I guess that's where we have that literally from the minute you apply for a job when you get our information pack about our company we tell you that you know we say in our information pack we expect you to acknowledge a customer within 60 seconds of them walking in the door we prefer it to be in 30 seconds now obviously if you're on the phone or something it might be 60 seconds but it's really not that hard just to not at somebody when they walk in the door they can see you're on the phone yeah and you'll get off you know hopefully you'll get off as soon as possible but to at least acknowledge somebody but I know I've been in shots with money in my hand waving it at somebody to try and buy things and they just don't want to serve yeah that's my biggest one is some acknowledgement when I walk in the store but the clutter that you talked about I can only go into a shop if there's space I just can't do and I guess grocery stores are it really really well they have everything lined up in you know hopefully a legible manner so you know if you want this you have to go to that aisle and whilst it's nice in our stores we don't tend to bulk things together we have lots of things that are relevant but sort of interspersed so it's more about the experience of sitting and looking at individual products and working out if they work for you and that works for us but it needs to be relevant to the customer and it needs to not make them feel like it's too much hard work to make a decision to buy something yeah well they and they've got to go in in the first place as well so I think if it's looking overwhelming from outside then they're just not going to go in in the first place yeah I just I think I just over ran your podcast you know more about this stuff than I do so you might as well talk yeah it's no no it's great I really love hearing what other people think when they go shopping because you know there's literally everybody from the person who has to be very frugal with their money to the person who doesn't but each of those people have to make a decision on whether or not they need to buy something and that's either going to be from a monetary point of view it's either going to be a want or a need and you have to fulfill one of those things and if you want something you want it in a way that makes you desire it and that's where your Apple store and your skateboard shop obviously have worked for you is you know that if you go in there you'll probably buy something so they have triggered those emotions in you to make you want to buy they know what their they know who you are they know who their ideal customer is and they've tailored that experience for you those bastards but one thing I'll say about about that is it's the same with website is is I think I don't know it'd be interesting to see what answers you get to that question but I reckon a lot of people wouldn't know why like that like that would probably know the shops they like going back to but they probably wouldn't know why and and that's it I think that's a good thing I think if you don't know why then that retailer has absolutely nailed it they know who you are and what you're looking for yeah yeah I mean it's the same with anything it's the same with coffee shops and bars and websites and yeah I think I think with the website it's it's like design is a really misunderstood thing and people will people will know the difference between something that looks good and something that doesn't but they won't really understand why and so I think it's probably that probably translates well to so I think I think like the idea of getting someone to help with that kind of stuff makes a lot of sense because you probably you probably think you know why things work but if you're not really an expert it's sort of like trying to design something if you're not a designer and it doesn't really work but more importantly you need to know who it is you're selling the product to yeah because if I'm trying to sell those skateboards to everybody not everybody is going to pay your what did you say you spent $2,000 on your skateboard US US plus the shipping to get it around the countryside pretty fast though you know what I mean like not not everybody is going to go out and buy a $2,000 skate just making this up a guy in his early 30s with a high disposable income he probably likes Apple product I can't walk past the Apple products that apply everything in the shop yeah yeah he's probably got a MacBook Air he probably drives a car like this he probably has you know a wife and 1.4 kids but they've actually gone out and worked out who you are and you know what that bloke likes this he likes lots of white space or he likes a black background and there's this huge psychology that goes and if you don't know you don't have the psychological degree you just go out and find that person and say dude you kind of fit my the guy I'm looking for what do you think do you like the white background or background the black background that's where I think it doesn't work because I think I think those people don't actually know like they know a good something that's well executed and something it's not well executed but they don't know how to get there so I think especially with websites when you sort of start doing okay do you like this do you like that that was like the whole Steve Jobs thing is why you hated focus group so much is because they people don't really know what they want to give it to them was his quote and I think there's definitely some truth to that in in with in the website stuff and I don't know I've never experienced in retail stores but I think that's definitely something I've noticed where people will know something that's good and something they like but they won't know why and they won't know how to get there so I think sometimes asking people is a little bit fraught with danger so maybe you should just go out and do it if it's not working you change that or you should keep work with someone who actually does know what they're doing yes that's probably the most important part all right well thank you so much for your time today I really appreciate it I think you definitely underestimate the success that you have and it's up to Alex to actually you know pinch you and tell you that you've achieved way more and I hope writing it down did you write that newsletter yeah I write all of it yeah yeah so hopefully writing it down actually made you go you know what I am gonna go and have another bar to be because we freaking rocked it this year yeah no no that's definitely true it's it's a bit weird actually because that normally it's been a long a lot of years of things not going that well so it is weird to have that many things go that well but it's yeah it's good I think it's going great and we'll put all that information in the show notes and if you need to help with your WordPress site head over to WP curve thanks for being on the show well thanks for having me and I hope it's been useful oh definitely thanks so much all right bye so what did you think of Dan's journey was there anything in particular that really spoke to you was there anything that struck a chord I'd love to hear about your journey what are you struggling with what have you truly blitzed and want to shout from the rooftops about make sure you head over to my website you can find this episode of the podcast at Selena night calm slash one and leave a comment and I'd love it if you could leave a review of the bringing business to retail show on iTunes or Stitcher if you enjoyed this episode by leaving a review it will help other people find the bringing business to retail podcast and it also tells iTunes and Stitcher that you think this podcast is worth listening to and remember to share the podcast with your friends if they need some help working out how to listen to a podcast you can send them to a little video that I made showing you how to add the app on both iPhone and Android you can find that at Selena night calm slash listen thanks again so much for listening today to the bringing business to retail first ever episode and I look forward to having you on the next one see you later you