Gamifying Your Product: Mark Stern on Standing Out in the AI Era

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0:00 Hello and welcome back to the Owner Meeting podcast. I'm Chris, your channel host today joined by Mark Stern. Mark,
0:06 welcome to the podcast. Christian, it is so good being here. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. Now Mark is uh absolutely
0:12 fantastic. I'm actually really excited to share this episode specifically. We have so much real estate specific
0:17 content. I love to bring in other entrepreneurs and while you've done stuff in the real estate space, I'm sure
0:22 we're going to get into that. I'm really really interested to talk to you about one the way that your business is
0:27 branding, packaging, and using creative. I think there's a bunch of universal things that you are dealing with right
0:33 now in your business with the rise of AI and actual human relatability. I I'm
0:38 really interested in your company. If you happen to be listening to the podcast, uh just know that Mark also has
0:43 an epic background of a ton of projects that he's worked on. So, I I am very very interested in this on a branding
0:49 and just human connection in business standpoint. Uh this is going to be a fun episode. Mark officially, welcome to the
0:55 owner meeting. I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. Oh, dude. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Di diving right in.
1:03 You're not So, I actually started my career literally in the apparel and promotional products industry. Oh, yeah.
1:09 You are not you are not a swag product industry. What you do goes way way way
1:14 beyond that. Tell us a little bit about your core business. Yeah. And so, there's nothing wrong with swag. Uh we joke and say swag means
1:20 stuff without a goal. Swag has its place, but what I find is people are spending a lot of money on swag. And if
1:26 you haven't established connection and community with your people, it's just stuff. And if you send me stuff, it goes to Goodwill. It gets left in the hotel.
1:33 It gets thrown out. And so when we think about it, at the end of the day, what I really care about is what are the tools and resources that your people,
1:39 customers, clients, members, students, whoever you serve, what do they need to be set up for success out of the gate.
1:45 So much of what we anchor on is customer journey and the customer experience you're trying to create. We anchor it on
1:52 a simple formula, which is your customer life cycle. you acquire, you on board and deliver your services, and then you
1:58 want to retain. Those are three different ways that we start to think strategically about the campaigns we
2:03 build out. And we specialize in physical products. So, what that means is whatever your goal is, we'll get into
2:09 your business and build a unique product asset that literally will take your people from onboarding and minimizing
2:15 the overwhelm that typically happens when they start working with you to having a clear pathway to getting the result. And this is why we love physical
2:22 is in this age of AI that we live in especially and when we talk about experience. Yeah. Experience is seen
2:27 through the senses. Your your five senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. When you're only digital, you're
2:33 only tapping into into what people see and hear. And the question that people are having right now is this rise of AI
2:39 is also this rise of digital distrust. What's cool about a physical product is
2:44 I can create a unique experience that keeps you top of mind, takes up real estate in their house, and truly gives
2:51 them the tools and resources to navigate what it is you're trying to get them to do. And then we can incentivize behavior
2:56 with physical products as well. So having that real human touch, I can activate all the senses. But more
3:02 importantly, when you think of physical and digital or physical and local or physical and in person,
3:08 yeah, there's just so much you can do that takes that experience to the next level and truly removes obstacles to give
3:14 people what they need to get results faster. Give me an example of a company that would be traditionally digital uh that
3:20 you guys have worked with and how you would take the hey, this is a digital brand and we make it physical without
3:25 just adding swag. So, we're assuming you're not going to We're not just sending them Yeti mugs and a branded
3:30 cap. How would you get a online product, community, education, any of it to be a
3:37 physical, it takes up real estate in their house. I'm really interested to see how this works. Well, I'll show you one of the campaigns
3:42 that we deployed. Um, and it was a simple concept, which is if you're a business owner, the question I have for
3:48 you, and it doesn't matter what business you're in, do you know how many hats you're wearing in your business? So part of this is in
3:54 our ecosystem, we have a staffing agency to help staff these roles. So if you're looking and it's a virtual service, hey,
4:01 I need people that can fill whether it's a graphic designer, a project manager, a client manager, you probably have roles that you need
4:07 filled and you and we have a service to help fill those. But how do you grow that? Well, part of what we did with a
4:12 box experience, and this is what we would call an acquisition play, is we created this product called 57 Hats. And
4:18 all this product is is it's a deck of cards that represents all the most
4:23 common roles in a business. And you literally can go through the system and say what are the different roles or hats
4:30 you're wearing in your business. You flip through the cards and you can pull out all the different hats that you're wearing
4:35 or that your team is wearing. And then uh we'll take you through an exercise. There's actually a game board inside.
4:41 Like think of like a Monopoly board. I wanted to build a game board out. So within this experience, we literally had
4:47 our own game board produced that literally takes you through two different exercises. One of if this is a
4:53 role that you're deploying, should you do it, delegate it, or delete it? And there's an evaluation criteria to help
5:00 you think through this is a hat I'm wearing, but I could delegate this role. I didn't even know this was a role. And
5:06 then we'll take you through an exercise. Can you delegate it with AI? Can you delegate it with an existing teammate? Can you outsource it? Or is this
5:12 something that you need to hire out? So, at least it's driving awareness to if you don't have a vernacular for all the
5:18 things you're doing in your business. Yeah. Um, now you can go through the system in less than 15 minutes and you can see
5:23 like here are the different cards. We literally played off of like CEO and the hat you'd wear. So, all the different
5:28 colors represent different departments in your business, but we're trying to give you the power to understanding, you
5:35 know, what it is. So, if in 15 minutes you can do it, it opens up the question of you drove awareness. These are roles
5:40 I need to staff. Yeah. Can you help us staff it? And the best part is for every card there's a QR code
5:46 on the back which gives you for that role we already give you job descriptions you can manipulate interview questions personality test
5:53 KPIs roles and responsibilities so you have a lot of stuff behind every single
5:58 role in an online portal to help you on this. So it's all about relationship building introducing the products and
6:04 services we can do on the back end. But this is how we've taken something that's a digital service tied a physical
6:09 element and oh by the way when you're thinking about physical products repeatability is important because if I
6:15 play Monopoly today or play it a year from now I may have a different experience. It's no different than how
6:21 we think about products because if you know you're wearing 28 different hats in your business do it again in six months
6:26 and if you find out you're wearing 16 hats or there's new hats you've introduced because your business has evolved. Now, this repeatability keeps
6:33 us top of mind and taking up real estate in your house. And the last thing I'll say is you don't realize uh until you
6:39 release products, other use cases. So, now we're seeing people use this as part of their sales process, taking their
6:45 prospects through how many hats are they wearing to be able to simply say, "Oh, by the way, if you hire us, we can
6:52 replace all these hats." So, there's been so many different use cases that we're seeing roll out. But it just
6:57 started as a simple idea which was me going as my business grew. Yeah. Um I took hats off of me and teammates
7:04 and people went through a morning phase of like do you not respect me? Do you not appreciate me? And I'm like no I
7:10 just want you focused on why I hired you. I want to get rid of all this nonsense. And the second they realized that how it transformed my business. And
7:17 so it's just been really cool to see how quick people can get a quick win. Well,
7:22 this 57 hat concept is so interesting because because there's a bunch of boring business tasks that I do. So, this reminds me of two major things that
7:28 we do as a recurring theme in all of my companies. Uh, one way less cool, [laughter] but once a week when we're
7:36 when we're implementing these, we'll go through every single week. I want one day all of my leadership. It's it's it's
7:42 arduous, but write down every single task you do. So, so just just for one day. And then we'll do this for usually
7:47 about eight weeks. So, you'll end up with eight full days of notes. you're going to highlight them either uh red. This this task could be delegated to
7:55 someone else or an AI and also makes no money immediately. Uh two, this is an important task that does need occasional
8:01 human input. I probably should manage this occasionally, but we may be able to systematize this or maybe AI could beat
8:08 us or green. This is an incomeroucing task that is high value to the company right now and needs. So, we just put
8:15 into three boxes. I love the idea of saying, "Hey, let's make this fun because it's a chore in my company, and
8:20 it's a really valuable one. We took in like a recent example. We took a similar concept to what you've done in 57
8:26 halves. It's a way like less cool version. We redid things to where the
8:32 same staff, we average getting a lease signed every four and a half days was our average. We've brought that to two
8:37 in two markets." So, we've done this, you know, we we've rolled this out two times. That was the only change that we
8:43 made in that time as we went, can we build and like claude code? Can can we
8:48 go through and just build an app that will take responding to Facebook Marketplace, create a lead and send
8:54 someone out? How much time will that save? It will be the little things like that. If you can gify that, the other
9:00 thing that that does is it fixes your org chart, which is something that I do. I I should do quarterly, honestly. I I
9:06 really just do this annually. We all should. But we get together and it's like, "Hey, let's write out the
9:12 roles and let's assign everyone to the roles. Let's make sure no one is doubled up on the same task and let's make sure that there's no critical task that has
9:18 no one assigned to it." Like that's the rules for the org chart game. But all of those are like they're the meetings that everyone dreads. Like no
9:26 one's excited like, "Oh yes, it's the annual org chart or we're going to we're going to go to Christian's house and hop on the Smartboard." Like no one's
9:31 excited about that. 57. I mean, that's a what a great idea. As a board game nerd, I would have so much more fun being
9:37 like, "Okay, everyone, uh, here's your deck of cards. I want everyone to sort out by by card. The graphics's cool. The
9:43 art's cool." If you're listening to this, I actually recommend going to the Multif Family Strategy YouTube channel. I also host the podcast episodes there.
9:49 So, you should see the image that he held them up just a minute ago. Awesome artwork, but it makes it visual and
9:57 tactile instead of conceptual. That's like that's really the only difference of what you did. And that's I'm already
10:03 excited. I'm I'm sitting here being like, I need that. Like, that's a Oh, I'll send you one product that we need. Like, that's just a cool idea when
10:09 you come with an idea like that because that's really well thought out. Like, you've come up with 57 things. You have QR codes. You have concepts. Like,
10:15 that's a You do these in mass. You've done this for a ton of projects, but let's use the 57 hats. How many people,
10:22 how much time, what does it look like to actually develop, hey, I had this cool idea into a beautiful simple product
10:28 like that? Yeah, it's it honestly it just depends on the complexity. I always tell people about 3 months.
10:34 Um, and there's a give and a take with the client. And so we can drive most of this ourselves on our we have a full
10:40 service team. My team, my core team is over 20 people and we have our warehouse that has about another 20 or so people
10:46 in it. Um, but really it's a fun process. What we find is step one for us
10:51 is um, we do a two-hour virtual strategy session with our clients to understand their universe. Where are you today?
10:57 What's the big vision? What is your suite of products? What do you offer the market? cuz sometimes they think they want to go here from a physical product
11:03 standpoint, but once we see all the pieces, we can at least paint the story of all the different permutations. And
11:08 then once we land on where we want to focus our energy, typically people will fly into Austin and spend a day with me.
11:14 And at that point, if you have a book, we're going to read your book. If you have a course, we're going to go through your course. if you have any services,
11:19 we're going to want to understand the slate of services because what I don't want you to do is show up in Austin and
11:25 be like, or it could be done virtually, but it's more fun in Austin because you can touch dozens and dozens of examples in real time and see things that are
11:32 really it just when people think about it themselves, they don't think about physical products the way we do because
11:37 we spend 100% of our mental capacity on physical products. Um, the designing of the experience, what we anchor on is
11:44 backend first. What is success? What's that success metric? Um, an easy example
11:49 is right behind you. A success metric for YouTube is, "Have you hit 100,000 subscribers?" And you get the award
11:56 behind you. Uh, ClickFunnels two comic club award if you're familiar with it. Oh, there we go.
12:02 They have such an aesthetically cool award, too. Yeah, they they do a great job doing it.
12:07 Yeah. So, if you ever want to do a plaque award, like what's behind you or whatnot, that's what we consider retention because that's all about
12:13 incentivizing, but understanding the success metrics. You know, we've had clients in the real estate space say,
12:18 um, success for us is you have 10 properties in your portfolio generating passive income. So, the goal is they
12:25 want you to build generational wealth and that's their lipmus. So, if we know that's what success looks like, the
12:30 pathway needs to be clear about getting your first property and then eventually how do I celebrate you when you have the
12:35 milestone? Because the cool thing about having a su success metric, we know what success is. When your client hits it,
12:41 they know undeniably they've achieved it. Um, if you don't have that, then sometimes I see this in most businesses.
12:47 How do you know they've been successful? And they may be happy, but I need them to know they've achieved the outcome of
12:52 this part of the journey because how do I extend lifetime value? I introduce the next success metric. Yeah.
12:58 And so you're constantly from one game to the next. We love gamification. Um, or a game in disguise. And so that's a
13:04 lot of how we do it. If we know that, then we go to the beginning and say, what's the onboarding process? Because this is where a lot of people get lose
13:10 customers, which is they don't have good onboarding systems to say, "Here's the journey you're about to go on. Let me
13:16 set you up for success. This is where a box comes in perfectly because it can paint the story of your universe as well
13:22 as delving deep into the product, uh, the benefits, what they have access to, how to get started, and then the pathway
13:28 to it. So, there's so many different ways to incentivize or gamify that journey. But that's what we look at is 10,000 ft down to 1,000 ft down to
13:35 ground level. And by that point, it's so clear in terms we built so many of these on how we're going to engineer it. But
13:41 not every experience is the same. So it's not a cookie cutter. It's custom box. Custom is a key part of our brand
13:47 name because how we deliver for you may not be how we deliver for someone else in
13:52 your space. It's all relative to what you're trying to achieve. And one last thing I'll mention is even hearing you talk about
13:58 like here's systems that we do in our business and your dashboarding and your
14:03 red, yellow, green metrics in terms of the health of the business. Things that you are already deploying may be perfect
14:08 recipes for a product to develop because all we're doing is taking what you already do turning into a product and
14:14 now I can scale you without tapping into your time. We just turned you into a product that's an extension of you.
14:20 What a cool design. Oh, the creative process. This this is where I find this the most interesting because your business is imper This is a very fun
14:25 business for for like it's a blast. We are as an entrepreneur, you get to wrap your head around new challenges that already
14:31 have some framework, right? You're working with clients who already ostensibly they're already making money before they work with you, right? So you
14:37 have these these products you're like, hey, we have a working product. We have a customer base. We are lacking this
14:43 side of the creative. How large is your creative team? Like when when you on the front end, so someone comes to Austin,
14:49 they touch, feel, you give them all the pieces. What does the creative process look like on your guys' end? Because that sounds unbelievably entertaining.
14:56 Oh my gosh. Yeah, we have a big creative team. I mean, our creative team is so much the bread and butter because now people are coming to us. We always
15:03 focused on initially physical products, but like our design is we don't do sloppy like um we have it so dialed in
15:09 at this point. We have about 10 people on the team. Um and that's growing. I look forward to the day we have 50 to 100 different designers on the team that
15:16 specialize in different types of crafts. But like this is kind of where if people have a vision like we'll bring it to
15:21 life. Um, every time I see what the design team puts out there, it is impeccable. Um, anything with design has
15:28 to start with some type of brand identity and uh, some type of mood board look and feel because we call it a stop
15:34 the process moment. If we can't align on look and feel, you're just designing blindly. And this is kind of where, you
15:40 know, what I always say about design is design is personal. There's things that I love, but if I'm not the client
15:46 representing the product in the marketplace, at the end of the day, it's what you want and what you love. So, we tell people there's three options from a
15:51 design standpoint. If you already have your brand identity buttoned up, we're going to replicate the same look and
15:57 feel with the products to keep it in your family. Most clients want the other two options, which is taking our existing
16:03 brand identity and taking it to the next level. So, we can keep the same look and feel, the aesthetics, but how do we
16:09 create a modern spin on it, but it still feels like it fits in your family. And then the third category is blow it
16:14 up. This doesn't exist, so we're ready to rebrand. Branding is huge for us because once we anchor on that now we
16:22 have a common language for designers in terms of bringing it to life. So we'll focus on that brand identity piece
16:27 initially because otherwise a lot of these experiences may have anywhere from 30 to 50 unique assets in them.
16:34 If we don't have that buttoned up we have to redo the work around it. Um so that's kind of like our approach
16:40 initially is we have to capture that look and feel. But this is I would say it's getting into our bread and butter
16:46 because we're so any day of the week, show me pretty pictures. Don't show me a bunch of black and white words on a
16:51 page. I don't want to read a book. I want to I want to go through an experience that the picture brings it to life.
16:56 What a great show. Well, and so being in the real estate, so like my I have
17:02 several companies, but my three core companies. I have real estate acquisition, which is just me and my buddy buying real estate. Uh then we
17:07 have uh our property management company and then multif family strategy which is our actual like that's my education brand. That's that's where I spend
17:13 almost all of my time. And one of the biggest problems I as soon as you said it right at the beginning of the podcast
17:18 I I instantly went like almost every real estate group large real estate education right I've we've coached over
17:25 a thousand students. We're way larger group for that space especially in creative finance. All the groups do the
17:31 same things though. You get like your first deal pen. It's a it's a promotional thing that you don't do, you know, or you get a coin. It's always
17:37 something small. It's but it's always like a tokenized like congratulations,
17:42 you did the thing. You get your first deal pin. It's not interesting. So, what
17:48 I what I like about your group is that you guys can come into this and say like, okay, if everyone's doing this,
17:53 how do we take this not one, not two, but three levels farther? And like how do we take this and make a completely
17:59 oneofone unique experience? Do you have any examples of where you've done this in the in the real estate space out of curiosity?
18:05 I have so many different examples. Um, you know, real estate, one of the clients we worked with, I don't know if you are familiar with Christa Mayor.
18:11 Have you come across Christa? Yeah, Chris is a buddy. Christa, you can kind of see her tiles right here, but we did a box set. So, she has a real estate
18:18 education program. How do you um dominate your local market, especially if you're brand new, competing against people who have been
18:23 in that market for ages. And so we literally turned her product into an entire box set similar to kind of this
18:30 where you had the box with all the supporting resources on how to navigate her training and two workbooks. The
18:36 first workbook is for your first 30 days. The next workbook is about amplifying marketing since so much of it
18:41 is her approach to marketing in the marketplace. Um the example that you just gave with coins. So you do you send
18:46 out coins or pins or different things like that? I don't I've actually I have I have not gified or tokenized my thing
18:52 out of a frustration of every other group that being the same thing. That's
18:58 why that's what So you said swag and I really relate to that. I'm like I don't want to be a swag company. I I don't
19:03 find a lot of value especially because my logo is my my I'm raising my eyebrow. I get all the time in YouTube videos
19:10 people are like why are you doing the rock eyebrow? I'm like I don't know. It's just my face but it's just my backwards hat and my eyebrow and multi
19:15 family strategy. That's that's our logo. I'm like, I don't want to put my face on apparel or coins and be like, "Hey, you
19:21 can wear my eyebrows on your head." Like, that's just it's not been interesting to me. So, when you're looking at like, "Hey, it's
19:27 a box set. You can get this out." That's that's interesting. That's high value. I would like that's a really cool thing to
19:33 do. But I love open loops. I love like setting like the painting the vision of what
19:40 it's like working with you long term, but focusing on where you are at the beginning of the journey. that you have
19:45 seated um the broader journey and especially if your three companies somehow interact that people may need to
19:50 leverage the other two in some capacity or have the opportunity to. Yeah. I you have to tell that story as well.
19:55 Um when I was a kid my father and I do you remember when the US launched a new
20:00 quarter for every state. I don't know if you remember that. Yes. Yes. I actually had when I was a kid, we did the thing where we collected
20:06 each you have the little cardboard thing. You collect all the coins and so that's a perfect example of when you
20:12 are collecting coins like that, you're never going to throw out that coin board because the inherent nature of
20:19 collection is you're going to keep it till you collect all the pieces. So there's intentionality of how you can engineer and the experience that simple
20:25 thing is actually have this arm woo that can be engineered in a way. This is kind of where I say you can get inspiration
20:30 from anywhere. But I have a real estate or an insurance client that does a lot of insurance agent education, helping
20:35 them grow. And we build out a simple coin board for them that literally they got the first
20:40 coin, but we want the two other gaps looking at them back at the face, something that they can put up and
20:46 display. It's still the same type of material. We've done this in books and different things, but the whole idea here is I may give you the board with
20:53 your first coin, but you got to hit the certain milestones to earn it. And the simple idea of this um is powerful. um
21:01 simply because when you have an open loop, people typically want to close the loop. This is exactly why we may have
21:06 boxes that at the beginning of the process you may get box one, but you don't get box two until you hit a certain milestone. And even how we did
21:12 this as a client in the trauma space helping people who um have gone through immense trauma and how they can escape
21:18 it and reclaim their identity. But even how we designed it as you start to collect the pieces, you can even design in the way.
21:24 So there's there's all different ways to engineer that. For me, so much of where I got inspiration for this was I do
21:29 Spartan races. I don't know if you're familiar with mud runs. Yeah. Um, super tense.
21:34 I did my 23rd one this week in Houston. I did my half marathon. Wow.
21:40 Um, but what Spartan does so brilliantly is when you cross the finish line, they give you a medal and then they give you
21:45 a third of a medal. And when I got my first third of a medal, this was when I was not in shape. I spent most of my
21:50 life in the 220s. I got up to 250 pounds during COVID. I'm about 160 right now.
21:55 Wow. Congratulations. But like when I started that journey, like they gave me a third of a wedge
22:01 and said you have to complete a 10 mileer and then a half marathon to get the other two wedges and you have to do
22:06 it the same calendar year. That was the rule. So how they engineered this experience had you told me when I first did my first Spartan race back in 2016,
22:13 I didn't even run. If you said I would be doing a half marathon in 6 months, I would have said you lost your mind. But
22:20 they engineered an experience and as entrepreneurs, we need to hold a bigger vision for our people than they hold for themselves. So, it made me want to train
22:27 for the 10 mileer. I got two of the three wedges and there was no way in hell that um I would not get that last
22:34 wedge before the year ran out because I didn't want to have this thing staring back at me that I left this journey
22:40 uncompleted. And now I am on to my eighth trifecta uh this year. Um, which
22:46 is just crazy to think about like how it reprogrammed my identity on helping me
22:51 evolve someone who didn't see himself as an athlete to someone who is now in his 40s and for the first time in life truly
22:57 considers myself an athlete. Exactly why we have you on the own meeting podcast. This is something where any entrepreneur
23:04 period needs to be thinking about how you do this and make this a game because I mean what a great example the wedges
23:09 like I would never think like hey the goal is to complete a Spartan race right like that's that that's most people's
23:15 starting point right so they correctly identified this is the average first goal for everyone and they will get a
23:22 piece of their full award if they want to continue which of course you don't want to have a third of a wedge you want
23:28 or a third of a a medal you want the whole medal So, like it gets you thinking like, okay, well, if I did this
23:34 one, maybe I wasn't aiming high enough. Let's get the second one and let's get the third. What an easy way to turn
23:40 someone who would run one Spartan race into someone who has now run you said more than 20.
23:46 More than 20. You're you are nailing it because insane because you didn't just do three, right? You didn't just you're now a
23:52 repeat user. Well, this is now something I do and now I identify with this brand and now I'm excited about this brand and now I want to push myself. What a great
23:59 perfect example. You you could not have chose a better example than that. Actually, that's 10 out of 10. The two lenses that you can't forget is
24:05 your goals as a business owner. This is exactly what you were hitting on. And my goals as a customer or client. My goal
24:11 was achievement and identity shift. Like I was doing this because it's it sounded
24:17 larger than life and I didn't realize that my body was capable of even doing something like that. For them, it's
24:23 lifetime value. They found a way to extend lifetime value without it making
24:28 me feel like I'm just giving them more money and I don't know if I want to keep giving them money. Like they engineered a way that made me say like a group that
24:35 I bought in 2015 when I saw like a group for a Spartan race that I may have paid
24:40 60 bucks for has now translated into me probably spending thousands of dollars. It has definitely with Spartan race over
24:47 the last 10 years. Um and so that's it is they want lifetime value. We want an
24:53 experience. We want a transformation. We are in pain. We want a certain outcome. How they engineered, how they balance
24:59 the two. This is why I love that example. And it is anchored so much in my thinking in terms of how we design.
25:04 Mhm. How long have you been running me physically running? Yeah. How long are you running the the
25:10 business like this concept? How long has this been been your your thing?
25:15 Informally, because this was never meant to be the business. This was the supplement to everything else we did because I was frustrated.
25:20 That's how a lot of the best businesses start, by the way. you you have a subniche in a problem you're already solving like oh my gosh we could just be
25:26 really good at solving only this piece and now you have a way bigger business that's awesome but uh continue
25:31 so back when I so I was in corporate America I was a corporate American junkie for years and I worked for a
25:36 company called Deote it's a big consulting firm for many many years and when I left it was in 2018 and the first
25:43 business I started was virtual events I saw this opportunity in virtual events but what drove me nuts about virtual
25:48 events was sitting in front of a computer just listening to someone talk just drives me nuts. Like I don't want to just sit here for hours watching you
25:55 and it may be interesting, it may not. Or you may overwhelm me with 40 interviews. Um, so I it started me with
26:00 me just saying I just wish they would just send me something that helps me navigate this so I can get the most value and it's a benefit for them
26:06 because if I can get what I need then I'm ready to ascend, buy your more expensive products and services. That
26:12 was back in 2018. So we always introduced a box or something physical with anything that we did. And people
26:18 just kept saying how are you doing this? How are you doing this? And when COVID happened um back in uh 2020, it would
26:24 have made sense to just go all in because we had two years of experience in the virtual event space. But everyone became a virtual event expert overnight.
26:32 And I was starting to build out custom box agency in 2020 as a supplement just
26:38 cuz people kept on asking me about it. And it was my mentor who looked at me and said, "Are you the virtual events
26:43 guy? Are you the custom box guy? Cuz you're confusing people. Half think you're one, half think you're the other." In in corporate America, I was
26:49 celebrated for being the world's best generalist, being good at everything. Entrepreneurship, they want to celebrate you for being known for something. And
26:56 uh I killed the virtual events business at the beginning of COVID. And that one pivot turned me from being a competitor
27:03 to anyone running a virtual event to being a strategic partner. And going all in on the physical, there was just
27:09 something that was just itching. Like it was like an itch that needed to be scratched. And especially during co when
27:14 everyone's quarantined at home, we were the means to be able to deliver a
27:19 connection point and value with a physical product in a world that everyone's just trapped at home. And so
27:26 this is really we went all in May 2020. So we're officially coming up to formally six years in this business.
27:34 Wow. Congratulations. What a great time too to uh to launch a a a business with
27:39 uh deliverables to at home. Uh that's a there's some great world events that
27:45 made that excellent time to launch that company. Um there's a lot of entrepreneurs had ideas that took off at
27:50 that time. Like for me um two of my core companies it was that time that got me out of corporate America. I was I was
27:56 the ability to be at home like wait everything shut down and I I actually have time to sit here and think.
28:04 Historic amazing time to launch a business. But what a great vertical to be in like hey we we take things from
28:10 conceptually online which being in the online space 2019 2020 2021 great time
28:16 to be in that event space you're in and using that to pivot into physical products uh awesome awesome market
28:22 timing that's a fantastic idea I'm so blessed but it's it's so crazy
28:27 because it's like anytime you start a business if I was like hey Christian we can build a box experience on that you look back
28:32 at me and be like I don't know what that is cuz like box experience No one knows what a box experience is, but yeah.
28:38 Um, like to to refine it and to prove case in the market, you know, it was one of those things that I probably everyone
28:44 says emulate before you innovate. But I was like, but I need this now. And um, how it's [clears throat] evolved
28:50 has been such a blessing, but it's been so cool to take just how I think and turn it into a business. That's the best
28:57 part about it is it doesn't feel like work. Yeah. Well, and AI is going to help your business a ton because the biggest So,
29:02 so especially in the education space. So, we'll take me or any of your education clients as a a perfect
29:07 example. All the information is now free and it's and it's delivered better and faster and easier. You can ask AI
29:14 anything. It will it'll spit it right back out at you, right? You can even create a bot to research it for you. You can turn a physical product into an
29:20 interactive digital experience using Cloud Code or Replet or Vibe or any of them. Just the amount of like how SAS is
29:28 getting so commoditized at this point. Yeah, you can build anything. It's insane that ways that we could take 57 hats. We're
29:34 turning 57 Hats into a digital product as well and turning it into a training tool that anyone can then take and do it with
29:40 their clients and then leverage that as a sales piece. Like there's just so many different angles that we would not have been able to do if it wasn't for AI.
29:46 Yeah. But but having that human element to like hey you really have to understand the brand at a higher level
29:52 at a human level to even start to prompt all the things it can do. anyone can learn anything. But the only So I I my
30:00 prediction I think by the end of this year anyone like the the classic online guru, right? Hey, I'm going to launch a
30:07 $500 course. You're going to sign up for I think that's I think that model is completely dead. AI can do that for free. So no one's signing up for
30:14 subscription courses at low cost. No one's doing a online information that's dead. The only surviving I think this
30:21 industry will grow incredibly. The only thing that survive are experience and like direct mentorship. Those are the
30:27 only two things that make sense, right? AI hasn't run the business yet. It knows a lot of facts, but it can't help you
30:34 with hands-on. And the actual gamification, having a community and an actual tailored experience, I think
30:40 that's going to be the only way to survive uh for anyone who's in the education space because the the actual
30:46 fact educating it has no value. Now, there's no reason to watch a YouTube channel when you can just have AI do the
30:53 same thing but faster with less mistakes and no brain farts. So, like I I feel like people in similar businesses to me
31:00 have to have your product. Like I imagine your sales have gone up very notably over the last couple years and
31:06 will continue with AI. Uh that should be expanding pretty rapidly. We're having fun. Um everything you say
31:12 I completely agree with. The last thing I like still to this date I can't tell you the last time I've gone through a course. I can tell you that I've bought
31:17 courses, but I never go through it. And part of it is that one, sometimes you get a course that somebody locks themselves
31:23 into a room and films a course and I'm just like, they haven't pressure tested it. They don't understand my problems. They just put a bunch of stuff together.
31:30 Um, and there's been so many times that even seven and eight figure businesses that we've worked with when we've gotten into their product and gone through
31:35 their course, we will map out to a tea to be like, did you know you have about 60 hours of video in this course? Is
31:41 that what you hold up a mirror to what's being built? And it's one of those things that I love to look at people be
31:46 like, would you go through this thing that you created? And it's shocking like how often it's like you create something
31:53 but it doesn't even reflect the systems of how you deliver it. Whereas that interaction, the experience, results, I
31:58 want results. So sitting and watching is not as good as taking something and building. And this is where AI is so
32:04 powerful is if you can take what I'm doing and bring it to life like an interactive experience, interactive workshop with a tangible result at the
32:11 end. I value my time more than anything at this phase in life. And um it's the one thing I will never get back. And so
32:17 this is kind of where it's just I don't want to sit and watch a course. I want something that when I'm done like I have
32:22 an actionable result that I'm proud of that's advancing the needle as to why I purchased this thing in the first place.
32:28 That's fantastic. When you are going through all of these, you you've had like a ton of clients and I I understand
32:35 why your concept so successful. I I I honestly do think that the industry need
32:40 for what you do is going to triple in the next few years. So I I think you're uh you're positioned very well.
32:46 It is very expensive typically for people to go into things that they know nothing about. U and there's the dumbest
32:51 you'll ever be is at the beginning. So I'm going to ask the question that everyone always waits for. Uh if you're an entrepreneur, better to have someone
32:57 else make the mistakes for you and so they can pay the stupid tax for all of us. We all make mistakes. uh in the
33:03 building of this business or any of your business ventures, what has been the highest stupid tax you have paid to be
33:09 where you are today? Oh god. Like like cancel your afternoon. Um [laughter] at this point um there has
33:16 been so much and the thing that I will anchor on is I've learned um selfrespect
33:22 is something not to be undervalued. that it's so easy as an entrepreneur to be like, I'm not an expert in this and so
33:29 I'm going to tap into the person that's an expert in that. So I'll just keep it simple. You may say sales and marketing is not your expertise and it on a scale
33:36 of one to five. I may say I'm a two at sales and marketing and five being exceptional betting experience design
33:42 and box builds were a five. Yeah. And then I find the next person who says, "Well, I'm a five in sales and marketing." and you just trust and um
33:50 hope that what they say is the thing that they're actually good at, but you realize that their five is actually your
33:55 one, that the meters aren't weighted the same, and we try and compare everyone and second guess our own selves. And so,
34:02 there's been elements of that that I was like, we hired an accountant. Um, this was the accountant that we worked for
34:07 for the last 13 months. And there's a lot of little things that went that felt
34:13 like it was being mismanaged, but I was constantly being told I was wrong. And it turns out that I was right. This
34:20 count did not file my 2024 taxes correctly. They did not balance my books. They did not do a lot of the
34:26 things that they said that they were going to do. And every time I raised a concern, it they put it back on me when
34:31 I knew that I was right. And when we switch [laughter] they knew I fired I fired a bookkeeper uh on
34:36 Monday this week. So, as of the filming of this, uh, two days ago for the same exact problem. It's just like, hey, you
34:42 didn't deliver the deliverables. And every time it's brought up, oh, well, it's because you didn't give me this one thing that I forgot to ask
34:49 you for. Absolutely. Have been there. So, where am I now? Um, my new
34:54 bookkeeper was the one who revealed it, and I kept on going back to the old one being like, "Hey, you told me no, but
34:59 here's the thing." And when push came to shove, it's costing me probably almost $10,000 to redo and refile for 2024.
35:07 The same with 2025. And so the amount of cleanup that I'm having to do, but here's the reality is
35:13 I found the right partner. But I had to go through the exercise of going through bad to understand good and appreciate
35:19 it. So sometimes as an entrepreneur, the taxes we pay is simply to learn the lesson that we needed to know at this
35:24 phase. Same thing happened with um I never like had to engage a lawyer that
35:29 much. Now we have a lawyer and retainer. It's some of the best money that I could ever spend. Absolutely. And lawyers are designed, it's scary
35:36 when you get lawyers involved, but you don't want to have a lawyer involved because of blocking and tackling because
35:41 you're dealing with something. You want a lawyer to be involved to help put in the systems to be preventative. So when you face things and so what you
35:48 learn in this game, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors. There's a lot of people who claim to be performing at
35:53 this level, but when you really get into it, it's it's just not real. and um a lot of narcissism and entrepreneurship
35:59 and we dealt with clients that their business worked at one point in time. It
36:05 made sense. A lot of make money online excelled during COVID because when there's a recession in the marketplace,
36:10 make money online typically skyrockets and they were not able to ride that cartel. And all of a sudden, you're in
36:17 the situation. We had a client that would not get their inventory out of our warehouse over 30 pallets for 6 months.
36:22 and we wanted to love on them and take care of them, but we ultimately had to get lawyers involved. Um, and so part of
36:28 it is just, you know, it made us look at our contracts, our agreements, everything in place to say, are they designed to protect your clients as much
36:35 as your business? And so I feel like in the last two years, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars cleaning up and
36:42 blocking and tackling to preserve because for me, my team is my everything. We love on our clients. We
36:47 want to deliver an exceptional experience, but I can only control me and you can control you. And um so it's
36:53 just been one of those things that I feel like I've spent a lot of money to uh be in a position to ultimately say
37:00 now I've learned this lesson. And this is kind of when I hear people say, "Okay, when you build a bu million dollar, multi-million dollar business,
37:06 it takes a while to build the first one, but the second one you build a lot faster." It's because you've worked the muscle and you've learned all the little
37:12 things that have happened. But that would be probably the biggest one in the last two years is the amount of things
37:18 that I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I'm trusting these people to do the thing that they say they're going to do and now I'm having to clean up um in a
37:25 way." And but you you can look at it as gh this is just costing me money. Really, it's looking at it through the
37:30 lens of why is this happening for me? What's the lesson learned here? Uh to ensure that it does not happen again.
37:37 And so with things like this, we have the right lawyer partner. We have the right accounting partner. You're starting to build a moat. And here's
37:43 what happens. the louder you get and grow your business, you're more susceptible to risk. You're more
37:48 susceptible to people who want to come after you because of your success. And in that sense, this is kind of where the
37:55 best thing you can do is preventative means in finding the right strategic partners. And sometimes it doesn't
38:00 happen instantly, but don't ever get pissed about this bad experience you had. It's a lesson learned that
38:05 sometimes the universe needs you to experience it so you don't do it again. So that would be kind of the stupid tax
38:11 of other people's incompetency and um lack of follow through and lack of doing
38:17 what they said they were going to do doesn't just impact me but impacts you like impacts a lot of us. Um
38:23 and and how you mitigate that by the way you just helped everyone a ton. You mitigate that by getting advice from people who've already gone through this.
38:29 Like you already know hey accounting is something that needs to have a you need to keep an eye on it and you need to be
38:35 fast to fire when it's not going right. trying trying to work with the wrong person in the wrong space unbelievably
38:42 expensive. Like once you know that it's not the right person for that, your ability to remove them and replace them
38:47 in the organization could save I you got $10,000 is actually not too bad for taxes done uh done wrong. You actually
38:54 kind of you did a good job identifying early. That same mistake done incorrectly and not solved.
39:00 That could have cost hundreds of thousands instead of 10,000. Like that's an easy mistake to go way up in cost.
39:06 and look at someone like you who has multiple businesses. Um like how you structure your business to minimize risk
39:12 to you. It's another thing that like as a new entrepreneur I don't I don't know how to structure the business or businesses or if I wanted to have you
39:20 know a uh umbrella business that other things fall under and setting that right up correctly to minimize risk across the
39:27 entire organization. you personally. Like some people just have a bunch of businesses that people work across all
39:32 the businesses, which means if one business goes down and is susceptible to a lawsuit, it may expose all the other
39:39 businesses to. And so thankfully, I'm not I've never been in that situation, but I've seen that play out in a way of like you don't know what you don't know.
39:46 But this is one of those things that could cost you a lot more if not done correctly. Oh, fantastic advice. Super fun podcast.
39:54 I actually learned a ton. So, this is very fun. And I think my number one takeaway is almost any business I can't
40:00 think of any business that would not benefit from finding a way to gify your deliverable. Like you don't have a
40:06 business if you don't have clients. So everyone in business you have end users. If you can have a way to make the task
40:12 that you need done engaging and take a need to do task and turn it into a
40:19 one-on-one experience. You now have a top tier product that is a opened my mind to a lot of things. I
40:25 now have a bunch of thoughts. So now I'm going to have to like I'm going to be taking like a ton of notes as soon as we're done with this. Uh
40:31 yeah, now you got my entrepreneur mind just spinning on like, oh my gosh, we've missed out on a huge opportunity. Uh
40:36 it's awesome. Awesome. If if if someone's listening to this podcast right now and they're like this is I I
40:41 need I need Mark and his team to do this for me. Uh how do they reach you? What is the what is the simplest way to get
40:46 connected with your team? Yeah. No, thank you for asking me. Um, uh, easiest way is go to
40:51 custombboxaggency.com and just book a free consultation with us. Uh, we love to hear what you're
40:57 doing. We always are very upfront. If we can easily help and support you, we'll show you what's possible. Um, if we're
41:02 not the right solution for it is what we're trying to do, we always love to help people and guide them in the right direction. We're so focused on the relationship piece. You can also look me
41:09 up on LinkedIn, Mark RT Stern. Um, or find me on Facebook and just shoot me a note on Messenger. Um, you know, we love
41:15 to hear from people. I love to hear what people are doing in this game. So, easiest thing is to do just go to customboxaggency.com.
41:21 Awesome. Link for that will be below in the show notes and description. Amazing. Awesome. Any closing thoughts for us,
41:26 Mark, as we are as we wrap up here? Any closing thoughts or things that uh anything you want to share to someone
41:32 who is looking to do exactly that? They're trying to grow their brand or learn from you. Uh final thoughts? Yeah,
41:40 my only final thought here is so much of what we do is just taking what it is that you do and pull it out of you and
41:45 restructure it in a way that allows me to scale you and buy back your time. Um, and so in that sense, like the the sky's
41:51 is the limit in terms of what can be produced or built out. The process is meant to be fun. And what I don't expect
41:57 is that you have a fully baked idea when you come to us because chances are you don't know what you don't know. And so I
42:02 actually like knowing what's the goal. That's all I really need to know because second we know what it is you're trying
42:08 to achieve. It doesn't matter the industry. Um our whole thing is we are very like
42:13 we have a process that we'll take you through and guide you through and make it as easy as possible for you. But um like that's the fun thing about what we
42:19 do is you know if you have a comparable service to other people. We all have
42:24 businesses that a lot of other people um are doing some version of but no one does it the way you do it. And
42:31 especially when you tie a physical product into the game when your competitors don't have anything like that, it's an instant point of
42:38 differentiation and it stands out in a in a perceived premium way. And that's essentially what we're trying to do is
42:44 how do we make you stand out in a loud crowded environment um in a way that represents you and you know really makes
42:50 it easier for you to do what you do. Oh, that's fantastic. Well guys, we meet with owners on this podcast specifically
42:57 uh so that you can get all the benefits of doing the owner meeting without doing that. I built my entire business off of meeting with the people who've done the
43:03 things that I want to do. Uh Mark, the business you built is incredible. I'm super excited. Thank you. As soon as we're off this podcast, I'm
43:09 going to uh I live in Dallas, so I'm Yeah, I'm going to be uh I'm going to be scheduling a trip down to Austin. This
43:15 is Oh, please, dude. Fantastic. Fantastic idea. Biggest biggest takeaway. You got to
43:22 implement implement a experience in your business and you have to find a way to make these tasks fun. So get creative in
43:30 your business. Set yourself apart from your competitors. If you don't know how to reach out to Mark, his team will help you do it. Guys, this has been the Owner
43:37 Meeting podcast by Christian, hosted by Multif Family Strategy. We appreciate you and we'll see you on the next