Who's Your Customer - Interview with Maggie Curran

Grab your drink and get ready. This is the caffeinated hustle. The best place to learn about entrepreneurs and FTS and life expert advice and guest interviews to launch your business and NFT journey further than you ever imagined. Now, here's your host, entrepreneur, coffee fanatic and founder of the NFT project, caffeinated creatures, Ben Carson. Welcome back to the caffeinated hustle. I'm your host Ben Carson. thanks for stopping by. All right team. Today we've got a very special guest. Her name is Maggie Kern, and she's a strategic consultant to CEOs and startup entrepreneurs. People from across the world are paying to talk to her on the phone starting out on Wall Street working for an institutional fund investment company. She moved on to working as a financial analyst working on special projects for Deloitte, Disney, Boeing and dozens of other multinational corporations. Eventually, she moved to Stockholm focusing on strategic digital marketing. She ran the first global internet campaign for Ericsson, the Swedish telecom giant in the year 2001, still considered their best practice campaign generate over 1 million unique visitors per week to the campaign site 21 years ago. For the last five years she has been heavily involved in the startup world, first advising Boston startup entrepreneurs from MIT, Harvard and more. And then guest lecturing at Cambridge Innovation Center venture cafe, Florida International University, University of Miami and University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Maggie is super techy, having built her first PC in the 90s teach herself to code 20 years ago and been heavily involved in the cybersecurity. She speaks four languages has moved 34 times across the US and Europe so far, and is currently based in Nashville. She's always taking on classes reading philosophy, studying esoteric themes, drawing and reading everything she can about various industries. She is highly selective about projects she takes on but you may find her on LinkedIn or by emailing Maggie and Maggie kern.com. Maggie, welcome to the show. Thank you. Wow, I sound great. Oh, man, I'm just blown away by how often you've moved. I mean, was that part of the military? Or what caused you to just go so much across the country? No, not at all. And it wasn't just across the country. It was in Europe as well. That's amazing. I've moved across the Atlantic four times. I feel like I gotta get out there more. I mean, I've been I've been in Kansas my entire life. I've traveled but I've never moved in. Yeah, it's clearly time to pack up and go. Now, if you had asked me 20 years ago, I didn't plan to move all these times. You know, I only figured it out because I went to visit my dad one day. And he started complaining because he's very old school. And he has, you know, he has one of these address books with pages. And he complained, he said, I've run out of pages for you. And then I started counseling, I thought, wow, have I really moved. But that really is so cool. I don't think I've ever met someone move that many times. That is That is awesome. Yeah. Well, I'm really excited to have you on the show really excited for what our listeners are going to the value they're going to get out for you. As an entrepreneur myself. And being in the space, I totally understand people that like to just, you know, ready fire, aim, jump without a parachute hope for the best. But you know, talking to you, I'm really looking forward to what you're going to teach her about, about research. Because if the entrepreneur is not doing the right research before they started, they don't have a plan, they're never going to succeed. I think more than anything after our discussion is research is so important. It's the most important. I talked to so many entrepreneurs, people that are either they have been in business, and they want to increase their revenue streams, or they want to launch a new business or their tech guys or whatever. And they're just focused on their one thing. So for example, the tech guys, the it's about the app, it's about the technology, and they spend all their time and money building it. And then they complain, like, where are the customers because our app is so good. They haven't researched the market, they don't even know if the app is going to be accepted by the their potential customers. They don't even know who their customers are. My son, I have a son who's 25 and a musician, and he makes fun of me. And he'll say, who's your customer? Because he hears me ask this every single time that I'm on a zoom talking to a client, because they don't know who their customers are. Who is your customer? You have to know specifically where do they live? What's their demographic information? What are their habits? What are their concerns? What do they need? And and is your product or service really helping to satisfy that need? You would be surprised people don't pay attention to that I had a client recently from Abu Dhabi, who there were three co founders. He had a CTO Chief Technology Officer. They had employees that had built this app with like 20 different functions. And he didn't know I asked him who's your customer? And he says everybody in And then talking to him throughout the hour, I think I spent two hours talking to him. It turns out that really the only people that would be using his app were immigrants from India and Pakistan, who ran auto repair and maintenance places, they didn't speak Arabic very well, the app was in Arabic, they had all this functionality that these people would not use. And they had all these incredible revenue streams, that clearly these people that were new to the country and didn't make a lot of money would not be able to pay for. And so he did not like what I had to say, and I'm gonna always be honest. And I said, you're not even reading the economic situation, I said, there's high inflation coming, and you're gonna not be able to provide all of the services that you are planning for, and people will not pay because they're going to be the hardest hit, because they're the lowest on the totem pole in the country. And he was really annoyed, you know, but I was right. Oh, I can entirely see that. I mean, I think that's the whole issue with with, you know, startups with new companies is that entrepreneurs don't go after the people that will, will shoot holes in their plan, they're going after friends and family, and friends and family just want to see you succeed. I mean, they're not going to tell you the hard truths. And if you don't go talk to someone, an advisor, you know, someone like me, what's going to happen is you're just going to take your plan to market and the market is going to humble you in the worst possible way. That's why the success rate of new companies is so low, most of them are out of business, within five years, I think even five years is a stretch to be honest, I don't see, you know, when you're having to pay money for let's say, an office space, or you know, all this stuff, and you're not getting customers, how long can you keep digging into your pocket to pay for things? You know, the other thing is business plans, you know, I help people with business plans, and they don't understand what a business plan is, I literally have people contacting me. And I say, Okay, what's your business? And they say, Well, that's what I want you to do. I'm going to pay you for a business plan. I don't know you, I don't know what your experience is, how many years? What can you do? Well, I don't know, I want to hire you. No, that's not I'm not a coach, you know, you have a business. And you need a plan, which is a blueprint of how to make your business successful? And how are you going to get customers what your strategies are going to be? How your operations will work for, oh, this is my pet peeve. I feel like I know every single slacker from high school, who does the absolute minimum on homework just to get a passing grade. And that's how they treat a business plan. Because they say, Well, I only need it to get a loan, a business loan, or I only need it to get investors and I tell them Do you not realize how many bad business plans a loan officer, you know, sees across their desk every day probably. And investors, you don't think they've seen the difference between a realistic business plan and something that's just fluffy like they haven't. In order to be an entrepreneur printer, you have to be not just expert at something, product or service or whatever software, but you have to know at least a little bit about everything, right? Finance, Accounting, advertising, marketing, and then you have to know who if you can't do that or don't want to do that, then you need to find competent people to help you and support you in those areas. But I see there are people that are clueless, completely clueless, and I fear for them, because they're getting money from their friends and relatives. And this is all going to go down the drain. So this is why I told you previously that I don't take every project that I get most of the time, I would say probably 80% of the people that contact me I say I can't help you, or I'm not going to help you. So how often do you think you've told someone? No, they have their eyes wide open, they realize why you told them? No, they try and fix it and then they come back to you? Or do they just say forget you, I'm just gonna go find someone else to help. Most of them are idiots. They go to somebody else. That's great. They go to somebody else, who then will take their money and give them fluff because I've seen the business they say I have a business plan. I just need you to touch it up. Or I just need that budget section or the forecast financial forecast section. Because somebody else has done a really great job with my business plan. And I look at it and it's it's junk. It's fluff, just random things. General market research. They throw in a graph, you know, and people that are not haven't educated themselves in entrepreneurship to them, it looks good, you know, because they don't know any better. But this is not going to work. If you don't know how every part of your day So this is gonna run before you start it, how are you going to succeed? How? Okay, so when someone's making a business plan, do you feel like those? The law of large numbers is in effect, you know, the plans where they're like, Oh, I've got a demographic of 10 million people like, does that actually matter at all? Or is that? Is that part of the fluff you're talking about? Okay, I'm here back back to who is your customer? Because this is counterintuitive, but it's easier to be a big fish in a small pond than it is to be a big fish in the ocean, right? So I asked who's your customer? So many of them will say, everyone? Oh, really? Do you have a billion dollars in a marketing budget to reach everyone? No, you have to know specifically who your customer is? Is it a single mother who doesn't have enough childcare and lives in a big city? Is it a white collar, middle management executive who needs something, you know, software related specifically to a certain function, you really have to know specifically who your customer is. And I can't believe that people want to go into business and don't know who their customers are, like I told you about the the guy in Abu Dhabi, or the tech guys, you know, who build an app, and then, you know, build an app, and they will come that type of thing. So, alright, so we talked about demographics, and the law of large numbers don't actually help the plan. So what about passion? You know, I know a lot of entrepreneurs who are really passionate about what they do doesn't necessarily give them that edge. They thought, you know, just because you enjoy doing something doesn't mean you can make money at it. What do you think? Okay, I recently talked to a very passionate, passionate guy, super entrepreneurial, very clever, great ideas, super passionate, but doesn't follow through. So he, he throws out ideas. And then I was on the call, his mom was on the call, too. And I was very straight with him. And she said, Oh, thank you so much, because I keep trying to tell him, like, he just has ideas, he throws it out. And then his mom is supposed to do everything. And she's very detail oriented and everything, but you have to stick to something. And it takes time. You have to grow it organically. You just can't say well, you can't just be an ideas person. That doesn't work. You know, that's why he hasn't had success. He has a lot of ideas, but he doesn't follow through. And he has an educated himself in different aspects of business. So I really appreciate the way he thinks and his passion. That's fantastic. Because a lot of people lack that. They lack vision, he has vision, but no follow through. So obviously, you need both. Yeah, as entrepreneurs, I definitely feel like we just we get caught up with shiny object syndrome. And it's really easy to just bounce and just keep trying new things and never stick to something and that that usually comes back to bite us because of that, you know, I mean, you've worked with a lot of companies over the years, a lot of different types of people do you do you feel like you like working with smaller entrepreneurs, like one man shops, one woman? Or do you enjoy like the larger companies where you can make a bigger change? Because they have more resources? Where do you find your sweet spot? Oh, I've worked with all kinds of businesses, huge, multinationals, medium sized businesses, entrepreneurs, I personally enjoy helping entrepreneurs, especially the ones that have educated themselves and have some idea, you know, about what's required. You know, another pet peeve of mine before you go on is, in order to have a business plan, you have to have a financial budget, and you have to have a forecast. Well, I go right to those sections, because they're all made up, the numbers are made up, you are going to all open a business in New York City, and you've put down rent is $800 a month. And then utilities are you know, $100. And whatever. I mean, yeah, it's like, where did you pull these numbers? And do you think that a loan officer because they want to get small business loans, or they want to apply for, you know, they want to convince investors that it's a great idea. And I said, Don't you realize that they're gonna see immediately that these numbers are all made up, and they're not going to trust your ability to run a business because you haven't done the work. Being an entrepreneur, you must not just be visionary, you must be detail oriented, you're going to have to have your your hands and fingers in every part of your business, at least until it really starts growing, even if you have some co founders or whatever, people have different areas of expertise. Okay, this is another pet peeve of mine. You're a CEO you decide you want the title of CEO in your startup, right? But then you you because you you think you're an expert in social media, you're going to be the Social Media Manager. That doesn't make sense. I mean, I had one, one client, one client who thought he was an ex just because you posted, you know, you post regularly on Facebook or Instagram doesn't make you a strategic social media manager. Nor should you be that if you're the CEO, a CEO is the face of the company, you have to have other duties, but they don't understand the role of a CEO. So yeah, so you know, it's a big project, I flew to Paris three times, you know, once a month, and there was a joint venture that was taking shape and everything. And then the product hadn't been launched yet, but he was doing a soft launch. And suddenly he's announcing on social media, a big discount for some holiday, you know, Mother's Day, or whatever it was. And I said, How could you be running a sale, we haven't really released the product yet. And once you people see that you're selling it at 75% of the full price, they're never gonna pay the full price again, especially not upon launch, because now it's out there. Right? So there's no strategy, no thinking, if you're a CEO, just search and look up to see what is the CEO was supposed to do. Now you can make an argument, if you gotta search what a CEO supposed to do, I don't think your CEO material, the guy had a decent product, but he had no, he came from the hair salon industry. And so it was a great product, because of the fact that he came from that industry. And he saw a specific need. So that was amazing. He saw a need, he created a product to fulfill that need. And it was a great product is so great that a big company from France wanted to buy it, buy it and partner with him. But he should have just done the joint venture and then learned more about how he could stay involved or take the money and launch something else. You know what I'm saying? But instead, he wanted this big roll that he completely was, you know, screwing everything up. And I'm sorry, I said to him, this is that you can't do this. You can't do this. That's not what a seed. Oh, does. Yeah, I think that's such an interesting point. Because entrepreneurs, you know, we try a lot, you know, we talked about shiny object syndrome, but I think that's partially because you know, we're never satisfied, we're always trying something new. And then you know, we fail a lot, you know, entrepreneurs constantly mess up constantly just get burned, it just doesn't work out. So when something really takes off, I feel like sometimes it's hard to release the rains, because like, this is your baby like, this is the one that's going to work and you really want to give this up to someone else after you work so hard, failed so many times to finally find success. And I think, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs will refuse to give up later to the detriment of it. Okay, that's another thing because I said, you have to have your fingers in everything. But that doesn't mean you have to control every little detail. Maybe at the beginning, when maybe it's a lot, you're alone, are you with somebody else. But you know, as you take on people who are actual experts, or and have experience in these different departments, then let them do their jobs, I see the difference in cultures, because I've worked throughout the US and also in Europe. And so there's a huge difference in in cultures, for example, in Sweden, it's very flat, the organizations are very flat, and you'll go into a meeting and you won't even be sure who the head of the department is, or the you know, the manager or because everybody speaks openly and freely. And somebody who is a low man on the totem pole here in the US will speak frankly, to the department head, Well, I disagree with you, blah, blah, blah. But in the US, it's very hierarchical. Normally, you know, the tough person says something, and then everybody's just supposed to do it, even if you know that it's wrong, or you suspect that it's wrong. So the cultural differences, you know, are for me very obvious. And there are weaknesses. For example, the big weakness that I see in US companies, whether it's a large corporation or a small one is the lack of communication. So lack of communication causes so many problems. People don't know what the goals are, the financial goals are for the company for the year for the quarter, they don't know what their role is in achieving those goals. There is no consistent follow up like for example, weekly, monthly quarterly meetings and with you should have an action plan that in order for the whole company to reach these financial goals, this is how you individually need to work towards those goals, and you have certain actions that you should take, and there should be ways of measuring it, you know, SMART goals. This is a big issue. I remember years ago, I did a project for the Disney Channel. I didn't sign an NDA so I can talk about it, and it was a long time ago. So anyway, and this is when I was working as a financial analyst and they couldn't find $2 million at the time. So they knew that it hadn't been stolen because when they did the consolidation of all of their financials from their various divisions every thing balanced out, but where was the $2 million? So they put me in a room and said, Here, here's a computer. Here's some boxes. Where's the $2? million? So I figured, well, that's crazy. I'm not sure most entrepreneurs are like, ah, you know, I forgot where I put that $2 million? Hopefully we can find it. That's crazy. Well, yeah, but I found it. And it was lack of communication. Why? Because the department that sent out the billing statements to subscribers was in one location. And then there was a lockbox in Florida where they were receiving money. And so the people that were receiving money, were crediting a different account. So that account had a credit balance of $2 million. But then over here, there was an accounts receivable of $2 million, showing that they never received the 2 million. So there you go, lack of communication. And that's just one of many examples. Do you feel like lack of communication sometimes falls under the fact that people don't want to look stupid or less, you know, work in these companies, they don't want to stand out the wrong way. They don't want to raise red flags, potentially jeopardize their jobs? Or do you feel like when you're going through this type of stuff, I noticed more for companies setting than for entrepreneurs. But do you feel like the people that you're working with are never afraid to look foolish or to you know, just have the red flags call down on them. Normally, when I work with bigger companies, I'm working directly with the CEO or one of the top executives, normally it's a CEO. So then I can speak directly and frankly, and I actually love that situation, basically, because they really see the value of what I'm doing, and they're willing to pay. And so one of the things that I do in those types of situations, if they allow me is I actually go through and I interview the various people that they have working in departments, different departments, and then I can see big issues, and I can see where things need to change. And then I can give input to really help the real bottom line instead of me just talking to the CEO, and then he or she, from their perspective tells me what the problems aren't, they may not know what all the problems are. But I can tell because I've, I've in my career, I've literally, I've audited so many companies when I worked for Deloitte and I've also analyzed contract, I spent a year analyzing contracts working for 20th Century Fox. And so I know where to look for problems. So one company that I worked for, they were spending 1000s of dollars a month on Pay Per Click advertising. You know, if people don't know what that is, it's the ads that appear when you do a Google search or whatever. Or if you're on a certain website, and you see ads appearing, you know, mysteriously and magically, yeah, makes you feel like your computer got hacked every time you do a search these days, because you just searched for a bathrobe. Yeah. So so they were spending 1000s of dollars a month on pay per click. And so this is something that I really know about. And so I showed them how they are, they're wasting their money, they were not getting the results, you know that that money would have been better spent somewhere else. So that's another thing I say is that when you put money in your budget, and you're actually spending money on advertising, you need to follow up and make sure where, where are your customers coming from? If you're spending $10,000 a month on Pay Per Click, but your your customers are mainly coming from events that you're hosting, well, maybe take some of that money away from pay per click and do more events, right? Doesn't that make sense? Wow, that's a that's a great thing to say there. I appreciate you pointing that out. Because so many entrepreneurs are focused on things that don't actually help the bottom line, they don't really help move the ball forward. And on the outside, it's pretty easy to see that, yeah, this person just needs to stop spending money on the wrong methods of marketing. But you know, when you're running your own business, everyone falls into this trap, where they're focused on things that aren't helping their goals. They're not helping their long term success. And they're just stuck in this trap of splitting their attention up so many ways that it's not really helping anything. But you have to, you have to prioritize where your attention is. So when you're starting out, what you want is more customers. And so focus on that sales and marketing channel. And I would also say customer service, because that's a big area when people don't get when something is wrong, the product didn't work it whatever, whatever the issue is, make sure that you treat your customers very well, so that they will keep coming back. And not only that a dissatisfied customer will tell 25 people that they're really unhappy, you know, or leave a Google Google review or whatever, some kind of review. So those are the two areas that I think people should really focus on. Especially nowadays. I think we live in a climate. It's pretty obvious, where trust is lacking on many, many levels, in terms of whether it's political Go, you know, the government, certain organizations, whatever trust has been eroded. So for me, I feel that the most important thing besides what I just mentioned, sales and marketing and all that underlying all of that is building trust with your customers and with your potential customers, like really focus on that. And sometimes it means that it's more effective to meet the customers and to, to try to customers through face to face activities, whether it's through zoom, webinars, doing events, doing a road show, than pay per click, for example, paid advertising, it really puts a distance between you and your potential customer. And also people, the trust level of online marketing has decreased a lot. I mean, we're all tired of emails, email newsletters, you know, I'll sign up for something, and then I'll get 20 other emails from related type where they think that I might be interested, and I know they've sold my email address, please, if you're gonna do email marketing, don't buy email lists, you know, that doesn't work, you're gonna be labeled a spammer, and people are gonna hate you. So better to grow organically, like really provide value. If you need to convince people of your worth, do podcasts write great content that helps people you know, that solves a problem. Rather than listen, I had this was years ago already, a customer was spending tons of 1000s of dollars per month on pay per click. So I thought, You know what, let me analyze the situation for them. This doesn't seem right, they're not getting any traffic, right. So I look and they wanted specific, very laser targeted advertising to only certain areas, certain zip codes even. And there were clicks coming from Africa, from the Middle East from all over. So thankfully, I don't I never just use Google Analytics, I always put some other statistics program analytics program software in the website. So by using that, I could prove that there were 1000s of clicks that we didn't want, that my client ended up paying for. And this company quietly refunded $9,000 to my client. Wow, that's intense. That's that's like those ads I keep seeing on social media where it's like, you know, your competitors are clicking your ads, you know, use a software to prevent the competition from taking your money. And, you know, I've always thought that's a scam. But man hearing this, it's like, you know, maybe that's legit. Well, there are click farms, just go to YouTube and search for the term click farms. And you will see hundreds of people that are paid very little money, and they have all these mobiles in front of them. And they're clicking, clicking on ads, they click on but also they do keyword searches to drive up the auction price of a certain keyword phrase, you know, if you're doing if you're paying for keywords in pay per click through options, got sometimes for a keyword phrase, you might have to pay $50 per click, or more, or 100, or whatever, depending on what it is. So I would say this is why I advise to find unique ways of reaching your customers. And the more laser targeted you can be the better, let's say trade, trade magazines or trade publications online. You know, often, because it's directly related to your industry, you can put out a press release and tell about your product or service that you're launching or new deal that you made. And they will publish it for free because it's a trade publication, they need trade news. And this gets you exposure and it's more legitimate. That's just one example. There are many things that you can do that don't require randomly paying a huge corporation for bad clicks. All right, so what about those as seen on Fox News, Yahoo Finance, CNBC, you know, all those articles that you see on the website, you know, the the trust factors where you're basically paying a company 1000 bucks or 3000 bucks, whatever it is, to get your your press release out there on these famous sites, and that way you have that trust factor, does that work anymore? Or do you feel like that's not the way to add trust because, you know, if everyone's doing it, it's just one more way that just is getting ignored. I mean, I don't even my eyes glaze over when I, when I see that section of a website, to be honest, you can write your own article and you can post it there's a section on like Huffington Post where you can actually add your own stuff to to the website, you know, that you've written about your company. So I don't think you even have to pay for that. But it's hard to find you have to search for it. So that type of thing and you can put out press releases that will be picked up by those sites. And then you can say as seen on CNN, as seen on Reuters, I see it on wherever. Okay, so is there a website Is there a spot online that you know the listeners can go to to just go find where to send these publications or the freeway the right way so that they get the traffic, the trust that the traction? They're trying to get off this that you have to study? How, what kinds of articles do they pick up or write? You know, and do something similar? It takes work. It's not, if it was so easy, everybody would be an entrepreneur and have their own successful business. Right? No, that's a great point. I don't know if I mean, yeah, if it was easy, everyone could do it. And so if you're trying to find your audience, do you? What do you use? I mean, what comes to my mind is Facebook audience, you know, it's a big algorithm, it's something that can give you a lot of metrics, a lot of laser focus results, like you're talking about, what do you think of using a tool like that to help find the audience you're trying to find, I do not recommend Facebook, a long time ago, you was really great, you could super laser target. But there again, I found really bad clicks. Even though I did some, this is several years ago, already some super laser targeted advertising for actually my son who is an award winning jazz pianist. So he was getting I had super laser targeted ads, just for major cities, like where jazz was big New York, Chicago, LA, and the US getting clicks from like, single mothers who didn't speak English in Brazil, you know, those types of profiles, I do not recommend this at all. So, again, I don't know who the customer that you're aiming for is, but there's always some kind of a trade publication for every industry, even if it's small, like I said, easier to be a big fish in a small pond. So really focus on go from, you know, find a trade magazine, see who's putting ads there, what the articles are, click through, click through, click through, I find you get the best information that way. But you have to put time into it. Nothing is fast. You can't just go to one website, and get all the information that you want. That's unrealistic, you know, and there are a lot of websites that publish market research, but you have to pay them a couple of $1,000. And maybe it's not even relevant specifically to your situation. Oh, absolutely. This, this makes so much sense. You know, so many entrepreneurs are looking for corners to cut, you know, I mean, we're, we're a society that loves microwave dinners, drive thru dinners, like we want quick, we want speedy, we don't want to put in the time and this type of stuff. Like, there's always going to be an entrepreneur out there that that wants to just dive in without doing the work. But there's no scenario that you can just cheat this rule. You can't look for the quick solution. There is no magic pill. And I'm sure that there's entrepreneurs every day asking you Hey, how can I? How can I do this little quicker? It's so annoying. I actually had when I was living in Spain, a friend of mine, I was having drinks with her. And she's she, she asked me well, so how, what degree like, where did you get your strategy degree? I said, No, there's no strategy degree. Well, well, how did you learn it? I said, well, one, I'm a super critical thinker. Two, I'm extremely analytical three, I have spent decades researching reading every industry, I'm fascinated by business and economics and marketing and strategy. So I read everything. And I've had many experiences that have allowed me to see different parts of business from big to small. And so therefore, I naturally am very strategic. So what would you say to people that don't have the experience that you have the you know, they want to do what you're telling them to do, but they don't feel like they have those traits that you have that that gives them you know, the ability to be strategic, like, you know, I'm sure there's not everyone wants the easy pill, there are going to be some people out there that really wants success here. They want to do the work, but they're just like, you know, I don't have that sense of strategy that she has, how am I supposed to be able to do this? But you can you can do it. You have to have an interest though, right? You can't you everybody can read. Don't think that you can just go to one website and get everything no, like, learn a little bit about accounting, learn a little bit about finance, learn a little bit about marketing and sales and look to see what would companies that are more successful in your niche are doing, and then learn about that. Don't copy them because they're ahead of you. Like the best thing to do is if you're starting from scratch, find a competitor that is maybe three years ahead of you, or five years ahead of you, right? So don't look at somebody that's up here that's making millions and millions of dollars in your niche. You want to look to see what your next steps are. Right because to get to that big point. Well, maybe you had huge investments of millions of dollars from venture capitalists or but somebody else had smaller will you know, maybe they just had their own money or family Money or, you know, friends to get them to slowly reach that point. So you want to see what the next steps are, they should be very clear to you what your next steps should be. And you should see what they're doing that works and what they're doing that doesn't work, sign up for the newsletters, see how they communicate with you. This is another pet peeve of mine newsletters, email newsletters, I could go on forever. Yeah, I think that's a fantastic point, you know, focus on the competition to serve, just look for the ones ahead of you. Look for the ones that you can learn something from something that you can do better than what they're doing. And that's how you can beat them, you know, but stop trying to compare yourself to these, you know, giant competitors, you'll never be in the same arena with, you know, focus on the ones that you can take on the focus on the ones that you can only you beat them, you get a little stronger, and then you keep improving. Maybe you get there eventually. But yeah, I like that. That's you're focusing on the the ones that are in your grasp just a little ahead of you how they get there, how they get better than you. And then how do you get better than them? I love that. And that means you have to analyze like, what do they do that's really working like Nick, believe you're the customer? Oh, this is another pet peeve of mine. People write their collateral material marketing materials, websites, whatever, from internal points of view, like, do I care how your company is set up what your departments are, that's not how your website should be set up. I don't need to like this department, that department know, if I'm looking for something, show me what I'm looking for right there on the homepage, you know, I probably searched to reach you or I saw an ad and I click through. That's another thing. You have an ad that has a very, very specific message, you click through and you get to the company's homepage. No, this should be it should be a landing page that has that specific key message that I clicked on, because that's what I'm interested in, I do not want to go to your homepage and have to click through and find whatever the hell your use, tried to sell me. Yeah, there's a lot of failed entrepreneurs out there right now that have realized that you know what customers don't like to put in the work, they just want to spend the money, if you got to make your customer work to place that order, they're not going to place that order, the customer is not going to do the work, you know, unless they really, really, really need the thing. And you're one of the few that's offering it, you know, or maybe you had a great sale price. Yeah, so the email newsletter thing, please, if you're gonna do emails, start from the very, very beginning with segmented emails, what does that mean is where like, if my customer is if I have various customers, I need to know who Okay, these people are on the East Coast, they're female, they're males there, this job, that job, whatever. And when they came to the site, they went to these pages, they're interested in these things, because maybe I have different products and services, right? I don't want to send the same same email to everyone. That's so infuriating. If I have customers around the world, don't talk to me about some big holiday celebration that's happening, like in India when I'm in Tennessee, right? Same thing. I mean, you have to know who they are, where they're located, speak to them there, if there was a hurricane somewhere, you know, and, and I'm in sunny Florida. Like, don't talk, don't be offering me repair services, or, you know what I'm saying I say this all the time, there's, there's just, if you do things correctly, from the beginning, you don't have to go back and spend a lot of money to fix it. Because that's an I see companies that need to do that. But it's so expensive to go back and segment a list of 5000 customers or 10,000 customers, but it has to be done. Because otherwise you're not going to be successful. Yeah, that's such a great point. And I think that, you know, for this particular one, you know, if you're trying to build a business, you're trying to focus on the things that move the needle the most. And I don't think entrepreneurs realize how important it is to not only have a great product, and not only have a great website, to not only have great marketing, but to understand that you're only going to talk to your customer at certain times. And if you don't understand that, and you're blasting every response to every customer, you know, it's killing you. And so, you know, I feel bad because so many entrepreneurs are doing so many things, right? And the little details that they they think are not that important are actually the ones that can take them out, you know, so I mean, Klaviyo ActiveCampaign, any decent email responder now can do this. And I think that's phenomenal information. You have to segment your audience so you know, what customer you're talking to when you're supposed to be talking to them. So Ben, another thing that I see new entrepreneurs do, they got the money, investments, whatever. So they rent a nice office space, they buy a nice furniture, they put the nice sign up, they have everything set up, and then they come to me and they say I don't have money for marketing. Yeah, that's great. You know, they got They got the fancy office, they got the I'm sure food deliveries every day there that are $400 coffee maker, you know, they got everything they need to impress the customer and succeed, except that they forgot they have to go pay for a customer and do that marketing. But well, Maggie, this has been an awesome time, I really appreciate you coming out and just helping everyone that just learned some really interesting things. You know, we've talked about a lot of different things here and you've added some phenomenal value. But if we really wanted to just circle back and get to one overarching theme that you wanted our listeners to come away with, what would that be? Who is your customer? You know, I had a feeling you might say that. So where can our listeners find you if they want to get a hold of you? You can find me on LinkedIn, Maggie Curran, or you can send me an email at Maggie and Maggie kern.com. But just remember that I don't take on all projects. Oh, of course. I mean, only the ones that you know, know their customer. All right. So I think we're gonna close this out. Now with our last question. We asked every guest on the show and that is what is your favorite caffeinated beverage? I'm boring. I like almond milk lattes. Nothing wrong with that, Maggie, thanks for your time. Thanks for stopping by. We'll talk again soon. Thanks for listening to the caffeinated hustle. Sponsored by caffeinated labs LLC. For more information or to connect with Ben, check us out online at caffeinated labs.io. Or email us at support at caffeinated labs.io. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Or give us a follow on social media by checking the links in the description. We'll see you next time.