Tom DuFore: 0:01

Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I'm your host, Tom Dufour, CEO of Big Sky franchise team. And as we open today, I'm wondering how do you keep in touch with your old leads and old customers in your database? And how do you keep in touch with longtime friends or family members? How do you stay in touch with them? Well, our guest today is founder and CEO of Warmstart, Dave Siffry, and he's created a solution to help all of us do a better job of keeping those relationships with the people that matter the most. Now, Dave is a nine-time founder. He created Tech Norati, the world's largest blog search engine, and was an executive at Lyft and Reddit. Based in San Francisco, he's built multiple B2C and B2B companies and has raised multiple rounds of venture funding, scaled teams, and led products used by millions. He's also been through hyper growth at three different companies, giving him a view of how organizations succeed as they grow and how relationships shape opportunities at every stage. You're going to love this interview, so let's go ahead and jump right into it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:14

Tom, first off, it is a pleasure and it's so nice to meet you. My name is Dave Siffery. I am the founder and CEO of Warmstart. Warmstart.ai is the URL. And what we do is warm sales outreach using AI.

Tom DuFore: 1:31

Fantastic. And I know we had a great pre-show conversation here, really talking about reaching out to extended networks and really some of this idea of referral marketing, which has its own unique pain points and pauses. But right before we pushed record, you were starting to give a little bit of the why you started this business. You were starting to mention you didn't have to do this. So I'd love to give a little bit of your background and why you started this.

SPEAKER_01: 2:00

So I'm um a nine-time entrepreneur, which I guess is a blessing and a curse. You know, my wife told me after we had our first exit, you know, and and I was sitting on the beach for a little while. If I just kept sitting around, I'd end up selling beach umbrellas to the other tourists. So I think for me, it's a little bit of a drive. Like I just love building things and helping people and solving their problems. And I've been incredibly fortunate to be out here in Silicon Valley, like to grow up a nerd, you know, like a you know, computer guy who loved to sell. And I built a number of different companies, some of which you may have heard of. One was called Linuxcare back in the 90s. Another one was called Technerati back in the mid-2000s. And then I worked as an executive at places like Reddit and at Lyft. And what I was doing, I was just tinkering one day. I was playing around with all these new AI tools that were coming up. This was like back in the early days of Chat GPT. And if you remember, right, like the big problem back then was you couldn't trust what they said. Like half the time they would hallucinate, and you just didn't know was it actually giving me real information or was it just telling me something I wanted to hear? And fortunately, I was like, wait, I know how we can solve that problem. And so I built a business. Now, this was business number eight. And what it did was it solved that hallucination problem. And it's it's a company called Questy. You can go to it right now. Like, you know, we're it's still a nice business. We we help people by going out and doing research automatically for them, coming back with substantiated information and answers. And it was wonderful. And I really wanted to tell the world about it. And after, you know, thinking of all the people who I could in my immediate network, after posting a few times on LinkedIn, right? I found myself sitting at the computer one day, just sort of staring at my screen, saying, Oh my gosh, like I know that I know more people, but why is it that I cannot think of a single person who I haven't already talked to about this cool new thing? And then it hit me. And it was, you know, it was a little bit one of those moments where it was like, Dave, you big doofus. Like, you just built this artificial intelligence agent, this thing that will go out on your behalf and do research for you. And it'll give you back non-hallucinated, substantiated answers. And what hit me was like, why don't I take that and use that with literally the thousands of people who I have met over the years? Like, what if I connected that to my email inbox? Which, by the way, is tar, it's horrible. Like, it's terrible to search, you know, like it's it's incredibly difficult to find anything. You have to know what you're looking for. I didn't know what I was looking for. And like what fundamentally hit me was I was like, well, let's so let's do that. Let's pull all of that stuff in within a relatively short amount of time. I hacked something together, took a few months, and I started my first campaign. And I'll tell you what, Tom, I had to actually shut it down after five days because the response rates were so high. We literally had a 56% meeting setup rate. So I'm not even just talking about people who opened the emails, I'm talking about people who then responded or clicked on my calendar link and they were like, Dave, it's been such a long time. Oh my God, that's so cool to hear. Like, I want to talk to you about this. This is really neat. Let's talk. That I actually didn't have time for my regular business anymore because the responses were so high. And so a number of them said, Hey, you know, that email that you sent me, it did sound a little AI-ish. Like, did you did you write it using AI? And I was like, actually, yeah. And I sort of, you know, chuckled, you know, and they said, wait a minute, could you do something like that for me and my business? And that was the moment where like you have that realization where you go, oh my God, like this AI thing, look, it's never gonna truly sound like a human. It's never gonna truly understand everything about me and my relationship with this other person. But human beings suck at unaided recall. Okay. We are just terrible at it. Like, sure, ask me maybe like what, you know, who did I meet in the last week or you know, what happened a month ago, and it already starting to get a little dim. Ask me to remember something that happened six months ago, but we're amazing when we're reminded. And that fundamental insight was that, oh, so I could use AI to go back through my inbox, only look at human beings that I have actually interacted with, not all the spam and not all the crap and not all the commercial stuff, throw all that stuff away, but only look at actual human beings and then have the AI connect to my social media, because that's the other thing. It's like, uh, you know, like I sat around, I would doom scroll on social media, right? Oh, I'm gonna do some prospecting, you know, and I'd go on Instagram or I go on LinkedIn and be like, ah, like and four hours later, I'd realize I hadn't written a single freaking outreach. And I was terrified about something going on in the world, or I was outraged about something. I was like, ah, social media did its job, right? It got me sucked in, but that doesn't help my business. So I was like, wait, what if I could use AI to look at all of those people and read their social media for me and then just alert me when there's something interesting. Somebody just changed their job, or they got a promotion, or maybe they just wrote something really interesting that's related to me and my business, or it's like our anniversary. We haven't talked to each other in a long time. And out of that came what is now warmstart.ai. So the idea here is that for anybody who is, you know, running a business, you if you've been running your business for more than a year, I guarantee you, like your next six customers, you already know who they are. They're in your inbox. They're people who you have met, they're people who just haven't heard from you in a long time.

Tom DuFore: 8:26

Well, that was very, very well said. And really, to me, it really is driving to the main reason when I saw your initial background on this was to talk about this, because for me, in franchising, I think it's the most underutilized aspect in franchise sales, especially by new franchise oars. So the clients we work with and help them franchise. Literally, last week had a call from a client who sold their first franchise to someone they knew, and they've got franchise number two and three lined up with someone they know. The week before that, the first franchise that person sold was to somebody that they knew. It's kind of like this list continues to go on. And so I was enthused to see with what you're doing because I think this network owners and usually owners, they may not be quite the quote, mayor of the town per se, but generally they're very well connected. They're very personable, they know lots of people, and they've built a lot of goodwill in their community with their customers, with their staff, with their people close to them. So I'd love for you to talk about this. And really, I'm thinking in two pieces. And we talked a little pre-show on this. One is on franchise recruitment, finding people who might be interested or who might know someone who might be interested in their new franchise. And then secondly, how franchisees that sign up can tap into their own network to recruit. So I know it's a multifaceted question here, but to me, it's so, so important. And I think it's a very underutilized piece in franchise sales efforts.

SPEAKER_01: 10:03

Yeah. And I think that some of this is just lack of knowledge or it's difficult to do. Some of it is quite frankly, fear, embarrassment, and shame. Let's be frank, right? Like I think that there's always a fear of wait, like these are people who I've known for years, and I've really got to be able to, you know, if I if I'm gonna ask them, and I don't want to abuse that trust relationship, or or they wouldn't want to hear from me. Well, you have no idea. You have no idea whether or not they want to hear from you. This could be the best thing to happen to them since sliced bread. But I think there's that internal mechanism where, well, you know, I don't know, like, you know, I met them through somebody else. So the the clarity to this is number one, you don't know until you actually ask. So how you ask and how you start that conversation is critically important, right? Nobody likes being sold to, you know, hey, dumb, how's it going? You know, like have I got something for you? You know, I'm already on my back heel. But somebody who knows me and who I know, and like it's really more, it's not even about what the AI might write for me. It's just the AI reminds me and maybe gives me a prompt to get started in the morning and says, hey, do you know what it's not about me, it's about your potential customer, it's about them. What's going on with them? Hey, I saw, you know, congratulations on what's been going on with you, or hey, I saw that, you know, there's this new thing that's going on in your life, or, you know, wow, can you imagine it's been over a year since we talked? I can't believe it's gone that far along. And, you know, so number one, what I always recommend to people when they're starting out with a warm start campaign, don't sell. Don't sell. Just reconnect. Just reconnect. And it's really powerful because number one, it's a joyful experience. These are people who know you and like you. And we see, you know, who doesn't, when they get an email from somebody who they haven't heard from in a long time that just focuses on them and doesn't try to sell them anything and says, hey, I've just been thinking about you. Right. You know, it's been so long. Like that can make your day. So of course you're gonna respond. And by the way, when people take this approach using Warmstart to do that initial outreach, we see response rates from 20 to 60 percent. That's literally 10 to 20 times the industry average for cold email. So, number one, they know you and love you, they just haven't heard from you in a long time. Number two, don't sell. Okay, it happens naturally. You start talking. So, what are you up to, Tom? What's been going on in your life? And then again, what's the natural thing that happens? Well, hey, Dave, you know, how about you? What's been going on with you? And now we get to start to have a conversation. Okay. Here's the second thing that we do is don't ask them now that they've now that you've heard from them a while ago. You don't say, look, would you like to buy a franchise or do you want to come and be my customer? It's the second level network. So you say, Hey, do you know anybody who might be interested in A, B, and C, like who might be looking to start a franchise or you know, buy a franchise doing X, Y, and Z. You already know me, this is what I do. Do you know of anybody in your network who you might be able to recommend? And that is a whole other huge thing because two incredibly interesting things happen when our customers do this. The first is it immediately gets a bunch of people to say, oh, you know what? I was thinking about that, Dave. Yeah, you know, like I want to connect you with my friend Larry. Like, this is a great idea. But the other thing that happens is sometimes they say, Well, you know what? Why are you asking me to connect you to somebody in my network? I'm interested in this. And it's totally opt-in. So I'm not selling you. I'm just saying, hey, look, I built this really great franchise. It's built based on what I've been building out here before. It's been a great money-making opportunity for a lot of people, like, not for nothing. Do you know of anybody who you think might be interested in starting a new business and is looking for somebody reputable to work with, right? That they might want to do this. And you'd be amazed. Like about a quarter of the people aren't people making recommendations to their external networks. They're people who are saying, What am I, chop liver? Like what? Like you do, you don't want to ask me personally. And then you say, Oh my gosh, wow, Tom, like wouldn't have even thought about that, but it would be an amazing honor to work with you. Right. And now that relationship isn't shame-based, it's not embarrassing, it's about focusing on mutual benefit. And the two now we get to be partners and working together and build this combined business together. So, you know, this is where AI is never going to replace this. AI is never going to know that you and I happen to bump into each other at the supermarket. And I asked about your spouse. Right. Or, you know, it's just not going to do that. So, what we make sure of is that when we build these campaigns, the way it works, like every morning, you just wake up and there's 10 to 15 new email drafts that are sitting there waiting for you. And they're going to be perfect because they're based on email and social media and so on. They're not going to know that we just bumped into each other at Whole Foods. Okay. Great. But they're a reminder. And what we found is the people who actually do this for 15 minutes a day tend to see way higher results. Usually two to six meetings set up in the first week alone, if they just do this for 15 minutes a day for seven days.

Tom DuFore: 16:17

For people that are looking to tap into their network to go do this type of referral type marketing or network type marketing. I know that part of it is almost embarrassing or shame or I don't know or what's going on. But also there's the part of it, I know I have felt this way, in that I also don't want to be viewed as that sales guy that's just trying to call my friends and sell some multi-level marketing thing or selling life insurance or whatever. I also don't want to be, quote, that person calling and doing that. And so the thing that you shared that was really that I found interesting is how you've designed this is to help make that first step a little bit easier, right? To kind of not just have these things warm and set up for you, but literally to warm you up as a person to this idea of taking that step. So I'd love for you to chat on that.

SPEAKER_01: 17:12

Yeah, I I couldn't agree more. Like, let's just take, so let's say it's uh insurance. Okay. These insurance tends to get triggered on these major life events. And nobody wants to be sold to. I don't want to be sold to. I don't want anybody, especially, you know, somebody coming over and now they're in my face, and now I'm like awkward. Oh God, now I got to go tell Tom, like, oh Jesus, dude. You know, now it's gonna be awkward between the two of us. Uh-uh. As that person who is trying to see if there's anybody, I focus on one thing. Can I be of service to this person? So it's not what are you gonna do for me? It's what can I do for you? And this is where I think the whole philosophy behind Warmstart really starts to shine. So you start by saying, What's going on with you? Like, I'm paying attention to you. Let's talk about the things that you want to talk about. And then if it just so happens, well, you know, now that you've just moved into that new home, like have you thought about insurance? Do you have a provider that you like? Right? Or, oh, you know, you're a real estate agent, you're selling, you know, you're selling homes on a regular basis. Like, how's your relationship with your provider? If they say, Oh my God, I have the best insurance guy in the world, terrific. What's the worst thing that happened? We just had a conversation, right? And we just caught up. And at the end of the day, I go back and I go talk to my family, and I'm like, I just talked to Tom. And do you know what's going on in his life? And here's what's happening with the wife and the kids and the dog, and that. And what will often happen though is that now it's in Tom's mind. Now you're thinking, you're saying, wow, okay, so Dave's selling insurance. Next time you bump into somebody who just, I don't know, bought a new car and is, you know, saying, gosh, do you have do you know a good insurance agent? Who are you gonna think of first? And that's where the side benefits of having this no pressure, focus on the person in the relationship kind of approach pays off in the long term. Right. So if you're focusing on short-term sales, you know what? Like, don't try Warm Start. Like if you're just trying to like extract the value right now, right here, you know, like this probably there are other approaches. Let's just say this. There are other approaches that you can use. But if you're really focusing on how do I build a business that's going to last, and it's really about the relationships, well, then you want to be able to use something that's going to be helping you to develop that and maintain those relationships over time.

Tom DuFore: 19:47

Yeah, that's very, very well said. And it definitely plays to my heartstrings as you were talking about going in with the idea of mutual gain and relational in nature. I mean, our number one value, and I talk about this all the time, is win win relationships. So it's really pursuing a win-win engagement and being relational in nature, which oftentimes means something in the short term may have to be overlooked for sake of a relationship, because that's most important. I really, really appreciate that. And for someone that maybe listens into this and is saying, how can I use this kind of an idea for selling my first franchise or my fifth or my 10th or my 15th? I was recently looking at some franchise data that we have published in our franchise sales training workshop. And a data point was super interesting that showed that in this data source, it was more than 50% of leads that came through as a referral from an existing franchisee. So an existing franchisee referred someone else to corporate to consider buying a franchise. More than 50% of those leads turned into a franchise sale. That is significant. So you just never know where that kind of stuff is going to come from. And if you're not out there asking and inviting people to connect with you and have those conversations, that may never happen. So this is very well said. And everything you just said applies to franchising and for your franchisees to be launching their own business as they launch into their new market.

SPEAKER_01: 21:26

You know, you're selling retail products, right? Like that's fine too, right? So you want to be able to reach out to the people who you think might actually be able to get value from whatever it is that you're selling. And you know what? Maybe if it's not them, then you use the second approach. So you say, you know what? What's one of your most popular franchisees or franchiser types of businesses?

Tom DuFore: 21:51

The last five years or so, the most inquired about franchise type has been a home services type of franchise. Think of like a painting franchise or something like that.

SPEAKER_01: 22:01

Painting, plumbing, like home warranty, like all of these kinds of things. Okay. Now I might not right now be in the market for that. You know, I only paint my house what, every five, 10, or 15 years, or maybe when there's a major life event that's happening. So, you know, number one is just being there to be on mind, right? So that when, you know, you announce, oh my gosh, you know, there's a baby coming. Oh my God, that's great, right? Like, what are we gonna do? Pink or blue? How do I do that? Right. But also to then be able to use your second-order network to be able to say, hey, you know, do you know of anybody who might need a good painter or somebody to come into their office because they just did an office move, or you know, you name it. And being able to stay top of mind, you know, we talk about this idea in marketing of the seven magical touches. So people need to feel that touch from you when they feel that touch for seven times, and it's you know, through different ways, different experiences. So it could be they see the billboard, it could be they see the ad, but also interacting with you personally or getting an email from you, you know, that puts you at the top of their mind for when they do need to be able to have your services, or even more importantly, when somebody comes to them and says, Hey, I need a painter. Do you know of somebody?

Tom DuFore: 23:28

As someone who's tuning in might say, Okay, I'm interested or I want to learn more. How can someone find out more about what you're doing or get connected?

SPEAKER_01: 23:34

Yeah, I mean, I tell you what, I'll make it even easier. You can just go right to warmstart.ai, warmstart.ai, just like it's sounds. You can actually start a free trial. You can connect your email to it directly. You get a week of free trial where it literally costs you nothing. You can get all of your email processed, see all of those people. Your privacy is completely protected, like you are the customer. And what we find is that for most people, when they start using this and they start getting it every single day, they tend to see new business within the first 60 days and their first leads within the first week. So, you know, it's a pretty easy sell, right? And at$99 a month per seat, it's not a very big business expense to be able to stay on top of and help to maintain those relationships.

Tom DuFore: 24:29

Oh, fantastic. Well, and we'll make sure we include that link in the show notes so it's convenient and easy for someone to tap into here. Dave, there's a great time in the show. We ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we ask is Have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?

SPEAKER_01: 24:46

Have I had some? Oh my God. So, like I said, I'm a nine-time entrepreneur and all out here building technology businesses out in Silicon Valley. And, you know, when I was uh had a lot more hair and was was getting started out, I had a business where we overhired. We were growing, growing, growing. And you know what they say out here with the world, the land of venture capital, and hey, there's more where they came from, and take over the world quick. You know, you can get drunk a little bit on your own success. So with that company, we had built a really successful customer service and technical support and professional services organization. And we had the likes of Dell and IBM and HP and Compaq, like all of these big companies that were our customers. And so, you know, the VCs were saying, You're you're growing too slow. What the miss was was we didn't know how much revenue per employee we were actually getting. This was a huge, huge learning for me was that even though you're thinking, okay, we're gonna grow ahead of where we are, you still gotta be keeping track. And one of the really interesting things then to learn from that was that you think, well, we're eight people, we're 10 people, we're 12 people. As we add more people, our productivity grows. This is true. But as soon as you hit about 18, 19 people, something really interesting starts to happen, which is productivity per employee actually starts to drop. And it's just because communication costs, like you know, you're trying to do too many things or people have to coordinate. And then, you know, when everything's a priority, nothing's a priority. And what I learned from this was really being able to focus the business on one business and really making sure that revenue per employee, so that every single new incremental employee that we were getting, we knew that we could pay for. I mean, obviously, you know, recessions, things like that can still happen. This is no guarantee. But like we were just hiring willy-nilly. And that by focusing on that financial discipline, that once you get to 20 people, your controller, your CFO, they become my best friend, right? And they helped to meet me to manage that. And then a really interesting thing that happened is when we got to about 50, 60 people, all of a sudden productivity started to grow again significantly. And so that 20 to 50 zone, I call that the death zone for small to medium-sized businesses. And it's really, it's a slog and it's hard, but staying really focused and making sure that I was really tracking revenue per employee like a hawk are the things that helped us to turn failure into success.

Tom DuFore: 27:49

The next question we ask is Have you had a make that you would share or highlight a win or two?

SPEAKER_01: 27:56

Some of the really amazing things about being able to work in technology and work in Silicon Valley are the kinds of people that you get to encounter. You know, there's people who are like mercenaries, and there's people who are missionaries. Nothing against mercenaries who are there to like, I'm just here to make the money. Nothing against missionaries who are there like, we're here to change the world. But you kind of have to pick which one of the two you're gonna be. And I gotta say, I'm a missionary, right? I love this idea of being of service and helping you solve people's problems and bring something, you know, win-win into the world. And what's great is I got the chance to work with some of the most incredible, high potential people in the world because they also were motivated by that same mission. You know, what that meant was the kind of people who came to work, like I'm just gonna like some sort of techie nerds, right? Like these are people who I would be like, I bow before you. And like some of them ended up reporting to me. And and just to know that you're coming home at night and you're saying, oh my God, I am working with people who are so much smarter than me, who are frankly so much cooler than me. And like, and I get to sign their paychecks, right? And we get to build some pretty amazing things together. So, you know, we built a company together called Technorati, which became the world's largest search engine for blogs, for web blogs. This was way back in the day in the 2000s, and so that enabled me to all of a sudden get invited onto the literally the world stage. Like, you know, we'd come and keynote conferences, and and I got invited to the World Economic Forum and Davos, Switzerland, you know, and the kinds of people who then you get to be put in front of, right? To you know, sing at a piano bar with Bono and Richard Branson. And and like I was like, I got it, somebody pinch me. Like, like, how did some nerdy kid from New York end up getting to be able to be put in a place like this? And and so, you know, these are some of the incredible opportunities. And if there's one thing I learned from it is, you know, the minute that I think that I got this, or that it's because, you know, because Dave is so great, it ain't because Dave's so great, right? It was about focusing on a mission and really helping and get a team of people aligned and motivated that allowed us to bring in these incredible, incredible performers who then were able to make a dent in the universe to be able to get invited to places like that.

Tom DuFore: 30:37

Fantastic. Well, the name of the show is multiply your success. And so we ask about a multiplier. Have you used a multiplier to grow yourself personally or professionally, or any of the organizations you've run?

SPEAKER_01: 30:51

Service is a big one, uh, and I talked a lot about it. So I'm gonna talk about something that is really practical right now. So, so values and you know, like having clear sets of values and a clear culture, like that is by and large, the biggest multiplier. But what's been so fascinating over the last three years is watching how these artificial intelligence tools, when applied with taste. And that's the trick, like that's where humans are still so incredibly important. Because we've all seen, you know, Shrimp Jesus and like you know, the the AI slop that's out there. Like we've all gone to LinkedIn and read yet another M-filled post that was written by some AI. And, you know, so to me, I could not get the business that I've built here at Warmstart done at the level of efficiency at which we're doing it if we weren't using artificial intelligence throughout the entire process. Everything from helping us to A-B test marketing, copy, do research on customers before they actually become customers, so that when I get on the phone with them or talk to them on a Zoom call, like I can actually speak halfway intelligently. To again, in the product itself that we're building, we use AI at its core to build a dossier on every single human being who I've ever interacted with, and every single one of our customers has ever interacted with so that they get that kind of capability. And using it for customer service, first line requests, so that you know, when those calls come in, they don't have to wait, you know, because Dave might be having lunch at the time, they can get a much, much faster response as well. So, all throughout, I would say if you're not playing around with how to use AI in your business, you're falling behind at this point. Now, I want to be very clear. I don't believe that AI is going to take over someone's business. I mean, maybe at some point in the far future that'll happen. But I think the way I look at it is while I'm not going to get replaced by AI, what might happen is I might get replaced by someone who uses AI effectively to be three to five times more productive in my business. And that's why I want to be the one who knows how to do that and use that and be the three to five times more productive person. So that would be my multiplier.

Tom DuFore: 33:30

The final question we ask every guest, Dave, is what does success mean to you?

SPEAKER_01: 33:35

You know, it's really about freedom of choice. You know, in the like I've gotten the chance to know quite a few centimillionaires, you know, and and a couple of billionaires. And, you know, they're not that much happier than me. I mean, they have a lot nicer things and they have, you know, more places to go and a private jet, right? But really, for me, what entrepreneurship is all about is being able to get freedom. And if I'm a slave to my business, but I'm a business owner, you know, who has to work 24 hours a day when I don't want to. I mean, if you love to work and you get to work and you go to work and you love it, bless your heart. Like work for as long as you want, you know, like I hope. But for me, success is really about being able to have the resources to be able to prioritize effectively, focus on the relationships that are most important for me and my life. And holy moly, I get to work on stuff that I would do for a hobby if I wasn't doing it for a job. Right. And there's not that many people out there who can honest to goodness say that that's what they get to do each day. So for me, success is about being able to have an attitude where I get to do the things that I do, as opposed to having an attitude where I have to do the things that I do each day.

Tom DuFore: 34:59

Very, very well said. Well, Dave, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you're hoping to share or get across that you haven't had a chance to yet?

SPEAKER_01: 35:08

You've done a terrific job. You've been a fantastic interviewer. It's just been a real pleasure to be able to come on here with you and chat about this stuff and talk about a few of my successes and failures. And hopefully some of the folks who are listening to this might be able to take something out of this and maybe even make their business run faster or like multiply what they're doing and you know, be able to get some more customers. So if that's all that happens, man, it'll be a great day.

Tom DuFore: 35:37

Dave, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. And let's go ahead and jump into today's three key takeaways. So, takeaway number one is when Dave was talking about how to conduct the first appointment that gets booked through a system or really just any longtime follow-up, reacquaintance, check-in meeting. And the idea is to not sell, just reconnect. It should be joyful. It should be a great experience. And who doesn't like getting an email from an old friend or an old contact? And remember, don't try to sell your product or service, whatever you might be engaging in. Just have a conversation. It will come up organically. Number two, focus on one thing when you're having this meeting with the person. Can I be of service? How can I help them? Remember, let's just talk about the needs of your friend. It should be relational. Think of it as relational, not transactional. Takeaway number three is when he talked about a multiplier and he said, I might not get replaced by AI, but I might get replaced by the person who knows how to use AI. I thought that was brilliantly said and very, very well constructed of a comment. So just to get you thinking about how to start using this as a tool, thinking, reflecting back to the late 90s and into the early 2000s and thinking back then, and where people weren't necessarily replaced by the Internet, but someone who knew how to use the Internet as a tool to help them certainly and likely progressed quicker and faster than someone who didn't. And now it's time for today's win-win. Today's win-win came at the end of the episode when he talked about a make, and he gave this idea and said that there were two kinds of people in Silicon Valley. And he said there are missionaries and there are mercenaries. He said he's a missionary. I thought the way he described this was fantastic because I think this applies to just about any business or any industry. If you're a missionary, hiring mercenaries does not seem to be congruent with the kind of business you're running. If you're a mercenary, hiring a missionary is probably not going to work out all that well long-term. Or if you're working for a mercenary, and this can apply the same to recruiting franchisees, helping your franchisees recruit, providing guidelines or structure as franchisees are recruiting staff. Understanding that from a broad picture, I think, is a great takeaway from the episode and just a great win-win today. That's the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at BigSkyFranchise Team.com to schedule your free no obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.