Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com and a man who should know better than to keep his mic too far away from his mouth. People need to hear me. You know what? Instead of my usual intro, Brady, Brady Lewis, my guest, I’ve got to read you this email that you sent me from 2012.
Brady: Oh, boy.
Andrew: You said, “Funny thing–I’m leaving right now to seclude myself in my cabin in the woods for a full week to listen to as many Mixergy interviews on sales strategies as I can find and I plan on coming back with the plan. I plan on being on your program someday to tell everyone how helpful Mixergy was in allowing me to build my billion dollar business. I can’t wait to talk to you later. I’m practicing my story hahaha. Check us out so you’ll remember this when we’re the shizz.”
Brady: Oh my gosh. I forgot I wrote that.
Andrew: Yeah.
Brady: That’s funny.
Andrew: That’s because I asked for some feedback. You emailed me some great feedback. I said something like, “How do I improve my pitch for Mixergy Premium?” You said, “How about just including a link to it?” And I replied back and I said, “Of course.” And you emailed me back and said, “Is this really you or is this some kind of automated system and then we got into a back and forth where this email came from.” Long time, huh?
Brady: That was a long time ago. A lot has happened. And I didn’t remember that I had done that, but now it makes for a great story.
Andrew: Yeah, it really does. So, I should introduce you as the founder of Allmoxy. Allmoxy is a cloud-based software suite for manufacturing companies. Now, I know for people who aren’t your clients, that won’t really make much sense. So, let me look at your website and find a couple of ways to explain what Allmoxy does. Basically it allows manufacturing companies to organize their businesses. That means get paid. It means manage their supplies. It means manage their employees. It means automating their business, which was huge for you. That’s what the business is about, right?
Brady: That’s right. Yeah.
Andrew: Cool. And we’re going to find out how you built it to a billion dollars?
Brady: No.
Andrew: Not yet.
Brady: Almost there.
Andrew: I like the drive, though.
Brady: We’re creeping along. We’ll get there, Andrew.
Andrew: By the way, you’re from Utah. Do you feel like there’s something about Utah entrepreneurs that makes you guys be willing to aim for a billion dollar business?
Brady: We’re pretty ambitious here.
Andrew: Yeah.
Brady: Yeah. I don’t know, something in the water. I don’t want this to get religious, but I think the Mormon culture does rub off on a lot of people around here.
Andrew: I feel that too.
Brady: There’s something about the culture. There’s a lot of ambition and drive, a lot of self-improvement. So, I think that does leak into everything I do. Maybe.
Andrew: I’m curious about where you were mentally at that period where you going to seclude yourself in the cabin and figure out the plan that helped you get here. But first, I’ve got to say thank you to my sponsor, Pipedrive.
Let me tell you guys how Pipedrive revolutionized my business and how it could help you. If you’re doing any kind of sales–if you’re listening to my voice right now and doing any kind of sales, this can revolutionize your business too.
Here’s the thing, Mixergy used to be really chaotic. I had to scramble at the last minute to find a guest. I had to book all guests myself because the system was–there was no system. Then I signed up for Pipedrive, where the system basically there says, “What are your steps to closing a sale? You can change it any time, but just tell us what your steps are.”
So, I laid them out. I have to suggest guests. I have to find an email address, etc. I put them in there. And then I was able to every time I had a new idea for a guest, drop them into the first column and then move the card that represented that guest to the “Find Email” column whenever I found their email address, then invite them to do an interview and move to the “Invited to do an Interview” column. Inevitably, people will not respond to the first invitation. So, I send them a reminder. That goes to the next column and so on, until we get to column number ten, which is what we’re doing right now which means the interview is done.
Because Pipedrive is up in the cloud, everyone on my team including a virtual assistant who I’ve never met before, a woman named Stephanie, can work and collaborate on the process by doing things like what Stephanie does. She finds the email addresses so I don’t have to do it myself.
All right. That’s Mixergy. You guys who are listening to my voice are not running Mixergy. You don’t care about Mixergy. How does this apply to you? Well, if you’re selling, what Pipedrive will ask you is, “What are your steps to selling?” You could make it up right now because you could adjust later.
Maybe step number one is find some prospects. Maybe step number two is find their email addresses. Step number three–find their Twitter accounts. Step number four–tweet them something completely away from your businesses. Then next step, email them something–whatever your process is. Then finally send them and email asking if you can make a phone call after you’ve warmed them up a bit and then make a phone call and so on.
Whatever your process is, Pipedrive will let you lay it out. Then it will hold you accountable to hit your numbers for how many people you add to your pipeline, how many people you follow up with, etc. to make sure that you can get those sales closed and if you need to bring other people on the team to maybe find email addresses for you or send out the first message or follow up, etc., Pipedrive allows you to do all that.
Now, I could describe it, but the best way to really see how it will change your business is to experience it. If you go to Pipedrive.com/Mixergy, they’ll give you a free account. Yes, Brady, you’re raising your hand.
Brady: I have a friend. I don’t use it myself. Part of our software includes a CRM solution. But I have a friend that uses Pipedrive and he loves it.
Andrew: The way I found it is by hearing a guest here on Mixergy talk about it and he had this cult-like affection for it, so I cut him off. I assumed he was getting paid by Pipedrive. It wasn’t until later on that he said, “Look, I’m not getting paid. Try them out.” I tried it out. I fell in love also and I’ve been raving about them forever.
Brady: I’ve heard good things.
Andrew: And now they’re sponsoring. Now, they’re completely out of the tech community, so I feel like they’re not known outside of our little cult. They decided to buy a few ads on Mixergy to see if they could start spreading awareness.
All right. Go to Pipedrive.com/Mixergy, sign up. In three months, you’ll see it will revolutionize your business or just cancel if it doesn’t. But I believe it will. I’m grateful to them for sponsoring.
Brady, thanks for being here.
Brady: Thanks for having me. It’s an honor. I’ve been listening for years and I’m just glad to be here.
Andrew: Thanks. And you’re one of the original premium members and when you went to seclude yourself in that cabin, what were you going through that you needed to go and get some space and focus?
Brady: To be honest–and again, I didn’t even remember this. Even talking to your producer, this didn’t come. I was in a pretty dark place, one of many, I think. As we all know, entrepreneurs have a lot of, I think, dark periods. That was one for me.
I was feeling the pressure of having gone several years without revenue. We had put a lot of money into this and I’m just not naturally–I don’t love the sales process. And I love the product. I love the innovation part of the automating and the systems. So, for me, sales isn’t exciting. So, I finally had to just go say, “Look, I’ve got to figure out how we’re going to get the sales we need to make this company work and go seclude myself, make myself do this.”
Yeah. That is exactly what I did. I had a whole bunch of Mixergy interviews. I had them all downloaded. I just went out there and pounded through them. I had five pages of notes. I implemented–I made a whole sales and marketing plan out of that trip.
Andrew: Do you still have that now?
Brady: I think I do. It’s a Google Doc somewhere. I can look that up. That would be interesting to do.
Andrew: All right. Let’s just set it up a little bit so people understand where you’re coming from with this software and how you ended up spending all this money that you needed to recoup by increasing your sales. You’re a guy who, when you were a kid, you were sitting in your tighty-whities, you said, when your dad came over to you with a bowl of what?
Brady: Oh, this is funny. Sawdust–so, a bowl of sawdust.
Andrew: Sawdust? Why did he bring sawdust over in a bowl?
Brady: So, my dad was still a steel mill worker. He worked at Nucor Steel. Both my parents were entrepreneurs, actually. At this moment, my dad had decided to quit Nucor, a safe, secure job and start a cabinet company in my grandma’s chicken coop.
So, a big step, obviously. There hadn’t been any entrepreneurs, really, in our family that I know of. So, it was a big step for him. He came to us. Me and my little brothers, they were twins. We’re all in our tighty-whities there at the bar. He sat down these bowls of sawdust. We were eating cereal, right? He said with this solemn face, “Kids, it’s going to be rough around here.”
They explained what we were going to do and that as a family we were going to need to pull together and go through this together, but there may be big rewards in the end but that it was going to take a significant amount of sacrifice. He said that, “From now on, we’ll be eating sawdust.” I remember my little kid mind. I wasn’t excited about it, but I was willing. And I thought, “We could do this.” It turns out he was kidding and I’m glad he was. I will never forget that moment ever.
Andrew: It was his way of saying, “All the food that’s coming into your mouth from now on has got to come in from this cabinet business that we’re building, this carpentry business with all the sawdust. It’s going to happen right here where we live and we’re going to do it together.”
Brady: Yeah. And we’re all going to have to make sacrifices. Dad can’t just be there all the time anymore like he used to be.
Andrew: He’s going to be in a chicken coop.
Brady: He might, yeah.
Andrew: Why the chicken coop? How big is a chicken coop that you guys can actually start sawing in there?
Brady: This one was a little bit bigger than a chicken coop. It was technically a chicken coop. I don’t know, probably like 30×20 feet was where he started. Yeah. So, I would stand on a milk carton and I would sand doors for him. And he would hide dollar bills in piles of sawdust. So, as I’d clean them up, I’d find the money. So, he found ways to include the family and have us all–from a very early age, I learned to work. That was it. We were expected to contribute and be part of the business in both my mom and dad’s businesses.
Andrew: And one of the reasons why I’m asking you all this is because I want to get to know you, but the other is that this is what led you to create software for a community that is underserved. Most people are thinking about how they live within the tech bubble and how they’re going to create software for other people who live in the tech bubble with them. Your idea kind of came out of left field. Who thinks about what software manufacturing companies want? Who thinks about how to add cloud-based solutions to manufacturing-based businesses?
And it’s because you lived in it, because you used to grab bills out of sawdust and basically did everything except eat it, that you discovered this. You were working as a kid with your dad. But it was also pretty rough. You told our producer that you and your dad used to butt heads a lot. About what?
Brady: Yeah. So, I mean, we have an interesting relationship. I love my dad. I idolize him, by the way. But he’s from the old school. And he didn’t have tech growing up. Obviously I barely did. So, technology, I think, was a little bit scary, especially when we start talking about putting all your eggs in that basket. Something that he had built over 12-15 years and this group of customers and he had served them and done it manually and now all of a sudden I’m expecting him to hand all those guys over into my system and it was scary for him, I think, and rightly so.
Andrew: But even before then when you were growing up, you used to tell him, “Hey, Dad, I’m going to be an artist.” He used to say, “Just keep sanding.”
Brady: Oh, yeah. So, I’m kind of a creative personality. I like solving problems. He wanted to teach us work ethic, but it was just monotony and I hated it. I was miserable. So, I’d sit there for hours sanding these doors and it was literally hell on me. I would sit there and dream of machines that would do it for me. It honestly made me who I am today, I think. It made me hate it enough, hate monotony, hate things that could be automated, to the point where I sat there and I just dreamt all day of how to automate these things and how to eliminate myself having to do that for the rest of my life.
Andrew: Which is essentially what your business ended up doing.
Brady: Exactly. That is exactly what it ended up doing.
Andrew: I remember my dad used to manufacture women’s clothing in Manhattan–and you can tell why that business didn’t continue after China hit–but he would send me to work at his client’s stores for the summer and I would have to untangle hangers and put alarms and shoes before they went up on the floor. And I would sit there and dream–unlike you, I wouldn’t dream of automating it.
I would just say, “I’ve got to work so hard at school that I never have to spend my whole life doing this.” Because I’d look around and I’d see people in their 20s doing it and I’d see people in their 40s and 50s who were doing essentially the same job. That really pushed me to work hard, to study, to actually care about school or at least books.
Brady: Yeah. And my dad wasn’t so much–neither of my parents finished college. They weren’t very much into education. But it was all about merits, learning to work hard and knowing lots of real life skills, being able to actually do things with your hands and not being scared of anything, really. I grew up, my dad just told me, “Look, there’s as much money as you want to make out there. You just have to go get it. You just have to figure out how to do it.”
So, to me it wasn’t even–I actually didn’t even think that much about school. I was just kind of like, “How do I start a business? How do I start making that money right now?” School was kind of like, “Why would I go to school?”
Andrew: Me too. It wasn’t so much about that. It was just knowledge to start a business. I get that fire and I feel like that’s what Mixergy is about–feeding that fire. There are very few people that have that. Most people just say, “Why aren’t you happy with what you have?” Well, I am happy with what I have. Also, part of my life is trying to build more. That’s part of the fun of it.
Brady: Yeah.
Andrew: And then you couldn’t actually go and start your business. You went to Mexico on a mission.
Brady: Yeah.
Andrew: For the Latter-day Saints? What is called, for the Mormon Church?
Brady: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Andrew: Okay.
Brady: Most people call us the Mormons because of the Book of Mormon. I am a part of that church. Typically, not everyone, but typically the males go out on a mission for two years. I did that. I did two years in Monterrey, Mexico. So, it was amazing. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I had so much experience gained in learning how to meet people, talk to people in any situation or circumstance and actually threatening environments where people don’t want to listen to you.
Andrew: Do you have an example of a time that you went into a threatening environment and had to preach the gospel?
Brady: Yeah. So, this one time–for the most part, we try to not knock doors. We try to stay away from that and just go to people that are actually interested in hearing us. But in this one particular case, we had kind of finished up what we were doing and so we thought, “Oh, we’ll knock a couple doors around here.” So, we did. We knocked this door. This guy opens the door, throws open the door and he’s super just like in your face, wants to fight me almost.
I’m just kind of like–obviously as a representative of Jesus Christ, I should not be threatening back, although I’m only 19. I’m a little bit rough around the edges. So, I probably said some things I should have, not like threatening, but sort of snarky maybe back. In Spanish, when you call someone trucha, it’s like it’s a trout, so it means kind of like a sly fox is in English. So, it’s kind of like, “Oh, sneaky,” or whatever. So, he calls me, “trucha, trucha,” or whatever.
He slammed the door in our face. The next day, we were back in the area. There were all these police in his house. We’re like, “What’s going on here?” “Oh, the guy killed someone at 7:00 last night.” Right after we left.
Andrew: I see.
Brady: We were in this environment where people are hostile and we’re still out there trying to serve. You know, I did the lady’s dishes right next store.
Andrew: What’s a lady’s dishes?
Brady: A lady that lived next door to him.
Andrew: Oh, you actually went and did her dishes?
Brady: Yeah.
Andrew: I’ve heard that that’s part of the process. Can you tilt your camera down a little bit? I think we’re cutting your chin off sometimes. There we go.
Brady: How’s that?
Andrew: Yeah. Good. You know what? I can see how that would make you a better sales person. I remember–I didn’t go to preach any gospel, but I did go dating in LA. I would force myself into situations where if I was interested in having a conversation with a woman, I would just have to push myself to go and do it.
That really pushes you outside of your comfort zone and it forces you to learn how to deal with situations where someone is rejecting you in a very personal way. It’s not like someone hitting a reply in an email and saying, “You suck.” It’s a very personal rejection. Once you deal with that a few times, you grow up and you become more of a person who’s willing to take on bigger challenges.
Brady: Exactly. You hit it right on the head.
Andrew: All right. By the way, I see your eyes are going over to the side. What’s going on, on the side?
Brady: I was trying to dismiss some notifications. I’m sorry.
Andrew: What app is notifying you?
Brady: I’ve got messages up. I thought I had closed it.
Andrew: Is it email messages? Do you allow those to pop up throughout?
Brady: It’s closed, actually. I don’t ever do this. So, I’m not used to it.
Andrew: Are you on a Mac?
Brady: Do not disturb.
Andrew: There you go. So, what was the message? What was it coming from? What app?
Brady: Oh, it was just the native–I’m on a Mac. So, I guess it was a notification.
Andrew: All right. I’ll move on. I was trying to pry into your life a little bit, but it wasn’t anything you noticed enough. All right. So, you’re there. You baptize this guy who’s a security guard. That means a win for you, right? You got him to embrace the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Brady: Yeah.
Andrew: And you he teaches you something.
Brady: Actually, in Mexico, that’s quite common. There were a lot of those.
Andrew: Really?
Brady: Yeah. Oh yeah. So, yeah, this guy’s a security guard at GM. Really cool story–he’s an awesome guy. But yeah, as it pertains to this story, he invites us to tour the GM plant. So, I was interested. We went on a tour. It was pretty inspiring. I had never seen automation like that. I had worked in my dad’s shop my whole life just with these small hand tools and little things.
But this was a whole new–this was a new world for me. I started seeing all the things that I had been dreaming of all growing up, like, “This is what I was talking about. This does exist.” And I was really excited. It just inspired me, the level of organization and automation in that plant.
So, I can remember walking through there. I actually remember the thought right now. I can remember seeing the tape on the floor. I remember thinking, “I’m going to go back to Utah and I want to do this to my dad’s shop.” At the same time, he’s sending me letters and stuff and he’s talking about how stressful his life is.
When I grew up, the guy would go to work every morning and throw up. I don’t know about every morning, but all the time. He’s so stressed trying to run and grow this business. He would just go in the bathroom and throw up every morning like it was part of the job.
Andrew: I can’t imagine watching my dad or knowing my dad was doing that.
Brady: Yeah. It was excruciating. And he’s such a hard worker, doing everything for us. I wanted to help. I just felt so inspired by what I saw there. I knew that we could bring back some of those principles and apply them there and help my dad out.
Andrew: All right. So, you come back to the US and it’s time for you to start applying some of those principles. What’s the first thing you did?
Brady: So, I started at the bottom of the barrel. My dad put me at the very lowest position in the shop, which is sanding doors, which is what I did when I was a kid. So, here I am, 20 years old, 21, whatever, starting at the bottom, which I’m so grateful for.
Andrew: Even when you came back he had you sanding doors again?
Brady: I started at $13 an hour and I was sanding doors.
Andrew: Okay.
Brady: So, I was literally just like any other employee out there. I’m going to maximize this. Does it look like I’m looking all over the place?
Andrew: Yeah, it does. Here’s the trick to looking really good on a webcam for your audience–make my video really small, my window small and move it up above everything else to the top of your screen so it sits just under your webcam, that way when you’re looking at me, it will seem to the audience that you’re looking them right in the eye.
Brady: There we go. How’s that?
Andrew: Good.
Brady: Okay. Sorry.
Andrew: No problem. So, you’re back. It’s time for you to take this–you’re back at the bottom of the barrel, as you said, even though you had learned so much and you were so good at sales. You’re sanding doors, which is the worst job, apparently, there. You’re thinking about machines, I imagine, all over again, but this time you have context. You know what kind of machines you want. You’re also looking around and realizing all these other problems that your dad has at his manufacturing company. One of them was you guys were extending credit to cabinet makers. What was the problem with that?
Brady: Yeah. So, in that industry, in his business, he’d produce cabinet parts and doors for these cabinet shops. He’d send them out and a month later, he’d get around to invoicing them. And then two months after that, he’d realize, “Oh my gosh, these are past due and I have wood bills due.” And he’d start calling a couple of them and then they’d say, “Oh yeah, I’ll get to it next week.” So, the cash flow was just a nightmare for him. So, yeah, he’s giving all this credit to all these wood shops and just being starved.
Andrew: I see. It wasn’t that you guys were the cabinet makers. It was the wood shops. What’s the difference? If you guys are cabinet makers, aren’t you buying from wood shops and they would be extending you credit?
Brady: Yeah. So, we’re outsource manufacturers for cabinet shops.
Andrew: I see.
Brady: When you walk into a cabinet shop, you’re talking to them and you think that all the stuff is coming from them, but they’re buying it from us.
Andrew: Got it. So, you guys were giving them credit saying, “Hey, look, we’ll ship over the cabinets that we made. You can pay us later on.” The problem with that, of course, is…?
Brady: Yeah, cash flow. We had people all the time that would just come and go. We’d get taken for $40,000 here, $20,000 there. And I would just sit there and watch my dad lose all this money and it was just excruciating.
Andrew: So, it was lots of little problems you were discovering. Actually, it doesn’t sound like little–lots of big problems you were discovering. Which was the first one you decided to attack and the one that led to Allmoxy being its own company?
Brady: It happened organically. I’m so glad that it did. Literally, so I started sanding doors and I would literally just kind of move up. As I learned how to master that, I would hire someone under me and just keep moving up. So, by the time I kind of went through it, I was in the office then and it was my job. I was trying to replace my dad at that point, he was doing all the cutlets. So, he’d get a fax in. He’d pick it up and he’d type it into an Excel. And some neighbor had written a thing that would translate out and give him the door parts that he needed for that.
So, it didn’t work all the time. If there were any special modifications that had to happen, that was broken, blah, blah, blah. There were lots of problems with that. And it took forever. It was a full-time job for him. So, he was spending eight hours a day doing that.
Andrew: Just putting faxes into an Excel spreadsheet so the Excel spreadsheet can say, “If you want to make this cabinet, here are the pieces you need to create.”
Brady: Yeah. That’s it. Just calculating all the parts for the cabinet doors, for example. So, yeah, I threw myself into that. I started by just improving the spreadsheet. I didn’t have any ambitions–I didn’t even know about cloud-based computing. Internet was still kind of AOL-ish. So, things were young.
But I just started going to town on this Excel sheet and I realized that I really liked it and I loved the fact that I could make one modification to a big old formula and all of a sudden save myself 20 minutes a day and then 40 minutes here and then an hour there. I just sat and watch it start to melt away. I thought, “This is amazing.” So, it just kept going. We went from there to Access.
Andrew: Access is the database software that Microsoft includes with their Office Suite if you buy the higher level Office Suite.
Brady: Yeah. So, typical me, I’m like, “I’m going to do it myself.” So, I went to like a community college class on Access and figured out how to get everything from an Excel into Access. So, at least it was on our network now and multiple people could look at it in different ways. And then of course we quickly found limitations there and decided to take it to the web.
Andrew: Okay. And when it’s time to take it to the web, you don’t know how to code for that and you’re not going to go and take another college class for that, so what did you do?
Brady: So, I naively thought that we were just building a website. The way that I pitched it to my dad–and thank goodness. He would have shut me down instantly if he knew that seven years later we’ve put $1.5 million into this. So, I pitched this like $25,000 website. It’s going to help us capture orders and then we’ll see where it goes from there.
Andrew: Just capture orders. It wasn’t even going to break down for him what he needed to build. So, you said new source of customers for us.
Brady: We’ll capture orders and yeah, we’ll start the process of converting all that information into parts. We’ll start down that road. So, I hired my brother’s roommate at the time. He was just graduating college and he’s like, “Oh yeah, I can do it. Whatever.” He had no idea what he was doing either and said, “Yeah, I’ll do it for that.” And we started and just naively went down this road.
Andrew: And how long did it take him to build it?
Brady: The very first version, I think, was about a year. Part of that was him going on vacation to the Middle East and leaving us hanging. We had all kinds of issues.
Andrew: Doesn’t that freaking drive you nuts?
Brady: Yeah. I mean, I guess you kind of get what you pay for.
Andrew: $25,000 is a lot of money.
Brady: Yeah, and I don’t think we were even at that at that point. We were probably half of that at that point. So, we were all just naïve and just iterating and didn’t know any better.
Andrew: Okay. So, you get that first version. Is it good?
Brady: Yeah. So, after the first year, it was good. It captured the order. It was all hard-coded, though. So, everything was hard code. This was no Allmoxy. This was Lewis Cabinet’s ordering system.
Andrew: Okay. Lewis Cabinets is the name of your dad’s cabinet company.
Brady: Yeah.
Andrew: I see. Your dad could not have any easy way to add a new kind of cabinet if he wanted to make it.
Brady: Right.
Andrew: He couldn’t make any adjustments to the output that came out at all.
Brady: It was all hard-coded. We had to call the developer and say, “Here’s what we want to do.” So, there was no system. This was something that we had built. It worked. But it was kind of like the Excel sheet. He was used to that anyway. If you wanted a change, you had to call your neighbor and have him come over and work on it.
Andrew: I see. All right.
Brady: So, it did work and when we launched it, I was scared. I was scared to death because I had spent the last year, year and a half arguing with my dad about the feasibility of this. I had put everything on it. I had sworn up and down that it was the future and that it was going to work and blah, blah, blah.
I was nervous. When it came down to it, I was dealing with our family’s livelihood in my hands. And he was going to trust me with that. I was nervous. I also at the same time, we decided to go cold turkey. We were not going to accept any faxes ever again.
Andrew: This wasn’t we. This was you imposing this. So, in addition to beings scared, you said, “I will take this up a notch and say, ‘We will not accept any more faxes. People have to use our website,'” before you even had confidence that the site was going to do what it needed to do. How did your dad react to that?
Brady: He was furious. I remember arguments we had that were quite–and justifiably so. Now looking back, I could have argued the same things in his corner.
Andrew: So, why was it important to you? Why was it important to you to say, “I’m going to shut down the fax?” Why not make the website so good that people stop using the fax?
Brady: Because of the industry we’re in. People just don’t like change. If they have their way, they’re going to just do it the old way. I knew that. I knew that these guys were not going to jump on to some new technology. They’re not like me. They don’t want to do that, really. There’s just no incentive.
As much as I try to sell it to them, “Oh, you’re going to save time. You’re going to know this. You’re going to know that. You’re going to know your price immediately, blah, blah, blah.” They weren’t going to hear it and I knew that. I knew that arguing with my dad because he is our customer. He is just like most of them. So, I knew if we didn’t go cold turkey that I wasn’t going to have a chance to really show what this could do. It was scary, but I’m glad we did it.
Andrew: One of his arguments was, “Look, our customers really are set in their ways. If you change this, it’s very possible that they just won’t come back and buy from us.” Did you lose a lot of business?
Brady: We lost one customer for only a couple of weeks. Yeah. So, I was so relieved. He was a big customer at the time. But he called and he left dirty messages and told us he wasn’t going to use it anymore and we were done doing business. And he did. He came back a couple of weeks later and he’s still one of our best customers today.
Andrew: Okay. So now you’ve got people on this website. It’s not great for them yet because they like the fax machine. But it eventually becomes better experience for them as they get used to it. More importantly for you guys, it simplifies things on the back end a little bit. What point did you start to really add more simplicity, more functionality for yourselves on the back end?
Brady: Yeah. At that moment when I turned around in my chair and I’m like, “I’m not inputting orders anymore. I have a full day.”
Andrew: Oh, I see. So, right from the start was it able to do that?
Brady: Yeah.
Andrew: Oh, I see. So, even though it wasn’t a drastic difference, just having all the data go directly into what–actually, sorry, I don’t mean to seem so clueless, but I don’t understand. The first version of the site still let someone order a cabinet and send to you guys all the pieces that you needed to make for that person.
Brady: Yeah.
Andrew: So, that’s essentially what the spreadsheet did?
Brady: Yeah.
Andrew: Oh, wow. All right. So, you replaced the spreadsheet completely and nobody even had to enter data into the spreadsheet?
Brady: Exactly.
Andrew: Ah, that’s a huge step forward for you guys. All right. Now, we’re still not at Allmoxy. This is still software built internally. At what point do you say, “Let’s take this and this is the new business?”
Brady: So, we started having some success, right? At that point, I turn around and I’m like, “I have all day. That worked amazing. What else can we do with this? Let’s repeat.” So, as problems would walk in the door, we’d just try to automate them and systemize them and put them in this new platform, this new thing.
Andrew: Okay. What’s the next big problem that you remember?
Brady: So, inventory. So, it was then my job to go around and figure out how much wood we needed for that order that came in and how much do we have. We had no real system to do that. That was a no-brainer. We got the order coming in. We’re doing calculations already, figure how much wood we need, figure out the waste yields and spit out the PO. So, we built that and again, turn around and we’re losing office employees. The system is just working as our customers type in their orders.
Andrew: Okay. And when do you finally say, “It’s time to take this out?”
Brady: So, I think people started to notice that our efficiency was going up. We had a little bit of chatter. At the time, our nearest competitor had about 15 people in the office. We had 3. So, it was kind of a talking point. And I think people in the industry started to say, “Where can we get something like this?” Our customers started to ask us, “Hey, what are you guys using? How is that you look up my orders so fast? How is it that you only have three people in the office?” Oh, and then we did get an offer form a competitor. He was kind of a competitor at the time. He was in a different region. He wanted to buy it for $50,000.
Andrew: To software? For himself or for others?
Brady: For himself.
Andrew: He just said, “I’m not looking to compete with you guys on this software. I don’t want to create a business out of it. I’ll pay you $50,000. Let me implement this in my business.”
Brady: Yeah.
Andrew: Interesting. Just for context, you guys sell for how much a month?
Brady: Well, it’s based on a percentage of transactions. Our average customer is like $1,500 a month.
Andrew: All right. And this guy was willing to pay $50,000. So, there’s some evidence that there’s a market for this software.
Brady: Yeah. My mind just kind of starts churning like, “Okay, well, there’s more than one of him out there and he wants to pay $50,000.” And my dad was wanting to take it and I’m like, “Wait a minute.” That’s when SaaS was starting to make sense in my mind. I’m starting to think, “The problem we’ve got here is we’ve hard-coded this for our business. What happens when he wants to do something else?” He has different variables, different cut variables, different supply names, different door products. So, I started thinking, “Oh, we should rewrite this and sell it to everyone that does this type of a business.”
Andrew: Okay. So, where do you get the developer who’s going to do that for you?
Brady: So, our guy that’s my brother’s roommate had kind of one MIA. He’s a great guy. But he had gone to the Middle East. But he had kind of given us a lead of this guy that he had worked with. I think he had peddled some work to him before. So, yeah, I just went and met with him and told him what we were wanting to do. We wanted to rewrite the thing to a more open platform. Again, there was naïveté on both sides. We thought we’d do this in a year or whatever and we just got to work.
Andrew: So far I’m not seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars. You said it cost over $1 million, right? So, this is after the launch.
Brady: Yeah. So, this has been going on for seven years now. We just keep putting more and more features, more functionality into the thing. So, yeah, we’ve spent a considerable amount at this point on the feature set.
Andrew: All right. So, 2008, let’s go back to that time. That’s when you finally get your developer. He builds it for you. You guys launch. I’m looking at the version of the site that was up back then. Headline was, “Your Big Competition Just Got Smaller.” I love the reaction from people when I say I’m looking at the old website.
Brady: I can’t even do it, Andrew.
Andrew: It’s fun to go back sometimes. “We turn common sense business into web applications for small and medium-sized businesses. We level the playing field by providing software that is simple, accessible from anywhere and powerful.” I actually am not doing it justice. The way I’m reading it is not doing it justice. Let me read that again. “We turn common sense business into web applications for small and medium-sized businesses. We level the playing field by providing software that is simple, accessible from anywhere and powerful.”
Brady: So, this is a 25-year old kid that grew up in the country running a wood shop who’s trying to figure out how to run a tech company.
Andrew: All right. But you ended up doing well with it. So now the software is up on its own. Is this when you’re starting to struggle to get customers or in the beginning the customers start to come to you?
Brady: It’s been a struggle from the beginning. You know, what we did is pretty much built this with the knowledge that at best, this is another business and at worst, this is something that is going to make Lewis Cabinet a standout business.
Andrew: Okay.
Brady: So, we knew that going in. If we don’t get a single customer, we’re still willing to put this into it because it’s giving us that much benefit. Actually, that still works. It still rings true even if we haven’t had customers, which I like. But anyway, so, of course, my dad wanted to see that investment going somewhere. That’s hard-earned money and he wanted to see sales.
Andrew: And he’s from Utah. They don’t just take things. They don’t just allow expenses to go out the door. They want them to come back with friends. You send a dollar out the door, it better come back with a couple of friends. So, one of the ways you got your first customers was you went to an annual tradeshow.
Brady: Yeah. I fought it for years. Actually, we didn’t even tell anyone, really, about our product for the first four years, probably. We kind of buried our head. We used Lewis Cabinet as our beta customer. We tried new ideas. We built it. We put features and figured out the bugs and made it work there first. We really didn’t tell anyone about it. I did that as long as I can hold off everyone. I know that goes really against a lot of what startups teach. But that was what made sense at the time in our business.
Andrew: Why? Did it really in retrospect make sense to keep this all built for yourself instead of starting to get some new customers?
Brady: Yes. The only reason is this. One, because of resources. Had I gone out and raised money, maybe. But I don’t know that I could have even done that. But the industry just really wasn’t ready for anything like this back then. They’re just now really getting ready for it. People are just now using email daily, which sounds absurd, but it’s true.
So, even five to seven years ago, it was just too early. I think that it did end up working out just fine, really incubating it and working things out so that when we did go out public with it, it worked and it worked for these old school ornery woodworkers that are very harsh judges.
Andrew: All right. Now I’m looking at your site from July, 2011. There’s a lot more going on, on the site. One of the things that’s on there is the AWFS Las Vegas show, right? Is that where you guys got your first big set of customers?
Brady: Yeah, I believe so. Our first tradeshow–no, our first tradeshow was in Atlanta. It must have been right before that. That was ’11, you say?
Andrew: Uh-huh. So, you got a booth somewhere maybe in early ’11?
Brady: Yeah, probably. I didn’t want to do it. I thought, “This is a tech company. I’m just going to put it out there and viral media is just going to bring the masses.” I was dumb. So, I fought tradeshows and that type of marketing for a long time.
What kind of inspired me–there was an award that I had kind of grown up knowing about. It was called the Challenger Award. They give it to an innovative company in the woodworking industry. In my mind I’m like, “This is the most innovative thing this industry has seen in like a long time. It’s a complete departure.” I’m like, “I can win this.” So, that’s what actually–
Andrew: I see. This is the International Woodworking Fair in Atlanta. They had the Challenger Award. You said, “You know what? Tradeshows are not for high tech companies. They are for woodworking companies. I’m high tech. I’ll work on viral media. But I do want to win this award and I believe I can win it.” So, that’s what drew you there. That’s what got you to get a booth. All right. How did the booth work out?
Brady: I’ve never been a guy to go for awards. But I think the fact that I grew up in this industry and I had seen the trophies sitting there and, I don’t know, something nostalgic about it. I thought, “Wouldn’t that be cool if my dad saw me win this award?” So, that’s what kind of got me there. I’m glad I did it. We didn’t win it. We didn’t make it to the finals. I still don’t think they know what the hell we’re doing. I really don’t. They don’t understand anything about it. So, we’ve never won anything in the industry even though we’re turning a lot of heads.
But it got us there. It got my butt out into the industry. It went well. It was the first time that I realized, “Okay, this are real, critical, ornery wood workers and my booth is full of people and they want my product and I actually have a real business besides just what I’ve done for my family here.” It was pretty liberating. I remember just being elated thinking, “Okay, the past five years I haven’t just been delusional. This does work.” So, I was pretty excited.
Andrew: You told Jeremy Weisz our producer, “The leads from that tradeshow fed us for a year.” What does that mean?
Brady: Yeah. That’s pretty much how it’s been since then. We go to one tradeshow a year. We have a bunch of people sign up. By a bunch, I mean maybe ten, which is very small. And those people in the past have been a high-volume customer that take a long time to get implemented, setup and running. So, yeah, we’d work on setting them up and getting them running over the whole year. So, we just do one tradeshow, set everyone up. By the time we got them done, another tradeshow would hit.
Andrew: So, it takes you a year to get someone up and running?
Brady: It used to.
Andrew: I see. So, you’d have a lead and you’d say, “I’ve got to work with this guy first. Everyone else has to wait.” Once you’re done with the first customer, you’d go to the next one and the next and the next.
Brady: No, no, they weren’t leads. They were actual signups. They were handing us checks. They were saying, “Okay, I’m going to pay you to get me up and running.” There’s a lot of work to get their custom cabinet catalogue up and running.
Andrew: I see. Because you need to put all their stuff into your system and that takes a while, months.
Brady: Not anymore. But yes, that’s how it was back then.
Andrew: Okay.
Brady: So, we realized early on that’s what’s going to limit this company’s growth, all the time that it takes to do that. So, we’ve seen automated most of that and eliminated a lot of it. But yeah, back in the day, that’s what it was.
Andrew: All right. Then in 2014, you became profitable. Do you remember what got you there?
Brady: No, not a big event or anything.
Andrew: It was just more of what you were doing. More tradeshows, more onboarding, constantly improving the software.
Brady: Yeah.
Andrew: Before we started I asked you what share of your revenue comes from the cabinet company that your dad started to kind of get a sense of, “Is this whole company really being propped up by the cabinet business?” And you said how much? What does your dad’s business pay?
Brady: They are one of our bigger customers. They pay about $4,500 a month.
Andrew: $4,500 a month. And overall revenue is?
Brady: About $50,000.
Andrew: $50,000 a month?
Brady: We do about a half a million a year.
Andrew: So, your dad’s company is about ten percent of the business.
Brady: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. And actually, maybe it’s hard to make a distinction because Allmoxy is also your dad’s company too, right? You guys share the business.
Brady: Yeah. He’s part of the ownership. Yeah. He’s on a mission, by the way. He’s in Hawaii.
Andrew: You guys still do missions now and he’s just going out to Hawaii to hang out and needed an excuse to tell everyone?
Brady: No, he’s working. He’s at the Polynesian Cultural Center and he’s working as a service missionary. So, he’s basically retired. But he does have ownership. Yeah.
Andrew: What’s a service missionary?
Brady: So, he’s actually helping with the maintenance. They have a lot of attractions and stuff. He helps to just–
Andrew: By the way, you guys don’t drink coffee, right?
Brady: No.
Andrew: You don’t drink coffee personally?
Brady: There are a lot of people–like even my wife drinks coffee. It’s kind of one of those a little bit grey areas. The more, I guess, orthodox people in the church don’t do it.
Andrew: I stopped drinking caffeine a few days ago, maybe ten days ago. It’s easy except when it’s hard. There are times when I just feel like, “I could use one right now. I think I can get a boost.”
Brady: Here’s the thing. I’m going to admit some hypocrisy here. I drink Diet Coke like it’s going out of style.
Andrew: I’ve actually heard that’s okay. I’ve got Mormon fans so I’ve been prying all kinds of information out of them, most times personal stuff. Sometimes it’s about what they drink. Is it true that it’s no hot liquids? That’s the problem, not caffeine.
Brady: So it’s a general set of guidelines. It’s kind of one of those spirit of the law/letter of the law things. That’s why you see different people in the church taking it different ways. You’ll see some people in the church saying, “We can’t drink coffee.” And some people in the church saying, “It’s just hot drinks.” There are other people that look down on me and they’re like, “You shouldn’t be drinking that Diet Coke.”
Andrew: Are you going to hate that this is all public now, that everyone is going to know that you drink Diet Coke?
Brady: No, no, no. I publish it all over the place. I love Diet Coke.
Andrew: You told Jeremy–where is that? Let me do a search for punch in my notes. There it is. You at one point texted or messaged your developer and said, “I’m stepping away and coming to your house to punch you in the face. I’ll be there in 30 minutes.” What got you to say that to him? What’s going on here?
Brady: I forgot I said all this. This is funny.
Andrew: Jeremy is good.
Brady: Yeah. He has a knack for prying information out of you. My developer and I have had a very rocky go at things. I don’t want to stereotype. But as a lot of developers are, kind of introverted, very logical, maybe not strong in the people skills–no offense to all you guys. I know a lot of developers are listening. He’s especially one of those cases. He’s great. He’s brilliant.
Andrew: What could he possibly say to make you say, “I’m stepping away and coming to punch you in the face?”
Brady: I called him a douchebag just yesterday, in fact.
Andrew: I see. This is just your way of talking with him. The two of you do get frustrated with each other, but you’re not looking to punch him in the face.
Brady: I really was going to punch him in the face. I really wanted to.
Andrew: So, what did he do? You don’t remember?
Brady: I don’t remember. The guy has said about everything you can think of. He’s personally insulted me on every level.
Andrew: I’ve heard on multiple chat sessions he has no problem calling you stupid and every few months you guys blow up at each other.
Brady: Things are actually really good right now, knock on wood.
Andrew: They won’t be after I publish this interview.
Brady: I know. Sorry, Josh.
Andrew: He’s the full-time guy with you?
Brady: Yeah. He’s been with us since the beginning, not the very first hard-coded version. But he’s the guy–yeah. So, about seven years. Sorry.
Andrew: When you went into seclusion, what did you come out with? What did you take and learn that you were going to take and build out your business? At the time you were struggling, you didn’t have any sales and then afterwards, the business started to grow.
Brady: Well, admittedly, I left and didn’t do I’m doing now. So, it kind of took me down a path that I’m glad I went down, but it didn’t end up being the ultimate path. So, really what I’m came away with is, “Okay, Allmoxy is long implementation, high value clients. It takes a long time to get setup. We have to do big implementation costs, long sales cycles, blah, blah, blah.” In that world, I knew that I needed to have really good sales teams.
Andrew: Like real people who could make sales calls for you.
Brady: Yeah, sales calls and the whole process, right?
Andrew: This is not a buy some ad words, throw some ads up on Facebook type of business. I see. So, you decided you’re going to start hiring sales people?
Brady: Yeah. I’ve got to hire amazing sales people. I’ve got to put systems in place. These guys are going to have to get really good about getting ornery wood workers on the phone, explaining how they’re going to use technology, blah, blah, blah, over six months, get them to sign up and then actually implement it. And then I’ve got to have good implementation people.
So, I came away with a lot of really good ideas on how to do that. It turns out that’s not the way we ended up going. It worked. The information that I gleaned from Mixergy, if I were going that route, was brilliant. It’s the way that you do it. I learned a lot about doing that. But in the end, we ended up–maybe this is just my personality preference. I told you in the beginning of the interview that I’m not passionate about the sales part of the process, it’s the product for me and it’s getting it out there. I want as many people to use this as possible.
Andrew: What did you do to get more customers if hiring sales people wasn’t the direction you ended up taking? What did you do?
Brady: We went free. We went to a freemium model.
Andrew: Okay.
Brady: Actually I think this is when I got back in contact with you. I had this idea like, “I want to run by someone who talks to a lot of entrepreneurs.” Hold on.
Andrew: Yeah, I didn’t know if I should bring this up because you and I had a few email interactions and I wasn’t sure which ones I should keep private and which ones not. I have a sense I know which one you’re talking about. I can even bring it up if you want.
Brady: Yeah. I don’t care if you do.
Andrew: Where is that?
Brady: Basically I was saying–oh, go ahead.
Andrew: No, you go ahead. I just see the email here. The subject line was, “You. Only You,” meaning just like, “I need you to keep this quiet and I need only your feedback.”
Brady: So, you know what I was using there was I was using techniques from copywriting course that I learned on your show, so a subject line that would get someone’s attention.
Andrew: Well, it worked. I responded.
Brady: It worked. You opened it. So, anyway, my idea was–so, our old model was this. One percent of growth sales through the system and we’d just build it. So, everything that came, every order that came in, we’d take one percent and bill it monthly. People looked at that like, “Uh… Now I’ve got a partner. You’re taking one percent of my business.”
Andrew: Yeah.
Brady: So, it was a hard sell. And it was completely–no one was doing anything like it, anywhere close in the industry. So, me being bull-headed, “No, this is the right way to do it.” I stuck with it for a few years. But finally, after hearing so many times at my dad’s company too, they didn’t mind paying 3.5 percent to be able to accept payment immediately on a credit card. But yet, they wouldn’t pay me 1 percent to run the whole business? This was just appalling to me. I was like, “This just doesn’t make sense.”
So, I sat and fought it for two years, but then I finally just said, “Fine, let’s just get into that business then.” So, I did a lot of research with merchants and how that whole world worked and figured out that, “Hey, let’s just get into that business. We’ll get referral fees and we’ll be free.” So, that’s what it is now. People love it. They love the model.
Andrew: The model is, “You guys can use our software. You can put your catalogue online. You can sell online. We will do online payments for you. We’ll make sure that we’ll collect payments for you. Supply management,” I’m reading directly from your site. “We’ll do all that stuff for you, but you need to use us as your merchant processor.”
Brady: Yeah.
Andrew: By doing that, you get a share of all the revenue they make.
Brady: Yeah. So, we just have a partnership with Stripe. Stripe pays us a check separately.
Andrew: That’s such a freaking brilliant idea. I didn’t realize that was the direction you were going in. I thought this was for another business. I think this would work in so many businesses.
Brady: Yeah. I think you’ll start to see a lot of it, quite frankly. Yeah. And I mean, Square is doing it. You’re starting to see a few things. It’s basically the same. You give your software away and get into the merchant processing business. Yeah. It’s working wonders for us.
Andrew: And there’s no way for me to use if I were one of your clients. There’s no way for me to use my own processor. I can’t bring Authorize.net in.
Brady: …
Andrew: I see. There are ways to work around. I see.
Brady: For a great big VIP customer doing lots of business, there may be a way around it. Let’s just say that.
Andrew: What’s the $4.99 a month then?
Brady: It’s not something we do regularly.
Andrew: What’s $4.99 a month, then?
Brady: Oh, $4.99 a month. I’m actually thinking about taking that down because no one buys it. First of all, it’s a way to sort of give people a sense of the value. I wanted a number that kind of framed the price. So, it’s just for chat support within the app.
So, for $4.99 a month, you basically get a rep that’s dedicated to you and you can be inside your app chatting with us directly. We also do the forums and other ways to get around that if you don’t want to pay $4.99 for the personal attention. A lot of people in this industry just want like, “I want you to hold my hand.” So, that’s what that is.
Andrew: It’s such an interesting model. It’s such a great model. Yeah. This is the model exactly as you described it to me except I didn’t realize you were going to apply it to this in an email on October 22nd, 2014. You said, “Listen, you barely know me and one day I’d like to change that. But I know and respect your stuff,” and then you just went on to explain what you had in mind. I thought you had something completely different in mind. I thought you were going to just start businesses with merchant processing as a requirement and that’s how you were going to take money on an ongoing basis from them.
Brady: It takes a while to sometimes explain all this and sometimes I’m bad at it.
Andrew: What other businesses could this apply to?
Brady: Oh, so when we rewrote it, we said, okay, “Obviously other wood workers would use this, but there’s a whole world of service companies and other types of manufacturing companies that I think need this.” I got talking around to some of my other friends. They were running other businesses, aluminum and different manufacturing.
So, with every feature we built, I tried to keep it as open as we could to other types of businesses. We’ve done a little bit of everything, everything from ChapStick to hamburgers, custom–anything that’s custom and that’s more of a business to business type thing, it just really shines for that.
Andrew: I see. I like that answer and that’s helpful to know, but what I meant was what other businesses could your model be applicable to? I guess any Shopify-type store possibly, but it’s hard to compete with Shopify.
Brady: Anywhere that you’re touching the transaction. In a sense, like Airbnb sort of does this.
Andrew: Right.
Brady: They’re more of a marketplace model, where they’re actually taking on–and we may go to that eventually once we figure out the risk and we want to get into that business a little deeper. But anywhere that a transaction happens between two parties and you can offer some value in the middle and bring these parties together–
Andrew: I can see that–what was it? I interviewed one of the founders of Summit Evergreen. What they do is software for publishing courses online. Let’s see what their pricing is. Their pricing is $99 for the starter package–$99 a month for the starter package. So, they could do this model too. They could say, “It’s free for every single package, but you need our merchant processing account.” That way they could collect payment every time.
Brady: Yeah. And we’re going to lose revenues in some ways. But the dice were rolling. I watched my dad’s company go from accepting credit cards for maybe 20 percent of its payments to now to about 70 or 80 percent. People just like doing business like that. They like the convenience.
Andrew: They used to do checks before?
Brady: Yeah. It was all checks. It was all cash. It was all send an invoice in the mail and then send it back with a check. People just like getting an email that says, “You owe this much. Click here to pay it.” They click. They pay. Done. The convenience is worth it. So, that’s the dice I’m rolling. Everyone will follow suit too. Eventually, the more tools we give people and the easier we make their lives, the more people will want to use the system more to perpetuate itself and we’ll end up making those transactions.
Andrew: There’s a good example of how you’ve helped people. Do you remember that story of you sitting in the Noodles & Company restaurant? What happened there?
Brady: Yeah. This is kind of tender to me. But it was a moment when I think I finally had some satisfaction of like, “What I’m doing, I think, is actually going to matter to humans, to real people.” It’s one thing to make money and have toys and what not. But I really believe that this life is more than just that. This life is about relationships and people. It was at that point that I realized that I’m so glad that I could start to get into that mode of helping people.
This lady had written me–they were one of our first customers. We landed them at that first tradeshow. They signed up, got all their stuff in and were users for a couple years. Her mom ended up getting cancer. Even before this, they had written me a few times saying, “Oh my gosh, thank you so much for building Allmoxy. Now I can spend more time with,” I can’t remember the name of their kid, “At home. Now I can be a stay-at-home mom and I can do all the things that I was doing at the shop at home in half the time and I can devote the rest of the time to my children.”
So, that was already good enough. She talked about in this letter, she wanted me to know that her mother had gotten cancer and that she had been able to spend final days with her and how much it meant to her because she had this software. It’s kind of an exaggerated example. It’s one of those touchy-feelys. But I do. I remember sitting at Noodles & Company reading that email over lunch. It was hard to hold back tears. I remember sitting there all alone, like, “Hey, this is cool. This is what I want to do.”
Andrew: Yeah. And you’ve done it. Congratulations on being on Mixergy. I’d love to have you back on as the business grows. You said that you’ve been listening and you’ve learned a lot. What’s one thing that you got out of Mixergy that allowed you to build Allmoxy up to where it is today?
Brady: Oh my gosh. I don’t think I could do that, Andrew. I’d need another hour. Just little things–you heard me say that the email I sent you was out of copywriting. I think if people listen to Mixergy with an open mind thinking, “What can I take away from it?” Don’t shut off to any type of business just because it’s not mirroring yours.
If you open up and you think, “What can I take away from this very different business and apply it in mind?” That’s what I’ve done. Literally, you could probably attribute all of this in some way shape or form back to Mixergy. I’ve learned a ton from you and your guests, so I appreciate it and it’s been an honor.
Andrew: Well, thank you. Right now, there’s somebody who’s listening to the two of us who is where you were a few years ago trying to figure it out, listening to the interviews, looking for insight into the next step.
Brady: I hope so.
Andrew: If you guys find it and when you do, the person who’s listening to us–when you do find it, not if, I know you will if you’ve listened this far, if you’re this committed. When you do–in fact, even before, I’d love to hear from you today and I’d love to know as you progress. My email address is Andrew@Mixergy.com. Brady, where’s a good way for people to connect with you if they’ve learned something and they want to say thank you for it?
Brady: Sure. Just Brady@Allmoxy.com.
Andrew: Allmoxy. Allmoxy is a really good name.
Brady: Really?
Andrew: Allmoxy.
Brady: I struggled with it on and off.
Andrew: Why?
Brady: Maybe it’s just our industry. People have a hard time, “What the hell? Allmoxy, what’s moxy?”
Andrew: Oh, what’s moxy mean? How do you even describe moxy or define it?
Brady: Moxy is kind of old showbiz term.
Andrew: Yeah, like, “You’ve got moxy, kid.”
Brady: Like, “You’ve got balls,” or, “You get it.” We knew early on that people were either going to get this or not. And then we needed a domain, so we put the all in front of it. So, that’s how we got it.
Andrew: All right. Allmoxy. Congratulations on your success. Thank you everybody for listening to Mixergy. If you like this program, subscribe to the podcast. Go to your favorite podcast player and just look for Mixergy. Thank you all. Bye, everyone.
