Recession Proof: How to snap back from sudden financial loss

Today’s guest is exactly what I was looking for when I put out a call on Twitter saying, “Is there anyone who’s doing well despite what’s going on with Coronavirus?”

Well, Michael Alexis is the inspiration I think we need. Just before this whole thing hit the guy bought Museum Hack, a company that takes you and your loved ones into museums. First of all, you can’t even get into museums right now–but you also can’t get next to your loved ones or anyone else.

How does someone suddenly running this business deal with the situation? He found a way to turn things around. He went online and created a business second business. It’s called Team building.com. They provide team building activities that your people will love, but it’s all done online.

Michael Alexis

Michael Alexis

Team Building

Michael Alexis is the founder of TeamBuilding.com, Virtual Team Building Activities & Online Games for Remote Teams.

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Full Interview Transcript

Andrew Warner 0:04
In freedom fighters, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m not gonna do the whole intro, I got to tell you this is exactly what I was looking for when I put out a call on Twitter saying, Is there anyone who’s doing better now? or doing well now post the CO Corona crisis, despite what’s going on. And the reason that I say that today’s guests Michael Alexis is perfectly exactly what I was looking for is because he is the inspiration that I think that we need. Just before this whole thing hit the guy bought museum hack, a company that he was very closely affiliated with, and we’ll understand what, how, within this interview, the whole idea behind museum hack is that they take you they take your loved ones, they take your co workers, they take you and other people into museums. Now, number one, you can’t get into museums right now. Number two, you can’t get next to your loved ones. You can’t get next to strangers you can’t get next to your co workers. How does the guy who suddenly running this business deal with the situation and as I’m saying this, you guys can see it, he’s got a smile on his face, because he’s recognizing it. But he also has a smile on his face because I feel like this whole situation has taken a deeper emotional toll on most of us than we realize. Despite that, he found a way to turn things around. And he went online, he created a, I guess, a spin off business second business. It’s called Team building.com. Where they provide team building activities that your people will love, but it’s done online. And what we’ve found now is that there are a couple of things that Michael I think I’m understanding this business is two things number one, there are a lot of people like the good people at my kids schools who don’t know how to do any remote anything right and now suddenly, they have to figure out zoom and remote interaction and all that right. And so they come to team building calm and they sign up for a program with They could, they could learn how to do remote work better. And number two, they’re people who are feeling disconnected from the people they’re working with, even though they’re on slack and zoom with them. And so those are some of the problems that team building com is solving. And because he’s solving it instead of crashing into a wall and feeling defeated and blaming Corona and really rightly rightfully so saying, just crap happen. He’s making things happen and keeping his people in his company going anyway, Michael, Alexis and I have known each other for years, there’s fair to say it’s fair to say that there would not be revenue at mixergy not real revenue of mixergy, if not for him, and I really appreciate him for getting me going when I was starting. I’m appreciating him for being here. I appreciate him for being here. Even though he is stuck on an island. We’ll talk about that. We’ll do it all thanks to two phenomenal sponsors. The first if you want to get a sense of how your customers feel about your business, and then understand why they’re feeling that way, you got to check out the lighted.com slash mixergy and the second if you’re building your business, this is the time really to take care of your business. you’re all thinking about how do I garden in the backyard and raise potatoes Your business too. And I’ll tell you why Click Funnels is the tool to use to help you grow your business. First, Michael, good to see you.

Michael Alexis 3:07
It’s my pleasure to be here. I’ve been humbled by the intro.

Andrew Warner 3:11
Was there a minute when you freaked out? Because I see you smiling. Was there a minute when you freaked out?

Michael Alexis 3:16
I wouldn’t call it a secret. I assume you’re talking about what happened with the business and what happened in the vironment, etc.

Andrew Warner 3:22
Yeah. Was there a period any anything that made you feel like oh, holy crap, what’s going on?

Michael Alexis 3:27
Yeah, we had a couple of interesting early warning systems or signs. One is that I have actively done business in China in the past and still have a lot of friends and relationships there. They do this much now. And their businesses have been on top effectively for at least three months, in some cases a little bit longer. So we saw that coming in. I think I had a little bit more time to adjust to what might happen in the US. The second was that for us, our clients were very quick to be So companies like Google companies like Facebook that do corporate team building events with us, quit in internal travel, bam, early on. And part of that was, you know, not going from office to office, part of it is not holding group events. So within a period of the three days, all of our new business stuffs coming in, and almost all of the work that we have the next couple of months cancelled. I don’t think that that in itself is unique story. I believe that’s happened to a lot of people in the last month in the last couple of months. So for us, there wasn’t a preset moment. But there was this very sober realization that we needed to make substantial changes quickly. One of the things we’re going to talk about, but I’ll start to get into now is we did by museum hack last year, we’ve been my partner patia. And I am part of a large part of that was that it was a seller finance transaction. So there’s significant amount of money from revenue and profit that still goes towards that purchase. It wasn’t just an option for us to say Okay, well, the markets slow, we’re going to do kind of a temporary hibernation mode pause mode, we had to figure out how to fix the business, which I think meant there wasn’t time to say, like, Oh no, what’s going to happen to us? That would be maybe my ideal sorry to tell reality. There was one moment, one moment that I’d love to share. So we’re hearing we’re in the Canary Islands right now. Tenerife, super beautiful, milder climate, they were actually stuck here for a little bit, but a day or two after all the cancellations happen when I climb. This beautiful mountain just along the coast and pace of legislators decided that we weren’t going to hike up the trail which ability about 20 minutes, we were going to stay on the side of the mountain that we’re talking about. A slow climb or crawl up at non cliffhangers now, about three quarters of the way up, I would suggest After that I was sweaty, I was cold, I felt like I was gonna fall off the side of the mountain. And I also started to have these ruminating ideas of what was happening to the business. And it wasn’t panic, but it was, oh, if we can’t fix it, the last five years of non stop nonstop work and hustle and effort and investment that I’ve put in to try and to build and grow our business and build and grow. You know, our legacy and what I can do with my life might be wiped out. So coming off that mountain. That was wasn’t that emotion of like longing or loss, but we felt empowered and we thought action oriented to do something better.

Andrew Warner 6:45
How do you snap back to being action oriented?

Michael Alexis 6:49
I think that two things happened. One, I just was very optimistic. To I’m going to Mexico go for three. So one very optimistic. too, I’ve had financial losses in the past. And it’s not that bad. So my, my cost of living is very, very, very low. I enter, you know, I live out of a small backpack. This is my only shirt, I have one pair of shorts, but I have a couple of other small things. But life is simple. And my cost of living is very, very, very low. So well, it’s nice and exciting to have money in the bank, losing some portion of it one was fine, right, I recovered, I’m actually on to more exciting things with the business that we’re doing now. So very hopeful for the future and that way. And then the third one was, we started to see through our marketing system, this opportunity for virtual team building very early on, and realize that, well, hey, we’re going to take a very large hit to our revenue on our profit for at least one month in the month of March. If we can make this work, it may actually be Bigger, may lead to a lot more work for us and for our people, and a lot more opportunity for one that was locked up, they become a big one.

Andrew Warner 8:10
I’m gonna come back and ask you about the virtual options that you saw. But what you mentioned about having financial trouble in the past is something that I noticed several other people who I interviewed who snapped back from feeling bad for themselves have also had in the past, like I think about Russell Brunson, he was in a bad economy about 10 years ago, the founder of gumroad. Sahil Lavinia, he just went through his own personal thing where he couldn’t get his company to get back on track and so the investors turn their backs on him and when he recovered from that, he got a sense of I could deal with other financial loss it’s never as bad as I think it is. I wonder for you, what was it that you go back to and remember, that was terrible. I survived it. Even if this is terrible things will be okay.

Michael Alexis 8:52
Yeah, let me tell you a little bit about what I did investment wise. So I have for as long as I can remember being extremely frugal prep school and Even afterwards, I would say 90% or more of my income, I would find little side hustles turn a little bit more to pad, what was eventually becoming a large emergency fund or something to actually build for this money other than it was just, like comforting to have more of it. I made about five years ago, decisions that I was going to take my entire life savings, I sold a property that I had, I took all the money I had in the bank, I took out a loan and lines of credit to get more access to cash and capital. And I sent that money to tie the ad to get into business there. And within the first few weeks, I started to see money coming back. So that was super cool. So I said more money.

The restaurant business so friends.

I hope that I hope that you can try those restaurants. So the festivals are right now their own They’re on

Andrew Warner 10:02
money because you saw some profit come back, you sent even more than what happened

Michael Alexis 10:06
a lot. And maybe, maybe interesting to share numbers. So for me, my life savings at the time was about $170,000. So this is the money in total that I sent to China. And then it slowed down, not because the business wasn’t doing well, but because I hadn’t completely understood the agreement that I had gotten into with how cash flow was going to work, how capital was going to be retained in the business for later what was going to happen with the landlord contracts and these malls, etc, that the restaurants were going into. So it was due diligence that I should have done and understood better to understand what was going to happen to cash flow and didn’t. So for that point, the loss actually hadn’t happened yet. And frankly, still hasn’t happened. It’s still kind of unknown with what will go on. But being there, I felt like I lost everything. I felt like my last several years of just Everything I had and like staying in and not going to restaurant and the other like small ways we find to save money, the 10,000 decisions that I made to save a few more dollars, I felt like that they had been wiped out with this one decision to send money. In some ways. It’s kind of interesting how it’s continued though the going from having a financial buffer and being very flexible to do kind of whatever I wanted in North America meant that I went and started to do freelance marketing work again, I joined CPM. As you know, a few years later, I ended up buying the company and buying that company is positioned right now. So I kind of have what it takes to have a healthy mindset and objective one that will just say, we’ll see. Right? If things are going well, well, we’ll see maybe maybe it’s going to try to get if they’re not going well, we’ll see maybe it will, even for the investment in China, but right now is when It really is still in the last because it’s so interesting kind of nuanced about what’s happening with the Chinese government, there’s less financial support than what’s happening in America. I think that the US government has actually been very quick to act, at least with the financial aspects of the virus than than the plant recovery plan, etc. Not so the case in China, l’amour cut many buddies, right? So the businesses are burning money very, very, very quickly.

Andrew Warner 12:29
Okay, and so the reason that I had I didn’t even think of that, but there are from what I understand coming back online faster, right. They’re getting closer to getting back online, wasted three months, but it’s three months.

Michael Alexis 12:42
Starting to I think they’re still Yeah, oscillating and touchwood. I think it’ll still take time to get back in them. My understand the reports from the friends and business partners is that they haven’t seen that big positive change status, not like people have gone from staying at home to flooding the restaurants in the mind.

Andrew Warner 12:58
Right, right. I’m Even if they’re opening the door doesn’t mean that people are going in. Right. Okay. And so one of the things that I noticed in you in that period was,

Unknown Speaker 13:07
you did

Andrew Warner 13:10
pair your wardrobe down to, as you describe right now. Very, very little. I think when we met here in San Francisco, you had it all in your backpack. And you turned me on to wool not being a smelly material, which I had no idea I went I research I said, is it possible It doesn’t smell himself? Turns out, you’re right. I actually for my marathon in Chile, and then the one in Antarctica, I did wear a wool like running shirt. It’s the best running shirt I ever had in my life cost me 120 bucks, maybe, maybe 170. Totally worth every intimate. But I have to say, running those two marathons in the shirt did smell it. So let’s say there’s a limit on low, but it’s a pretty high limit. So you I had the sense that you paired yourself down and you found that you didn’t need as much as you thought you did or that you could be happy with less Is that right?

Michael Alexis 13:57
I think it kind of actually happened over the years just moving from place. Place I grew up in a small town near Toronto, I went to Vancouver for school, I moved to China so that I moved to Boston for a bit afterwards. Every time I moved, I got rid of furniture, I got rid of clothing, I got rid of stuff to the point where I just thought, I don’t want to get these things. I just want to get like, one small bag of things that takes care of all the bases me.

Andrew Warner 14:20
Okay, so then you also said there was a virtual customer or virtual option that seemed like a glimmer of hope that you could then build on? How did that come about? You’re you guys do museum hack, which is take people through museums and give them these radical experiences. Who came and asked you for virtual experience?

Michael Alexis 14:39
Yeah, so museum has done a number of things. The most well known and visible on the site is public museum source. So Andrew, you and your partner could go we don’t work with kids, but any Apple anybody over the age of 18, you could go with friends, you could go through whatever it happens to be and tickets for that are anywhere between about $50 and $99. Depending on the product, a large part of the business is actually corporate team building. So clients like Google, Facebook, KPMG, Lego Johnson, and Johnson, many, many others will have a group of their employees, maybe 20 people, many 50, maybe 50 people go do an activity together with the idea that it’s going to be fun, it’s gonna be relaxing, it’s going to be a way to create bonds between them. So as part of that, the marketing systems we have set up. I’m fairly obsessed with Google Search Console. And what’s happening with traffic and volume. We’ve learned an asset for example, certain parts of the year. Yes, why did why did our lead stop while we can dig into Google Search Console, we can dig into other data platforms to figure out what happening. Nobody, nobody is looking to do team building that Christmas with the Fourth of July, the same thing. So watching that, we saw this kind of rapid decline of people searching for a team building in New York. study team building in Chicago, corporate events in the Bay Area and similar searches that we rank well for. And I wondered, well, if those searches are going down is anything going up? So from Google Search Console to trends that google.com and this is something I would recommend everybody, look at if your business is challenged right now. And if you’re trying to find a way to redeem it, search keywords related to your industry and see what Google says, I noticed that when I put in words like in building New York City, or even just the generic 15 building, while those searches were considerably down from where they should be, at this time of year, virtual team building was 3,000% on and it’s probably more than that since then, as more and more companies move to remote.

Andrew Warner 16:43
Oh, so you know, the team building is one of the reasons why people come and look for you and then end up signing up for a museum experience. You just typed in team building and you said what is going up? Let me try that right now. So I would go into to Google Trends and type in team building. And then that’s what you did and if I do that what I see is kind of a slightly downtrend, but I see the trend. Oh, Okay, got it. related topics telecommuting. breakout axe throwing for some reason that’s up the virtual team topic 300% bingo for some reason 300% Why is x again coming up 250% got it. And then team building activities bay area that’s got related searches. This is the type of thing that you’re looking on virtual team building activities. And so you started to baste. Oh my god, dude, I just typed it. I just tapped the virtual team building activities. It’s like a hockey stick up.

Michael Alexis 17:46
Okay, so our our search console, we’re used to about for the last maybe two years, we’ve had two to 3000 people per day, collect works from Google, and we thought that was good that got a lead to solve. The carpet stuff that got us out of some museum consulting work. That’s part of what we did. Now we’re talking about like 20,000 a day. So the trend for it is skyrocketing fortunately. So are we and what we’re seeing from that. So then

Andrew Warner 18:16
what sorry, let me ask you what is Google Search Console.

Michael Alexis 18:20
Google Search Console is a tool that will tell you the kind of high level data of how people are finding your site on Google. So you can see an organized by different pages or posts on your site, you can see the search terms that they use to get there, you can see the position that Google Places you for each of them. So for example, if somebody searches the word Museum, of course, we come up number one, right every single time, if somebody searches, museum tours, we’re page one as well, but we might be like position three. So Google Search Console has all of that data in a way that is pretty clear and easy to understand.

Andrew Warner 18:59
Okay, and so You’ve started to notice based on those tools that virtual team building activities is going up. What did you first do about that? How did you understand what they were looking for?

Michael Alexis 19:10
So

part of it, I credit to an intuition that comes from working in the industry for at least five years, right? We had an idea that if people had searched for team building in the past and searches for virtual team building is essentially the online version, they still want to get their people together to do some kind of event. A lot of departments have budgets allocated toward that. So the intuition or the assumption was that they wanted a similar kind of experience, right away to get 2050 people together in one place to do some kind of activity together, that would be fun. The actions then that came from that were a number one, we started to rework all of our marketing channels and marketing spend and where we’re putting our time. A very simple example of that is that we cut off spending on Yelp ads, because Yelp is certainly for local business searches and businesses. In the past, we caught up that we put our ad spend instead to Google AdWords for Searches related to virtual team building remote team building, online team building, etc. We already had team building calm, but hadn’t used the site much. We were still working vcm hacks and some other smaller branded sites that we have. And I had set up team building comm with idea that we could start building links to it and we might be able to, like rise the ranks with all the global searches so that when we were ready to launch activities, when we were ready to launch that brand specifically, it would already be in a good spot. So we went to team building calm, we put a virtual page up that same day, right in a matter of a couple of hours. And simultaneously or within that same day launch at least four specific products that we thought would be very good Good for the audience. So for example, we have one called online office games, originally called online Olympics. Unfortunately, Olympics is a very, very, very trademarked term. But it captures the spirit of the event, right? It’s a series of small mini games and challenges. We do trivia now that’s like, that’s really cool, fun, interactive trivia. It wouldn’t be named that soon it would be. Okay. Everybody has like 15 seconds to go grab their favorite mug, and then some story you tell about them with that new point. Another prompt for it might be Hey, you know, like, Andrew, how do you say, I love you without using your voice. And somebody might go, Oh, I know American Sign Language. I could do that I could get a quote from it. So kind of the fun trivia that lets you move your body. There’s some other games in there that are about communication. So it’s kind of a balance of acknowledging that there’s kind of skills that people need to work productively online, but they’ll be on

Andrew Warner 21:57
time and this was not with it, based on the experience you had with museum hack, understanding what kind of games what kind of experiences bring people together,

Michael Alexis 22:05
kind of Yeah, with the very broad categories of being like fun. Another one that we launched at the same time is called tiny campfire is it’s pretty hot. It’s also pretty adorable. So what we do is we send a tip out to all the attendees before the event. The idea is it’s not 100% virtual experience. It’s kind of a semi virtual experience where Andrew a week before the event, if received the kit that has all the ingredients to make s’mores, you’d get a little pea light, can’t fire and then for the event itself, we played another series of games, but then the main portion of it is about half an hour where our former museum tour guides are now telling stories, historical ghost stories. So there’s one for example about a strong theory that Abraham Lincoln’s ghost was haunting somebody whose dress This is what kind of started we thought around the campfire where everybody is making their floors.

Andrew Warner 23:04
So you tell the story. And then these these smears, you got to see it to actually really fully get it. If anyone wants to go check it out. It’s a team building calm. It’s like a little toothpick with a tiny marshmallow over a little tiny fire that you send out to them. It’s a it’s a tea light. And then they’ve got graham cracker and chocolate equally small, and they’re just heating up their marshmallow and they’re listening to the story while they’re heating up the marshmallow. I imagine making their their smaller and then holding it up to the camera and now they’ve got a shared experience even though they’re not in the same room.

Michael Alexis 23:34
Yeah, tiny virtual campfire.

Andrew Warner 23:37
All right, let me take a moment to talk about my first sponsor. It’s a company called delighted and then I want to come back and ask you a little bit more about which one of these programs worked. And and then what you did from there. So here’s the thing about delighted they recognize that right now. Things are getting difficult. And so if you have customers who are happy, you want to understand why they’re happy and bring that happiness That experience to other people who are happy. And then if you have customers who are not happy, this is not a period where people are going to say, You know what? Who cares? Let’s just keep it on the bill for months and months and months, right? Everyone’s scrutinizing their bill very carefully. And so with delight, it said was, Andrew, we’re taking a shot on a mixergy ad, we’re just going to give your people this software for free. All they have to do is go to delight a.com slash mixer to get it for free. And what it’ll do is it’ll allow them to ask their audience ask their customers, are you delighted with the experience, and you could do the NPS test which is net promoter score, we call it a test. It’s not a test. It’s it’s the feedback experience, where they on a scale of one to 10 say how likely they are to share the your site with with their friends. And we know that that is a good insight into how well your business is doing. Here’s the problem though, Michael. And you might have seen this. You could put this form up using any software right type form. When we have I forget Gravity Forms, whatever it is. I said to them, why would anyone use you right now if you could use all these other forms? They said, you ever use those forms? I said, Yeah, I said so. Would you do I said, I felt overwhelmed. They said exactly. You don’t know what’s drawing what they said, we could take a look using the data we pull in from your site and understand for example, for your experience, maybe it’s the campfire experience. That is actually a lower NPS score. Nobody typed in. I didn’t like the campfire experience. Maybe it’s people from Chicago are Giving everything a low score, you would know it because you’re looking at the data, you’re just seeing raw numbers, we can look at it, we can understand, Can I throw in the term machine learning here? Probably not. Right? We’re throwing it at everything. But in this case, it’s actually right that they’re using intelligent software to understand to draw conclusions that people couldn’t otherwise and tell you, aha, this time of day, this is what what’s leading to happiness or maybe it’s this city that’s that’s causing unhappiness, or maybe it’s this product or maybe it’s a shipping option, that is leading people to say that they’re unhappy, they will draw those conclusions for you. Listen, if you want to get this started, go to delight a.com slash mixergy. They’ll let you try it for free. They are asking for a credit card. I said Ask your credit card if it’s free. They said, because we also do follow up email because we make sure that that you message people properly if they don’t give you a high rating so that you understand what to do with it, and then you do follow up with them properly. For example, maybe turn them into testimonials if they did give you a high rating, all that stuff is automated. He said people could use it for spam. We’re trying to keep this professional we also have a system that asks for credit cards anyway, but trust us Andrew if we say that it’s free, it will be free. And if you’re listening to me and you want to for free all you have to do is go to delighted.com slash mixergy delighted calm slash mixergy I should probably spell delighted. First, I kind of wake my nose. I’ve got a runny nose here. It’s not COVID I don’t think it’s COVID it’s just me naturally being actually I always have a runny nose but I can’t hit the mute button. I mean like this weird situation Michael where nothing is exactly where I like it to be. The the whole equipment is off. I’m dealing with everyone in my house 24 hours a day. We’re all trying to get things done with every one of us like in our faces. Really, really challenging. Anyway, so in this situation usually I have my whole mute button If I have to, you know, do that without getting it on mic I hit the mute button. And I don’t even have a new button. This is this is a

Michael Alexis 27:12
black boy man, I expect that outfit your audience will forgive you and pretty

cool. Here we get a pop up and

Andrew Warner 27:21
I don’t think this is what the lighted pay for when they said let’s buy it from you. But they’re always going to get real Andrew here it is delighted D Li gh t d.com slash mixergy delighted calm slash MIXE rG why mixergy goes to go try them for free. By the way, I keep wondering what the light did paid for their domain. I gotta ask you the same thing. You must have paid a lot of money for team building calm. That’s a functional domain. That’s super clear.

Michael Alexis 27:50
Yeah, happy to say more about that story. So I joined UCM hack about five years ago, so 2015 part time freelance marketing. And didn’t know what was going to come with it but continued, continued on, we bought that business. We knew this corporate inseam button was the thing. I also knew that we had first reached out to the owner of team building calm in 2015 or 2016, when we first started to do that business, and at the time, we couldn’t afford it. We didn’t know how to negotiate. We didn’t know what was happening. So last year, I sent her an email again. It’s a really nice lady based in Illinois, I believe. And I was a little bit coy with how I reached out and sent it for my Gmail address, not the museum hack, when I said, Hey, you know, we’re in the team building industry. Would you ever consider selling this domain? We’re interested I’d be happy to make you an offer. And she said, Sure, making an offer. I lowball her, I offered $10,000. I know that sounds like a lot of money. To some people. It is a lot of money. It’s a lot of money to me too. But I had new from kind of the valuation I’ve seen of strong keyword domains in the past that 10,000 is a drop in the bucket. So it was very, very hopeful on my part that she might be willing to do it. She said though, much, much heavier at this then I will try to give her credit for and eventually countered. She said that she wants to be within a certain range. That number was at least six figures. I didn’t want to lowball or a second time I thought that would be insulting I thought it would jeopardize the deal. So we offered her $125,000 initially on some kind of a payment plan, I suggest we might be able to pay for it over three or four years something like that. And ultimately just decide to do a cash deal and do the transfers since we could so that a prospective about seven or eight years ago whenever I first registered Michael Alexis calm maybe it was a little bit longer than that. I stressed over the 795 I paid to Dreamhouse $7 95 cents per vendor, I was 100% sure that I was going to build anything about Michael like calm and frankly, there’s still not a lot there, my personal blog, it’s just the thing. But going from that to being willing to pay 125 grand cash upfront for a domain is such a massive shift in mindset for me and how I think about domains, how I think about marketing and how I think about business growth, investment, etc.

Andrew Warner 30:33
What did she do with her business? This is Karen Clark Frederick, she she ran a team training leadership training business to did she close it up when she sold it to you.

Michael Alexis 30:42
So I think that

I can tell you a little bit more about the size. So even with the cash offer, she wasn’t 100% sure that she wanted to sell it and she mostly wants to know that it was going into good hands. So she shared a personal story where she said hey, I had this for 20 years. She’s the only person before us that ever own quiz obeyed team building calm, she had massive difference in it. She was a pioneer in the industry and did a lot of really interesting things with a lot of companies and was successful with it. I didn’t ask about all the details, I got the perspective there. She’s kind of nearing retirement or maybe has been on a transition phase out and was looking in in a way to pass on that legacy. Not necessarily through an active business that could be sold but at least kind of the brand name that she had helped and grown and built up over the years. It was a really really touching email from her and why have initially sent out that Koi like Hi, we do this thing with you except a little bit of money for it. I wrote a really personal one back. I was worried with doing so I thought hey, I’m gonna throw away all of my negotiation power. If I tell her like, look like we just bought this company. We don’t have a ton of money. I want to give you as much as we can. You know this Here’s how I grew up, this is what we’re working on, this is what we’re trying to build. I was worried that she might see that and go like, Oh, this guy would pay like $500,000 for the domain, which I didn’t have, we don’t have, we wouldn’t have been able to pay that for it on buy. Instead, she sold it in a really good way. She said, you know, thank you so much for sharing this. Like, I feel a lot more comfortable and knowing who you are and knowing what you’re gonna do with it. Let’s make it happen. And a week later, the fire

Andrew Warner 32:29
is great domain worth the price. I thought the very first thing that you put up on on it was what was the how to work remotely. program, right. Maybe that’s the first one that I happen to see as I was hunting through the site.

Michael Alexis 32:47
So it’s the first one we put on the front page just because I was trying to get anything about virtual or remote work on the front page. And then create the virtual team building page. I wanted to make sure that at least with So that those with our virtual team button page wouldn’t be competing with the homepage. So the content wouldn’t be identical. I’m less worried about that now, but that’s why, how to work

Andrew Warner 33:11
on it. All right. And so I see now on the site online office games, tiny campfire, tea verse coffee, you send people to tea. And then the paper that

Michael Alexis 33:21
you sent them a little tip is to kind of unique piece maybe a turmeric tea, maybe avocado leaf tea, as well as coffee, mushroom coffee. Some

I don’t remember the name for the coffees

Andrew Warner 33:36
and teas together on a zoom call. And you given that piece of paper that I see on this on the web page right now on team building calm so that they could actually put it down like a flight the way that they would in a bar.

Michael Alexis 33:48
Okay, if it goes with it. So part of setting up these businesses very quickly with a little bit of smoke and mirrors. So that picture is from a trip that I had a tasting that I did and some unique coffee this last year.

We’ve got to the bathroom, we had to represent the company that explains it because everything

Andrew Warner 34:04
on your site is so freakin polished. But on that one I see there’s like spilled tea on Bali. So if you look carefully actually had to zoom in a little bit, right? There’s online storytelling and how to work remotely. Which one of those did did the best?

Michael Alexis 34:22
So the two that are the most success right now are online office in some time a campfire, online office games, I think partly just because the first one on the list, people see it. And so we end up having that conversation. Tiny campfires can be capturing the hearts and the minds of today should mean the world. There’s something very charming about that idea of a campfire, right. It’s like this thing, nostalgic thing from our childhood, where we went out with family or with friends who sat around the campfire to share stories, some just very strong metaphor for what people need right now. An interesting shift in additional two just going virtual for team building is the reasons why people are doing it and the benefits that they need to get from it. So when a company takes people to the museum, or via one of their brands does the guacamole making competition, it’s like, Hey, this is a great podcast, I it’s like, Hey, this is going to be a fun thing. We’re going to get people together. Like we’re going to get some fun pictures with the team. Hopefully, they’ll tell their friends about it. So they know what a cool company we are, whatever it is, like a lot of reasons. Most of them are with the global shift to remote work. So many people are working from home for the first time. And if they haven’t yet, they’re going to discover that it can be really, really late. Right? If you’re not intentional that talking with other people and other people, if you don’t get to go into the office and say hi in the morning and have lunch with their colleagues, then something’s missing. So kind of campfire, online office games are not just a way for people to have fun together. It’s a way to counter that kind of psychological toll of what it takes to work from home, in a kind of reliable, sustainable way over time.

Andrew Warner 36:00
This though I’m on zoom all day I see my wife is on zoom even more. So we’ve got kid obligations, the kids now have to zoom through for school, we’re talking about a five year old and a three year old, a three year old can put up with it. But the five year old has to suffer through it. Isn’t it a lot to ask a team to get back on zoom and do another meeting except this one is not directly productive when they’ve got so much else going on in their lives.

Michael Alexis 36:25
can be right every company out there every team out there every event has things going on. We heard some really nice feedback about the event. That was one a couple of days ago where a lady that attended one of the guests afterwards said, like thank you so much that made me for just a few minutes, forget everything that was going on in the world. So it’s not another meeting about their business finances or what they’re going to do next with marketing or how they’re going to like restructure their team or how long it’s going to last. It’s let’s just get together and like be people and have fun and do something cool.

Andrew Warner 37:00
All right, I guess I get that. The reason that I think that I could relate to it was I first saw a friend do a double date on zoom. This was Brian Harris. I said, Brian, that seems kind of lame. I’m done. I want to just spend time with my wife on the couch at the end of the day. And

Unknown Speaker 37:15
then I thought about

Andrew Warner 37:16
it. I said, Olivia, I’m going to surprise you. I’m going to set up something for us for Saturday night. And I invited not just one couple, I invited two couples, they loved it. We were done. I said, we’re just gonna have wine with you guys and give you space to go and like live your lives as couples. I didn’t realize it. They stayed on till midnight, the other two couples talking it was that great. And then we followed up the following week. And it is nice to just have a conversation with people where you don’t have to care that much where you don’t have to be on and they’re just kind of there while you’re doing something else. Alright, I get that. And then the advantage then of having you lead it is it’s not this awkward. Everyone’s staring at each other trying to figure out what to say there’s a professional who knows how to lead things and keep things interesting. working there.

Michael Alexis 37:59
Yeah, all right. facilitators are so damn dead. So most of the staff that are running them now are the same people who run the museum tours. But we have 10s of thousands of guests a year for that run the guacamole making competitions that do other stuff that we’ve done in other parts of the year. Many of them are, they’re not full time tour guides, they’re professional stand up comedians that tour the country, their performers, musicians, theatre people, and they just connect with audiences so well and read the level of little cues and engage people. So part of it that part of it is that they’re great at it. Another part is just, it’s somebody different, right? It’s not the HR manager, the event planner that leads every meeting, it’s, hey, we brought in somebody else, and it just feels like it feels VIP. It feels like a special experience. It feels like you’re doing something different. People could go to the museum without people could certainly rather guacamole competition but that if we do want a Christmas that’s gingerbread versus the gingerbread house, making coffee There’s a lot of fun, they do see stuff like zombie apocalypse, gingerbread houses or dinosaur attack or something like that. So very, very cool. You could run those without us. But it feels good to bring in an outside company and also for the event organizer to be able to participate in it to and interact with peers instead of the person that’s doing it. So you don’t have to as the boss lead, you can just be a part of the fun with them.

Andrew Warner 39:29
I want to know about why you’re at the Canary Islands still, is it safe there? And then how businesses doing like, if you’re willing to share some dollars and cents, I’d love to know that. And then also, you talk a little bit about like, some people are freaking out. Before we started. You said like some people are freaking out and there’s emotional stuff going on. And I think the tactics might help them get past it. I want to come back and ask you about that to me. First tell people about my second sponsor. Do you know them? Do you know clickfunnels the second sponsor? You do what clickfunnels did is they said,

Unknown Speaker 40:01
your site

Andrew Warner 40:02
kind of stinks. Because it’s a brochure What you need is a funnel, which is people come in and then they have the first step and the second step and the third step, and let’s be honest, we need steps that will let people know who you are because they’re not going to buy necessarily right away. And steps that lead to a sale and the fact that they were always focused on how do we tell people who we are and get to sail meant that they started building software to make that really easy, and make a lot of people signed up for clickfunnels in the past, and then just held on to the accounts and didn’t do much or thought of signing up. And then what the founder Russell Brunson told me was in March, as people were forced to stay home as sadly many people were laid off as suddenly people had time on their hands and anxiety. A large number of them started going to Click Funnels actually setting up their funnels or setting up an account for the first time playing with it, seeing what they could do, and actually got themselves up and in business. I interviewed him about why his business was doing well. And that’s the big takeaway that I got that I’m feeling crushed by having people around me so much but at the same time, now Getting the freedom to go out and see people in person, which is it’s painful for me. We’re all feeling some of this. But there are some people who are saying, despite this, I’m going to get up and do something creative. I’m going to let myself have this artistic experience this entrepreneurial experience and see where it goes and see where it leads. And frankly, me doing these interviews is part of me saying, I’m not just going to sit back and deal with my frustration How can I channel this into something useful? And frankly, for me, it’s useful to hear people do well I come back after an interview, feeling refreshed feeling like oh, there’s possibility What else could I be doing? What else should I be adjusting and I get more productive. So if you’re out there listening to me and you haven’t taken that first step to feeling and to taking act to feeling better taking action is going to get you there and I think the best way to get started right now is to go to clickfunnels comm slash mixergy. When you do they’re going to let you use their software for free for two weeks. Here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna create a landing page you’re gonna say okay, this is actually looks good. Now what? I urge you to not just stop there but play around with their other tools even if you just get ready rid of that landing page, get rid of this funnel, I urge you to play with the tool that lets you slide over and collect a credit card and experiment with what you were charged for. And then experiment with what the next step is. Well, Michael Alexis helped me with years ago was our mutual friend, Noah Kagan said, Andrew, you’re trying to create something to sell? I said, Yeah. Because Well, what’s the big complaint? So a lot of people listen to my interviews, but they don’t know what to do at the end of it. He goes, Okay, great. Why don’t you just create something that helps him they take action afterwards? I don’t know what to create. What’s the easiest thing you could do? I said, I don’t know. He and I somehow, I think came up with the idea of take the transcript and turn it into an action guide. I said, Okay, I think I could do it. Except I was a pretty crappy writer, Michael Alexa said, I think I can help you and he made it sound really good and actually feel like an action guide. Anyway, that first little thing that we put up a landing page for ended up selling and then I got some feedback and I improved, it got more feedback and adjusted and by improved I mean, I understood what people were really looking for and what we could create an ongoing basis and that we had a business. All because of that little experiment. I urge you to go out and do a little experiment of your own by going to click funnels.com slash mixer. I just spin up as I said it. Click fun. I’m like a COVID nightmare. It’s a good thing that nobody’s around me. I get so worked up I click funnels.com slash mixergy. Don’t worry, I do have like a thing that I put up on my face. You want to see the thing that I put up on my face? Until I get that? Oh, hang on a second. Wait, I’m gonna show you. I think I should tell you Nobody. Nobody ever sees this because I’m not. I’m not around people.

Unknown Speaker 43:36
Hang on a second.

Andrew Warner 43:40
There’s this dorky little kid who always wanted to have an ascot. You know what an ascot is?

Michael Alexis 43:45
Yeah.

Andrew Warner 43:47
It’s like that handkerchief thing that you tuck into your, into your shirt. He says, see men with mascots and think, oh, they’re so dignified. They look so distinguished. I would like one of those, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. This is above, if you’re going to Antarctica before you get on the plane, somebody will inspect your stuff to make sure that you could survive there. And so they gave me a list of things to buy and whatever I was missing, they made me go and buy from a local store in Chile before I got on my five and a half hour flight to Antarctica. Thankfully, one of the things that I got was this buff, you know, it goes around your neck, just this like circular thing goes around your neck, but it’s long enough that you can put over your mouth and so you could keep your mouth warm. You could put it over your ears like your mouth, you could put it over your head anyway. I wear like around my neck like in case I need to wear a mask but really what I want is the feeling of an ascot and I think this looks good, right? It looks cool.

Michael Alexis 44:39
Yeah. And now look if it Well,

Andrew Warner 44:41
no, I didn’t think I can I get it in Well,

Michael Alexis 44:45
almost definitely a bad

Andrew Warner 44:47
look if I put it over my my nose. Doesn’t this looks pretty cool, right?

Unknown Speaker 44:52
Yeah, like a bad?

Andrew Warner 44:53
Yeah, it’s like a bandit. Exactly. Now it’s not the most protective thing. We did have a bunch of masks Olivia got some masks for the fire and then she I think gave them out. Yeah, she’s too frickin much of a do gooder. So I don’t think we have masks but other people who know us have masks. So until I get a real mask or conceal something this is this is my thing. I look, I think I look good. I shouldn’t say that because

Michael Alexis 45:21
I like it. In the meantime, you help protect the community,

Andrew Warner 45:24
right from my overenthusiastic, spitting self. No one’s in here. Don’t worry. I’m not getting it on anyone. All right. Let’s get into let’s get into you being in the Canary Island. I thought Canary Islands Where is it? Canary Islands or Canary Island?

Michael Alexis 45:38
Island. There are several several and I

Andrew Warner 45:39
thought they were off of off of the UK a little bit south of there but no off of England, not south of England. It’s east of Morocco right now Western Morocco, excuse me in the record.

Michael Alexis 45:52
That’s more than I knew about 10 months ago, we we did a cruise with our team that was starting to be talked about As COVID and what was going on, but the messaging from the crew says, Hey, don’t worry about it. Anybody that’s been to China is not going to be allowed on the boat. I was like barely outside of the window but unable to come back from China. But we did that. And at the end, I thought, Hey, we want to go somewhere we’re looking for somewhere new. We want somewhere with like a good internet connection, the time zones important to be able to work, but otherwise not a lot of criteria. We didn’t want to go directly back to Asia. We used to fight. I think it’s called no bad list or something like this today, based on the parameters and the Canary Islands, I had no idea where it was looked about, hey, it’s about the northwest coast of Africa. And it it’s a rad place. It’s got this super temperate climate, it barely rains. Most of the people that come here seem to be from the UK or from Northern Europe. And so it’s, it’s built to be just a quiet, relaxing place that I’ve kind of fallen in love with. I really like it here. Beautiful. Beautiful everything.

Andrew Warner 47:03
Yes, I got

Michael Alexis 47:05
insurance pretty good. That took us a while to figure out not everywhere we say it has had it. At our current place, we called him a technician. And we had it fixed because we have a longer term rental now, kind of unique thing about being here, though, is that we’re on lockdown. Not necessarily because there was a major threat here, but because of the connections I made man, Spain, the Canary Islands are controlled by Spain. So when they went on lockdown, so that we were not allowed to go outside. There’s like very few flights out of here. And also personally, I don’t think it’s good to travel. A second part is kind of fascinating is that with, with Trump’s travel ban on Europe, which I see very kind of mixed ambiguous information about I think it excludes me from coming back to the US even though we have an accident there, even though I pay taxes in your country. I’m Canadian, they become friends, but it’s it’s citizenship based. Not us and Generally, like spend a lot of time at our country base. So I’m pretty sure I can come back to the US even if I want to. There’s not easy ways to leave the Canary Islands. So we’ve got a couple of, we’ve got long term rental on Airbnb. It’s comfortable place. It’s got a good internet, and we’re fighting to save and grow the business from here.

Andrew Warner 48:19
When you’re there, are you saying you’re in lockdown? You don’t even get to go and experience it. Can you go to the beach? Can you go out and see the sun?

Michael Alexis 48:27
Now when we first got here we could. We’re fortunate with our place now. So generally, I’m actually in Provo, when we travel, we try to get places that are like a reasonable, right? If it’s like 4050 or $60 per night, something less than like a high end hotel. That’s okay with me and kind of built into the budget of being able to kind of live and work remotely and make sure that we have enough comfort. With COVID nobody’s traveling now in a place that relies on tourism. Airbnb have become very, very cost effective. So We are now staying in a semi luxury gated community with extensive patio and a beautiful view of the ocean. So while we are locked in, at least there’s a beautiful environment we can go out on the porch.

Andrew Warner 49:14
How are you dealing with not being able to go out for walks?

Michael Alexis 49:17
Andrew, I don’t get out much we kind of just stay home at work anyways. So the main, the main difference for us has been used to go to the grocery store three times a week, something like this, the grocery store was an excuse to go out it was, of course a block and look around and go get some time away from the computer. Now we go once a week because we’re allowed to and we load up when we bring it back. So yeah, last time outside, but not substantially different from the life that I’ve been living for the last years. And it’s we who else is with you in there. We and my partner Keisha.

Unknown Speaker 49:51
Okay, how long have you two been together?

Michael Alexis 49:55
Two and a half years. I am so Partners also business partners. Got it.

Andrew Warner 50:03
So you were saying that you were the people going through the emotional stuff. I wonder I hope I’m not like spilling all my emotional challenges here and not communicating that despite it all. I think I’m fairly happy even though I’m challenged, I think I’m fairly productive even though I’m not as productive as I was when I could go into the office whenever I wanted. I’m just trying to be as open as possible because I think that most people aren’t open enough about it. I look at my Twitter stream, and it’s everybody having like, the greatest work from home experience ever, instead of acknowledging that things aren’t great. And so I want to I want to give people permission by being like one of the first people to talk about it. I just hope I’m not talking about it so much that I’m making people feel like they need to come and like save me from this. Partially I get to I get to go out for a run San Francisco still allows it. I’m going to do my bike with that we’ve got a nice backyard. I’ll do a bike with a trainer in the backyard. If I can go out for runs and that’ll that’ll help me. But what is the emotional stuff that you’re seeing that entrepreneurs are going through? And then what’s the what are the tactics that you’ve seen that helps them?

Michael Alexis 51:11
Well, I’ve noticed that people are having kind of short term reactions to what’s going on. So for example, dealing with the stress of, hey, do I need to lay off my staff, my part time staff, my full time staff, how long should I do it for working through all of the documents of the financial stuff, the loan patches, etc, that are available? It seems like people are trying to find ways to make the business work, but in many cases aren’t able to do so yet. So tactic wise, I shared on google.com like everybody get on there right away. A couple of other things that I think are really important, really helpful right now. One, get crystal clear with your messaging. This is something I believe in in general Think clarity over clever in almost all cases is going to work better for small businesses that are trying to sell a product or service anything that’s better so that I mean not an email that’s like this poetic work of art. But hey, we sell X to this. People, this is the benefit of it, etc. Not. There’s people that do fancy operating, write it out there incredible results. I’m not one of them. But right now, be very, very crystal clear with your messaging. Second thing that I’d recommend with email with social media etc, is I would consider the first rule of COVID-19 with marketing to be don’t talk about COVID-19. We’re so saturated with mastery and about it. Every company you have ever done business with, has emailed you, their plan on how they’re dealing with it or what they’re thinking about it. Every many websites that you go to, they’ve changed the front page, to the information about it. There’s announcements of stuff in the news or stuff from the government. There’s stuff from your friends or stuff that you’re feeling like It’s okay to not mention it, it’s okay to just say, Hey, we have this service available. Would you like it? Let’s find a great way to make it work for you. some subtleties that that that have been very effective for us, we have to scrape in like, Hey, we want to support our community right now. One thing that allows us to do is be a little bit flexible pricing as we’re figuring it out with this model. Other ones with the making proactive investments where you see the opportunity to so three weeks ago, around the beginning of three or four weeks ago, around the beginning of March, as I mentioned, almost all of our business consoles for cash flow for March looks very, very bad. We were talking about going from between 200 to $240,000 for expected revenue for the month, because we do that most to pretty much nothing. We had a couple of consulting contracts that were likely to continue that weren’t contention, finally a

Andrew Warner 53:53
million dollars a month to

Michael Alexis 53:54
zero, effectively, probably somewhere like 20,000 A couple of consulting things that we had going on, which is not enough to sustain a business, that usually does a quarter million because you have part time staff, you have full time staff, you have software, you have all this other stuff. So some of the action items, we took them and I would recommend other businesses to take now. I can I can share. So one, we started ruthlessly cutting software expenses. One example of that is MailChimp, we usually pay I think something like $4,000 a year, I don’t actually like MailChimp, I found it clunky, it’s hard to navigate, it’s super slow. And I feel like MailChimp is trying to trick me into billing me more somehow, because it’s this convoluted thing of audiences that list something, it’s like very hard to leave their platform. In my opinion, if you just like make the product great and some that people want to use you don’t have to make it with us, but somebody, I’m not here to trash MailChimp, but that’s one example of something that we’ve been thinking about leaving. So it’s very, very easy to say Hey, let’s get off that we moved to basically a self hosted Amazon Web Services person that costs us more like $4 a month based on usage. And we haven’t done that all the same emails that we did before. So hey, that’s one way to say $4,000. Other kind of actual stuff, quick stuff. I didn’t show this earlier. But we did do partial layoff, partial short term, my Ops, for our team, in particular, all the facilitators into our bed, we saw that we have no work available for them and believes that the best thing that we could do was make it possible for them to apply for unemployment, perhaps even before a lot of other people were able to. I’ve seen other businesses hold off on that decision, move people to kind of just a few shifts or having some kind of income in a way that doesn’t quite give them access to the funds that they need. So I think worth kind of making those big bold decisions, to be able to support your people. Another thing that we did was we created an emergency fund for the staff. This isn’t about growing the business. This is about trying to take care of our people. We knew that not everybody would be able to access unemployment By the way, we knew that not everybody has savings, other videos other source of income. So we set aside a pool of hobbies where if they email us and ask for any reason, right, whether they have to pay their phone bill or credit card or medicine or paid or something like this, just hey, here’s some fun we have available to other action items. We started hiring again. So we had actually with the slow down the has the tour guide, click on these and then a couple members of our headquarters seem to also did temporary layoffs with the intention to bring them back as soon as we could. We actually ended up bringing them back two or three days later, and hired other people. Before all this went down. We have been in the final stages of hiring a Director of Sales with IBM If they were going to be able to help grow the business work on kind of high level strategic stuff, we told them very politely that hey, you’re our top choice, but we can tell you right now all of our revenue just disappeared. This is an investment that we make in the business. A few days later, as soon as we started to see pick up again, we made that investment. We have cash in the bank, we want to invest in such a way that captures the opportunity that is available to us now. We cut I mentioned cut AdSense on Yelp, we did that before any of our competitors I was keeping an eye on and FISA was still funding where, which helps with the cash flow burn while we figured out what the new model would be.

Andrew Warner 57:45
And it seems like things are going well. And still, I think at one point in the interview, you said that you needed to find a way to keep the company going. How if revenue was about a quarter million a month before, where’s it now

Michael Alexis 58:00
Oh, March came out at a little over $100,000, I think or $120,000, something like this for a couple of reasons. One, we did capture some revenue before everything started to cancel. And in some cases, in some cases, the canceled decided to take it as a credit for the future instead. And we said, Hey, usually we have kind of the flexible six month policy, on your policy, whatever, you can have it for two years. So we’re able to retain some of that money instead of sending 30 $60,000 back whatever it was. We had some other consulting revenue that was just in March, you know, it wouldn’t be coming in April. And then the new money coming in from virtual as well. So I think for the virtual team building the numbers in about $40,000 for March, with the expectation it’s going to be significantly more this month, because there is even as quickly as we acid, there’s still a procurement process for all these large companies. It takes them two or three weeks to make a decision. So We closed the light at the end of the month, a lot, we closed about $40,000 worth. And this month expected to be somewhere between 80 and 200. And if we continue to see the lead some interest coming in, we’re building better systems every day. So we actually have more interest in what we’re doing right now than we have ever had before. With museum hack with walk off with some of the other brands. I’m like, a normal day we’d get between 20 and 30 qualified leads and could expect about 10% of them would turn into business deals with us. Now, instead of having 150 leads a week we have 150 leads a day. So the week of March 9, when it first started coming in. We couldn’t handle that capacity, right? It was just too much. We had two full time sales reps, another part time person. But as the weeks have gone on, we’ve hired more. We have another I think three sales reps. We got the director of sales on We’re figuring out pricing, we’re figuring out what exactly people want. And we’re getting data to be able to convert a lot more. But so this one should be healthy, going forward should be healthy as well.

I’m wondering,

Andrew Warner 1:00:14
this is an amazing turnaround for a company that really could have just said we’re going to go into hibernation for a little bit and had a lot of understanding from people. I’m wondering why you were a little hesitant to do the interview with me when I put that call out. A handful of people said I don’t want to do I’m doing better, Andrew, but I don’t want to talk about it publicly. And I totally understood. People don’t want to look like they’re like dancing while others are dying, you know. So I said, Okay, I’m not going to push I didn’t push with anyone who had even the slightest bit of hesitation, including you. And then now that I’m hearing your story, I wonder why you had any hesitation. This feels like the this story to tell right now. It just shows like, how you able to keep your head on a way of turning things around a way of recognizing The challenge that people have in the world today, which is this this online transition is it’s creating demand creating challenges, creating frustration, creating opportunities. You found it, you’re helping them out. Why was there any hesitation? That’s a long winded way to ask why was there a lot of hesitation?

Michael Alexis 1:01:16
He have a lot of competitors. And I wasn’t confident yet in our lead. So now a couple weeks in, I’m able to see that we accept faster than anybody else did. We update our website in about a week. It was about a week before anybody else did substantial actions. And in that time, yeah, we started to build the landing pages. We started to build branded microsites. We started to put up ads, we started to do SEO and link building. And that one week is enough of a competitive advantage, that it’s going to be very, very difficult for competitors to catch up. So I’m now happy to say like, hey, virtual people, the big idea Nobody else wants a piece of it like, less than we can go head to head, because it’s going to that gap. Some of our competitors, they’re super smart, they’re super savvy, they’re good at marketing, they’re going to close the gap. I don’t think anybody is going to be able to pass what we’re doing.

Andrew Warner 1:02:17
I get it, your site does look really good. I feel like who’s your designer? That’s you. It’s me. The little characters in the bottom right of team building calm.

Michael Alexis 1:02:29
I didn’t draw the buy ads or vector images about the site everything is

Andrew Warner 1:02:34
that takes like an artistic sense of confidence because the characters have nothing to do with nothing. They’re just like a nice design touch, right? without feeling overwhelmed, without feeling like it’s forced. Wow. All right. Okay, the website is for anyone who’s curious, go check out Team building.com. I do think it’s just really beautifully designed. I don’t know what else I could say about this. I think this is the story to tell right now. I think Like every frickin newspaper in the world every newspapers anymore I think the media should be picking up on this I think this is the field good story for business people a guy whose business should have been completely destroyed who instead says I’m going to recognize a problem and I’m gonna go and help out go check them out a team building calm I want to thank the two sponsors who made this interview happen the first if you want to understand what’s keeping your customers from continuing on with your business what’s keeping them happy if you want to really get in their minds and not just by asking them but by asking them and merging it with I’m not gonna say artificial intelligence I probably could say it I think it probably is I’m gonna say with with smart software to help you pull all the data together and make sense of it go check out the lighted really delighted comm slash mixergy they’re giving you something they’re not giving other people which is free use of their software for for life, I think. Let me see. Okay, can this be for life life? You know what, go check it out just to confirm, I just don’t see them charging our people at all. They just want you to go in there and try and yes, if you Want to upgrade they will charge you more if you will charge you if you start to go through the upgrade process, but they just want you to go and try it. Right now. It’s available limited time, they only bought like three ads with me. So once it’s gone, it’s gone. Don’t lose it, go to delight a.com slash mixergy you’ll be really grateful that you did number one and number two, I want to thank clickfunnels if you are creating any kind of webpage online right now do one that will actually get you results. And that’s the beauty of Click Funnels, they will turn your visitors into customers and make it so easy. You won’t believe in all the things we’ve been talking about. You’ll get to us just by using their software drag and drop it baby at Click Funnels comm slash mixergy. And since I’m going through this whole list of links right now, Michael, I will also say that now that this podcast is over, if you want more tactics for marketing, go check out Marketing Secrets podcast and whatever app you’re listening to me with Marketing Secrets. Thank you so much, Michael.

Michael Alexis 1:04:51
It’s my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to share the little bit that we’ve learned, and I hope it’ll be really useful for people, man All right.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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