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As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the 2x Webby Award Honoree Be A Marketer podcast!
On today's episode, you'll hear from a man who built a train in his basement and a business empire out of pure passion. This is the Be A Marketer podcast.
Dave Charest:My name is Dave Charest, director of small business success at Constant Contact, and I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing. And on this podcast, we'll explore what it really takes to market your business, even if marketing's not your thing. No jargon, no hype, just real stories to inspire you and practical advice you can act on. So remember, friend, you can be a marketer. And at Constant Contact, we're here to help.
Dave Charest:Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining us for another episode of the Be a Marketer podcast and riding shotgun. Today is the always awesome Kelsi Carter. Hi, Kelsey.
Kelsi Carter:Hi, Dave. You're always awesome too.
Dave Charest:Aw. Thank you. I'll take it. That's it. Show's over.
Dave Charest:It is, folks. So listen. Our guest today talks a lot about how honesty and fun are core to their brand. And, Kelsi, I'm wondering from you, have you ever seen a business kind of lean into transparency the way our guest does today? And if you have or you haven't, do you think more businesses should?
Kelsi Carter:I think maybe the company that stands out to me is Chewy. I don't know if you've ever ordered for your cats or anything like that, but I feel like they're very transparent in how they run things. Their customer service is amazing, and you can just tell that they're really just passionate about the people they're serving in general. Like, when a pet passes away, they send something, like, to the parents and stuff like that if they're, like, a subscriber. So I think it's just really, like, you can tell that they're passionate and really care about what they're doing.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Yeah. I think it's also you know, it really connects with people on on a different level when you know that the business that you're interacting with is kind of, I guess, for a lack of better way to say not b s ing you all the time. Right? And really kind of being honest with you and being transparent that way.
Dave Charest:And so I think it's a it can be a good things and a strength in many many instances. What can you tell us about our guest today?
Kelsi Carter:Today's guest is Jason Shron. He's the president of Rapido Trains Incorporated, which is Canada's largest manufacturer of high end model trains and accessories. Rapido has operations in both North America and The UK, and it really started with Jason's lifelong love of trains. He even left his PhD program in art history to make trains full time. And really fun fact, he has a 20 foot section of a real train in his basement.
Dave Charest:That is wild to me on a bunch of different levels. But also, I guess that's just, like, there forever now. Right?
Dave Charest:Like, when you sell this house, you get get a train in your basement as well. So whatever the case, in this conversation, I really enjoyed talking to Jason. You can really hear his passion come through. And we talked about how being obsessively honest really helped him build a loyal fan base and get this, 81% email open rates. I mean, that's just off the charts in terms of what we're looking at here.
Dave Charest:Right? Why embracing your inner nerd can be your marketing superpower. And we talk about the marketing magic of knowing exactly who you're talking to and what they care about. So let's go to Jason as he shares how procrastination led him to start his model train business.
Jason Shron:It's a company built on passion. So I started it twenty years ago, just over twenty years ago, and it was just I'm a model railroader. I love model trains. I love real trains. And I wanted to make the trains that I wanted.
Jason Shron:I was actually doing a PhD in art history in Birmingham, England. And while I enjoyed living in England, I was not in the career path. I just wanna make model trains all day. So while procrastinating for my PhD, I started this model train business on the side. And it's very funny when we delivered the first big shipment a couple years later and and I got my first ten thousand dollars check from a customer.
Jason Shron:I took a model train and sent it to my PhD supervisor in England and said, here's my thesis. I officially withdraw from the program. I I make model trains now. And it's that passion that's being a modeler my whole life since I've I've loved trains since I was two. We were building model trains since I was four in the family.
Jason Shron:I got the the bug from my father. Of course, I he's he just was doing some fun thing with his kids, whereas I've taken it to a whole career and a whole life. And that passion and desire for my own trains that make me happy and make me go wow, was the way, like people saw that. And over the last twenty years, it's tuned into their passion because it's not a very, it's not a corporate thing. It's a company run almost entirely model railroaders.
Jason Shron:I've hired one after another every few years. We've our stable of different model train nerds to design our products. So now that we're, you know, we're a team of mostly model train freaks who design stuff that we want, and so our customers want them too because we're thinking along the same lines.
Dave Charest:So was it I mean, was this in your purview just in terms of, like, how big this has gotten? I was this something you thought like, yeah. Oh, I had no clue.
Jason Shron:It I had no idea it would get so big, especially, like, this you know, when we expanded into The UK, it's like, wow. Have a British company now. This is cool. Last time I was here was a student, and I've got a British company. But it's amazing how large it's grown.
Jason Shron:I think grown has brought challenges. I think any company who's experienced growth, especially during COVID, we had rapid, rapid growth as rapid for Rapido because people found they had tons of free time and nothing to do. So they got out the old model train set from the the top shelf in the cupboard and said, yeah. This is pretty old. Let's see what the hobby is offering now thirty years later.
Jason Shron:Holy crow. You got sound now in models, and you've got details specific to one railroad in your models and all this cool, like the hobbies advanced. So we just could not keep anything on the shelf during COVID. At the same time, we had tremendous logistics issues of getting goods overseas because of all the delays around the world. So managing that growth has actually been a challenge.
Jason Shron:It's a good challenge to have. I'd rather manage growth than manage a shrinking company, but it definitely brings us challenges because, you know, there's whether it's you can't keep up with the customer service emails or whether it's you just can't keep up with the product and you have to design more product. So I've had to hire three of my six senior designers have been hired in the last two years.
Dave Charest:How big is the company now just in terms of staff?
Jason Shron:We've got about 30 in North America, and there's another, dozen or so in The UK. So we Freedom is two separate companies.
Dave Charest:Sure. Yeah.
Jason Shron:So we actually have a separate UK Constant Contact account. We're not gonna talk they they won't like it if I talk about that here because they're very proud of their Constant they wanna talk about that. They'll talk about that one.
Dave Charest:Well, so it's interesting. We have some parallel paths here as actually Constant Contact is we're we're doing a big push into The UK this year too. So look at that. I'm curious. I guess, what is it about trains then?
Dave Charest:What is it about model trains, and what is it that kind of gets you in there? Right?
Jason Shron:Well, started when I was two. I live in Canada. I live I moved born in Montreal and Quebec, then we moved to Toronto. It's about 330 miles away. And we would go back.
Jason Shron:And then we moved in in July, went back in September. I was two, two and a half. And my first memory is on the return trip in September of seventy seven. We're on this train called the Turbo. It's amazing high-tech train of the future that of course never lasted because, know, often these high-tech trains of the future don't last very But I fell in love with it.
Jason Shron:And I remember I wanted to go. You can look over the shoulder of the engineer out the front. It was open up. It was a really cool design. And I wanted to go, but I was afraid of getting lost.
Jason Shron:And my father said, go ahead. This was like 20 feet away. Right? But I was gonna get lost. And I, right, so I got up and walked like six feet, know where I was, sat down and started crying.
Jason Shron:My father picked me up, took me to the front of the train, looked out the front. And ever since then, I've been obsessed with trains. I think they're just I can tell a whole bunch of scientific reasons why I like trains, why guys like trains, almost always guys. It's very much a guy thing. I'm also a huge Doctor Who nerd, and Doctor Who used to be a guy thing, but now for the last twenty years, it's now an everybody thing.
Jason Shron:Whereas trans hasn't really broken that glass ceiling to be appealed to the masses, it's still a guy thing. I think it's the same part of our brains that have Star Trek facts and figures, baseball facts and figures, train facts and figures, right? You have to, you know, women are are doing amazing things all the time with all their brain, and us guys, we have like a lot of spare room, right? So we fill it with train packs of things and stuff like that. I could give it like a scientific reason, but I'd much rather it's just, it's a passion thing.
Jason Shron:You become totally in love with this motor transportation. It's more than just like toasters. And some people don't get it. They say, well, why aren't you in love with toasters? Why aren't you in love with ovens?
Jason Shron:Why aren't you in love with fridges? You know, well, it's not, it's more than that. There's a whole culture around trains. And there's a history of the trains being an innovative technological development of the nineteenth century that we're still using every day today. We have the technology shifted in the twentieth century, but the essential basics of the steel wheels, steel rails hasn't changed since the nineteenth century.
Jason Shron:It's tied together in America, it's tied together Canada. Trains really built both countries, which is something special. But then there's also the memory of riding these trains back and forth to see my grandparents, see my auntie and see all the other people in Montreal. And so I associate specifically that route, from Toronto, Montreal and those trains with very, very warm, very wonderful memories and feelings. And so when I started the company, I was starting to make these trains, the trains that I rode, I would include stuff like the bathroom faucets.
Jason Shron:You can't see them unless you take the roof off the train and look down into the train car to see the bathroom because there's no windows in the bathroom. In the bathroom, you've got you got toilet, you got faucets, you gotta flush your pedal, everything. Right? Because I wanted to recreate a miniature of my memories. I mean and so the cafe car has little shelves that you can put sandwiches.
Jason Shron:No no one I know has put sandwiches in their shelves. Sandwiches in their shelves. But the shelves are there.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Jason Shron:And the coffee pot is on the shelf of one of our cafe cars. There's a coffee pot on the shelf. And we're talking one eighty seven scales. The coffee pot is, like, less than a sixteenth of an inch tall. All right?
Jason Shron:And it's just, it's cool. It's just cool. So that desire to recreate the whole thing, and I really went nuts over what's under the train. So train models over the last, you know, hundred years that model trains have been a thing, underneath people, they often leave nothing there, or they put a couple of blobs of plastic and say, oh, there's it's dark. You can't really see it.
Jason Shron:But when I was a kid and I was like three feet tall and the trains here in Canada, you could see all air conditioning, you could see air brake equipment, you could see water tanks. Because we have so much snow up here, we used to, we don't have as much anymore, that the snow, if you close that off, it would just all get caught up in there and then the train would just stop working. So they left everything open. And so when you're three feet tall and you see all this hardware, I was fascinated by it to the point where I was on the train once and I was five or six and the train broke down. And so I had two hours to kill at the station with our train parked there.
Jason Shron:And I asked my mom for a pen and paper and I was drawing the stuff under the train. That because my brother and I would rock trains and on. So our models had all this stuff, and they still do today. And people who were in Houston said, Why are you wasting money making all these pipes and things like that under the train? I said, Well, if you're making a model of Jaguar, you wouldn't open up the hood and have nothing in there.
Jason Shron:Can have a Jaguar engine in there because that's what makes it Well, if you don't have all that air conditioning, heating equipment, all that stuff underneath, then it's just a box on wheels, right? So that to me was just important. And so some people didn't get it, but most people got it. And so we became known as this crazy guy with this crazy company that does details that no one ever thought they needed. And we always joke that our models look best if they derail and fall down an embankment.
Dave Charest:Does that
Jason Shron:use You see all the things. Amazing.
Dave Charest:So I could definitely see well, I'm curious. I mean, I don't know a lot about the industry. Right? But as someone who does get obsessive about things, that attention to detail, I can see how that can be attractive to somebody. Are there other businesses that follow suit?
Dave Charest:Like, or are you the only one that kinda goes into it with that meticulously?
Jason Shron:There are. So we sort of broke the mold, but of our we've got a lot of friendly competitors, I'll call them,
Dave Charest:who Yeah.
Jason Shron:Yeah. Yeah. Pick that up. Certainly, far as locomotives are concerned, I'd say we're at the same level as a lot of our competitors, but maybe two or I should say two or three of our competitors. It's not a very big one.
Jason Shron:But when it comes to passenger cars, no one's ever come close. They just they look at the balance sheet. They look at the profit and loss statement. They say, I gotta pay how much for pipes? Yeah.
Jason Shron:Yeah. Yeah. I gotcha. But you have to have someone who's so nuts about this stuff to to want to spend the money to make all those little details that you you hardly can see.
Dave Charest:Well, I was gonna say you gotta have a very particular group of clientele, right, that share that same passion that you do. I'm curious for on the business side of things, was business in the family? Are you the first one to own your own business? Like, did you think you'd ever own your own business? Tell me a little bit about that.
Jason Shron:I had no clue. In fact, I started seeing a business coach about five years ago, and the business coach actually, six years ago now. And the business coach, I said, I can't even read a balance sheet. I didn't even learn how to go to business school. And I said, It must be like, for you to teach someone like me, it must be very frustrating because I don't know anything.
Jason Shron:He says, I love people like you because you just started a business and did it, and you're doing it, and you're running a successful business. People who come out of business school, they know how to do everything, but they may not have actually ever run a business before. So I really just figured it all out as I went. I mean, my father, he's a phenomenal salesperson. He's most of his life worked for other people.
Jason Shron:So I get my sales ability from my father. He's very, very talented. My father, when when we left Montreal, he left his job in Montreal, and he sold his briefcase on the metro on the subway. So he's he's last day of work, he's coming home, he's got an empty briefcase, and he sold it to somebody on the subway. Like, that's my father.
Jason Shron:Right? He he can sell ice cubes to the Inuit. But so I have that naturally from my dad, but we have no real history of business in the family. And I am following my father. I'm only the second person that's really gone off on my own that way.
Jason Shron:My brother has since gone off on his own running a business, but I have no business training. I have graphic design training from So I knew how to do graphic design and use Adobe Creative Suite and whatever else. So I could actually design stuff, which is helpful. But I've just figured it out. And so I've started a UK company much more recently, 2020s when we really got that off the ground, and versus 02/2004.
Jason Shron:And I find that UK company is actually much more smoothly run because I could come to it and say, okay, we have to do this, this, this, this, and this. All the things I didn't do back then, right? We have to set up a robust system for taking orders that will grow, whereas the Canadian company keeps on having to go to a new system because our old system just comes like life expired. So as the company grows, it just can't handle the volume of sales that we're doing. So we've started the UK company on a bit of a firmer footing because I'd already had, like, sixteen years experience at that point.
Jason Shron:But when I started, no, I I had no business experience at all.
Dave Charest:Wow. So well, then did you go into this any doubts coming into your mind as you're starting to do this? Like, where are you? Yeah.
Jason Shron:Make a small fortune in model railroading, you have to start with a large fortune. That's the thing. And I didn't have a large fortune. So I had I raised up $75 from my my uncle, my father-in-law, my father, 25 each. And I had a financing partner at the original days, and let's put it this way, before we delivered our first product, we were half a million dollars in debt.
Jason Shron:Right? Because it really does. You have you're paying your tooling costs like a year before you ship the goods. That's where you make the actual steel molds, you inject the model trained plastic into the molds or the die cast parts. And then you're paying for the molds, you're paying for production, you're going through months of production, and then you're waiting two months for it to arrive and get laid out and shipped out.
Jason Shron:And then thirty days later, after your customer got it for thirty days, then you get paid. So you have to finance the business for such a long time. And that's actually the biggest challenge, I think, for anyone interested in getting into this sort of business is when you're making things, you have to finance them and you have to finance that, The tooling, you have to finance that production, and it it's a huge process. Right? So that's been an enormous challenge all the way through.
Jason Shron:It still is a challenge today.
Dave Charest:How does it feel to be where you are today? And did you ever think, wow? You know?
Jason Shron:Honestly, for me, it's I'm so focused on the next project and the the last the current fire I'm putting out. It's hard to step back and say, woah. I've changed the hobby. Great. Like, I just don't think like yesterday, I spent the whole afternoon trying to get a cooking sound onto an engine.
Jason Shron:Right? So I'm like, I'm on the phone. I'm on the I'm on the WhatsApp with the sound supplier. There's no spinner. It's a valve that takes the humidity out of the airlines.
Jason Shron:It just goes tick, tick, tick. There's no I put the spinner on. Nurses had an hour working on a spinner valve. And, like, so on the one hand, I'm I'm running this big company. I've got a whole team.
Jason Shron:On the other hand, I'm the one who's like, where's the spinner valve? We need no. That's an air filter. It's the wrong we need the spinner valve. So I'm sort of caught up in it.
Jason Shron:So I always say there's like a there's the view at zero. There's the view at 5,000 feet, the view at 10,000 feet. So I've got the view for the business at 10,000 feet going forward. I haven't really taken the time, I should at some point, to look back. You know?
Jason Shron:I wanna look back to say, oh, we screwed up there. We gotta fix that. And here we are. I think that what's actually helped us to grow, and Constant Contact's actually played a big role in that, is that because I have no business experience, well, now I do, twenty years running this business. But before that, I'm just a model train guy, make and model train.
Jason Shron:So I would share, as I was starting this journey, 02/2006 is when we delivered our first way to run models, or early, late two thousand and five. So 02/2006 is when I started with Constant Contact and I started these newsletters as a way of sharing with the customers what we're doing. So, all right, we're now injecting the models. Okay, we've run into a problem. The problem is this.
Jason Shron:All right, we just delivered products and guess what? A whole bunch of them have a problem. This is the problem. And we showed that problem to the, I would show that to, I say we, that it was just me back then. I would show the problem to the customers.
Jason Shron:I'm trying to fix it now, right? And so one time I had to make new shells for a train because I got the letters backwards on one side. I was making the artwork, I flipped it and I forgot to flip it back, right? So I was still on my Central Railroad on one side and it was Central Illinois Railroad on the other. That's collector's item now, is you can find a Central Illinois baggage car.
Jason Shron:And by being totally honest, that got people on side because they saw, oh my god, this company, whoever they are, Rapido, they're a new company, we're still at, by the twenty years later, we're still the same way. If we screw up, we just tell people, okay, we screwed up here, here, and here, and we're fixing this one. And this one we can't fix because it's a model. The real one, like it would have cost us $100,000 to fix that little tiny thing. So you just have to live with the little tiny thing is going to be there.
Jason Shron:I mean, we have to make real. But we explain the economics to our customers and they understand it and the vast majority of reasonable people, and they get it, right? So even an example, when I was at one point looking at future options for the business, had a financing partner, we're moving on to end the partnership, met with my lawyer one of his team, and they're saying, Well, do you want to bring the company public? And the team member says, Oh, you don't want to report to boards. And then my lawyer says, You haven't read his newsletters.
Jason Shron:Jason tells more to the public than most CEOs tell their boards. And that's just always been the way. You know? I just share what's going on.
Dave Charest:Well, I'm curious though. Where does that come from? Because I would argue, I mean, like, you're doing, back then when you started, something that even works really great today. Like, that's a way to do So, like, I guess, where did that even come from? Why would you do that?
Jason Shron:Because I didn't like the idea of spin. I just like the idea of being honest.
Dave Charest:Okay.
Jason Shron:Again, most of our customers are very, very reasonable. If you're honest and it's like, we had a a project that leapfrogged another project. So the orders for the first project the people who ordered the first project were very upset. Why is this one being one of these first? I've had this in order for two years.
Jason Shron:So I said, Because no one's ordered that, right? So they've all ordered this. This is gonna make money that will allow us to pay our bills so that we can make the thing that you want. Yeah. Right?
Jason Shron:And we're just going being totally, totally straight with the customers. And that's the sort of a policy I've maintained all the way through. Now, as we have more and more projects, it's sometimes more difficult to have me directly involved in that communication. I have a team now, but we still take the same principle is that we want to tell people what's going on. And look, there will be people who are not reasonable.
Jason Shron:We have a customer who's upset that one model, the interior light bulbs don't match the position of the real train. And say, that's because it's this tall. Yeah. Okay? The train is two inches tall.
Jason Shron:We can't have every little, the 72 light bulbs in the real train. We're going to have like six LEDs and you're going be happy with that. So there's a reasonability test. Okay? But that honesty, I think, is very important.
Jason Shron:And the newsletters are a great way. It's a direct way to communicate with those the end customer like that.
Dave Charest:So, yeah, how much do you attribute that approach, right, that mentality to the success you've had?
Jason Shron:Oh, it's a huge it's a huge element to it. And I mean, our open rate on our newsletters is 80%.
Dave Charest:I have that written down in your click through rates. So we'll dig into that a little bit here, but that's insane. Particularly when you think if you're looking right, averages, no one wants to be average. But if you you're wondering where the average is, right, we're probably these days in, like, the 32% range. Right?
Dave Charest:So 81%. Okay. Impressive on its own. When we start thinking about click through rates, you're probably again, averages 3%, twenty five %. What the hell's going on, Jason?
Dave Charest:What are you doing?
Jason Shron:A lot of our customers, by the way, they don't click through because they take our newsletter and they go to the hobby shop and they order the goods from the hobby shop across the country. We're a very old fashioned hobby. Okay, very old fashioned industry. So, I mean, up until recently, were getting orders by fax. In fact, in fact, 2018, we almost lost an order because the store hand wrote the order and included it on piece of lined paper with beautiful penmanship, I might add, with his check and my controller just threw up the envelope.
Jason Shron:It puts an order for a hundred thousand dollars on locomotives behind the check, right? We're a very, very old fashioned industry. So a lot of our customers actually read the newsletter and then go to the hobby shop. Our stores and distributors are 90% of our sales. Some model train companies have shown up in the last twenty years after, and they're going after that direct customer because they want that extra margin.
Jason Shron:If you're giving 40%, fifty % off to your distributors or to the hobby shops or 30% off, it is, that's margin you're not getting.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Jason Shron:And so people have gone into the hobby and gone that direct approach, and they're wondering why their sales are lagging. Whereas we take the approach that, no, we want our models to get in as many places as possible so we support the hobby shops. So, yeah, I think that all of that all of that combines. I'm explaining my low click through rate of 25%. That's why
Dave Charest:Yeah. Low. I know. Like, yeah, please. You know, you really you gotta you gotta figure something out, man.
Dave Charest:This isn't working.
Jason Shron:I'm like, well
Dave Charest:so I have to imagine, as you didn't have any business experience, I mean, did you have any marketing experience?
Jason Shron:No. Not really. I mean, it's yeah. I I not really. No.
Jason Shron:One of the things that we did from the start is silly videos.
Dave Charest:Okay. Interesting.
Jason Shron:We were recording there's a locomotive that we weren't happy with all the sounds out there because they always record a locomotive sitting in the yard and going blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. You know, it doing anything. So what we did is we hired a railroad for the day and we hauled a dead locomotive, which weighs 130 tons, up a hill. And then we stuck a little Zoom recorder on the roof we just recorded what it did. So I had this video of me on the roof of this Oh, okay.
Jason Shron:Now this is move of duct taping bits of the engine down because it's rattling. I didn't like the rattle, right? So duct tape. Yeah. So this video of me duct taping stuff on the roof.
Jason Shron:And then it just got more and more ridiculous, the videos. They would just get very, very silly. And we there's a share of customers who say, oh, stop the silly videos. We don't care. But actually, there's a lot of customers love the fact that we're having obviously having fun.
Jason Shron:And I think that when people see that we're having fun, it brings joy.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Jason Shron:We're so used to it. If I look at all the emails we get, I'd say 85% of them are complaints, right? Because who emails? This is broken. This isn't working.
Jason Shron:I don't like this. You got this wrong. But it's a time, it's like 2% of our customers. The rest of the people are very happy. If they're happy, they don't email.
Jason Shron:Sometimes we get some beautiful emails. We got an email from a customer once who had suffered a very deep personal tragedy that our models helped them through it. And that was to me, like, it's just, we were his happy place that he could go to while dealing with that personal tragedy. So sometimes we get emails like that and then I shared to the whole team, look at what listed.
Dave Charest:Yeah, right. Yeah.
Jason Shron:Customer, I'm so happy. And we've had some good feedback, But people see that we're having fun. And I think a lot of people, especially through COVID and after COVID, we've gotten really nasty, really bitter, really grumpy. I think a lot of people forgot over the course of a couple of years how to interact with other people. And and having a company that is just clearly having a good time.
Jason Shron:You know, I'm pushing 50, and a lot of my team, they're the millennials or they're Gen Xers. So a lot of our the stuff we include with our models and our videos are all cultural references that we get. And so you get other people who get our references, and it's usually have so much fun with it. All right? And we will rip off anything in our videos.
Jason Shron:We'll, like, do a parody with this, or the other. And I grew up watching, you know, Monty Python and and SCTV, Saturday Night Live. So I have that element in my past, and we try and bring that joy. And, right before COVID, I hired this new guy coming into work. He's gonna fix models.
Jason Shron:Right? His name is Jeremy. He's gonna fix models. And so, okay. And he says, by the way, I do some video work.
Jason Shron:I said, sure. No problem. He's one of those guys that as soon as I saw him, you probably employ people. You you see him the interview and you know I'm hiring that guy. It's like
Dave Charest:Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know somebody. So yeah. Yeah.
Jason Shron:You know, you can tell. Just through the window, I'm hiring that guy. Right? So I know he's hiring. And then he says, do some videos.
Jason Shron:So he says, COVID has now started. Everyone's locked down. Everyone's working from home. He says, I'm gonna go pick some models up, work from home, I'll I'll do a video from home. Okay.
Jason Shron:He does. I've put up a draft. Go have a look at the draft. I looked at the draft. I said, Jeremy, you're fired
Kelsi Carter:from our work.
Jason Shron:You're now our full time video guy. I think he took a lightsaber and, like, cut the engine in half or something like that. It was such an amazing video. And so he's now done like two fifty odd videos since then. We try and do one every week or two.
Jason Shron:And they're funny, they're cheeky, they're not serious at all. We one time made track. So we did tests. We said, will this track be strong enough? And we ran over it with a real train.
Jason Shron:Guess what? The track failed. It was a little bit it was molten crack. It was failed. Right?
Jason Shron:So he said, this failed completely. This is a terrible test. Do not buy the track.
Dave Charest:So you mentioned you're doing this on your own to begin, and then you start to build the team. So, like, who's involved with helping you do the marketing now? Like, how big of a team do you have there?
Jason Shron:Marketing team is a core group of people. We have Natasha, who just started last year as our marketing manager because I was doing too much. I needed someone to take a lot of my work. We're great. We have Jeremy who does the videos.
Jason Shron:We have Jordan who does all the social media. We have Bobby who does our newsletters. And we have Priyanka who does our website. So we're a small marketing team amongst the larger team. No one has one particular job.
Jason Shron:You know, I'll review a newsletter and I'll edit it, or I'll write part of the newsletter, or Natasha who's, you know, the manager, she'll she'll design labels for our mystery boxes that we sell to customers, things like that. So we all pitch in in different ways. It's good. It's a good team. It's been and yeah.
Jason Shron:And we've we've grown. I mean, Jordan is the the oldest marketing person. He's been with us since 2015.
Dave Charest:I guess, is there a marketing meeting? How does this all come together? Like, do you guys get together to plan things? Like, what does that process look for you and and what are you trying to do?
Jason Shron:Every week, we meet on on a Monday afternoon, and we just go over what's going on, what we're doing. We plan our newsletters. Bobby then goes and does the newsletters. We try and tie together the you know, we bring in a project manager and say, well, okay, we're launching your project. What do we talk about this?
Jason Shron:What do we say about this? And what are the three most important things of this model? Why should people buy, you know, this model? This is a podcast. We're holding a model here, right?
Jason Shron:This is a model. Why should people buy this model? Actually, this is actually from ten years ago, but it's still cool. Why should people buy it? Now, in this case, they're gonna buy this model because nobody's ever made one.
Jason Shron:So of course, gonna buy ours or you buy nothing. So there you go. Then we have to convince people why they wanna buy this model, right? Because it's a great model. But in some cases, we're bringing out a model that's been released three times before by other manufacturers.
Jason Shron:And we have to tell people, why are you buying our model? And so it's talking with the product and the project manager is a trained nut who's been buried into this model for the last eight months designing it, right? So it's like, well, it's really cool. Oh, well, actually, you know, we have a lighting here that no one's ever done. We have the control stand, the little dials on the control stand in real life were only this big.
Jason Shron:They let up, right? I said, well, that's a selling point, okay? We recorded the sounds ourselves on the tourist railroad in New York State. That's a selling point, right? I mean, these are all good things that we would.
Jason Shron:So we make sure that there's communication between the guys designing the models and the marketing, you know, who But the marketing, Bobby, Jordan, I were train nuts, right? So often, it's like Bobby says, Well, you didn't talk about this. Okay, so talk about this. It's like, Okay. Bobby points out, Who didn't design the product?
Jason Shron:Well, you forgot the biggest selling feature. So then Bobby will just throw it in there. I wish we could say we're totally organized and we're corporate. We're not.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Shron:We're not. Every product launch is a scramble of Rapido because we just, oh, why don't we make this also in another scale? The launch is next week. Well, let's try. Everybody scrambles so that we could launch the product in two scales instead of one, and then we end up increasing our sales by 35%.
Dave Charest:Well, it sounds like you're in this unique situation where in many instances, I mean, would you say that you are your target customer in many ways?
Jason Shron:Yeah. We're making the stuff for ourselves.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Interesting.
Jason Shron:And recognizing who our target customers are. I mean, we know our demographics. Our demographics primarily are men, like 99.9% men, right? So our marketing is aimed towards men because these are our customers. We'll often say, well, our manuals are full of humor.
Jason Shron:Like the beginning of it, a lot of people buy model trains and then stick them in their boxes under the model train in the crawl space, in the basement, in the attic, until they build their model railroad. They never build the model railroad and they end up dying with a whole bunch of beautifully preserved model trains. And they all go to a store and they're sold in a state sale. And then you're buying a model train that was like released forty years ago and it's brand new in the box. Right?
Jason Shron:So our manual actually says, hi. If this is the year 02/1973, stop with this, and it's missing a doodad, You're out of luck. We can't help you. We're all dead. That's how we introduce our manuals to our customers.
Jason Shron:So we we bring all that into it. We definitely bring all that into it.
Dave Charest:That's amazing.
Jason Shron:So you need three things to be a big spender in model, to get really serious on model railroading and become a big spender. You need time, space, and money. Okay? So our typical demographic, they tend to be dads. Okay?
Jason Shron:And when do they have time, space, and money? Well, it's very simple, when the kids move out. Because now you're not taking them in Canada, we all go to ice hockey practice. You're not going to hockey practice. You're not going to baseball, soccer, football, whatever.
Jason Shron:You're not stopping them here, stopping them there. They've moved out. So now their stuff's not all over your basement anymore. You've got room in your basement or your spare room is now a spare room because juniors moved out. Right?
Jason Shron:And then you're not spending money on the hockey equipment and the vacations to the busy world and this, and the other. So you've got the three things that you need of time, space, and money. So it's generally in early to mid fifties is when suddenly every year there's more people turning 55. So every year there's more people becoming model railroaders, right? Because like, I've got time.
Jason Shron:I'm feeling it now that I've got one kid off university, I've got one kid who's graduating high school soon, and one kid who's now, he's in grade seven, so he's more self sufficient. And suddenly I'll have an evening, it's like, I have two hours with nothing to do. I'm gonna work on my trains. I'm talking to you from my basement where I'm building a model railroad that's 12 by 40 feet, five feet long. It's gonna take me another thirty years to build this, even with all the time I now have.
Jason Shron:Because I'm building that route from Toronto, Montreal that I rode when I was a kid. So I am my customer. Now, I don't make a lot of money off me because I don't pay a whole lot for my model. But it's like Jordan says, oh, we gotta I've eight of the new dome car. Jordan, you don't pay for the new dome car.
Jason Shron:So I don't care that you order eight of the dome. I want people I don't know who bought the new dome car.
Dave Charest:Well, so that's actually a good lead. Like, so when you start thinking about success for the business and particularly where you are now and you're expanding and you're doing all of that, I guess, like, how do you start what's most important to you? I mean, I guess sales is the easy answer. Right? But is there a particular thing that you're looking at in terms of measurement?
Jason Shron:So the most important thing yeah. In terms of gross sales and making a profit, obviously, any business owner, that's what's important. I'm not keen on shrinking. So I try to move mountains so that we always grow a little bit every year. And so for the last, nine years, we've grown a little bit every year.
Jason Shron:Sometimes a lot. During COVID, we grew by 60 percent one year because it was like, woah. Because all the stuff that was delayed in 2021 showed up in '22 along with 2022 sales. So we had like two years worth of sales. It's like, woah, we've grown a lot.
Jason Shron:That was, and then you show that and then your accountant says, this is gonna happen every year? No, this is not gonna happen.
Dave Charest:Anomaly. Yeah.
Jason Shron:This is a one time deal. I'll take it. I'll take it. But actually the most important thing for me is having customers love their models. If I've got customers, that email a guy who was really, you know, upset and had a personal tragedy and was so, you know, have found solace in his models, I've had other emails similar where someone said, I've wanted this my whole life.
Jason Shron:I mean, there's, I've got, we know people who who've changed their whole model railroad because we brought out the model they never thought they would get. Right? So now they got the model that they really wanted. They've sort of sold everything else and they've gone back to basics starting again because they finally got the model they actually really wanted. So when I hear stories like that, that to me is what is what I do this for.
Jason Shron:I do this for where that connection with my customers, where they, I mean, I'm getting the models. I never thought that I'd ever have a model of this train I'm holding right now called an LRC. It's a Canadian only train that only ran in two provinces in Canada. We're not talking about a big popular train that this is not Union Pacific. This is not Pennsylvania Railroad.
Jason Shron:I never thought one of those would be made, and it's been made. And similar to Jordan, has been obsessed with an Amtrak train called the Turboliner, which ran only along the Hudson River Valley. It ran from New York to Albany and New York to Montreal. That was where it ran, so occasionally to Toronto. That's it.
Jason Shron:He wore me down after like five years. We finally produced it and it was very successful. And you had people coming and saying, I've always wanted this. Like, I've, hey, I can't believe a manufacturer made this. This is unbelievable.
Jason Shron:We're now making subway trains that people are saying, someone's making a subway train. No one's ever made a Toronto subway. I can't believe this. So, like, that's just cool to be able to have that that connection. That connection to me is is if I'm connecting with people and one of those emails makes up for the 100 emails, oh, I can't find my part.
Jason Shron:The grab iron broke. Blah blah.
Dave Charest:It's amazing how meaningful those things are. Well, so my follow-up here then too. Right? Because I think there's a couple of things that you also do in this journey that you have here that are interesting. I mean, you've you've written a book, so I'm curious about the impact that has had.
Dave Charest:But along with that, you also if I'm not mistaken, you are the owner of a popular discussion group as well. Right? Is that true?
Jason Shron:Yeah. It started out it was popular. I think that social media has taken over most of job, but that led to Rapido. So I was on Usenet. Those of us of a certain age remember Usenet, the early days of the internet when you would just talk and text with people on your dial up modem.
Jason Shron:And it was a a company was bringing out a a model of a Toronto train, but they were a California company, so they measured the train in Los Angeles and then just painted it up in Toronto colors, so it wasn't accurate for Toronto. And I was quite upset with that. And someone said on this Usenet group, just be happy they're painting it in Toronto colors. And I said, that's it. There's gotta be a forum here for people who actually want accurate Canadian models.
Jason Shron:So I started this, what was a Yahoo group, it's now groups.io, about that sort of thing. And that's, and I remember the first post in 02/2002 is, okay, here's a new group. It's about Canadian models. What do you want? I want a turbo.
Jason Shron:I want an LRC. I want blue and yellow equipment. And like the first three models we made are the turbo, the blue and yellow, the LRC. Like we, I manufactured the stuff that was all my wanted list from 02/2002. We've made it all now, which is great.
Jason Shron:But yeah, now I think that the social media, there are now more places for people to congregate online. So the group is not hugely as important as it was. However, I did, I actually built a full size train in my basement. So I'm talking to you from my model train room, which is a conventional model train room. But if you were to walk down the hall from my model train room and go down the stairs, there's a real train there.
Jason Shron:It's a 20 foot slice of a real train. I had a financing partner and the partnership was ending. I kept the train in the basement quiet publicly until I knew that I owned my company again. And once I was fully, my wife and I owned the company ourselves, I released that into the world. And I was on NBC, was on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I was on Discovery Channel, all these different places, Ripley's Believe It or Not, about the guy who built this train in his basement.
Jason Shron:I gotta tell you, that did, and it was a constant contact email that I sent out in January 2013. I was like this new feeling of freedom that I had. I sent this out saying, by the way, I've been working on this for the last like five years. And I put a video on YouTube, I linked to the video, it was a very short email, and it went mad. The video had like half a million views almost.
Jason Shron:In my industry, that's that's viral for model trains, you know. It's and that helped the marketing of the company a lot because it's like, holy crap. This guy is so serious about his love for trains that he built a full size train in his basement. And I would get people coming up to me and saying, I was able to get my model train room from my wife who didn't want me to have that that room for my wife because I showed her your video and said, look how crazy I could be. And she said, okay.
Jason Shron:Fine. You can have you can have the guest room. Build your model train. Fine. Alright.
Jason Shron:Don't build a full size train at my basement.
Dave Charest:A cautionary tale is what we have here. Amazing. Another
Jason Shron:thing about the the constant contact emails that I don't know who's listening to this, but I don't filter so much in the sense that our emails are sometimes 3,000 words long. So when you've got an audience that respects you and wants to hear what you have to say, then just take your time and say it. And so we'll often have essays, either I'll write something or, you know, one of my employees will write something. We had a summer intern who wrote a young guy, he's guy in his early twenties, loves model trains, how he got into it and showing him photos of his model, something like that. And people love that stuff.
Jason Shron:So we have a few people who skim the newsletter and just click on the new announcements. They just want and there are other people who read the whole thing, 3,000 words sometimes, if not more, top to bottom, and that's the connection. And then when I meet these people at shows, they know us. They know me. They know Bobby because he writes the news.
Jason Shron:They know Bill because he designs the models or Dan or whoever. They know our team. And that's wonderful.
Dave Charest:So I guess the question is like, how did you land on that approach? We can start there or we can start with, like, why did you even come to Constant Contact to begin with? You started you mentioned 02/2006. I'm curious what led to that decision to be like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna do this because I want to I don't know.
Dave Charest:You tell me what you wanted to try to do, but then I'd love to know how you got landed on that approach.
Jason Shron:I wanted to talk to my customers. So I found when I went to a hobby shop, we had amazing conversations. And sometimes someone would come angry about something. And they come to the hobby shop and they've got a real so angry because the model didn't work. It's so angry.
Jason Shron:And then we talk and I say, well, okay, number one, I'm new at this, which I was. Number two, no one's ever done this model, this kind of detail before. Number three, this is how we can fix that and we're fixing it for the next run. So by the time they left the hobby shop, they weren't angry anymore because they met me as a real guy. And he's just like me, he loves trains, he's doing his best.
Jason Shron:And so I thought there's gotta be a way to communicate that with people. And so I looked on the internet. I don't even remember we were using Google back then. It might've been Yahoo or whatever, right? And I went and I looked for some way to do email newsletters and I found Constant Contact.
Jason Shron:And I mean, that's now eighteen years, nineteen years with Constant Contact. So it's it was the right move. It was absolutely the right move.
Dave Charest:So how did you land on this approach then? Right? Like, so you mentioned, yeah, 3,000 words in there. You know, I've looked at a few examples. It does have those things.
Dave Charest:Right? It has all the things that if I'm into that thing, like, I wanna see. Right? Did you trial and error this? Is that how you always done it?
Jason Shron:It's just do it and see what happens. Certainly, Bobby and Natasha, who are of the more marketing experience, are saying, like, okay. We need to sometimes, you know, change that around, maybe we don't need to have so much information. They tried at one point, they tried to make it more simple with information. And I just said, it's not working for me.
Jason Shron:And I said, the people who don't want to read the 3,000 words, they're just going to scroll anyway. So we don't have to cater to them. It's just electrons. Let's just keep the essays as we have them. And the people who want them will want them.
Jason Shron:And they're very personal emails. I mean, there was one time my aunt died and I shared that. I just sent out an email. So that or it was Somewhat, it was either my aunt or it was one of my employees passed away in 2016. It might have been that.
Jason Shron:It was someone died. And I just sent out an email saying, This has happened. We're devastated. And stop putting off your hobby. You know, everyone said, I'm honest with people.
Jason Shron:Other manufacturers don't do this. I know there's a hundred boxes in your basement that you haven't opened yet. Go open them. Stop buying for a couple of months. You know, have the manufacturer telling you that.
Jason Shron:Stop buying for a couple of months. Go play with your trains because you might not be here next week. Right? And that honesty and that rawness, it reached people. And I think the emails that we've sent out that have had that honesty to them or especially when something raw has happened, you know, when Mike passed away or whatever, those speak to people the most and that we get the most positive feedback on those.
Jason Shron:We're connecting with other people's pain, and we're saying we hear you and we feel it too. And here's one thing you can do about it. Stop diddling around and go and enjoy your hobby.
Dave Charest:So when you think about Constant Contact and your usage of that and and how you've been doing things with that, I guess, what is the overall kind of Constant Contact experience been like for you as a user?
Jason Shron:Constant Contact has been great for us. We've had a great experience with it. I like the fact that we've got the different mailing lists, which is good. And what we do, one of the ways we have an 81% open rate is about once every six months. Sometimes I'm lazy, do once every year.
Jason Shron:I will output all of our did not opens, into an Excel spreadsheet. And I will put them into a column. And then I'll take the last six newsletters, and I'll put each one into a column in Excel. And there's a formula I found by Googling of how to find a value that is the same across all six columns. So if we find an email address that hasn't opened the last six newsletters, we go in and we just take them out, delete them.
Dave Charest:Oh, okay.
Jason Shron:Usually, it's one of two things. A person's got a new email and never unsubscribed their old one, or a person died. Those are generally the two reasons why people leave, don't open the newsletters for Rapido, because a model railroad passion is generally a lifelong passion. You don't suddenly stop being interested in model trains. It generally goes, You're there.
Jason Shron:You've got the Amtrak logo on your tombstone, Right? So by doing that, we remove every time we do this, it's always eight hundred to 1,200 people that come off of this the list. So our list will go will bloat up, and then our open rate starts to go down 79, 70 eight, 70 seven. Get rid of the people that haven't opened last six. Now we're back up to eighty, eighty one, 80 two.
Jason Shron:And then we do the same thing again every six to twelve months. And it's a useful exercise because you've now you've got people who are you know, saying I have a big mailing list doesn't mean anything.
Dave Charest:Right.
Jason Shron:Saying 81% of people I send it to open it, I'd rather have 81% of 10 we have 14,000 people right now in change. I have 81% as opposed to 3% of 2,000,000 people. I'd much rather have the the 81% open up.
Dave Charest:Actually, let's talk about the email list a little bit more. Like, how are you growing that list? How do you actually get people on? Are there any strategies that you're in play?
Jason Shron:So we have a link all over our website. We have the old newsletters that are on our website. So we link to them for you can go to visit our old newsletters. There's a link to join to to subscribe. And we use all over the top of our website and bottom of our website both have links to join newsletter.
Jason Shron:That's the best way to do it. We find just through our website. We've actually tried. We tried one time experiment. We had to add in a printed magazine, and we gave them a a link to subscribe to our newsletter.
Jason Shron:And we looked at if we had a bump. We had like a bump of six people. A hundred thousand people saw the ad and six people subscribed. So that didn't work. So that's not worthwhile.
Jason Shron:But just put it on our website, we'll share our newsletters on social media and have people give them a link there to sign up. We're growing it steadily. The UK group has been growing much more quickly because they're newer.
Dave Charest:You also do something interesting from a business perspective, and maybe you can talk through this a little bit, but I have to imagine you do this maybe through email as well in in terms of getting people there. But you do preorders for things.
Jason Shron:Yes. It's all preorder beta business. It's all
Dave Charest:preorder beta preorder Yes. So this is something I'm aware of, like, that a lot of, I wanna say, like, coaching or Internet courses, like, types of a lot of businesses, like, operate that way. Right? They get people pre ordered, then they create the thing before they do it. I guess what led you down that path?
Dave Charest:And then I I have to assume when you're doing the pre orders, you're using email to drive people to that. Am I correct in that?
Jason Shron:Or Oh, absolutely. A hundred A %. In fact, that Constant Contact is the best way for us to get people to come to our website. Now with an open rate, a click through rate of 25%, that that's when people come into our website and visiting our website to and whether they're preordering with us or what they're doing is they're looking at the product and they go to their hobby shop and preorder from the hobby shop. But preordering is essential.
Jason Shron:Model railroading today, the industry, it's not a one size fits all. You can't take boxcar, a generic boxcar, generic locomotive, and just paint it up in a bunch of railroads. That's what it was thirty five, forty years ago. Today, you've got Union Pacific had these details, Burlington Northern had these details, Western Pacific had these details, Southern Pacific had these details. It's not one size fits all.
Jason Shron:So you can't just make, you know, I'm going make 300 of everything, when actually you didn't realize that actually you could sell 900 of the UP and 100 to the Western Pacific. You can't predict what the sale is gonna be. So really from very early on, February '8, went mainly to pre orders. There was pre orders from the start, then especially as the economy tanked in 02/1989, we definitely had to go to pre orders because we just had to, we couldn't afford to make stock. And so by going to pre orders, now this is the hobby that's been conditioned, we know about that.
Jason Shron:So if we get orders for a thousand, we make a thousand and 10, maybe a thousand 20. If we're feeling generous, we'll make 1,100. But, you know, we think that that it's gonna sell a lot later on. But often we will sell out before it arrives. So the hobby shops may have stock, but we'll often sell out before it arrives.
Jason Shron:And it's every financial controller's dream is an empty warehouse.
Dave Charest:Yeah, right.
Jason Shron:It's like,
Dave Charest:you want them come
Jason Shron:in and they're all sold, send them out the door. There have been times, especially towards the end of COVID, our inventory was one shelf. It was one shelf, multimillion dollar company, and we had one shelf of stock and that was left. We decided to make a little bit more these days than we used to, just because as we're a growing company, we can benefit from those extra sales. But I'll tell you, the pre orders can be two, three years, very common.
Jason Shron:The best case scenario is eight months for a year, but often it's two, three years. Our record, I'm gonna bring a locomotive that I've been showing to, you know, because we're on, it's my voice and you can't see it. But this LRC engine I've been holding up over this course, this conversation, that was eight years. I announced the product and I was still a very young company, had no capital. And it took eight years for the company was big enough, and I had enough capital, and there were enough interest, and the only cancellations were from people who died.
Jason Shron:That was the only cancellations we got. I've brought out dining car. We had made coaches, we'd made sleeping cars, we made lounge cars, and I got an email, Jason, eighty two years old. My customers need somewhere to have dinner and I wanna see it before I die.
Dave Charest:Amazing.
Jason Shron:Thankfully, we delivered the dining car the next year. He got his dinner, and all was well. Fine. But now reorders, it could be a problem, that if it takes a little time and you're you're getting up there, you you hope you get most of your models.
Dave Charest:What would it be like trying to run your business without Constant Contact?
Jason Shron:Oh, that would be very difficult. Yeah. Having a an email newsletter that tracks open rate and tracks clicks, that's very, very important. And without Constant Contact, it is our primary way to let people know about our products because they read it, and then other people share it on the internet forums, the social media, etcetera, on Facebook. So it's our biggest tool, more useful tool.
Jason Shron:So, we couldn't do without it.
Dave Charest:Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number one, create trust through transparency. Now Jason's newsletters are long, raw, and unfiltered, and his audience loves him for it. He's also being honest about setbacks, and it actually ends up deepening customer loyalty. So I want you to think about how you can share the journey with your customers.
Dave Charest:How can you be more transparent? How are you thinking, and what actions are you taking to serve them better? Like Jason, you'll find that most times your customers are reasonable and, well, when you run into trouble, also appreciate the honesty, which, of course, pays off in the long run-in the loyalty that it creates. Number two, meet your audience where they are. Rapido communicates across multiple channels but knows that email and print are best for reaching its older, passionate customer base.
Dave Charest:Now beyond that, the business really understands its customers too, men in their fifties with time, space, and money. And so they know exactly how to appeal to this audience. How well do you know your customer? Where does your product or service fit into their everyday lives? Number three, don't underestimate fun.
Dave Charest:Rapido's cheeky videos, humor filled manuals, and team enthusiasm help them stand out in a niche market, and it keeps customers coming back. So let your passion shine through in the content that you create. At the end of the day, sales and marketing is all about that transference of passion from one person to another. So just do it and see what happens. So here's your action item for today.
Dave Charest:Try constant contacts resend to non openers feature on your next email campaign. Now I didn't make the cut in this episode, but Jason credits this feature with significantly increasing open rates and making sure his passionate fans never miss an update. So give it a try the next time you're scheduling an email. As always, you'll find more details in the show notes. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Be a Marketer Podcast.
Dave Charest:Please take a moment to leave us a review. Just go to ratethispodcast.com/bam. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. That's ratethispodcast.com/bam. Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.