Dave Charest: Today on episode 20 of the Be a Marketer podcast, you'll hear from an owner that practices abundant thinking to overcome challenges and solve problems. And I'm sharing why now is a good time to reflect on your accomplishments. This is the Be a Marketer podcast. My name is Dave Charesthe, director of small business success at Constant Contact, and I've been helping small business owners like you make sense of online marketing for over 16 years. You can be a marketer, and I'm here to help. Well, hello, friend, and welcome to another episode of the Be a Marketer podcast. As always, I am grateful to have you here and grateful for your attention.
Ed Bernstein: Today.
Dave Charest: I thought I'd take a moment to celebrate you. Why is that? Well, in the conversation that you're about to hear, I was reminded of how important it is to reflect on your accomplishments. Look, we're all moving fast and oftentimes so focused on the things that we haven't done that we don't take a moment to reflect on what we have done to get to the point that we are today. Now, look, I know there's more to do, and you know, I'm confident that you're going to do it. But right now, I hope you'll take a moment to smile and be proud of yourself. Recognize that you're taking some chances that many people don't have the guts to take, and you're doing it. You should be proud of all you've accomplished. Well, friend, today's guest, Ed Bernstein, is the president of 25 score, Santa Clarita's longest running local loyalty discount program, which today also serves Antelope Valley. Now, the business has been around since 1989, and Ed purchased 25 score in 2009 after becoming friends with the previous owner. The two worked together for about six months, where Ed would share what he would do if he owned 25 score. Now, you'll probably notice throughout this conversation that Ed is the type of person who, if you have a problem and he can add value, well, he's going to help you solve it. Now, with this attitude of abundant thinking, Ed has been able to forge strong relationships throughout the community that lifts others up, which in turn comes back to Ed and 25 score. Now, I asked him why he bought the company. Let's pick up the conversation there.
Ed Bernstein: We love the company. I mean, I worked in telecom for 30 years selling phone systems. I couldn't imagine myself doing anything besides phone systems. It was something that I was really good at doing. I was top in my field there. And then when we did the local thing. I got to meet all these great merchants. They all love what we were doing. And we brought this program from being just a discount card to be a community conduit, to connect the merchants to merchants, connect the public and the schools to the merchants. And we basically drive a lot of buying habits through our program, through a 1015 percent discount on the loyalty card. So when we started, it was a plastic card. They didn't have a mobile app, the website didn't have a search, it only had like a PDF file you'd print out. And 2009 apps were just becoming something that's being done. So we revamped everything. But the one thing we never changed, which is a big plug for constant contact, is Bill. The guy that owned it before had constant contact from Eriche, from the guy before that, and before the website existed, constant contact was the email program that we used to notify the members what new merchants have come on, what kind of discounts they can get. And it was the most flexible part of our pushing out that we had. And as we grew, constant contact grew. So that's how my wife and I run the company. We were doing newsletters twice a week. And at the time we first started, it took us 8 hours to do a newsletter because you had to change all the content every week. So we'll get into more of that as you ask more questions, because there's a lot of stuff we did with the program, and you're going to want to hear it on a separate issue. Jeff?
Dave Charest: Yeah, I'm definitely going to want to get into that. So what I want to get into right now, though, which I think is interesting. So I guess my first question is, is 25 score, is this what you do full time now, or are you doing other things as well?
Ed Bernstein: It is. I've been doing 25 score. It was supposed to be a six month job, and then I hand it over to my wife, and six months later, the company was growing at a rapid pace. My wife wasn't into sales. She's more in the back end. We said we'd never have a building. I had 20 employees at my old business. I sold it and got rid of the building. I said, I'm never going to have a building. I'm never going to have employees. But within six months of owning 25 score, we'd expanded our offices. We had seven people working with us. It's like when you're pregnant, you have amnesia, you go, now, why did I not want to have a baby? So we expanded quite a bit and we had salespeople out in the field, all the schools came back and selling cards. It was really quite a phenomenal turnaround. Everybody thought it had gone away.
Dave Charest: Preston well, im curious about some of this turnaround stuff that youre talking about then. So I guess it sounds like youve had some other businesses before. What kind of made you decide to move into this? I know you had this relationship, but what was the thing like?
Ed Bernstein: Okay, im going to blame my wife. See, I like Bill. Bill was nice. My wife always thought it'd be great. She was a road rep selling t shirts, you know, throughout Southern California, hated being on the freeways. And when the opportunity presented itself, I was making really good money selling phones. But this is 2009. 2008 was the crash. So I'm looking at nobody's thinking about expanding their phone system. They're all closing because the mortgage businesses went out. A lot of companies went out of business. So if I was going to transition to something new, 2009 was the year to do it. And I said, ill do this for six months, honey, and then ill hand it off to you and ill go back to selling phones. And I kept telling my manufacturers, I was working for ten phone companies when I did this. I kept selling them. Ill be back in six months. Ill be back in three months or whatever, and I just never went back. I just loved what I was doing. And the income started raising. We grew 30% year to year till 2017. So we went from like maybe 15,000 members to almost 30,000 members in a period of, you know, seven years. And we went from maybe 300 merchants to over 800 merchants, and then expanded to the Antelope Valley, which added another 200. And then we added another 800 e tickets for national e tickets for any theme park, hotel cars. We really blew the program open. We were one of the only discount companies in the country that was printing their own regal tickets to go to the theaters and cash them in. AAA was still handing people physical tickets. They had to buy a. So we automated so much stuff. Everything we did reduced the amount of money it cost us to do the programs. Even the mailing out of cards were done by hand addressed. When we bought the company, I said, this is ridiculous. Let's buy window envelopes, print the invoice to spill them, and print the invoice paid, and use that as the envelope label. So there was no mistakes on the printing. Some things came back because you wrote it wrong, wrong zip code, whatever. But each step of the way, you always look at yourself and say, what did I not get done? But if you look at what you did do, it's insane amount of things that you've implemented.
Dave Charest: Robert, so it sounds like you're a really big operations type of person here. Am I correct in saying that?
Ed Bernstein: I would say that I am 75% marketing, packaging, 30% logistics, because salespeople, good salespeople, are always looking at the problem and trying to find the solution. I have the brain to say, okay, and I do consulting on the side. Its a very small portion. Maybe 10% of my income is derived from doing per hour consulting. And the people I meet through 25 score, they have a problem. Ill go look, I cant help you with my discount card, but if you buy a block of 10 hours, I think I can fix the problem. You have the highest return was, I think, 6 hours for 600 grand in additional income. So the people that did it was a lady did whitening, and she needed to change a bunch of infrastructure stuff. And I gave her a list of stuff to do and she did it within a week. And the net result was almost $600,000 a year in increased profit. But ive always been, I ran my own phone company. I didnt do the installations. I knew how to install. I knew what was being done. I did all the sales, and then I had 30 people installing in operational. So ive always been the guy selling all the stuff. My wife was printing cards. I had employees doing that. The operational side, once its done and geared in, it runs itself.
Dave Charest: I want to talk about some of this then, because I think this is really interesting because ive heard you say a few times where youre already noticing just having these conversations with the previous owners, like, oh, you should do it like this or you should try it like that as you take over the company. And obviously youre making these changes. Why are we doing it that way? I guess. What were some of these challenges that you faced? How did you fix them to get to this amazing growth that you started having? And then this has become a thing that is no longer a six month project, and now the thing you're doing, you know.
Ed Bernstein: Right. It's, I'm now on my 14th year doing this.
Dave Charest: Amazing.
Ed Bernstein: Yeah. So, you know, they say you want to make God laugh, tell her your plan. So we in each time was a challenge. First of all, the website was bad. So we started researching, doing a new website. Took us about three months to find out what we wanted to do. And we first did the backend because the cards were being printed without names on them. We wanted to put the names on them in order for people to show it with their name. So we needed some kind of accounting program that put the correct name on every card. Again, misspelling and names caused cards to be mailed back. So when they entered in their account, they didn't misspell their name usually. So the program we put in was behind the old website that allowed people to sign up for a membership every year. It would send them an invoice to renew, and then we had cards we printed to send out to the schools that have the expiration date and a number to allow them to register their cards, because they didn't buy them from us, they bought them from schools, and then they would have to enter the card number. So our whole website creates the cards. Constant contact is the email platform we send out to inform them of all kinds of things. When we bought the company, the first thing we did is update a PDF file that showed all the merchants, and then we proceeded to call every merchant to say, are you still honoring 25 score? Because I don't think anybody had called them for years. I know that Bill didn't, and he owned it for two. I know Eric probably did it every year because he wanted to make sure they printed a book. There was no website prior, so the book had to be accurate at least within ten minutes of being printed. People go out of business all the time. So we updated that list, and we haven't really called them all again, because when they go out of business, somebody calls and says, hey, that company's gone. And we take them off the list. But the amount of knowledge we had to learn to was insane because we built the second website in the last year and a half, and we did almost all of it by ourselves, which is, if you knew the complexity of our website, you'd say, well, I can't believe two people that are not mis people did this. I did all the art, I did the databases, everything.
Dave Charest: Well, I was going to say, so where did you learn how to do all of that? Self taught, Jeff, where you turned to learn that. That stuff, though?
Ed Bernstein: Well, in doing phone systems, I had to do bidding quotes, so I built spreadsheets to automatically configure the phone system. Ten phones, ten lines, how many cards, how many boxes, all that stuff. I wrote those because I didn't want to do it by hand. Everything I do is just make things quicker. I don't like typing because I'm not a real good. I'm not a real good speller. So everything should be in a computer. So I just print it instead of typing it out. So everything was automated in phones because of that. So when I gave him a quote to be done, my secretary would type up all these proposals off of just giving the configuration of these, type it into a form we built. So I've been doing spreadsheets for years. When we built the new website that my son built his first website, who's a physics engineering guy, when he, about eight years ago, nine years ago, he built our first site. And it was built on a combination of stuff. It was custom, and the whole site was designed off one big spreadsheet. So all the art, all the content, all the offers, all, if you look at the site, all that information that populates each listing is all still on one spreadsheet. Same kind of thing you do in constant contact, you can import into constant contact, their name, phone number, email, all that. Imagine when we opened up Antelope Valley. We imported the spreadsheet and put it onto the site and the site was up. You know, if you built a website with WordPress, each individual listing has to be put in. So I have all import for WordPress. For importing, I have export to export out stuff I can't get easily from the site. So if I want to give out a link for their ad, I just export all the links and I email them through constant contact. This is your ad. Click here to see what it looks like. Doing it another way would be insane. It's just. So the big thing with constant contact that was killing us was the two newsletters a week. And because each one couldn't look the same, we all know it's. I don't know how our minds do it, but when we look at something, we know we've seen it before. You go to a Facebook page, oh, I know this person. I've seen their face before. You go to a newsletter, if you think it's the same newsletter, what do you do with it? You delete it. So every time we do the newsletter, we have to change the salutation, we have to change the order of the vendors, we have to make sure there's not two burger places on the same newsletter, because that's not fair. You want to promote them individually. So my son, who built the website, made an interface with constant contact. I think an API did it or something, allowed us to build a newsletter by having a spreadsheet showing how many times they ran and showing us who's running on the next spreadsheet. And we hit click, go. And it would build that newsletter, and then we'd add stuff that was not merchant related to it, it took us maybe an hour and a half versus eight or 12 hours. You know, think of the manpower, time it costs you to build a newsletter.
Dave Charest: Yeah, no, this is amazing. I mean, this is a whole set of, like, technical skills that I clearly do not have. Right. So this is amazing, Jeff.
Ed Bernstein: Right. And, you know, and tell you the truth, I don't either. I don't think I've ever billed a newsletter from scratch. But my wife spent 12 hours doing, and she was doing it for a program she had seen in Sev in Santa Clarita that was doing very well. That was like twelve bloggers that were writing blogs every week. And she spent probably a day and a half putting out the newsletter for that with constant contact prior to us buying 25. Score. We've been using constant contact, I think for over 20 years. And, you know, and think of all the programs that have come out since then, you know, the different email programs that we'll do it for, one quarter of the price of constant contact. And a lot of times, you know, kind of like auto deposit of your paycheck. You don't want to change something that's automatic already. I didn't want to. Now everything's changing so much. We could probably start over, but, you know, you guys have been great partners and I'm not doing it because I get paid to say that. But when we were sending out to 25, 26,000 people, we had an opening of 9%, nine to 10%, which was respectable but wasn't great. I went through and looked at the emails that signed up back in 2011, 1011. And I started looking at each of them to see how often they engaged because there's a place you can go on each email and say, did they engage? Did they engage? Engage? The ones that never opened it. After registering, I removed from the list and I took out 5000 people that had not opened their emails. Again, they weren't spamming us, they weren't saying it's spam. Many, many people moved away and they just ignore it. So when we remove those 5000, our opening went to 40%. So I'd rather tell people that I have a newsletter goes out to 15,000 people that 40% open than to have 25 with only 12% opening. Yeah, I love that they don't even ask, but I rather see that kind of number.
Dave Charest: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about, I guess, what's your point of view on marketing in general? Like, I like earlier when you were talking about this idea of hand delivering tickets and things like that. I mean, you're in local communities, I guess. What's your, just your approach in general?
Ed Bernstein: Okay, wear a discount card. There's nothing exciting about ten or 15% off a deal when you can get 90% off to sell your email to groupon. But yet our company, in its 34th year, is still well known, well supported, and you look at all the constraints weve had, all the mobile apps that you order food on that we cant apply our discount to. The application of our discount has gotten smaller because not as many people go in to eat as they used to. So our engagement that kept our company afloat was using constant contact to what I call herd people, not hurt people, but heard them. So the first thing we did back in 2011, we started a program called Lunch Mob. It was something I made up. My wife argued with me about it nonstop. I said, we're going to have a lunch at two in the afternoon to three, where business people can meet each other and they will listen to a speaker for an hour and they'll introduce themselves to everyone in the room. Similar to like a chamber of commerce lunch. But at the chamber of Commerce lunch, they don't introduce themselves. You don't even know who's there. You can be sitting your next partner and not know it because they didn't introduce themselves. So we put this model together. It was a clear vision. We ran it the way we did it the first day for eleven years, every month on the first Tuesday at 01:00 we started at two. Two was a little late. People had lunch hours. One is after lunch hour for a restaurant, two is definitely after they're closed sometimes. The first one we did was at a chinese food place that'd been here for 30 years, at two in the afternoon on the same day as our local valley industrial association and the chamber had a lunch youre talking about two of the bigger social organizations in town had lunches at the same time. We did in this brand new lunch program had 30 people show up. It filled the restaurant on their slowest day and their slowest hour. And we knew we were onto something. They didnt even know what it was. They just came because we said were having it. Every month after that, except for a couple of times in December, we sent out a newsletter to 6000 people and invited them to lunch. And we always got between 15 to 80 people to show up. They would prepay. And this is a good thing about constant contact, is we use the event portion on constant contact to do all the billing for the tickets for lunch. If they prepaid it was dollar 20. If they paid at the door, it was 25. Some people actually bought their ticket at the door on the app so they wouldnt pay the extra $5. Its kind of smart. A lot of people walked in the door and paid 25 but the reality was, and then we were paying between ten and 15 for the lunch. So wed make $10 times 30 to run the program. But more importantly, a restaurant that signed up with us to advertise their business would get 30 brand new customers that had never set foot in their restaurant in 1 hour at a non discounted price. Lunch Mob was not 25 score, it was a division of 25 score to market local business. So a lot of restaurants signed up. At least twelve of them a year would sign up so they could do the lunch mob and get those 30 people. Genghis Khan every lunch I go, how many of you have never been here before? And at least 75% of the people that came there would raise their hand saying, I've never been here. Do you know what it costs to get a restaurant, to get 75% of the people coming in brand new in a day? You can't do it. There's no physical way to get 75 or 30 new people to walk in your door in 1 hour and pay full price. I can't think of any other way to do it than invite a bunch of cool people to come to lunch and they can't wait to meet them. And they meet people they never would have met because they all went for the first time. A lot of mergers, a lot of people did business together with people they met at lunchmob. It was a great legacy for the program. And the last one we did was shortly before the pandemic hit.
Dave Charest: So I mean, obviously the pandemic changes a few things here, right? So like what was that period of time like for your business?
Ed Bernstein: It sucked. Listen, heres our demographic. We sell our cards through schools, which were all closed. We sell our cards through restaurants. Oh, and they were closed too. We had other services. And during that time, in the middle of 2021, we had to upgrade our website. So we had to put up a temporary website with a list of the merchants. And not a lot of cards are being sold because people weren't going out to eat. So we basically cruised through two years without any major income coming in like we used to because the schools bought maybe 50, 60% of the cards and the colleges were also closed and they bought 20,000 cards a year. So our business, basically, we moved. This is the irony of our life. We live in. Our landlord wanted to raise the rent in January of 2020. In January we told them we're going to leave by the end of February because we're never in the office. We don't need to spend more money on rent and sign a three year lease. So we actually gave notice on February 1. We moved out of the office by the 15th, two weeks early, sold all the furniture we didn't need, moved everything to our house, completely set it up, and a month later the entire country closed down. It's like selling your stocks the day before 911. It was really a good time and we would have been bankrupt if we stayed in the office because our income dropped so much that we couldnt pay the rent, would have been in a three year lease, so were operating out of our house. We go to the merchants to meet with them about the ads and we go to events to talk about our program. Nobody needs to visit. Everythings automated, so even movie tickets, no matter what we sell, its all done online now.
Dave Charest: Its obvious that you are problem solver and all of that. So, like, what's going through your mind during this period of time? Like, obviously you luckily were out of the location that you didn't need to pay for anymore, but, like, this whole thing is blowing up, your whole thing. Like, what's going through your mind? How do you work through that period?
Ed Bernstein: Jeff well, first of all, I have always saw a clear path how to fix something or change. That's what I do. This was the first time in my life I've actually written four different books on networking that I haven't released, that I started to write during the pandemic. But my heart wasn't behind it because nobody was meeting anybody. They'll be finished. When people start doing, now's the time to start finishing them. But I did not have a clear path with all the people ordering online. All these things were affecting how we'd move forward. And when you think about it, we're a 34 year old loyalty card. Entertainment books filed bankruptcy three times. Now triple a, they make their money off towing. Theyre not making it off their discount program. So were really an anomaly that were still here. But our relevance was the social programs and connecting people. So our next step is going to be price of foods gone up. So if we do a lunch mob now, its going to have to be $30 to 35. But I came up with a bunch of ways to fix it. On the card side, the schools are struggling to do fundraising, so were going to get a bunch of local business people who want to meet parents of kids or teachers or firefighters, writers, or all these people that are gainfully employed that get cards from us to have them sponsor them, and we're going to print on the cards sponsored by blah blah blah and a phone number. So out of all the cards out there, they're the only one that's on the card. And they're paying for the cards to be given to the schools to fundraise with them. So we're going to go from selling 500 cards in a school to selling maybe 2000 cards to a school that a local merchant paid for. There was a company like ours down in Savannah, Georgia, that gave me the idea back in when we first started in 2009, where they get their cards in the military base and the local car dealer printed on the back of it saying, these cards are sponsored by the local car dealer. And I thought that was brilliant. They didn't have to sell them individually, they gave them to the military and they bought cars from them. So in this case, I can break all those different categories, teachers, firefighters, first responders, sheriffs, healthcare workers, and get those cards in the hands. We should be able to increase the number of cards were in the circulation in maybe 5600% in the next six months because now were not going to be selling it to the school. The schools will get them free and theyll sell them for the fundraiser and theyre not out of pocket anything. They should take as many cards as they can give out and get funding for it. That came to me in the last two months. Our company will have a lot more members. It's chicken and egg. If advertising is built on how many people have a card versus what you're charging for an ad, we charge like 10% of what any other company does for advertising because we don't print a magazine, we don't print a newspaper, we don't have a radio station. We have to maintain, we basically do it through email, constant contact, constant contact, our push notification on our app and social media. So we have three spokes going out and then inbound is the stuff coming from email. So people are kept in tune with what's going on. Now we have community partnerships with the cities where they will buy an ad to advertise the local theater, and in exchange for that, they'll get a bunch of cards they can give to city workers. It's a double dip for us where we get a bunch of new members and we get paid for an ad. It helps us get the circulation higher because we had to find something that wasn't one on one sales for card members because some people have moved out of the area, some people don't know what it is. It's usually introduced by a school, and the schools are not doing as much because they've all changed staff. We did all the high schools, some of the junior high, some of the elementary, and now we're doing most of the high schools. We'll probably get them back when they're free. Who can turn down free?
Dave Charest: How big is your like, is your staff now?
Ed Bernstein: Basically internally we have two, we have another two to three that are outsourced, that are either family members or people that do art and people that do web. I have a couple people that help us fine tune stuff, but it's being run by two people full time.
Dave Charest: Gotcha. So how do you do the marketing to get the businesses on board? You have a couple of different audiences here. When you think about it. Obviously you have the people that you're trying to get on board, the vendors, and then you have the consumers of the thing, and then you have also people from a fundraising entities.
Ed Bernstein: It's third party, right? So the card thing is all done through third party endorsement. Everybody knows what it is. They want to do fundraising. They pretty much call us to do it. It's better than candy bars and stuff. It's been around for so long. Everybody knows what the card is, and if they don't, somebody they know knows about the card and they talk about it. The merchants. There was a period of time where anybody opened up a store in Santa Clarita. One of our members would walk in and go, welcome to Santa Clarita. Have you talked to Ed yet? And my marketing program was 100%. How many people do you think said, I should talk to you? And I said, I have no idea. It would be five or six people said, you should talk to Ed because he knows what's going on in the community. And then I go out there and sell them an ad that's cheaper than anything. I'll be the least expensive mistake they will make based on what I charge each time we raise the price on our ads. We doubled our sales, ironically, because people didn't think we could do what we say we can do for $750 or $1,500 a year. There are pay places out there to charge 7000 a year to do something you can't even track. So we have a strong following. This last year, a lot of our best customers sold consumers. One of our furniture people, they sold their building to another company. We had people that bought ads every year that are no longer owning their company or went out of business, we'll have a whole new breed of people that are raving fans about us in the next six, eight months. And our cards get really renewed mostly in August because that's when all the school cards went out for the last 30 years. So the largest number of renewals is done. August, September, January is not as busy. March, April, May, June are pretty busy, but we had cycles. So if I do something amazing right now, we'll have a really good renewal next year because all those people that got cards through whatever means they got them this year will be up for renewal. And if they like the card, I mean we charge $25 for a card and the average person saves between 305 hundred a year on that $25 card. And if they do car rental or construction, we have probably 200 restaurants out of the 7800 merchants. The rest are retail services, entertainment. So there's a ton of things you can, all you have to do is look at the list to save at five locations you save 300 a year. So its a very good return on investment. But you have to look at the list and you have to be, its like joining a gym and never going. If you dont go, there is no benefit if youre not going to use it.
Dave Charest: Preston, I like what you said here about the idea of like, oh, have you talked to Ed yet? So obviously theres a huge role that community plays in this and the word of mouth of that. Talk to me about that.
Ed Bernstein: Okay. I was involved with a lot of networking groups. I ran a networking group for twelve years called Dynamic Networking alliance. Every person in that group got advice from me on how to make their business better. Some of them paid you, some of them didnt. Your friends didnt. Your merchants paid for an ad and got consulting that was worth a lot more money than they paid. One of the local sandwich places out here started with one location. When he was up to three, he used to meet with me once a year to go over what we should do for an hour. He says, I look forward to this meeting every year. And he says, do you know why I buy everything from you, Ed? And I said, no, why? He says, because youre the least expensive consultant ive ever hired. So what happens is my belief is, and I think every business should think of this way, it's, I'm a very abundant thinking person, if you add value to your clients, they will throw money at you, whether it's friendships or businesses, if you add value to people's lives, they will do everything they can to make sure you don't leave them. And if that involves paying you for an ad or paying you for consulting, they'll freely do that because nobody else cares. And when they can't pay you anymore, and you're still their friend and you're still talking to them, that's proof that it was a genuine, authentic relationship. It's not transactional. If we happen to meet each other and I can help you, I will give you something that's worth far more than I'm ever going to charge you in our first meeting. And if you're not abundant, you will run away and say, hehe, I got something for free. But if you're abundant thinking like me, you're going to come back and say, what can I do for you, Eddie? And that's where people start talking about the things that you do. There's no way I could have built this company off of just advertising. It's all word of mouth. It's all belly to belly, helping people every single day, every single month. And if it doesn't work, we change gears and do something different. The one thing I haven't done that I should have done is give myself consulting that I would give somebody else in my position. It's ironic that your plumbers pipes aren't fixed. I'm now following my own advice right now to move forward. And am I tired of doing discount cards? Obviously, I wasn't doing just discount cards. What I'm tired of is not doing all the other stuff that I used to do that the pandemic stopped me from doing. And I didn't want to be responsible for putting people together and then two weeks later they're all sick. So I feel comfortable now that the chambers and the organizations are all having meetings and people aren't complaining about getting sick. So I'm ready. And people are now starting to ask, when's the next lunch mob? Do you have any networking things you can refer me to? At one point, we had four groups of people meeting every single month. We had lunch mob, we made a breakfast mob for those who couldn't make lunch. We had bio mixers, which, for abundant thinking, grateful business people, they all paid dollar 500 to join. And then we would meet four at a time and talk about what we're grateful for and what challenges we overcame are still trying to. That was an amazing organization. 50 people signed up at Rand for two years until the pandemic hit. And then we did mind your own business, which was training by those great people on how to overcome all kinds of challenges when you open a business. Can you imagine the power of those four organizations bringing people together and none of it really was 25 score. It was me designing a social program for business people that didnt have something like that to do, and Im ready to do that again. Its just Im getting older. I cant go to four meetings a week at night. I really have to choose the stuff that I participate in based on my energy level and what I think the emotional and financial return is. Trey.
Dave Charest: So Im curious about a couple of things. One, how are you bouncing back from 2020 now? Are you guys in a good place? Are you feeling things are coming back?
Ed Bernstein: Or.
Dave Charest: I mean, what did you even lose? Preston?
Ed Bernstein: A lot of money. Preston I think most people in our position would have closed it. I mean, if you were not making any money at constant contact, you guys had the same problem. I'm sure a lot of people stopped doing their email programs when nobody was buying anything. So I'm sure you had a dip. You weren't going to close over it. If my overhead was still really, I mean, I had seven people. Now I have two. The amount of income I have to make now is a lot less than I was making before. I had to do probably four times as much as Im making now just to break even. Were on the upswing. If we work smart, we might get to 75 80% of what we were before. I dont see us seeing the numbers we had in 2017. I just think that the worlds changed enough. The thing is, im clever enough to say ive got 30,000 people that are active. I have another 30 that decided it wasnt important enough to watch anymore, that if I go in there with something that I joked before the pandemic that if I just sold toilet paper I could quit selling cards, and before I knew that toilet paper would become gold, I used that as my example. Costco's biggest item they sell is cigarettes and toilet paper. Before the pandemic, it was that way. So if I could sell anything to my audience directly, I could have residual income coming in for anything that's consumable. Right now I just promote everyone else. But if we had a problem product that we wanted to sell or we partnered with something that somebody wanted to sell, we could blow this thing up. Every other company that does what we do makes a percentage of the sale. Think about that. Groupons living social grubhub, Uber eats all make 20 30% of the restaurants profit. We dont make a dime off the transaction. If we changed our model to be order fulfillment through our people, but its not what we do. Theres a lot more infrastructure in that, a lot more changes. You have to keep up with a lot of more privacy issues. Were probably the only company on the planet that doesnt data mine their clients. We barely segment our list. We have a list of where they came in from, but we dont only send restaurants to restaurants, and we dont only send entertainment to entertainment. Now, some would say thats really stupid, Ed, but I figured just because they never bought tickets to amusement park before doesnt mean they may want to now. And if they don't want to see it anymore, they can stop getting the newsletter. And that's worked for us. But would we make more money if we segmented the list like you guys would recommend? Yes, we would. But it's not always about the money, is it? It's about the experience. Human beings have not changed the way they buy anything for the last 2000 years. Basically, go to this fishing hole. You find fish. If your friend tells you, I joke with people, if a guy sitting outside, homeless in front of a restaurant, and he tells the guy going by, I only eat once a week, and I save up $20 to eat at this restaurant, do you think people would listen to that man and try that restaurant if it's the only meal he eats all week? It doesn't matter what the source was. It matters that somebody gave you a third party endorsement and that it was believable. So a lot of people that come to us, hear about us, they'll sign up for our program, they see what they said was true, and then they'll tell their friends, when we're doing a lot of work, we do even more because everyone that's doing business with us say, have you talked to Ed yet? And I really thought it was kind of funny because I never would have started a campaign saying, you need to talk to Ed, you know, the 25 score guy. But we have a business. When we walk into a store, strangers will come up to us and say, we really love your card. We've never met them before. They see our emails, they see us on Facebook, and they feel compelled to say hi and that they've been a member forever. I can't think of any other business I would have that people would be that thrilled about the product that they come up and talk to in a store.
Dave Charest: Tell me about what you're doing with constant contact.
Ed Bernstein: All right, so constant contact is our email list is built through the mobile app and through signing up on the website and through signing up as a member. So when you sign up as a member, we put you on the email list. If you sign up on the mobile app, we put you on the email list. And if you sign up on the site to be on the email list, most of that was automated. I think we have to check it out to make sure it's still happening. That way we send out the newsletter. If you think about the use of constant contact for most companies, they're advertising themselves with that they're doing. We're basically advertising maybe 60 different merchants that pay us to push them out more. If they don't pay us, they can search for what the person does. So when we send out a newsletter, we have a certain number of openings, depending on who they are. If I get a really popular restaurant on our newsletter, we may get three or 400, 500 people click to see what their offer is. If it's somebody who's been on for years, they may not click as much, but they already know that they honor the card. We'll get a certain number of people that download the mobile app so they can see where they can use the card. So that motor and what's neat is constant contact evolved with social media. So it used to be for a while they were going, nobody's opening email anymore. And really they don't open as much. Then we had email on mobile. So all of a sudden there was a period of time, probably about five years ago, that 50% of our emails are being opened on a mobile app versus on the computer, which was like a big shift because it used to be 90 ten. And then we're able to share that constant contact newsletter on Facebook. We have 15 pages on Facebook. All different groups for all different, you know, all those groups I told you about. Plus we have a group and then we have a page, so we share that link to the newsletter. So now the audience that never opened their email may check it out on Facebook, and then we push the link out on our mobile app. And a mobile app is a push notification, and the people that never pick up Facebook or email may see it on the mobile app and click and see what event or what new merchants coming on. So constant contact was the center of our universe. For billing, for events, for notifying people of changes, and for finding out what people think. We did a survey, we don't do a lot of surveys, but about six, seven years ago, we did a survey to find out what people thought of 25 score and not knowing about surveys. This survey was 30 questions long. Okay, so you're laughing. I'm laughing, too now. It was 30 questions long. I sent it out to all of our members. The city sent out a questionnaire, what they should do with the center of a roundabout, and they got ten people to respond. How many people think responded in the first 24 hours of our survey?
Dave Charest: I have a feeling you're going to blow my mind.
Ed Bernstein: No, it's not going to be that hysterical. But considering response to other stuff. We had over 200 people fill out the survey. And from the survey, half of them had been members for longer than four years. The other half were newer or if someone wanted to be merchants. But we found out a whole bunch of stuff we didn't know. I would say I had five phone calls when it went out with friends that were halfway through and said, ed, how long is this thing? I'm filling it out. I said, there's only 30 questions. Okay, I'll finish it then. But I mean, have you ever filled out a survey that was 30 questions long? I don't think I have.
Dave Charest: But I want to say the reason why people are filling it out is because of you, though, and that relationship that you have with people. Right?
Ed Bernstein: Yeah. And, you know, part of that yet most of it is they want to help me. Yeah. The other part of it is they want to be heard. They want to give their opinion. They want to tell us what they think. And the questions were not dumb questions. They were, how often do you go out to eat? You know, how long have you had a card? Where do you use it most? Did you know that we have movie tickets? Did you know that the questions were, yes, no, I do now. I'll try it kind of thing. Where, where it let them know, hey, we have a mobile app. They didn't know we had a mobile app. Or they didn't know we did e tickets for movies. Or they didn't know that we had a pharmacy card. All these things that we weren't sure what people knew. We were amazed how many people didn't know about stuff we thought everybody knew. And that I recommend to anybody on constant contact. I think it's still free. Part of your app is to do surveys, is ask the important questions. I would even send them after every time somebody bought something, I don't do it. Mine. An entrance survey, did we handle it correctly? And then an exit survey saying, are you still happy with us because it gives you information, lets you change direction without having to call.
Dave Charest: I want to ask then after you learned what you learned through that survey, what did you change? How did you shift based on what you knew.
Ed Bernstein: We shifted all the things that we started promoting, certain things that we weren't promoting enough. We started promoting the mobile app more because we didn't know, everybody didn't know it was there and they didn't know the card to be on the phone. The reason our mobile app is so popular, we got like 15, 13,000 people downloaded the app at one point in Antelope Valley, we were the largest app download of the month. That we introduced it to the college out there blew my mind. And we must have done 3000 downloads in a period of a month for our free app to do the 25 score on the phone. So what made the app so important is you could search the list, but you could do that online, the regular site, it was putting the card on the phone so they could show it in the store and not carry the card, which was very exciting for the younger people who had smartphones. Not everybody does, but back then the young people had them. So that's what drove the openings of these emails and, you know, all the things. And then some people said they wanted to be merchants, so we followed up with them and signed them up to be merchants. I don't know why we never did it again. Well, there's a lot of work to go through all the surveys and respond. We should have done a shorter one every year just to get a temperature, but about the time we would have done at the pandemic, it. So are you at home? Yes, I am. Okay, bye. It's like, are you making your own food? Yes. Are you buying food out? No. You know, it's like we knew the answers. It was really a sad time. I mean, luckily I have a spouse. Don't ever let me hear it, say it, that I don't mind hanging out with 24/7 for the last 20 years. She still laughs at my stupid jokes. That's like a big, big deal, you know, the big ones were automating the newsletter. If you have to spend $150 a week to build a newsletter, to have a staff do it, it's hard. It's hard on your budget. But since we were able, and anybody could do that, they do the API and they have certain things they want to say every season. They could build newsletters that way and then update the stuff that changes. For us, it was a necessity. Just like we don't hand address envelopes anymore. Right now we're actually hand building the newsletter again because the number of people, when we updated the new website and stuff, we didn't have the same information, the same place. So we had to redo it and we weren't doing as many. We weren't doing two a week, we're doing one a week and she's gotten faster at it. But when we're having someone else do the newsletter, it was a big deal. But I can't think of anything that we've done consistently that helped us better. And we've been through two websites, two mobile. We're now on our third mobile app, we're on our fourth card printer, but we're still on the same constant contact. So the constant and constant contact is probably pretty relevant, right? It's one constant that we've had. It was worth the money.
Dave Charest: Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number one, look for ways to run more efficiently. Ed has a keen eye for making things more efficient, whether it was printing invoices to use in windowed envelopes so there were no address mistakes or connecting with APIs to save time pulling the correct information into email newsletters. Think about your current processes. What can you automate? Number two, give to your community? As Ed says, add value to your clients so they will throw money at you. How can you focus on helping your community, whether that's local or online, so that they will do everything they can to ensure you don't leave them. Make those connections that will pay off in the future by giving all you can today. And number three, don't be afraid to shift strategy when necessary. Now, after the pandemic, Ed had to change how 25 score did business sponsorships became a new way to make the business thrive versus the direct sales they were doing before. Always look for ideas you can adapt to keep your business relevant. Now here's your action item for today. Automate some emails you send all the time. If you haven't done so already, get a welcome email setup. This is a simple but important email that allows you to start building those relationships as soon as someone joins your email list. Then consider using automated birthday and anniversary emails to celebrate with your contacts. I'll include some links for you with more details in the show. Notes I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Be a Marketer podcast. If you have questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me directly at dave.charest@constantcontact.com. If you did enjoy today's episode, please take a moment to leave us a review. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. Well friend. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.