Have you heard the phrase ‘hyperlocal marketing’ before? Or at least, heard about local marketing? If you have not or you would like to know more about it, then this episode is for you.
Our guest today is Wayne Reuvers, who shares with us the significant improvement marketing campaigns see with hyperlocal marketing initiatives when compared to more broad marketing efforts.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
The 3 Cs are essential to succeed in any business relationship: 1. Contact, 2. Credibility, and 3. Chemistry.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- You can visit our guest’s website at: https://liveretail.com/
- Attend our Franchise Sales Training Workshop: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/franchisesalestraining/
- If you are ready to franchise your business or take it to the next level: CLICK HERE.
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Wayne is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of LiveTechnology Holdings. He has successfully invested in and built multiple subsidiaries and successfully exited 6 businesses, having created over $110 million in wealth for the investors.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/ or by calling Big Sky Franchise Team at: 855-824-4759.
If you are interested in being a guest on our podcast, please complete this request form or email podcast@bigskyfranchise.com and a team member will be in touch.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:01):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open today, I’m wondering if you have heard the phrase hyperlocal marketing before? Or at least heard about local marketing. And if you haven’t or maybe you’d like to learn more about hyperlocal marketing, then this episode is for you. Our guest today is Wayne Reuvers and he shares with us the significant improvements in marketing campaigns that you see with hyperlocal marketing initiatives when compared to more broad marketing efforts. Now Wayne is the founder and chief strategy officer of Live Technology Holdings. He has successfully in invested in and built multiple subsidiaries. And successfully exited six businesses having created over $110 million in wealth for investors. So let’s go ahead and jump right into our interview.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (01:07):
I’m Wayne Reuvers and the company we talking about today is one of our subsidiaries called LiveRetail that we’ve span out of Live Technology Holdings. And I’m the chief strategy officer and the founder of Live Technology and thus LiveRetail as well.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (01:21):
Thank you so much for being a guest here. And one of the things I wanted to lead with in preparing for our interview today is just the concept of hyper local marketing. And you’re an expert in this area with what you do. To me it seems a little bit of a buzzword today. And so I’m wondering how would you define that or help explain to us what is it?
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (01:43):
Cool. Well, about 85% of a consumer’s disposable income is spent within 15 miles of where they work and live. So the two locations, and obviously a lot of people are working from home now, but what tends to happen on the web is that people are typically buying display advertising or social media advertising to reach an audience, but they’re not really reaching an audience in a regional area. And so what hyperlocal marketing is, it’s audience targeting to reach your specific audience. So if you’re, for example, a Domino’s Pizza or you’re a Midas, you want to reach people who are specifically talking about a problem with their car within a radius around that store. And hyperlocal also needs to bear to mind the density of population. That doesn’t make sense to just target 25 miles around your store if people aren’t going to get there.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (02:34):
For example, Manhattan, you would never target 25 miles around your store. Whereas, if you’re just outside Manhattan, in Orange County, New York, you could comfortably target 25 miles around your store. So hyper local targeting is all about encompassing both the targeting of your audiences that consume your product or you want to consume your product coupled with radius, zip code, county, et cetera targeting. And the thing that it also does just an extra little piece is it actually reduces your cost of media buying, ironically enough. And we can talk about that later, but it reduces your cost of media buying. It gives you more opportunities to show your ad, and at the end of the day, your response rate goes through the roof if you do it properly.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (03:17):
That’s really interesting. And one thing that I think of when I see large organizations, even small businesses, when you start advertising and promoting and doing things, there’s a one size fits all kind of approach that’s taken to things and it may not tap into some of the local interests or buying habits. So why is it important to maybe change those ads or change what you’re doing based on the local interests or buying habits of your customers in a local region?
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (03:45):
People are going to respond to something that connects to them emotionally and something that’s very emotional to everyone is the place they live, city, the town, where they work, the school they went to, as well as there’s a bunch of other things, but the main things is where they reside and where they work. And so the difference between a consumer that just sees a national ad, that just sees an ad for a brand and a consumer that actually sees the name of their city or town on that ad, the response rate goes up between a factor of three to five times more. It’s not just an image with some postscript at the bottom of it that mentions the top, the actual ad needs the name of the town. And I’ll give you a quick example of what we did.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (04:25):
So Unilever was running a national campaign targeting 18 to 35 year olds on a national basis. And they were looking at these young males, 18 males, 18 to 35 years old, they were interested in video gaming. They wanted to start building a database to connect to them to target one of their brands, Unilever being one of the largest advertisers on the planet. They wanted to target Axe deodorant to reach these consumers. So they were using Universal Macon and they had a national campaign running and they were bidding against everyone else at targets 18 to 35 year old males. And those include Blizzard games, it includes Nike, it includes Coca-Cola, it includes McDonald’s. These guys are all buying national ads. And so the national cost for them, they were bidding, it’s an auction, they were paying a premium for it, and everyone pays a premium for that demographic.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (05:12):
Universal Macon approached us and said, “Hey, can we take the way that you localize and you hyper target what you do and actually target 236 specific locations we want to test?” So what they did is they looked at locations where they had ShopRites that they actually sell Axe deodorant through, and they took what’s called MDF market development funds, which amounted to 4% of their national campaign, tiny, tiny amount relative wise. And they ran 236 ads that are identical with a few differences. The first thing is they had a picture of the strip mall and the shop ride in it on the ad. Our tech does that automatically.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (05:47):
It included the name of the town the strip mall was in. So where the opening slide on the national ad was win a PlayStation 5 with the Axe branding. This now said win a PlayStation 5 and then it had highlighted in the graphics Chester, for example. Win a PlayStation 5, Chester. Picture of the store as well as basically the Axe brand and the ShopRite brand. The consumer rate of clicks was 4.8 times higher because the consumer, when they see win a PlayStation 5, they go, “It’s another national campaign.”
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (06:17):
Whereas here they went, “Wow, win a PlayStation 5, that’s a town I’m close to, I live in, I work in.” So that response rate went up, but more importantly, the media buying was 62% less. Why? Because they had no one else bidding 12 and a half miles around Chester targeting males between 18 and 35 that are interested in video gaming. They were the lowest bidder. And you get that social media buying those Google display ads at a significant discount. The outcome of the entire campaign that is with within 70 hours, the Unilever registration service failed. They had so many registrations that 4% of their budget did more than the other 96% over the last three months in just 70 hours just by localizing. Adding a picture of the local area, some of the consumers are recognized, as well as the top. Knock the ball out the park.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (07:08):
And that is why it’s localized ads is not just by hyperlocal targeting, but it’s also about hyperlocalization. People will recognize your car dealership, they’ll recognize your local store, your local gym. They’ll recognize the Midas, the Domino’s, the H&R block, every one of those franchisees that owns a location. There’s a picture of it. And we need to reinforce that both as a branding exercise but also as a hook because the consumer recognizes things. They may not even realize it, but when they see an ad in front of them that is something local to their town, city, neighboring town, they respond.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (07:45):
You were mentioning here a little bit about some of these large franchise systems and the clients we tend to work with tend to be emerging franchise brands. Maybe they have zero franchises or less than 50 or a hundred franchises out there. Can you talk about maybe some tips or suggestions you might give to franchisors to support their franchisees? And then a follow-up question to that would be, if a franchisor is maybe not as supportive of a franchisee in this regard, how maybe just an individual franchisee might be able to take some of this into their own hands for hyperlocal marketing.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (08:21):
Okay, cool. Well, you touched on something that’s very interesting. Less than 10% of franchisors have more than 100 locations, so 90% of our entire base. Now, one of the things just… I’m going to digress slightly. The thing that makes America the most amazing country on the planet, there’s a bunch of things, but one of the most amazing things is America created this concept of supporting small businesses better than any other country. 72% of our entire workforce is employed by small, medium-sized businesses. The reason America’s so successful in these small, medium-sized businesses is because they invented this concept of franchising where they created a blueprint that allows businesses that do something once really well to scale that business. We’ve got 30.5 million businesses in America, it’s 330 million people. There’s not a country that’s close to that. It’s what makes us economically sound. We control the workforce through these small businesses.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (09:13):
They can weather an economic storm way better than anyone else. So franchises are brilliant. So every time I see a franchisor starting, whether it’s the first store that they’re turning into a franchise or the whole thing, it’s the holy grail because we know it’s going to result in jobs, we know can result in economic benefit. And what we are doing is we are turning every single hour of the person who buys that franchise into a much more optimized process. As an example, you want to actually start an independent restaurant, try get a $300,000 loan from your bank. You’ve got zero chance. You want to start a franchise, and you are very, very likely to get a $300,000 loan from your bank based on what you’re doing. And it’s because the capital markets like it, the banks like it because it’s a proven success model.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (09:59):
In the franchise process, you’ve created a blueprint of how to run a business, everything from logistics, to human resources, to everything. And America is the best at this. We’ve created this industry with all these franchises. So back to your question about the ones that are only 100 or 200. So in the Live Technology Holdings Group, we’ve had a number of successes. We’ve sold a number of businesses to companies like Microsoft, Omnicom, et cetera. And the latest one is LiveRetail. Well, one of our businesses live platform is one of the largest providers to corporate systems. They typically cost between about $400,000 and two and half million dollars a year. And these are really behemoth management systems with information and marketing and do it yourself. And during the whole COVID-19 lockdown, our office building was forced to be closed down. All of our clients, Century 21, all of these companies were forced to stop working.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (10:52):
Car dealerships, Honda. Our client was forced to stop working. Northwestern Mutual, all of the big clients in some of those other businesses were forced to stop what they were doing. And so we took a different view and we said, well, how do we actually automate the production of creative no matter how big a franchisor you are? Whether you’re a three unit franchisor or a 30,000 franchisor. And we use a bit of clever AI that actually went out and actually pulls the brand from website. We said, every franchisor has a brand, has a website, which is their brand compliance. It’s compliant to their entire brand. It’s the essence of their brand. So we built an AI engine, we just trained it to go pull out from the CSS all the colors, the artwork, and literally set up a franchise or portal for them at zero cost.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (11:40):
And so we did that and we said, “Well, T, it costs me about 16 US cents in AI fees to do that.” and so we send it out. The second thing we then do is we send out a crawler that crawls every location from that franchisor and automatically adds it into what we call a matrix so that we have now all the locations down the Y axis. And then across the X axis it interrogates the website, once again some AI to figure out what the corporate franchisor wants these local entities to promote. And it takes all of that in the artwork, and now you’ve got the items to promote. The stores are on the vertical axis, and we build a set of customized localized ads and free posts for every single franchisee. So gone are the systems where you have to go in and build ads. We actually now pre-built every single ad.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (12:30):
And the reason we actually did that, we said, “Well, at the end of the day we’ve got the brand, we’ve got the store, and we go and aggregate content from Bing Places. We sold the business to Microsoft many times many years ago. And so we go get content from Bing Places to actually bring in storefront images and images of the actual local store. So every single ad is completely customized and we turn it into a post that’s free. Our logic is very simple. We provide the ads for free, we provide the posts for free, and then we say, “Hey, if you want to run the ad as a hyper targeted ad, we take a small 10% fee.”
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (13:02):
And that’s literally what we do. So the key is this hyper targeting is it’s a three-step process that you traditionally have to do. You have to get your ads built at a brand compliant, then you have to figure out how to target those ads to build campaigns, then you have to pay for and run the campaigns and optimize them. [Inaudible 00:13:18] complex. We said merge all three of those, the ads are pre-built, they already set up with targeting and the reports just come in telling you what you do. So whether you’re a brand that is 60 units, 6,000 units, doesn’t really matter. And we’ve got franchisors that are typically… Most of our franchisors typically sit around 30 to 300 units, but there are a few, there’s one with 11,000 units and there’s some that are just two to three units.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (13:46):
One thing that came to mind as you were talking about this is you’ve talked a lot about retail operations where you have a B2C type of business model. What about a B2B play? Maybe you’re a professional services provider or you’re serving commercial accounts. How can you help an organization that’s a B2B?
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (14:04):
Ironically enough, so a company like ServPro and a lot of these, Rescue One and all of those franchisors are looking at actually targeting businesses that have particular problems at a particular point in time. So there might be a flood in the area. So one of the nice things we can do, so our AI engine also maps all of the Facebook or the Meta targeting elements to specific keywords. So we know by pulling the search engine terms out of the site, that there’s certain circuit things like disaster, flood, rain damage, those keywords and now we’ve mapped those and those are already corporate that say “Yes, the consumer also have could use ServPro, but most of the time it’s B2B.” And then we cross section that to small business owners. So literally you’re only paying for people that are talking about a flat incident that are the owner of a small business, a manager of a small business and within 15 miles of the ServPro.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (15:04):
And so your cost of buying the media is super, super cheap because you’re only reaching a certain number and the Googles and the Facebooks and the Instagrams of this world and the Twitters, they’re actually charging you for the media. Now they can charge you cost per click, but if you make it super, super targeted, you reach fewer but much more relevant basically for a much lower amount of money. So targeting B2B is no difference. We just change the audience segment to know that it’s actually a person in a business because business is already just run by people. So we just targeting people in those businesses. And we can also target within a certain limit, you can use the Facebooks of this world to target certain brands. That said they’re not as good at targeting the smaller brands. So you could target Domino’s, but you couldn’t target a small pizza franchisor and people in that brand.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (15:57):
I’m sitting here thinking for audience who tends to be successful, small business leaders or franchisors or other business leaders that are tuning in, they may not be in a franchise, maybe they’re just serving kind of a region or a local area. Can something like this still apply to a business? Say for example, if I said, “Well, I would love for my company to advertise or work through a system like yours.” Would that be effective?
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (16:22):
Not particularly from the LiveRetail helping the businesses. The small business, there’s tools out there like Canva, wonderful tool. You have to go build your own ads and you can drag and drop it and most businesses don’t want to do that. But for us as LiveRetail, what we find is these small businesses really don’t have a brand presence like the franchisees and the franchisors particularly does. And so our AI engine really… Think about it as the perfect dog that knows how to hunt. And so when we send it into an area where you’ve had the professionals around franchising, setting things up, it’s very good at retrieving hunting and getting all that information to set it up. If Joe Blogs mechanical services or Michael Jones Electrical services as a local business, there isn’t any easy system for them. What they would have to do is go to a Canva, they go to any one of these tools or employ a small local agency to go build their ads for them then they’d have to figure out the targeting.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (17:21):
And before they even start, before they could even get their first ad up there, they’re going to look for a few hundred bucks, they’re going to spend a few hundred bucks. Our whole goal is to take what I believe is the most amazing industry in America, which is everything in this world needs to be done at scale, that you can replicate best practices and that’s why the franchisor business… Now that said, we do also help companies like local liquor stores and local independent businesses that sell other people’s brands. So for example, in the alcohol business, the big brands like the Absoluts, the [inaudible 00:17:56] and all their subsidiary brands, those are all brand controlled. And our AI engine, we have every single bottle of wine, almost 16,000 different bottles of wines with shadows. They’re already there.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (18:05):
So any liquor store that wants to promote that wine, it’s already pre-built for them, promotes them. They get money from the distributor, which in turn gets money from the manufacturers or the brand owners. The same happens for any one of these companies because we work with a lot of the OEM brands and automotive, we already have a lot of that content already in the system as well. So we can help the smaller businesses that way, but for us to even reach them is really, really hard. So we help the distributors reach them and send them their pre-created creative and campaigns, but maybe in the future it’s something we will look at. It’s just they’re so different.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (18:41):
That makes a ton of sense. And you’ve got your expertise, what you’re really great at. So as the old saying goes, we want to stay in our lane for right now and see how that works. And that’s part of the reason we wanted to have you on to talk about this for franchisors and franchisees to serve the audience here. Well Wayne, this is a great time for us to make a transition in the show where we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we ask is, have you had a miss or two in your career and on your journey and something you learned from it?
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (19:09):
In 1992 I think it was, I discovered a very clever way of serving an image and expiring it. And we invented what became the clear pixel. It was called LiveStat. It became the most requested server outside of the US and one of the top 10 most requested servers on the planet. And LiveStat exploded. It allowed people to track website traffic without using log files. Problem with log files is that only counts what was request from the server. Their pixel looked at the entire way you went by the site. And that then transformed into Live Analysis. And I managed the company, it’s one of my best goals.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (19:47):
I founded the company in South Africa and my number one goal was to become an American. And I was lucky enough that sort of leapfrogged us, got us into the US and one of the first companies that we met with was Jupiter Media Metrix that had bought Jupiter and Media Metrix with the two big analytics players and they had merged into one big behemoth and they had what they called a panel, a group of predefined people that they tracked what they were looking at.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (20:12):
And what we had invented was very complimentary. All the big companies in those days were using our stuff, CNN, all of these guys were using LiveStat and we ended up selling for what you got to understand, coming from South Africa was a huge amount of money to me, which was 9 million. So it was a hit, but our three competitors within a year and a half each all became billion dollar market cap companies. So the miss was, we were, call it greedy, naive, whatever it was, I’d never seen so much money in my life. So we took the deal and I definitely learned from it.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (20:48):
I learned to be patient, I learned to have all the ducks in a row and don’t be blinded by the size of the check. And it was very, very interesting. We learned a lot and it was a wonderful experience. Sadly, Jupiter Media Metrix eventually just imploded and went bankrupt and it also helped us. We had a few nice hits after that with Microsoft and eBay and Omnicom. Omnicom’s the largest advertising conglomerate, and they ended up paying 12 and half percent for 5% of our holding company. So it was a 260, two and a half million dollar pre-money value, post money valuation, which was ready for us. It showed us that we were fairly good at what we do.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (21:30):
That seems to dovetail right into the next question we ask every guest is make or two that you’ve had along the way. You’ve just shared a few. Anything else you’d like to highlight?
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (21:40):
Yeah, I think everything actually comes down to what I call the three C’s. Contact, credibility and chemistry. And if you miss any one of those three, nothing will ever close. Whether it’s a deal pitching a small business, whether it’s trying to get your pool fixed, whatever it is, absolutely everything comes down to those. The Microsoft deal was an amazing thing for us in the sense that it was someone that had used our LiveStat technology and it ended up going to Microsoft and had kept in contact and seen what we had done, seen how it fitted. So we had the contact and we had the credibility because we had sold LiveStat already and the chemistry was, they liked working with us. We could turn things around faster. And so I think a lot of those things are really… They always say luck is preparation plus opportunity.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (22:30):
I think it’s a lot more opportunity than preparation. Preparation’s vital. The Microsoft deal would not have happened without the contact. The eBay deal would not have happened without the contact. eBay was struggling trying to, or they weren’t really struggling, they were doing really well, but they were creating messages every time. If you were bidding on something, you would get an email saying, “Hey Wayne, you’ve been outbid.” One of the executives, once again, the contact had actually moved to eBay that we had worked with before and they had just over 700 email vendors. 700 because they had acquired so many businesses and each business they acquired had a MailChimp agreement and a this and a that. And he approached us to say, “Hey, my IT guys have told us that there’s no way we could put ads in emails. We’re doing 1.3 billion emails a month telling people they’re outbid.” I said, “Of course we can.”
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (23:22):
So within seven servers, we were doing just over 2,200 emails per second per server. And what it was doing is it was getting the feed that when someone had been outbid, it was looking at the items and we were able to put into the emails, all the references were into the email and send it back to eBay to deliver it. This was all done in servers and they ended up buying that entire thing. It was called Live Mailer and things ended up quite lucky. And again, that was the sea for contact. And that goes for absolutely everything in this world. If you don’t have the contact, you don’t have a way to get to anyone, you’ll never get business. So the contacts are one of the most important things. The credibility is absolutely crucial because no big business, no small business is going to do business with anyone without the credibility and then the chemistry. If they don’t like you, they’re going to do business with you.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (24:09):
Very well said. I love those three C’s. Let’s talk about a multiplier that you’ve used to grow yourself personally or professionally or businesses that you’ve built and exited out of.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (24:21):
The key is if we can bring anything that is replicable. So one of the first things we do is we look at an industry where things are very, very inefficient. So anything where you’ve got a lot of people doing the same thing with a slight tweak or slight difference. So in the case of if you just look at someone like McDonald’s. Phenomenal franchise and they are really, really good at everything they do, but they still have every franchisee paying local agencies tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And so what we typically do is we look at that and we go, “Okay, you’ve got almost 30,000 McDonald’s franchisees,” or franchise locations, fewer franchisees. “Why are they doing slight differences?” And they’ve got these approval processes and they’ve got all these other things. So we look at that and what we find is you’ve got sort of a clash.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (25:16):
It’s very hard to optimize something when you have a lot of conflicting points of view of people. So we try and avoid that. So if you’re at the corporate level, you’re all about control and reducing what the local franchisee can do. And if you’re at the franchisee level, you’re always about trying to do as much as you can for as little as cost and efficient as possible. And it seems that these two are countered to each other. They’re not. But typically what happens in corporate is the people that are working in the corporate brands that have become these big behemoths are actually not the entrepreneurial mindset that started the franchise. And so they’re not even entrepreneurs themselves. And so they bring bureaucracy down and they force it up and the franchisees will self-made people that are entrepreneurs. And so that’s where the culture of this chemistry happens.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (26:03):
So for us, we actually don’t look at China change where there’s this massive dichotomy of points of view. What we rather do is we either approach something that’s completely scalable for the people that will appreciate it most. So one of our other businesses we realized selling to a McDonald’s and McDonald’s has been a client and saying to McDonald’s, “Here’s a three-year process with a lot of bureaucracy and your likelihood of getting it is close to zero even if you bring it.” Whereas if you can convince every one of those McDonald’s franchisees that are still employing agencies, still doing things manually, their ads are still not localized. Every single McDonald’s ad that goes out there for every franchisees looks the same, the consumer ignores it, but some of them do work. And so what we look at scaling is where something ties to the person’s mindset and is replicable and scalable and that goes for everything we do.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (26:57):
So we looked at how we actually get every single location. How do we get every location? So we’ve got over 30 million prebuilt on brand ads for almost every brand you can imagine. And how did we go get that? Well, we sent out our callers to every brand including McDonald’s. So we’ve now gone and built a combination ad for all 41 menu items of every McDonald’s store customized to their location, free to post. They can download and run it themselves without paying us a cent, but we know that running through our system where the campaign’s already set up and traffic and bought for two clicks, they’re more likely to use our service.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (27:34):
So the scalability is removing the pain and the cost from the process and never force anyone to do anything. The cost of sale is the biggest cost in digital to try to actually get people to use the system. So our cost of sale is we do everything for free and if they decide to use it, we make a commission. If they don’t, they get to use it for free. So our cost of sale drops down to the fractions of the cent, takes us to do things, but it’s all about scaling. So our goal is we have to get to 200,000 franchisees using our services within three years. We’re just under six months in so far and we’ve got quite a few thousand. So it’s good.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (28:09):
Excellent. Well the final question we ask every guest, Wayne, is what does success mean to you?
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (28:15):
Success to me, I’m on an island in The Bahamas. We spend a lot of time here. And success for me is just having pride in what I’ve created, pride in what our business has done, being able to not stress about anything. I’m a volunteer fire firefighter, I’m a rescue diver. Giving back to your community. I think a lot of people look at it as mandatory. One thing I will say is if you don’t have to worry about money, then your stress goes down and your success is much easier to achieve. So financial gain is important, but it’s just a score. Not having to worry, being able to contribute a lot, being able to give a lot and the most enjoyable success is giving back and giving to people. And a hell of a lot of our franchisees that use our services will never make money.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (29:04):
We’re getting $2 a month from them in terms of the media they buy, they’re posting for free. That ironically enough, makes me more proud than the big boys that can afford the big money. And that to me is success. Knowing that you’re making a change, that you’re more efficient, that you’re allowing people to do what they do better. This is the most amazing country we’re in, and if everything just gets better optimized and more streamlined with less bureaucracy, it’ll continue to be the best country. And to me, the success, you cannot beat it, just being in the US and obviously I’m in The Bahamas now, but there’s nothing better.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (29:39):
Well, Wayne, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (29:45):
Yeah, we’ve spun LiveRetail out of Live Technology. We’ve incubated a bunch of businesses. As I mentioned, we sold a few of them. So we spun LiveRetail out of Live Technology in November, December, and then we decided to actually make it open to business to become shareholders. I made a decision once again talking about the chemistry. If we have a shareholder rather than just a user, they become an absolute advocate for what we do, as well as they catch the rider. So we’re intending growing this to be another large business that will naturally be acquired or just do very well. So we launched a Reg CF that allows any one of our users, investors, even if they’re not user yet, and for as little as $200 they can become a shareholder. So they in essence, become my boss. And to me, there’s nothing better if you’re a shareholder of LiveRetail and you end up using it.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (30:40):
And what we did is we made a decision that if you invest in LiveRetail, then all the annual fees are removed for the first two years for you. So not only does it cost you nothing to use, but it also helps you become shareholder. And there’s some interesting anecdotes if the Reg CF process is what the IPO process used to be many years ago, it’s regulated by the SEC and it’s designed to allow people to invest in businesses. And the IPO process was originally like that. If we look at Microsoft, they originally went public raising $19 million. They’ve never needed to raise anything else since then. But if you had invested when Microsoft was worth $20 million, your $200 would be worth a few million by now. And the same goes for Google. If you put $200 in Google that are 20 million valuation, it would be worth about $11 million today.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (31:30):
And so the key there is the IPO process was originally set up to allow people to invest in businesses they liked. It then got completely taken over by the investment banks that do these pre road shows to all their buddies in the investment houses. And they get all the money that way and then those guys dump it and make a nice turn. And yeah, the IPO process doesn’t make sense unless you’re going to raise $100 million. And so we love the concept of small owners being in small businesses that become larger businesses.
Wayne Reuvers, LiveRetail (32:02):
The website is obviously the portal where you can get all your ads for free no matter what franchisee you are. And even if your brand’s not there, just request your brand. It will appear within 70 hours, 72 hours. And so the URL is liveretail.com and you’ll see this little tag at the top if you’d like to invest in LiveRetail and we’d love you to become a shareholder. Liveretail.com/invest if you just want to go there directly. And it’s Reg CF and it’s currently set to close on July the fourth Independence Day because that’s one of the most special days to me.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (32:35):
Wayne, thank you so much for a fantastic interview and let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when he talked specifically about the power and success increase with hyperlocal marketing initiatives. And he said, when the ad has the name of the hometown or the person’s town where they live, those ads are three to five times more likely to be clicked and for the users to take interest. And I thought that was a great example he shared when he talked about winning a PlayStation locally and it saw 4.8 times increase in responses. Takeaway number two is when he shared a miss that he had in 1992 when he had created a top 10 server on the planet and he sold early in that effort. And while he did make out, he was able to sell for $9 million, his miss was that his largest competitors at that time, 18 months later had valuations over a billion dollars.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (33:36):
So it’s that age-old conundrum of when to hold them and when to fold them. And he thought the miss was folding just a little too earlier, selling just a little too early. And takeaway number three is the three C’s that he shared and the three C’s are, one is contact, making sure you have the right contact. Number two is credibility. Do you have the credibility? And number three is chemistry. Are you developing a chemistry or quality working relationship with the person you’re looking to do business with? And now it’s time for today’s win-win.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (34:15):
So today’s win-win is when Wayne was talking about his love and appreciation for the United States and the small business community and it’s fitting that July 4th is just around the corner for us. And I thought it was just a great takeaway and just a great appreciation and point of view he had because it’s really a gratefulness that he has for the mechanisms that have been built over time to allow for small businesses to flourish and to create an environment where some of those small businesses, maybe yours, can go from small company to a mid-size large company. And you can do that in a short window and sometimes as short as a few months or a few years to as long as maybe a few decades or build generational wealth for your company or for your family. And that’s something that you can do here in the United States in one generation.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (35:11):
Your wealth can go extreme or the opportunity to grow and build your business. It’s all available here. And I just think that’s a great way to close for a win-win, to have great appreciation and gratitude for the opportunities that we all have here. And so that’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone might be ready to franchise their business or take their company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to having you back next week.
