How to Grow a $10+ Million Business (SellYourMac.com) with Brian Burke

Audio Transcription

Today’s show, we are featuring a guest by the name of Brian Burke. That’s B U R K e. Now Brian is an business coach or entrepreneur who started a company called sell your Mac. It still your Mac.com. And he went from a startup to where last year, uh, he did nearly $10,000,000 of revenue. Now Paul Hood, you are a CPA with CPAS and a proud show sponsor. How often do you see a business doing more than $10,000,000 of revenue and employing 22 people

that you get up over 3 million and you’re in, you’re in my experience when you’re in the top one percent. I mean that’s, that’s a, a revenue number that very few companies hit

and I just want to share this. That means that he’s bringing in roughly $454,000 of gross revenue per employee. And that’s a very high amount of gross revenue per employee as well. Unless you’re talking about the NFL or professional sports of some kind. I mean, that’s a high numbers. They’re not paulie hundred $54,000 of gross revenue per employee. That’s a pretty large number.

That’s a huge number. I mean we pay our, our staff at our firm about that, but that’s, that’s a large number of revenue. Amount of revenue per employee.

Sure. So on today’s show, he’s going to teach us how he was able to generate a mid, almost a million original visitors per year and how he’s able to build, sell your Mac.com. He also gets into his personal story where he grew up. He started out as one of his first business ventures was selling phones on Ebay and he talks about his progression and how he motivates his team and he also recommends a few books that I think everybody out there should read. Now that any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Mr Bryan Burke. Now Chubb, as you know, on each every one of these shows we try to interview a guru who really knows their stuff. That’s the goal. Yes. So today we have booked a t harv Eckard. He’s confirmed tr Becker is confirmed to be on the show, Daniel Goleman, the legendary clinical psychologist, New York Times bestselling author, and a roster, Steve Blank, the Silicon Valley author and entrepreneurial Xtrordinair, Justin for set, former nfl running back or booking a lot of good minds. People were kind of a big deal and they all have kind of their little elevator pitch thrown nifty narrative to describe what they do. And on today’s business coach show, a chapel. I’m excited because in the offices, you know this, we use what kind of computers and what kind of computers? Only all Mac all day. That’s right. Today’s show we have the founder of sell your Mac.com and the man note around the world as the mcmahon. Mr Mcmahon, Brian Young guys. Brian, how are you today?

Oh, it’s an awesome Monday. It’s a rainy out in Cincinnati, but I am feeling excited and ready to kick off the week.

Okay, well I’m going to interrogate you with some hot and fresh questions and so my first one for you is for any of our listeners out there who are not familiar with your company sell your Mac.com, could you give our listeners a look into the history of your company and how you’ve started it?

Sure. I’d love to share a little bit about the background. You know, my, my true passion has always been in selling and arbitrage sales. So when I first graduated from college and didn’t have a typical job, I started buying and selling cell phones and it kind of came easily to me because I had a lot of Ebay experience. So as soon as I started going around town, I made a network of local verizon resellers. I able to buy all these old foam on zip people will have traded. And then from there I went to Ebay and I started selling them, you know, by adding on cases and charters in a warranty to kind of increase the value of the product. And soon after that I kind of pivoted to go into the apple world, which has always been my love and passion. Like you guys said you’re using all the apple products in your studio. I cannot imagine using the product these days.

Can you explain to the listeners out there? We have, by the way, Paul, one of our incredible show sponsors on Mr Bryan Burke is on the show today. He’s with hood CPAS and he’s just waiting to interrogate you with those tough questions. But could you explain to somebody like Paul who’s an accountant or somebody out there who is a listener in a different industry, why you are so passionate about using macs? And then I will jump on. Um, and I will pile on there.

Yeah.

I think the passion lies in the ease of use and the gorgeous design. Now when I look at a non apple product, it doesn’t look very fun to use. And then you look at in Nice Apple Laptop, you know, it’s easy on the eye. You can tell what it’s going to have a great user experience. And did you do start using it? They are simply easy to use and all of the vices linkups so well together. If you have an iphone and ipad and a Mac, it’s really a seamless transition between the devices. If you’re going to make a phone call and switch to another device or you’re sharing stuff, you know, an icloud and some other services they offer there. You know, just recently I saw a google made a big announcement that you could now get your messages in the cloud. You know, this is something apple’s been doing for years and it makes it really easy to go between devices.

Well for, for Paul, I want to have a chance to interrogate you here. Maybe you can try to sell Paul on why he needs to buy some more. Max Paul, do you have a Mac office or a PC and Mac office? What kind of computers are you using? Their Hood Cpas?

Well, we have a pcs clay pcs. Yeah. Maybe we’re behind the times, but I don’t know. I mean I’ve got an it guy and politically correct. We, we have an it guy and we use. We have a virtual server, whatever that is and call it virtual, but I can see it. It’s sitting right there, so I don’t know why they call it virtual, but you know, we have three business coach offices and it’s all tied together and you know, and I think maybe I’m a slow adapter, but I don’t know because I wouldn’t go to any other cell phone than, than my iphone. So, and as far as the ease of use and everything else. So I think in that area in my life, I just rely on my it guy and that’s the direction we have.

Well, Brian, on today’s show and I want you to do is just passively aggressively try to sell Paul a Mac. I’m going to sell Paul Right now. Okay. So can you, can you share with us their, uh, Brian, uh, when you first had the idea to actually transition from selling phones to starting sell your Mac.com?

Yeah. One of the things behind the switch is that selling apple products deliver such a great customer experience that it really leaves the customer with a good feeling. You know, compared to selling a Adele or another, you know, pc or android device, a lot of times it’s not going to be a great experience and I really want to have happy customers. That’s been one of my missions from the star is deliver a very customer centered experience and that’s kind of led us to be the number one rated a service in the world for apple trading.

Okay, so let’s say hypothetically if a friend of mine, a show sponsor with am of Paul Hood, he goes, you know what I’m, I’m listening to the show are and oddly enough I might or might not be miked. What if Paul wants to get like a Mac mini from you or some kind of Mac? How does it work? How do you, how do you, how do you sell him a computer or what does that exchange look like? How does that happen?

We sell mainly online on Ebay, Amazon, and then we also have a retail store here in Cincinnati. So if you were to buy from us, he could jump onto our ebay store and find a Mac mini or any other apple products you might need. Probably a laptop so you can be on the go with his CPA business.

Okay. Okay. So we go online. We can, we can buy your products there. Uh, how did you initially attract those first customers there? Brian, how did you go out? So many people have a great idea to start, have the super domain in their mind they have this idea, I’m going to start selling your Mac.com or whatever their domain is, but they don’t actually ever sell anything. How did you initially attract those first customers?

Our first customers came to us organically and the thought was to have great search engine optimization, which I know you guys talk about on some of your shows. Yeah. And you know, for us one thing that helped out a ton was our url being sell your Mac.com. It helps, you know, when you’re searching in Google and type in, you know, sell my Mac, you know, w we pop up number one in the world. So that originally led our customers to sell their products on our website. And then on the flip side, when we go to sell it, we are listening to them on Ebay and there’s so much organic traffic on there, there’s no half a billion eyeballs that things were just selling a, you know, right away.

Can you, um, share with us, I’m not asking you to give specific numbers, but um, can you, I mean, do you sell thousands of Max per year? Do you sell a seven Max per year? Don’t know, what kind of volume are we talking about

in the tens of thousands now?

Really? And so

yeah, we, we’ve been growing very quickly.

Okay. So, so what was the most difficult aspect of growing? So I, I know for me a jump and you’ve seen this with our companies like elephant in the room. Yeah, just half it just happened today. Brian, this is hot and fresh. Paul, you could probably relate to this scenario. We have somebody who is really, really good at their job and so we had to promote them. Brian [inaudible], they’re really, really cool. Yeah, but when we promoted them, it kind of promoted them to a level of incompetence where he came to me and said, hey, we have just hundreds of employees so he won’t be able to guess who this is. This is released. Okay. I’m going to just kind of a vague a business coach conversation, but he basically let me know like I, I don’t want to manage. I just, I can’t do it. Like I don’t like having conflict with people were holding people accountable or there’s some people that just don’t like the, their, their position on the, on the org chart. Some people don’t like their schedule, some people don’t like the office they have to work. And what was for you the most difficult aspect of growing an entire team? Was it the hours? Was it finding people, was in compliance with labor laws? What was the most difficult aspect?

Yeah, managing people. It’s definitely one of the toughest things. You know, as you mentioned, that it’s a whole new level of skills you have to have to do that, you know, my personal skills, uh, don’t lend themselves very well to managing and holding people accountable, you know, I’m really, really great at attracting people and showing them the passion around apple and around the team and that’s kind of my strong suit, but I have to have some other people on my staff to help hold more people accountable since I’m not doing a great job of that.

What state are you in?

We are in Ohio, Ohio. Cincinnati, Ohio, a little suburb called blue ash.

Have you ever had fun with the unemployment commission in your state? Because I had. I’m having fun with them today. Are you? Do you ever have fun with the unemployment commission up there in Ohio?

Uh, no. I have not.

Oh my, you, you. Here’s the deal. If you want to create a fun pre podcast experience for yourself, what you want to do. And Paul, maybe you’ve seen this before, you. I know you have dozens of employees to Paul, but we want to do Brian and you will be focused on your goal, focused on your mission, and you’re going to have an employee who just doesn’t do, decides not to show up to work at all. They just never happened. They ghost you. And then when they go should, they said they said they were wrongfully terminated and because everyone has a right now you’ve got to respond to all the paperwork. And how do you keep yourself, Brian, for being distracted from your main goal with legal compliance, with employee compliance. How do you stay focused on the main thing? Who’s who, who’s helping you? How do you stay focused?

So for me, the being able to focus on my, my items, I’m able to focus on vitamins by hiring great people around me that also are very passionate about the business and about the team so that they stay here for a very long time.

Okay. Okay. So, so let’s say this, I’m pretty out there who’s listening? Who Goes, okay, I am passionate about my business. Uh, uh, Brian sounds passionate about his business coach. Um, can you describe why you’re passionate about cellular Mac.com, Andrew customers

about doing what I love each day I’m able to connect with a team that is passionate about apple and we share, we share that passion. Um, so it’s, it’s very, very easy to get along with everyone and kind of push forward towards our common goals and we have, you know, we built so many people around us that are team oriented and want to help the company keep growing and helping more people and it’s kind of that shared cars that you know, keeps us together and it makes it everyday easier.

Paul, you’re growing a team there. Yes sir. And you know this hood Cpas, you want to be America’s most proactive accounting firm. And at first it starts with stating the vision. Obviously step two, it begins with talking about it to your brain explodes. And then three, it’s holding people accountable to that vision. What’s the hardest part from your perspective, Paul, with casting a vision and getting everybody excited about that vision? From your perspective, what’s the hardest part as you guys are experiencing massive growth at Hood Cpas, what’s the most challenging aspect of casting the vision and getting everybody in line with that vision?

Well, the most difficult part is again is the type of people we have that are surrounded them. We have a great team and but I still get surprised sometimes, you know, I may think I’ve got an a player and this is a is an a player, but the a player doesn’t want to go further and so that kind of sets you back a little bit and. But that’s, that’s my role is to be able to put people in positions to where they can. They can excel and, and they can benefit. They can enjoy what they’re doing. And Clay, it’s fun though when somebody does like we have a fairly new receptionist. I’m and she’s worked for me probably a year, year and a half and, and I just heard her talk and she didn’t know I knew this but she said that Paul Hood is trying to take over the accounting world. And so I love that. I mean because that’s right, we’re in it and so she was excited to say that and so, but the difficult part is for me anyways is seeing somebody that I have a lot of faith in. I think they can do so well, but they don’t really want it bad enough and so now there still may be good players was and I’ll put them in a different position on my team, but that’s the hard part for me is getting people that will actually run side by side with now. Bryan,

I had read, and you could correct me if I read it the wrong place, but I had read that you have over a million unique visitors annually to your website. Is that correct?

Just about a million. We’re getting pretty close. It’s pretty busy. That’s how we get all our inbound and convert people a telco products.

So what, what keeps you motivated now that you are getting traction and you’re beginning to experience more and more success on what keeps you motivated on a daily basis?

I motivation usually comes from growth and from my team, you know, I love seeing that grow. I get so excited about doing big deals and finding new business class and stuff like that and I also have know seeing the team around me grow and be able to help people along their lives and then in and then in turn be able to give back to the community by donating laptops.

You donate laptops.

Yeah, I’ve been doing a ton of different and give back work this year and the latest thing has been donating laptops to underprivileged students that are going on at the college and they couldn’t afford them.

If you see a guy with the name of Eric Chop registering for a free laptop, just know he’s the cohost, the show and he’s messing with you man. Oh, you really? It’s impressive. Okay. Now here’s my next. My next question for you, um, and this is just something I don’t know if all the listeners out there can relate to this, but chuck, we announced today that December eighth is going to be our annual Christmas party. What that means is we’re going to have about four to 500 people at an event at about $55 a head. So we’re gonna spend about $22,000, promote, know, celebrating this event. It’s gonna be at the Mayo Hotel and if anybody out there listening, if you want to, uh, attend a one, you can’t. But if you show up with a number of a compelling argument you might go to get in, it’s at the Mayo Hotel, downtown Tulsa, December eighth.

You can meet hundreds of our employees and I, this is my take. Once you grow past 10 people, it’s a, it’s a new world, it’s a new dynamic. It’s things are different when you’re past 10 and it’s because you as the founder can’t personally have isn’t as tight of a relationship with everybody as you used to. And I’ve heard Larry and Sergei, the founders of Google explained that once they hit 50 employees, they went ahead and said let’s have thousands. We don’t know anybody anyway, you know. So I want to ask you as far as the size of the company, how big is sell your Mac at this point? Just so the listeners have some context. You have dozens of people, hundreds of people, seven people. How many people are working with you now?

Right now we have 22 people and we’ve actually added six this year.

So you’re kind of in that zone where, you know everyone’s name and uh, you’ve connected with everybody. How do you stay in touch with those couple dozen people on your team?

It is definitely getting harder and harder to get everyone together as we scale up and size. I try to do events about once a month to get everyone in the same room, whether it be a, um, a little luncheon, you know, ordering pizza and hanging out or we’re going to the park nearby, maybe playing outside, throwing a football, kicking the soccer ball, having a beer type activity. Um, and so there’s always these opportunities, you know, throughout the year to get to get the team together and get to know one another.

So what does your day, what did you, what, what does your schedule look like now on a daily basis? As you now have a couple of dozen employees, things are going well. You’re top in Google. If you’re typing in certain keyword phrases, what is your typical schedule look like today?

So I’m wearing a lot of hats at the moment and need to hire some more people to help out. Uh, so right now my typical day might start off with working on some marketing activities, you know, putting together some posts for facebook and instagram and linkedin and then I’ll move on to some financial duties where I’ll be making sure I clean up each day’s activities and transfer all the funds around and payoff in the invoices and stuff like that. And then I’m at that point, usually I come into the office, so the morning I kind of work a little bit at home and make sure I try to get a bike ride in and keep my body healthy. And then it come to the office, you know, try to go around, talk to each of the team members, see if there’s anything that they need help with throughout, at the day. And then I sit down to work on some projects. And our biggest project currently, it’s our new inventory ERP system that we’re designing to all make it a lot easier both for our external customers and our internal team members to be able to sell their products in a much more streamlined fashion.

Um, I, I understand your Paul Hood. You have a hot and fresh question for Mr Bryan Burke with cellular Mac.com. I do Brian. Hey listen. So uh, what our pushes is to be the anti CPA if you will, the, the new, the new type of CPA I’m sure. And so, you know, with you being in a tech business so and, and, and to me this is kind of, I’m actually at 51 years old. It’s kind of makes me laugh inside that I even asked him this question, but like what’s your office look like? Do you have like Ping Pong tables? Do you have like a coffee bar? Do you have a tiled with ipads? Yeah, you have a nap room.

That’s a great vision from my office, but right now it’s a little more down and dirty with a bunch of individual business coach offices. And then we have a little retail store and then in the back we have two warehouses where we do all the processing and testing and wiping and stuff like that. Okay, great. Well there’s, there’s no, no ping pong tables. We had a break room with a cup of coffee makers, but no cappuccino machines. Surely

you got like pillows or something for people to take naps or something. Right now I don’t have, I don’t have a dream room

yet. That sounds fun. Now Brian, what do the first two hours of your work day look like? I know you kind of gave us kind of a broad look at your day. What are the first couple of hours of each day look like for you?

Start actually, is that my house? You know, I’m working why I’m on the bike, uh, whether I’m doing my marketing campaigns then or it might be learning the daily news about apple and wanting ted talks and stuff like that. Kind of getting my brain going, uh, as my body’s turned it up.

So again, the bike right away. Yeah. That kind of got to get on the bike, really gets everything moving. Okay. And they have to get on the bike. What do you do?

Lab to the bike. Then I head to the office and start talking to team members and working in all our, our different priorities.

What time do you like to wake up? Are you waking up at Mark Walberg Time? Two in the morning or you’re waking up at four in the morning. What time are you waking up? Usually about 7:30. What time do you go to bed?

Uh, between midnight and one.

So do you have any, uh, uh, you know, hacks that you feel like, like, oh man, this is something that I use everyday. That saves me a ton of time. You know, some entrepreneurs swear by having two monitors. I’m one of them or three monitors, maybe five, maybe five. I used to have

five monitors and you’re back in the day when I was trying to do every single aspect of the business on my own, I could kind of segmented off like that. But now I’m actually down to one monitor, so working out

okay. Okay, so what entrepreneurs do you look up to the most? Uh, do you, do you have a certain entrepreneurs you’ve read about or certain entrepreneurs you’ve researched that you really have looked to for inspiration?

My two favorite entrepreneurs are probably steve jobs and Elon musk and I loved them because they have such a great ability to vision what the future looks like and then surround themselves with amazing people to help make it a reality. I think everyone assumes that, you know, Steve jobs kind of made apple, you know, all on his own. But if it wasn’t for Steve Wasniak for instance, he wouldn’t have been able to make it the first computer. So it’s really just seeing you know, who you need on your team and then designing the company around that. So easily able to have everyone know, create roles that he knew he couldn’t do himself and have it all circled back to him.

So you like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I don’t mean to cut you off there. I was curious if you’ve ever read their books or if you listen to them or how you get your fix. For Steve Jobs and Elon Musk,

I’ve read about every single thing about Steve Jobs I believe.

Okay. Okay. And what about musk? Would you like to listen to interviews with him or do you like to read a certain? Is there a certain book you’ve written? Either

one, true biography of Elon Musk that he ever talked to? The reporter. Um, so yeah, I’ve read that, you know, that’s pretty interesting. You’ve got to get a glimpse into how crazy hard he works and how he moves between these companies and you know, a little bit about his social life.

Okay. So you, you, you devour Steve Jobs, Elon Musk knowledge when possible.

Worse. I saw the latest podcast, ellen on the Joe Rogan show. I’m sure you guys might’ve seen it. Oh yeah. At least at least a clip. A couple clips.

Hmm. I want to ask you this here, which you, as you’re thinking about, um, advice for our listeners out there that would love to build a multimillion dollar company, like you have built a. what’s the number one book that you would recommend every entrepreneur out there listening needs to read? What’s, what’s the number one book where you say that right there is the book every entrepreneur just gotta read.

Yeah. You guys were just talking about visions earlier and how to you know, look at, look forward to the stripe of the company it looks like. And to that aspect, I think a amazing book to read is called vivid visions by Cameron herold. Okay. And he goes into a lot of detail about how to describe your company three years out and how to put that all into writing and then share it with your team to get them on board and start driving towards those goals

in that book. Again, one more time. We’re gonna. Put that on the show notes. Can you repeat that book title and author Real Quick.

It’s called vivid visions by Cameron herold and cameron originally built his chops as the coo of one 800. Got Junk. She took them from about a $2,000,000 company to a hundred and $50 million dollar company in something like six years. So he definitely has a pretty solid track record and now he is a fortune 100 fortune 100, you know, coach and advisor and is helping make these companies, uh, move from good to great.

And so you’re, it seems like you are pretty much self funded. I mean you started working, if I’m correct at the age of six selling jewelry on the street, is this correct?

Always been working. I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was born. It feels like. And uh, yeah, it is self funded. I am currently still 100 percent business coach owner have not taken on any outside investment besides for just a little bit of debt.

So did you, when you’re selling jewelry at the age of six, where you like a breaking into your mother’s jewelry collection and then selling that they’re to neighbors, how did that work?

Actually kind of learned a little bit from camp. I started making lanyards and similar kind of a key chains and jewelry there. And then I started going to the local beach shops, uh, buying beads and necklaces, necklaces and stuff like that and stringing them together. Just kind of doing some sidewalk sales in the neighborhood

and then age 13 you’re trading stocks. Am I correct?

Yes. I’m very passionate about stocks and I got a few thousand dollars for my bar Mitzvah and I wanted to put that to work. So been focused on growing my stock portfolio ever since.

Did you make any money at the age of 13?

A little bit. You know, it’s tough when you look at the dollar gains because they’re not, they’re not. It doesn’t seem like very much when you start off with only a little. But I think that’s one of the problems that people have. They don’t really understand the laws of compounding interest that you have to start somewhere. Even if you’re only putting away $100 a week to invest in, it’ll still grow over time. So, you know, at first I started off with some names I was familiar with in the tech industry and I did start buying apple and about 2002 and split adjusted. It’d be about $2 in a quarter right now. So it’s gone up significantly.

So for anybody out there who says, you know what I love, I love what I’m hearing here and Brian, I just want some really good coaching or advice from you. What’s the best coaching advice you could give to all the entrepreneurial listeners out there,

gets the offer some advice about starting your business if you haven’t already or if you have been able to turn it quite a success. I think the number one thing is pig headed, discipline and determination. There’s so many people out there trying to probably do what you do. So if you’re not working significantly hard at it, it’s probably not going to be a reality. So be prepared to grind, you know, every year is a struggle with new problems. You got to be willing to put in, you know, 12 to 16 hour days to get off the ground. Have a chance of beating the competition.

And when you talk about pigheaded discipline, does that mean that you’re a Chet Holmes fan? Do you like his book? The ultimate sales machine? Love Chet Holmes? Yes. Okay. Yes.

To thought that I was trying to decide that mentioned ultimate sales machine or go with evisions.

Okay. All right. So that, that’s a great book for anybody out there who’s looking for another book recommendation. Chet Holmes wrote a book called the ultimate sales machine and Chet Holmes worked with Warren Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger, and he talks so much about you don’t necessarily need formal education, but you do need a phd. That pig headed discipline. Now I want to, uh, tap into your wisdom here as it relates to leveraging technology for increased productivity. Can you share with us a few ways in which you use currently or are leveraging some technology to increase your personal and your team’s overall productivity?

There’s still a lot more I can do to increase productivity, but I’ll give you a few of the tidbits that are working on right now across our team. We use google docs and Google drive and we found that the be the easiest way to all collaborate on a, on a single task of helping to send emails back and forth about each individual document. And then from there internally, we’ve created a lot of different custom automation scripts to drive the elite workflows and that’s helped save time, you know, when it comes to printing, shipping labels and some other internal processes like that that can be a little bit more automated behind the scenes. So overall that stays a little at a time for both our team members and our customers.

So Google docs is a big piece of technology you use on a daily basis?

Yeah, we use it. It’s free. That what’s not to love.

Okay. So now chuck, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give you and Paul the floor here. I ask our final two questions for Brian. So Chop, you can ask anything you want. Here are Brian prefers religiously divisive politics and offensive thing for 500 points. Well, since I’m Dr Zellner is not here today, I’m gonna. I’m going to fill in for him. I’m going to ask his his prototypical question that he asks most of our guests, if not many of our guests. And he would ask, you know what, if you could go back in time and he would talk about a Delorean and clay would go, you could go back in time and have lunch with a young six year old or 13 year old, 21 gigawatts. If you could go back in time and have lunch, what piece of advice would you give yourself as a young person getting into your business ventures?

I would say the higher more amazing team members. I think the only thing that’s held back our growth, which is having more more team members on board. And that was part of. That’s one of the things that I chose to do is to build this company, you know, organically without all this outside funding. So that has held back our growth. I do think if I gave away a sizable chunk of the business and it took on some equity partners, we would have had more cash to hire more team members and to grow inventory faster and other business activities. And I’m not upset that we have taken this path and you know, we are a sustainable business for many other companies that have taken on money and spent it and gone under. Uh, but that’s definitely the biggest thing I think holding us back.

Paul Hood, you get to one up chop as always here as the final question of the day. You get to one up, Eric Chop the business coach Paul Hood. What question do you have for Mr Bryan Burke with cellular Mac.com.

Brian. So yeah, what, uh, you know, I come from a opposite of clay. I come from a formal education. I actually went to that college and, and learned how not to make money and how not to duplicate, how not to grow a business, but how to be a good accountant. So where did you learn? Where do you think did, I know from a very young age you were Kinda like Warren Buffet and you were in business for yourself, but how did you get that fire as far as to leverage and to grow and to scale and to even know, you know, things about scripts or, or what have you versus, you know, just somebody coming from a traditional college education.

So I definitely did not learn in college. Uh, it’s, it’s funny how a college does not really prepare you for the future in my opinion, for many industries. Oh, real quick. For anybody out there who’s going to business college right now, uh, Brian, we prepared a sound effect that would articulate really how effective college has proven to be for all of our guests we’ve interviewed so far. I’m sorry, I’m just saying we have a lot of clients on the show happens. A lot of entrepreneurs and so far we’ve had

maybe maybe

not five, maybe two or one who’ve said college mattered at all outside of getting the certification they needed to be in business, but dentists, doctors, lawyers, what have you. So okay,

okay. I was picturing Jim Cramer there when you did the sound effect,

so, so you’re saying that college wasn’t super helpful for you to learn how to run a business. Are there certain books that you could look at? The biggest

that youth to teach myself is probably just learning from others. You know, I’ve surrounded myself with informal advisors that are a lot of entrepreneurs and other business owners. I watched Ted talks a religiously to learn from, you know, people are so knowledgeable in their industries and it’s not that they’re specific knowledge that’s going to help me out. It’s just the way of thinking and being able to connect different ideas and I’ve joined other business groups, no one that I’m in now is called vistage, which is take a CEO round table group and people bring their problems to the table and discuss them and a a very trusted forum. So places like that where you can have have peers that I’ve done it before to kind of show you the way. It’s been my biggest point of guidance

now. Brian, as we, as we wrap up today’s show, I want to give you an opportunity to share with all the listeners about cellular Mac.com and the services you provide and potentially why all of our listeners to check out [inaudible] dot com at least one time.

So pretty simple. Sell your Mac eyes, sells and services, all the apple products. So people come to us when the new iphone, the iphone 10 s and tennis Max for launched just this last week that people are going to come to us and they’re going to trade in their old iphone for the new one. And similarly the, uh, have a laptop and they’re, they’re gonna upgrade. They’re going to come to us and sell their used one. And then flip side, you could buy use products from us at incredible prices compare to apple. It typically you’re going to save like 30 to 60 percent buying a one to three year old computer. So that’s, that’s the way the way to do it. I don’t think many people need a brand new product these days unless they have to have the most cutting edge of technology. And you know, for me that’s really my phone. I always want to have the best phone because I use it the most. I need to be super fast and take a awesome photo bulb, all my food and my family and stuff like that. But in general, I think that the, uh, the laptops and the ipads for instance, ones that are fear old are still going to be awesome.

I want to sneak in a bonus business coach question here. Chuffed because Brian, you mentioned earlier that search engine optimization has been a big part of. Oh goodness. Where did you learn search engine optimization?

I think I just read about it, you know, back in the day. I mean our website launched in 2009, so it’s been a decade ago when we were envisioning the siren Mac.com website. And the business coach webmaster that I hired was pretty familiar with Seo, so he had a bunch of tricks. It’s really just a plan on how to lay out the website and the links and stuff like that. And even right now, I know there was a ton more opportunity to increase our search visibility, which is something that I’m actively on with a local firm here and you know, trying to drive more traffic to some of our best keywords and also do more Edwards.

Well Brian, I appreciate you hopping on today show and uh, it’s certainly exciting to catch you mid stream in terms of you’ve built a company already to a size where you have 22 great folks on your team, your sustainable, you’re profitable. And A, I’d love if you could share where you see the company being three years from now, you know, maybe maybe even a year from now. Where do you see the company headed in the next 12 to 36 months?

So it’s funny you mentioned that three year time mark, because that’s what they talk about in divisions by Cameron herold. And so last year when I wrote out my three year plan, it was to get to that just over 11 million and we’re going to get close to that this year. So I, I honestly did not foresee how fast the growth could happen, so I think I need to reset my sites. So now I’m looking out about five years and I want to get to $50,000,000 and we’re probably gonna have between 30 and 40 employees at that time.

Okay, well that’s awesome. So you as your, as your revenue scale and you don’t have to scale the number of employees.

The biggest is a very hands on business, you know, a lot of people are needed to be able to process items and test them so that’s not going to go away. There is no automated way to take, take computers out of a box and, and wipe and test them yet. So it’s really the front office that hasn’t scaled quite as much as the team members in the back knee and the process. But one thing I’m always laser focused on is our customer service. That’s something that we need to grow here a little bit more quickly to ensure that we still do continue to be, you know, the number one most trusted a website for apple buyback.

Well, Brian, again, thank you for being on today’s show and uh, we always want to end the show with a three to a one and then a boom boom stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum. And so, uh, Uhm, I’m ready. Okay. Paula, you ready to, to, to, to drop the boom? Absolutely. Let’s get it. Chuck, are you ready to drop a bill? Bryan? Here we go. Three, two, one. Boom.