CEO Cultivation: Turning on Old Money-Makers, Staff Interaction & Keeping Innovation Alive
Welcome back to the podcast, I'm Adam Dragan and we're live from Manhattan, walking around the city while I’m talking into a headset. Why? Because I don't have any time to do this the proper way, and I’ve got too much shit that I want to get out there. This is just the way it's going to be.
I was just talking with my assistant yesterday about how there's so much I would I want to be doing, but I'm procrastinating too much. I say things like I don't have the time to do it or I don't have the right spot or walking around the city this way too loud to do a podcast. But it's not, that's just me making excuses. So to get my own head of my own ass, I’m forcing myself to start doing this stuff in places when I have time, which is walking around to the movies, I'm going to see the new Slayer movie right now.
Today we're going to talk about how I'm turning old money-makers back on to make new streams of revenue, how I'm making more consistent interactions with my staff, managers and companies to get them back on track, about keeping innovation alive, and stealing from other people.
So first one is turning on old money-makers, tweaking them to make money again. You’ll hear me say time and time again that you have to have multiple revenue streams, because when one dries up, you have to have another one coming in. If you are relying on one source of income, you're fucked, plain and simple. There is no way in the world you will be safe financially unless you have some trust fund that you're sitting on. If you have one job or you have one online website that is selling stuff, what happens if that site gets shut down because of who knows what? What if your job fires you, what are you going to do? Rely on savings? Fuck that, that’s just stupid.
You need to have multiple sources of income. You need to have multiple revenue streams going on, and then you need to have multiple subrevenue machines. So for each revenue stream, you’ve got to have subrevenue streams. An example would be that I have my tattoo shop. One revenue stream through the tattoo shop is the obvious tattooing and piercing. The main one is tattooing, most tattoo shops have tattoo artists that work with them. That's pretty much a given.
Well, not all tattoo shops have piercers because in the tattoo world, tattoo artists believe that they're above piercers. They think they're more special, so therefore they don't want to have it. Fuck that shit, that shit makes money. The margins are way higher, the service has a lot less requirements from a skilled labor perspective, so it's easier to find people and honestly the piercers tend to be more reliable. Overall, piercers are more egotistical in the sense of business, they think they're basically right on par with doctors. So when you need someone to keep track of everything, make sure your shit’s clean and the health department's going to pass inspection. piercers are the ones you want to pass that onto. Tattoo artists not so much.
But for a tattoo shop, that's a second revenue stream. Say all of a sudden tattoos go out of style, I still have a second revenue stream. Another one would be selling merchandise. Selling it online or in the shop would be another revenue stream. Obviously it's not big, but you can build it to be big. Look at Sullen and all these other brands that have come out of the tattoo industry that are making millions just by selling T-shirts. So even if you have a revenue stream of some kind, think about ways that you could make subrevenue streams, other ways to make income.
Right now, that's something I'm working with my team - how can we generate more income from the shop. I’m paying for that shop to be open, no matter what happens, if someone gets tattooed or not. Every square foot of that space, I'm paying for it and I'm paying for it even when it's closed. So I'm paying the power bill, rent, all my licensing fees, the accountants and all that crap. Even if the shop is not open, it's still being paid for. To maximize that, I’m trying to figure out other ways to generate income from the shop. Maybe at night we close it down and turn it into some type of a lounge game night/paint and draw thing. Maybe in the early mornings, we open it up to seminars or art classes or things like that. But, right now we're just kind of spitballing, we don't really have anything locked in for sure, but that's the whole thing, it’s about brainstorming. I have a weekly call with my manager, and all we do is go over what are additional ways to make money with the shop? How can we save money with the shop? Are we efficient as possible? Are we marketing well? It's always about what can we do to make the shop better.
I haven't gone over the first topic yet, so we should probably backtrack a little bit. The first topic is that we need to turn on old revenue streams. So what I used to do was I used to have a website called bodymod.org. It was a body modification website, I made it in my early twenties and it was more of a hobby and for fun. It wasn't really meant to make money, it was meant to have a good time and meet new people, travel the world and explore, and that's exactly what happened. That website brought me all over the world, and it opened up all kinds of opportunities, and it taught me a lot. I've met a lot of good people through it, so definitely worked for what I wanted. But as a side gig, it was pulling in close to $1800 a month. Not a lot of money at all, but it paid for itself and it put extra cash in my pocket. Do you know how much time and upkeep I put into it to make that money? Almost nothing. I could go months without having to do anything and just collect a paycheck just being deposited into my checking account automatically.
I turned it off awhile back because the automatic billing got fucked up and I was running out of time with a bunch of other shit, and I didn’t have time to fix these problems. It wasn’t worth it, so I killed it. Also at that time, Facebook just came about, MySpace died. It was like this whole transition from websites and blogs to mass social media sites. So my site also went on the way of nostalgia. In these new days, Facebook is fucking dying like crazy, big social media sites are lame as fuck and Instagram, which is just a fodder of people posting the dumbest shit they can think of online all day long. There's no real content anymore. So I was thinking, I should just spin the site back up. Whether it makes a ton of money or not, whatever, I’ll just turn it on, it’s fun. Maybe I'll tweak it up a little bit, bump up the price. Let's say in a good scenario, that thing winds up giving me an extra grand a month. Is that worth it? To me it is! $1000 for a few hours of time to get a site back up and running just to see if it works, $1000 a month? I'll take that!
Another one is we used to sell different types of merchandise in my tattoo shop. We stopped just because we stopped reordering things. I did something super simple. I built a great brand around my tattoo shop, where everyone really loves logo. They love the brand, it's not just like they like the logo. They like what the shop represents, it's like the cool punk rock tattoo shop in Puerto Rico. So anything we slap the logo on, people want it because we haven't really made anything. There’s a high demand, when new stuff comes out people grab it really quickly.
For a completely different reason, I wound up buying a bunch of lighters and made some stickers, and I wrapped the stickers around the lighters for my company rootAffects to hand out as promotional material. I realized I could use them for the tattoo shop as well. The majority of people who come in use lighters for weed or cigarettes. So I thought to buy some lighters, put some Live Once Ink stickers on them and sell them at the counter to make an extra $100 a month. I started just selling candy bars like M&M's, soda and little shit like that in the tattoo shop at normal prices, like $1 for a Snickers for example. I buy it at Costco next door, and just those little sales from snacks started bringing in an extra $200 a month! So hey, if M&Ms make me $200, I could get some lighters in there as well.
I made one lighter as a sample and sent the video to my manager to find out if people would want them and what could we sell them for. He said we can sell them for a dollar easy. I’ll make 50 cents a lighter but it’s also something else out there to get my logo out there. Lighters stay in people's pockets, they get stolen and passed around, so it’s just about getting the name out. That's the whole reason I was thinking about it. So my manager took that video, posted it online and people went crazy. People got excited about a lighter with our logo on it. So the lighters are showing up in the shop next week, and we're actually going to wind up doing a whole tattoo special around the lighters. We're going to some flash tattoos with fire and lighters and have the lighters available for sale as well.
The thing is that sometimes little tiny things wind up getting you additional money here and there. So like this lighter idea, little things can wind up generating you a lot of money. So if these M&Ms, these lighters and other little items each generate $200 a month, that’s an extra $2,000 a month from little knick-knacks, lighters, and candy. Now all of a sudden, M&Ms and lighters don't look so stupid. So little things like that can help increase your revenue as well as subrevenue streams. Look for things that you've done in the past that used to make you money but you stopped doing because the times changed or you didn't have the time so you killed it. Spin it back on, add some tweaks and redo it so it fits with today. Find some niche that you can plug it into. Think about the underlying frameworks of the things that you've built.
Maybe you built an entire company where all you did was website design for people, and it was great back in the late 90s - early 2000s, but now that industry has drastically died because no one pays to get websites done anymore at that small level. Now people are paying big money for websites to be professionally done. Maybe you spin that back up and just go for the high end models and charge a bare minimum of $20,000 to do a website. For that price, you can also tie in the social media for them, do a podcast for them, do a blog for them. Think about today's tech and what's going on around you. How can you adapt these old things that died and put some life back into them to get some more money in your pocket?
The next thing that we're talking about is regular meetings with staff and managers. This is something that I’m really, really bad with, because my philosophy is that I tell you what to do, just go do it. I just expect you to do it, and that it’s going to be done right if I only say it once. That's completely naive and stupid on my part, and even I understand that. It's just my brain is wired that way. So that's why I love hiring managers who understand how I work, this way I can work how I like to work. Their job is the follow up and to make sure they do everything. But even then I still have to do my part, which is to follow up with my manager. So a couple of things I would just pawn off under my managers to run. One of my shops, I probably had interactions with the manager there once every 2 to 3 months, I might have a phone call just to check in. Most of time, it’s only when something bad happens and they call me. It gets to a point where when my manager calls my phone I'm like oh, shit, something really bad is happening, because otherwise why would he be calling?
I've set up regular meetings in all of my companies. At least once a week, I meet with my managers that basically run the company or deal with whatever they need to deal with such as the staff. We meet up once a week and we talk about the accomplishments, the roadblocks and the fuck ups that happened in the last week. So we go over what happened, where did we do good, where did we do bad, and why so we know how to fix it or replicate it. Then we talk about what's going on for the next week - what are you planning on doing, what new revenue streams are you trying to spin up, what new artists are you trying to hire, what new marketing strategies are you trying to use to get people in the door? So we do a reactive with what happened over the past week and a proactive with what's going to happen next week. I try to keep it anywhere between 15 - 30 minutes, and every month I have about an hour meeting where it's more in depth to figure out what's really going on.
Obviously for my bigger businesses, that have higher revenue streams and demand more of my attention, there's a lot more going on, like a lot more daily meetings and things like that. For rootAffects we have a weekly meeting in person that we book for an hour, but it always goes for at least two, sometimes three hours. These things can get pretty lengthy, but they're important. That's what keeps the momentum going, especially when you're running things by yourself. You need other people behind you, so when you're tired, stressed out, pissed off or you just don't want to do it, your partners, staff, friends, or family will course correct you. They’ll remind you that you need to get this shit done because there's a bunch of people relying on it. They’ll help you get your head out of your ass and start doing it, and that's why I'm making this podcast right now.
So keep in touch with all your people, probably more often than you're doing it now. The more you keep in touch with them, the more you're going to be able to drive and steer your company towards success instead of reacting to all the failures that happened. That's something that I've been cleaning up now for the past five months. I've been very reactive to everything, I've been focused so hard on building my other company that I've neglected the other one. As things come in, I deal with it. But now I'm trying to take a different approach, I'm trying to be more proactive. I’m focusing on growing the business rather than trying to keep the business from being fucked up, which is obviously a much smarter decision. Sometimes you just get caught up in the minutiae of the company. If you're an entrepreneur and you're running a bunch of different businesses and also trying to start up new things, your time is limited. Things do get left behind. I try to do these meetings and have these daily recaps sent to me so I can have a pulse on everything. If I notice someone hasn't done something, I can check in and ask at the next meeting if they’ve done it.
It's a good idea to keep a heartbeat with your companies as much as possible, because that's what generates your money, and it's other people's livelihoods. You have to remember your staff too, not just you. You may be thinking you’re too busy, or you don't want to do it, or you’re sick of it. That doesn't matter, because there's other people involved, that's their livelihood. You chose to open that company, you chose to open that business, and you chose to hire those people. They believed in you to take that job, no matter how menial or how difficult the job, those people depend on that company to exist and do well for their livelihood. That is your job, your responsibility. A lot of people think the CEO just sits around and collects a paycheck, but a good CEO, they're fucking kicking ass and taking names to make sure their staff are taken care of as best as they can. That's a little food for thought.
Let’s skip to the next one, keep innovation going and steal from other, different types of businesses if necessary. What this means is the whole Steve Jobs “good artists create, but greater artists steal” or whatever the hell that quote was. Basically it means don't spend a shit ton of time developing strategies or anything for the first time. You need to get a product or solution in place as quickly as possible to generate money or stop a problem from losing money or whatever. Here’s a simple example. I just spun up my CBD oil website, and we're doing a monthly subscription now. The first one is free, then after that, it comes to you every month automatically. The website for it sucked horribly, horribly bad because it was one of the things where I just needed something up so people have a reference when I sell it store to store.
But now I want to turn it on full force, and put some marketing strategy and money behind it. The first thing to do is to make the website look better. So do I spend days designing up a website and making it look all fancy and going back and forth on layout? No. I find templates, and I use them. I find other websites that do really well in the same space that I have, and I copy the shit out of them. As the sites grow, then I’ll morph it into my own look and feel. But in the beginning, no, just copy it. I'm not saying like straight copy the images and such, you have to use your own, but you get the idea. Just copy what they did and figure it out later, you can tweak it as you go.
I was looking at a magazine about cooking the other day while I was waiting somewhere, and there were all these QR codes scattered throughout the magazine with little captions saying to hover your phone's camera here to get the recipe on your phone, or to see a video by Rachel Ray on how to cook this meal, etc. They took the old media of print magazines, and they're trying to adopt it into the new tech with our phones by having QR codes throughout the magazine. That's a pretty cool idea, that's something that I could probably do myself.
So I did it with my business cards. Half of my business card is a giant QR code. Why? Because nobody holds on to business cards. They look at it, take a picture or enter the information into their phone, and they're done with it. My business card is a giant QR code, all you have to do is hold the camera over it, it instantly goes to the website where you can download the information into your phone. It puts in all my contact info, my bio, my photo, everything goes right on your phone. Instantly. No one wants to hold onto business cards, but they do want to keep your contact information in their phone. If you can make it easy and kind of cool, you have a win. So find something that seems to be working or is unique in any market, and try to find out a way to adapt it to your business.
I hope you got something out of my meanderings and if you got one thing out of this or it helps make you a dollar, I’m fucking stoked. I'd love to hear back from you.
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Cheers!
.: Adam
CEO