The Brad Weisman Show
The Brad Weisman Show
Mail Shark's Success and Dumpster Dudez' Growth w/ Brian Johnson
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Join us for an exclusive conversation with Brian Johnson, the visionary force behind Mail Shark, as he uncovers the secrets that propelled his company to the forefront of direct mail marketing. Imagine revolutionizing industries like pizza shops, automotive repair, and HVAC companies with a simple yet groundbreaking weekly mailing strategy. Brian's journey from a single opportunity with a multi-location pizza shop to overseeing operations that handle over 160 million pieces of mail annually is nothing short of inspiring.
We'll take you behind the scenes of Mail Shark, exploring the surprising complexities of paper production and the logistics of housing a USPS facility within their own warehouse. Brian's story is one of resourcefulness and dedication, underlined by a unique company name inspired by the dual ferocity of a shark and the practicality of mail. This episode is packed with insights into how Mail Shark ensures a steady flow of business and better budget management for its clients, showing how understanding and catering to specific industry needs can lead to phenomenal success.
But that's not all—Brian also shares his latest entrepreneurial venture, Dumpster Dudez. Moving from marketing to a successful franchise model, Brian discusses the simplicity and effectiveness of the dumpster rental business and its growing appeal. Learn how Dumpster Dudez is expanding at a remarkable rate and the importance of mentoring new business owners. We wrap up with a heartfelt discussion on community engagement, the value of collaboration, and potential business opportunities, like the exciting expansion prospects of Dumpster Dudez in a location NEAR YOU. Don't miss this chance to hear from a true innovator who knows how to turn simple ideas into thriving enterprises.
"From ONE pizza shop sending 5000 Mailers to now over 160 Million Mailers a year, is nothing short of Amazing! Brian Johnson's (founder of Mail Shark) ONE idea and a ton of hard work and vision has turned into a large company with over 120 employees. He has a national footprint with Mail Shark and now he's looking to use those same ideas to grow the franchise Dumpster Dudez. Must listen Epidsode! - Brad Weisman
Listen for of-the-moment insider insights, framed by the rapidly changing social and...
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Welcome to The Brad Weisman Show (formerly known as Real Estate and YOU), where we dive into the world of real estate, real life, and everything in between with your host, Brad Weisman! 🎙️ Join us for candid conversations, laughter, and a fresh take on the real world. Get ready to explore the ups and downs of life with a side of humor. From property to personality, we've got it all covered. Tune in, laugh along, and let's get real! 🏡🌟 #TheBradWeismanShow #RealEstateRealLife #realestateandyou
Credits - The music for my podcast was written and performed by Jeff Miller.
basically bought a second cell phone, created a name. I wish I had a great story about the name Mail Shark. Do you have a good story about that?
Speaker 2:I don't Were you just looking at Mail Truck and then you heard about a shark and you just said it had nothing to do with baby shark. No, none of that was even around, by the way I had that going through my head this morning just because I knew where I was going to see you today.
Speaker 2:From real estate to real life and everything in between the Brad Wiseman Show and now your host, brad Wiseman. All right, we're back in the studio. Okay, we have a local guest here, but I'll tell you what. He's not that local, because everything he's doing is all over the place. We have Brian Johnson here Now. I just want to let you know if you're thinking it's the singer from ACDC. It is not the singer from ACDC, it is the local Brian Johnson. How are you doing, buddy? Great, great, thank you. So how's ACDC?
Speaker 1:doing. I don't know if we still hit the road much.
Speaker 2:You're not out there that much. Well, you look good for 76, by the way, I feel good, you feel good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, on certain days I mean some days I really do feel 70s.
Speaker 2:Well, I can understand that You're a busy guy. You're doing a lot of different things, but, brian, thanks for coming in today.
Speaker 1:Pleasure to be here and in the studio with you, great setting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I met you the first time was at a club and we were drinking lots of wine. That's the way to do it. That is the best way to meet somebody, right, I enjoyed it. Yes, what I remember? Yes, it was, that was a while ago. Yeah, exactly, that was a lot of bottles, so, yeah, so I brought you in. You know you're doing some amazing stuff. The last thing I just saw you started getting into and we'll get into that later on was dumpster dudes. Yes, growing like crazy amazing franchise. I would definitely want to dig into that. But the one that really sticks out is Mailshark. You are the creator, founder of the company called Mail Shark. Yes, you do pretty much anything that has to do with sending in the mail, like any kind of postcards, mailers, brochures. I was looking through here the scratch off, the new scratch off postcards. You do those. Yep, I've never gotten anything through those.
Speaker 1:I'll clarify the answer to that question. We design print and mail and it's a commodity based business, so paper and ink and there's competitors in all different shapes and sizes within marketing and then narrow it down to commercial printers that feel that they can execute on a marketing campaign for designing a postcard and mailing it out for anyone. And where we really hit a stride was carving into the niche of a very specific industry in 2008, which was pizza. And who doesn't love pizza?
Speaker 1:Love pizza I mean that was a layup for us, but really getting into the mind of the pizza shop owner and understanding exactly what they needed turned the commodity into a lot more. And so fast forward, 16 years later and automotive repair shops, heating and air conditioning companies and, of course, pizza, our beloved pizza from day one are really our focus.
Speaker 1:we can design, print and mail for pretty much any industry, but we've mastered the art of consultancy in those specific industries, giving us a little bit of an advantage when one of them calls in to ask about their marketing and we can talk the talk and, yeah, understand the consumer behind the. You know their efforts and what they're seeking from them and be the true expert in those um niche industries. And the beautiful part about those niches is they're every town, America. Um, we service the entire United States and so call it a niche, but it's fairly large. But when you take all the pizza shops, all the automotive repair and all of the HVAC companies, the audience for us as a customer base becomes pretty large.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's huge, yeah, huge. You know what I think is cool? You just mentioned in there that you know. I think the thing that sets you apart and you can tell me is that you actually listened to the pizza owner, right, and said here's our issue, here's our challenge in what we do, we print out 10,000 of these things. They all go out in one month, if I'm not mistaken, because I read the story.
Speaker 2:I'm going to tell you what I read. Give me the pitch. Here's the pitch. I know, mr Pizza man, you're sending out 10,000. It goes out at one time, but the problem, the issue there, is that you're you're making your one effort, that's it, yeah, whereas whereas what you had come up with is is let's spread this out, let's send 10,000, but let's send 1000 or 1500 or 2000 a week for the next 10 weeks, and that got got them much more exposure. It evened out their business. So therefore, they can budget better and everything else. And I think a lot of places probably just came into them and said, well, we'll do 5,000 and just going to go out tomorrow and that's it.
Speaker 1:And there was also the more you print in from an economies of scale for most commercial printers, the more the cheaper it is Absolutely.
Speaker 1:It didn't make it better for the pizza shop owner, Right. So you hit the nail on the head and it was again taking that commodity of. I can print as much as as many pizza menus as you want and mail them all out on a Friday night, and then that pizza shop just gets killed in one Friday and it's not a good thing. I mean, they didn't buy their food right, they didn't staff their restaurant right and they ended up pissing off half the customers. So the mail shark was born, really, on this unique selling proposition of a weekly mailing strategy and a trickle effect to the marketing and consistent approach to getting something out there every single week of the year, as opposed to one big blast on a Friday night, which was detrimental.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it actually, like you said, it was tough on that I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure, cause it was probably also it's more, it's less expensive to send all 10,000 at one time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's really was. Um, the pizza shop owner that shared the magic recipe said he shared it with everyone. Please help me spread this out. And most of it was. I'm not sure how to do that, or it's just not economical, and so maybe young, dumb and hungry for pizza and marketing. It was just a chase to find out how to accomplish that, and once we started testing it, the economies of scale started taking off to make it more feasible.
Speaker 2:It's amazing and you have a pretty big I mean you have a big warehouse. I mean that's the only thing that changed too. You used to outsource it. Correct All the product right, all the postcards, all the brochures. You were outsourcing all that and now you brought that in You're actually doing that in-house.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was Houston, texas, the initial outsourced effort and a great relationship, but wanting to control the big picture and really understand how to better produce the mail for every small business owner and not kind of hit the roadblocks or guardrails that were being put around us with the outsourced efforts, it was a control effort more than a better profitability. I mean, manufacturing in itself took us five years to master. It's a beast to get the people, the machines, the building. I mean it was certainly a simpler world when we could just let someone else do it but, to control from start to finish.
Speaker 1:Design print mail under one roof. Change the game for us.
Speaker 2:Does it change the cost then, to better cost them for you?
Speaker 1:You control your costs ultimately, once you learn how to do it Right, gotcha.
Speaker 2:So of wasted material in the beginning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in the beginning, I remember shoot, we printed the wrong postcard doing a lot of things wrong and burning through a lot of money quickly and wondering if we made a good choice. People that kind of rebounded and came back the other way yeah ultimately, of course, we're thrilled with our decision now looking back on it, but it's, it's uh.
Speaker 1:You can be a great marketer but not a great manufacturer. And we had to figure out how to do both. And now I can say we, we, we buy paper, uh the commodity that it is better than most commercial printers in the united states because of the way that we source it from south korea. Believe it or not? Amazing, they don't even have trees. Uh, they import pulp and still float paper around the world to us.
Speaker 1:Um at a better price, and actually a good quality product, correct, wow. And a lot there's, you know. For another show, maybe there's a lot of details on the depths of the global paper industry and the paper mills in the us are really converting to packaging for amazon-esque cardboard isn't that something so? We were almost forced out of the country.
Speaker 2:So paper is is leaving the country.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, paper the way we know it, like this kind of paper that paper, printed paper, mail, stationary things where people aren't writing letters and bill pay is now electronic, and so it's an interesting shift and something we pay attention to dearly with. Is our marketing channel of direct mail viable and for how long but the sheer paper purchasing became a global effort.
Speaker 2:Amazing, never would have thought that, right, you think that you would think that with you know, paper is paper and you can buy it anywhere and that we have plenty of supply here in the us. But it's like anything. If, uh, if, somebody's using up those plants like amazon to produce the all the packaging they need, I mean that's. It's incredible. A paper machine is a billion dollar machine. Oh my god. The last time one was. Should we buy two?
Speaker 1:of them. I think that's all the packaging they need. I mean, it's incredible A paper machine is a billion-dollar machine.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, the last time.
Speaker 1:one was Should we buy two of them?
Speaker 2:I think that's what I'm thinking. I think buy two.
Speaker 1:I've got a few more direct mail pieces out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then we'll buy. I'll invest in one with you too. That'd be great. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I've got at the us, wow. So this is not a, you know. Hey, let's just big deal, pop open a you know manufacturing facility to make paper.
Speaker 2:Well, I heard the electricity for them. Yep, because I know the place locally and here in reading that was making cardboard, they actually created their own power plant, correct most of them yeah, most of them will have their own power plant because of the amount of electricity it takes, so amazing.
Speaker 2:so let's talk about this. So you go from. Let let's go back to the pizza, the pizza shop. You go from one piece. How does it go from one pizza shop to like, wow, we've got something here? I'm going to talk to Tony's pizza down the street and there's a good Tony's pizza from Robison you just say you know, very good customer of male shark?
Speaker 2:I hope so, they're. They're really good. We can help. But how do you get to the next step? That's the whole thing with any entrepreneurial thing, any business. Yeah, okay, I did it for this one, but now I got to do this on a larger scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, the pizza shop owner that put Mailshark on the map had 20 locations, so that was a great stepping stone to allow for certain economies of scale, just to get that first good price or good purchase from the Houston printer.
Speaker 2:Do all the stores.
Speaker 1:If you do all the stores, I can offer you this Right and really I couldn't offer that because I was on a different quest when I met that pizza shop owner and he asked me if I could execute on this thing that was in his mind on how to help his 20 stores for the last 20 years and nobody else could or wanted to take the time to figure it out. And so when he said 20 stores, I said you know, you're writing down on paper, whatever you need.
Speaker 1:let me figure this out and got to that point. So once we executed on the first campaign for his stores, it worked.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's just you at this point.
Speaker 1:right, it was just me and my basement in Birdsboro and you know, just kind of getting through the first 10 weeks of pizza menus, going back to this pizza shop owner and saying how's it going? Did we hit the mark? And the answer was a resounding yes. This is exactly what we were looking for.
Speaker 1:And now let's do a postcard with a magnet on it. So me going back to the drawing board to figure out the next product. But it turned into this 52 week program and then, once we got into a more steady rhythm with his stores, basically bought a second cell phone, created a name. I wish I had a great story about the name Mail Shark.
Speaker 2:Do you have a good?
Speaker 1:story about that.
Speaker 2:I don't Were you just looking at Mail Truck and then you heard about a shark and you just said it had nothing to do with baby shark. No, none of that was even around, by the way I had that going through my head this morning just because I knew where I was going to see you today.
Speaker 1:The story goes that the competitors were MenuMon, Predators were Menumon the cowboy, and the legal entity I had was Targeted Solutions LLC for this business, and it just wasn't sexy enough.
Speaker 2:No, that didn't sound good at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that sounded really boring, my sister being a graphic artist. We came up with a fierce animal, a shark, and we do mail. No more thought was put into it, yeah no, that's good, that's it, that's it.
Speaker 2:And then we went. Good thing we didn't do a podcast, just on the name.
Speaker 1:Well, because it would. It would be over. I gotta go. Yeah, see you gotta go. That's it. The podcast is done. Male shark, that's it. Yeah, and now looking back great choice oh, great choice.
Speaker 2:Well, you know what the name does not make the the company. The company makes the name and I think um.
Speaker 1:That, of course, resonates with me as my baby born out of the basement of birdsboro yeah, shark, and absolutely where it is today so tell me what.
Speaker 2:So tell me where you are today, like just so people understand that you know you're. You're obviously not just doing one pizza place, 20 pizza places, you guys are. You have a serious business going on. So give me some number. I mean whatever. However, you want to tell us what you're doing. It doesn't have to get personal, but yeah, yeah. So how many pieces are you doing a day or month or whatever?
Speaker 1:Well, we do a couple of fun numbers here. That 160 plus million pieces of mail per year.
Speaker 2:That's a lot.
Speaker 1:And you can divide by 52 or 12 or you know it's a ton of mail that goes through our facility. We have a post office in our warehouse that verifies all the mail on site. You have a what on site on a united states postal uh office that's actually staffed by the usps. You're kidding me our volume, so you?
Speaker 2:you have your own, he has his own freaking post office hey by the way I did. Oh, I was gonna say would you be able to mail this for me?
Speaker 1:exactly, I knew that was coming. So yeah, you're not.
Speaker 2:You're not the only reason we had you here.
Speaker 1:I want you to weigh something and send it for me I'd be happy to take it down the street, but I can't take it to my warehouse.
Speaker 2:Holy, that's incredible.
Speaker 1:So tons of mail goes through our facility justifying a postal employee dedicated to us, and one of my favorite stats, though, in the 16-year journey is we have 130 team members that work at MailShark, about half of them in the production side of the business and half on sales, customer service, accounting, support, you name it.
Speaker 1:And the real shining star is not to be cliche, but just as I kind of you know, soak in all of the history of where I've been and where I'm going is the talent that now is following us and coming in the doors and making this happen on a daily basis so I can be here talking to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I get it.
Speaker 1:It's just phenomenal, and that's, that's a number. I love to share the number of hundred, and what is 132, 130.
Speaker 2:And it's funny Cause in that article you went, you were had you had 12, I think and you were looking to hire another 17.
Speaker 1:Those were scary, like having 10 employees was you know 10 employees was a scary moment. Each chapter became.
Speaker 2:So what's the future of MailShark? Is there some different stuff you want to do, stuff that you want to dive into? That's different than the mailing.
Speaker 1:We are very good at mail and watching these five-year clips we think mail is very viable in the next five years and beyond.
Speaker 1:Don't get me wrong, but we all have to be careful with the strengths and weaknesses and threats of the business. But what's next is right in front of us. We really just entered the home services realm heating and air conditioning being the driver and data integration is a fascinating subject in the Mailshark walls these days, where we're actually able to API and pull our customers' data out of their CRM systems Wow and either suppress their customers out of their mailers we can mail loyalty mailers. We can, on the fly, grab all of their transactions and see who's spending money on what and be much more intelligent instantaneously in the mailbox than we could years ago. And we can also calculate ROI. So you spent this much to mail to these people. With us, now we can see the transactions coming back in and match it back to who you mail to and tell you exactly how much money you're making on our campaign. So amazing, tying technology into the mailbox and that data integration has kind of changed the game.
Speaker 2:A bit and AI is coming in to do all that too. Yeah, and we're doing that in our business too. I mean, we, we send out postcards through a company called RPS. It's basically just for real estate, and it's neat because they do the same thing. I mean, it's it's telling you the main thing was actually easy with real estate was it tells you how long the person's lived there. Yeah, you know why would I want to send hey, do you want to list your house to somebody that just moved in six months ago? It's kind of not a good idea to send that postcard.
Speaker 1:It's bonkers. How deep you can go on that.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, you know left-handed Chrysler drivers in. Whitehall, pennsylvania. Yeah, exactly, it's amazing, it is, it is incredible and sometimes it's overthought.
Speaker 1:You know my personal opinion of marketing is you get so deep into the analytics that you forget that everyone eats pizza and just hit everyone around your shop and hit them strategically. So sometimes the magic is in analytics, and sometimes it's a little simpler than that, and just executing at a good price point.
Speaker 2:And you think males it's one of the things I had on my bullets here is is you know? Do you think how long is male going to last? You know, and I'm not trying to say that, but you have to think of that. I mean, we, we get told realtors are being replaced. You know what I mean by AI and all this stuff. So every industry, I think, has the fear of what is going to replace me. Is it going to be a machine? Is it going to be okay? They remove mailboxes eventually. Who knows? You know, do you? Do you sit up? Do you sweat when I tell you this?
Speaker 1:Are you a little nervous right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, he looked like he's running ready to pass out. Are you okay? I'm going to take a deep breath here, here, hold on to this.
Speaker 1:I'm going to shock you. It's not the first time I thought about this. I'm sure you wake up in the middle of the night. You know it's something we have to pay attention to Everyone.
Speaker 2:Does Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Every industry has it. You can have a threat coming in to replace you tomorrow and email came out in who knows what year and that was a threat to mail and Facebook. Social media, digital marketing, google AdWords all of the newer digital platforms are a threat to direct mail, but it seems to be cutting through. Noise is marketing and the mailbox is still a very relevant place to cut through the noise. Gen Z loves the tangible piece that they can pick up and hold. But you know, but we, we joke and it's not a funny joke but about you know, these days when we're going to tell our grandchildren about this metal box at the end of our driveway where you grab this paper out and you know, and I'm hearing that in that story is the kind of like the DVD player, the death of my business.
Speaker 1:Um but, um, we really just feel the momentum and the fact that it's backed by the USPS. The government is not going to go away overnight, no, and it's working.
Speaker 2:And you know what I found too, and I think the the less that we see bills coming through the mail, the more enjoyable it is to go to the mailbox. I think Seriously, because I get all my bills now I hardly get any bills in the mailbox, so it's actually not a negative experience to go to the mailbox. In fact, I get my. This here comes into the mailbox because it's a smaller box, you know, and it comes to the mailbox that way. But a lot of our stuff now comes in our mailbox and it's an enjoyable experience. Well packaging.
Speaker 1:I mean shipments, small shipping stuff goes to the mailbox. The e-commerce boom, yeah, is thriving on direct mail as well, in that you know how many catalogs do you get at your house? Yeah, daily, yeah, you know, and um, they're just trying to the ones my wife can I throw away? I throw those away. You got to get to the trash.
Speaker 2:Can let me go into the dumpster dude thing.
Speaker 1:Oh good, we'll go there we'll go there.
Speaker 2:I'm just saying how do?
Speaker 2:you think I chose these industries? Yeah, exactly, that's amazing, right? Yeah, so before we let's get into this here, I'm going to actually give you three of these things. So we're actually, um, have you ever tried new tropics? I have not, okay, so this is one of them right here. Uh, it's actually one of the more popular joe rogan's uh talking about is a lot of different people talking about, and little brad here in in burke's county is talking about it now too. But if I'm going to give you three of these, okay, you're going to take those home and try those with your coffee in the morning. Do you drink coffee? Yeah, I love it. Okay, it goes great with coffee. Don't pour it in, though.
Speaker 1:That's terrible. That would taste horrible if you did that. It's really bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you take a sip, a little double fisting, which I'm pretty good at. So drink the coffee, take some of that. There's all kinds of stuff in there Turmeric's in there, there's some mushrooms in there that are, that are good for you. There's there's vitamin B, vitamin C, all these things. And you know, what I've noticed is that you know how there's. Sometimes you take something and you're like, okay, this is not doing anything. I don't really feel anything with this. It takes a little time. It takes about three days.
Speaker 1:Better, I've seen the Joe Rogan podcast.
Speaker 2:My mom is drinking it now. My dad's drinking it.
Speaker 1:I wanted to try it. I'm excited to Now the taste.
Speaker 2:I'm going to be honest a little different. Did that sound, right yeah?
Speaker 1:Have you ever done a shot of something?
Speaker 2:No, I just do two sips. Okay, yeah, no, actually it's sweet, it tastes good. Okay, yeah, give it a try. Yeah, I will, and if you go on, it's Wiseman20. If you go onto the website, it's Wiseman20 is the code and they'll give you a discount. All right, yeah, thank you, pretty amazing, right, so let's talk about Dumpster dudes, all right. So how in the world did you go from postcards?
Speaker 1:to dumpster dudes and I wasn't looking. You know I wasn't seeking. Yeah, I guess you know I've been an entrepreneur since 18 years. Yeah, before that I worked for Boscov's in their executive training program.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 1:I just want to give a shout out to them because that put me on the map with the right mindset of how to even think about business. So loved my four years with Bosco's and their executive training program and with Mailshark was, you know, kind of just enjoying the freedoms of what was being created and not seeking 10. Some people like to go out and start 10 businesses. I was kind of happy with where I was at but also went to high school with the founder of Dumpster.
Speaker 2:Dudes, oh, you did Okay.
Speaker 1:He was a little bit younger than me and also his partner, who opened the first franchise location, used to work at Mail Shark and also went to high school Exeter.
Speaker 2:Oh, get out of here.
Speaker 1:Okay, exeter Eagles shout out yeah, yeah, there we go, exeter, cool To my Berks County roots. Yeah, my Berks County roots. But so these guys will pick. Wanted to pick my brain on marketing for their dumpster rental business and it was supposed to be an hour long coffee meeting and turned into seven hours of tell me more about this incredible business, this opportunity, the simplicity of dumpster rental, and no business is simple. You know I don't want to overstate that and I talk about why I love the model low employee count. Drop it off, pick it up. You're not hoofing the material into the bin. So many things resonated with me in their story. But the brand is very cool.
Speaker 1:I thought that from the first time I saw one, it's just a great business that I fell in love with. We romanced each other a bit in the weeks ahead of that and ultimately decided to partner up to really pour gasoline on the fire of bringing this to the whole country and expanding the franchise offering. And that's kind of where I felt I could add value and we joined forces. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:And I was looking that up. Dumpster Dude is pretty, is pretty cool, you know, and I think one of the things that I liked about it when I first saw it, when it first came out, I remember seeing one and we use them for houses. We use them a lot. I know Susan McFadden here uses them all the time. She's a partner of mine and one of the things I thought was cool is it's a smaller. It doesn't have to be, but they the street Right, you know, couldn't be in your driveway. Then you have to worry about permits and things like all that other stuff.
Speaker 2:And when I saw this come out and saw it in somebody's driveway like in Whitfield in a smaller I was like, oh my gosh, somebody finally came out with a dumpster that actually fits and it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1:The 10 yarder is the smallest 25 yarder, but they get deeper right. A lot of debris has taller walls, yes, but the footprint still fits in your driveway. Amazing. Kudos to dustin the founder. He, awesome, came up with all of this and really polished, over seven years, a very turnkey, yeah, model and that's kind of franchising. In a nutshell, you got that right. I mean making it simple for people to duplicate the model, and we're now expanding to 30 locations as of today.
Speaker 2:I saw cause on those websites there's 24.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's, there's more than that, so that's up to 30. Wow, and it's been a journey over the last couple of years for me where we're fortunate enough to be very selective and all of us are not needing a paycheck out of the franchising side today, which allows us to make sure we're supporting each franchise owner, picking the right people to join the team. And, you know, 18 years into my own entrepreneurial journey, it's my opportunity to really mentor and seek a new chapter of helping other small business owners get off the ground with something that we believe in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really cool. That is really cool and I'm glad to see you got involved and I'm glad to see you're doing that. Your vp of franchise development is what it said on the website. So if somebody wanted to do that, what does it take?
Speaker 1:just go on the website, fill out the information that's on there as far as getting a franchise, yeah, so we um, of course, have 30 locations, so the first step is is that territory still available? And from there there's probably as many conversations as the person wants to have with our director of franchise development, willie Katnowski.
Speaker 2:Don't spill those.
Speaker 1:There we go. How do you get? I drink them now.
Speaker 2:See, look at that, Look, he's already got energy. It's just sitting there in front of him.
Speaker 1:Well, you talked about selling a franchise. I just got all.
Speaker 2:It does get you. That's exciting. My juice is fun. It's exciting.
Speaker 1:I uh well, willie Katnowski is an amazing individual who's having as many conversations as necessary with our prospects to ensure they have the money, they have the know-how, they have the desire and passion about renting dumpsters.
Speaker 2:Right and also being in business by yourself.
Speaker 1:That's the big one.
Speaker 2:Everybody thinks that that's all fun and games and it's great. I can take off anytime I want. I don't have to. Yeah, you know, I'm in a business myself for 30 years.
Speaker 1:It's a 10 year relationship that we're about to form with this person for the franchise agreement, and so we want them to take their time and see themselves in the shoes of a dumpster dude. And so the last step is they come out to Reading Pennsylvania, we fly them in. If they've gotten to this point in the process and we have lunch and they you know they take a day in the life got out in the truck interesting understand the game and and again at the table.
Speaker 1:There there's no hard sales pitch. Yeah, go home, talk to your family. This is a huge decision in your life. You may already have millions of dollars in the bank. Some of our franchisees do yeah or this may be, you putting all in your chest to the middle, and so there's certain requirements to you know have at least 200 plus thousand dollars of liquid cash. But, more importantly, is this really where you see yourself? Yeah, and that's exciting for us when we find that match.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know, we're still learning every day, but it's a.
Speaker 1:It's a great business.
Speaker 2:It's really cool. Yeah, I love, but anything else going on I mean. One thing I do know is you just celebrated your 20-year anniversary with your wife, angela, and you have three daughters, yeah, so that's most of my life. It keeps you busy. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:It was a great milestone. Yeah, it's awesome. We went down to Charleston, south Carolina. I saw I looked at you eating some good food.
Speaker 2:Yeah the food looked good, I saw steaks like on a tray that the guy was showing you these steaks. It was Hall's Chop House. They looked a little raw, though Did you eat those right away? I?
Speaker 1:told him to sear it on both sides before he put it on my plate.
Speaker 2:It looked really good. It looked really good it was a great spot. Oh yeah, it's awesome. Hey, thanks so much for coming in here today. It was a pleasure and hopefully we the fact you're in our community.
Speaker 1:It's great. I would throw that right back at you. I appreciate all you're doing as well.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you, thank you so much, so thanks for being here. Pleasure, All right. All right, there we go. That was fun. We got Mail Shark. You will find him there. Also, if you have anything you want to throw away, look up Dumpster Dudes. And also the franchise thing sounds amazing. So I am actually thinking about Ocean City. Maryland would be a good idea for Dumpster Dudes. What do you think it's available? See, he already told me it's available. Alright, that's about it.
