speaker-0: Hi there and welcome to season two, episode 27 of The Print Reviews. I'm your host, Colin Sinclair McDermott, aka the online print coach. And today I am joined by Lemay Sanchez. I got the names, the pronunciation right, hopefully. Lemay Sanchez from Plan Profits. Thank you for joining me today, sir. How are you?
speaker-1: Pleasure being here, Colin. Thank you for the invitation.
speaker-0: Excellent. So tell us a little bit about yourself, Lumaigh. Who are you? What do you do? Let's start with that.
speaker-1: Well, ⁓ today I am Lamai Sanchez, ⁓ co founder and CEO of Plant Profits, and I sell print software for a living.
speaker-0: software. So tell us a little bit about that print software. We're going to go deep in the episode, but just give us a rough overview.
speaker-1: Give you the 15-second ⁓ quick ⁓ overview. Planet Property is essentially a it's a print-focused customer relationship management that focuses very heavily on the growth side of the business. So we plug into most data points that a printer has, your estimating system, your QuickBooks, your Excel database sitting in your desktop with your list of clients. And we grab that information and we help you grow on scale. Stay in touch with your customers. going as far as even helping you with marketing, collection, anything else that is needed to make sure that a printer can focus on the things that matter most and they delegate to us the things that a machine can do.
speaker-0: Wonderful. We've just finished actually before we come on to record this. I was running a print mastermind session and this was a kind of topic that loosely came up and I think absolutely everyone on that call could benefit from checking this out. So if you're listening guys, go get a demo, go get a demo booked. But before we get into the business stuff, let's talk about you. ⁓ How did you come into the industry in the first place?
speaker-1: completely by accident. I don't have anybody in my family that has ever worked in print or friends or ⁓ yeah, many of the clients that we have today landed on this line of business because the family ownership or whatnot. There's definitely that was not the case for me. I I went to college ⁓ business school in in Miami and right after I graduated from business school, I I created a business and the business was all about branding and and growth, consulting. My clients were small mull and pop businesses in in Miami, which is my hometown. And ⁓ turns out that as part of that consulting for growth, the vast majority of the things that I was doing for them is buying out print and signage and changing the way that their apparel and vents and lobby looked. So it wasn't too quickly calling until I came to realize that I was really in the in the business of selling print and signage. And that realization, I gotta be honest, didn't come in Easily. I didn't think I went to business school to be a guy that's selling print. You know, back then this was a little over 20 years ago. That wasn't necessarily the hottest thing that that that you could do for a living, but it was it was certainly paying the bills and and and and and then some for for a 20-something-year-old. So that led me to transition into taking a sales job at a large commercial ⁓ print facility in Miami. And ⁓ I was there for for for A while wasn't necessarily the happiest person there. It was a little too much of a commercial shop for me. And I felt I had no say into the eventual outcome of what was happening with clients. And and we were speaking about this before we got on the call. I'm a little bit of an OCD ⁓ person when it comes to to getting involved. So I transitioned all the clients that I had ⁓ into a much smaller ⁓ printer in town that allowed me to have, you know, more of a partnership revenue of of of the operation, if you would, and certainly more control into the operations too. Eventually I I ended up buying that shop out. ⁓ that that worked out to be a beautiful experience for me and certainly learned almost everything I know today about the world of print and the challenges and and the opportunities and and you know what it looks like to to to to wear hundred hats at the same time while I was at that stint and on on the smaller shop. So It was experiencing those pains that then I I transitioned to the world of software about six or seven years ago. And ⁓ together with with somebody that I've that I've known since I was ⁓ about eleven years old, we found a plant profit. Yeah. Yeah. That's a funny story. So we found the Plant Profit and that's ⁓ the rest is history. That's that's what I do today.
speaker-0: Tell us about that transition then from being a shop owner to moving into software.
speaker-1: It was, it was, I would say easier than I thought it would be. Plan Profit for me in the beginning was gonna be a fun experiment because I needed the product that I was building. It was certainly not gonna be a product that I thought I was gonna dedicate to full time. but quickly after launching the product, I would say six months after launching the product, I immediately saw how. The people that were buying it were responding to the the effort that we all put together. Yeah. And and I knew I had to, you know, pick one route or the other. So I decided to to abandon abandon my my daily operational ⁓ task at a print shop and do this stuff full time pretty early on. And and and but I I I think it was honestly easier than I thought it was gonna be from the transition side, but
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: harder than I thought it was gonna be on the continuous pivoting that a software company needs to stay relevant for six, seven years.
speaker-0: Yeah, I can imagine that's quite intense at times. So was it a defining moment then where you've made that transition or drove you into the software where you just thought there's a better way to do this? This is why we need to build this solution.
speaker-1: I I think that the defining moment was when as a as a small print up owner and wearing a lot of hats, I was always more on the sales side of ownership. You know how you have owners that are usually a lot better operators. Others are a lot better salesmen. I was certainly more on the sales side. I was a horrible operator. I if you asked me how much money I had in the bank, I never knew. If you asked me how much money people owed me or if what stage of production a a job was at, I never knew. I was I was honestly horrible at that side of the equation. but but I always I remember thinking about software at one point and saying, well, what's available out there to help me ⁓ automate the stuff that I that I do every day that could be automated. Like things are simple as sending an invoice or collecting or following up on a quote or saying thank you to a client. I Nothing really existed that was made for print. I had to go and buy ⁓ you know, standalone or or or industry agnostic ⁓ marketing platforms and figure out a way to ⁓ you know, feed it data. And and and and that was really not what I was looking for. I really wanted a product that I could spend whatever amount of money they would charge me so that I can focus on continually growing my business. It was either that or I had to hire five or six more people to do those tasks and certainly could not afford it. So that was that was when when the idea of plant profit came to mind. And and I remember, you know, a friend of mine, Renee, who's my co-founder, he actually was a Salesforce cons consultant. He had a consulting agency for Salesforce, which is, by the way, the foundation layer where plant profit is built on top of. I remember I reached out to him and said, Hey, I've got this problem. Can you build a product for me that fixes these things for me? And he said, We can, but you're not gonna like the the price. So
speaker-0: Okay.
speaker-1: It was right. I didn't like the price, but then we both thought about it and said, Hey, how about we make this into a business? I'm sure there's more than one person in the world of print that needs the same things you're you need. So I started making some calls and s to some friends in the field and they said if you build that, I'll buy it. ⁓ and that's exactly how the idea was born.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Nice. I didn't get as far down the road. In fact, just going back to what you said there as well, ⁓ you sound exactly like me. I was a salesperson for the business, but ask me anything about the admin or the finance side. That wasn't my strength. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong. They try and wear so many hats. ⁓ You've got to stick to what you're good at as well. But I actually had a ⁓ print software business. for a very, very short time, ⁓ back in probably around about 2010, I think it was. ⁓ It didn't work out. We brought in some, I won't go into too much detail, but some rogue investors who didn't deliver on what they were meant to and it didn't get any further. again, similar to yourself, it was trying to address a problem, a frustration that I had. ⁓ And actually we had... We actually launched it at an event in the UK. We had about a hundred people sign up for the demo at this one event and frustratingly the people responsible for delivering on the project kept missing deadlines and eventually I ended up walking away. But I get the sentiment there for sure. was there a particular frustration in the business that annoyed you so much that you just thought, I can't do this anymore. We've got to build this.
speaker-1: For me, it was the fact that I needed to the little details. Let's let me give you not the political grand answer. I'm gonna I'm gonna try to give you a legitimate ⁓ little pains that I needed to solve. So I needed to do marketing. And in order for me to do marketing for my clients, I needed to go to my estimating system and export my database of customers into, I think it was, I don't know, MailChimp or Constant Contact, whatever that was. And and and then I felt good when I did it. But then next week I had clients that were new and clients that were now dormant that I had to continuously ⁓ keep updating that database. And I I hated the process like with vengeance because I was the only person really doing that in my shop. I didn't have a marketing director or or anything like that. So that whole that was a little detail. The the other little detail was that we were leaving so much money on the table because we were sending estimates and we were only following up on the really big ones on those like two to three thousand dollar estimates. But the Hundred and fifty dollar estimates. Nobody was really following up on those. And I felt good when I did follow up on those, but then that happened maybe once every two weeks. And 90% of them were not getting done. then it comes collecting. I I I was I I felt at one point I was almost like a bank. I had more money in the street than I felt rich. I said if I had if all those dollars that I had out in the street were in my bank right now, I would go and buy me a Rolex. I would go I you know, I I had had this this notion that if I got more aggressive on just asking people for money in a nice way and that's aggressive as in persistence maybe is the the better better word and sending books more often and and and I so I looked for software that had all those all those things and and nothing really was out there. ⁓ still today, nothing is really out there that does exactly what we what we do, you know, in in the comprehensive way that we do it. So, but back then it involved you having to hire somebody and yeah ⁓ and development money to build it exactly for you. And then as I mentioned earlier, Colin, I could not afford that bill. It was obnoxiously high. So it forced me almost into make it into a business model. And in my mind, if I just broke even on what it cost to build it and I still got the software that I needed, that was
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: That was gonna be a complete success in my eyes. ⁓ So hopefully that gave you an idea. Obviously, the more you're in it and then you start seeing the potential, then you start coming out with more problems you could solve and more opportunities. Those those two or three things that I mentioned earlier were I think the a very basic layer that I was trying to to peel off.
speaker-0: That's the thing, it just compounds and you keep looking for new ways to make improvements and add more value as well. Tell me, what was that like then? You've obviously gone from fairly secure job to then obviously there's a risk with anything ⁓ launching a new business, a new software business, like friends, family, all supportive, did the buy into the vision at the same time.
speaker-1: a combination of everything, but you're calling the print business a a fairly what what what did you call it? Fairly ⁓ found good foundation or something, you said any business. Well you gotta remember I own I own the shop. So ⁓ it's not like I was getting just a you know continuous paycheck that was a hundred percent guaranteed. You know how it works when you're a small print shop owner, you have great months, you have a horrible month. So so no I wasn't too worried about that side of the equation. ⁓ Especially because for the first few months of launching the product, I still own ⁓ the business. So at the same time, my my wife also has a a you know, a good income, a good job. So it it did give our family the the flexibility to say, Hey, ⁓ this is worth something that that that we could try and see what happens eventually and pursue it. And I mean obviously we didn't jump in blind. We we knew already there were forty or fifty or sixty clients that had installed the last six months. They were all raving about the product and paying money. So we got lucky certainly in that sense. ⁓ not when we launched it, because we launched it on March first of twenty twenty. That was the official launch date of Plan Profit. And if you know, if you remember what happened on March first of twenty twenty, I don't have to go into details, but we
speaker-0: My goodness. It comes up almost in every episode at some point. ⁓ Let's talk about why print shops struggle to grow. Why do you see so many print businesses hit that ceiling for growth?
speaker-1: ⁓ That's that's a loaded question. And and I I'll try to I'll try to tell you what I see more more consistently. I think printers rate reach a ceiling. And by the way, this answer doesn't come from my experience of not reaching a ceiling in the world of print, because I certainly reached the ceiling to the point that I I abandoned operating the print shop and I went into software. So I I it doesn't come from my own personal experience, it comes from what I see.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: Time and time again, now that we have hundreds of of of of of customers that we're we're speaking to every single year and we see the difference between those owners that are still that are stuck at at certain point versus the ones that I see continuously break away and and shatter those those those ceilings continuously. And I think that the problem is that what worked at a million bucks in revenue a year, i i it it it's certainly gonna be ⁓ chaos at three million bucks a year. So you cannot proportionally scale processes and technologies as you proportionally scale revenue. Those same things don't work at one as it does at three. So you need to find a way to continuously reinvent yourselves and and exponentially push the limits of automation of the people you're hiring. of of the software you're using, of of of the way that customers want to interact with you changes. You no longer have the time to know every single thing about all of your top twenty clients because you're scaled, right? So It's changing the way your processes work, your tech stack works, your equipment works continuously as you as you get to that certain next milestone and then and then doing it again again and then doing it again. So far, far too many times I've seen I've seen printers think that just because it worked at this level, it's gonna work again at the next level.
speaker-0: Yeah, no, you need to reinvent yourself for sure. Tell me if you were to walk into half a dozen print shops tomorrow, what mistakes would you, what things would you see, predict that you would see, like mistakes that people repeat over and over again?
speaker-1: I think confusing being busy and seeing the presses humming with with growth. And there's those are two completely different things. And and and you you still need to step back and understand that unless you're running a non profit trade shop, which we do have several of our clients that are, those are completely differ different models. Most operators that we deal with that we that are part of of of the planned profit ecosystem.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: They are in it because they want to make money. They're in it because they want to they want to sell more every year and they want to take home more money every year. So a very common mistake that I see is we're growing. Why are you growing? Well, look, look how much work in progress orders we have. Look how much more sales revenue I increased from last year to this year. And look how much. But then when we go down into the the details of, well, Do you feel like you're taking more money home? You you just grew 50%. You went from $2 million to $3 million. Do you feel you're taking exponentially more money home? Do you do you do you see more money in the bank? Are you paying your staff a lot more? Did you improve the conditions for your employees a lot more? And usually the answer is, well, not necessarily. I don't know where my money is at. I I I we're busy. I keep hiring people. We're busy. So I I think the biggest mistake is not putting more emphasis on on profit, on on the fact that grow growth doesn't mean busy. Growth means revenue is increasing, but but profit, what you take home, should increase at even a higher rate than revenue is increasing. And the way you do that all these days is by employing things such as automation techniques, ⁓ using cheap labor and cheap labor I don't mean humans, I mean software, I mean automation, I mean robots.
speaker-0: Absolutely. And we must, we must see a lot of this as well. Like we'll both get the benefit of working with a lot of print businesses all over the world. But one of the biggest challenges I have is getting people making that shift from, and we all know the kind of the cliche phrase of working on the business, not in the business. But why, why do you think so many business owners struggle to make that transition? Like I know I see a lot of people who have It's a control thing. They don't want to let go of that control. What's your take on that?
speaker-1: It's easier said than done. ⁓ it it it you know, it's it's when you when you get to your shop as an owner at eight in the morning, whatever time you get in there, and and you start looking at all the jobs that have to be produced. And and by the way, I am generalizing based on the typical Printer that has limited resources of time and employees. I'm not speaking about the, you know, the customer that the, you know, a plan profit user, customer that has 150 employees and a full marketing team and a full sales team. Those are those people already got to the point that I think they're truly having, you know, they're truly working on the on the business, not not ⁓ not not not inside the business. So the vast majority of our customers are not that size, by the way. The vast majority of a plant profit user. they have anywhere between six or seven employees and maybe eight employees. And and and they they're they're definitely struggling with what you just mentioned. You wake up, you know that there's customers that have to be called, you know that there's paper that needs to be ordered, there's bills that have to be paid, you know, there's there's clients you have to entertain, and and and and you know, by the time you realize it's five or six PM and most of them are not twenty year olds. So by the time 5 p.m. hits, you already want to go home and, you know, d drink drink a little bit of wine and and wind down. And then it's back to square one the very next day. So the only way to break the cycle is to either hire somebody that helps you break that cycle so that it removes things from your plate. And then you need to let go of control. You cannot be a control freak. You need to let go of control. Or you employ technology that works. To help fill that gap.
speaker-0: Yeah, 100%. In your opinion, what do you see costing print businesses money just now that they don't even realize?
speaker-1: Most people were gonna are gonna focus on the on the on the waste angle, right? We're we're we have too much waste in inventory or or the cost margins in our estimating system are not well built, so we're certainly underestimating. But I I truly believe that the number one waste is revenue that is not being pursued.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: When was the last time that you reached out to your existing customers and told them the stuff that you do that maybe they didn't know you did? When was the last time you you reached out to customers haven't ordered in six months or eight months legitimately and said, Hey, we miss you? When was the last time you walked out of your store and got into your car and visited your top twenty clients in person? So I think the biggest waste by far is revenue from low-hanging opportunities. Like quotes you need to follow up on or clients you need to worry about.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, I find that. A lot of people come to me and obviously they want to grow, they want to drive up more profitability in the business and they're so focused on trying to find new clients that actually a lot of the time the growth they're looking for is within the customers that they already have, the customers they've worked hard to get. We've done a test case with a client a few years ago now but The usual, hopefully you'll agree with this as well, but we get in a bad habit of like, we speak to those top 10, 15, 20 customers on a regular basis, but we neglect all the other ones. ⁓ And he was very much of the mindset, well, if they need something, they'll come to me. They know where we are. And I thought I'm going to challenge you on this. So we actually brought someone in. In this case, we brought in a tele salesperson who understood the industry. And it was just a general courtesy call. Let's give them a phone. Can I check in? It's been a while since we've heard from you. This is what's going on here. know, we increased their revenue over a three month period by about 30%. Just by lifting the telephone to those customers that had been neglected. And again, you've got the other side of it where... how many customers if you're not marketing properly, how many times as a print business owner heard, ⁓ we didn't know, we didn't know you'd done that. It's a whole educational piece, which again, if you're not telling your customers what you can do and suggesting what they should be buying, then it's lost revenue you're leaving on the table, isn't it?
speaker-1: The vast majority of customers we deal with, of printers we deal with, have been in business for years or just purchased a print shop that has been in business for years. And and the data that resides in the estimating system that that that they've been using for years is so rich. Yet yet the usage that they're continuously getting out of that data is minimal because there's nobody focused on it.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: And that is perhaps the number one way in which Plan Profit helps our customers, at least in the initial 90 days, we we we tap into that rich historical source of information from customers. We continuously go at it, make sure that we impress you fast. And the easier way to impress you fast is to, as you said, you help t a client grow 30% by just Reaching out to existing customers, that is essentially the number one thing we do for you before we transition into what can we do for prospects and for new clients, et cetera. So yes. ⁓ if and by the way, if you would have if you would have asked me the question of I think you asked me what's your the number one waste ⁓ in in a pr in a yeah, and if if I would have been that operational mentality ⁓ owner when I when I did what when I worked in print, you would have gotten a completely different answer from me. I would have gone the whole wasting too much paper, ⁓ would you charge more angle? Yeah. And that's true. But I've always been in the belief that selling more fixes everything. So ⁓ it does. More revenue. Now, obviously you have to watch your your bottom line, you have to watch your your burn rates, but but but yes, let's sell let's I I think any print will be happy with another 30% of growth in in whatever time period you did it. So So yeah, let's waste equals let's first try to sell more to the low hanging fruits and then we'll worry about the burn rates and all that stuff.
speaker-0: Exactly. So tell me, let's imagine a small print shop, maybe five to 10 members of staff. What does automation look like in a place like that to you? Where would you start?
speaker-1: So if if I walked into a typical print shop with with ten ⁓ employees and and they're asking for my help, what can your product do to help us? Where would I start? ⁓ well the f the first thing that I usually do is ⁓ understand w what are they trying to accomplish. And this does change dramatically from shop to shop. Are you trying to ⁓ sell more? Do you need more sell? Is that the number one is that the number one thing you need help with? Or or is it that you're struggling because you feel like you're you're selling a lot? You know, sales is certainly not a problem, but you feel like you're working a hundred hours a day in your business. ⁓ you feel like nothing is is working effectively. You feel like collection is an issue. In other words, there's a lot of efficient efficiency issues in your shop. And if that's the case, then we work with you on that first. So it really depends on what the needs are. I c I I would not pretend call into to decipher that everyone has the same needs. Now if I have to generalize most of the times what what these owners need, most of the time they need sales. They they need help with making sure the marketing is taken care of. They need help with making sure that their customers know all the things that need to happen. ⁓ they're drowning. Typical ten person shop is drowning with with the fact that they know that they need to do marketing, they need to sell, they need to do all these things and they know that they're not doing it. Yeah. So so that's That's what we mostly see.
speaker-0: Okay. If you get any examples of kind of successful stories where you've gone in and you've helped transform, obviously you don't need to mention names, but is there any examples you can give me at all?
speaker-1: I I I do. I I have ⁓ I I think have a lot of success or actually hear from our clients all the time with little things. ⁓ so for example, ⁓ we've had clients that ⁓ our system reached out to them automatically. Now sometimes our clients forget what our systems are doing behind the scenes because many of these workflows act as if it's Colin and and you call in forget that this this stuff is going behind the scenes, acting like it's you. So time and time again, ⁓ Especially those inactive check-ins that we conduct every day. We we would reach out to your clients on your behalf saying, Hey, this is calling, just checking in on you. It's been a while. We're here to help. We make it look like like it's really you. Yeah. One line our emails. And this one client reached out to us and says, Your system sent an email to my number one client from I don't know, a year and a half ago. And They had gone completely silent because they went with another printer. They told me that we're gonna go with another printer. I was really sad about that. But they had like an 18 month inactive check-in. And that 18 monthly inactive check in, I remember this client said, I want to make it sort of nasty. And I go, What do you mean sort of nasty? This was early on in Plant Profit. I was really involved in everything. I was helping them set up workflows and everything. Says, Yeah, if somebody has an order from me in in in a year and a half, I don't want to just go casually and say, Hey, it's been a while and miss you. I want to go. Obviously, I did something wrong. Tell me what I did wrong so I can fix it because I know you went somewhere else. That was sort of the language that he put in there. And we put that thing in there. And I think a year later or something, he reached out to me and said, Can you believe what happened? I lost my normal number one, number two client over a year ago. And I was really sad and we moved on. And then a year and a half later, your thing went out and sent an email to them. They responded to me and said, you know what? You're totally right. Our fault. I told you when we sold a printer, they kept messing up. We're let's meet again next week. So long story short, he got his number one and number two client back. And and that that was that was a very positive story. And he had forgotten that that thing exists. Now, obviously, not every story is about getting your number one client back. Yeah. But a lot of the stories are getting little wins that you just forgot about that you normally would not have time.
speaker-0: No, no. And that's the thing you can just because someone's left doesn't mean that they're never going to come back. And that's just a prime example. You shouldn't give up on, those customers that maybe have dwindled away over the, over the years as well. ⁓ Let's talk about AI. ⁓ I'm going to bring this to the discussion because again, as I mentioned, we've just come off a mastermind session, which is probably why it's top of mind just now, but ⁓ we had a bit of a mixed bag in the room today. ⁓ There's probably about 50 % of people who are using AI very, very strongly in their business and obviously driving more efficiency, productivity. And then there's the other half who are just completely bamboozled by what's going on. They're overwhelmed, they can't keep up. They're kind of holding back. I think one chap said he's holding back a few months to kind of see once it settles and see what tools work and what don't. Like you, you obviously, you do a lot of speaking at industry events around AI. Like what would your message be to those people who haven't yet started to make any adoption?
speaker-1: I I think that they they better because AI is is one of the things that right now it's it's so overhyped. Everybody's talking about it to the point that sometimes I you know I've come to hate those two-letter words ⁓ because of how much is it being overused and maybe overstated. But but at the same time, I'll give an example. I think 40% of our Development budget in the last 12 months have gone to AI because we have to. But as everything that we do in Plan Profit, we're making it launch ready. We're making it print ready. So the challenge that I have sent, Colin, is that the vast majority of ⁓ printers, they don't have time for marketing, they don't have time for sales and follow-ups. You think they're gonna have time to research how to leverage AI in a tangible way for their business? Now you're asking for too much. So the vast majority of printers that we ask, are you using AI? They're using it to the extent that you would expect. They are, the vast majority of them are using it to help draft an email, maybe analyze financial data. Maybe you're fitting it some some type of customer database and you're you're having it, you know, research and opportunities within the customer, but then you're done and you move on to the next thing. ⁓ we do have a lot of clients of ours that are very advanced. They're using agents, they're developing their own. Tools. We have clients of ours that are that are that are creating special purposed inventory management tools and already cool, but that's not the majority of of them. So Plan Profit is launching. Well, we already have a lot of AI tools, but our big release for Printing United, maybe I'm I don't know when this podcast is gonna launch, but we'll
speaker-0: This will go out about three weeks before Printing United.
speaker-1: Right, so maybe I'm advancing things that you're gonna see at Printing United. We're we're launching ⁓ something we're gonna call the AI marketplace marketplace within plant profit with sixteen or seventeen tools that are ready out of the gate, ⁓ including tons of agents that answer your calls, that, you know, find new prospects, that you know, and it it's a smart way to leverage AI that I think it any print owner would would get it. ⁓ rather than sending our clients on an on an Easter egg hunt, we want ⁓ to experience it. Open the box, there you go, use it. Does it make sense or doesn't? And then it is our hope that those owners that don't have the time would at least get it and implement it and maybe using it.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. I look forward to seeing more about that at Printing United. That sounds exciting.
speaker-1: Hey, me too, Colin.
speaker-0: So listen, talk to me because you're not just a software provider. You're also a community. think that's the one thing I've noticed with Plan of Profit. It's the ecosystem around that as well. Talk to me about the community that you're also building.
speaker-1: So ⁓ yeah, I I would say since since Plant Profit launched for business, we we've really had a customer first mentality. We don't really look too much on whatever the competition is doing, what you know, what other stuff is going on. We're really are very customer centric. And the very first year we l we did our our our champion ⁓ summit, which is our yearly convention, and we had absolutely no money. And we we had no idea how we're gonna fund a a conference, but we did it anyway. And about forty or fifty of our customers showed up that first year. By the way, we maybe had a hundred customers, half of them showed up at that conference, which was impressive. And ⁓ we learned a lot from the community. We asked a lot of questions, and I think every one of our customers that know us, especially the, you know, our OG clients that have been with us for years, they know we use that time more for our benefit than they think or They think they're showing up to to learn and they usually show up and we ask a lot of questions back to them. What's not working, what is. ⁓ and and and through that process, we've I think we've built a culture of ask the client what they want, of putting customers in touch with each other, having continuous Zoom sessions that they can ⁓ freely speak to us, make sure that there's a line of communication open, that they can always reach out to us if they need to. And that certainly built a community. It builds a a a strong foundation of of evangelist clients that can't wait to tell other people about it. ⁓ because as much as you can grow by having people say good things about you, it can stall your growth or turn if if if if people spike speak about bad things about you too. So we have to be very careful on that.
speaker-0: sure and I'll give you a chance to plug the next summit. You've got a summit coming up in October as well haven't you?
speaker-1: Yeah. We have our yearly conference. Actually, this is gonna be our fifth or sixth annual one. I I think it's our fifth annual one. ⁓ coming up in October, twenty second or twenty third. I don't know if if you're coming,
speaker-0: I'm still trying to make it work but I'm hoping to be there in Miami.
speaker-1: Be the worst trip you take. It's Miami on October, and ⁓ we were expecting upwards of 200 customers. We we sold out completely, and we're in the process of seeing if the hotel through fire code can accept another 20 or 30 people as we speak. Please sold out for this one. It's gonna be a fun one. We're releasing our AI package, as I mentioned. ⁓ and ⁓ which by the way, funny story, we actually released our very first AI package on last convention. Our ⁓ CTO, which is my co founder, promised it in two to four weeks and it really took more like four to six months for that first release to happen and it's it's become a joke internally. Our clients now every time that they say, Well, when is that release gonna happen? We say two to four weeks and you know, it is one
speaker-0: It's always longer than you anticipate, isn't it?
speaker-1: No, for us has always been sorta what we what we predict, except for AI. Because whenever we feel we're done, something better comes out and we're embarrassed to launch whatever we had. ⁓ but yeah, that's try to make it. We we look forward to seeing you here.
speaker-0: Nice, I'll definitely, I'm one dog sitter away from making it on the flight, so watch this space. But no, looks fantastic. Tell me, what do you think this industry needs more of?
speaker-1: I would say curiosity. But the vast majority of owners that I speak to are very ⁓ we already have that. ⁓ our estimating system doesn't need to be touched or or or altered. ⁓ burn rates are just fine, or or our people don't need to be trained on anything new. Or you know, your software sounds good, but it may take too much time to to test and put it into practice. So this is one of those industries that have been around for, you know, a long time. But I truly feel like the vast majority of of printers are operating as if it's still nineteen ninety-eight, bearing of course the computer industry ⁓ advancing, bearing of course the technology of digital disruption of printers that happened. The actual foundational ⁓ structure of printers today are largely unchanged. So I I wish there were more, more curious things of what else can I be doing ⁓ that that I perhaps don't know about.
speaker-0: Yeah, I like that answer. Nice. ⁓ Let's talk about, actually I'm going to take two sides on this. Obviously we've got two challenges at the moment. One is trying to get more young people coming into the industry. How do we make it more attractive to them? But on the flip side of that, there's a lot of really well skilled and knowledgeable people. leaving the industry and there's a big concern, I spoke with Ford about this actually last week as well, but there's a big concern that we're going to lose that knowledge. What's your thoughts on that? How do we retain that knowledge from people leaving and how do we attract more people coming into the industry?
speaker-1: We gotta start calling print as ink on paper. Because it's not. Print is all about robotics. It's about automation. It's about software. It's about producing a tangible product that AI is not gonna replace. And those are all things that matter today. I have three kids, right? And and one of my children is fifteen years old and he's he's he's already started to think about what was he gonna do in his in his career. And I never thought me sitting down with him and saying things such as, well, maybe you should rethink being an attorney. Maybe you you should rethink being an engineer. And and maybe you sh maybe you should rethink being a software programmer. Those are things I never thought in a in a million years that three years ago I would be telling to my son. And I focus on my son because that's the person that I want more than anything in the world to succeed. More than me. More than anybody watching this podcast. It's it's my son. And and my advice to the young generation is I don't care if it's print, I don't care if it's anything, but you need to get involved in something that that cannot be easily phased out by AI in the near future. And I love print as an option. Print, as I mentioned, is not just ink and paper. There's so much going on in a modern print shop that that you could play a factor on it and make a lot of money on and not have to worry about Claude or Chad GPT replacing you tomorrow.
speaker-0: Mm hmm. Love it. Love it. And what about on the other sides, the people that are leaving the industry, can I, how do we retain that knowledge?
speaker-1: Well, why are they leaving? Do they need to get paid more? Do they do they need to be more challenged?
speaker-0: They're getting older. As in people retiring, I'm meeting more people like 60 plus who are coming to the end of their career, but they're leaving. They're leaving with so much knowledge and it's not coming back in at the other end at the moment.
speaker-1: When when a printer retires. So here's one interesting thing about this industry that maybe I'm going off topic here, but you're more than welcome to correct me. But there's so many older owners in this industry that are that refuse to sell. And and and and I ask ⁓ sometimes, why don't you just sell? You're you know, a hundred and fifty years old.
speaker-0: No, go for it. Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: ⁓ what are you waiting for? And and many times the answer is more ideological, where I love what I'm doing and and and that's why I keep showing up to work and that's that's a very very valid answer. But but many times the answer that I get is well I make more money running the business than I would ever just selling it. And right now the the you know valuation for my business, if I'm taking home two hundred thousand dollars a year. ⁓ all that I can get for it is maybe two times what I'm taking home or two and a half times what I'm taking home. And you know, for that I'm just gonna stay for the next three years. And that's usually the argument. And that is true. And the reason why that is true is because for some weird reason that I hope changes in the near future, the the print industry is the same as this thing that's gonna end tomorrow. And it it looked there's only three years left. Why would you invest too much money buying a print shop? If anyways you've only got a runway of three or four more years before it's replaced. And that's that's been the consensus time and time again since I've been involved in the industry for 20 years. And yet it's not going anywhere. So I wish people get better paid when it's time to sell their business. I wish they got 5x on whatever they're taking home. I wish they got what they deserve because then it would make more people that are ready to retire in their 65 and 66 sell it. And it would make people that are in their 20s or 30s that have some money. or access to getting loans, believe that they should invest in this industry so that the transition happens sooner rather than later.
speaker-0: Okay, no, cool. Let's talk about ink runs deep. can't end this podcast without talking about the infamous jacket. Tell us about that. I've seen obviously you were doing a live.
speaker-1: During our conversation, by the way.
speaker-0: So for the people that are listening and not watching, I'll put some images up on social, but they look pretty cool. Tell us about it.
speaker-1: So a little over a little a little over a year ago, we were brainstorming what can we do to help make print a little sexier and and attract more the younger generation. ⁓ and ⁓ the idea came that if we sell if we build something that the younger generation will want to wear as something cool, then then maybe we start spreading the word with cool messages. So, you know, we said, hey, I bought a varsity jacket, because you know, younger generations not love wearing varsity jackets everywhere, but we make it something that has patches on it. Then you as a printer can add your own patches if you want. If it's a 10th anniversary of an employee, you could do I said, ⁓ it's great. So how about we We sell that and all the proceeds that we get out of that, we we donated to charities that are actually nonprofit organizations that are putting young adults through college that are print focused careers. And I said, That's a phenomenal idea. I love it. And then we said, Well, ⁓ how much are we ch gonna charge for these jackets? And, you know, everybody, well, it's just as inexpensive as we can, so we can sell more jackets. But then I started doing the math and I said, Well, If we sell very inexpensive jackets, right, people are not gonna want to wear them. We can only raise too little money. So we decided to go the complete opposite way and sell these obnoxiously expensive things now. They're $850, but on purpose, because we decided to build it in a company that does this by hand in California, in the US, and everything is a hundred percent handmade with the highest quality of craftsmanship. And I think it's a beautiful thing because that's what print's all about, Colin. It's all about craftsmanship. It's all about the you know, the pride. That's what we call this campaign Inc. Runs Deep. And yes, it's expensive, but the more money we charge, the more money we can donate to, and the better quality jackets we could build. So we're probably gonna run this campaign for the near future. And we're hoping we're gonna end it, maybe never, but at least sometime in the summer of next year. We wanted to let it run at at least 12 months its course. And then we're gonna hopefully donate a significant amount of money to the ⁓ different groups that were That we we selected are going to be the better features.
speaker-0: And people can find out about that on the Plan Profit website.
speaker-1: Yes, ⁓ you could go to Plant Profit, there's a little thing that just says Inc. runs deep. And you could, you know, buy your jacket, gift it to your employees, gift it to your number one ⁓ s ⁓ salesperson or or customer ⁓ and the whole story around it, yeah.
speaker-0: Nice. And I'm guessing you'll be waiting years in Vegas.
speaker-1: I'll be wearing mine, I don't care how hot it is from now on everywhere that I go because I've been forced to. So it's now like a hundred and twenty degrees in Miami. And if I go grab lunch later, I'm gonna be wearing my jacket at a hundred and twenty degrees.
speaker-0: Love it, love it. Okay, listen, before we round up, I've got a very quick, ⁓ quick fire round for you. If that's all right, just six or seven questions before we get to the end. You're sitting down, you're ready?
speaker-1: Let's go. I feel like this is a game show now, so
speaker-0: All right. Okay. What's one piece of technology you couldn't live without?
speaker-1: That's an easy one, probably the phone.
speaker-0: phone okay coffee or energy drinks a lot of it if you were not running plan profit what would you be doing
speaker-1: Coffee. ⁓ Building something else. ⁓ I love the challenges just just building something from scratch and see what happens.
speaker-0: Nice. What's the most underrated skill in business?
speaker-1: I'm gonna go with follow through. It's incredibly difficult finding people today that do what they say they're going to do.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Nice, like that as well. Now, I won't put you on the spot. So with the exception of the print reviews, obviously, what's your favorite podcast?
speaker-1: You know, it changes. It changed throughout throughout the year. But right now I'm really I'm I'm really loving stuff like Diarvis CEO, which is actually one of your fellow one of your fellow ⁓ you know, Brits. ⁓ I I I love the stuff that he's putting out there. ⁓ and I I I've also been a long time fan of Guy Raz and his ⁓ how I build this ⁓ podcast as well.
speaker-0: Okay, cool. Yeah, I watched Dairy of a CEO quite a lot as well. The other one I quite enjoyed just now is ⁓ Jay Shetty. I don't know if you've ever watched him. I have not. Check him out. He wrote a book called Think Like a Monk. He's a young guy from London, went off to, I think it was India, ⁓ basically lived in an ashram for three years, lived like a monk for ⁓ three full years there. Then basically get sent out to LA to basically spread the word of Buddhism and things, a lot of the guests you'll see on Diary of a CEO, you'll see on his podcast as well, but really,
speaker-1: I'm gonna I can't wait until you're finished with me so that I can go research that.
speaker-0: Right, last one. Favorite book.
speaker-1: ⁓ I'm gonna go with the alchemist.
speaker-0: the alchemist, good choice as well, good choice. Now we have a closing tradition on this podcast where we ask our guests to share something about themselves that nobody else in the industry is likely to know.
speaker-1: That's an easy one. I'm gonna go with that one. That's an easy one. So I besides software and the business, I am ⁓ over obsessive car and soup enthusiast. I spend countless of hours online on my free time, whenever that is, researching about the latest and greatest technology and why they did this instead of that and reading blogs on YouTube about ⁓ about cars. So it's certainly a a big time waste for me. But I guess it's my it's my one guilty pleasure. I don't do anything else.
speaker-0: So I have to follow up with that then. What's the one car you would love to have parked out in the drive?
speaker-1: ⁓ man, I'll probably w go with a Carrera GT, a Porsche Carrera GT.
speaker-0: Nice, okay cool. I'll see you driving up in Vegas in one of those hopefully.
speaker-1: I only need a little over two million bucks and I can make it happen. Maybe you send a donation over my
speaker-0: A few more members, a few more jacket sales, we'll get there. Listen, thank you so much for your time. I look forward to catching up with you. Obviously, we've got a couple of meetups actually. We're going to be seeing you at Printing United ⁓ in September. And then also you're coming over here to the print show in the UK as well. So lots of time to catch up, which I'm looking forward to. For anyone in the meantime who wants to look you up, check you out, get in touch, what's the best way to do so?
speaker-1: Make a couple. planprofit.com and ⁓ there's a whole bunch of links and stuff you can click on there.
speaker-0: nice. And before I go, is there any questions that you wish I had asked you today that I haven't?
speaker-1: I think you did a phenomenal job asking very, very different questions that I usually get on a podcast and I've done a few of these, so kudos to that.
speaker-0: I appreciate that buddy. I'll take that as a win. Listen, take care and enjoy the rest of your day and I will see you next month.
speaker-1: Looking forward to it.
speaker-0: Cheers, buddy.
speaker-1: Pleasure being here, Colin. Thank you for the invitation.
speaker-0: Excellent. So tell us a little bit about yourself, Lumaigh. Who are you? What do you do? Let's start with that.
speaker-1: Well, ⁓ today I am Lamai Sanchez, ⁓ co founder and CEO of Plant Profits, and I sell print software for a living.
speaker-0: software. So tell us a little bit about that print software. We're going to go deep in the episode, but just give us a rough overview.
speaker-1: Give you the 15-second ⁓ quick ⁓ overview. Planet Property is essentially a it's a print-focused customer relationship management that focuses very heavily on the growth side of the business. So we plug into most data points that a printer has, your estimating system, your QuickBooks, your Excel database sitting in your desktop with your list of clients. And we grab that information and we help you grow on scale. Stay in touch with your customers. going as far as even helping you with marketing, collection, anything else that is needed to make sure that a printer can focus on the things that matter most and they delegate to us the things that a machine can do.
speaker-0: Wonderful. We've just finished actually before we come on to record this. I was running a print mastermind session and this was a kind of topic that loosely came up and I think absolutely everyone on that call could benefit from checking this out. So if you're listening guys, go get a demo, go get a demo booked. But before we get into the business stuff, let's talk about you. ⁓ How did you come into the industry in the first place?
speaker-1: completely by accident. I don't have anybody in my family that has ever worked in print or friends or ⁓ yeah, many of the clients that we have today landed on this line of business because the family ownership or whatnot. There's definitely that was not the case for me. I I went to college ⁓ business school in in Miami and right after I graduated from business school, I I created a business and the business was all about branding and and growth, consulting. My clients were small mull and pop businesses in in Miami, which is my hometown. And ⁓ turns out that as part of that consulting for growth, the vast majority of the things that I was doing for them is buying out print and signage and changing the way that their apparel and vents and lobby looked. So it wasn't too quickly calling until I came to realize that I was really in the in the business of selling print and signage. And that realization, I gotta be honest, didn't come in Easily. I didn't think I went to business school to be a guy that's selling print. You know, back then this was a little over 20 years ago. That wasn't necessarily the hottest thing that that that you could do for a living, but it was it was certainly paying the bills and and and and and then some for for a 20-something-year-old. So that led me to transition into taking a sales job at a large commercial ⁓ print facility in Miami. And ⁓ I was there for for for A while wasn't necessarily the happiest person there. It was a little too much of a commercial shop for me. And I felt I had no say into the eventual outcome of what was happening with clients. And and we were speaking about this before we got on the call. I'm a little bit of an OCD ⁓ person when it comes to to getting involved. So I transitioned all the clients that I had ⁓ into a much smaller ⁓ printer in town that allowed me to have, you know, more of a partnership revenue of of of the operation, if you would, and certainly more control into the operations too. Eventually I I ended up buying that shop out. ⁓ that that worked out to be a beautiful experience for me and certainly learned almost everything I know today about the world of print and the challenges and and the opportunities and and you know what it looks like to to to to wear hundred hats at the same time while I was at that stint and on on the smaller shop. So It was experiencing those pains that then I I transitioned to the world of software about six or seven years ago. And ⁓ together with with somebody that I've that I've known since I was ⁓ about eleven years old, we found a plant profit. Yeah. Yeah. That's a funny story. So we found the Plant Profit and that's ⁓ the rest is history. That's that's what I do today.
speaker-0: Tell us about that transition then from being a shop owner to moving into software.
speaker-1: It was, it was, I would say easier than I thought it would be. Plan Profit for me in the beginning was gonna be a fun experiment because I needed the product that I was building. It was certainly not gonna be a product that I thought I was gonna dedicate to full time. but quickly after launching the product, I would say six months after launching the product, I immediately saw how. The people that were buying it were responding to the the effort that we all put together. Yeah. And and I knew I had to, you know, pick one route or the other. So I decided to to abandon abandon my my daily operational ⁓ task at a print shop and do this stuff full time pretty early on. And and and but I I I think it was honestly easier than I thought it was gonna be from the transition side, but
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: harder than I thought it was gonna be on the continuous pivoting that a software company needs to stay relevant for six, seven years.
speaker-0: Yeah, I can imagine that's quite intense at times. So was it a defining moment then where you've made that transition or drove you into the software where you just thought there's a better way to do this? This is why we need to build this solution.
speaker-1: I I think that the defining moment was when as a as a small print up owner and wearing a lot of hats, I was always more on the sales side of ownership. You know how you have owners that are usually a lot better operators. Others are a lot better salesmen. I was certainly more on the sales side. I was a horrible operator. I if you asked me how much money I had in the bank, I never knew. If you asked me how much money people owed me or if what stage of production a a job was at, I never knew. I was I was honestly horrible at that side of the equation. but but I always I remember thinking about software at one point and saying, well, what's available out there to help me ⁓ automate the stuff that I that I do every day that could be automated. Like things are simple as sending an invoice or collecting or following up on a quote or saying thank you to a client. I Nothing really existed that was made for print. I had to go and buy ⁓ you know, standalone or or or industry agnostic ⁓ marketing platforms and figure out a way to ⁓ you know, feed it data. And and and and that was really not what I was looking for. I really wanted a product that I could spend whatever amount of money they would charge me so that I can focus on continually growing my business. It was either that or I had to hire five or six more people to do those tasks and certainly could not afford it. So that was that was when when the idea of plant profit came to mind. And and I remember, you know, a friend of mine, Renee, who's my co-founder, he actually was a Salesforce cons consultant. He had a consulting agency for Salesforce, which is, by the way, the foundation layer where plant profit is built on top of. I remember I reached out to him and said, Hey, I've got this problem. Can you build a product for me that fixes these things for me? And he said, We can, but you're not gonna like the the price. So
speaker-0: Okay.
speaker-1: It was right. I didn't like the price, but then we both thought about it and said, Hey, how about we make this into a business? I'm sure there's more than one person in the world of print that needs the same things you're you need. So I started making some calls and s to some friends in the field and they said if you build that, I'll buy it. ⁓ and that's exactly how the idea was born.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Nice. I didn't get as far down the road. In fact, just going back to what you said there as well, ⁓ you sound exactly like me. I was a salesperson for the business, but ask me anything about the admin or the finance side. That wasn't my strength. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong. They try and wear so many hats. ⁓ You've got to stick to what you're good at as well. But I actually had a ⁓ print software business. for a very, very short time, ⁓ back in probably around about 2010, I think it was. ⁓ It didn't work out. We brought in some, I won't go into too much detail, but some rogue investors who didn't deliver on what they were meant to and it didn't get any further. again, similar to yourself, it was trying to address a problem, a frustration that I had. ⁓ And actually we had... We actually launched it at an event in the UK. We had about a hundred people sign up for the demo at this one event and frustratingly the people responsible for delivering on the project kept missing deadlines and eventually I ended up walking away. But I get the sentiment there for sure. was there a particular frustration in the business that annoyed you so much that you just thought, I can't do this anymore. We've got to build this.
speaker-1: For me, it was the fact that I needed to the little details. Let's let me give you not the political grand answer. I'm gonna I'm gonna try to give you a legitimate ⁓ little pains that I needed to solve. So I needed to do marketing. And in order for me to do marketing for my clients, I needed to go to my estimating system and export my database of customers into, I think it was, I don't know, MailChimp or Constant Contact, whatever that was. And and and then I felt good when I did it. But then next week I had clients that were new and clients that were now dormant that I had to continuously ⁓ keep updating that database. And I I hated the process like with vengeance because I was the only person really doing that in my shop. I didn't have a marketing director or or anything like that. So that whole that was a little detail. The the other little detail was that we were leaving so much money on the table because we were sending estimates and we were only following up on the really big ones on those like two to three thousand dollar estimates. But the Hundred and fifty dollar estimates. Nobody was really following up on those. And I felt good when I did follow up on those, but then that happened maybe once every two weeks. And 90% of them were not getting done. then it comes collecting. I I I was I I felt at one point I was almost like a bank. I had more money in the street than I felt rich. I said if I had if all those dollars that I had out in the street were in my bank right now, I would go and buy me a Rolex. I would go I you know, I I had had this this notion that if I got more aggressive on just asking people for money in a nice way and that's aggressive as in persistence maybe is the the better better word and sending books more often and and and I so I looked for software that had all those all those things and and nothing really was out there. ⁓ still today, nothing is really out there that does exactly what we what we do, you know, in in the comprehensive way that we do it. So, but back then it involved you having to hire somebody and yeah ⁓ and development money to build it exactly for you. And then as I mentioned earlier, Colin, I could not afford that bill. It was obnoxiously high. So it forced me almost into make it into a business model. And in my mind, if I just broke even on what it cost to build it and I still got the software that I needed, that was
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: That was gonna be a complete success in my eyes. ⁓ So hopefully that gave you an idea. Obviously, the more you're in it and then you start seeing the potential, then you start coming out with more problems you could solve and more opportunities. Those those two or three things that I mentioned earlier were I think the a very basic layer that I was trying to to peel off.
speaker-0: That's the thing, it just compounds and you keep looking for new ways to make improvements and add more value as well. Tell me, what was that like then? You've obviously gone from fairly secure job to then obviously there's a risk with anything ⁓ launching a new business, a new software business, like friends, family, all supportive, did the buy into the vision at the same time.
speaker-1: a combination of everything, but you're calling the print business a a fairly what what what did you call it? Fairly ⁓ found good foundation or something, you said any business. Well you gotta remember I own I own the shop. So ⁓ it's not like I was getting just a you know continuous paycheck that was a hundred percent guaranteed. You know how it works when you're a small print shop owner, you have great months, you have a horrible month. So so no I wasn't too worried about that side of the equation. ⁓ Especially because for the first few months of launching the product, I still own ⁓ the business. So at the same time, my my wife also has a a you know, a good income, a good job. So it it did give our family the the flexibility to say, Hey, ⁓ this is worth something that that that we could try and see what happens eventually and pursue it. And I mean obviously we didn't jump in blind. We we knew already there were forty or fifty or sixty clients that had installed the last six months. They were all raving about the product and paying money. So we got lucky certainly in that sense. ⁓ not when we launched it, because we launched it on March first of twenty twenty. That was the official launch date of Plan Profit. And if you know, if you remember what happened on March first of twenty twenty, I don't have to go into details, but we
speaker-0: My goodness. It comes up almost in every episode at some point. ⁓ Let's talk about why print shops struggle to grow. Why do you see so many print businesses hit that ceiling for growth?
speaker-1: ⁓ That's that's a loaded question. And and I I'll try to I'll try to tell you what I see more more consistently. I think printers rate reach a ceiling. And by the way, this answer doesn't come from my experience of not reaching a ceiling in the world of print, because I certainly reached the ceiling to the point that I I abandoned operating the print shop and I went into software. So I I it doesn't come from my own personal experience, it comes from what I see.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: Time and time again, now that we have hundreds of of of of of customers that we're we're speaking to every single year and we see the difference between those owners that are still that are stuck at at certain point versus the ones that I see continuously break away and and shatter those those those ceilings continuously. And I think that the problem is that what worked at a million bucks in revenue a year, i i it it it's certainly gonna be ⁓ chaos at three million bucks a year. So you cannot proportionally scale processes and technologies as you proportionally scale revenue. Those same things don't work at one as it does at three. So you need to find a way to continuously reinvent yourselves and and exponentially push the limits of automation of the people you're hiring. of of the software you're using, of of of the way that customers want to interact with you changes. You no longer have the time to know every single thing about all of your top twenty clients because you're scaled, right? So It's changing the way your processes work, your tech stack works, your equipment works continuously as you as you get to that certain next milestone and then and then doing it again again and then doing it again. So far, far too many times I've seen I've seen printers think that just because it worked at this level, it's gonna work again at the next level.
speaker-0: Yeah, no, you need to reinvent yourself for sure. Tell me if you were to walk into half a dozen print shops tomorrow, what mistakes would you, what things would you see, predict that you would see, like mistakes that people repeat over and over again?
speaker-1: I think confusing being busy and seeing the presses humming with with growth. And there's those are two completely different things. And and and you you still need to step back and understand that unless you're running a non profit trade shop, which we do have several of our clients that are, those are completely differ different models. Most operators that we deal with that we that are part of of of the planned profit ecosystem.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: They are in it because they want to make money. They're in it because they want to they want to sell more every year and they want to take home more money every year. So a very common mistake that I see is we're growing. Why are you growing? Well, look, look how much work in progress orders we have. Look how much more sales revenue I increased from last year to this year. And look how much. But then when we go down into the the details of, well, Do you feel like you're taking more money home? You you just grew 50%. You went from $2 million to $3 million. Do you feel you're taking exponentially more money home? Do you do you do you see more money in the bank? Are you paying your staff a lot more? Did you improve the conditions for your employees a lot more? And usually the answer is, well, not necessarily. I don't know where my money is at. I I I we're busy. I keep hiring people. We're busy. So I I think the biggest mistake is not putting more emphasis on on profit, on on the fact that grow growth doesn't mean busy. Growth means revenue is increasing, but but profit, what you take home, should increase at even a higher rate than revenue is increasing. And the way you do that all these days is by employing things such as automation techniques, ⁓ using cheap labor and cheap labor I don't mean humans, I mean software, I mean automation, I mean robots.
speaker-0: Absolutely. And we must, we must see a lot of this as well. Like we'll both get the benefit of working with a lot of print businesses all over the world. But one of the biggest challenges I have is getting people making that shift from, and we all know the kind of the cliche phrase of working on the business, not in the business. But why, why do you think so many business owners struggle to make that transition? Like I know I see a lot of people who have It's a control thing. They don't want to let go of that control. What's your take on that?
speaker-1: It's easier said than done. ⁓ it it it you know, it's it's when you when you get to your shop as an owner at eight in the morning, whatever time you get in there, and and you start looking at all the jobs that have to be produced. And and by the way, I am generalizing based on the typical Printer that has limited resources of time and employees. I'm not speaking about the, you know, the customer that the, you know, a plan profit user, customer that has 150 employees and a full marketing team and a full sales team. Those are those people already got to the point that I think they're truly having, you know, they're truly working on the on the business, not not ⁓ not not not inside the business. So the vast majority of our customers are not that size, by the way. The vast majority of a plant profit user. they have anywhere between six or seven employees and maybe eight employees. And and and they they're they're definitely struggling with what you just mentioned. You wake up, you know that there's customers that have to be called, you know that there's paper that needs to be ordered, there's bills that have to be paid, you know, there's there's clients you have to entertain, and and and and you know, by the time you realize it's five or six PM and most of them are not twenty year olds. So by the time 5 p.m. hits, you already want to go home and, you know, d drink drink a little bit of wine and and wind down. And then it's back to square one the very next day. So the only way to break the cycle is to either hire somebody that helps you break that cycle so that it removes things from your plate. And then you need to let go of control. You cannot be a control freak. You need to let go of control. Or you employ technology that works. To help fill that gap.
speaker-0: Yeah, 100%. In your opinion, what do you see costing print businesses money just now that they don't even realize?
speaker-1: Most people were gonna are gonna focus on the on the on the waste angle, right? We're we're we have too much waste in inventory or or the cost margins in our estimating system are not well built, so we're certainly underestimating. But I I truly believe that the number one waste is revenue that is not being pursued.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: When was the last time that you reached out to your existing customers and told them the stuff that you do that maybe they didn't know you did? When was the last time you you reached out to customers haven't ordered in six months or eight months legitimately and said, Hey, we miss you? When was the last time you walked out of your store and got into your car and visited your top twenty clients in person? So I think the biggest waste by far is revenue from low-hanging opportunities. Like quotes you need to follow up on or clients you need to worry about.
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, I find that. A lot of people come to me and obviously they want to grow, they want to drive up more profitability in the business and they're so focused on trying to find new clients that actually a lot of the time the growth they're looking for is within the customers that they already have, the customers they've worked hard to get. We've done a test case with a client a few years ago now but The usual, hopefully you'll agree with this as well, but we get in a bad habit of like, we speak to those top 10, 15, 20 customers on a regular basis, but we neglect all the other ones. ⁓ And he was very much of the mindset, well, if they need something, they'll come to me. They know where we are. And I thought I'm going to challenge you on this. So we actually brought someone in. In this case, we brought in a tele salesperson who understood the industry. And it was just a general courtesy call. Let's give them a phone. Can I check in? It's been a while since we've heard from you. This is what's going on here. know, we increased their revenue over a three month period by about 30%. Just by lifting the telephone to those customers that had been neglected. And again, you've got the other side of it where... how many customers if you're not marketing properly, how many times as a print business owner heard, ⁓ we didn't know, we didn't know you'd done that. It's a whole educational piece, which again, if you're not telling your customers what you can do and suggesting what they should be buying, then it's lost revenue you're leaving on the table, isn't it?
speaker-1: The vast majority of customers we deal with, of printers we deal with, have been in business for years or just purchased a print shop that has been in business for years. And and the data that resides in the estimating system that that that they've been using for years is so rich. Yet yet the usage that they're continuously getting out of that data is minimal because there's nobody focused on it.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: And that is perhaps the number one way in which Plan Profit helps our customers, at least in the initial 90 days, we we we tap into that rich historical source of information from customers. We continuously go at it, make sure that we impress you fast. And the easier way to impress you fast is to, as you said, you help t a client grow 30% by just Reaching out to existing customers, that is essentially the number one thing we do for you before we transition into what can we do for prospects and for new clients, et cetera. So yes. ⁓ if and by the way, if you would have if you would have asked me the question of I think you asked me what's your the number one waste ⁓ in in a pr in a yeah, and if if I would have been that operational mentality ⁓ owner when I when I did what when I worked in print, you would have gotten a completely different answer from me. I would have gone the whole wasting too much paper, ⁓ would you charge more angle? Yeah. And that's true. But I've always been in the belief that selling more fixes everything. So ⁓ it does. More revenue. Now, obviously you have to watch your your bottom line, you have to watch your your burn rates, but but but yes, let's sell let's I I think any print will be happy with another 30% of growth in in whatever time period you did it. So So yeah, let's waste equals let's first try to sell more to the low hanging fruits and then we'll worry about the burn rates and all that stuff.
speaker-0: Exactly. So tell me, let's imagine a small print shop, maybe five to 10 members of staff. What does automation look like in a place like that to you? Where would you start?
speaker-1: So if if I walked into a typical print shop with with ten ⁓ employees and and they're asking for my help, what can your product do to help us? Where would I start? ⁓ well the f the first thing that I usually do is ⁓ understand w what are they trying to accomplish. And this does change dramatically from shop to shop. Are you trying to ⁓ sell more? Do you need more sell? Is that the number one is that the number one thing you need help with? Or or is it that you're struggling because you feel like you're you're selling a lot? You know, sales is certainly not a problem, but you feel like you're working a hundred hours a day in your business. ⁓ you feel like nothing is is working effectively. You feel like collection is an issue. In other words, there's a lot of efficient efficiency issues in your shop. And if that's the case, then we work with you on that first. So it really depends on what the needs are. I c I I would not pretend call into to decipher that everyone has the same needs. Now if I have to generalize most of the times what what these owners need, most of the time they need sales. They they need help with making sure the marketing is taken care of. They need help with making sure that their customers know all the things that need to happen. ⁓ they're drowning. Typical ten person shop is drowning with with the fact that they know that they need to do marketing, they need to sell, they need to do all these things and they know that they're not doing it. Yeah. So so that's That's what we mostly see.
speaker-0: Okay. If you get any examples of kind of successful stories where you've gone in and you've helped transform, obviously you don't need to mention names, but is there any examples you can give me at all?
speaker-1: I I I do. I I have ⁓ I I think have a lot of success or actually hear from our clients all the time with little things. ⁓ so for example, ⁓ we've had clients that ⁓ our system reached out to them automatically. Now sometimes our clients forget what our systems are doing behind the scenes because many of these workflows act as if it's Colin and and you call in forget that this this stuff is going behind the scenes, acting like it's you. So time and time again, ⁓ Especially those inactive check-ins that we conduct every day. We we would reach out to your clients on your behalf saying, Hey, this is calling, just checking in on you. It's been a while. We're here to help. We make it look like like it's really you. Yeah. One line our emails. And this one client reached out to us and says, Your system sent an email to my number one client from I don't know, a year and a half ago. And They had gone completely silent because they went with another printer. They told me that we're gonna go with another printer. I was really sad about that. But they had like an 18 month inactive check-in. And that 18 monthly inactive check in, I remember this client said, I want to make it sort of nasty. And I go, What do you mean sort of nasty? This was early on in Plant Profit. I was really involved in everything. I was helping them set up workflows and everything. Says, Yeah, if somebody has an order from me in in in a year and a half, I don't want to just go casually and say, Hey, it's been a while and miss you. I want to go. Obviously, I did something wrong. Tell me what I did wrong so I can fix it because I know you went somewhere else. That was sort of the language that he put in there. And we put that thing in there. And I think a year later or something, he reached out to me and said, Can you believe what happened? I lost my normal number one, number two client over a year ago. And I was really sad and we moved on. And then a year and a half later, your thing went out and sent an email to them. They responded to me and said, you know what? You're totally right. Our fault. I told you when we sold a printer, they kept messing up. We're let's meet again next week. So long story short, he got his number one and number two client back. And and that that was that was a very positive story. And he had forgotten that that thing exists. Now, obviously, not every story is about getting your number one client back. Yeah. But a lot of the stories are getting little wins that you just forgot about that you normally would not have time.
speaker-0: No, no. And that's the thing you can just because someone's left doesn't mean that they're never going to come back. And that's just a prime example. You shouldn't give up on, those customers that maybe have dwindled away over the, over the years as well. ⁓ Let's talk about AI. ⁓ I'm going to bring this to the discussion because again, as I mentioned, we've just come off a mastermind session, which is probably why it's top of mind just now, but ⁓ we had a bit of a mixed bag in the room today. ⁓ There's probably about 50 % of people who are using AI very, very strongly in their business and obviously driving more efficiency, productivity. And then there's the other half who are just completely bamboozled by what's going on. They're overwhelmed, they can't keep up. They're kind of holding back. I think one chap said he's holding back a few months to kind of see once it settles and see what tools work and what don't. Like you, you obviously, you do a lot of speaking at industry events around AI. Like what would your message be to those people who haven't yet started to make any adoption?
speaker-1: I I think that they they better because AI is is one of the things that right now it's it's so overhyped. Everybody's talking about it to the point that sometimes I you know I've come to hate those two-letter words ⁓ because of how much is it being overused and maybe overstated. But but at the same time, I'll give an example. I think 40% of our Development budget in the last 12 months have gone to AI because we have to. But as everything that we do in Plan Profit, we're making it launch ready. We're making it print ready. So the challenge that I have sent, Colin, is that the vast majority of ⁓ printers, they don't have time for marketing, they don't have time for sales and follow-ups. You think they're gonna have time to research how to leverage AI in a tangible way for their business? Now you're asking for too much. So the vast majority of printers that we ask, are you using AI? They're using it to the extent that you would expect. They are, the vast majority of them are using it to help draft an email, maybe analyze financial data. Maybe you're fitting it some some type of customer database and you're you're having it, you know, research and opportunities within the customer, but then you're done and you move on to the next thing. ⁓ we do have a lot of clients of ours that are very advanced. They're using agents, they're developing their own. Tools. We have clients of ours that are that are that are creating special purposed inventory management tools and already cool, but that's not the majority of of them. So Plan Profit is launching. Well, we already have a lot of AI tools, but our big release for Printing United, maybe I'm I don't know when this podcast is gonna launch, but we'll
speaker-0: This will go out about three weeks before Printing United.
speaker-1: Right, so maybe I'm advancing things that you're gonna see at Printing United. We're we're launching ⁓ something we're gonna call the AI marketplace marketplace within plant profit with sixteen or seventeen tools that are ready out of the gate, ⁓ including tons of agents that answer your calls, that, you know, find new prospects, that you know, and it it's a smart way to leverage AI that I think it any print owner would would get it. ⁓ rather than sending our clients on an on an Easter egg hunt, we want ⁓ to experience it. Open the box, there you go, use it. Does it make sense or doesn't? And then it is our hope that those owners that don't have the time would at least get it and implement it and maybe using it.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. I look forward to seeing more about that at Printing United. That sounds exciting.
speaker-1: Hey, me too, Colin.
speaker-0: So listen, talk to me because you're not just a software provider. You're also a community. think that's the one thing I've noticed with Plan of Profit. It's the ecosystem around that as well. Talk to me about the community that you're also building.
speaker-1: So ⁓ yeah, I I would say since since Plant Profit launched for business, we we've really had a customer first mentality. We don't really look too much on whatever the competition is doing, what you know, what other stuff is going on. We're really are very customer centric. And the very first year we l we did our our our champion ⁓ summit, which is our yearly convention, and we had absolutely no money. And we we had no idea how we're gonna fund a a conference, but we did it anyway. And about forty or fifty of our customers showed up that first year. By the way, we maybe had a hundred customers, half of them showed up at that conference, which was impressive. And ⁓ we learned a lot from the community. We asked a lot of questions, and I think every one of our customers that know us, especially the, you know, our OG clients that have been with us for years, they know we use that time more for our benefit than they think or They think they're showing up to to learn and they usually show up and we ask a lot of questions back to them. What's not working, what is. ⁓ and and and through that process, we've I think we've built a culture of ask the client what they want, of putting customers in touch with each other, having continuous Zoom sessions that they can ⁓ freely speak to us, make sure that there's a line of communication open, that they can always reach out to us if they need to. And that certainly built a community. It builds a a a strong foundation of of evangelist clients that can't wait to tell other people about it. ⁓ because as much as you can grow by having people say good things about you, it can stall your growth or turn if if if if people spike speak about bad things about you too. So we have to be very careful on that.
speaker-0: sure and I'll give you a chance to plug the next summit. You've got a summit coming up in October as well haven't you?
speaker-1: Yeah. We have our yearly conference. Actually, this is gonna be our fifth or sixth annual one. I I think it's our fifth annual one. ⁓ coming up in October, twenty second or twenty third. I don't know if if you're coming,
speaker-0: I'm still trying to make it work but I'm hoping to be there in Miami.
speaker-1: Be the worst trip you take. It's Miami on October, and ⁓ we were expecting upwards of 200 customers. We we sold out completely, and we're in the process of seeing if the hotel through fire code can accept another 20 or 30 people as we speak. Please sold out for this one. It's gonna be a fun one. We're releasing our AI package, as I mentioned. ⁓ and ⁓ which by the way, funny story, we actually released our very first AI package on last convention. Our ⁓ CTO, which is my co founder, promised it in two to four weeks and it really took more like four to six months for that first release to happen and it's it's become a joke internally. Our clients now every time that they say, Well, when is that release gonna happen? We say two to four weeks and you know, it is one
speaker-0: It's always longer than you anticipate, isn't it?
speaker-1: No, for us has always been sorta what we what we predict, except for AI. Because whenever we feel we're done, something better comes out and we're embarrassed to launch whatever we had. ⁓ but yeah, that's try to make it. We we look forward to seeing you here.
speaker-0: Nice, I'll definitely, I'm one dog sitter away from making it on the flight, so watch this space. But no, looks fantastic. Tell me, what do you think this industry needs more of?
speaker-1: I would say curiosity. But the vast majority of owners that I speak to are very ⁓ we already have that. ⁓ our estimating system doesn't need to be touched or or or altered. ⁓ burn rates are just fine, or or our people don't need to be trained on anything new. Or you know, your software sounds good, but it may take too much time to to test and put it into practice. So this is one of those industries that have been around for, you know, a long time. But I truly feel like the vast majority of of printers are operating as if it's still nineteen ninety-eight, bearing of course the computer industry ⁓ advancing, bearing of course the technology of digital disruption of printers that happened. The actual foundational ⁓ structure of printers today are largely unchanged. So I I wish there were more, more curious things of what else can I be doing ⁓ that that I perhaps don't know about.
speaker-0: Yeah, I like that answer. Nice. ⁓ Let's talk about, actually I'm going to take two sides on this. Obviously we've got two challenges at the moment. One is trying to get more young people coming into the industry. How do we make it more attractive to them? But on the flip side of that, there's a lot of really well skilled and knowledgeable people. leaving the industry and there's a big concern, I spoke with Ford about this actually last week as well, but there's a big concern that we're going to lose that knowledge. What's your thoughts on that? How do we retain that knowledge from people leaving and how do we attract more people coming into the industry?
speaker-1: We gotta start calling print as ink on paper. Because it's not. Print is all about robotics. It's about automation. It's about software. It's about producing a tangible product that AI is not gonna replace. And those are all things that matter today. I have three kids, right? And and one of my children is fifteen years old and he's he's he's already started to think about what was he gonna do in his in his career. And I never thought me sitting down with him and saying things such as, well, maybe you should rethink being an attorney. Maybe you you should rethink being an engineer. And and maybe you sh maybe you should rethink being a software programmer. Those are things I never thought in a in a million years that three years ago I would be telling to my son. And I focus on my son because that's the person that I want more than anything in the world to succeed. More than me. More than anybody watching this podcast. It's it's my son. And and my advice to the young generation is I don't care if it's print, I don't care if it's anything, but you need to get involved in something that that cannot be easily phased out by AI in the near future. And I love print as an option. Print, as I mentioned, is not just ink and paper. There's so much going on in a modern print shop that that you could play a factor on it and make a lot of money on and not have to worry about Claude or Chad GPT replacing you tomorrow.
speaker-0: Mm hmm. Love it. Love it. And what about on the other sides, the people that are leaving the industry, can I, how do we retain that knowledge?
speaker-1: Well, why are they leaving? Do they need to get paid more? Do they do they need to be more challenged?
speaker-0: They're getting older. As in people retiring, I'm meeting more people like 60 plus who are coming to the end of their career, but they're leaving. They're leaving with so much knowledge and it's not coming back in at the other end at the moment.
speaker-1: When when a printer retires. So here's one interesting thing about this industry that maybe I'm going off topic here, but you're more than welcome to correct me. But there's so many older owners in this industry that are that refuse to sell. And and and and I ask ⁓ sometimes, why don't you just sell? You're you know, a hundred and fifty years old.
speaker-0: No, go for it. Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: ⁓ what are you waiting for? And and many times the answer is more ideological, where I love what I'm doing and and and that's why I keep showing up to work and that's that's a very very valid answer. But but many times the answer that I get is well I make more money running the business than I would ever just selling it. And right now the the you know valuation for my business, if I'm taking home two hundred thousand dollars a year. ⁓ all that I can get for it is maybe two times what I'm taking home or two and a half times what I'm taking home. And you know, for that I'm just gonna stay for the next three years. And that's usually the argument. And that is true. And the reason why that is true is because for some weird reason that I hope changes in the near future, the the print industry is the same as this thing that's gonna end tomorrow. And it it looked there's only three years left. Why would you invest too much money buying a print shop? If anyways you've only got a runway of three or four more years before it's replaced. And that's that's been the consensus time and time again since I've been involved in the industry for 20 years. And yet it's not going anywhere. So I wish people get better paid when it's time to sell their business. I wish they got 5x on whatever they're taking home. I wish they got what they deserve because then it would make more people that are ready to retire in their 65 and 66 sell it. And it would make people that are in their 20s or 30s that have some money. or access to getting loans, believe that they should invest in this industry so that the transition happens sooner rather than later.
speaker-0: Okay, no, cool. Let's talk about ink runs deep. can't end this podcast without talking about the infamous jacket. Tell us about that. I've seen obviously you were doing a live.
speaker-1: During our conversation, by the way.
speaker-0: So for the people that are listening and not watching, I'll put some images up on social, but they look pretty cool. Tell us about it.
speaker-1: So a little over a little a little over a year ago, we were brainstorming what can we do to help make print a little sexier and and attract more the younger generation. ⁓ and ⁓ the idea came that if we sell if we build something that the younger generation will want to wear as something cool, then then maybe we start spreading the word with cool messages. So, you know, we said, hey, I bought a varsity jacket, because you know, younger generations not love wearing varsity jackets everywhere, but we make it something that has patches on it. Then you as a printer can add your own patches if you want. If it's a 10th anniversary of an employee, you could do I said, ⁓ it's great. So how about we We sell that and all the proceeds that we get out of that, we we donated to charities that are actually nonprofit organizations that are putting young adults through college that are print focused careers. And I said, That's a phenomenal idea. I love it. And then we said, Well, ⁓ how much are we ch gonna charge for these jackets? And, you know, everybody, well, it's just as inexpensive as we can, so we can sell more jackets. But then I started doing the math and I said, Well, If we sell very inexpensive jackets, right, people are not gonna want to wear them. We can only raise too little money. So we decided to go the complete opposite way and sell these obnoxiously expensive things now. They're $850, but on purpose, because we decided to build it in a company that does this by hand in California, in the US, and everything is a hundred percent handmade with the highest quality of craftsmanship. And I think it's a beautiful thing because that's what print's all about, Colin. It's all about craftsmanship. It's all about the you know, the pride. That's what we call this campaign Inc. Runs Deep. And yes, it's expensive, but the more money we charge, the more money we can donate to, and the better quality jackets we could build. So we're probably gonna run this campaign for the near future. And we're hoping we're gonna end it, maybe never, but at least sometime in the summer of next year. We wanted to let it run at at least 12 months its course. And then we're gonna hopefully donate a significant amount of money to the ⁓ different groups that were That we we selected are going to be the better features.
speaker-0: And people can find out about that on the Plan Profit website.
speaker-1: Yes, ⁓ you could go to Plant Profit, there's a little thing that just says Inc. runs deep. And you could, you know, buy your jacket, gift it to your employees, gift it to your number one ⁓ s ⁓ salesperson or or customer ⁓ and the whole story around it, yeah.
speaker-0: Nice. And I'm guessing you'll be waiting years in Vegas.
speaker-1: I'll be wearing mine, I don't care how hot it is from now on everywhere that I go because I've been forced to. So it's now like a hundred and twenty degrees in Miami. And if I go grab lunch later, I'm gonna be wearing my jacket at a hundred and twenty degrees.
speaker-0: Love it, love it. Okay, listen, before we round up, I've got a very quick, ⁓ quick fire round for you. If that's all right, just six or seven questions before we get to the end. You're sitting down, you're ready?
speaker-1: Let's go. I feel like this is a game show now, so
speaker-0: All right. Okay. What's one piece of technology you couldn't live without?
speaker-1: That's an easy one, probably the phone.
speaker-0: phone okay coffee or energy drinks a lot of it if you were not running plan profit what would you be doing
speaker-1: Coffee. ⁓ Building something else. ⁓ I love the challenges just just building something from scratch and see what happens.
speaker-0: Nice. What's the most underrated skill in business?
speaker-1: I'm gonna go with follow through. It's incredibly difficult finding people today that do what they say they're going to do.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Nice, like that as well. Now, I won't put you on the spot. So with the exception of the print reviews, obviously, what's your favorite podcast?
speaker-1: You know, it changes. It changed throughout throughout the year. But right now I'm really I'm I'm really loving stuff like Diarvis CEO, which is actually one of your fellow one of your fellow ⁓ you know, Brits. ⁓ I I I love the stuff that he's putting out there. ⁓ and I I I've also been a long time fan of Guy Raz and his ⁓ how I build this ⁓ podcast as well.
speaker-0: Okay, cool. Yeah, I watched Dairy of a CEO quite a lot as well. The other one I quite enjoyed just now is ⁓ Jay Shetty. I don't know if you've ever watched him. I have not. Check him out. He wrote a book called Think Like a Monk. He's a young guy from London, went off to, I think it was India, ⁓ basically lived in an ashram for three years, lived like a monk for ⁓ three full years there. Then basically get sent out to LA to basically spread the word of Buddhism and things, a lot of the guests you'll see on Diary of a CEO, you'll see on his podcast as well, but really,
speaker-1: I'm gonna I can't wait until you're finished with me so that I can go research that.
speaker-0: Right, last one. Favorite book.
speaker-1: ⁓ I'm gonna go with the alchemist.
speaker-0: the alchemist, good choice as well, good choice. Now we have a closing tradition on this podcast where we ask our guests to share something about themselves that nobody else in the industry is likely to know.
speaker-1: That's an easy one. I'm gonna go with that one. That's an easy one. So I besides software and the business, I am ⁓ over obsessive car and soup enthusiast. I spend countless of hours online on my free time, whenever that is, researching about the latest and greatest technology and why they did this instead of that and reading blogs on YouTube about ⁓ about cars. So it's certainly a a big time waste for me. But I guess it's my it's my one guilty pleasure. I don't do anything else.
speaker-0: So I have to follow up with that then. What's the one car you would love to have parked out in the drive?
speaker-1: ⁓ man, I'll probably w go with a Carrera GT, a Porsche Carrera GT.
speaker-0: Nice, okay cool. I'll see you driving up in Vegas in one of those hopefully.
speaker-1: I only need a little over two million bucks and I can make it happen. Maybe you send a donation over my
speaker-0: A few more members, a few more jacket sales, we'll get there. Listen, thank you so much for your time. I look forward to catching up with you. Obviously, we've got a couple of meetups actually. We're going to be seeing you at Printing United ⁓ in September. And then also you're coming over here to the print show in the UK as well. So lots of time to catch up, which I'm looking forward to. For anyone in the meantime who wants to look you up, check you out, get in touch, what's the best way to do so?
speaker-1: Make a couple. planprofit.com and ⁓ there's a whole bunch of links and stuff you can click on there.
speaker-0: nice. And before I go, is there any questions that you wish I had asked you today that I haven't?
speaker-1: I think you did a phenomenal job asking very, very different questions that I usually get on a podcast and I've done a few of these, so kudos to that.
speaker-0: I appreciate that buddy. I'll take that as a win. Listen, take care and enjoy the rest of your day and I will see you next month.
speaker-1: Looking forward to it.
speaker-0: Cheers, buddy.
