What's the Biggest Challenge You've Faced in Your Business?

Four business veterans, from startups to big FBOs, recount their biggest challenges.

Anyone can run a business when times are good. But when challenges come up, it takes some creativity and fortitude to overcome a challenge.

Tylor Hall of Shrike Eagle Aviation, John and Paula Williams of ABCI, and Mickey Gamonal of startup Gamonal Tutors talk about the biggest challenges we’ve run into, and how we’ve managed them.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlO9Bl5mpCI[/embedyt]

Transcript:

Mickey Gamonal: Sweet. Cool. So, yeah, we’ll do some pictures real quick. My name is Mickey Gamonal. I’m an ASVAB tutor. I tutor through gamonaltutors.com. You can find me there.

Tylor Hall: Okay.

Paula Williams: Paula Williams, ABCI. We help aviation companies sell more of their products and services.

John Williams: To that end, I do the backend stuff for ABCI and the occasional business consulting thing rather than marketing.

Tylor: I’m Tylor Hall with Shrike Eagle Aviation. We’re looking to raise funds for a project in Las Cruces. There’s another one going in up here at Double Eagle. That’s kind of unique.

Paula: That’s fantastic, a lot of opportunities for investment in aviation for folks wanting to invest.

Tylor: Well, it’s more real estate investing kind of a thing.

Paula: Yes.

Tylor: Because the big thing is the hangers themselves, that’s the big number. What’s unique out at Double Eagle is Eclipse had made arrangements with the city to acquire 130 acres right next to the north-south runway through the fence access that’s already in place. That’s seven and a half million dollars.

Now, the other unique thing is that Amazon has built its million square foot office building, 3 miles down the road. They’re saying they want to extend the runway to full 10,000 feet and they’re going to pay for it. So they can bring a 767 freighter ship. There’s no room at Albuquerque Airport.

FedEx, UPS has the whole air freight side. The other side of the airport is Kirkland. Well, you can’t go there.

Mickey: Right.

Tylor: So Amazon is coming on real strong and the object would be we’d start on FBO and the fuel farm and the service to 767s. One of the guys has gotten a letter of intent to park-like ten two-way caravans just for the hauling out and back stuff. Making Albuquerque a big freight help for Amazon.

Mickey: Nice.

Paula: Cool.

Tylor: That’s the short version of it.

Paula: Great. We’ll get into the long version in a minute. So that’s cool.

Tylor: I have the full long version, if you want it.

Paula: Fantastic.

Mickey: Cool. Cool. So, today’s topic is going to be the hardest thing you’ve done or the biggest challenge your business has faced. So, I’ll go first and then we’ll take turns. Anybody, feel free. It’s conversation. But for me, it’s obviously not aviation based, but the hardest thing I’ve done is just wake up. I started teaching at 4:30 in the morning for my East Coast students because that works for them. They’d rather have 7:30 a.m. classes. So, it is tough. I actually told my wife, because I try to drive her to work and I’m like, I quit my daytime job and now I have all this autonomy and I choose the worst possible schedule. How could she deal with that?

So, yeah, waking up at that hour. And then also, I think next month, I’m going to be going to Basic Officer Leadership Course, also known as BOLC, in Fort Lee, Virginia. And then while I’m there, I’m going to be teaching as well. I kind of like having the toughest thing that I’ve ever done for my business being in front of me rather than behind me. Because I feel like that means that I’m doing more for my business than I did last year, which I think is a good thing. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. I mean, my business is still relative, so who could say.

But, yeah. I survived BOLC and I’m able to maintain my business at the same time. I am going to have to hire some outside help and that’s going to be a tough thing, too. So I’ve got a lot of major adjustments and some tough challenges that my business hasn’t faced before. But I think it’s like Grant Cardone says, he’s like, these are good problems. If you have to pay more taxes because you’re making more money, that’s a good problem. Like you want those kinds of problems. So, you’re going to have problems no matter what, you’d rather have the good ones. So, I’m trying to be selective and intentional and [inaudible].

Paula: So, there’s no shortage of early mornings in the aviation industry.

Mickey: Yeah. Today was your day, right?

Paula: No, actually, they canceled. That’s another one of the issues in the aviation industry is there’s a lot of things going on with most of our clients. They can have a bunch of planes going out. I mean, there’s just a lot of things that can happen, weather, other things that take people’s attention off of their marketing or off of their sales training or whatever. And we shouldn’t be their first priority. Safety should be their first priority. So there’s a lot of reasons that they have to reschedule. So, I got up at four o’clock in the morning and I was all ready to teach a class at 5:00 for some folks from Jordan, the country Jordan, not [inaudible] and got a message that they need to reschedule.

John: One of their clients is the Rocky Airlines. So if they’re involved in that, then that needs to be their first priority over learning how to do what to do.

Paula: Oh, yeah, and I mean, if they’ve got an opportunity to give a presentation or to be on the phone with somebody that they’re selling a big contract to, they will take that over a training course any day. I mean, I totally get that and reschedule what they’re doing with me. So, totally fine, but it kind…

John: You’re making some wreck of our schedule.

Paula: Right. Throws off my schedule because I would, just as soon, have slept in. Yeah, no, and I totally get the hiring people. That’s been tough for us, too. But I’d have to say the hardest thing that I have ever done and I screwed it up, to begin with, was sales. I’ve always been a marketing person and I have never really been a salesperson at heart. And my dad was very anti-sales. He felt like if someone was a salesperson, you didn’t owe them the courtesy of calling them back. And, I mean, he was just pretty, oh, that’s just a salesperson. You don’t have to open the door or you don’t have to answer the door, that kind of thing.

So I kind of got that vibe of salespeople are less than from him and never really resolved that until I really had to kind of beat myself up over this. One of the first things I did was a really huge error. We were at a mastermind group on the hot seat and, of course, you get all stirred up and everything else and people tell you what you should do and they give you a script and they tell you what exactly to do and you go home and you try it. This is what I did. In my defense, this is what I did.

So I called Jack Pelton. The weirdest part of the story is I actually got him on the phone. Jack Pelton is the CEO of Cessna before it was Textron.

John: Yeah.

Paula: So the weirdest part about the story is we actually got him on the phone and I completely froze. I was not going to use the script verbatim, but I ended up doing the script verbatim. The first line was, do you ever work with outside copywriters? He’s like, copywriters, is this like about intellectual property? I’m like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, this is about advertising, this kind of copywriting and this is what we were doing, is we were selling copywriting at the time. He had no idea what it is I’m talking about. He ended up saying, well, our marketing department handles that. I’m like, okay, fine. Thank you very much, click, and I hung up on him.

So I think that was like the worst sales call ever. I’m just hoping that he doesn’t remember this or if he hears this, he’ll probably laugh. But, now, I can look back on it because this was thirteen years ago and smiled. But, anyway, that was the worst thing I’ve ever done and the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced was learning how to sell. So then we got into a bunch of different sales training courses. Took what we learned and applied some intelligence to it before we actually ran out and did it. That’s where the course comes from is trying to be a little less scripty[?] and ridiculous.

Mickey: Nice.

Paula: Yeah. I hope he doesn’t remember that.

Tylor: I understand he’s a really nice guy.

Paula: I’m sure he is. I’ve never met him other than that. Anyway.

Mickey: Well, that’s cool. I mean, it sounds like you’ve overcome the challenge at least, right?

Paula: Now I can talk about it without turning completely red. So, that’s another thing.

Mickey: Yeah. What is a minor like a rosy…

Paula: Exactly.

Mickey: A little red, just a little.

Paula: Yeah, exactly. I totally get, there’s a lot of folks in our courses that are really, really nervous. I totally get that because that’s where I was thirteen years ago. I totally get that there are people who just had this huge hesitance to pick up the phone and they’re afraid the worst thing in the world is going to happen. But you know what, I didn’t get struck by lightning, I didn’t get set on fire. I lived to tell the tale, so it does get better. So, that’s cool.

Mickey: Cool. Good deal. How about you, John?

John: I’ll split it into two parts, one physical and one intellectual.

Mickey: Okay.

John: The physical part was winter SERE training in Washington State, two weeks. I mean, I got through it, and obviously, because if you don’t, you go take it again and, of course, it’s not good [inaudible]. It actually was funding ABCI, I mean, because everybody, you get money anywhere easy, easy at the cost of 51% of your company. We already work for somebody, didn’t want to do that again.

So then how do you do that? We took everything we had and what we didn’t have, we put on credit cards. That’s the way we did it. Expensive but controllable on our end and our company is ours. No, that’s paid for, of course. But still, that was a hell of a challenge to be able to make that work and balance while we were making it, you get a bill and your credit card, making that money to pay for it next month. It didn’t always work. We did that later and we’re good to go now.

Paula: Yeah, we got [crosstalk]. Yeah, we got thirty days to come up with the money. Sometimes we were selling CDs and stuff on Amazon too or on eBay just to make that extra hundred bucks to cover a bill or something like that. So, that’s crazy.

John: Yup. But we did it. We changed credit cards a few times to get the year of interest-free rates on different cards along the way.

Paula: Oh, and another thing we did to raise money was we did those candy machines. We installed candy machines in restaurants and things like that. That’s a horrible way to make money.

Mickey: Really, I’ve heard good things, I’ve heard good things from Side Hustle School. What did they say? What happened? How did it go?

John: I mean, I don’t remember how much they were. We got…

Paula: Three, four hundred bucks apiece, yeah.

John: We got twenty of them. The first thing is you got to sell, you got to go out and get some ice formation and put it on their property.

Paula: Which was good for me because I needed this.

Mickey: Yeah, you needed the sales experience.

Paula: Right.

John: And then secondly, you have to determine what kind of candy is most likely to sell in that particular location. And then you got to go by every day with candy to refill and to take the money out every day, because some of them fill up or go away. And then you have the ones where gets stolen. And then they just walk off with them and beat them up until I get the money out. There’s not that much money typically. Or in one case, it got thrown in the swimming pool.

Paula: The owner of the swimming pool calls us all unhappy, your machine is in the bottom of the swimming pool. Come get it, like come get it like now. Like I have a meeting.

John: Yeah.

Mickey: You can say like, oh, it’s a really good machine. You just [inaudible] all day.

Paula: Right.

John: But I suspect that because there are other people in town that were trying to do that, so I suspect it was a competitor.

Mickey: Oh, really?

John: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Mickey: All’s fair in love and war.

Paula: Right. But we knew we would need the long-term cash and we were trying to find something that was independent of the clock so we could schedule our stuff during the day and then go do this at night and that kind of thing to raise the cash we needed and things like that. I guess it was sort of compatible with what we were doing and we ended up breaking even on it. But I don’t know that I would recommend it as a Side Hustle for a startup because, damn, it’s a lot of work and a startup is a lot of work, so.

John: It’s unbelievable how much work it is. You have to go rain or sun or so and all that stuff, just like the post office and you go out because if you don’t, I mean, it won’t take money. And then if it’s cool and if it’s out of candy, I mean, then you have to adjust the machines for how much candy dispersed per quarter. So it depends on the candy.

Paula: I bet you never heard that the people involved in aviation would do this, but, I mean, just anything you could…

John: Yeah, I mean, you do whatever it takes when you’re funding yourself.

Paula: Yeah, and we were making Costco runs them. Crazy times and things like that.

John: Oh, then the candy suppliers, right? There’s only two in the whole Utah State so not really competitive.

Paula: Insane.

John: Yeah. Anyway, it goes on but that was a…

Paula: Yeah, but that’s because, in aviation, we’ve got about an eight-month sale cycle. From the time we meet somebody to the time we make a deal, it’s about eight months and we can’t sound desperate or look desperate or anything else during that time. So we had to make the money to cover that margin. For a startup, that’s kind of a long time. So this was something where we would actually make cash every week. So we were kind of trying to prime the pump that way so that we could pay for advertising and some of the things we needed to do to…

John: Some of the better machines were like every other day, you had to go. And then you get those and so then you have a little thing on paper or a database or whatever because this machine runs out, and one day, this one in three and this one on four. So you got to keep running around and you’re on the road all the time.

Paula: And then you got these Home Depot buckets of quarters. [crosstalk] basically a hard work.

John: Anyway.

Mickey: Nice, no, I like that. I think it is very raw struggle, very truthful. Cool. How about you, Tylor? Toughest thing for business.

Tylor: Raising the money, the first round, the seed rounds. I’ve done things on the shoestring before startup but it’s very, very hard and sometimes you fail.

John: Yup.

Paula: This is an order of magnitude different than what we were talking about, right?

Tylor: Yeah.

Mickey: Can’t just get some candy machines is what you’re saying.

Tylor: No. Back in Kansas, when I started up the business back then, I had a partner that had deep pockets and he knew the aviation industry and we had both work for Garsite before and I knew this bankruptcy was going to go tits up real fast. So he bailed before me. I came along about six months later. We went directly into competition with them. But he had all the money. He had plenty of funds behind us. It grew, exploded in three years to the point where the Garsite was going through a $35 million bankruptcy.

John: Nice.

Tylor: I’ve learned and talked to other people that that may have been the whole intent to begin with. They were using this New York money and they intentionally bankrupted the company.

Paula: Oh.

Tylor: Because they sucked all the money out of it.

John: Yeah. Kept happening.

Tylor: To their pockets, while it was in the corporate pockets, I mean, this guy was an idiot. I don’t talk to customers. I don’t talk to suppliers. I run the company.

Paula: So what was that? If it’s not talking to suppliers, I’m talking to customers.

Tylor: Okay. We ate our lunch marketing-wise and took the business roll and ended up buying them out of bankruptcy court, save sixty-five jobs. They had set up these strings for all the executives. The executive had this privilege and he had a parking spot right out front by the office and name on the door and that kind of stuff. All that immediately went away. Everybody in the shop was just nervous as hell as to what happened. On Friday, sixty-five people lost their jobs. On Monday, they all got them back. We just kept on and keeping on and I ended up parking in the back with all the guys in the shop. The shop guys get there at 6 in the morning. I don’t get there until 8, 7:30.

And, I park intentionally outback. I want to see what these guys are doing. So I came in the back door. It would sometimes save me two hours to get to my desk.

Paula: We did the management by walking around.

Tylor: Yeah, MBWA. Yeah. I was at the paint shop, which was a 9-acre site, where the back was where the paint shop with painted refiller trucks. I’m in there looking at our project we got on, in walks the new president of the company I’ve known for a while. He had his phone glued to his ear yakking away, wandering around, and he turns around and walks out. All these guys are looking at me and say, what do we do? What did we do wrong? This is nothing, don’t worry about it. That’s him. He’s glued to that dumb phone. So don’t worry about it. You’re doing a good job. I’m here looking at this. I see this is pretty and, gosh, that’s a good-looking truck you did over there. The compliment thing.

Paula: Yeah. I think people so want to be noticed and they’re almost insulted when they get away with something when they do something badly. But it’s worse when they do something great and nobody notices.

Tylor: Exactly. I was one of the senior people there so okay. Yeah, I appreciate these guys, what they’re doing and verbally express it. This guy walked in and walked out, and he was in la la land.

Paula: Not engaged.

Tylor: So, that’s what we’re starting to do something. I do have a question. In this new paradigm we’ve got of working from home, I’m at home, my daughter is at home here and you guys are in your office and you’re in Las Vegas.

Mickey: Yeah.

Tylor: How do we grow a business? I’ve been in sales my whole life. First, one on one, eyeball to eyeball, kind of a thing, and now it’s different.

Mickey: Oh yeah.

Tylor: Now I’ve been on Facebook. I’m on the Twin Commander guys. I’m on the Twin Cessna guys, Cessna single-engine. There’s also the Beechcraft King Air group and Citation Pilots Association.

Paula: Right.

Tylor: All these associations of aircraft owners, I look at them as my future customers. It would take a lot of time just working these conversations to go on. I mean, there’s one intriguing thing, guys find us 421 from up north down Florida and he’s two hours into the flight and they’re still smelling gasoline or some gas with a bad smell. What am I going to do? Oh, do I land here? Do I get mechanic to look at this? And then he turns around and says something to his wife and she’s holding her hands up at the air blower drying her fingernails.

Paula: He’s smelling nail polish.

Tylor: It was nail polish. There’s things like that. But others are, oh, I need this part.

Paula: Yeah.

Tylor: Where can I get this part? Or what should I do about my avionics? Or what should I change first? All these interesting questions that are great sales opportunities.

I’m meeting Jim Allmon who is the president of Blackhawk Aerospace, the PT6 engine upgrade for the Old King airs.

John: Yup.

Tylor: He also dabbles in 421s and 414s, buy-sell kind of thing. I met him back in 2003 when he flew into Pagosa Springs, first getting started on the 135s on the King Air 90s. And, really nice guy, very knowledgeable. They’re not sitting[?] a long time. I’m worried that, no, that’s my competition, but there’s other people that I see like Mike Bush[?]. He is a guru of engines and engine maintenance.

Paula: He’s got a ton of followers.

Tylor: I’ve been on his webinars a couple of times seeing what he does, what he talks about and how to maintain the engine, what to look for, and some real tricks of the trade.

Paula: Yeah.

Tylor: About making an engine last twice, three times as long.

Paula: So the question is, how do you use the new tools and paradigm without it turning into a time suck, basically, it sounds like.

Tylor: Right.

John: Now before you go into that, because I know this is your expertise, but before this quote pandemic it is, the year before, and I don’t know why we decided to do it but we did and I think it really helped us a lot, was that year NBA was in Orlando. I like road trips. So I said, let’s drive, and let’s just take a couple of weeks one on each end of it and I’ll drive. She said, okay, well, if we’re going to do that, can we stop here? I said, yeah, and you know what, why don’t we just stop in all our clients. I said, sound like a good idea. So we stopped at each client that she has had then. We either had lunch or breakfast or dinner with them and got to know them better then because she sold them online.

Mickey: Yeah.

John: The next year, we had indicated, I don’t think we lost anybody, we had the people suspend for a couple of months. But they came back. The longest suspension was, what, about a year.

Paula: Oh, not even that long. About six months for one of the flight schools that was closed down, literally closed down.

John: So I think no matter what, ultimately, you need a face to face with somebody.

Paula: Yeah.

John: As in face to face in real life, RL.

Paula: Not this kind of face of face. But Mickey, you have grown your business from scratch online and you have never met in person a lot of your clients. Maybe you would be the best person to answer this.

Mickey: Yeah, I would say I’ve only met 10% of my clients in person. The best way for me has been Facebook ads actually, Facebook ads and Instagram ads. Like I’m trying to pull away from it, I’m trying to work more in person and do it for cheaper. But the best clients that I’ve had, my repeat customers, they come at me through Facebook and Instagram. I would imagine it’s because it’s such a wide pool of people if you can get your message. My message is very simple. Like if this is what you’re struggling with, I can fix that. Yeah?

Paula: You use targeting to get to those people.

Mickey: Exactly, yeah. I use targeting, for sure.

John: But you’re selling intellectual property, whereas as Tylor, I think he’s got to be selling pieces and parts and service.

Mickey: Right.

Tylor: Right.

Mickey: But it’s still a solution to a problem at the end of the day, right? I mean, if that’s still your thing, you can actually go into and mom[?] would be better at showing you how to do this specifically, but you can go into those groups, right? You’re talking about like six, seven groups. Again, mom’s probably going to talk about this a lot more.

Tylor: There are twenty-one or twenty-two type certificate clubs in the States.

Mickey: Perfect. So you go to those numbers[?] and you can see exactly those interests. You can figure out exactly who’s in those groups. If those are the kind of people that you want to work with, they’ve never been more accessible, realistically. You can’t put a sign outside your door and say, hey, if you’re in this club, come by, because nobody’s [inaudible] club. But, yeah, I mean, it’s unbelievable how much access you can get as an advertiser.

Tylor: But what John was pointing out is that the face-to-face meeting is still important.

Mickey: It is.

Paula: Agreed.

Tylor: Somewhere along the way. This means to me, Oshkosh or MBAA. I mean, I’m looking at, we’re a brand new company. I’m competing against guys that have been doing this for forty years, lots of staffs of people. I got say, well, I got these new guys and these guys and I’m surprised on the websites that they don’t talk about the resume or the people that work for them.

Mickey: Yeah.

Paula: Right.

Tylor: Whereas some that I have seen that, and you click on the picture, now you get his resume.

Paula: Yeah.

Tylor: Oh, he graduated from Embry-Riddle. He has an AMP and IA. He did this in the military. I mean, that would be a way to sell our capabilities.

Paula: Oh, yeah.

Tylor: It’s the people.

Paula: Now, what I think needs to be done is a hybrid, where you start like Mickey and you target people who are in these groups and say, I’m going to be at EAA at this event. Let’s schedule a time to meet together. So that way, you’re making your face-to-face meetings a thousand times more efficient. So you’re targeting the people that you want to get to set an appointment with you. And then when you go to EAA, you’re booked solid. And you got meetings from 9 a.m. to as late as you want to go ideally because you can fill your calendar using those digital tools so that you will spend your time more efficiently when you get to those places. And then you can spend the time face to face because that is still important.

But if you want to meet with thirty people at a three-day show as opposed to kind of haphazardly wandering around and hoping you run into the right folks.

Tylor: Hope that somebody walks in who might be a customer, yeah.

Paula: Yeah.

Tylor: I see what you’re doing.

Paula: Right. So I love using digital ads to book appointments at physical events.

Mickey: I mean, to add onto that, since you’re already in these groups and you know who these people are and you know that they’re likely to be at these events, you don’t even need ads, right? Like all you got to do is just message them. I mean, the access is unbelievable. You can just say, hey, I’m going to be there too. What are you planning to get out of it? Like you don’t even have to tell them, hey, meet me. You say, what are you hoping to get out of it? And then if it vibes with what you got, you’re golden.

Paula: Right. And then you just set up a time and then you show up with a full dance card and you won’t be able to come up for air and enjoy the event. That’s the downside of it.

Mickey: Right, but everybody’s going to be wondering what you’re up to.

Paula: Right.

Mickey: Which is kind of a plus side.

Paula: Like I heard he was here, but nobody’s seen him. He’s in a room somewhere. But it does have a little bit of a downside and you might want to schedule some time off so that you can go wonder around. But I love scheduling events using digital ads.

Tylor: Okay.

Paula: I think that’s one of the best ways to combine both worlds.

Mickey: Yeah.

John: Yeah. And then [inaudible] to keep steering us, they’re going to be there in Las Vegas this year.

Paula: Yes.

Tylor: Yeah.

Paula: It could happen.

Tylor: And then Oshkosh [crosstalk].

John: Yup.

Tylor: Oh, I got my vaccine on Friday, first of all.

Mickey: Congratulations.

Paula: Good for you. Yeah, we get our second one on Thursday.

John: Thursday, Thursday.

Paula: Yeah.

Tylor: Thursday?

Paula: Yep.

Tylor: Both of you, okay.

John: Yup.

Paula: I hear it’s gross but it might be fun. We have until Thursday so we got the weekend to recover.

John: Well, it can’t be as bad as my interest in the military where I got nine or ten shots within the space of five minutes. You walk down a landing [crosstalk].

Mickey: And they let us all into a room single file.

John: Yep.

Mickey: We all had to have our shirts up, right, so they could stamp us. And then as soon as the room was full, everybody had to drop to their knees and get ready for the mean shot. So then we started going around with IVs, all of us. It was terrible. It’s terrible. Very livestock, very much like livestock.

John: Yeah.

Paula: Oh my gosh.

John: These pressurized hydraulic guns for us. I tell you, if you move, it’s going to squash you open, you got to go to hospital. So you stand still and take it.

Paula: So they don’t serve milk and cookies afterwards or anything like that.

John: Nope.

Paula: Oh, that’s horrible. Okay.

Mickey: Yeah.

John: So first, it can’t be that bad.

Tylor: Yeah.

Paula: There you go.

Tylor: Well, you’ve gotten your first shot, right?

Paula: Oh yeah.

John: Yeah.

Paula: It wasn’t too bad. I felt like I’d work out the day before and I hadn’t. So it was like I’ve been lifting weights or something.

John: Mine just hoots[?] a little bit.

Paula: Yeah. Cool.

John: That was only 1 milliliter for crying out loud, it’s not that much even going in.

Tylor: Yeah. Well, New Mexico seems to be pushing hard on opening up. A few states around us are also into the mass inoculation thing. I think it’s more of eliminate that fear.

Mickey: John, to your point as far as like face to face, as far as what you and mom did when you guys went from client to client. I’m going to be trying to do something similar because I do value the face-to-face interaction. I know that as a teacher, I know that at least one like in-person meeting goes a long way.

John: Oh yeah.

Mickey: But we’ll see. That’s what I’m hoping to do once I’m done, once I get back to [inaudible].

Paula: Well, sometimes those online events lead to in-person events because we did a Zoom like this with Nara[?] talking about how airport businesses could tell their stories better. That was with Doug Goldstrom and Lara Kaufmann. It was a great event and we had more than a hundred people show up to that event online. But the better thing is then I got an invitation to an in-person. Basically, they want me to tell the same story to their association.

So the Zoom meetings do lead to in-person events. So one thing leads to another. I would just say it’s just so much more efficient to cast your big net digitally, whether it’s for investors or whether it’s for students or whatever you’re looking for. And then once you have a qualified group, that tells you where and when to spend your time more efficiently because you’ll get more face-to-face time with the right people if you’ve kind of cast the big net in a digital way and then you do the [inaudible].

Tylor: That’s interesting way of looking at it.

Paula: Yeah.

Tylor: My kind of sales, I call a consultant say like, I’m not there to put the hard clothes on them. They do it for themselves. But if he wants $50,000 worth of all new avionics and thing, well, which one do you like? Do you like this one or that one? This or that. That is actually a way of closing.

Paula: Yeah.

Tylor: Because you’re getting closes all the way along.

John: Yeah.

Tylor: He’s making a decision on this piece, this display, this aspen[?] or that radio or the radar or tillman[?] or autopilot. And then all of a sudden, he comes to a yes.

Paula: Yeah.

Tylor: Because he talked himself into it.

John: Yup. Yeah, I remember I was online or not online, I was on the phone with Paula standing next to me because she’d had me out to this individual and we talked a few more minutes. She’s, well, how do I make this happen? I said, you give me your credit card number and we’re good. He did exactly.

Paula: Yeah, yeah.

Tylor: Exactly.

Paula: But, yeah, I mean, what you need is more at-bats because you’re a great salesperson already. So you just need more opportunities to have that conversation, right? That’s the marketing. That’s the digital marketing, I think, that does that more efficiently than anything else.

Tylor: Now you’d mentioned wanting for us to do ninety-second videos.

Paula: Yeah.

Tylor: I really like that idea. I can think of all kinds of little things to talk about or big things to talk about. Big things, this is what’s going on at the airport.

Paula: Yeah.

Tylor: This is the latest.

Paula: You start publishing those in those Facebook groups and then you’re not spending nearly as much time answering people’s questions, but you become a regular feature every Thursday or whatever day you pick with the different video. Here’s what’s going on. Here’s what we’re looking for. Here’s the types of people, we were looking for people to be mechanics or we’ve got some openings for avionics upgrades, whatever it is that you’re looking for. Hopefully that will make the right connections. Some of those, you might want to boost to a targeted audience and say, here are the people who are the most likely to be interested in this and that kind of thing, so [inaudible].

Tylor: Great. I can see that building the database, the personnel of members of these groups also putting an ad maybe in their magazine that[?] you drive interest.

Paula: Yeah.

Tylor: Okay.

Paula: Cool. So I guess we kind of covered the hardest thing you’ve ever done, right, did we?

Tylor: Yeah.

Mickey: Yeah, looks good to me. Sounds about right. I feel like everybody had a chance to speak and be heard. So, yeah, if we’re good, we can pitch out. Is there anything else, any final words on most difficult thing you’ve done for your business?

Tylor: No, I’m done. I got to find this.

Paula: Yeah, exactly.

Mickey: Golden. Cool. Well, okay. Well, my name is Mickey Gamonal with Gamonal Tutors ASVAB Domination. You can look me up at gamonaltutors.com.

Paula: Paula Williams at ABCI. We help aviation companies sell more of their products and services.

John: John Williams, what she said.

Tylor: Tylor Hall, Strike Eagle. See you guys all later.

Paula: All right.

Mickey: All right.

Tylor: Appreciate this.

Mickey: Have a good night.

Tylor: Yeah.

John: See you guys, stay healthy and safe.