Episode 357: Finding Million-Dollar Accounts in Plain Sight (with Mark McCormack)

[00:00:00] Music Intro

[00:00:06] Bobby: What if your very first promo sale was $30,000? That's exactly what happened to Mark McCormack on his first day calling on clients. He was a college senior working at an ad agency, and he was supposed to be their designer. When 18 people quit and his job started shrinking before his eyes, his boss asked if he could make a sales call. So he did, and he got completely hooked on promo.

[00:00:25] Bobby: On today's show, we're exploring how to use promotional products as your gateway to becoming the strategic quarterback of your client's brands. Welcome to the skucast, the podcast for innovators and maverick thinkers in the promotional product space. My name is Bobby Lehew. I'm glad you're here.

[00:00:42] Bobby: Mark McCormack built Identity Marketing Group by understanding one fundamental truth: if you're the person who has the logo, you control about 80% of clients' spend if you're a good quarterback. Today, he runs multiple revenue streams per client. He just won our Shops Innovation Award for explosive growth in pop-up shops, and he's cracked the code on landing the kinds of accounts most distributors only dream about.

[00:01:06] Bobby: Join us as we talk with Mark about three things. One, the employee headcount formula that identifies million-dollar opportunities hiding in plain sight. Two, why everything is going print-on-demand in the next three years, and how winners are preparing now. And three, how to position yourself as the brand quarterback instead of the order taker.

[00:01:25] Bobby: Today's episode is brought to you courtesy of us at commonsku. Over 900 distributors powering 1.8 billion in network volume rely on commonsku's connected workflow. Process more orders, connect your team, and dramatically grow your sales. To learn how, visit commonsku.com. Now here's my chat with Mark McCormack.

[00:01:43] Bobby: Mark, thanks for joining us on the skucast.

[00:01:45] Mark: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:47] Bobby: Yeah. We were talking shop because we've both been in the industry. We won't share exactly how long, maybe we will with you. Long time. We joke that when people ask us how many expos we've been to, basically all of them. You started in, is it 2003?

[00:02:00] Mark: 2003, I started on my own. Yeah. Before that I was with a distributor. Basically it was an ad agency. Went to work for an ad agency out of college that had a distributorship. So I was with them for almost three and a half years.

[00:02:09] Bobby: Okay. So that explains why you've built more of an agency-type model. Can you explain a little bit? Like, merch is just a part of your revenue, right? What are the other components?

[00:02:23] Mark: So we have a really solid design department. We have a division that manages social media. We do management of HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce. Lots of different CRMs for clients. And then we have traditionally what we call strategy or concepting. So we bill for everything from custom promotional items, custom campaigns. But what it does is it spans everything.

[00:02:47] Mark: And it came from, I was a graphic artist in college. And so I spilled out to work for a friend of my dad's who had bought an ad agency. And I was supposed to be their designer. And my very first day was the day of the acquisition. So I watched like 18 people quit because all of their non-competes were null and void. And I started to see my job shrink on my desk.

[00:03:06] Mark: And he came in and asked me, "Hey, can you go call on this person?" And I did. And I went there to talk to him about promo. And my first order was sizable. It was probably $25,000 to $30,000 worth.

[00:03:17] Bobby: Oh, you're spoiled.

[00:03:18] Mark: Yeah, at that point. I got really lucky, but it was like print too. So it was like envelopes, key chains, all sorts of stuff.

[00:03:25] Bobby: In an industry where the order average is $700, you just got spoiled.

[00:03:28] Mark: Yeah. I got this guy that was an enormous property owner, so he owned tons and tons of apartments. And he's like, "I need mailing envelopes." People would still mail checks. They didn't have direct deposit of their rent, so they would mail their rent checks. He'd give them like a key chain with their keys every time he had a new renter or tenant, and brochures for each of the apartment villages that they owned, all this stuff.

[00:03:53] Mark: And so I went back to the office, wrote up the POs, got it done. And I was still a designer and I went to dinner with who's now my wife, and she's an accountant. And she goes, "Are you going to get paid commission on that?" And I had no idea what that was. And I was like, "I'm just happy to still have a job," because I watched all these people leave. And she's like, "Just go ask."

[00:04:14] Mark: And I did. And it was more than my two-week check. My commission, when it finally came in, was sizable. And I was born into an entrepreneurial family. So I went back in and I was like, "Hey, so what are you guys going to do with all those folders in the back? And can I start calling those people at three o'clock every day? I'll get through all of my jobs because there was little jobs left." And so that's how I got into sales.

[00:04:36] Bobby: That's a crazy story. I've never heard that angle on a story like that.

[00:04:40] Mark: Yeah. So, and then I just started calling. I did a million dollars in my first six months.

[00:04:44] Bobby: Well, no wonder you got hooked into promo.

[00:04:47] Mark: Yeah, it was fun. And during that time I was still a senior in college, and I took a whole extra, I think it was a year, maybe three-quarters of a year of school. And I started hiring designers in my class that were in my design classes. So I was like, "Hey, $500, can you get me a brochure by Friday? $200, can you lay these pieces out for me?" Because I wanted to concentrate on sales versus doing the design.

[00:05:09] Mark: And at one time I hired every kid in my class, and the teacher was like, "Why are you still here?" Like all you, you come with a box of zip drives, you know, like zip discs. That's dating myself there too, right? And I'd come in and just dole them out like cards. I'd write on top of it like what I needed, the name of the brand, the business card, or the person that needed it. Be like, "Here, if you can get this to me by the next class, I'll bring you cash."

[00:05:27] Bobby: So fast forward. You obviously then had this major imprint in agency side, design side, all of that from the get-go. Fast-forwarding now, there's lots of crossover, it sounds like, with your clients. So some people that go agency route typically have promo clients that stay in the promo lane, and then some don't. Is there a lot of crossover with some of the other work that you do with clients?

[00:05:47] Mark: Yeah, tons. I mean, it's really interesting because it allows us to be really nimble. We'll have clients that just use this for promo, just use this for social, just use this for retainer work. And what usually ends up happening, what I found like years and years ago was that if you're the person that knew what the logo was, what the brand guide said, and had access to the EPS file, you controlled about 80% of their spend.

[00:06:21] Bobby: Spend purchasing.

[00:06:22] Mark: Yeah. Just, yeah. Because they'd be like, "He's the guy that has the logo." And everything flowed to you. Now it's, you have to have other pieces of your business. Typically, I like to say that we want to have between seven to eight income streams coming in into the business per client, per logo, just in general. So that we're nimble enough where if promo starts to take a dive or there's tariffs and that starts to slip, what you find out in large enough accounts is that the money moves somewhere else. And they'll shift it like, "Hey, our trade show budget got cut," but they still have to talk to their clients, or they still have to gift them.

[00:06:58] Bobby: Yeah. Activation. Rattle off the categories that you saw.

[00:07:02] Mark: So, and that's just a few of them. I mean, we have, we're tied into a ton of different things. So we have print, social, promo, strategy. I have a guy that shoots video for me all over the country, so he'll fly anywhere in the country and shoot video. We have graphic design and we do retainer work. We do local search and Google AdWords. So there's a variety of things. And we do brand management, so we handle like web design and copywriting and everything from that standpoint. So we can handle kind of the whole thing.

[00:07:26] Mark: And there's a ton of that in Omaha. Because of where we're at. So you have Berkshire Hathaway, which is Warren Buffett. So all of those companies, you have Mutual of Omaha, you have every type of insurance company exists in our backyard. So they're already there. Which is fun.

[00:07:41] Bobby: That's great. Congratulations, by the way, you and your team won our Shops Innovation Award.

[00:07:46] Mark: Thank you.

[00:07:47] Bobby: I know you do a lot of different types of shops. You guys had a massive growth year just in shops with commonsku. How did you spark that growth? Is shops like a natural part of your DNA when you guys are working with a customer? Do you have to proactively push that? How does that happen?

[00:08:02] Mark: We usually ask them how they purchase their stuff before we kind of jump too far. Like we don't, "Hey, you need to order this stuff." And it's like, well, maybe they don't have the space to put it, or they want it on demand, or they might not have budget or have been stung in the past with inventory. Like, "Hey, we had all this inventory and our logo changed."

[00:08:17] Mark: So we had a really large customer that had a logo change in the last year and a half, and it was massive amounts of inventory and we didn't have the store at that time. Now we have their store, but I think they had, from their previous vendor, they had over 2,000 polo one dozens sitting on a shelf with the wrong logo. And there's no way to fix that.

[00:08:44] Mark: So sometimes you go in and they've had massive pain points of inventory. So if I know that, I'm going to sell an inventory-free store. So I'm going to go, "Hey, how about we do these as drops? Or we do this as a fulfillment in auto-fulfill?" Or something like that. And we use multiple platforms for stores, but it's one of those where we can answer that a lot through the commonsku platform, right? We can say, "Hey, we can do it as a pop-up store, we can do it as a corporate store. We can use it as this type of store or that type of store," and these are the triggers that we need, and it allows us to do that.

[00:09:13] Bobby: So thanks for us. You and I that have been doing shops for a long time, one of the hardest things about shops and stores was it was complex to set up. I know I'm pushing an assumption on you, but the ease of which you can use shops in commonsku has been a huge part of the growth. Would you say that's the case? You and your team?

[00:09:30] Mark: Yeah. It's absolutely easy to set them up. Turn it on, let it run, turn it back off. Ease of use from a customer standpoint is great. We like it a lot, and you guys have been a great piece of growth in our company, so it's, it's mutual. Feeling's mutual. We like working with you guys.

[00:09:44] Bobby: Both growth-oriented companies for sure. I also don't do a lot of inventory shops now, but you did at one time. That was the only option for the longest time, right? So now you do a lot of POD. Do you see that category growing? And maybe a dumb question, but that's one of the hottest challenges and opportunities right now.

[00:10:01] Mark: Yeah. Everything's going to be POD in the next three years. Everything will be POD. And it is just changing. I was sharing a story with you earlier, but we had a client, one of the largest nurse recruiters in the country, as a client of ours, and we still have them as a client. But it was one where we had a whole warehouse dedicated to them, and we just saw it go. We shipped a thousand boxes a day for them, new hire kits, during COVID. So a thousand a day went out the door, and it was random items, so it was like everything from beach towels to tote bags, to backpacks to bento boxes. I mean, we had everything in this warehouse. I mean, unreal.

[00:10:43] Mark: And I was telling you like the shipments went from a thousand a day to 250 a day, or 500 a day, to 250 to 50. And I was like, "Thank God I didn't own the inventory." I was like, "Oh, if I had owned that inventory, I would've been losing my mind." And when we told them, "Hey, we don't know what's going on in your business," but, or we did know somewhat, you know, COVID was over, et cetera, but we wanted to know what was happening.

[00:11:00] Mark: And they said, "Well, we're just not as busy." And I was like, "Well, I'm not going to hold onto this inventory. It's your inventory. You own it." It was seven semi-trucks of inventory that was all owned by them. And what do you want us to do? Because I can't have seven people twiddling thumbs shipping 50 boxes. It's just not worth it. And so they took the inventory, and I was like, "Well, when you're finished using all this stuff, we'll switch it to POD." But there's no reason to turn up a store for them when they have all that inventory. And they were just using it internally.

[00:11:25] Bobby: One last question about shops. You have done every type of shop imaginable. You did the inventory shops. You do POD, and your team has embraced pop-up shops, and you've obviously won our award because you've had massive growth in that category. How would you encourage distributors? We're seeing a lot of organic growth with shops. Clients just come and ask for it. "Hey, can we do a shop with you guys?" How do you recommend they proactively go after shops business with their clients?

[00:11:47] Mark: I always open it with asking them how they want to buy. "How do you want to get this stuff? And how are you getting sizes?" Open-ended questions that are, "Where's all your stuff sit right now?" If they're like, "Oh, it's at our warehouse," I'm like, "Okay, who's fulfilling it? How long does it take to get?" That's a big pain point. Speed. We're in the Amazon economy. People want to order it now and get it tomorrow for free. And, you know, that doesn't exist yet in our world. But at the same time, being able to order it as a customer and get it quickly is where PODs kind of just dominate.

[00:12:14] Mark: Because, you know, once somebody's bought all of that inventory, and let's say you have 500 employees or a thousand employees or 200 employees, after a year, everybody that's ever wanted that shirt has it. And you're stuck with tons of inventory. And they're like, "Oh, you sold me something bad." So it's a bad experience for the distributor too. And it's a bad experience for the customer because that's all they have is choices. Is the shirt that they didn't want six years ago, and they still have it. And it makes it tough to pivot, where POD, it's like, "Hey, we can spin up these 100 items, and if you don't like any of those in six months, we're going to spin up another 100 and take those down and keep things fresh." So that's big.

[00:13:01] Bobby: You and your team have been great customers of commonsku for a while now. Think back to when you made the switch. What made you switch? What made you jump to commonsku?

[00:13:09] Mark: So I worked, I was in a top 10 franchise for years, for nine years. Left there, went to another software that was very antiquated, and it really bugged me because it took a really long time to enter the order. And that was kind of the main pain point from our CSRs. They're like, "I entered the order." And I'm like, "Well, how long did that take?" And they're like, "Oh, it took us 30 minutes to enter an order." I'm like, "That's crazy." If you think about that, then you max out your time of how many orders you could enter a day. And I was like, "That's not going to work."

[00:13:43] Mark: And I think that was right as commonsku was kind of merging into a full-stack CRM, like merging into, "Hey, we know how to enter orders, but we also have these other tools that we're going to develop along the way." They didn't have stores. Commonsku didn't have stores then, right? Not at that point. So that was the big decision factor for us.

[00:14:00] Mark: And I'm a UI person too, so I love when things look clean. And my wife runs the accounting side of our business, so when she likes something, it makes it easier for me to go, "Hey, I think we're going to switch systems, and you're not going to kill me." Like, "Oh my God, we're going to change all of our accounting," and, you know, make life easy. So, happy wife, happy life. But that was one of those things where it made it simple, and it helped that Mark and his wife were in the business too, because they understood it. So in talking with them, that was a big part of it, was like, "Hey, they get it." They've been down the road that we're on and understood the pain points where most people that design the CRM or design the stack or the order entry system, they're too far removed. They've never written an order before. And they go, "Yeah," and you're like, "This doesn't work, guys."

[00:14:44] Mark: And we went, we tried, I can tell you, we tried six different ones before we picked commonsku. Like we tried them, we'd be like, "All right, what does this look like? Let's test an order, see if we could enter an order, make it work." And I met with our employees like every Friday, and I was like, "This is not working."

[00:15:00] Mark: And then that was right when commonsku was kind of scaling. And I liked the community that was behind it too. So like I've been to some of the commonsku events, and that was cool because you're talking with distributors the same way you would in a franchise, but without the franchise. Like without the giant fee, giant franchise fee, without the giant fees that are associated with that. We're like, "Wait a second, I just paid them to lick, stamp, and mail invoices," and it was like a hundred grand. That was a lot. So where you go like to a community where everybody's kind of all on the same page, you're all on the same system, you're trying to make things work, and you're trying to grow. Everybody's trying to grow, but that was cool. Big part of it.

[00:15:31] Bobby: How integral do you think that has been to scaling your business because of the connected workflow?

[00:15:34] Mark: Huge. I mean, it's huge. It's just something where it's allowing people that do what they do incredibly well into your company will only make your company healthier. So that's how I look at it.

[00:15:45] Bobby: That's cool. And you as a leader then, real-time process, like visibility into your business. How's that helped you as a leader in terms of transparency? What's going on? Because I remember I was on one of these legacy systems, and you know, you couldn't see anything. You were operating in the dark all the time. You only had a rearview mirror to look at what happened last month. You couldn't see anything that was going on currently. How as a leader, what does that do for you?

[00:16:12] Mark: It's huge because I can pinpoint where to spend time. Like that's, for me, it's all about time. Time is a huge part of my day. It's like, okay, I need to spend time on this project because it's of this importance level and this has an opportunity to grow. And where if you see the customer buy the same amount from you every year, you go, "Okay, I've probably capped that out, and maybe this is something that we can just handle internally. It doesn't need a rep attached to it. Just needs somebody to take the order, process it."

[00:16:33] Mark: Which is wild because I've had a bunch of orders come through portals in like the last three months. We set up portals for these companies. I remember the employees singing the portal song at a commonsku event three years ago. I remember that. Yeah. Like I was laughing about it. I'm like, "Hey, we set these things up, and we're getting orders on them, and I forgot about them." Like, I forgot about them, and there's orders coming in. And I was like, "Hey, did you see this?" I walked into like our staff, Grant and Wendy, were on there the other day, and they're like, "We just got an order from portals." And I'm like, "Yeah." I go, "That's crazy. It came in." And I was like, "Run it. Let's go."

[00:17:13] Bobby: Why do you think it suddenly hit?

[00:17:13] Mark: I have no idea. Like literally no idea. I called the client, I'm like, "Hey, did you know about this?" She's like, "I found it in my email. I was looking up to send you an email," and she goes, "And I saw this thing, portal," and she goes, "It was an unread email from like two years ago."

[00:17:26] Bobby: Oh my goodness.

[00:17:27] Mark: And I was like, "Yeah, crazy." I go, "I can't believe you didn't read my email, but that's great. Thanks for the order." So it's hilarious.

[00:17:34] Bobby: That's cool. But yeah, it's funny. I'm real curious about your advice to distributors since you run a full-spectrum business from digital and marketing. Talk to that young entrepreneur out there who's considering and looking at the business and looking at the landscape and going, "I want to do what Mark's doing," because it's fascinating to me. How do you diversify that portfolio? How do you even begin that step? How do you start to do that?

[00:17:56] Mark: Network. I mean, you just have to network. Like I was telling you earlier, but like walking down the aisles at PPAI, you're like, "Okay, these are my competitors. There's a million of them out there." And you go, "How many of them do stuff other than promo? How many?" It's very rare. So if you can diversify your product offering, you know, and it's funny because you walk down some of these aisles and there's like a printer there, like standing there trying to sell print at a promo event. And be one of the few people that talks to that person. Like goes, "Hey, how do you sell this?" Or learn how to sell print, or learn how to sell local search or Google AdWords. I have a lot of those. If people want references, I can give you references.

[00:18:45] Mark: But it's one of those where those people are trying to crack into the industry and are sometimes the biggest help you can get because they'll be like, "Oh, I'll quote it, they'll get it done for you." Or, "Hey, go quote this," and there's all these opportunities. And they'll even send you leads too. Some of them send us leads.

[00:18:56] Bobby: Is that also perhaps where a lot of the innovation's happening in these small little pockets of interesting industries like that?

[00:19:00] Mark: Absolutely. A hundred percent. I mean, you'll see it where people that will do local search, they'll do all these tools, social media management. I mean, everybody's trying to get a piece of it. And you go, if I can go be a resource for that, what I can do is go be a resource for them in the promo industry. Like I'll go, "I'll tell you what's going on. I'll walk you through the show. Here's who's great at this. Here's who's great at that." And be an educator for them. And I help a lot of, like even in the Omaha market, there's a lot of, you know, agencies that are trying to do promo, and it doesn't work well. And I've consulted with a few of them to say, "Hey, here's how to do it. Here's how to price it. Here's what you need to..." And it changes everything.

[00:19:38] Mark: And you go, it opens a whole world up for them. Like they're flooded. So I want to diversify myself, but I also want to make sure that other people are understanding how to do it so that we don't have bad experiences as an industry overall. Because if they're having bad experiences with a distributor and then they go, "Oh, promo doesn't work." Yeah, it does. It might be just that you've got the wrong person doing it. So it's kinda the same way if you go to a, you know, a restaurant and they have horrible service and you don't like it, like you got a bad waiter. But the food's good. So don't knock that restaurant completely. Try it again. You just had bad service.

[00:20:00] Bobby: Yeah, yeah. You just got one bad server. Exactly. That's a great analogy. Your business is about a third digital, a third branding, and a third promo. Is that ballpark?

[00:20:07] Mark: Yeah. It's probably a little bit more promo heavy in certain months.

[00:20:11] Bobby: Right.

[00:20:11] Mark: But yeah, ballpark, that's about right. It always floats because we have certain contracts on retainer work and certain ones are obviously, you know, promo heavy, but then quarterly, we'll shift because maybe it's a big trade show and then it shifts back. And the thing is, it's kind of nice because I can sit there and go. "Wow, the last two months was a lot. It was really heavy. Let's just work on retainer stuff for the next month and clean up some projects."

[00:20:33] Bobby: Right.

[00:20:33] Mark: So you can manage that internally. And I think that's the coolest thing, where I'm never sitting there like, "Oh my God, the phone's not ringing." You know, it's always crazy. It's a controlled chaos.

[00:20:44] Bobby: It's great to have multiple funnels and revenue streams like that. What's a, in your business, I assume you're trying to look at every client and not every client will be the full umbrella, but when you look at it, what's your ideal, when you think about a client where you're going, "Okay, this is, this is working the way it should work." What does the split look like for that one client? Do you think like a third, a third, a third, or is it different?

[00:21:03] Mark: I try to keep it balanced. I mean, if I, I always know that if I'm doing retainer work with them and we're handling stuff on a monthly basis, they have multiple shots to buy things. So it's kind of a foot-in-the-door opportunity. And then we know it's going to shift at some point to something else. You know, maybe we're going to do a mailer or maybe they're going to do fulfillment or something like that. But it kind of, one thing leads to another, and then all of a sudden you're doing branding and you're doing a lot of different things.

[00:21:29] Mark: So we just kind of start with retainer and then start going the other way because I feel like if you are just doing promo with somebody and you're doing like a few jobs a year or maybe one big job a year, they're too transactional. So I want to move them into the, "Hey, do you guys do XYZ? Like, can you help us with our emails? Can you help us..." And then that becomes a stickier relationship. Where, it's just, it's more involved in their actual business.

[00:21:54] Bobby: Yeah, you're more integrated into the fabric of it. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about, I'm curious because you run all these different disciplines. Let me look for the right word. Looking at the industries you serve, right? So you've got, I assume insurance, you've got financial services. What's your expertise? Where does your business have the most knowledge or expertise? Where do you look at it and say, "Hey, we're really good at serving, you know, these three industries"?

[00:22:20] Mark: Financial services.

[00:22:21] Bobby: Yeah.

[00:22:21] Mark: Big time. That's number one. We do a lot of it, so kind of understanding their world, what they can and cannot say. We do a lot of work with assisted living and health care in general. Big because of the market. There's a lot of health care here in Omaha. And then also just corporate, corporate businesses. Just corporate businesses.

[00:22:42] Bobby: Yeah. You, we were talking a minute ago about, and I'd love to have you just expound a bit more on this in terms of, you talked about looking at how many employees a company has can kind of give you a scope of what the potential spend is in promo. Can you rattle that out real quick for me?

[00:22:56] Mark: Oh yeah, totally. So typically if, if a company has 300 employees, what we do is, like one of my former business partners taught me this years ago, but like the rule of thumb was always to do a thousand dollars times the number of employees is the size of their total marketing budget or promo budget. So 300 employees is about $300,000. And you kind of start there and you go, "Is this ballpark?" And then you know, you might go, "Well, this is tech." So if it's tech, they have more money. So, okay, $1,500. So you kind of figure that out. And then what I try to do is figure out what platforms they're on.

[00:23:30] Mark: So if they've got 300 employees, I always try to figure out what percentage, what platforms that's on, and if I know they're 80% laptop users, then I know, okay, I'm selling laptop bags. Like, I'm selling like, "You guys doing webcam covers?" Like things that go around the laptop economy, like, "Are you guys doing tech?" Stuff like that. And it's really easy to kind of identify that, so.

[00:23:50] Mark: Then I go, all right, they have 300 employees, 80% are mobile. Like they're mobile in nature. I need to sell them something that can go in their carry-on. Like backpacks or tote bags or whatever. I need to get them stuff that they can take to client meetings. So pens, notebooks, all of that kind of stuff. And then I can kind of start to cross off. Like, "Okay, well, they're not going to need all these mugs," or they're probably, they might do a holiday event and maybe need drinkware for that. But you start to know like, "Okay, they need X, Y, and Z." And then you start adding up.

[00:24:18] Mark: If each of those employees spends a thousand dollars, and I want to get 25% of that, so about $250, that's $75,000. So that's $75,000 in promo alone. And I want to try to add, you know, add retainer. They've got 300 employees, they probably have about a 10 to 15-person marketing team. Okay. So I can sell them social media management, or I can sell them web design or a host of other things. So they're paying me a minimum of $7,500 a month. That's another $90,000. So I'm at $165,000. Where's the rest of it?

[00:24:51] Mark: Okay. Print. They're doing business cards, they're doing trade show posters. Okay. All right. Let's add another $20,000. You keep going and going and going. And then you're at like $250,000, $300,000. And you go, "Okay, this is a big account." And then you go, all right, and a lot of times that number's going to be $1,500 to $2,000 per employee if they're a big company. So, like, and you think about like, you know, if you get a company that has, 1,500 employees. So, and just do that across each of those platforms, and they will, that account that has 1,500 employees is a $2.5 million account if I go get all of it. You're never going to get all of it.

[00:25:27] Mark: I love it when people go, "Oh, well, they have a three-person company, and they're like, 'We have John Deere.'" You do all of John Deere? It's like, "You don't do all of John Deere, just an FYI." Not going to happen. But you might do two or three big orders for John Deere. Awesome. I love that you're doing that. Wonderful. But, and I would never say I got all of this account or that account. I don't. But we have some really large accounts that we get a sizable chunk of it. And when you get a sizable chunk, those big accounts produce bigger orders, and you can spend more time on them.

[00:26:44] Bobby: I love the practical advice of employee headcount because you look at the fast-moving sectors right now on the technology side or whatever it might be, and there's a downstream effect. They need more other services. It's still an ideal aim. So last question for you, Mark. What's next for Identity Marketing Group? What are you looking forward to this year?

[00:26:58] Mark: Growth. We keep growing. We're growing fast, and we're doing it with our same headcount, which is amazing.

[00:27:04] Bobby: That's AI's helping?

[00:27:05] Mark: Yeah. How so? We use a lot of different models, and then I also have other businesses that we're adding to the portfolio of social, promo, all of that. AI has been a big one. We started doing AI modeling and data sampling. Incredible tools.

[00:27:20] Bobby: What do you mean by that? For your customers?

[00:27:22] Mark: For our customers and for ourselves. So you wouldn't believe the data that's out there. The data is incredible what you can find. And we charge clients for it. So we say, "Hey, tell us who your perfect account is, and all right, let's go find them and let's go."

[00:27:36] Bobby: And you're using AI tools then to basically do that?

[00:27:38] Mark: Yeah. Use the AI tool, pull those lists into HubSpot or Marketo or Salesforce, shoot out email, create drips. All of that is done through our system and the AI data. I sat on a call about a week ago with a company in the financial services industry, and we have a tool that is mind-blowing for that, and we just asked them to customize it for us, and it's going to be lightning in a bottle. It's so fun to see it.

[00:28:00] Bobby: Isn't it interesting for you to be looking at a year ahead of you with this tactile part of the merch equation and then this very cool digital part that you apparently have some solutions for?

[00:28:10] Mark: Yeah, it's fun. It's another tool in the toolbox. And that's what's cool about commonsku. I run it through commonsku. I'll run the orders in commonsku and put that in there. And then I also have ones where I get referral offline, where I just work with that company and say, "I'm going to put you and this company together," and it's a revenue share. But it's one of those where I love that because it opens up so many more conversations. It's like, "Hey, we did this or we tried this, and this is how it worked out."

[00:28:42] Mark: And then I know one of the questions that you had told me about was how do digital and promo flow together? You'll find out that like when those people are doing campaigns, it opens up so many other conversations. It opens up the, "Hey, here's our holiday list. Make sure that's sent. Here's our trade show list of new contacts. Here's what we have going on." And you add value by understanding more about the client than just, "Hey, here's our logo. That's 185 red and black, and it needs to be on this shirt."

[00:29:01] Mark: That's wonderful. It fills a sector of the industry. But the ones that I think if like I was new, and that probably comes from me coming from a graphic designer standpoint, seeing that and going, "Well, the brand standards used to be just for print. They were always for print, just, here's our color, here's what it looks like on a letterhead." And you go, "Well, what does it look like on a golf ball that has dimples, or what does it look like on a pen? What does it look like on this?"

[00:29:20] Mark: So we've actually written brand standards, promo brand standards for clients. And you charge for it. And go, "Hey, why does this pen not look like that? And why is this etched and why is..." And they're like, "I don't know." And you go, "Well, it's because you're using a hundred different vendors to produce all this stuff. Can I be just the vendor for all of that? And then I'll make sure nothing looks wrong. And I'll solve that issue of you getting to your trade show and your brochures not matching your trade show booth and this and that." And that's what a designer loves to do because they like consistency. They like things to look clean. Brand control. And it ends up spraying into tons of orders that fly through. It's a brilliant idea. It's work.

[00:30:00] Bobby: One thing that also I learned from you is the more you know about your customer, the more opportunities you can find.

[00:30:05] Mark: Oh, for sure. Especially when you have so many different solutions that you do under your roof. They start calling you for other stuff. And if you're the guy that just sells hats or promo or embroidery and you have an embroidery equipment in the back of your office, you're the hat guy forever. You're, they're not going to change their mind about what you do. Like they're, you're the hat guy, or you're our shirt guy, or you're the uniform guy, or you're the person that sells his mouse pads once a year.

[00:30:33] Mark: But if you go in with a much wider pitch, and if my elevator pitch to clients is totally different, I just say, "I play quarterback with your brand, and I've got 30 years experience doing it and some major wins, some Super Bowls under our belt. Let us handle it. You can call the plays with the budget, like you can tell us what the budget is, but let us handle that so that you don't buy junk. You don't buy stuff that's going to fail. It's not going to make you look bad."

[00:31:00] Mark: Like kind of, we were talking in the hallway on the way up, and I said, you know, there's people that will stay in kind of a, "This is my environment, and these are the brands that I sell." And I look at it and go, "I'll go the exact opposite way," like 180. Like everybody sells out of like a SanMar catalog, Alpha Broder catalog. I love both brands, don't get me wrong, but I'll find the guy along the edge of the back, like a Straight Down, or a brand that's in the golf sector like Peter Millar or whatever. And I'll go get with them directly at a different show and be like, "I want to be the rep that only has this."

[00:31:36] Mark: Because when I quote against somebody, I don't have to quote. It's, "If you want this and this is really high end and this is good, this is the price." And they can call 20 other distributors and not find it. And they're like, "Yeah, okay, well that's what our CEO wants. So yeah, we'll just place it." And your margins are better. Your production time, because you know you're the only one selling it. They love you. So that's good. It isolates you. You create a moat. You know, you've read lots of Seth Godin books. You're creating that moat around your brand, but also around their brand to say, "Hey, we can go back and forth, and this is going to work out well."

[00:32:00] Bobby: Yes, you need to do a masterclass for distributors on building your business. That'd be fantastic.

[00:32:05] Mark: Love to do it. Yeah, love to do it.

[00:32:07] Bobby: Mark. Thank you. Congrats again on the award. Thank you. Thank you for being such an amazing customer and an inspiring customer to us. And we appreciate you, my friend.

[00:32:16] Mark: Hey, appreciate having me. Thank you again. It was awesome.