Latest / Spokes & Strategy: Marketing the Bicycle / EP 20: How Customers Actually Choose a Local Business with Mike Blumenthal
Transcript
- Mike B: brand plays a critical role both offline and online. Brand influences decisions after the fact as well as before the fact. And Google knows this. Google has always known this and uses brand as a proxy. They've even in the release of the secret ranking algorithm became clear that brand was a metric that if a business had a lot of brand searches because they did a lot of offline advertising, they would rank higher on Google Brandon Morphew: Welcome to Spokes and Strategy, Marketing the Bicycle with Brandon Morphew and Chris Melman of Miso Partners. Hello and welcome to Spokes in Strategy, where the business of bikes meets the joy of riding. how Mu Mike Blumenthal answered one of our questions caught my attention. The long journey and many pivots involved in making his fifth company successful. I want to hear what those pivots actually involved, what he had to go through, what he learned, and what kept him going. Michael also studies how people choose local businesses, investigates deceptive listings on Google. So today we're connecting the business building story with the work itself. How do you understand what customers need, earn their trust, and compete without losing sight of your values? I'm Brandon Morphew, your host of Spokes and Strategy, and joining me today is Mike Blumenthal. Mike, welcome. I'm really looking Mike B: Thank you for having me. Brandon Morphew: I'm really looking forward to hearing your story and getting into it, but but before we talk about work. I want to start where we always do here is with a little bit of room for bikes and and whatever is bringing you joy. are bikes part of your life these days, Mike? Mike B: Absolutely. I I almost might bring tears such a big part. But so I didn't start biking seriously till I was sixty-four. The kids had finally left. I had spent, you know, a number of years trying to run a business and got overweight and unhealthy and I decided to buy a my bike and it's now twelve years ago. And I bought a trek one, I think it was and I still have it actually in the background. It's not my exercise bike. But I started riding to and from work. I live eight miles from work and Downhill and and uphill home. So the first couple of years I struggled to get home successfully, but my wife was very kind and generous, came picked me up when I needed it. But now I really I start I've expanded my season. I start riding I live in western New York, which as you'm sure you're aware has a bit of a snow precipitation in the issue, but I start riding in er in mid March w weather permitting and I ride through November. I've managed to extend my season that far. Still haven't got gotten to the point where I have spikes on my tires. I'm not that serious. But I ride every day home and back and often will take a couple of recreational rides a week. So I'm putting a hundred, hundred and twenty five miles on a week at this point. Brandon Morphew: Good on you. That's fantastic. Is there a is there a trusty steed in your in your stable that you you choose first? Mike B: Well, yes, there is. I I think I told you this in the green room where my wife I bought my wife a specialized Vado a couple of years back and she wasn't riding it that much, so I started riding it to work, replacing my regular road bike. And it was very it was fun. I mean, I loved being able to go twenty miles an hour as if I were twenty. Right? And I hadn't done that in a long time, so this year though she wanted to ride her bike more. She encouraged me for our anniversary, this is a great woman, right? To go buy any bike I wanted. So I went and bought a specialized Avado SL two six, whatever. I mean specialized has the craziest naming and numbering system. But it's such a an amazing, wonderful bike. It is I've never ridden a bike this much fun. So Brandon Morphew: I I know that joy. I and I'm glad we started there. I I really appreciate you giving folks a little bit of background. And y you know how the bike has has touched your life. That's fantastic. Mike B: Yeah, and it's it it's meaningful every day I ride along this beautiful on a typical day I ride along the Allegheny River and it's stunning, both in and back and it's you know, other than the batch it crazy drivers, I have a great time. Brandon Morphew: You're not alone there. There's lot of us that that make that asterisk as as well. so so Mike is a co-founder and analyst at Nair Media. he previously co-founded Gather Up and Local You. his background also includes running a family retail business. His current work focuses on local market research, specifically for personal injury lawyers, looking at advertising, whether people recognize their names, and how people search for and choose an attorney. but the the description in your response that interested me most, Mike, was this idea of sitting between small businesses, Google and agencies, and helping each helping each to understand the others. so I want to understand how you came to occupy that space. so Mike B: Sure. Brandon Morphew: start starting first, before Near Media Near Media Gather Up or the local search blog, there's your family business. Mike B: Yes. Brandon Morphew: What was what was the store and and what did a normal day look like for you there? Mike B: So it was a five million dollar retail operation, been formed af right after World War II by my father and grandfather. And it was essentially to big toys for big boys. It was cameras, motorcycles, sporting goods. I added a computer division in 1980 and we were very, very successful. We capped out a point in a very small market. Town is 13,000, 14,000 people. we were very successful at a five million dollar run rate. Until we didn't. Apple really screwed us in the early nineties. Every year I was confronting big retail, coming into town, taking ten percent off the top, ultimately confronting the internet, taking another ten or twenty percent off the top till we had to close the doors in two thousand and one. You know, I spent a week curled up in bed you know, worried about the future, about me, about my family. I had two young kids at that point, and about my fifty employees and spent a a week really asleep in bed and got up and realized that everybody was still alive. I was still alive. The business was dead. But I had in the last years of that business started a computer a web development company where we took some open source software, converted it to very early CMS system and built websites for the first right for the immediate time both before and after we lost the family business and laid off 50 employees. Brandon Morphew: So when you reflect on that, you know, obviously it sounds like there was a lot of emotion tied up there and and some h real hard experiences, I think. But when you think back on that work, what what what about it did you genuinely enjoy? Mike B: Well, I loved both the exploration of new technology we We're one of the first because my father ran a camera store and I ran the computers, we were one of the first companies in the country to start selling digital and quasi-digital cameras. And we found a niche very early on into newspapers. So sort of integrating that technology was both discovering it and integrating it. We were a Macintosh reseller, so I was an early user of PageMaker and Adobe Illustrator. And integrated that with laser printers and learned all about the printing industry and sold into so it was what was fun was solving those bigger problems through integration across both industry and technology, cameras, computers, printers, to create working solutions for small newspapers. So that was incredibly fun until it wasn't. And it wasn't after a fashion. So you know. Brandon Morphew: And and and you had, you know, I guess this sort of formative moment, you know, where the where you turn, you know, the turn the lights off and and the business gets wound down. and then you're you're pivoting to this you know technology website production. And what what about the the family business? What what what did that experience change about about the way you worked as you moved forward into this next opportunity? Mike B: Two things. One is, you know, physical infrastructure and inventory were a huge burden and I didn't want that. And employees. All three were huge burdens. One. And two, families are not trustworthy business partners in my situation. That may not always be the case. But I s was very nervous. I mean, I felt both taken advantage of and exploited by close family members in the difficult times that ensued. And subsequently I only formed businesses with people who I trusted both intellectually and financially. And that has proven to be a huge you know, having people that are s as smarter, smarter than me, but in different areas who are just as honest as the day is long. And I found interesting, that's mostly people from the Midwest. It's hard to find somebody from California. Sorry about that. But it was difficult in the time at the initial stages of Silicon Valley and stuff, to find people who I could relate to and empathize with from either the coast, New York or California. And I was drawn towards people from the Midwest, I'm part sort of on the edges of the Midwest, western side of New York State. And I just found that ability to you when you shake hands, that handshake is a bond stronger than any contract. That's the value that I tr look looked for the most in developing business partners and businesses. And I didn't find that with my family. You never know which my pocket the money was going in and which one it was coming out of, you know. So Brandon Morphew: Well, I'm sorry that you had that. I I I don't think you're the only person that's that has had that happen. I think it's a really powerful lesson. Is there anything as you're looking for partners? I think trust is such an important part of any business operations, you know, being Mike B: Yeah. Brandon Morphew: able to trust your clients, being able to trust your your vendors, being able to trust your your partners. you know, I I I it it just it and it's a actually quite a common theme that comes up in the bike. industry. There's a there's a really unique supp supply chain. Unique. It's it's I will say it's a complicated supply chain sometimes and you've got manufacturers and brands. you've got all the retailers, you know, and there's, you know, some folks in the middle and, you know, shipping and things like that. And so is there anything that you've used, any shortcuts or things that you you tend to bring with you n outside of geography, you know, working with folks in the Midwest, is there anything else that you have tangible that you can point to as far as like helping to verify trust or build trust or or you know, good markers that are Mike B: Well, b I so I got involved in local search marketing shortly after I closed the business because I was building websites and they needed SEO, so I taught myself SEO and then when Google Local came out I taught myself that and I w had a blog at the time and virtually everybody who I became my virtual acquaintances became people I would see regularly over time. I would listen to their presentations. I would be able to assess their ethics in terms of how they related to their clients, because they were mostly agency types. And I was able to assess their skills and the way they approached knowledge, which to me at a philosophical level is very important that they that they approach knowledge in a way that allows them to keep learning and keep improving because i it's easy to get into a rot particularly in SEO world and marketing where, you know, you put yourself on you put your business with the client on autopilot, you charge four or five or two thousand dollars every month, and you're not doing shit for excuse me. And that that always bothered me, that model always bothered me. And so I was looking for people who weren't doing that, who were looking to continually learn, continually add value. And over time I learned which of those had intellectual honesty and which had real world honesty as well. And those are the people who I partnered with. Brandon Morphew: So it sounds like, you know, that sort of familiarity breeds trust and in and you know, Mike B: Yes. Brandon Morphew: that kind of you know, working with people over time, you learn to who to who to cut ties with and Mike B: Right. So LocalU is a good proving ground because if they spoke for me at LocalU spoke for us, I could see how well they prepared, how much integrity they brought to their instruction for small businesses, and how willing they were to perform at the crunch time. I mean, because there's o when you're doing present we we used to travel around the country putting on shows. There's always a crunch time in that situation, and you could see You know, some per people you could trust, you know, you give them the football at the two yard line, they get it over. It was exactly like that in Local U, where some of these people were just, you know, they maybe didn't commit mid between shows, but they but when they committed, they committed. That was the you know, the learning, right? always perform and always performed on stage to a very high standard. So you're right. I mean Local U was for me, I me My last two of my last partners and one of my current partners came out of that environment, my relationship with them. Brandon Morphew: You know, s from success can seem very not overnight, but you know, people on the outside don't see how the sausage is made. I think this is, you know, pretty common. And you think about, you know, all of the components so trust clearly, you know, having control over the environment, you know, whether that's you know, working with the right people or or working in the right office, you know, the i working with the right partners. is there anything that you've experienced in that, you know, outside of this people part? You know, I think people maybe it's around product or maybe it's around the the process side of things of systems. Is there anything that you've experienced that you would say really set you up for where you are today? So outside of that people part and the trust piece, is there something Mike B: Yeah. Brandon Morphew: that you've you've sort of like as you've walked through, you know, you've you've, you know, learned, I'm sure quite a bit in the in in the, you know, multiple businesses that you've been a part of? Mike B: Right. Well, one thing I learned which I think is I've applied to every business I've been in since is that I don't want to be the leader. I wanna be the wingman. I wanna be the lieutenant. I am best when I can spend twenty percent of my time studying who knows what crazy thing, because the bulk of those crazy things become products in the future or services in the future. I am best when I can advise the oper chief operating officer or the CEO. I am best when I'm not responsible for every employee. I hate having employees. So for me, the big learning was just to understand that my curiosity was valuable. It needed to be nurtured, but it couldn't be nurtured if I was in charge. And I didn't like the responsibility of being in charge or the need to fire people, whatever. And so I I just learned that I'm really best in a business where I can contribute the way I consistent with how I operate throughout my day. So I'm not layering some management thing over the top of my humanity. Brandon Morphew: reminds me of the the old flo philosophical quote, you know, know thyself, you know, that's sort of understanding where your strengths are and and maybe where your blind spots are. Is there a moment or was there a process that you went through that got you to sort of help you understand yourself better? Mike B: Well no, you know, I mean failing in business has certainly put you on that path because you have to really understand ultimately you have to understand how much is systemic, how much is caused by my failings or other people's management failings and you ke and you can't blame is not a useful emotion in this context. Understanding is, right? You need to really try to be honest with yourself and others around you and take that into the future where y so it it comes from experience. I don't know that there's any other way to get it, but it requires this sort of I I'm not a guy that tends towards guilt. I don't you know, I mean, I felt bad for a week. I spent a week in bed, but then I got up and put one foot in front of the other and started moving forward and and so some amount of resilience is is required, but in resilience you have to not be be constantly blaming or faulting yourself. It's like shit happens, right? I mean, we were in a period of massive retail change. There was no way that somebody who was buying at the level I was buying could compete with the level that Walmart was buying. Just no way. And and we were in a regulatory environment where the rules that used to protect that situation, Robinson Patman, all the stuff that came out of the thirties, government was actively ignoring them. I mean, I once met with our senator and he said, we're gonna ignore it even more in the future. We don't care about that law, which protects small business. We care about effectively they were saying they care about Walmart. And it's like, okay, you can't fight the government and Walmart simultaneously. It's a very difficult spot to be in. So I also learned that you want to be in businesses where you're sort of a little bit under the radar, right? Where you're not being directly targeted by large scale op organizations, because in this country they get regulatory privilege that most small businesses don't have. Brandon Morphew: Sounds like you've had several of these we'll call pivots, in your in your career and in in your journey. is there one that was the hardest for you to make? Mike B: So I I think I expressed this earlier where I always spend some percentage of my time just exploring things that tickle my fancy. And what I've seen happen is every time I let myself do that, sooner or later that Tickled fancy became the next thing I did. So in that sense, I became an expert before I made any money. Like I started exploring local SEO as soon as the red pins came out in 198 or 2005, but I didn't make a dime on it until 2011. So that was six years. I wrote in my blogs, I studied it, I went to speak, I listened to other speakers. I didn't make a penny on it because I live in a very rural area and it's like you knew what who your plumber was and you knew who your shoemaker was. And so you didn't need local SEO. But when other people caught up with me, I started making money, and then that became my dominant thing. 2012, I started Gather Up, which was a review management platform that was designed to help small businesses make ethical decisions around garnering more reviews effectively. And people didn't realize that was important, but I'd been exploring it for three or four years prior to that. And when I actually got into business, I again didn't make any money in that till twenty fifteen. But that turned into the jackpot, right? so y I don't know. I just I've never had a hard time transitioning, but I'm transitioning every five or seven years. Brandon Morphew: Is there anything like a moment or is there like indicators that w so you you've been doing all this and is it just you're making money and that's the point to pivot and and switch or Mike B: I'd ne no, never focusing on making money. I fortunately in a situation where I was making enough money, that was the issue for me. Once we closed the main business, I was always making enough that we could struggle by. And beyond that, I figured as long as I can put food on the table I'm free to do other things. And I pursued those regardless of money. Now what happened was time after time money came at me, and you obviously don't want to turn it away, but I never focused on it as the first thing. I focused on my curiosity, interest, intrinsic understanding of the parameters around these problems. And sooner or later, and I wrote about them because I felt that was the best way to learn about them. Asked the questions that other people weren't asking, and sooner or later money came. my way. money was n you know, I'm I don't know, maybe I I don't belong that well. I don't fit that well in current capitalism because of that. But meanwhile there's so much money sloshing around that if you really are an expert, people are willing to give you money, you know? Brandon Morphew: Yeah. D I I'm just curious the the the personal injury component, the research legal s l lawyers, you know, sort of focusing on this. where did that come from? How did that enter into your Mike B: So near Media has a co we started after I'd sold both Local U and Gather Up successfully. Local U's both are current active companies. Gather up, we sold to private equity. Local we sold to Sterling, Sky in Canada, Joy Hawkins. Those are both going entities. But you know, I worked for them for a while. It's clear that they didn't understand me. I didn't understand them. So I decided to to work with two people who I'd known for close to twenty years and we wanted to create a media company with thus the name Near Media. We tried that. We weren't able to find a great go to market. product that scaled. And so we switched into c consumer behavior research primarily initially in whatever category. So we would with hotels or restaurants or storage or healthcare or legal, we would put together panels of consumers. We would put some software on their phone with their permission or on their laptop. We would record them, we would give them a prompt in each of these industries. We would then record them, tabulate, and we would record both their screen and their voice. And it's seemed very exciting. We got four or five jobs right off the bat, but then we just didn't have the wherewithal to to keep find more business. every I mean we had to become experts in every vertical and that was difficult. And ultimately we partnered with two agencies. attorney Sink and Mockingbird that were in the legal space and through conversations with them before we partnered with them, we, you know, knew about PI law because it's one of the largest local spends in any category. they have huge marketing budgets. And when we took our user behavior research and applied it there, we had some success. They didn't fully understand the value, how they could make as much money as we were charging them. But we then added local more local components in terms of brand recognition and media quality assessments. imperatives and with those three products we finally have hit in partnership with these two firms have hit stride it's now we formed this company five years ago and we're just in the last year hitting a scaled operation where we're as busy as we want to be right now. So we two two or three pivots Till we got here, we're here, we're doing really well. And you know, fortunately we all could hang on. Brandon Morphew: Yeah, and this is a it's an interesting challenge because I think oftentimes people want to be something to everyone. That's sort of like a kind of a Mike B: Okay. Brandon Morphew: you know, a feeling. I think I think it's common. and and when you decided to narrow in and you know, maybe it was sort of forced on you, maybe maybe not, but did it feel like progress or did it feel like you were giving something up? Mike B: Well, we learned a lot by being in multiple categories, you know, because user behavior is totally different based on the category and that to me was totally fascinating. But we are learning just as much in a single vertical. We're really very knowledgeable in that vertical now and We now are accumulating time data in that vertical, which is also given the rate of change of digital marketing over the last two years, that time sequence data is very valuable and a lot to learn there. and also discoveries in terms of Google rank ranking leak. The Google antitrust stuff brought in a whole range of other knowledge and how we're applying all that. We did this great series on. relation of building brand in the local market. Right? People think of brand as this sort of Nike, amorphous, you know, kind of thing. When reality every business has a brand, Google relies on proxies for brand to rank. And what does that really mean in in a local business? So we did a great series, not that long ago, five parts on You know, what is brand? How does it work? How does Google leverage it? How is Google leveraging it different than, you know, what you need to do? How is AI leveraging brand? And how does all this tie together in terms of your marketing? And so It doesn't matter what industry you're in. I mean some of the same stuff applies that we could still learn, but you can become we can become an expert in that industry in addition to, you know, learning about brands. So for me it's not a limit to narrow to really look deep into something. It's a opportunity to I don't know if you ever do macrophotography where you take your camera and you look at the inside of a flower, which you never really can look at. That's what this is like. It brings out this sort of deep view brings out a complexity that you don't really get if you're a generalist. Brandon Morphew: I I Mike B: Not a loss, a gain. Brandon Morphew: Yeah, it's interesting. I I have personally had wonderful experiences when we have sort of a framework and and I'm sort of forced to like narrow in on something. It it is you learn a lot about that. It and it o also opens up a lot of other doors. I think to to your point, it's there's you've s you see the sort of the intricacies and they're often appliable to other spaces. So y knowing that our audience is in in bike, they're either retail or their brand. I'm just thinking about like this this experience that the the the behavior of of a consumer, you know, of someone who's on the other side of the phone or the or the computer screen as as you're you know, you have this view into them. I think that's probably more in depth than than most of us. you know when you're when you're thinking about someone who's using a phone, using a computer and they're they're handling a search task, so if if you wouldn't mind walking me through like what does that session look like when you're you know recording them, you're engaging with with them, understanding their behavior. What kind of questions do you Ask them what what are you what are you looking for? What are you watching for? Mike B: So our user our consumer user behavior research is most interesting to me. And typically there we don't we provide a scenario and we tell them to go at it. And we don't frame it for other than something in personal injury, a typical task would be a close relative was injured, they're gonna be okay, but they're gonna be out of work for the next six months and they need to find a lawyer to help them. You've been you've chosen to do that task. you know, solve that problem for them. so it's an open-ended thing and, you know, explain y your reasoning along the way and pick the lawyer you would or pick the business you would call first. We don't even tell it's you know, what kind of lawyer it is, that sort of stuff. So it's very it's a task that allows them and Google to sort of develop the story at some level and AI to some extent. And so we give them this sort of open ended task, we watch them and we see How whether they know what a personal injury lawyer is to start or they don't. Oftentimes they'll go to AI to uncover what what kind of lawyer they need, or they might go to Google AI mode or AI overviews. They typically won't make the decision there. They'll then go on to Google and start doing a search and then making a decision. How local, what are the issues, you know, how do they make a decision? All the lawyers have 2,000. Reviews and 4.9 stars, so they may or may not be able to use that to distinguish. So, what becomes the second choice or the third thing? You know, when do they go to the website? When do they not? When do they select ads? When do they not? What does Google show them in that process? I mean, Google understands Google's the only people besides us who actually knows what users are doing before they've made a choice. Most businesses see their analytics, which is largely less. Last click attribution. It's the last place they stopped. And Google is more than willing to claim credit for that, but the picture is bigger than Google, right? Picture is much broader than that. And so it's pretty messy and we look to sort of clarify that messiness. Brandon Morphew: Any any like big aha's or things that like made you reconsider assumptions you had? Mike B: Yeah. I you know I've been doing local SEO for twenty some years before I got into this and I thought I knew how people made these decisions. And initially we were doing them in different verticals and what you would re what I realized from that is that each vertical has sort of different criteria. For example, in medicine G general practitioners or you know, people were interested in the best. They would go into Google Local Finder, scroll through 20 doctors, pick the ones that had the best looking reviews, visit their websites to then determine did they look like me, were they in my tribe, did they have take my insurance, did they have an opening? Right? So started out with reviews in Google, went to the website to sort of understand the gestalt. In hot in say storage, they only cared about one thing. They they cared about cost and proximity. physical proximity. I mean in doctors they wanted somebody in town, but they didn't bother, they didn't mind traveling twenty or thirty minutes to get there. In storage, proximity was of critical importance because they're hauling their crap there or back, and price was critically important. So their reviews weren't didn't play an initial role, but they did play a subsequent role. So they'd pick their three to explore and if somebody found bad reviews they might reject them. So reviews play totally different roles in those situations. and so we saw this throughout each industry had a sort of collection of key things. Like in lawyers, you when they couldn't pick based on reviews, because they all they looked at reviews first, they might then move to l length in business, then they'd go out to the website and again there's a certain tribal response to you know all these tricky looking lawyers standing there, two white guys with secretaries behind them, or a more inclusive photograph of people that might have looked like them, you know, you could hear them struggling with that, right? They didn't want to deal with the white male lawyer who didn't look like them. They wanted to deal with people who looked like them, but who also had good reviews, had been in business a long time, et cetera. So you could see these different sort of collection of attributes that people were looking for. Brandon Morphew: I know it's not your focus and and I and I wouldn't want you to make assumptions or or you know sort of like try to try to guess here, but is there anything when you think about independent bike shops, is there anything that you've learned that you think would be worth sort of carrying over and saying, you know, you could confidently say, you know, XYZ are are good things to focus on or important, you know, parts of the process when you're thinking about Mike B: Right. Well the first thing I would do is is tr I mean what we see is brand plays a critical role both offline and online. Brand influences decisions after the fact as well as before the fact. And Google knows this. Google has always known this and uses brand as a proxy. They've even in the in the release of the secret ranking algorithm became clear that brand was a metric that if a business had a lot of brand searches because they did a lot of offline advertising, people were they would rank higher on Google because they were doing brand searches. And then if they went to that website and stayed on that website, Google is watching that through Chrome. They would then rank them higher because the person accomplished their task. So I guess one of the things you can say that I think applies in every business is brand defines sort of pre-existing attitudes and Google measures that with proxies. And a great website where people can get done what they want to get done. So if if you if somebody comes to you recognizing your name, we see this in legal all the time, they do a query on Google and they look and they say, I recognize that name because I liked their ad, or I recognize that name because I didn't like their ad. I mean, in PI law, bad ads are a problem, right? because you you might be perceived as an ambulance chaser if your ad is not really good. and that in Influences their decision to go visit the website, and then the website reinforces. I think that flow is applies to every every business where somebody hasn't doesn't have a loyalty. Like I during the pandemic, a good friend recommends specialized e mountain bikes to me. And I during the pandemic, my wife and I bought two specialized bikes and We love them so much that my brand loyalty was to specialize, not to a dealer. because they be they they were like I didn't know anything about riding moun mountain bikes. I just wanted to do something on the weekends to you know, beyond riding to work every day. And what I found with these mountain bikes was I just let them point the direction and I just had to hang on and they would get me through, right? And they were so intuitive. They made so much sense. There wasn't a hill I couldn't climb or a puddle I couldn't go through. Well, except once when I tipped over going slow in a puddle and landed in muck up to my knees. But that now I became brand loyal, not business loyal. But but brand plays a huge role in these decisions and I and the website that they get to as a result of that locally plays a huge role. So it's this dialectic where It isn't people going to Google making this decision totally devoid of context. And I think that that's true across every business. Now, how that plays out is dependent. And what I would say in a new category that I haven't been in, I would say, well, you better do the research to understand what this journey looks like in its full You know, not the last bit just before they make a decision, but how did it how's the whole journey look? And that's gonna vary by category a great deal. But but the tools are available. G you know, you can interview your customers, you can find out where th how they made this decision, why did they pick you, that sort of thing. And I think that's critical in to every business. Brandon Morphew: So that's a it's a that's a great point. So let's say you're working with a client of a bike shop and they're they wanna grow their service, they wanna understand their service customer and what's happening. Where would you start? Like what what would that process look look like for you? Mike B: Right. Well, one of the things I've learned about bike shops is they come out of people's passion for bikes, which tends to be a somewhat esoteric sport, right? Sp spokes and wheels and gears and you know. And right now with e bikes, there's this tremendous expansion going on that hadn't you know, that I think is a tremendous opportunity, and I think a different clientele. So I think You know, the question is whether they c w a business owner can move beyond their sort of technical framing into a more lifestyle framing is is a question of ability and desire, right? I mean, does the technical owner want to become a lifestyle business or not? Because I think bikes have a tremendous opportunity to reframe everything from exercise to transportation. That's a huge arena. And to me there's nothing more efficient I mean, you could build I think five hundred bikes out of a typical car EV battery, right? You can build five hundred E-bikes. So it to me bikes are this trem tremendous opportunity at radically changing the world, but not everybody wants to radically change the world. Not everybody wants to be part of that. But if you want to be a lifestyle business, I think there's a lot of opportunity to grow. I was thinking about this the other day. My wife is a timid biker. She sits right near the edge, even when there's no shoulder. I'm thinking, my God, you know, she's gonna drop off the edge here and be toast, you know, have this on her face. But she would love somebody to come by once a month, pump her tires up, check her chain loop, lube it, and then once a year take it in, clean it, tune it, bring it back and stick it in the basement for the winter. She would love that, right? But that's a whole different way of approaching biking than we are the bike shop, we are the experts, come to us, we'll fit you. And you know, that's largely the end of the relationship. And I think I th th I think there's room for a lifestyle business around that that a lot of dealers don't take advantage of. Brandon Morphew: I I agree wholeheartedly. I think this is a there's a there's a lot of folks thinking about this right now, I think, in the in the bike industry and and the role that the bicycle plays for people, both both young people and and older people and some of those barriers. This is a conversation that's happening, I think, across the industry. Yeah. Mike B: Right. And I think one area they could be building brand and doing good is being vocal about local infrastructure. My experience riding for the last twelve years is that the infrastructure sucks. Dangerous. a threat to the driver in the car and me. And if they want to solve the growing problem of e-bikes, they gotta solve the infrastructure problem. And I think there's a tremendous branding opportunity for the bike shop that takes that lead in helping people understand the kind of infrastructure that bikers need to both not be a danger to themselves and others. Brandon Morphew: I I love that and and I agree. And I think I y your your current organization, your current current company and and I just shifting gears a little bit here 'cause I I do I'm recognize Mike B: We would do bike research if somebody wants to understand how bikes are chosen in a local market. We'd be glad to do Brandon Morphew: Yeah. Mike B: it. We're just not it's not our first you know, it's not our first thing, but we'd be glad to do it. Just saying. I mean maybe specialized needs it or some or Brandon Morphew: Yeah. Well, there's there's there's bound to be there's bound to be somebody listening that has actually fits that bill. So if Mike B: Trek needs it or somebody who's listening who who can look across markets because that's where it would be really valuable. Brandon Morphew: Yeah, yeah, I could I can see that. So when you think about a successful business and especially like in this most recent iteration of your your business, going beyond revenue, you know, what what does that success need to give you? Mike B: Well, firstly margin. As I learned in my retail business, shrinking margins is a slow path to a painful demise. And margin is everything, right? And one of the reasons I was attracted to software I couldn't un when I first got out of retail and into web hosting, you know, you could take one piece of software to open source that we had modified, deploy it time and time and time again. And it was virtually all margin labor of my time to consult, but a lot of margin there. And I love that about software. It's a little harder when you're dealing with a physical good and you're competing against crappy bikes from Walmart and what have you. But margin is everything. And I understand from talking to a couple of dealers that, you know, names like specialized are squeezing margins on them and s and that's a hard spot to be in because It it's it's you know, you're you're used to running on thirty margin points and all of a sudden you're down to twenty eight or twenty six or twenty four. It's painful. Very hard. So to me margin is the next big thing and I don't know how you get it in a hardware field like that. Brandon Morphew: it's interesting. There's there's definitely some interesting ha thing h happening in the space, you know, as you mentioned, specialized and and I they've got some great products, Trek as well. And there are some newcomers that are Chinese brands, you know, coming over. There's one I believe it's called X Lab and their road and and I think some gravel product and and more coming. And I I think, you know, they're manufacturing a lot of the product for these brands. And they they've done A pretty good job of of looking at the category and sort of so the competition is coming, you know, fast and fierce from lots of directions. And I think it's it's on people's minds. So if you were to make a recommendation to a brand like a specialized or a trek, where where would you to to sort of like help them understand where their value is, understand where they're differentiating as far as a brand Mike B: Right. Brandon Morphew: goes? You know, you mentioned this. Yeah, where would you what direction would you point them in? At least to start. Mike B: Yeah. I mean education at the manufacturer level is critical because particularly in e bikes, well it's true in regular bikes too, build quality is essential. And people don't realize it. Everybody's jumped on the first bike they got and it got down the road and because of centrifugal force it stayed on the road. But build quality is essential. I mean, I ride, I helped form with a group of seniors, I helped organize a riding group every Tuesday, mostly e-bikes. And I can see the problems these guys have from buying cheap e-bikes, batteries, motherboards, doesn't weight, they can't lift the bike and put it on the rack themselves, right? How and yet they're not prepared to spend the three, four thousand it's gonna take for them to get an e-bike. That they can both trust and handle. I mean, I don't know, there's a big gap there, right? So you you know you get a and there are some bikes now cheaper that are in the 30, 40-pound range, e-bikes, but I don't know how you bridge that gap other than through education. And education is hard for the individual dealer to do. So I see that as a huge role for Trek because By necessity they're now expanding outside of the traditional bikers into my wife as a biker and into other people as commuters as bikers and into a society that is caught in an infrastructure problem, right? Unlike Copenhagen or wherever, you know, we have this sort of allegiance to the car and it it creates fear and danger too. So that there's all these sort of impediments to successful biking in this country, but I only s I can s only see the manufacturers as being the ones who can deal with that, not the local dealer. And I don't think they do enough of it, right? I don't know. Brandon Morphew: It's a it's a big ask. Yeah. I think they're they've got a they're getting pulled in a lot of directions, I think. But that's a good direction to recommend. I think that's a to me is an interesting thought exercise anyway. I you know, I think w we'll see what what the response is. On on that front, you mentioned, you know, you sort of always have one of these every five years. You've sort of always got one of these. What's next? What's next? Interested, you know, curiosities. What where is your cura curiosity taking you these days? Mike B: Well recently so for years I used to help small businesses let me step back one step further. I've been helping small businesses in Google business forums since two thousand seven. So going on twenty years I've been helping cover Google's ass because they don't want to devote the staffing to support. Because I felt sorry for these businesses that were dropped into an a technical environment that was run at scale. with no concern for whether one business or another got kicked out or lost all the reviews or whatever. So I've always helped. And one of the problems that I discovered when writing my blog fifteen years ago and I see in the forum is abuses of fake locations and fake reviews. And fake locations are particularly onerous to me. I mean fake reviews are bad from ethical and financial point of view, but fake locations are even more so because it's a form of theft. It th it steals not just from the consumer, but it also steals from the local business. So I've always had an interest in in identifying large scale fake networks that are either lead gen or criminal or whatever. But because they take place over multi-state Jurisdictions, they've been very hard to enforce. Google doesn't have, doesn't care that much about them. They do deal with them once they get reported in the news. I learned that if you can get a story up to the New York Times, it'll come off of Google, but only temporarily. And there's a whole range of signals that you would think Google would be aware of, but for whatever reason they don't focus on. That and it wasn't until Claude Skills came along that I was able to take all of this, you know, 20 years of learning and codify it. And when somebody gives me a list of 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 or 5,000 local businesses that they think are fake. I've developed the skills through Cloud and still using Gather Up and then Gather Up to Claude back again to to be able to assess how likely these are to be in a fake network and what what are the attributes that are identifiable that can educate Google in a concrete way that this really is a fake network. So my It's like my hobby right now, but these things have always been hobbies. I've developed a number of cloud skills that help me assess these networks and then because I'm what's called a product expert for Google, I have access to some staff on the back end. I can then escalate this detailed report that I've built out through Gather Up and Cloud to identify and nail, get taken down these fake review these fake location networks. So that's my current hobby. So Brandon Morphew: it. I like it. well w we're we're coming to the end here. I is there anything I I should have asked you that I didn't, you know, thinking about, you know, bikes and the in the bike industry, anything that that might have been place Mike B: You didn't ask me how old I was when I started biking again twelve years ago. So and that's what Brandon Morphew: I I Mike B: you're mean, because it it to me it points out that you're never too old. I was sixty twelve years ago, sixty-three when I started biking. And I've been biking for twelve years and I'm doing more now than I ever did and it's more fun now than it ever was. And y it's never too late to start. That's my that's the question you didn't ask, but the the answer I wanted to give. Brandon Morphew: Well I Mike, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for taking us you know, behind sort of your business and and the things that you've worked on and inside the t decisions you've made. and and really I think research in general is a is an opportunity for a lot of folks and it doesn't have to be as hard as maybe we make it out to be. It can be just, you know, talking with your clients and and with your with your customers and and Mike B: Yeah, you should I mean they people should be surveying their clients once a quarter, twice a year as to how they and why they came in, how they found them, and why they keep coming in if they're repeat clients. Absolutely. Brandon Morphew: Yeah, I it's great advice. So, Mike, folks can find you and your your blog you're writing at nearmedia dot co. Is that right? Mike B: Yeah, I have an open email also. Blumenthal at nearmedia dot co. I never tr or Mike at Blumenthal's dot com. I never as you know, you reach out to me on email, I try to always respond if they look real. So Brandon Morphew: I appreciate you being here and taking the time. Well, make sure to include those links in our show notes. and I just want to thank everyone for listening to Spokes and Strategy, where the business of bikes meets the joy of riding. Thank you very much.