Confronting Tensions Head-On: The Art of Productive Workplace Conversations

On this episode of the Grow Show, Eric and Jeff center around the concept of "belly-to-belly" conversations - facilitated discussions to address tensions and conflicts within an organization. The hosts emphasize the value of this approach over avoidance or individual problem-solving, providing strategies for effective facilitation.

Additionally, the episode explores the significance of understanding a business's total addressable market (TAM) and how it should inform marketing and sales strategies.

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• 10:11 (Cont.) Confronting Tensions Head-On: The Art of Productive Workplace Conversations

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

All these years,

Eric Watkins: 0:11

but I'm still here nothing. Welcome back to the Grow show. Yeah, can we do it without know? Maybe I wanted Jeff talking.

Jeff Winters: 0:19

You know? What I like is that Eric tell me what such a rush he got here 15 minutes late, and all of a sudden we're in some big hurry.

Eric Watkins: 0:27

Welcome back to the Grow show. I'm here with my partner in growth, not plural, just growth. Jeff winters, how we doing today?

Jeff Winters: 0:37

You said not plural, but you meant partner versus partners, and then you said, Damn

Eric Watkins: 0:41

it started from the top. Start. No, keep going. No, no.

Jeff Winters: 0:46

Growths, partner and growths? No.

Eric Watkins: 0:50

I said growth. Oh, yeah, no, not partners and growth. I didn't say partners. Oh, I

Jeff Winters: 0:56

know what you meant.

Eric Watkins: 0:58

I'm here with my partner in growth.

Jeff Winters: 1:00

I cannot plural order. Read it back to you, if

Eric Watkins: 1:03

you like, not plural. Did I say partners? I did not say partners. You didn't exactly so partner in growth, not plural, meaning I would have said partners in growth if Scott was here, but he's not. We're a little spicy today. If you can't tell out there in the

Jeff Winters: 1:18

ethos, sometimes reality is what you make it.

Eric Watkins: 1:22

That is true. Perception is everything. Sure. Okay. Anyway, you know whose perception I care about? Who's that? The people on LinkedIn,

Jeff Winters: 1:31

I thought you're gonna say, Me, no, not. I

Eric Watkins: 1:33

don't care about your perception. But the people on LinkedIn, I want to know how they're perceiving the content out there, because they're reading some stuff. They think it's good, it's not good. And tell us,

Jeff Winters: 1:51

while the summer may be coming to an end, there is no shortage, there is no slowdown on LinkedIn with both the good and the truth and also some of the lies. Each week we come to you, we bring you two truths and one lie from LinkedIn today. Our first truth comes from Katie Ferris, and this is very personal to me. I've been an AE sales rep for 15 years. I love it. But there's one thing I hate to see when marketers rev ops and other sales leaders treat the sales or SDR teams like a low IQ population. This is like the salespeople are mouth breathing idiots. Yeah, thing she hates and I love it. It happens too often. Yes, we pound away on the front lines. Yes, we are motivated by money, but most of the salespeople I know are actually pretty smart. We like to understand how things work. We like to know the why behind the go to market, strategy and operations. I

Eric Watkins: 2:58

really thought this was lovely. Who she's saying thinks they're idiots.

Jeff Winters: 3:02

She's saying that sometimes the mark when marketers rev ops and leaders treat the sales team like

Eric Watkins: 3:12

idiots. Yeah, we're I don't have any issues with this here. I feel like we have a pretty good marketing sales relationship. Oh, 100% Yeah. But I You see this all the time out there, when someone in marketing makes this big LinkedIn post about using all this jargony information, and you're just, like, something's gonna have to close that deal.

Jeff Winters: 3:32

Well, I think I come at this more of Oh, you're just a salesperson and like, the the the implication is, oh, like, motivated by money, greasy and like, dumb, you put them over there. I've heard that forever, and I've offended by that. As a individual, and on behalf of my fellow sales folks, we can understand. And in fact, I'll tell you this, there are some sales people at this company, plenty of them, in fact, most of them, maybe all of them, in fact, who are pretty darn smart, pretty shockingly. So yeah, probably. And so that just in true, yeah,

Eric Watkins: 4:10

and honestly, yeah, they know more than you. No offense to marketing, but they're talking to people every day. They're hearing what's going on in the market. If your

Jeff Winters: 4:19

marketing people are assuming that your sales people are just like, go over there and sell and close and get the contract signed. We don't need your help, salespeople, you're missing an opportunity. Missing True. True. Marcia Slater, this is gonna sound boring, but it's so important. Business Insurance is essential at every stage it can help keep your doors open, support your employees and more business. What type of

Eric Watkins: 4:49

insurance is she talking about specifically?

Jeff Winters: 4:51

I suspect I have my own take on this, but I suspect whether it be property and can. Casually, or key person, or, yeah, benefits,

Eric Watkins: 5:03

yeah. You know, I go back and forth on insurance, but, you know, back and forth on what kind of insurance it's just, you know, the insurance industry makes not health insurance for employees. Correct, no, correct, no, no. I'm saying like it doesn't do insurance companies take advantage of businesses. Yes, in a lot of cases, however, you still need it. Like, if that's one thing goes wrong, you potentially lose your business. Especially starting out, I'm

Jeff Winters: 5:32

on the other side of this. I started off. I got very lucky. I was I rented space from a company that sold insurance, and I was just undereducated on how many business risks you could truly insure against for a pretty nominal amount of money. I'm setting aside employee benefits in this particular discussion, and I think you'd be surprised at how little money you can spend on insurance and make a huge difference, especially around cyber days, yeah, yeah, there's for sure, so much around cyber and ransomware and what have you, insurance can come in pretty darn handy, even as a tiny company.

Eric Watkins: 6:12

So yeah, I feel like that insurance is just going to get more and more expensive. It is, yeah, very boring, yeah, very boring. Yeah, very boring. You were right about that. But

Jeff Winters: 6:23

you know what? We're not here to bring you entertainment. We've proved that over a long period of time, we're here to bring you what you need. And speaking of what you need, you need to lies. And it comes from Michael M, and Michael M says interview questions should be simple. Are you going to show up during your working hours? Number one. Number two, do you have experience with this particular type of work? Number three, does the salary range meet your needs? And number four, this is it. Do you have any other pressing questions? I'm nearly convinced that the targeted web interview questions and gotcha moments are fabricated for the purpose of power trips and providing an income to the gurus who claim to tell you the proper answers to the questions themselves. Why do we go out of our way to make this way more difficult than it needs to be if you're a hiring manager work to make questions simpler, real and human. Stop trying to make them solve a puzzle just to answer questions properly. Good Lord,

Eric Watkins: 7:30

no, that's dumb. The the part that I feel like this is this is why interviews are important, because everybody is going to be the absolute best version of themselves, if not lie in interviews? Yes. So the goal of interview questions, you do it is complex. It is complicated because you have to root through all of that to figure out who is actually that person that's going to show up, not on that first day, but three months down the road. Are they going to be that same person that they talked about there? Because what's the first question? Are you going to show up to work on time?

Jeff Winters: 8:03

Are you going to show up during your working hours, not even on time?

Eric Watkins: 8:07

What are they going to say? Yes, absolutely.

Jeff Winters: 8:09

Yeah. I don't know. Big maybe on that one, yeah, I

Eric Watkins: 8:13

don't know. Maybe not, maybe not. Do you have? And

Jeff Winters: 8:17

by the way, the fourth one isn't even a good do you have? Do you have questions? That's not a fourth,

Eric Watkins: 8:21

nope, no questions. Can I have the job?

Jeff Winters: 8:23

You know what? You never hear. You never hear amazingly successful CEOs or other leaders go interviewing. Waste

Eric Watkins: 8:32

of time. Overrated. Yeah, just bring them in.

Jeff Winters: 8:35

Will they show up? Probably hired.

Eric Watkins: 8:39

What do they want to make? Okay, okay, good, good. What was number three? By the way, there's

Jeff Winters: 8:43

people this is why I do. This is why I take this because there's people that say stupid shit.

Eric Watkins: 8:48

That person's just tired of interviewing for jobs. That's the reality. I've been beaten down

Jeff Winters: 8:55

the fact that it wasn't phrased will you show up on time? But will you show up during working hours

Eric Watkins: 9:00

at any time, anytime you want to show up. Show up is the absolute highlight of that. That's great. Thank you. Good job. Good job. Today, two for three. Two for three.

Jeff Winters: 9:10

You know what? Business? Insurance is important. Hey, that's above

Eric Watkins: 9:13

50% it's above 50% all right. And then Jeff, take us into the 50 for 50. You

Jeff Winters: 10:02

uh, the the 50 for 50 today. And I think, I think we, there's some of these, we don't do as good a job at, I think we do a pretty darn good job at this is around making sure that your organization has what some in our exec team would call the belly to belly real conversations, the actual conversations with the people who are involved in a particular issue where there may or may not be some contentiousness, ill will or bad feelings. I'm going to unpack that, but I think it's like the the team. Lady belly conversation, having a real conversation. And I, I give credit to one of the partners here, Brian Condon. Is the is the master at this. He promotes this, and I'm bringing his aura to this, 50 for 50. So in any organization, as a leader, ultimately, if you're there long enough, what's going to happen is you're going to have a group of people that are in some way disenchanted with another group of people, whether it's ops and sales or marketing and sales, or maybe it's part of the marketing team in the other part of the marketing team, or part of the video team in the other part of the video team, or the technicians and the accounting, whatever it is. And when that happens, you have a couple of different options. And most of the time, people select option one, which is kind of like, deal with it like, let's just, let's, let's get let's go along to get along everybody. You calm down a little. You calm down a little. It's not that big a deal. Tamp it down, no problem. That's option one. And I don't have any science on this, but my suspicion is that's what most people do. You know, everybody, come on, let's let's not. Then you've got option two, which I'm sure plenty of folks do, which is, you know what I'm going to individually talk to people. This is what I did for a long time, which is wrong. I would individually talk to people, and I would try to kind of smooth it over with every single individual, my own little way. And so then they would go talk. I'd kind of manipulate the situation, and then I would, behind the scenes, try to make things more copacetic for the whole group. Sure that was wrong. And then there's the third way, and I think we do a really nice job at this, which is, you have a facilitator for a discussion, and you bring everybody into the room, and you get it out, and people speak their truth, and it's uncomfortable. There are often tears. There are raised, there can be raised voices, intensity, passion, sadness, and then at the end of that, you have magic. Because once it all comes out, and it comes out if you, if you, if you're able to proctor it right, if you're able to facilitate it, right? You get everything onto the table, and people feel good. They feel a sense of relief. There's issues that have been festering, in some cases, for decades. You bring it out on the table. You have the belly to belly, the real conversation. Everybody gets it out, and then you wrap it up with a really nice sort of ending, and you leave from there. Resist the urge to not do that, because that conversation the first five minutes and the anticipation is difficult, and for some people really, really challenging. Do it anyways.

Eric Watkins: 13:36

I totally believe in this. I think the and this may have been what you were saying with option one, but I think the most popular thing people do is nothing at all. They don't even it's just like hope, hope. It goes away on its own, and it never does. It only gets worse. Second thing is this doesn't mean you have a terrible business like this is actually kind of a good thing, especially when it's business related, like you want friction, like you want people holding others to higher standards. The issue is when they don't work it out and they just talk behind each other's back, and it festers and festers and gets worse and worse. Last thing I would say is when you're doing this, yes, it is a it's gonna be as good as the person facilitating it, but do it regardless, right? Because doing it is better than not doing it at all. But at the end of these meetings, it's over, like, if you, if you bring up something outside of that meeting that you didn't bring up in that meeting. Like, that's a really important part to Claire Faye, I want to make sure everyone has said their piece. And because if you have something that you didn't share in here in front of everybody and you want to share with me directly after the fact I'm not listening to it so important, like, just get it out. But I like that. It's uncomfortable. I will say I've done one of these. I've done a lot of these. One of these went really bad, yeah? And it was, and it's typically when it's two individuals and it's not business related, yeah, but I've done majority, majority of these that I've done, like, it's good, and ultimately, if they am bad, it's typically because people don't want to, don't want to be here anyway, right? Like, if they if you can't put your personal feelings aside for the greater good of the whole then you'll figure that out in this conversation. But like that, people have to be reasonable individuals and willing to do

Jeff Winters: 15:30

that. The extreme of this I saw, I was watching, I saw a clip of, I think it was the former, C. CEO of JP, Morgan. He said they had a really dysfunctional exec team, just like a three day off site, and two days was just getting it out like, you know, and make it really personal and nasty and negative. And then ultimately, people after like that was just exhausted. People were saying to the facility, can we say something positive? And that was the turning point. That's the extreme of this. But I think if you, if you're listening to this, and you're going, Wow, I really do have two, you know, factions of our company, and it's an issue, and, like, we got to air it out, but I'm nervous. How do I do it? First of all, there's plenty of facilitators. But secondly, if you don't want to do that, the key to making this not go horribly wrong, in my opinion, are really strict ground rules. Up front we're gonna have a conversation. But here are the ground rules. And you can you can mute how bad this can get based on the ground rules. If you're a skilled facilitator, you want fewer ground rules, and you just do it yourself so you can sort of get it out. But the ground rules are what puts the guard rails on how bad this can go south, but do it. It's better to do it and have it go south than not do it

Eric Watkins: 16:40

and feel free to cut people like, Hey, Jeff, we've heard your point at this point. Going further into it, is just, is not going to be productive. We understand where you're coming

Jeff Winters: 16:50

from. I'm I don't bring HR to these two What do you think about bringing HR to these meetings? It

Eric Watkins: 16:54

depends. Yeah, if they do, then it depends how HR related it is. I think a lot of these happen where it's just, it's more business related, right? Yeah, and it and people make it personal. If it's, if it's HR related, it's not a bad idea. But I would say you're not running this meeting like you're here for support.

Jeff Winters: 17:15

I if it's if there is a HR issue, absolutely, don't get me wrong, but if it's a lot of these feel and could look like HR issues, but they're not. They're to your point, their business. They're interpersonal. It's not. And then I think if you have HR there sometimes, and we have amazing human resources here, they call themselves advocates. They are. But even there, it brings a level of like formality to it. Yeah, that I think, could stifle the actual conversation. And

Eric Watkins: 17:42

then the other thing I would say is, like, as an employee, like, if you're one of the people that's having this business issue and your your team is upset, and their team is upset, if I, as your leader, have to bring you guys together to solve this, you messed up, yeah, like, you should be able to have the you know, be able to put your ego aside and go talk to this individual. And it ultimately comes out as people feel so passionate they just want to be right. They don't care about the other person's side. They don't empathize, they don't understand. But like, good, really good people don't like, can manage conflict well. And

Jeff Winters: 18:18

let me just go and let me, let me not to put Eric and I on a pedestal. But you know, Eric and I are, for years, opposites, and work as hard as anybody, as passionate as anybody. We argue like, like brothers, but Scott, who in the operating structure is both of our bosses. Have we? We've never been, like, you gotta decide, never, never, yeah or forget to side like, maybe even just like, we'll figure it out. Like, we never, have, ever, ever, ever, and we're as passionate, like, think about that, like, if, if he and I can do this, anybody can do this, right? It's high stake for us. It's as high stakes as we have, yeah?

Eric Watkins: 19:01

And I think it comes down to, and it's not like, oh, yeah, Jeff, whatever you want. Like, we, we get at it a little. We had it out the other day, yeah? But, you know, you ultimately got to be reasonable and understand, like, there's, there's a middle ground, there's always a middle ground. Yeah, yep. Good stuff. Not

Jeff Winters: 19:23

on that one. On that one, Eric was actually right. There wasn't a middle ground. There wasn't. In fact, I've never, now that I'm thinking about it, maybe that's why it goes so well, because I always get my way. I've never once been on the right side. Good golly. Uh, no, that's not true, and it is. But let us now move over to Eric's section, grinding. It's not grinding mining, mining,

Eric Watkins: 19:52

grinding in the mine,

Jeff Winters: 19:53

mining,

Eric Watkins: 19:58

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, today for mining, for growth gold, we're going to take a step back, and we're going to take a look at your business. And a phrase we use around here, which a lot of people use, are familiar with, is Tam, total addressable market. And the way I I like to look at it, instead of the amount of individuals you can target is really the the number of companies that you can go after as a business, a you need to know this as a business. And I'm not saying you need to know the number down to like the you know if you if you're pretty agnostic, I'm not saying you need to know all million companies. You can go after, but you need to have a pretty good idea of how many companies are in your total addressable market. And then you got you need to be smart about how you spend your money based on the size of your Tam. So I'll give you a couple examples. So we set a threshold of clients that we work with of a minimum of 2000 companies that we can go after. It's not, it's not too many where we can't work them through our call process. And it's the right amount, and it's enough to be able to know that, you know, a certain part of the market is not going to be interested, and in what we do in cold calling and cold email and through LinkedIn, it justifies the the outreach that we have, then you have two other sides of the coin. You have some prospects who they have 100 companies they can actually work with. Yep, they have a super specific service, and they can only go after these 100 companies. I'm not saying you can't cold call or send cold emails. You absolutely should, but But you should be spending so much more money per customer. You know, if our average program is $4,000 and you look at it and you're marketing to 2000 companies over the course of year, it's like $2 per company. You should not be spending $2 per company if you only have 100 100 prospects to go after, or 100 companies that you can work with, you have to get more finessed. You have to be more strategic, and also your brand and reputation matters that that much more. I'm not saying brand and reputation doesn't matter, but the more companies that you can go after, the the rewards of being more persistent outweigh the risk of one of the 2000 being upset, yes. And then when you go up at the top end of this, you know, it's even more extreme. And how do you, how do you get, you know, if you, if you eventually have, you know, say you have 100,000 companies that you should go after. You could do some cold calling. You definitely should be doing some cold emailing, and you probably can be running some sort of advertising to catch the because you don't need you only need 5% of the market to be able to fill your pipeline. So I know this is a little bit you hear it and you think common sense, but I think there's people out there that are not strategic enough if they have a smaller target market. And I think there's people that are trying to be way too strategic when they have a huge target market, and they really just need to be conscious of the message. And how do I get it in front of as many people as possible? Step

Jeff Winters: 23:12

one, what is your total addressable market? What are the what's the total number of companies that can buy your stuff? Do you know it? Does your team know it? I can tell you that if you ever went to try to sell your business, or if you went to get investment, that's a top three question, yep, every and having gone through this several times, what's the total addressable market? And they asked that for a very good reason, because they want to start to figure out strategically. How do they approach that market? What's the potential market size? How much have you captured? How much can you capture all of those things? And so if those are strategic elements that someone else is going to use to potentially evaluate whether they're going to buy your business or invest in your business, you should know it. Just take it as truth. Hey, we haven't really thought about it. Let me figure out. And by the way, it used to be, used to be impossible. You used to have to make a lot of assumptions and guesses. Now, with with chatgpt and perplexity, like you can really get good information. So I encourage you to do that, start there. And then. To Eric's point, I added a specific example. The other day, talking to a prospect who's got 200 companies. He can brought in great business. He's got 200 companies that he could potentially work with if he emails all 2000 a regular or 200 some sort of regular prospecting email, and it goes south and 100 unsubscribe. Now he can only communicate with 100 of his potential universe, and maybe that happens in two days. Yeah? You know, if he doesn't, if something goes awry. So this is something a little more strategic than our usual tactical stuff, but I think it's great advice,

Eric Watkins: 24:52

yeah. And I think the the other thing that goes in with this, now that I'm thinking about it, is Okay, so now you know your Tam, you know the number, right? I know it's 2000 I have these 2000 businesses in my market are the highest likelihood of me doing business with now you need to know about them. And I think people are get caught up in, especially in like local markets, they might get caught up in, what is my sales this month and what is by sales next month. And the reality is, if you sell a service where you're locked geographically and you're locked in these companies, you need to play the long game. You need to know, okay, these are the companies. Here's who makes the decisions. Here's what they care about most. And like building that, that data over time will allow you to get so. Much more advanced in your marketing and sales strategy? Yeah,

Jeff Winters: 25:40

and look, we don't do a lot of promotion here, but I think it's important, just from a tactical standpoint, to share that is why, when we work with companies in local markets, we spend time relationship building. That is the game, because if you have 2000 or 3000 folks in your market, you need to be relationship building. And that's the difference between tactic, whether you outsource it or INSOURCE it, sort of immediate gratification, spray everybody that you can with messaging and hope that you get meetings, versus we're gonna take a little longer term approach. It may not be as fruitful in the first month or two or three, but you're going to build relationships, and you're not going to take that entire market and throw in the garbage can. Great point. Thank you. Well, it's

Eric Watkins: 26:29

actually my point. You just had it on, but I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. All right. And next, Tales from sales, what are we going to do with all these leads? Your sound still sucks. It's just not good. I didn't make it. You. You approved it, and

Jeff Winters: 26:46

now you're interrupting it. Okay? It has to breathe. We've got all these leads, unless you're a small tam company, very few of them. But it doesn't matter. They're very they're they're high value leads in that yes, either way, you have to have really crisp follow up. And we have a 60% close rate alert, a 60% close say it Eric, a 60% close rate alert. On a new tactic we've been trying. I really like it. So POST call follow up. We've said it given tactics, it's so bad post sales call follow up is universally bad. I I'm trying to think of any sales POST call follow up, follow up, post sales call ever like plural, plural callback early in the episode that has ever been good or clever or interesting or value add, and I can't, and so we fight for that around here. And one thing we've been doing that has been extremely beneficial, 60% close rate alert has been after a sales call for our inbound product. So we're website, social media, search engine optimization, paid ads that product. What we're doing is a on the call. We're going through an audit for free will. We audit the website and digital presence, and we present it in advance with no nothing we have the call, and then, if it's a real prospect that we think might be wanting to partner with us. We take that call and we send it to our our guru. Is the best way to describe him. He is technical, he is brilliant, and he doesn't have time to be on every sales call. And so he does a two minute video in more depth about the audit that we just did, how they can potentially address any gaps in where they are and where they want to be. And it's just a little more technical dive from a very credible guy who is a legit gene like, he's one of those, yeah, you know, and we've been sending those, they're 90 seconds, two minutes, three minutes, 60% closer, dang.

Eric Watkins: 28:55

So how would you do this in industries, maybe not as technical savvy like, how

Unknown: 29:00

would you who's your guru?

Eric Watkins: 29:02

Who's your guru? Just had the subject matter expert,

Jeff Winters: 29:05

who's your guru one? I'll go back to local markets. Who's your guru on that geography,

Eric Watkins: 29:09

yeah, who's

Jeff Winters: 29:10

your guru on I've just done a little extra research. Here's what I found. I love that. Here's what I do. If I were to you, I have a maybe I have a software that does project management, helps you manage your projects. Hey, I was thinking about what you said on the call around the types of projects you have and the number of people you have. I did a quick video in the software of how you could set this up, whether you do with us or do it somewhere else, like this is kind of how I might diagram it. I

Eric Watkins: 29:37

love that, and I know software builds a lot of this into their sales process. Where will they bring the the tech person on the next call? And it's so interesting on those calls where the sales reps will start talking, and you're like, No, no, no, no, I don't I don't want to talk to you. I want to hear from the person that knows what's going on that's right. So not only can you do this without having to hire a sales engineer, right? You also get that person involved in sales they feel good about it. They're a part of it. If you can figure out a way to reward them a little bit too. I love that.

Jeff Winters: 30:08

It's good stuff. And I'll say this like, sometimes the subject matter expert on the sales call is not, is not great, yeah, sometimes they want to talk too much. They want to show exactly what they know. They're not a salesperson, so they're not looking for the cues. It's not natural. If you do it, not this person I'm describing on our team, it would be awesome. But I'm saying if you do it the way I'm describing the video, it's compact. You can edit it a couple of times if you need to. It's great value. I encourage you to try it in your post call follow up. Process. It's great. 60% close rate. Alert,

Eric Watkins: 30:40

alert, yeah. Alert, yeah. We've made it. We've made it to everyone's favorite section to do or not, to

Unknown: 30:50

do

Eric Watkins: 30:52

or do not. Q Yoda, thank you. There is no try. Thank you, Ryan. Okay. Today this, hits near and dear to home. There is a new restaurant opening up, and I won't use any names. They haven't paid for the sponsorship, so they don't deserve it, okay? And I haven't tried it yet. However, they have a little soft opening coming up, a soft opening, soft opening. And so should you go to soft openings, or should you wait till they get their stuff together and the food's actually good? Oh, man, what do you think?

Jeff Winters: 31:28

Jeff, so, like the ego, part of me always wants to be invited. I'm trying to think, if I've ever been invited to a soft opening, I don't think so. Yeah, I know that I would love to be invited to a soft opening. I would feel good being invited to a soft opening. I don't think I ever have so from my ego's perspective, do I want to go to a soft opening or be invited to a soft opening? Oh yeah, oh yeah. Can you imagine the glamorous people, real, who's who? Glad handing famous. Yeah, but from like a food standpoint, am I anxious to go

Eric Watkins: 32:10

try the the new grill?

Jeff Winters: 32:14

I don't think so. Yeah, I don't. I don't need that. So I want to, well, how would you describe my answer?

Eric Watkins: 32:20

I would say you're you're a yes, because you because your ego outweighs what you feel about the food. And you know what I would say, I'm the same one because, like, here's the deal. It might be good, it might be bad, but here's what I get to do. Yeah, someone comes up to me and they go, Hey, did you hear about that new restaurant? Oh, not only did I hear about it, I was at the soft opener, and it sucks that food is terrible, or, like, it's amazing. You have to try it. You have to go. You want it. You want to be that guy.

Jeff Winters: 32:49

I would love to tell someone that I would have a conversation and manufacture some way to tell people that I went to the soft open, yeah, like, oh,

Eric Watkins: 32:59

there's a lot of new restaurants opening up around here, yeah. And they're like, Oh, really? Which ones? I think there's this one called blank, oh yeah, I really want to go that. Oh yeah, I went to it.

Jeff Winters: 33:10

Or, like, I will ask somebody how their weekend was. So they would ask me how my weekend was, so I could tell them I went to the soft

Eric Watkins: 33:16

opening. And you know what you would say first? Right? You'd say I went to the soft opening. No big deal. Wait till they ask. Well, what restaurant? Well, I'm glad you asked. Yeah,

Jeff Winters: 33:25

I think it's and then I just, you know, I think it's gonna be really hard to get into for a while. So, yes, you know, maybe set it out.

Eric Watkins: 33:31

Sit it out, get the re in early.

Unknown: 33:34

I was at, yeah,

Eric Watkins: 33:35

I'm sure we could speak. You know what? I actually, I met the owner too. I could maybe get you in there.

Jeff Winters: 33:40

I don't know. Seems like a real swell, folks that own it. It's really,

Eric Watkins: 33:45

yeah, you know what? I actually don't want to go to a soft let me know when the food's good, yeah, let me know when the

Jeff Winters: 33:51

food weekend is okay. Is that special? Not really. Did go to the soft open?

Eric Watkins: 33:56

Yeah? No, yeah. Nothing hard, just soft, opening, regular soft friends and family? Yeah, no big deal. I'm not a friend or family. I somehow got invited. I don't know how, but All right, well, you heard it here first you do it, and you brag about it, or you don't do it at all, and you wait till it's good, and

Jeff Winters: 34:12

you pretend like you did. Is there in the first place? Is

Eric Watkins: 34:15

there a bigger flex than declining? Yeah, I got, offered to go to this the soft opening. I chose not to. I just don't think the food's gonna be ready for me yet.

Jeff Winters: 34:25

I can't even imagine the level of shame I would feel if I said with such pride but falsely modest, I went to a soft opening and somebody said, Oh yeah. I got invited. I didn't want to go,

Eric Watkins: 34:36

yeah. Oh, sound good. Oh, and then you have to act like it's good. You can't come back and be like You're right. It sucked. I

Jeff Winters: 34:45

can't actually wait to do that to someone else. If I ever come across somebody, they go, Yeah, I went to the soft Yeah. I didn't want to go, yeah.

Eric Watkins: 34:54

All right, okay, that's all we got for today. Thank you all for tuning in as always, subscribe, rate. We're trying to do whatever we can to help you grow your business. Let's grow. Let's grow. You.