Book Club Discussion – Sticky Branding with Jeremy Miller

Mickey Gamonal: My name is Mickey Gamonal and I run ASVAB Domination. So, anyone who is trying to get tutoring for their military career, I hope can assist with that, asvabdomination.com.

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

John Williams: Yep, everything except I do the back-end stuff for her. She’s a rockstar.

Paula: Which is why you’re in the dark. Can you turn on the lights a little bit, John?

John: Well, I can’t turn up the lights right now.

Paula: Okay, that’s cool.

Tyler Hall: Tyler Hall, Shrek Eagle Aviation. We’re a start-up part 145 maintenance facility in New Mexico and San Antonio, Texas.

Jeremy Miller: Well, I am the author of sticky branding and I run a strategy consulting firm called Sticky Branding.

John: Nice.

Paula: Very consistent.

Hal Stevens: Hi, I’m Hal Stevens, president/owner/founder of Sapphire Aviation Solutions, I wear all hats for my company. Just my wife and I, it’s a consulting company primarily with business jets from a technical standpoint. Pre-purchase inspections, large maintenance events right now, I’m in Gravenhurst, Ontario, overseeing a craft going to paint, stripping and repaint. Nice to meet you all.

John: Nice to meet you. So basically, we’re just going to be talking about the book. I think, I’ll let Jeremy kind of take it away. You wrote it. So it’s it’s a really good book. I really enjoyed the stories about you taking over the business and everything like that. But if you want to give us a rough outline or what you thought of it.

Jeremy: Sure. As you probably got for the book it was when I wrote this book, it was really trying to answer that question of I wish I had that when. And I’ve been revisiting the story a lot over the last year and a half with the pandemic. Because everything took on a very different light in this last couple of years, which was I grew up in a family business, I was in the recruiting sector and and I can tell you in vivid detail what each and every recession has felt like I’ve been like starting with 1989. Now, at that time, I was a teenager, I was a kid, but I remember the impact that had on my parents. And so when I joined the family business, that had always been a dream of mine. I remember in high school, at one point, I told my mom, “When I grow up, I’m gonna take over the family business”. And I think she panicked a little. She said, “Oh, that’s nice”. But she talked to some of her friends, both my parents did, and who ran other family businesses and their advice was, “You don’t want to have a lucky sperm and that’s just entitled of the business. You got to set some barriers to entry”. So for my brother and I, the rules that we had were: we had to have a university education, we have to work in the real world for at least four years and there had to be a job when we had to be qualified for it. And so, I started my career in the software industry selling CRM and I joined basically four years to the day and 2004 and it was timed. We were looking at a growth market and that type of set standpoint and one of the first things I did as I rebranded that family business and you can see behind me, there’s lots and lots of books and I remember and I went through that process that I was reading all these books about big companies like Apple and Nike and Starbucks, and I really wished where was the company like mine. And so to write the book, what I did is I profiled a hundred fifty companies from around the world and I combined it with my own story, to create what I felt was a practical tool that we could use and refer to. You may not read it cover to cover, but you can go and pull out different pieces. And so the idea behind it is, “How do you grow your business and brand?”. And any business of any size can grow a sticky brand. To me, it’s about creating that first-choice advantage. How do you get your customers to know you, like you, and trust you? And when your customers know you, like you and trust you, they will choose you first. And so, that’s the underpinning philosophy of it. But I’d be curious, just from everyone today who’s been reading it, “what stands out for you?”. If there’s questions that you’d like me to answer them happy too, but it’s, I’m curious what stood out for you in your own reading.

Mickey: Personally, my mom’s an entrepreneur and it’s definitely encouraged me to be an entrepreneur. And it sounded like, you know, reading through it, it was interesting to see your goal was always to take over the family business and I remember the specific part of the book where essentially, you were starting the business and you were trying to rebrand it, right? You were trying to like go after a different demographic and everything like that. And they were really calm when I didn’t just like explode, right? Like you expected a really big change, pretty immediately and I think I deal with that myself as I try to to launch my business. Every new launch and every new product I think is going to be the thing that puts me over the edge and everything like that, but it sounds like it’s a much more patient game, which is tough because that’s not that’s not what sells people on, entrepreneurial pursuits, right? Like entrepreneurial people are movers and shakers. So I think it was a really good reminder. I think patience as a virtue, for an entrepreneur, was really what stood out to me the most.

John: It’s a marathon not a Sprint.

Paula: Right. That’s it.

John: There is a chapter on, tilting the odds, requires sacrifice. Yeah, well, I know enough we need a lot of companies who can’t go through that for one reason or another. We’ve been through it several times to have minimal revenues in order to function and jump or drive or grow forward. That’s a tough one for new entrepreneurs to understand.

Jeremy: Yeah, it’s making those choices. It’s tough for established businesses too because if you think of the revenue plateaus I talked about in the 12th principle, in order to grow your business, there are natural plateaus. 1 million, 5 million, 10, 25 50, 100 etcetera. And at each stage, your building, for that next level. But to do that requires a sacrifice. I can give you a quick story on this. To reinforce what you’re saying John, the company I’ve worked with for several years is a Canadian company called Central Smith. And if you’ve eaten ice cream at any Canadian restaurant, well chances are, you’ve eaten their ice cream. They’re one of the largest manufacturers for the food services sector. Now, when I started working with them in 2016, they had I believe 9 market segments that they were targeting and we did the math, So the question was, “How do we grow the company?” and 80% of their marketing dollars went into scoop shops because that was the most visible area of marketing. That’s where they had their major competitors, like Kwartha Dairy, and Chapman’s, and Nielsen, and all these other Canadian ice cream brands. And the problem was, when we did the math, that revenue accounted for point, 0.7% percent of the total revenue. So doubling that business didn’t matter, but it took the line shareware dollars. And so in 2016, we reposition the brand to focus on food services and co-packing. Now through the pandemic, taking that they were significant in the restaurant trade, that business went poof. It basically disappeared in March of 2020, with every restaurant being closed. But the interesting part was the co-packing side grew by about five times. And so with that, we doubled down again onto co-packing. Now, within these types of sacrifices, sometimes there are more emotional than spending money in order to grow to the next level. We had to make another set of choices and we actually segmented their customers into fish. So we called them wales, tuna, salmon, goldfish, and narwhals. Okay. So a whale was any customer that had over two million units a year, a tuna was 500,000 units to two million. A salmon was one day on the line, which was 67 thousand units. A goldfish was anything below that, and a narwhal was basically unicorn services of fish with a horn. So those were professional services. The sales reps up into this point had always said, their minimum size order was 10,000. And it was based on how many cups they could get from the packaging Distributors. And what we had to change them by doing this segmentation, was to say, our minimum was 67,000. And the sales guys fought that to the nail. And they were like, “I just found the greatest brand. They are so awesome.” And they would just take a big retailer. Whoever it is. And the owner, will be like, “Cool. How many units?” Oh, 14,000. No. And that’s an $80,000 deal. That’s $150,000 deal. No, too small. In order to get to the next level from where they were, we had to set our minimums. And that was culturally, fought tooth and nail. So, when you make a choice to differentiate, when you make a choice to tilt the odds in your favor, it means saying no to other things, and it means sometimes abandoning customers and markets that you were really good at. And that’s the hard part.

Paula: That’s true. That’s absolutely true. And sometimes it’s things that that you really enjoy about your business. And, you know, I think that’s the important thing is that you know, you have to have a balance between what makes you money and what keeps you turned on. You know, because people aren’t in aviation because there are a thousand ways that are easier to make money besides Aviation. I always say, you know, the best way to make money in aviation, or to make a million to become a millionaire in aviation is to go in as a billionaire. But you know, that’s just one of the old sayings about this, but I just wanted to tell you we have read so many books on branding in this book club in the last couple of years. You know, and they are all good for different reasons. Well, all of these are good for different reasons, but I really did enjoy yours and I think, you know, it was probably the most readable and practical. Of the bunch. I don’t know if you would agree Mickey or John, or, you know, I guess you’ve been here the longest.

Mickey: Yeah. No, I completely agree. I thought it was, it was much more story-based, which is tough to do with a marketing book. So, I enjoyed that.

John: Well, it’s not recent now. When I went to business school, the marketing approach was you assume that your client is going to be Coca-Cola, Pepsi, those guys. And they spend 70% of every dollar on marketing. Every dollar revenue, 70% of it. Well, we can’t do that. And I mean, no company I know of does that. So that means all the marketing that they taught us in business school was just out the window. And you got to start over.

Paula: Right. And if you’re Coca-Cola, you know, it’s fantastic. But if you’re not Coca-Cola, it’s hard to apply.

John: Exactly.

Paula: Yeah.

Mickey: So how much do you spend in percentage of revenue on marketing and sales on marketing. Group the two together.

Paula: I think I’m gonna go with an average for what I know about our clients, because we’re a marketing company, and so our clients, probably spend less than 20% on marketing and sales put together. You know, most of their capital goes into customer experience and they’re depending on that for repeat business. But Tyler and Hal maybe you have some have a better feel for that, than I do because you actually have aviation companies.

Tyler: Hal?

Hal: Yeah?

Tyler: I’m curious about what you spend in marketing.

Paula: If you’re willing to share, oh, come on, you’ve got a website from us, couple years ago.

Hal: That was a year or two ago. I did go out to do a website with you folks but since then, no. I mean, the only thing I pay for is business cards. I’ve been in the industry for years. The most part is repeat business, word of mouth, and of course, knock on wood, I have a decent reputation. Zero. I mean I don’t go out and do any real advertising. It’s just sometimes I go to shows. You know I missed them this year because I couldn’t gey my wife to go with me.

Tyler: This is my stack of cards from NBAA.

Paula: Wow. You were busy. That’s three days. And you’ve got 30 cards there?

Tyler: Oh yeah, or more.

Paula: So it’s a lot of in-person marketing. Jeremy to answer your question, and you know, I’d say 20% or less. I think Hal’s been in business for a really long time and he’s kind of an outlier. So the newer businesses are spending more, older businesses are spending less.

John: Your time is also a cost that’s not being accounted for. So look at business development, networking, time and field, that is part of your real marketing spending. Especially with what percentage of your time is a good indicator of this.

John: We spend more than that. We spend more than 20%. We don’t spend 70%. But it’s between 50 and 70.

Paula: Right. So if you count going to shows, the travel, the hotels, the restaurants, you know, all of that is a marketing cost and at least in our books because we write it on our taxes that way. So Hal I don’t know if that changes your thinking?

Hal: Yeah, when I was going to my NBAA like Tyler said, you got to press the flesh. You got to go shake hands while you’re out there. And what Jeremy said as far as doing your own networking and that. And your time. I do a lot of that. I’m a sort of a nervous Nelly. When I don’t have a project for two or three weeks, I started calling people and trying to find new customers on LinkedIn, and my wife and most of my colleagues are like “when are you gonna slow down?” Well, I’m only 65, and to me, I’m just getting started.

Paula: Yeah, absolutely.

Hal: So when it gets in, it’s always a way when I get it or land a project, then the phone starts, ringing, and I need to be in three places at once. I roll with the times, so, to speak.

Jeremy: I think that really makes sense right now. I’m curious if you see it differently in your industry. But what we’ve seen after the pandemic, is a lot of the collapse of digital marketing as a lead generation platform. And what the phrase we often use is marketing looks a lot more like 2005 than 2019 today. So those tactics that you’re describing is are something we’re seeing across the board, especially with young people. Millennials are learning how to sell for the first time. They’ve never had to prospect. They’ve been spoon-fed their deals, their whole lives and all of a sudden,
“Oh wait I have to call a CEO? What does this mean?”

Paula: “How do I do that?” Yes.

Jeremy: It’s 101 learning. It’s crazy.

Paula: Right. And Mickey and I were just having this conversation about, you know, leads falling off on a lot of the social channels and on email as well. So what do you do instead? And, you know, we’ve been going through that a little bit.

Mickey: Yeah. No, I absolutely with, I think post outage, to post Facebook outage, I feel like the ads haven’t been delivering as well. That could be just like a psychological thing though, right? Because your faith is shaken.

Tyler: Excuse me. I hate to disagree. There are roughly 21 type clubs in aviation. And I’ve started joining everyone I can find because these are people that have problems and they’re asking their cohorts, that all fly the same Bonanza, Cessna, Piper, King Air citations for you know, “Where do I get this part? And “where can I get this?” And, you know, in the aviation maintenance, you know, I definitely want to be, you know, a part in watching those conversations going on daily. You know, “where can I get this? where can I get a prebuy on a 310 in Oklahoma?” You know, came up the other day. “How should I redo my whole my whole panel and what do I do first?”

Paula: One of the questions from the book is, you know, “Do your customers, choose you first you know?” I love that question and Tyler, the answer for you is because they know you and they know, you know the answers especially the Southwest.

Tyler: Yeah. I’m working with one of my previous customers. I’ve been in the aviation fuel business for 28 years. I’ve been a pilot for 55. So I provide the box into which fuel is delivered, you know. I don’t make the fuel, I don’t sell the fuel but, you know, we put fuel in airplanes, through pumping equipment tanks and that sort of thing. And one of my customers now is looking for a major maintenance issue with their to carriers. I’m going to keep the name of that customer, you know, private at this point.
And now I also made the decision not to put up a website, that was bad. You know, and I want Paula to do a good one, once we get some funding here. And you know, it’s been personal contacts, going to these individual shows. The Gatherings. I went to a serious gathering in Lauren Scottsdale. That could be huge. Enormous.
Multi-million-dollar contracts to update their panels. There’s 3,800 Cirrus aircraft that need 2008 to 2009, that needs a whole new avionics Suite. $75,000. 3,800 aircraft in that category.

Paula: That’s a huge Market opportunity.

Tyler: Yeah.

Mickey: Would you say that some of that comes from Facebook? Like learning about those different opportunities?

Tyler: Well, once we get an operation, we should, you know, I’m going to get back onto that, you know, their website, their magazine will put an ad in or news release or something. 50 people have already placed orders with Aventine.

Paula: Right. And they already recognize your name because you’re the one who’s answering the questions in these forums.

Tyler: Yeah. I was there. I was answering questions and what they have to do when they place the order with the factory is list me as the installment broker. And, you know, I get to say, oh, we’re in tax-free New Mexico.

Mickey: Even better.

Jeremy: That’s a huge advantage. Good deal.

Tyler: Huge advantage. You know, when you’re talking about this kind of money. So now, you know, Jeremy, I’m sorry I have not read your book, but I want to.

Jeremy: Okay.

Tyler: And yes, I did go to work for my father right out of college. He had just started. He bought a division away from a big company and it was six months into it. And fortunately, I was able to use my business degree to straighten out the accounting and do CRM and you know, books, logs, record-keeping, and all kinds of stuff to help them move forward. Now. I left him after about four years because I want to keep friends with my father.

Paula: There’s a lot of family businesses in aviation. And I wish they all had the barriers to entry that you set up or that you had Jeremy in your family. Mickey and I went in completely different directions. He started his own company, but we’re able to work together sometimes because we’re working on the same problem and he has a much different perspective because he went to school and he’s taking classes and is doing some technologies that I never heard about until he tells me about it. So, you know, it’s kind of cool.

Mickey: Yeah, well, it goes both ways. There’s a lot of foundational knowledge that I’m definitely lacking. So, you know, any time that I come across something that I don’t know, I can call my mom. She’s already seen three different variations of it. So that’s to my advantage as well. But we don’t work together because we want to stay friends.

Mickey: It’s everybody wins on that level for sure.

Paula: Right? So I hear where you’re coming from Tyler. I can understand that totally.

John: I thought it was pretty amazing how much money companies are losing, according to your book because they want to have a cup of coffee in the afternoon.

Jeremy: Yeah. 6% of your payroll is going out with the door every day for coffee. I don’t know if it’s the same number now, with covid. It’s probably higher since they’re not coming to the office.

John: But it was even worse, you know.

Tyler: Just drink instant coffee alright then.

John: Not just coffee, is people back in a day, they wanted to smoke. And because they take half an hour, I started going out with my smoke breaks and I don’t smoke.

Paula: Right? We actually got a lot done in smoke breaks. I remember that. Not smoking, you know, with people. But going out with them to have a conversation that ends up being a tangential idea that ends up being good for everybody. But, you know, without that serendipitous unstructured time, you know, I don’t know that I would necessarily call that an expense. I think that’s a cost of doing business, you know, an overhead, that’s very necessary.

John: Well, but then you could say that about a coffee too.

Paula: Oh yeah.

John: I don’t know how that works because by the time I had people taking a half-hour coffee break, I wasn’t doing that.

Jeremy: The point of the story is a brand storyline is simply a communication device to create a conversation. And that’s what you think of what relationship building is. If it’s the time you spent Hal, going out and meeting people type time. Tyler networking. It’s conversations are the root of all relationships. And in a marketing context, how can you create that at scale? Now the best example of a brand storyline
is the Dove campaign for real beauty, where they ask things like ugly spots or beauty spots, wrinkled or wonderful. It’s got these campaigns that have sparked a conversation. Now if you look at everyone here, but say, Mickey, we probably remembered Dove as the soap that floated in the bathtub. Not as the fashion brand it is today. So they recreated that brand through conversation. And the thing is that at a small business level, we can use conversations very well. So Muldoon’s is the coffee story and they are, at the time, they were about a 12 and a half million dollar corporate coffee service. And what the campaign said was 6% of your payroll is going out for coffee every single day. Now whether you agreed with it, disagreed with it, called BS, didn’t matter. It would just simply strike that conversation up this type of discussion of I think was great going out. I think the smoke break is serendipity and all that. That was the whole point of this thing. And we had a second campaign, which was on K-cups, which will it go into the into an organization with, “oh, you use K Cups?” I didn’t realize you hated the environment and they would be shell-shocked on it. But we train the sales reps to go into the sustainability officer and go like, you know, you could build like you’re building four times, over the Mount of K-cups being used here every year, and they’re like, “I didn’t know.” So we would actually get K-cups banned and then they’d have to go back to tender and that would set us up. But it all started with provocative conversations. And I think that’s something that we can all do. One of the tactics I used aggressively last year was “How has the pandemic affected you?” And our whole thing was around crisis marketing, which was we’ll show you how to recover the customers and revenue taken by covid. And that brought on, for us, on average, a new customer a week through the height of the pandemic. Simply on the back of speaking to a conversation people needed.

Paula: Yeah.

Jeremy: Like us here now too.

John: This is is the pandemic cat that got adopted through this as well.

Paula: Well you’re keeping him aren’t you?

John: Yeah. You know it came as a kitten a year ago and it didn’t leave.

Paula: That’s fantastic. Actually, we have been encouraging a lot of pandemics stories especially from our charter companies and others you know, how much money are you losing waiting for the airlines or because your people don’t want to be in the middle of that and because of all of the delays, and because of all the complications, and everything else, how much money are you losing because of all the missed opportunities. You know, your sales people sitting around for a day is a cost. You know, so that’s a huge conversation that people can get into, in pretty much any aspect of aviation. I don’t know if Tyler or Hal, if you have a story that you’re using lately. Or if there’s something you want to share?

Hal: The trend that I’m seeing is airways putting these aircraft back into service like my customers with these two aircraft sitting for three years. They realize that they’ve had a great aviation department going way back that saves them a lot of time, and now all of a sudden, you know if they got to go from here to Washington DC, and the president of the company gets stuck in Dallas for a couple of days because the cancellations are missed connections that, you know, this doesn’t work and they go to a lot of places that are not big cities. Little places, North Dakota, South Dakota, you know, Idaho.

Paula: Yeah. Three stops on an airline right?

Hal: Yeah. And heck, you could drive there faster than sometimes, you know. And so and the interesting thing is some of these companies from what I’m hearing at Oshkosh and NBAA a was, they’re putting their whole teams on the airplane. Not just the CEO. I remember, way way way a long time ago, I worked for a company and they had a corporate jet in but only Mrs. Temkane could get on the Jet and maybe somebody with the executive senior vice president, you know, if she invited him would go in and I think that’s not happening now. We lived in San Jose, Silicon Valley. And I did a very large fuel farm for the San Jose Jet Center. This is the home of, you know, lots of big people. Apple, whatever, you name it. But anybody can get on those airplanes to go wherever they’re going if it was an open sea. And some of them were actually running a little airliner around to a bunch of stops in there. There was no way to go from San Jose to Boise Idaho without three stops. Well, their airplane went directly.

Paula: Yeah.

Hal: So that’s happening and nothing happened during the pandemic. Some of the avionics shops, in fact most of them reported record years of sales.

Paula: Yeah.

Hal: Because they were taking even the 210 and the 310, those smaller aircraft and upgrade him getting ready to go back and, you know, to travel because you know, back in the heart of that stuff, nobody wants to get on the airlines.

Paula: Yeah.

Hal: Even now, the airlines are busy, and they’re busy to the point where they have no excess capacity, which is causing some of this problem.

Paula: Right?

Jeremy: So what would you do to create like a conversation piece about that? Like what kind of statement would you put out into the world so that your brand becomes top of mind? I mean it sounds like all of these conversation pieces are timely and so if that’s what’s going on, in the market, what would you put out?

Hal: I’m not sure. I’m looking for, you know, that’s a very good solid question. How do we market ourselves? Now I’m a maintenance guy, not aircraft sales.

Tyler: But Hal, you’re seeing, you know, no inventory in for sales of corporate jets. Earliest ones that are ready to go. Now, I am also seeing Duncan, came up and said “oh nice, so how do we get this G5 and completely restore it?” Standard Arrow has an ongoing contract with one of the large share operations to restore their older ghost streamers. New paint, new interior, you know. The customer doesn’t know the difference, you know when they get on the big jet. It’s a ghost streamer, okay. Who knows or cares if it’s G4 or G5 that are 20 or 25 years old if they’re properly maintained. And this is the other thing, I saw at NBAA was the preponderance of new equipment. New avionics targeted to the legacy aircraft. I mean, we’re only building what, 1,100 brand new aircrafts a year. There are thousands of these aircraft out there that can be fixed up. Oh, hell isn’t easier to sell an aircraft with the new avionics sweeter than the old mechanical gyros. I’m looking at these guys who the two carriers. Both of their aircraft have the old mechanical gyroscopic HSIs. And how are they going to track Pilots that used to find behind a Garmin 1000 fullscreen stuff or you know, the Rockwell 2121 system.

Mickey: Well definitely like it’s clearly your passion for sure. Like, you clearly know a lot about what’s going on in the industry. I would imagine it’s tough to break that down to the people that you’re trying to target. So do you, Jeremy, your mom, have anybody like any examples of people who are doing these conversation pieces right, right now?

Paula: Jeremy’s got lots I’m sure. In fact, yeah, there’s a whole book full of them.

Jeremy: Or are the ones right now are very much, pandemic driven and supply chain driven, are the two hot issues right now. And I think the root that you’re looking for is what is the customer’s burning need or issue? I’ll give you a one from the travel world, a company I’ve worked with for a few years is called Cascadia Motivation they’re in the loyalty rewards incentive travel space. So Cascadia felt and had the issue through the pandemic, where they basically lost a hundred percent of their business. 90%, of the revenue fell through last year and that was because of the collapse of corporate travels. Were able to kick start that through the summer with a very simple brand storyline that said, when the world opens up, where do you want to go? And then we followed that with, did you know that 50% of group bookings are sold out for 2022? And 90% of group bookings are sold out between September and November of 2022. Do you fear missing out another year? Then we tag that with oh, and another interesting stat is that rates for 2023 are up by 40%. What that did, was when people were not giving us the time of day to talk with anything else, the fear of missing out that fomo story had them buying. And for the first time of the company’s history, they had customers that were buying three years of event at one shot simply because of that. So when you look at this issue, I’ll look at just my own travel issues right now, from a business travel perspective. My cost of flying has doubled. At least, like I’m supposed to go to Italy but it might get canceled at this point but I was supposed to go to Italy the next couple weeks, and the return ticket on coach premium was 5,500 and there are no direct flight. It’s like a 4-5 stop nonsense to get there. The only way for me to get there is through New Jersey. So my brother lives in Cincinnati. There’s no direct flights from Toronto to Cincinnati anymore. I’ve got to fly through Chicago or somewhere else and it’s a freaking nightmare and it’s expensive. So yeah, business travel to streamline process and not have to go through the covid headaches. You’ll catch people’s attention.

Paula: Oh, yeah.

Jeremy: And then the question will be is, so you got the burning, you have the top-level industry issues, the supply chain is the biggest one. It’s on the stock market, CNBC every single day. Inflation and supply chain issues. But what is the direct effect to your market and services when you can connect the dots there, then people go, “Oh, that’s interesting. Tell me more.” Now, you got a solution and that’s where the power really kicks into that.

Paula: Right?

Hal: I asked a couple of interesting questions at NBAA and got a conversation with Abenine about the chip thing. And how is that affecting it? And they say well we got this and we designed it, and we can assemble it in Florida with US-made chips immediately.

Paula: Yeah.

Hal: You place an order on Monday, it’ll go out the door, newly constructed on Friday and I thought that was amazing.

Paula: Yeah.

Hal: And some of the other upgrades that that I saw were drop-in replacements not necessarily full suites of stuff and that was all US-made, US chips.

Paula: Right.

Jeremy: And by America is a big topic right now too.

Mickey: Definitely like a wealth of a resource, I really enjoyed your book. I mean, I want to I want to leave that message before you go.

Hal: So is it available as an audiobook?

Jeremy: No. I have not done that yet.

Hal: That’s an interesting thing that somebody knows that millennials are not reading books. They’re listening to books.

Paula: But he does have a YouTube channel.

Hal: Or do you have a youtube channel?

Jeremy: No. We just did it. We just started a podcast in September. And so this similar kind of Sticky Branding stories are being released every other week. So youtube.com slash sticky branding. And we’ll do more of that. The only reason there’s no audio book for Sticky Branding is the publisher that did the book originally refused to do that. And so I buy the rights back from the book in 2019. And then when I was supposed to record, the pandemic hit, so it’s a comedy of errors. Someday they’ll be there.

Paula: Right.

Hal: Okay.

Paula: I appreciate you coming and I really appreciate you sharing your experience with us. And I know this is not probably your usual venue for a book club, you know, it’s kind of specific and super niching, but I really appreciate you taking the time with us.

John: Yeah, so thank you very much.

Jeremy: That’s it. Well, if anyone has a question or anything, feel free to reach out to me anytime online, all the social networks and thank you for reading the book. It’s an honor.

Mickey: Yeah, so recently, I started doing an ad campaign that kind of targeted, I mean it hopefully tells a little bit more of a story. I have a distinguished honor grad, which is kind of how the military says you’re number one student. And so, I have, I had a student work with me for nine months. He got his job of choice and everything like that. And so we had a very in-depth testimonial type thing. And so my latest ad campaign is definitely more story focused and it sounds like that’s kind of one of the major messages of this book, is keeping it related to a story. So I’m really excited to see how that does and it’s tough to maintain that patience, right? Like I just released a new ad last week and it’s like why aren’t people like throwing credit cards at me right now? But yeah, so that would be my relationship to the story for sure. How about you mom?

Mrs. Gamonal: Well, I was going to share a different story but I think one came to mind while we were talking. And that is, that you know, talking about the driving need that people have and stuff like that. So, you know, one of our clients charters small aircraft and I know Tyler and Hal, both of you occasionally work with with smaller aircraft and they have a hard time chartering these smaller aircraft sometimes because people have a little bit of trepidation about that, especially if they’re a first-time charter customer. So, you know, the story is basically, “Does this small airplane, make you nervous? Here are its securities statistics.” You know, versus this is what happens on an airline and showing some of the craziness that’s going on with delays and you know,

Hal: The fights and riots.

Mrs. Gamonal: Fights and riots. Exactly. And driving to and from the airport and everything else. You know, which scares you more? Flying in a beautiful little Cirrus or, you know, going to the airport and getting on an airliner, you know, and I think for a lot of people, the answer to that question has changed in the last year or so. So that I think, is a story that we could leverage. But anyway, so that’s one that came to mind when we were talking and reading.

Paula: John you have something else?

John: One of the things that changed my mind and a lot of things we’ve done is, you know, nowadays, by the time you get in the car, and you have to be at the airport, that’s four hours before you ever get on the airplane. And then the average flight is three and a half to four hours. And then you got what? Two hours before finally, getting out of the airport in a rental car and get to where you’re going at the least, the hotel. For us, we’ll drive. I mean the Southwest used to compete with people who drive. That’s how they started the airline. And right now, I mean, there are people, lots of people, who absolutely refuse airlines. The airline is no longer serving its function.

Hal: I canceled my flight on Southwest because they sent me the emails that we may not be fine and I drove from Albuquerque to Las Vegas. Ten and a half hours.

John: Well it was five and a half for us but we drove as well.

Tyler: Hal, you’re corporate customers, are any of them considering instead of buying a new airplane or a used airplane to a restored one?

Hal: Oh, yeah, there’s I’m getting a lot of feedback of folks want to do that. All the shops are full right now, you know, like you said earlier, the pandemic a lot of the avionics shops will swap because everybody’s like, oh, we’re not flying right now, let’s go.

Tyler: That’s one of the advantages we’re gonna promote, soon as we get some funding is, we’re open. I’ve got several mechanics we can bring on board. I know there are some people coming out of the military that didn’t come out in 2020 because they, you know, solve this, you know, the shit happened.

Mickey: Because they won’t get a stable paycheck.

Hal: And they said, how will we hold up for a couple of years?

Mickey. Exactly. Well uncle Sam is splitting the bill. You’d at least his money’s good for sure.

Hal: And I was just fascinated all the stuff that NBAA for the legacy strike aircraft. We could make a make a new one out of an old one, you know?

John: Yeah. What do you think about the listen? Hopefully, not too far for you. I don’t remember much GE or Honeywell is coming out with a panel now, that is connected to the cloud. No, that’s the Honeywell Club. The new one. Now. I heard they’re pushing that into the rotorcraft, you know, inner-city stuff, but it’s supposed to be a whole new sweep and is not just now. Abenine stuff is only good in class 1, class 2 aircraft not in 3 and above. Well, the Honeywell is everything.

John: Yeah. I know. I ran it by 135 jock that I know and his initial reaction is that I don’t like this class too insecure. And he’s absolutely correct. In fact, the government has canceled a Pentagon, contract with Microsoft for the cloud, because the cloud is too insecure.

Hal: Yeah.

Tyler: Hal what’s your website?

Hal: It says, “sapphireaviationsolutions.com”

Paula: It’s a beautiful website.

Hal: It was put together by Paul and John.

Hal: Thank you very much.

Paula: You’re very welcome Hal.

Mickey Gamonal: Okay, my name is Mickey Gamonal with “asvabdomination.com” If you need any help with the ASVAB, let me be your first call.

Paula: Paula Williams of ABCI. We help aviation companies sell more of their products and services, “abci.flywheelstaging.com.”

John: John Williams. ABID.

Tyler: Tyler Hall, Shrike Eagle Aviation. I’m at “tylerhall.com.” or at tylerhall@mac.com. Well, my email.

Hal: Hal Stephens with the Sapphire Aviation Solutions. It can be reached at my website “sapphireaviationsolutions.com” and I specialize in pre-purchase inspections in management from a technical standpoint. I do everything but fly.

Paula: Great. Thanks, guys. We’ll call that a wrap.