Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Episode 004. How do you insure you’re meeting your customers wants and needs? Do you have a mission or cause that your customer can relate with and buy into?
Brad James discusses how he is leading Beepods (https://www.beepods.com/) to not only revolutionize the beekeeping industry, but to change the world by finding a real-world solution to the well-publicized epidemic called colony collapse disorder
Full Transcript
Welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast, a place for conversations about out of the box businesses in the self-reliance space.
I’m Brian Pombo.
Today we’re talking with Brad James. I wanted to point out right off the bat that we were experiencing some technical difficulties during this recording. I thought the information was so good. It was worth putting out, even though it was slightly flawed. So hang in there, listen to this. I think you’re really going to enjoy it.
Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family. If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing. You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.
We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your Maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.
From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.
This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure life off the grid.
Brian: Brad James is a rogue beekeeper and the CEO of Beepods, challenging the norms of keeping honey bees by leveraging science data and grit, to ask why over the traditional, this has worked for me.
At Beepods they create complete beekeeping systems that provide hardware, training, outreach and data tools to schools, businesses, nonprofits and backyard beekeepers all over the world.
Teaching and practicing a reflection based sustainable philosophy.
Beepods goal is to see a world where pollinators thrive with aggressive innovation, intelligent observation and unapologetic audacity, Brad and the Beepods team pursue solutions to make this vision a reality and our lifetime.
Brad James, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.
Brad: Thanks for having me, Brian.
Brian: Yeah, really happy to have you here. We’ll just start out at the very beginning. Why don’t you let everybody know what it is that you do.
Brad: So at Beepods we provide a complete system and education tools to all of our customers and clients all over the US and all over the world.
Our big goal is trying to find solutions for the pollinator collapse that we’re witnessing, especially over the last 10 to 15 years. And trying to figure out why that’s happening.
So for us, our big step forward with all of our customers is how do we get them involved in beekeeping and aware of it and then give them the right tools so they can feel like they’re part of the solution and feel successful in raising honeybees.
It’s really about customer focused and helping support them because they want to be part of a bigger story than themselves.
Brian: Got it. So how did you get started with the pods?
What’s your life story up to this point?
Brad: It’s a great question. I’ll try and keep that shorter. My background was in biochemistry and microbiology and I was on my way to med school when I was in college until I decided I was done with school.
So after that, it was about switching directions. During that time I had been doing some freelance and pro bono work for nonprofits and some other organizations around my school.
I realized and learned when somebody said, hey, you’re really good at this strategy piece in generating revenues. So I began to work with a lot of startups.
Beepods came across my desk and my team’s desk at the time and we said, hey, this is really impactful story.
There’s a great concept here.
What it really needs is some rounding out and working through some details and then all of a sudden it can really be a useful tool, not only for the customers that they’re targeting now, but other customers like schools where they weren’t necessarily working with on a regular basis.
For me, the business as a whole spoke to me because I’m an Eagle scout, really into nature, really trying to help make impact on the world, not just necessarily build businesses.
Brian: Right on. So how long have you been with Beepods?
Brad: Beepods now we’re going on six, seven years, somewhere in there. Every year it brings new challenges, especially when you’re dealing with bees.
The company itself has grown and evolved over the course of my time with it, both from a team standpoint and the overall concept and some of the core offerings. It’s been a fun journey.
The team’s grown. Everybody has enjoyed the journey. As far as I can tell, we’re all rowing the boat in the same direction.
Brian: Excellent.
I’ve been to your website, beepods.com and I recommend everyone to go check that out.
If you go there, you’re going to see a lot of great info regarding bees and beekeeping. You guys have classes, info products like books and courses. You’ve got beekeeping equipment. You could even get live bees themselves as well as in products produced by bees, you know, like balm’s and salves.
With all the different products and services you have. What would you say is your top selling one right now?
Brad: Most of our customers really begin with the education case, so all of our online courses.
They become, what we consider a Beepods community member that gives them access to all of our online education, our data collection tools, our private community and some other detailed support tools.
Then what we end up finding is that has people go through that journey of understanding and learning about top bar beekeeping because it’s very different than standard eke thing.
They make a choice and they end up moving on to purchasing the entire system.
The system is also our largest product that we sell. And that comes with, again, access to the members area.
But then we actually give them an a personal beekeeper that they can call and troubleshoot with as well as then they’re actively collecting the data, which for us is a big mission. Long-term is how can we create this cross sectional database that actually can point us in the direction of understanding why some of the symptoms are occurring in this industry.
So for us, we know long-term our big goal is let’s get 10,000 beekeepers collecting this data that we can actually cross analyze both geographically as well as within systems that are right next to each other to be able to determine why there’s things happening like colony collapse.
Because especially right now there’s a lot of challenges going on as to what is actually the root cause of this.
It’s a complex problem.
That’s really where our focus is with this whole mission of this company is,
It’s not just about beekeeping for honey.
Beekeeping is way more than just honey. You do get the satisfaction of enjoying those products, which is why we even sell them.
In fact every portion of like balm and salve that we sell go towards some of our nonprofit partners that we like to work with, including the pollinator partnership and some of those other organizations that you’ve probably heard of.
But for us, at the end of the day, this whole challenge that we’re facing with colony collapse and flying insects disappearing over time and anything dealing with sustainability and the environment as a whole.
We’re trying to put together, can learn from, to build awareness around as well as implement changes in what they’re doing regularly to help understand how they’re actually can help change the world.
Because I think with a lot of big challenges like this and climate change and some other things, people struggle to figure out, what can I actually do?
And that’s what we’re trying to do is help them do it, help them be successful in doing it.
Showing that what they’re actually doing is actually impacting that. Because so many people, you know, they recycle, they do these things, but they don’t actually see the results of it. They still hear all the bad news.
When we start talking to a lot of our customers, especially at schools, they go, hey, this is really cool because now we’re seeing other schools do it.
We can actually identify with those people.
We’re seeing these data analyses and reports that we’re putting together regularly for them to understand, hey, you’re actually helping us point towards something and it’s really making people feel good about what they’re doing.
Brian: You mentioned the schools and you can tell from just by looking at the website, you’re playing to a real diverse crowd, a real different type of customer base and so on top of the schools.
Who else do you play to or tried to talk to?
Brad: So schools that are one of our largest verticals right now that will work for two reasons. We know that the tools that we’re giving educators are extremely valuable for increasing engagement, increasing understanding of concepts and things even outside of science.
We have our teachers leveraging iPads. It’s like a inspiration tool or pulling product stuff to do our projects with their students, which is really good.
We really love working with schools, but we also do a lot of work with hobbyists obviously, as well as a lot of businesses.
We’ve got a lot of businesses looking for sustainable engagement with their employees and their teams, and this is one way for them to be able to access those tools.
But really we’ve worked with anyone and everyone anywhere you think you can put a beehive or have honeybees, we’ve done it. So rooftops, churches, backyards, balconies and skyscrapers, golf courses, urban gardens, agriculture professionals.
Everybody has their own need with it.
What we’ve really tried to do is offer that customization of the product, at least from an education and an outcome standpoint in order to make sure that whatever they’re doing they can be successful with.
That’s always been our goal.
That will always be our goal.
It’s just a matter of how do we scale and grow that and make sure that we’re supporting all of those people, but the same amount of effort that we can right now.
Brian: Where are you finding these new customers at?
A lot of our customers will come through our website.
So we’ve built out some customer journeys, specifically dealing with, you know, a lot of the hobbyists. They’re always looking for new novel ways to do things.
For us, we do a lot of lead generation through our website and some of our partners.
We’ve got some critical partnerships with some distributors.
In the education realm of things, Mother Earth News has been a huge supporter for us.
So much so that we’re in the midst of trying to figure out more ways that we can support them and other vendors that they’re trying to work with.
And so for us, it’s been a group effort.
I can tell you right now that when every time we come across somebody who we’d never heard of, it boggles my mind. We just got an email from somebody in South Africa trying to build the education around pollinators recently, and we’re not doing any targeting in South Africa.
I have no clue how they came across us, but somehow or another, our message is speaking to those individuals because at the end of the day we’re about, yes the greater change, but the education aspect of what we’re doing is really important for those individuals.
Because they’re trying to build programming and if we can help support their endeavors even just a little bit to make it easier for them to make the impact that they want to make.
That’s what’s really important for us. Those cool little anecdotal stories that you can actually connect to on a human level and see and get chills when you hear about it.
That’s what I love at least. I mean that’s, that’s the fun part of this business.
Brian: You’ve been doing this, six or seven years. What do you like best about your business and your industry?
Brad: This industry is right for innovation.
We’re talking about an industry and beekeeping specifically, or pollination that hasn’t seen significant upgrades to technology or information in 150 years since Lorenzo Langstroth was the guy who designed these white boxes that we see everywhere and identify with beekeeping.
It’s really exciting because we see all these different technologies popping up and we see different people trying to create useful tools.
We try to build partnerships with those people as best we can. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.
It’s definitely an exciting journey for us. When you talk about this is actually something that is impactful in the world.
It’s not just another widget that’s out there.
Like we see the plastic widgets at the store and I hope that those businesses generating great wealth for their teams and their employees, but at the end of the day, we’re doing something real like you can touch, you can feel it, you know that you’re connecting with nature when you go out there and and see this thing and work with a colony of honeybees.
And to me, there’s very few things out there in the world that you can actually do that with from a product standpoint.
Not only that, but then tie it back to the technology with all the data that we’re collecting and go, hey, now we’re actually working in cyberspace, which isn’t real. it’s just air or something.
And you’re connecting nature to this digital realm and I know people are trying to figure out how do we actually do this.
10 years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now. I as much as I want to say and could say, yeah, I’ve got a vision for what we’re going to be doing at that point in time. I don’t know. Who knows?
I mean we’ll have sensors in hives and colonies at that point. We’ll have this great database. Maybe will be part of the people who put bees on Mars or something like that. That’d be fun.
Brian: That’s what you like best. What gripes do you have about your business in your industry?
Brad: So the counterpoint to all of that is this is an industry that has not changed in a long time. And most of the people who’ve been in beekeeping for a long time have had great successes, great successes.
But the struggle now is, is just like with anything when things have been working for a long time and then all of a sudden they stop working and those people have been doing it the same way or the similar way for a long time.
They become very resistant to change or even being open to discussing why change is necessary because why should it be, we’ve been doing it this way for years.
You know, grandpa taught me this way, my father taught me this way, I’ve been doing it this way.
And then you ask them and they go, yeah, I don’t teach people anymore because I can’t help them succeed.
When you’re talking about something that is so critical to our way of life as humans, it’s really, really hard because you want to pick the brains of those experts who’ve been doing this for 60, 70 years.
But you know, at the same point in time that when you start to describe the way you’re doing things, they’re shrugging you off as you don’t know what you’re doing.
And that’s really disappointing for a lot of new beekeepers and a lot of people trying to innovate in this realm because I have bookshelves and bookshelves and bookshelves and books, right?
The only way you can really learn in this day and age is if you continue to learn and keep learning from the people who’ve lived it years and years and years and years ago and unfortunately I think there are a lot of beekeepers out there in the world who don’t either,
A, want to share what they’re doing or B, if they do share what they’re doing, the way they do things is the only way to do things.
Commercial Break: This is a great place to pause for a moment with our conversation with Brad and I want you to turn this conversation on you.
Are you in an industry where you are fighting against a normal way of thinking, a usual way of thinking, a typical way of thinking and not sure how to break through that public consciousness?
If so, let me tell you, you’re going the right direction. You’re always going to have to go against the grain if you’re going to actually break out and do something different. If you’re going that way, keep going, but what you need is perhaps some perspective on what it’s going to take to get you up and over the hump and get the attention of your ideal customer, of the people in your marketplace who are going to get the most out of your product or service.
Here’s what I recommend. We actually offer something called the dream business transformation. I want you to go to Brian J Pombo, that’s Brian J Pombo.com/dreambiz. All one word
Go to that website, check it out, apply for our dream business transformation. If you qualify, I am willing to sit down with you, open up your business.
Take a look at it, see what we can do so that you can have the dream business you’ve always been looking for. What we need to do is talk and see what we can do to get you moving forward to find those people that you know you can help out the most.
Go to BrianJPombo/dreambiz and now back to the conversation with Brad.
Brad: And so there’s a lot of resistance and pushback to some of the things that we’re doing in terms of our philosophy around beekeeping and the tools we’re using and the technology we’re using.
Who thinks that teaching beekeeping online is the best way to learn beekeeping? Nobody.
But the challenge is that you can’t get people all in the same place at the same time easily anymore because there’s so many things going on and people want education on demand, easy to digest. You know, books are great, but we know based on customer and psychology, most people don’t like to read anymore.
Make it easy for them to understand what you’re trying to explain and teach them. I using videos online on demand so that when they’re falling asleep at 11 o’clock at night, they can pull up their iPhone or Android phone and pull up a video and watch a video and then tomorrow when they go out to check out their bees, they can implement what they’re learning.
Like that’s a very different way of thinking and approaching, getting people to look at the world that deals with nature and like working with bees and animals.
And that’s really hard for some people to grasp. I mean it was even hard for us to grasp early on because we were trying to figure out how do we actually put together online education that is consistent because bees don’t always listen and do what you want them to do.
How do you make that work?
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. I love the fact, I’m not sure if the listeners caught this but, really what you like best and what you dislike about industry are two sides of the same coin.
So on one hand you’ve got this crisis going on, you’ve got this lack of innovation.
You’ve got kind of a mental block across the board, a lot of the leaders in the industry up until now. But at the same end you see that as an opportunity to be able to bring something new to the table to try and look at the same problem with different eyes, with different solutions.
I just think that’s great. That’s really the entrepreneurial spirit there.
Brad: I mean am I wrong in thinking that like when industries are at that point, those are the ideal times to look at that industry at a very different way?
Brian: Absolutely.
Brad: And who knows? I mean I can’t guarantee that we are going to be the ones to quote unquote disrupt the beekeeping world, but at the same point in time, it takes somebody to take a step forward and take the pounding and take the punches, which we’re doing and that’s okay.
And that’s good because we’re resilient enough, but somebody has to be the first one to go, you know what?
Maybe we’re just looking at this the wrong way.
Why don’t we try something different?
And there’s a ton of industries out there like that, especially in the sustainability realm.
That’s why we get so much interest from people in trying to build sustainable products or dream products or eco friendly products or services. I mean landscaping companies are trying to approach it differently or landscape designers, are approaching landscaping differently.
But then getting a lot of pushback because hey, what we’re trying to do from a landscape standpoint is very much eco-friendly and healthy for the environment and better overall for the support of what you’re trying to do in the long run from a landscape designer, plants and ecosystem.
But it costs more, so people don’t want to do it and you go, okay, so we have to help them understand the value of life doing this way.
Not only in the short-term is better, but the long-term is better and I think when we get to that point it becomes less of a product issue or a service issue and more of hey, how can we support you in helping to raise the either real value or the perceived value for those potential customers so that they really buy into what you’re seeing or at least look at it differently.
Rather than going with the guy who’s just going to plant grass, right. Great. Give me some great blue Kentucky blue grass all over my lawn and get rid of all the dandelions and all the weeds and instead of building in all these pockets of gardens that are wild flowers that actually give it an aesthetic value.
That’s one example.
I mean, yeah, sure we could come up with 50 more, but I know that those are all challenges, not only to make people aware of the options, but then to help them understand why some of those options might actually be better for them in the short-term as well as the long-term.
Brian: Yeah, that’s great. You know, an earlier conversation that me and you had, it actually pointed to a specific situation there that I think be useful, especially to people that aren’t as familiar with the beekeeping niche.
When you were discussing, and you made slight reference to it already, the difference between the top bar hive that you guys provide and the traditional hives.
Can you go into that a little bit?
Brad: Yeah. So what are the differences between the white boxes that we see and the style of equipment that we use?
Brian: Yeah, and what the response is from the industry and from traditionalists.
Brad: So the white box hives were designed and invented shortly after the civil war by a gentleman named Lorenza Langstroth.
Those boxes that we see and considered to be the standard for beekeeping have been around for over 150 years now or close to it.
The difference between our system and what that is that was designed for production, that was at the time of, hey, this is the industrial revolution.
How do we create efficiency in everything we do?
This was one way that now farmers and agriculture professionals back then could not only grow colonies of bees or support colonies of bees, but also transport those colonies of bees for pollination services.
These pollinate so many things that that was a huge issue, especially after the civil war when you’re talking about a complete shift and how the agriculture system works directly after that, the top bar hive actually originated in Africa and was discovered by Krishan explorers who went down to Africa and saw these tribes who had dug out logs and put sticks across the top.
They were raising bees.
So our style of equipment is very different both in terms of functionality and the goals behind why you would use this style of equipment.
There’s tons of styles of equipment out there and so for us the big thing was is hey, let’s take a different approach because statistics have shown that if we can support these the way that they would naturally grow in nature, then potentially we’ve got a better chance at growing populations of honey bees, which is why we chose this style of equipment.
Then we added a whole bunch of innovations to it.
You know, windows and user-friendly things and putting a lid on it, locking it down and top bar hives though are designed, especially ours, is designed to be supportive for the bees because we’re not using foundation.
We’re not using frames.
When we do an inspection, it’s less intrusive to the colony of bees so that the bees don’t get stressed every time we go into a colony.
There’s a whole bunch of reasons why, both from a philosophy and a equipment standpoint, why a top bar hive would be used versus a Langstroth. Really the biggest difference is hey, Langstroth’s are used for honey production.
If I’ve got thousands of colonies of bees that I have to manage, yeah, use the light boxes.
That’s what makes sense. If I’m going into beekeeping because I want to really understand bees, beekeeping, understand and have a relationship with my bees and I’m less worried about efficiency of transporting these colonies all over the world.
A top bar hive makes sense for two reasons.
They’re not doing heavy lifting to lift the boxes off of one another and the bees end up being more docile over time because every time you do an inspection, you’re not creating a stress response the way that you would in a traditional hive.
We don’t use smoke, we don’t use a lot of the tactics that commercial beekeepers will use from a efficiency standpoint to just get through them and make sure that their hives are healthy.
No, it’s bar by bar, do an inspection, look at these, make sure the queen is doing their job, make sure there isn’t a appearance of disease or parasitism in the hive and the colony and you can then use it as teaching tools, which is why we focused on teaching people with these colonies because they are compatible with Langstroth hives and so people then get their foot in the door with a top bar hive.
Then maybe some of them want to start doing larger scale production of honey and so they go this route, but now they’re using sustainable philosophies.
Not commercial philosophy is on raising bees, which as part of our goal long-term, because we know commercial philosophies, again, they’re about efficiency.
It’s similar to large scale agriculture.
Tons of dairy cattle in one barn.
Why is everything going towards organic free range beef and chickens and eggs and all that stuff?
Because there’s clearly a reason why those things have a more nutrition.
They’re better for the animals, they’re healthier for the animals.
It’s not necessarily as efficient, but the the farmers who actually raise those tend to be happier when you look at the statistics. A lot of reasons.
Does that answer your question?
Brian: No, absolutely. That’s great.
I think that’s really interesting and it tells a lot about your industry and where it’s at and why you guys are standing above and beyond because you’re thinking a little bit deeper about these things and you’re going through the process of educating people about it.
Which is a huge thing that a lot of people who start a website are trying to get going, trying to sell a product or service.
A lot of times they go around that and they expect the customer to know everything they need to know in order to purchase the product or get involved in a membership. And you guys really start that education and not only start it but continue it and you haven’t tied directly to your products, which I think is great.
Brad: And the testing, I mean every time we have our customers collect data and send it back to us either, you know, some people just take pictures of that data, but that data that we’re collecting from our customers, which is built right into the product, is part of our design iteration process.
I mean, I can’t tell you how many times, like the data’s come back to us and we’ve gone, oh, we got a tweak something in our education because we’re not getting something clearer, making something very clear for them to execute or implement on their own.
As well as part of it was a design feature.
So we use data one time because we had a customer go in and their hive kept getting vandalized.
And so we had to figure out ways to eliminate vandalism or theirs, so we put a locking lid on this thing.
The locking lid didn’t allow for people to get in or or bears to get in.
The lid locks ours down so that if a bear tips it over, the bees are a little angry the next day, but everything stays intact for the most part, so it’s not clear destruction.
That’s where having a systematic approach to building out a product, everybody thinks about lean startup, but take it constantly through what should doing even when the business is running.
Build that feedback loop directly into the product in some way, shape or form so that you can continue to iterate and innovate to stay ahead of the curve.
That’s the only way small businesses and startups are going to keep going is that they continue to iterate and innovate and continue to add better service and productivity and really work at those things.
It’s not a simple silver bullet at all.
Brian: Yeah. Some of the best businesses and websites out there right now, especially in the eCommerce realm. They’re asking their customers, they’re finding out what they want or what they like or don’t like about their products.
You guys have taken it a step further.
Your customers are actually a part of the research and development of your product.
They may not even know what they’re looking at, but because they’re feeding back to you the raw data, it allows you guys to actually see something that maybe they can’t even see. That’s really incredible.
Brad: Thank you.
Brian: And it’s something that everybody can learn from was listening to this so we can go on and on.
There are a lot of other topics I’d like to dig in with you on. But let’s just say we brought you back a year from now and we look back over the past 12 months. What would have had to have happened over the last year for you to feel happy with the progress of your business?
Brad: We set some high goals this year.
For us, the biggest challenge has been how do we scale this business each and every year. So for us next year, if I were to come back and go, Hey look, we we’re shooting for 10,000 beekeepers in 10 years.
If next year I come back and say we got darn close to a thousand new beekeepers this year or a thousand beekeepers that are, that are now in the education course and now they’re coming through and buying systems for the following year.
Of those 10,000 beekeepers long-term where, you know, we’re shooting for 25 a quarter of them to give us solid data next year, hey, a thousand new beekeepers, I’d be happy.
I mean I’d be good with a thousand new beekeepers.
Brian: Right on. So what are the obstacles standing in your way of getting that thousand?
Brad: Well, we recently addressed one of them.
We figured out how to do fulfillment and scale fulfillment a little more easily this last year.
There’s a number of components in this and especially dealing with bees and increasing their beekeeping team.
So scaling essentially all the customer support is a huge piece of this. We’ve done that now and now we’re at the point of, Hey, how do we actually scale the marketing and the sales efforts?
So we’re working towards doing that.
But all of that takes time and systems. And if we don’t have those systems in place and they’re not tested and working, I mean that is just a point of sometimes you hate it, but at the end of the day, if you can figure it out how to systematize a business like this, we can systematize anything, no doubt.
Brian: Awesome. So what advice would you have for other business owners that would be in similar markets?
Brad: I would take a good hard look at what your doing every day and begin to figure out how do I begin to delegate those pieces so that you can focus on growing the business.
That means you have to be able to document what that process is. Build out supporting tools so that you can delegate that to somebody and then build some sort of accountability so that you can trust somebody else to do it.
But then also have verification that it’s getting done at the level that you want to do. We use a lot of operational technology that we’ve had to piece meal because finding an enterprise resource software for beekeeping company like us does not exist.
It just doesn’t. So for us it’s a matter of, okay, cool.
How do we get from step one to step two, step three, step four we have every week our team focuses on building and not building, but documenting one new process.
So that’s part of a requirement of being part of a team is you do something new for the first time that you haven’t done before.
Write down the steps you took to execute it and write down how it turned out.
Then we have a a knowledge library then where people can log into and look at things, whether it’s sales, whether it’s beekeeping, whether it’s fulfillment, whether it’s talking to doing a customer service piece or updating the website.
It doesn’t matter what it is, but if you don’t make that part of your regular norm, then you’re never going to be able to scale a business.
It just won’t work because there’s no way that I as an individual can do this all on my own.
There’s no way.
Brian: Those are wise words and something that I think every business owner should really pay heed to.
What could a listener do if they’re interested in finding out more about beepods?
What would the best direction for them to take?
Brad: Well, there’s a couple of things. They can email me directly at brad@beepods.com.
I’m pretty good at getting back to people that way. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, BJJames23. You can follow Beepods on all the platforms. Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook. Just search Beepods. You’ll find us.
Other than that, I mean if people are really interested in our products, we put together a page for them at beepods.com/offthegridpodcast. That’s one place where we put together a special so people can access the membership area for a discount.
Typically it’s $300 a year. People want to do it cheaply. We’ll do it for $150 a year upfront or $25 a month is typically what we’re doing, but you can go there to find those details.
Other than that, I’m more than happy to work with people on small business stuff or startup stuff.
It’s a passion of mine. I would love to see more businesses in this arena succeed and succeed in whatever that means for them.
Like I said, I get emails and contacts weekly from businesses going, hey, saw you’re doing this. Got a really complicated business. How did get that done?
Again, feel free to email me directly.
That’s probably the best way to get ahold of me.
Brian: Thank you so much Brad. That’s a great discount that you’re offering our listeners and we really loved having you on the show and hopefully we’ll have you back maybe even in less than a year. I just use it as an example but love to have you back and go into more details because there’s so much depth here and we’d love to hear the latest on what you’re doing with Beepods, so appreciate you being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.
Brad: Great. Thanks Brian.
Brian’s Final Thoughts: You see we had a little bit of distortion in the audio there. I hope you were able to get the gist of what Brad was trying to say because I really think he brought out some great points and I can actually host an entire hour where I go through them point by point what they mean and what they can mean for your business.
But what I like to do is actually just pick out three main areas that I think he really hit it out of the park on.
The first one has to do with the model of his business in general and if you just look at his website, he has a whole bunch of different products, but there’s one main product that they have there and it’s called the Beepods beekeeping complete system, which is basically the top bar beehive with a whole bunch of other pieces to it.
But when you’re buying into that, you’re buying into the educational system that comes along with it.
So he could just go out there and just sell this beehive, maybe get it on other websites, things of that sort.
But the pods went a step further and they added education and they made it about the end user. This is a huge piece.
If you can make your business about the end user more than about the product that you’re bringing to them, you’re going to find ways to enhance it, to make it better than anything else out there on the market and to take yourself completely out of the competition that’s already out there.
You can’t compare what he’s bringing to the market, to other beehives that are out there because it’s a completely different process.
He’s not selling a beehive.
He’s selling a beekeeping system.
He’s selling an educational tool.
He’s selling multiple things to multiple people, and he talked about some of the markets that they’re playing to earlier in the conversation.
So the real question is how could you stand out?
What could you add to what you are providing out there that actually helps out the end user that actually helps out your customer?
That adds value all along the way and maybe even continues the relationship that you have with them as in a membership, can you add a membership to what you already have going or can you enhance a membership that you already have going?
That’s a huge piece that most businesses can learn a lot from and it’s something that is very, very, very difficult to compete against or to duplicate in any way.
Second thing I wanted to focus on was the customer feedback process that they have there at Beepods.
You see how he’s able to create better services off of it. It’s that whole continuous improvement term that you hear referred to. Quite often they talk about the Japanese Kaizen, which I don’t know if you remember back in the eighties they had the movie Gung Ho and everything back then was about the way the Japanese had this continuous improvement process and that’s been bandied about in corporate America quite a bit.
If you’ve been involved in any type of larger corporation, they’ll always throw around this buzz term continuous improvement.
They pay lip service to it, but they don’t necessarily have it built in as a system that you can actually show direct results from and he actually went through and talked about some of the direct results they’ve got back.
By having this constant customer feedback loop where they’re finding out what works, what doesn’t work, fixing what needs to work, educating customers where necessary to help them through the process and to make sure that they get the most out of everything that they’re being provided by from Beepods.
That’s huge. If you think about, it also comes back to that same original question, what could you do to improve your customer experience?
Do you have any type of feedback loop where you’re constantly finding out what they like, what they don’t like, what works and what doesn’t work about the service or products that you’re providing them?
The third thing I wanted to point out is one of the most boring things that most business owners hate dealing with, but you can hear that brand actually has a passion for the inside systems. The inside workings of his business, and the fact that he has all of his employees filling out processes, making sure that nothing gets left behind, that if they find a good way or a better way of doing something, they’re writing it down.
They’re making it part of their ongoing process.
Nothing’s dependent on one person. Everything’s more system dependent.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever worked somewhere. I know I have where everybody there has their own inner knowledge about their own process. As soon as somebody leaves, that whole department falls apart because that person knows what’s necessary to make things run. They didn’t write down enough stuff. They didn’t make it clear to everybody else.
They did not teach the process onto the next person.
I’ve seen that happen over and over and over again.
On the other hand, if you work somewhere that has very clear processes that where that’s written down, maybe they have training.
Nowadays it’s very easy to do training via audio and video. Do you have those types of things that your business, as your business grows larger?
Do you have the ability to be able offer these things to the people that are working with you?
Let me tell you something. If you are not focused on it as an executive in your business, you need to have somebody focused on it. It’s not the most glamorous thing to think about, but it is one of the most important pieces of running a long-term business.
Don’t have your business fall apart just because one person fell away from it.
Like I said, this interview brings up so many great points. I can see Brad and Beepods actually doing really good in the market based on these points that he just brought up here. If he can keep focused on meeting the needs of his market, he can’t lose because he’s got a built in ongoing membership model.
This is something that you should really look into for your own business, and if you’d like to find out more, definitely plug into BrianJPombo.com/Dreambiz and we should sit down and see how we can apply these principles and strategies to your business.
We’ve had some amazing interviews lately. You just wait for the next ones that are coming up.
Thanks for joining us.
Outro: Join us again on the next off the grid is podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets.
That’s BrianJPombo.com. If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact. Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor.
Our theme music is Cold Sun by Dell. Our executive producer and head researcher is Sean E Douglas.
I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.