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Episode 003. Do your customers think you’re just another website, or do they feel like they are part of a community?
Mark Robinson discusses how he developed Walkin’ Pets (http://walkinpets.com) from a tragic lesson he experienced years ago. He describes the highs and lows of building a community that became his most successful business to date.
- Walkin’ Wheels® Dog Wheelchair – https://www.handicappedpets.com/adjustable-dog-wheelchairs/
- Walkin’ Blind Dog Halo – https://www.handicappedpets.com/walkin-blind-dog-halo/
- Chris P. Bacon – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tP7Xrrxfxc/
- TO THE PETS! Music Video –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rB8tVjj_aQ
Transform your business into an absolute Dream Business! http://brianjpombo.com/dreambiz/
Full Transcript
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: All right, so on the show today, we’ve got Mark C. Robbin.
He’s the founder and president of walk-in pets by handicappedpets.com. A company that makes products for aging, injured, and disabled pets around the world.
His signature product, the walking wheels, adjustable dog wheelchair has helped over 50,000 dogs live happy, healthy lives.
Mark has had several businesses in the past in fields including security systems, magazine, publishing, computers, renewable energy, and more. This one though is by far the most successful.
You’ve also hosted your own show called a happy healthy pets, which you can find on his website, handicap pets.com so here’s Mark Robinson.
Hi Mark.
Mark: Hi Brian. Thank you for that great intro. Great to be on the show.
Brian: Yeah, I’m really happy to have you here. It’s a very interesting site if anyone’s listening it, whether you have pets or not, it’s worth looking at this site.
There’s a lot going on here and we’re going to get into some of the details as we get moving.
Just give us a little bit about what it is that you do Mark?
Mark: The website is called WalkinPets.com and there’s no G in there. That’s WalkinPets.com.
The reason for the long name is used to be called handicap pets.com we changed the name to Walkin’ Pets because our users seem to like it a little better.
So now when we introduce ourselves, we use both names, but you can also get to it at HandicappedPets.com
Brian: Awesome.
So how did you get started in this area? You know, what’s your life story, up until this point?
Mark: I had a computer business called computer network services that provided computer support for companies getting into networking back in the days of Novell Networks.
And I sold that business and was doing some private consulting for awhile, and was looking for ways to figure out really how to use the internet more and how it was used for business.
I wanted to try to create a website that was able to do e-commerce.
Many years ago I had a dog, a little Keeshond named Mercedes and it started snapping at my newborn son at the time growling. And I took him to the vet and the vet, he had canine epilepsy and said, you know, there are treatments but we can’t guarantee that it won’t happen again.
Because your son may be in danger, the vet recommended. We recommend you put your dog to sleep.
And we did.
Years later, after the advent of the internet, a good friend of mine was diagnosed with epilepsy. But then I had the internet and I did all the searching and did all the research and learned everything I could about epilepsy.
While I was doing that, I learned that if I had had the internet at the time when my dog was sick, I would’ve made a much more informed choice.
So I tried to set up a website that really started more as a discussion board. That was a place where people with disabled pets could go.
It’s the website I wish I had had when Mercedes was sick.
Almost right away, thousands of people from around the world started coming to the site and discussing Oh, mundane stuff. Stuff like, well, how do you cut a tail hole in a pair of Pampers so that the stuffing doesn’t come out?
This turned into a place where they could ask that question and we’re having people from around the world, and what I realized is that these people were being called just strange and odd by their neighbors and friends.
Oh, why don’t you put the poor thing to sleep?
You’re being so cruel by keeping it alive.
They weren’t getting the acceptance in the community they wanted until they found handicappedpets.com.
So I set up handicappedpets.com to be a message board to be a place where these people could congregate. I started giving them the products they wanted.
Some of my first products were dog ramps and dog harnesses and figured out how to sell them online with taking credit cards and then it was just a matter of listening to the community.
I didn’t build this website. My community built this website.
This business was built by me just listening to people talking about what they wanted, what problems they were having, what they needed. It was really a community effort and to this day over 100,000 people on Facebook, hundreds of thousands of messages on the message board, thousands of visitors a day on the website.
The world is changing in the way that it treats its pets.
Brian: Boy, that’s for sure.
That’s very interesting and I definitely want to put an emphasis on what you said.
It’s such a simple thing that most business owners don’t take into account and that’s listening to the audience.
If you’re one of them, if you’re one of your potential customers, that makes a huge difference, because you know it from that perspective, but you actually already built up the community and that in turn built your business because all you did is find out what they wanted and brought it to them.
Mark: I take it a step further. Sometimes I listen to people complain.
Brian: Yeah, yeah.
Mark: I’ve actually…I’ve started a number of businesses through my life.
This is the biggest one, but almost all of my businesses have been based on listening to people complain.
And actually it’s kind of become a habit with me that if I’m in a public place or I’m at a party or with a group of people and I hear some people complaining, I’ll immediately zoom into what they’re saying.
Every time somebody is complaining there’s an opportunity.
Brian: Absolutely. Wow!
That’s a great way of putting it. That’s really good.
So also on your site, like you said, you start out with the ramps and so forth and you have the dog wheelchairs. The harnesses supports for just about any part of their body depending on what’s wrong, you know, including splints, leg supports, helmets, gates, snacks, supplements and toys.
I mean it’s just a little bit of everything there, but all hitting on that one main market, but also at the same time, just going through the pictures on your Facebook, you could see that this isn’t just for dogs.
People are using them for pigs, goats, sheep. I even saw a miniature horse there was using one of the wheels.
How did all that come about?
Mark: Way back in the beginning, people talking on my message board about dog wheelchairs.
Back in around 2004, 2005 there were three manufacturers of wheelchairs and all of them were kind of homegrown.
They were all made of, you know, pipe and pipe clamps. They were custom made for the dog so that when somebody wanted a dog wheelchair, they’d take up to 13 measurements of their dog, send it in with a nonrefundable deposit.
Two or three weeks later, they’d get a wheelchair and it would work if it was the right size.
Very often they take a measurement wrong, the wheelchair would be wrong and they’d have to send it back to the manufacturer. And I’ve listened to people complain about this. They loved the wheelchair. It was great.
Their dog was mobile again, but now the wheelchair didn’t fit or the wheelchair was so big that they couldn’t fit into the back seat of their car.
So when I wanted to take the dog to the park, they’d have to strap the wheelchair to the roof.
They were also complained that it looks like a torture device.
You know, all these pipes and clamps and straps. People would look at them on the street and Oh, poor thing.
Why are you torturing them in that awful machine?
So I listened to that and I thought, well, you know, we can make a wheelchair. It’s easy to design a wheelchair that’s adjustable.
I was looking at crutches and crutches had this little snap button that would allow you to extend them. I thought, well, we could do that with flexibility and allow adjustability. And I saw wheels that could fold flat.
So what I did was I sat down and I drew up some plans for a wheelchair that was adjustable and size would fold flat, had exchangeable wheels, powder-coated blue, make it look nice.
It wasn’t a torture device because it was so adjustable.
People started using it on all kinds of animals. And then we started making slightly different ones for, we have rabbits and ferrets and the pigs.
There was a video that went viral, it was a very famous pig. His name Chris P Bacon and his veterinarian who adopted him down in Florida, put them in one of our wheelchairs.
Well, it got on the news and the thing went viral was a newscaster who was reading the news and saying, and in other than the news, a veterinarian puts his pig in a wheelchair, the pig’s name is, and he starts bursting out laughing and he must’ve laughed on this video for two or three minutes. He could not get the name out.
That was the story of Chris P Bacon.
Brian: So interesting.
Out of all these products that you have available, what’s one of your top selling products that you have?
Mark: Well, the wheelchair is a top seller. The wheelchair is what we’re known for. We recently introduced a blind dog harness, we call it the Blind Dog Halo, and this is a harness that the dog wears and attached to it is a white plastic coated wire, which extends around and in front of the dog’s head, like a halo.
The reason for it is when a dog goes blind, he gets very timid because every time he walks around he’s bumping his nose into something and his nose hurts.
With this blind dog halo, the wire hits first and the dog can feel that in the harness. And so he knows to stop before he hits his nose.
So dogs put this on and all of a sudden dogs that have been whining and won’t get out of bed, start wandering around the house and wandering outside.
It gives them their confidence back. It’s kind of like whiskers for a cat.
Brian: Yeah. Huh. How did you come up with that?
Did they already have something similar on the market?
Mark: Well, actually the whiskers for a cat. I had tried at one point to make this product by taking a dog helmet, which is another product we sell and taking some plastic pieces that extended out from the helmet like whiskers.
And my thought was that the dog would put the helmet on, strap it on and be able to walk around and feel it.
Well, it didn’t work.
The helmet would fall off and the whiskers were pointed in the wrong direction. Not all of my ideas are good ideas.
So we were looking for other ways to give the dog some method of sensing that something was ahead and actually there was a doctor, a veterinarian from Mexico, Dr. Pepe, which I haven’t been able to find him since and he posted on the internet a version of this where you had a harness with a piece of metal in front of it.
He posted plans for it. I had it on a do it yourself section on my website and I figured I could kind of commercialize that a little bit.
Brian: Oh wow, fabulous! That’s very cool.
Who would you say is your ideal customer?
The person that just gets the most out of walkinpets.com.
How would you describe that person?
Mark: I would describe that person and someone who sleeps with their pet.
This has actually been a criteria that we set that we’ve been using for years. Over 60% of Americans sleep with their pets and when your pet sleeps in your bed, it is entitled to the same level of health care you would give it to a family.
If you’re the type of person whose dog sleeps out behind the barn and chances are if your dog can’t walk anymore or your dog isn’t useful anymore, you’ll get a new dog.
If though you’re the kind of person whose dog sleeps in bed with you and something’s wrong with them, you’ll go to whatever length you need to, whether it be veterinary care, surgery, wheelchairs, whatever he needs.
And interestingly, when we go into other countries, we sell around the world and we focus in kind of one country at a time. When we do an analysis of a new country, that’s what we try to find out is what percentage of the dog owning population sleep with their pets and that’s how we determine whether or not there’s a market there for us.
Brian: Interesting.
That really makes it specific.
That really does pull it down to the right degree. That’s great.
Out of the whole industry, obviously you’re dealing in a very specific piece of it. What do you like best about it?
Mark: Oh, the people and the dogs.
This industry, everybody I encounter in this industry comes from the heart.
This is an industry that’s designed to keep families happy and healthy, to help pets, to help animals.
This is an incredible group of people that’s far beyond what I ever expected.
I was in the renewable energy business for many years and I also met some great people and what they cared about was the environment and social responsibility and you know, that was also another great bunch of people.
But here the level of compassion and love and family that you see at every turn is just inspiring.
I do like businesses that make me feel good.
I’ve been invited to participate in some businesses that seem to be mundane.
You know, for example, the financial services industry, the weapons industry, things like these. Those are great businesses, but I want to come to work everyday and feel like there are people or there are living things everywhere that are living a better life because of me.
And that goes for myself, my employees, and of course my customers.
Brian: Fabulous.
You have any gripes with the industry or with your business, how it runs?
What would be the biggest issue that you would have?
If you could change something.
Mark: As I mentioned before, of all the businesses I’ve had in my life, this has been the biggest, or this is currently the biggest and it has grown not by anything I’ve done, but by what my community has done and what my employees and team has done and it’s grown bigger than I ever imagined it would be.
I now work out of a 15,000 square foot warehouse with 35 employees.
The demands to run this business are totally unexpected.
I don’t get to do the stuff I love to do anymore.
I’ve had to learn and expand so much into financial management, into people management, into areas of business that were unexpected.
I mean, I just created a cool website, listened to people and invented stuff and that was fun.
Now the demands on me to grow and change so that I can support this growing business were unexpected.
One of the things I keep reminding myself is that the only limits to the growth of this business are limits that I impose on it. That if this business doesn’t get bigger, it’s because I didn’t want it to get bigger.
So the demands on me for inner reflection, for personal growth as well as educational growth have been challenging. Fun but challenging.
Brian: Yeah. That’s well said, in that you’re talking to business people.
Mark: One of the interesting stories that comes to mind is as this business was growing in my employees and my customers and people outside would always come to me and say, wow, you’ve created such a wonderful business.
You must be so smart, so good at this. Such a great businessmen.
And I’m thinking, geez, I’m just an out of work computer geek.
It was really becoming a little bit pervasive in a lot of the conversations and, and social interactions and people I was meeting.
It concerned me and I was speaking to somebody who runs a actually a $70 million dental supply business. Absolutely huge business. Thousands of employees, lot bigger than I’ll ever be.
I told him about this and he said, you know what?
I feel exactly the same way I’ve talked to other business people as well about it.
I call it the imposter syndrome.
I feel like I’m an impostor in my position and I think we all do as our businesses grow.
Brian: No, absolutely.
Commercial Break: I’m going to stop the conversation with Mark right here and delve into what he’s talking about there.
I’m wondering if you relate with his issue, are the demands of your business just getting out of control, especially if you have a successful business or the demands that you didn’t sign up for completely taking over your life. It’s like what Mark said, I don’t get to do the stuff I love to do anymore.
Doesn’t that just stab you in the heart?
I don’t know the silver bullet for that, but one thing I do know is it helps to talk to someone that’s worked with other people like yourself and been able to help them out of the same dark hole.
So what I’m going to suggest is go to BrianJPombo.com/dreambiz.
I want you to find out more about my dream business transformation.
I know that’s a mouthful.
The whole idea is to get back to that business that you always wanted. When you first started out.
Most of us were told if we can own our own business, if we could start our own business, we can have a certain amount of freedom. We can actually have this dream business in which we get everything we want.
We get to be creative in the ways we want and we get to live the life outside of our business that we’ve always dreamed of somehow. It doesn’t always work out that way, does it?
Well, if you want to start down the path of actually taking control of all of these issues that seem to drain you of all of your energy, then let’s get on a call for a strategy session.
We together are going to develop a game plan that you and your staff can implement and it’s not going to happen overnight.
It’s going to take some time. But if you’re serious about it and if you’re qualified, there’s an application there on that page, would you be able to fill out whether it’s a mindset issue, whether it’s you dealing with delegation, whatever the issue is, or multiple issues that are getting in the way of you enjoying your business to the fullest extent.
Let’s sit down and talk.
I guarantee that you’re going to walk away with a game plan that you can implement.
Let’s get you back to doing the stuff that you love to do.
Now let’s get back to the conversation with Mark.
Brian: You were talking about growing your business and you being the one in the way of growing your business, if it isn’t growing.
Where do you find most of your customers at?
Mark: I mentioned before that in some ways I consider myself an out of work computer geek.
I sold my computer business and computer systems is what I’m really good at and when I started getting into the internet, the internet became what I’m really good at.
When I first started my company, I had set it up with keywords and with search engine optimization, which was very different back then so that when you typed in handicapped pet or dog wheelchair, you’d see six to 10 listings on the page and they’d all be my websites and I really was able to manage my search engine capability.
Although you can’t do that anymore.
And I have a whole department with with two full time people and a consultant working on search engines, it’s still functionally the internet. That brings me my clients.
We do a lot of veterinary outreach. We have a veterinary certification program, veterinary referral program.
Even so even with the vets referring us, most of our customers just come to us from the internet.
Brian: No, that makes sense.
In regards to that, you’re really on social media, notice, Facebook, YouTube, et cetera.
How’s social media and online videos, how have you seen that benefit in your business?
Has that been a huge piece of driving traffic?
Mark: Social media has recently shifted from the eyeball metric into the Pay Per Click.
We are just starting on aggressive Facebook advertising plan.
Whereas Facebook used to be, yeah, put a video on there and wait for it to go viral.
Now it’s monetized itself and it’s really about using the paper click and paper view advertising methods that we’ve learned. So social media is becoming more of a factor and it’s becoming a lot more measurable as far as conversion rates, traffic and some of the ways that we use it.
Yeah, our Facebook community is huge.
A lot of people are constantly sharing. We had a video that we did called to the pets, which was actually done in house. The music video. Wonderful. You’ll love it if you see it.
Things like that kind of go viral and get a lot of play, but it typically, because we’re in such a niche, when you see our video, you don’t go to our website and buy something.
When you see our video, you remember me a year or two later when your dog has a problem and then you come and buy something.
Social media gives us very little of an instant hit.
We’re not like a travel pillow where you post it on social media, advertise it, right. Sell 10,000 units.
Brian: That’s understandable. With such a specific market that you’re going after such a very clear cut community. I could see how that would be the case.
Mark: Part of the concept behind a niche business was typified by Amazon back in the early two thousands when it was starting in selling books and starting to do a lot of print on demand.
They called it long tail business.
Amazon was built on the idea that traditional publishers want to sell 5 million copies of one book. A print on demand can easily survive on selling 5 million copies of 250,000 books, and each person buying two copies.
The internet gives us the ability to have this kind of long tail when you graph the number of possible users and sales. So when niche business is looking at the smaller end of that tail, you’re right, I could probably not sell many dog wheelchairs here in my community in Amherst, but give me the world and I can sell thousands and thousands a year.
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. That’s fabulous.
If we were to talk again a year from now, what would have happened in the last 12 months for you to feel happy with your progress concerning your business?
Mark: Our big push this year is new products.
We have done very well with the dog wheelchair and we’ve made a name for ourselves with it.
This year we’re coming out with at least half a dozen new, highly innovative products that’s going to change the way we look at dogs with hip problems, back problems, leg problems.
There’s going to be a push into the veterinary markets as well. We want to sell more to veterinarians, to some of these products that we’ve learned about as we’ve learned more about dogs and anatomy and dog owners and their needs.
This time next year, I hope to tell you that we’ve grown another 20% based on our, our new products and new innovations, not so much a dog wheelchair company anymore.
Brain: Oh, excellent.
What are the obstacles standing in your way from hitting that 20% right now, do you see?
Mark: As I said, the biggest obstacle is me.
There’s nothing standing in my way. There are challenges. There’s patents, manufacturing.
I’m manufacturing a lot of my products in various countries around the world and international politics is starting to get in the way.
The looming trade war has prompted me to over inventory.
I am in a situation where if I’m out of stock, I’m out of business. I’m not going to be out of stock.
So looking at diversifying our manufacturing in different countries, we’re moving some of our manufacturing to Vietnam.
Great possibilities in Malaysia.
I see in, another five to 10 years a manufacturing moving into Africa.
It seems that the civilization on this planet moves its manufacturing around into its developing nations and as the manufacturing goes into those nations and the nations develop, then they move around and we’re beginning to specialize, but it looks like as a species we’re kind of upgrading the entire planet at the same time we’re destroying it.
I remember the Hudson when I was a kid, the Hudson river was considered to be deadly poison and small quantities. I took New York 10 years to clean it up.
Brian: That is a really interesting perspective. That’s really cool.
With all the changes, like you said, the politics and everything that are going on right now, it’s definitely something to keep in mind, that big picture concept of where things will continue going.
What advice would you have to other business owners, even if they’re not in your specific market, but if they’re in similar markets or dealing with communities that are similar to yours?
Do you have any blanket advice or anything specific that you’ve, you’ve learned last couple of years that that you think would be helpful?
Mark: Well, in my vision, your business has to be fun.
Your business is a reflection of who you are and if you try to make your business something that YOU’RE not, it’s going to fight you.
As I said, one of my struggles now is to do the personal growth work I need to do to support my growing business.
If I feel like this business is bigger than I am, then it’s not going to get any bigger, so I need to do my work.
My advice to a business person. I think my first piece of advice is just pay attention to who you are and make sure your business reflects that you are a unique individual with some special gifts and you can make those available to your community and if you provide a valuable product or service to your community, then your community will support you.
Brian: Awesome. Awesome.
That’s great advice.
Could a listener do who’d be interested in finding out more about all the products and everything else that you have available on walkinpets.com.
Mark: Well, the first thing I recommend everybody do is watch our videos.
Our videos are set in by customers for the most part and they show dogs who one day are dragging themselves around the house and crying and not getting out of bed. And then a few days later they’re running in the woods.
The message of our website is that you’re aging, disabled and injured.
Pets are family and they deserve to live happy, healthy lives and they can with just a little bit of help.
You know, gone are the days when a dog can’t walk and it gets put to sleep. I mean for crying out loud, my back went out a couple of weeks ago. Don’t kill me, give me a cane. It’ll get better. Okay.
To watch these videos will give people hope, will help them understand that a disability for an animal does not need to be a life ending crisis.
It can be just a minor inconvenience and snapping a dog in a wheelchare the way we’ve got that system worked out is only a minor inconvenience.
Brian: Awesome. That’s great.
Mark, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate it and I love to have you come back and talk some more. You’re just a wealth of knowledge and ideas.
This is just, I’m really impressed. Everybody makes sure. Go out and check out walkinpets.com.
Walkinpets.com, Mark, appreciate you being on the show. Thank you.
Mark: Thank you Brian. Great to be here.
Brian’s Closing Thoughts: You know, I really enjoyed that conversation with Mark. He has a really unique perspective on things and he’s so easy to listen to, don’t you think?
He’s knowledgeable, he could tell a good story and I wanted to focus on three different themes that ran throughout our conversation that I think we could all learn from when it comes to our businesses.
First I wanted to focus in on his origin story and I can’t stress enough how important it is to have a moving origin story if at you possibly can.
If you can build some type of a story around what brought you into this market, what brought you into the business that you currently own or run?
Well, Mark story speaks volumes as far as that goes. Him talking about Mercedes, the epileptic dog and having to make the really difficult choice to have Mercedes put down and that ties directly back into the story of what created the website.
He said, this is the website I wish I had when Mercedes was alive and that’s powerful stuff, especially when you’re talking to other pet owners.
It means a lot.
If you can create some type of story around what brought you to doing what you do, if you can build a story around it, it will take you a long way in the process.
It means something deeper than just, I wanted to get into business and make some money. The second thing he brought up that I think really moves throughout his entire career is how his business and website got started to begin with.
Oftentimes our businesses get started based on a product or a service that we then go and find a market to match up with. We go and find the customers to go with the product or service.
He started with the marketplace he started with the customers. It’s really the most ideal way to start a business if you’re starting from scratch and if you’re in the middle of a business, it’s good to step back and think directly about the marketplace first.
If you can build a business around that market, if you can build a business around your current customer base or your ideal customer base, what would it look like if you had to create a product from scratch to help them?
What would that product be?
He started his entire website to just create a conversation online and that became a community built around that website and then after all that he had a business.
After all that, he saw a need.
It’s like he said, every time someone’s complaining, there’s an opportunity.
He heard the complaints came to meet each complaint first, starting with the wheelchair and then going from there, providing everything else within that community. There’s power.
Think about how he was discussing the acceptance factor in that community. The fact that people were coming on board because they were all used to being outcasts because of how they treat their pets.
When you get a whole bunch of people together into a community where they’re all discussing things that most people would find odd, all of a sudden there’s a spirit of acceptance.
That acceptance is actually one of his products. It’s a product of the community.
It’s not something that they’re outright paying money directly for, but in buying into the community by buying a product, by hanging out on the website, they’re getting acceptance in return.
What is your business delivering that is non-tangible like that?
Do you have enough of a community where there’s some type of non-tangible exchange happening there?
Do they tie that back to you and your brand?
Another great aspect of having a community like this is the testimonial database that they’ve been able to build up. He brought up briefly about all the videos that they have on their website and on their social media from all of the satisfied customers.
Do you have a community that feels comfortable posting videos about how your product or service has helped them? Have you asked them to?
Have you encouraged it?
Have you taken the few that are out there and promoted them to encourage others?
Never ever, ever underestimate the power of the community, the power of a club, of a membership site. There’s always a way to do it.
There’s always a way to build it around your current brand.
It’s not necessarily easy, but it is possible. It’s a really good book out there called the Automatic Customer, creating a subscription business in any industry, it’s by John Warrillow.
Really good book on how you can take your business and create a subscription model if you don’t have something in your business like that. It’s definitely worth looking into and definitely something we’re going to be talking about more as we move ahead in these episodes.
One more thing about the, every time someone’s complaining, there’s an opportunity that’s really is what the entrepreneurial spirits all about, isn’t it?
I mean that’s really what it comes down to is finding the silver lining in a bad situation, looking for trouble. This is what entrepreneurs do.
This is what business owners do and having that inventor mentality of being able to fix it.
Even the way that he described how he was handling the looming trade war, the rising tariffs and so forth, and that thread of over inventory of his products. His main solution was to diversify as manufacturing.
Find other places where he can get things manufactured at in the meantime so that he’s not going to go out of business.
That’s the attitude that everyone needs out there and that’s the attitude that as an owner or an executive, you really need to be able to execute it and see that you’re executing it and realize how rare it is.
Realize how most people out there just don’t have that attitude. Knowing the good parts of what you bring to the table will help you to overcome some of the issues that he was explaining.
This is the third point that I wanted to bring up is when he discussed unexpected demands and he said, I don’t get to do this stuff I love to do anymore.
That’s a really sobering thought and my question is, do you relate to that? Do you feel like your business and even if it’s successful, do you feel like you’re bogged down in all the minutia that you don’t really enjoy doing?
Would you rather be doing everything else and are you held back by other concepts?
Other little ghosts like the imposter syndrome that he talks about. Is that a problem with you?
If so, I definitely recommend checking out that dream business transformation strategy session that I discussed earlier. Go to BrianJPombo/DreamBiz.
Overall, I think this is a great interview to hold onto and to relisten to so many great points to walk away with. I look forward to talking with Mark again in the future and see how well he’s doing with the growth of his company and his personal growth as well.
Outro: Join us again on the next Off The Grid Biz 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.
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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.