Jeremy Weisz 12:43
Does it avoid you from having to flip it on the grill? Is that one of the things?
Laurier Mandin 12:47
It does that too, and it’s just the speed, the speed of cooking something. That’s why we came up with the catchphrase for CRBQ was double the flavor in half the time. And it really, really does create this amazing grilling effect the outside crust on something on both sides of it. And by cooking that quickly, it’s this kind of flash cooking effect that captures the flavor inside and makes just about anything you cook like that really amazing. And so with this particular product, we recognize that one of the biggest I need, that factors is appetite. That if you can see something, and you hear this, and you see it cooking, and you see the juiciness by bringing that across, human beings get hungry, and they automatically feel that whatever it is that they’re seeing before them, there becomes this intense desire to have it.
So we also discovered that the half the time effect, while that is nice, people enjoy the process of going outside and barbecuing. So that wasn’t as much of a need factor as we thought. But when we would show our most effective videos in promoting this product were the HOW TO THE RECIPE cooking, people would see us cooking these large, delicious steaks and cutting into them, and all the juices coming out, and the sales would light up. So with this particular product, when we launched it, once we started pushing everything into the recipe videos, it took off to the extent that PayPal shut the store down and thought that it had to be fraudulent activity.
So the CRBQ founder called up PayPal and was talking to them, and he said, Well, you guys must see this all the time with new products. And the guy at PayPal gave him this stone, never, yeah. It doesn’t happen, not to this extent, with a brand new product that didn’t exist before. And the trajectory for this product was really, really good that way. The reason I like to tell this story, though, is because it goes beyond just the discovery of the need with this product, we learned something really important about scaling, and it was really important to me that I take forward with everything else that we scale with. There were a few important problems that we had with this product. There was a flaw with food sticking to the grill that was a bit of a nightmare that we didn’t know how to overcome, and a lot of people didn’t know how to manage it. And when we scaled problems like that, there was a small manufacturing error with one of the screws.
When we scaled the product, we were scaling these issues along with it. And so that became something that we had to navigate. And for the company itself, it became very, very difficult. The bigger challenge that they were running into at the very same time, this was 2021 and early 2021 and the platforms, the cost of using Facebook marketing was just going our conversion costs were going from $5 per unit to $10 per unit to $20 per unit. It was at the point when Apple had really shut the door on with its privacy restrictions and the Facebook conversion APIs that the pixels weren’t communicating anymore, they kind of lost the conduit to the Shopify store. And so we kind of had this was more than a double whammy. At the same time the cost of iron was going up through supply chain crisis. And so it was kind of this perfect storm was happening right as this product reached its first million dollars in sales, and the brand itself, with things going the way they were, the owner of the company switched to another marketing agency, sales went even worse.
And the beginning of this year, this product stopped selling online. And for me, it was very emotional, because I love this product. I still have two of them, and my kids still ask for me to cook food that way. It’s still one of my favorite ways to cook. It was just this one of the most life changing products I’ve worked with because of how good it was. And yet, there it was, against all the good things they had going for it, going from this rapid PayPal doesn’t believe your success start to can’t viably sell units online because the cost of returns on this 30 pound unit that you’ve got to ship back whenever there’s a manufacturing error, killing the company.
Yeah, yeah, I remember the company owner. And the other thing was that when we were shipping this, it was heavy and expensive to ship. The cost of getting it to consumers was more expensive than producing the product when you had returns. On top of that, it was just absolutely logistically that the business structure collapsed on itself, and most of these things weren’t predictable at the start. It would have been very hard to see these things coming, because they evolved from something that was initially very successful into something that couldn’t find a way forward.
Jeremy Weisz 18:41
It’s really interesting. I love what you said about scaling products and also means you’re scaling issues. But it goes with, I guess any company just exposes some of the weaknesses. And I’m curious how they found you in the beginning.
Laurier Mandin 19:04
I believe they found us just through a web search. There may have been a referral.
Jeremy Weisz 19:08
So they’re like, they’re thinking, we need to get this in front of as many people as possible, and they contact you. Some of these things you say maybe seem obvious to you, but they’re not obvious to everyone, meaning like you’re saying, okay, well, when we cut into steak, it helped. When we create recipe videos and content, it helped. I remember, so I’d love to hear kind of what was the breadth of stuff you actually did with SearBQ, but I remember I had Rick Sasari on the podcast. Rick helped. I don’t know if you know Rick, but I think you jive with his episode. He talked about marketing, George Foreman grill, also Sonicare tooth brush, all through infomercials. And he would say that looking at the stats, every time they showed boxing in it, sales diminished. Every time George Foreman took a bite of the hamburger, sales spiked. So they just wanted to get him taking as many bites as the hamburger as possible in this infomercial, because every time they saw sales spike up. What did you do with SearBQ from the inception?
Laurier Mandin 20:34
Yeah, I’m still stuck on the I mean, I check out that episode, because that’s one thing about direct response, is being able to measure by the moment in what’s happening in the action, what does the actual audience react with the responses, rather than, on a larger level, saying, when we use a video that has recipe in it, that’s when we get the sale, that’s when we get the conversions. And sometimes you can tell at what point, how far they’re watching through the video, but that granular of information as to what’s working. But for SearBQ, we started off, as we usually do, with what we call our innovative product go to market roadmap. So when we’re doing that, we’re kind of dissecting the product, looking at the potential audience personas, which is the unique buyer types that we can target that are likely to be interested in purchasing a product like that.
So for something like SearBQ, one of the obvious things is this kind of king of the grill, backyard chef, usually father, type of guy that likes to get out, his one cooking job in the household is making steaks. So that’s what his pride and joy is. That’s what his reputation is, and everything he does kind of means on that. We look at other personas, like even the gift buyers, the people that know people in their lives that do that. And then we end up with little surprises that about half of the people that bought and used the SearBQ were female. And it’s this big, heavy outdoor thing. We absolutely expected that most of our buyers are going to be these male king of the grill type of purchasers, but it ended up not being so. So we ended up with these little surprises that you always do get. But back to what we do with our road maps is we do, as you’re showing on the screen, this discovery workshop, we learn everything we can from the client about the product.
Then we go and do our research, and we create a road map that has usually about what 15 to 20 different components within that are the most important things that we need to know in order to go to market, from competitive analysis to what we call our climb analysis, which is our customer life, improving mechanisms and benefits. And so we’re analyzing basically just kind of all of the need points of the product for consumers, for the people who are going to use it. Yeah, you’ve got on screen right now the different things that we often look through, including climb, use cases, competing options, the elephants in the room. So the things, how the product is a clear standout in its market, and how to overcome the significant barriers that everybody knows it’s going to run into when you do hit the marketplace, jobs to be done, which many people in Product Marketing know is kind of those and outcomes that you’re trying to achieve when you’re taking a product.
What the, I guess the comparison for that is when you buy a drill you don’t want, a drill, you want a quarter inch hole. And we also have what we call at Graphos, the coveted condition, which is kind of the long term benefit that you’re going for so way beyond a year down the road from when you’re buying the product, what it is that you want to change in your life by owning that product, and what you would miss the most if the product was taken away after a year of you owning and using and living with that thing in your life. So if you’re the SearBQ, what the coveted condition would be, would be you now not having to take these pink in the middle chicken breasts and microwave them to bring them to your family. You always know that they’re consistently cooked perfectly, and you’ve kind of risen to this whole new level of barbecued kingship.
Jeremy Weisz 24:35
I love it. So when you work with them, were you doing everything from different content videos, also advertising them across the social channels.
Laurier Mandin 24:47
We very often do things like video production. I’ve got great teams for doing that. We did not create the recipe videos. We did some video editing with this particular product. But we did all of the media buying initially, especially during that big, successful launch, and run up, though I was talking about, we created a lot of the static images, and we did photo shoots and image production. So probably about 80% of what end users would have seen about what the audiences would have seen. My team and I created, we did the positioning statement and all the content writing and even fines the recipes, and some of the testing of recipes and enhancing them, that type of thing.
Jeremy Weisz 25:33
How do you decide to work with a company? Because I imagine not all companies are a fit. They could have come to you and be like, Yeah, I don’t think we’re a fit. What is an ideal client? Why did you end up working or not working with certain companies?
Laurier Mandin 25:52
That’s a really great question. And I had a discussion with a prospective client yesterday about that, and we created this About You section that you might see on our website if you’re there, and because the clients that we work with, we end up working with less than 5% of the ones who reach out to us. Sometimes it’s closer to 1% of the prospects that we have that come to us to launch a product. Most often, there’s a bunch of factors that are involved. A big one is the personality of the people that we’re going to be working with, of the leadership team that we’re going to be working with, the type of product they’ve got, if they’ve got 1000 skews that they want to have us work with together and manage kind of the portfolio of products, we’re less interested in doing that.
Usually it’s innovative products. It’s products that we feel, after looking at them, that we’ve got a good chance of being able to deliver a successful outcome for that we believe that at the end of this launch, there’s a really good chance that they’re going to feel that it’s been successful, that the product is going to be dominating in its marketplace. So the amount of experience that they’ve got, usually one of the criteria is they should have prior agency experience. And part of the reason for that is, is the way that we do things is we just knock ourselves out for our clients. And if someone hasn’t ever worked with an agency before, they won’t realize quite how rare it is to work directly with a principal like me.
We have our people who do project management and strategy and all those different levels, but most, if not all of the clients that come to Graphos Product, end up working directly with me and using a good chunk of my available time. So we really need to limit who it is we work with. And there’s a big element of that is my gut feeling, after meeting with these people once or twice, do I feel that we’re going to hit it off, and that this is going to go really well, and we’re going to be successful for them. And the other criteria that you see on the about you page, as well as a healthy serving of my gut instinct, or what we use to filter who ends up working with this in the end.
Jeremy Weisz 28:22
What’s another story from the book, Laurier that’s. Thanks for sharing this here, because it’s really fascinating how there’s great things about launching a product, and then the stuff that we don’t see behind the scenes that kind of restricts the growth as well. What’s another favorite story from I need that?
Laurier Mandin 28:48
Another story that I talk about is a more recent product called the parallel pillow. So the company is Parallel Sleep, and this was a partnership, a group of people who had a whole lot of experience over 50 years, not 50 years combined, but 50 years of work, of the leadership team members in the sleep business. And they wanted to go DTC. They wanted to launch a sleep company that would sell only direct to consumer, and it was going to have to be based on nothing, but really, really, really good products. And they had some people on their team. They had house brand products that they launched previously. So they had the manufacturing connections. They had a ton of great information about what would make the best pillow, the best mattress, the best sheets, the best everything that they were going to put in their lineup, and they decided to start with a pillow.
So they had this product that ended up being the company’s flagship product. It’s called the Parallel Pillow. And it’s just an amazing product. Everybody who tries it, pretty much unanimously, says that this is the best pillow they’ve ever used. It’s fully adjustable. It’s multi-layered in terms of the really great things, from the outer cover to their anti-microbial inner cover that makes sure it doesn’t have mites living in it, or any kind of germs and bacteria. So it’s anti-microbial. It’s super soft and smooth on the outside. It’s not cooling, but it’s therm-temperature neutral, so it keeps you at the right temperature all night long. Very breathable, great support. And so we launched this Parallel Pillow. And the other thing that you might be seeing as you’re looking through the video there, is that they have this, buy one, we give one model.
So for every Parallel Pillow sold Parallel gives a pillow to someone in need, and so they’ve connected with Salvation Army, which gives them the reach to be able to run their donation model on a national level. So as people are being impacted by things like hurricanes and they’re being rendered homeless or without a pillow for various reasons this and this is all ages of people, from little kids to senior citizens. Parallel is able to deliver the comfort of a pillow to all of these people, and that has gone really well. The charities that they worked with in the Salvation Army just wanted them to recognize that that’s something that the people need every single day, and they wear out. They get dirty from people moving around and things like that. So it’s this area of constant need. So between those two things, the donation model, which the company founders have long been.
Part of the reason that they had such an easy time getting a national charity to work with them is that they’ve worked with charities for a good chunk of that 50 years, they’ve been in the sleep field. So they kind of had this natural connection that gave them instant credibility by having the backing of a well-known national charity and this really, really great product. And so when we went to market with the product, we focused on a few different things that were different from the sleep base. Most of the other sleep companies out there, if you look at their websites, they’re very white wash. They’re just this kind of white space with clean white sheets and clean pillows and things like that on them. So we went the other way with Parallel, it’s very rich colors and very what I would imagine being a nice, comfortable bedroom space that’s ready to embrace you and take you off to a good night’s sleep.
And we went with the tagline, your tomorrow starts tonight, because a healthy, restorative sleep is what empowers you to have better health and be more rested and be more powerful about everything you do. So the images we work with are not really sleep related images. They’re about empowered people, and we show through the different images. And we found that those images that we use of people that are able to live their best life with their families, athletically, in their job performance, in all the other things they do that feel would make people, would encourage people, make them want to own this product. So the experience of owning a pillow, of owning a Parallel Pillow, between that and that desired future state, the coveted condition, as I call it, of being your very best self, your most your most powerful self, able to make the biggest impact you can on the world. Were the tools that we use.
They were the messaging that we use in taking the Parallel Pillow to market, and it’s been very successful. The product is the flagship product, as I said, and right now we’re getting ready to launch duvets and comforters and another different kind of Parallel Pillow to a company this one on the market, as well as mattresses and a whole bunch of other sleep products. So it’s been a successful launch. It’s gone very well.
Jeremy Weisz 34:27
No thanks for sharing that. If you’re watching the video, you can see, I’m just pulling out like you could say, can see the parallelsleep.com, and then, like you were saying, kind of just the differentiation. And it goes back to basically how you run the roadmap piece, and I think is really valuable. I think again, for like any company, actually, it’s, I think your go to market road map is applicable across any industry, right? So I really like how you kind of map out thinking of the coveted condition and elf in the room and some of these things. So if anyone, whether it’s a SaaS company, you said, like, what is someone going to miss most, right? And highlighting those things from, like, a stickiness perspective.
So I encourage people to check out there. You can go to graphosproduct.com, and they have a go to market road map, which obviously we’ve shown on the screen, but you can kind of poke around to see how they think about products. Or if you have services, it’s the same application. One thing, Laurier, that I think about when you talk, I’d love to hear your thoughts on growth, right? Because you said, I know maybe your thoughts on growth has changed throughout your company. In the beginning, maybe more people now, I think you really least when we were talking before we hit record, just learn a little bit about yourself that you actually, some people enjoy running the business what you said, and some people enjoy actually still working with clients. So talk about how your thoughts on growth has changed with the company.
Laurier Mandin 36:17
Absolutely. And I think most agency owners are what agency Coach Drew McClellan calls accidental agency owners, is they, at some point, like I did, discover that running an agency is a really fun thing for them, and it uses the skills that they’ve got. Often they’ve got creative skills, and from writing to design and other things like that, and good people skills. But a funny thing happens when you start to grow is that you get pushed out of the room with the clients, and you get pushed into the room of executive decision-making and running teams and doing a lot of things that for that the personality that thrives on being hands-on, connected, collaborating, brainstorming, and presenting things to clients, and just the things that you got into the business for, those one by one, or sometimes three at a time, get taken away from you, and you find that you’re delegating, and you’re just doing all these very high-level activities. And for me, as an agency owner, I found that that made me start to look for an exit.
And it was in considering that and thinking, well, then what will I do? But I start over again, small and run this cycle. And some people do that. But that was kind of the revelation that made me say, okay, head-count. And this kind of ego-feeding vanity metrics of running this bigger and bigger company that you like less and less isn’t a great idea for me. And from that, I started to look at what I really did value, and it was the collaborative work, it was the creative work, and it was moving the needle for the client. Early on in my business life with the agency, I realized that my job wasn’t to design cool things and to create campaigns and to run marketing. It was to make my clients look good and be successful. And if I did that right, I would be successful, I would be very happy in what I did, and that more work would come, and it would go from one success to another.
So I had to take that to the next stage and recognize that success for me means doing more of what I like. So it means working with other people that are really good at what they do. So I’ve got really great web developers and a really great creative director that’s been with me for over 16 years. I’ve got a director of strategy that’s been with me a dozen years, and we think very much on the same wavelength. And the stuff that we communicate it’s just kind of the gaps between the stuff, the things that we already know each other know. So to me, this world that I’ve created, which is a fairly small group of people and a supporting cast of connected individuals that are also very expert at what they do and need very little coaching and hand-holding, is my ideal place to be.
So this team of less than a dozen people now, instead of 30 some people, that runs almost by itself, and people come to me and tell me, kind of how we’re doing with things, what needs to be done next, any gaps that we’ve got, and it’s just a simple matter of, kind of filling those little gaps and continuing to do the really fun work, which is kind of close to creative work in a bit of visioning. On top of that.
Jeremy Weisz 39:50
Laurier, talk about some of the elements you think looking back, led and helped with the retention of staff, because you say, like, 12 years, 16 years. Again, I’m going to make a broad generalization. It’s like, that’s not the norm, typically. So what are some of the elements you think that you’ve implemented that has helped with that, that maybe other companies can do as well?
Laurier Mandin 40:21
Great question, because all through my career, I’ve always had way better staff retention than my peers than other agency owners. And that’s something that I have a heck of a time telling you what the magic is, because I’ve had, you know, there’s always been, since I’ve been in business for 10 years, there’s always been someone with me who’s been with me for at least 10 years or 12 or 15 years. And I think that is just being really good at personality matching. And obviously there’s some things around making people feel listened to, and letting them do what they thrive at. And maybe that’s part of that is the same mentality that has made me recognize that being big isn’t important. It’s being able to drill down to what do we all share as common goals?
What’s really important to this guy in his career, assuming that it’s not jumping from one company to another and optimizing his salary, and part of that is making sure that those people are being properly recognized and rewarded. And we don’t do that by having awards nights and Recognition Day around the office. To me, it’s more about recognizing each individual idea. And if I talk to you about these people that have been with me for that long, I think part of the reason they’re with me for that long is because I’d hate to see them go and I value them as more than just the work that they do with their hands and their brains, and I value them as people that are really core to the work we’re doing.
Our clients would be devastated if I lost any of those people, because they love to have them there working on their project, and they love the insights each of these guys bring. And so for me, flipping back to that and saying, after the meeting, which we almost always do, is look at all the things you guys did, right? You caught all these insights, the work, the presentation you delivered, was flawless that, just recognizing all the detail and extra work that goes into doing things right in this world where there’s so many details, so many places to mess up, when we don’t have, when we do things that are flawless and nothing is messed up, that’s because everybody there was button down and just making sure that they dotted every eye and didn’t miss a detail.
So, I guess, the shortened version of that is, just love the people for real and value them for real and make sure they’re rewarded appropriately. But really, the reason that I’ve always managed to keep these people for so many years, for decades, is because, not because we go to each other’s house parties and things like that. We don’t, but when we work together on the team, we respect each other very, very highly, and we’re super open with each other. If something isn’t going right in someone’s life, the other people probably know about it, and they know how to compensate, and how to help, and if something is a mess with the project, and we don’t think we’re going to make a deadline, because that’s something else that my team does super well.
In 31 years, I could count the missed deadlines on one hand, and it’s just that level of accountability, and we’ve got each other’s back. When you feel everybody else has your back, you’re probably not going to go somewhere else in the world recognizing that that’s a rare experience. You don’t have that in too many places of your life, where someone is always watching for you and making sure that you don’t step on a crack.
Jeremy Weisz 43:57
Thanks for sharing that. I know it’s kind of hard to look from the outside, because when you’re living it, sometimes the stuff is just subconscious. It’s not like a set plan, right?
Laurier Mandin 44:12
Yeah, you don’t think, how am I going to keep this guy for 15 years?
Jeremy Weisz 44:15
Right? Exactly. I have one last question, Laurier, before I ask it, I just want to point people to, they can check out graphosproduct.com, we’ve been showing it on the screen. You can check out the book I Need That, and more episodes of the podcast. My last question is just about some of your favorite resources. Resources could mean your favorite tech tools. It could mean your favorite books that you’ve learned from business or leadership or whatever it is, what are some of your favorite go-to resources that you recommend?
Laurier Mandin 44:56
Oh, well as an agency owner, my favorite resource is the 2Bobs Podcast with David C Baker and Blair ends. And I’ve listened to every episode of that thing. They’ve probably got hundreds of them, and I’ve listened to every episode at least once. So that’s a favorite of mine. Ditching Hourly by Jonathan Stark. I just love everything Jonathan does. His personality, to me, is everything I want to be. He’s got this genuineness. He’s as authentic in everything that he does as he is as a real human being. So I like that when I see people that are able to just if they’re ever nervous, you don’t see it, if they’re ever not being themselves or making stuff up, I don’t catch it. I just don’t think they ever do. And to me, that is a really great way to live your life. So I look for authenticity that I see in those characters, in what they do. Jonathan Stark, by the way, inspired me to write a daily email newsletter.
And so if you’re interested in product and you’re interested in things around launching a product, go to lmandin.com, and I have a daily newsletter that you can sign up for there, model after largely what guys like Seth Godin and Jonathan Stark do, but I find that that’s also been a really helpful exercise, not just in addition to the stuff I listen to is when you’re writing something like a daily newsletter, it causes you, every day to open your mind and to be looking for that next really good idea, that next insight. And so I think that’s where future books and things I author are going to probably come from is just by daily exercise of coming up with something that I want to be valuable to my audience every single day.
Jeremy Weisz 46:52
So 2Bob’s podcast, Ditching Hourly. Any other books or podcasts are your favorites?
Laurier Mandin 47:00
My gosh, I am always reading and listening to books and in podcasts. And in particular, I think what else is there that might be of interest to people? I’ll cut it off there, since I’m going mental blank on you.
Jeremy Weisz 47:17
No worries. I figured there’s sometimes too many to count, but Laurier, I appreciate you. Everyone can check out more episodes of the podcast. They can check out graphosproduct.com, and we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks so much.
Laurier Mandin 47:35
Thank you.
