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S2 Ep3 Breaking Barriers and Building Businesses
97 Plays2 years ago
In this episode of Dial It In, Dave and Trygve interview Buffie Blessi, the founder and CEO of Rock What You Got. Buffie is a social enterprise entrepreneur who is known for her energy and ability to crush any business challenge. While she may not be a mystical creature killer like Buffie from the popular TV show, she is definitely a force to be reckoned with in the business world. Tune in to hear Buffie insights on growing a successful organization and embracing your destiny.
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Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
Connect with Dave Meyer
Connect with Trygve Olsen
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
Meet Buffy Bleezy
00:00:24
Speaker
All right, I know that when we had Pete on, I got the intro wrong, but I think I got it right this time. And I'm really super excited, Dave. I hope so, Trigby. This is a big deal. Yep, yep. So our guest today wanted a long line of young women chosen by fate to battle evil forces.
00:00:42
Speaker
She has been given a mystical calling, which grants her powers that dramatically increases both her physical strength, her endurance, her agility, accelerated healing, intuition, and to a certain extent, a limited degree of precognition. I'm not sure we got it right. She is a reluctant hero who just wants to live a normal life, but she is embracing her destiny. Oh, well, no.
00:01:12
Speaker
No, you got that wrong, Mr. Olsen. Do I have the wrong Buffy? Our Buffy, Buffy Bleasy is the founder and CEO of Rock What You Got. She's a longtime friend of Busy Web and of mine, and she is a social enterprise entrepreneur. So if we're looking for a mystical creature killer, she does kill jobs and kills
00:01:42
Speaker
The need for additional business, like she's just a crusher. And every time that I work with or talk to Buffy, she's an amazing talent and has unqualified amounts of energy. And so I think you're going to love our Buffy, Buffy Bleezy of Rock What You Got, much more than any vampire slayers.
00:02:08
Speaker
I was all set to add, I had a whole set of questions about what it was like to work with the bad guy from Ted Lasso, but I'm just going to... Paige Church, hi Buffy, welcome. Best intro ever. Nobody ever introduces me like that. Nobody ever, you know.
00:02:27
Speaker
confuses me for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but everybody asks if I am. Little known fact for all the old people on this podcast. I'm actually named after another fictional character from another TV show from the sixties called Family Affair and little girl Buffy and Jodie, her brother and sister and uncle Bill and Mr. French. So
00:02:56
Speaker
that is. But you have to be a certain age to have any idea what that's about. When we wanted to name our son, not Dave's and my son, Dave and I have a whole different slide. I don't want to know about that. But we wanted to have a unique name, but one that everybody could spell and pronounce. So my son's name is Linus, and we get asked all the time, where's your blanket? Does he name? No, it's not that. We just like the name.
00:03:26
Speaker
I'm sure he gets it too. At some point in time, you just kind of roll with it because people want to say something. They really do. I can tell when they want to and they just won't. And then sometimes they just blur it right out. And I was like, yeah. You guys both have the good names. My name, there were five Dave Myers in my high school. What? Yes. That's crazy. I don't know another one. My name is German Johnson. Is it really? Yeah, there's everything.
00:03:55
Speaker
Well, let's get down to business because Buffy is just one of those people that if you don't know her, you soon will because she's a master networker and she always has new and interesting irons in the fire. So Buffy, why don't you tell us about your favorite things that you're working on right now?
Rock What You Got's Mission
00:04:13
Speaker
I know rock what you got and all of the video and audio production things that you're doing right now, but tell us a little bit about you.
00:04:20
Speaker
Yeah. So let's start with Rock What You Got. You know, sometimes when you started, my business is 15 years old this year and I used to have a name for this company that nobody knew because I owned a franchise. And when we changed it to Rock What You Got,
00:04:36
Speaker
It happened over bottomless mimosas. The old name, nobody really knows. Just last year, we changed it officially to Rock What You Got. It's been around. Yeah, we work on a couple of different things. We leverage stage, which I'll talk about, and story, which I'll talk about, to drive gender equity. What we're working on right now on the stage is
00:05:04
Speaker
some projects that will put women on a stage, comedy, music, theater, spoken word, those things kind of go under a moniker we call the pay gap. So we have these pay gap shows. And it's not just about pay, but we do something called edutainment. And so
00:05:26
Speaker
whatever you like, you come and have fun. And while you're there, we'll talk to you a little bit about the crazy things that are still out there related to gender equity issues. So that's our stage work. And we do that under our nonprofit, Rock What You Got Fund. And we also have a brand called RockStoria Studios. And RockStoria Studios is a film production company and we do full service video production, commercial work,
00:05:56
Speaker
little clips, social clips, and some other stuff, podcasts, audio books, that kind of stuff. And Rock Story Studios is also a very beautiful studio. And so we let other creative types and community members come in and use the space. And that's kind of a fun, fun time.
00:06:18
Speaker
And we're really one year old. That's sort of funny. The Rec Story Studios opened yesterday, a year ago. And so we've been at one year of a new studio. It's so gorgeous.
Rock Story Studios
00:06:33
Speaker
And especially the big studio lighting setup. And our listeners can't see this, but Buffy's actually in the podcast Egg, which is so neat. And she has way better audio than we do.
00:06:46
Speaker
Hey, it's built. We can fix that for you. You know that you built my audio system, right? I didn't build your basement. Yeah, you were the one who picked out all my equipment. That's true. Well, you have those really lovely soft lounge chairs behind you. That helps with the sound a little bit. I do. It's what my wife refers to as my talk show set.
00:07:15
Speaker
Yeah. One of the interesting words that you use is one that I use a lot in how I talk about how I, when people hire me as a speaker, as a trainer, is the concept of the edutainment. And I think what's so interesting about the Rock What You Got work that you do is that we're in a culture right now where there is a backlash to any sort of equity work.
00:07:40
Speaker
There is a group of people who think that you can't do any of that if you make anybody else feel bad for who they are as a person, which in a bell jar, okay, sure, that has some respectable qualities, but on the other hand, no, it really doesn't.
From Equality to Equity
00:07:57
Speaker
There's something interesting about words that we choose a long time ago. When we first started this work four years ago, the word equality was what we were using. There's a really big difference between equality and equity. When we moved to equity, we found a rhythm with it. Equity really just implies
00:08:21
Speaker
the same opportunity to achieve at the same levels. Not that we are ever going to be equals because opportunity is something people capitalize on. When we're entertaining people, we meet them where they are. We put you in an environment that's comfortable for you.
00:08:43
Speaker
you come and you're just there to have fun. And while you're there, when we say to you things like, Hey, did you know that women couldn't get a credit in their own name for their business until 1988, I think is the date. Like I had already graduated from high school.
00:09:03
Speaker
Right. So when we hear those things, we can say, oh, wow, I just didn't know or even now what's still happening. One of my favorite. It's not my favorite story because it's a kind of a terrible story, but it it really helps people understand what the issues are. We work with a very well known comedian on TV shows
00:09:28
Speaker
And we had her interviewed once and she said, I still, my manager gets me headlining gigs around the country. And every single time she is working on some stuff, they find out that they can't get into a club because they just had a female headliner two months ago.
Gender Bias in Entertainment
00:09:51
Speaker
You're kidding.
00:09:52
Speaker
Yeah, and they will not put all women on stage at the same time. There's still these things even on radio stations about, can you put two female songs together? We talk about those things, but at the same time, they're all stuff we can understand. I put it in your brain for a second and you start paying attention. When you hear two or three things happen in a row, you're like, change.
00:10:19
Speaker
But the interesting thing is, is almost all our shows that we produce are female, lead and driven. And people say, oh, so only women come. That isn't the point. Nobody asks me if I go to an all male show, why I would dare to go to all male show. That's silly. They never ask us that. And so our goal is just to kind of help people say, hey, you know, if I meet you where you are right now, maybe you will make a choice.
00:10:49
Speaker
the next time in your business to hire diversity, to pay equally like you would if the guy showed up that day, or to even if you see, we have women, we ask them, what do you want to get paid? And they're always under representing themselves. And we say, that's great, but we're going to pay you this instead. And so we need more people to kind of say, just because we
00:11:16
Speaker
have seen that the whole time, that doesn't mean it has to be like that. So it doesn't have to be adversarial, basically. It can really just mean little teeny things. And that's what's so bewildering about the whole backlash to me is that it's not a zero sum game. One group doesn't have to have something taken away for another group to be equal. Like the thing you talked about, and Dave and I both were a little incredulous,
00:11:45
Speaker
Who on Earth keeps track of the gender of the singer on the radio? Program managers. That's why. What a waste of time. It seems like it is. But the thing is that news, media, radio stations, they still get
00:12:05
Speaker
feedback and comments from people. There's, you know, before we started trivia and I was talking about microphones, right? So the microphone is one of the most interesting things. It has not changed
00:12:18
Speaker
since it was designed, it is not designed for a female voice. So the tinning you hear over the radio where women, so people will say women's voice is great on them, on the air. And part of that isn't them, it is the microphones that are being used and how they capture the tone. The tonal value sound is sort of interesting because it bounces.
00:12:41
Speaker
and it comes back to people, and a microphone is built to take this range, and that range is for the male voice. That's part of why you'll hear some of that stuff, that women's voices sound different to people than men's, and there's a comfort level in that.
00:13:03
Speaker
doesn't make it right, just means we need more engineers to design more things, microphones and other equipment for us and they don't. That's just fascinating. And you know, for, for all of the media attention that especially gender equity and all of the different things that are, that are happening kind of in our society right now,
00:13:27
Speaker
with the backlash that I think Trigby pointed out, you know, we're very lucky to be in a very progressive state. We're in Minnesota where we're recording. It's not the same story everywhere. And so, you know, especially on edutainment and as you're, as you're speaking with folks and having that through the nonprofit through Rock What You Got, how do you handle the folks that are getting more and more vocal?
00:13:54
Speaker
with their side of the story. Yeah, it's sort of interesting. I mean, we haven't had a lot of pushback on the work we do. Maybe all those years of hyper focusing your target market.
00:14:10
Speaker
been helpful. People who come to our events, even if they're not all the way there, they're not progressively active in gender equity issues, they typically tend to be a little more in tune with the things that are there. But we talk about it all the time as much. So one of our
00:14:30
Speaker
Here, we do work on stage. That can be very much a blend of women and men, but behind the scenes, the people who do stage work, sound engineer, lighting, design, the stage management piece, almost entirely men. We are a full female crew. Same thing on our RockStoria brand of video production. We're claiming it. Nobody's claimed it. We're going to claim it. We're the first all-female crew in Minnesota.
RockStoria: Breaking Barriers
00:14:59
Speaker
And if somebody else has one, they can come and talk to us. We're happy to share in their joy too, because it's very unusual. I'm sure you guys have been behind the camera in interviews before. It is almost entirely
00:15:13
Speaker
men. And so some of this is really about being able to show what it looks like. And, and so the hard part is if there already isn't a whole lot of women in it, there likely isn't a diverse set of women in it either. So, so back to your question about, you know, what do you do about that? We also, our Rockstaria brand, we have to do more and better to get our information out in front of
00:15:43
Speaker
a broader diverse group of women to show them, hey, you know, you could be in this and we would love to have you be a part of that. And so in the Rockwood, you got fun. We have a whole educational component that we're working on with different colleges like Century College to get in front of more women and show them that it's there. And that means working harder to attract and engage and welcome
00:16:13
Speaker
a bigger diverse population of women. So that'll help us be able to stand out and push back more too, because at the end of the day, we're currently all white on our team. And that isn't our place either to push back. We're here to be allies and advocates. Right, and it's about diverse voices. And we actually had a podcast about
00:16:40
Speaker
gender equality and diversity, but I think the coolest part is inside of gender equity and inclusion and diversity, the thing that we're doing isn't necessarily or only helping people of that gender or that
00:17:04
Speaker
ethnic background, we're helping all of us because anytime a voice isn't able to be heard, you're missing out on that perspective. You're missing out on that experience. You're missing out on all of the talents that you're just missing. And just like you said before with the microphones is there should be a broader range of audio available and it's dumb that you can only hear big men, male voices.
00:17:33
Speaker
Yeah. Is a maturation effect too. I think one of the things you see, especially with social media algorithms right now is there's this continued silo effect that if you don't look at the world around you, you end up only seeing the things that you want to see. Yeah. And in our subconscious, I mean, clearly I'm not a psychologist, but you know, our brains are really good at compartmentalizing things to make us comfortable as humans. And,
00:18:03
Speaker
And when we're in our comfort zone, it's easy for us to check our boxes, to check things off our list, to get things done. As soon as we mix in something that makes us uncomfortable and we don't know what to do, we basically run away from it. And what we're asking everybody to do
00:18:19
Speaker
right now is to embrace that a little bit and say, yeah, I'm uncomfortable because I spent my 55 years being indoctrinated in my own world, right? And I got to untrain that and that process is going to make me feel weird. And that is okay. Um, we've asked other people to feel uncomfortable for, for hundreds and hundreds of years. And it's okay if we are to, you know, and even more so than that.
00:18:49
Speaker
I love that. And the, this is not your first career.
Buffy's Career Journey
00:18:54
Speaker
No, no, it's not even my first career as a business owner. It's, it's sort of a crazy thing. I, I, I've was at an event last night. We were talking a little bit about this too, how,
00:19:09
Speaker
even 40 years ago, 30 years ago, it was still okay. Maybe the word is expected that you would pick a career, get into it, still stay at that place for at least a while, 10, 20 years. I even stayed at a bank. I was a banker. I tell people, recovering banker. I worked in the financial services industry and brokerage firms and Wall Street firms.
00:19:37
Speaker
And i also consulted to them that i mean back a little. You know gender equity thing i was almost always the only woman. Yeah cuz i didn't work at a branch so you'll know at banks there's very distinguishing between do you work at a branch and do retail worker do you work in corporate.
00:19:57
Speaker
and I always worked in corporate and that was a little different. So yeah, I've had a lot of different careers, but I think telling people that it's okay to sort of pick something and try it for a while and get really good at it maybe and be okay with starting over, that's really hard. And it takes a little bit of risk tolerance to do that. And back to our brains, we like to be comfortable. Risk tolerance requires you to
00:20:24
Speaker
to step outside and be a novice again instead of an expert. And we kind of like to be experts as people, so. I'll talk a little bit more about the risk tolerance, because I think that a lot of people have, think that their skillset only allows them to do one thing. One or two things. Yeah, so when, and I used to be, I used to have a very low risk tolerance. So what that basically means is,
00:20:53
Speaker
you know, how much risk are you willing to take in decision making to make something happen for you, right? So our first shot at, I mean, not first, but it's something we, a lot of us understand is going to college. Do you choose to go to someplace close to your home or do you choose to go to someplace across the country or maybe even into another country, right? That's where your risk tolerance lies is really about your comfort
00:21:20
Speaker
in making and choosing something that might not turn out the way you need. You have to sacrifice more to get more on it. And we do that in our careers too. We choose something. I'll pick on my accounting friends. We choose accounting because literally one of the most
00:21:41
Speaker
safest jobs, you will always get another job if you go into the accounting field. And I kind of went that direction too. So if you're out there and you're thinking about doing something different, taking a risk on a new product or service are mine. Right now I am in the most uncomfortable stage of my business career.
00:22:03
Speaker
of all the things i've ever done even though i've been in business 15 years the pandemic really required you know i just got done talking about all the stage work we did but we couldn't do any of it my large three quarters of our revenue died.
00:22:22
Speaker
in March 2020, and it has not come back at all. It was a big festival that I owned, and I still own. I just haven't done it because it takes more than a year to plan and a lot of money to do. This is how I got into this crazy stage business to begin with. I was doing some event management for a non-profit and ended up
00:22:48
Speaker
purchasing this and revamping it. This is sort of my journey of really loving women and finding more ways for them to gain access to things for their very multi-faceted, multi-dimensional lives as opposed to, Hey, I'm just a shopper. I like, you know, sort of the stereotypical things. So yeah, I once I gave a talk about email marketing at an all women's conference. So it was me and 350 women.
00:23:17
Speaker
Yeah, awesome, right? I remember my opening joke for my talk, which was a good one, which is, you know, this is a unique experience for me and I'm really excited to learn and just listen more than I talk. But I do want to talk a little bit and I want to thank the women who sat at my table for lunch who, you know, thank you for letting me know that the salad was lunch.
00:23:42
Speaker
And it was not the first course. So thank you for that. I have feelings about lunches at big events since I'm an event planner too. Never ever leave them starving, even if they're women. So no salads. Give them something good.
00:24:05
Speaker
I agree. Uh, the worst thing in the world is having a heavy lunch at a, at an event. Cause then you just want to, and it drives me nuts when I get booked right after lunch and at like a conference or something. Cause everybody's going to be sleeping and checking their email. Yeah. It's not a, it's not a great time slot for sure.
00:24:24
Speaker
Well, Buffy, one of the things that I think we've been hitting and kind of tap dancing around is one of your career specialties, and that's the art of pivoting.
Embracing Change and Confidence
00:24:36
Speaker
So you've gone through a number of
00:24:41
Speaker
big changes in your career. And one of the things that we just talked about was having the ability to be okay when things are a little uncertain. How do you foster that in yourself, in your team, and for our audience, how can they be better at just kind of going to where the puck is going to be instead of just sitting there and waiting for the world to pass them by? It takes a great deal of
00:25:11
Speaker
I'll say self confidence. I don't know that I mean that. Trusting yourself is what I can say. I mean, sometimes I make decisions and I know they might seem absolutely
00:25:27
Speaker
off the wall to some people, whether it's taking on as a business owner, maybe it's taking on debt, maybe it's completely shifting or getting off of a product or service that you used to do and can still feed you, or it's hiring your first people or that person who's
00:25:47
Speaker
who's more expensive than anybody yourself. And you add them to your team or you have to make payroll and you will do absolutely anything to get that to happen. And that requires you to be very sure that you have the ability to get to where you really wanna get in the future. And that isn't easy. Obviously, we all second guess ourselves.
00:26:13
Speaker
And none of this supersedes the fact that you make the wrong decisions along the way. I've made plenty of those. But I always, and I still say this even though times, like even we're one year into our new business model and I feel like a startup and I absolutely hate it. When you start something up, it's typically just you. I have a team of five people that I am feeding every day. And so that
00:26:42
Speaker
managing my risk tolerance with this really surety that the work that we're doing is
00:26:49
Speaker
is important that we can make a living at it and that we're confident along the way even in those little things. Even when the team can recognize the stress of that, I have to balance their need for stability and their risk tolerance with mine, which is much higher than theirs. But I'm also the one taking on 100% of the financial risk
00:27:13
Speaker
And I would say to people, that might be the one place where most of us falter. When we're thinking about how are we going to live if something happens to us, whether we're laid off or we choose this leap to entrepreneurship and we're asking people to support us,
00:27:33
Speaker
that weighing that risk is really important. And you have to trust that you have the ability to do whatever it takes to make that happen. And I think the second piece of that is you got to have a good crew of people outside your business who understand what it is you do. And that means another entrepreneur or two or three or 10 or 100.
00:28:02
Speaker
Because nobody, I mean, both of you guys have been entrepreneurs and are entrepreneurs. You understand this. Nobody, your friends, like their eyes glaze over, like, what are you talking about? I don't understand it. They're like, oh, that sounds really hard. And then they're on to something else. I have, especially one person in my life who is absolutely stellar in
00:28:26
Speaker
talking me off the wall and putting things into perspective and telling me, honestly, maybe there's some shifts here, but also saying you got this and you can do it. Just keep pushing right through. And that's
00:28:41
Speaker
Um, there is no plan b for me. I would tell everybody if this is an advice column here Do not have a plan b if you have a plan b just do plan b because that's really a and i've never had a plan b But i've shifted my business Significantly from being a business coach is just where I started to running a a film studio a video production company I do not do video like that's not my
00:29:08
Speaker
and talk about risk tolerance that I hired for that. We tripped into it because of the pandemic, that big pivot not doing stage work to having to come up with ways to reach an audience and to make a living. It required me to really go out on the ledge and hire
00:29:28
Speaker
incredibly talented people who are very expensive and taking that risk to do it. At the end of the day, I'm confident that we are on the right track, that we're doing the right work, that my team is phenomenal. But every day, I wake up and I'm like, oh my gosh, how am I going to do it?
00:29:50
Speaker
And if we need to do another slate pivot, we will do it because this isn't my story. It's not the end of the story. I'm assuming, and I don't want to assume, so I want to ask, when you make big changes and when you're pivoting like this,
00:30:08
Speaker
You're not just going by the hip and saying, oh, yeah, well, I guess I'm going to get into video production now. That sounds like fun. You do the homework and you have a plan before you go in, right? So mitigating risk is one of your talents. What are you telling me about? Well, here's what I will say.
00:30:28
Speaker
Um, my planning, you know, even with all my financial background, I've kind of a little bit of a savant with the numbers. I think about things in my brain first, but I like to begin with the end in mind. I don't, I don't, I don't have big, long, big, giant budgets. Even when I was a business coach, I did coach people to do it. I did it for them, but I don't, um, I am very pliable with things. I am very much a,
00:30:56
Speaker
Let a be testing kind of gal. Like if I want to test a couple things, I want to test it. That's uncomfortable for people though. So we might test some pricing, you might test some products.
00:31:08
Speaker
But if you spend too much time developing all that stuff and it's not right, you've wasted it. So I kind of have this mix of really looking at how I might purchase something and use it and trying to, in my years, I've coached more than 300 businesses. So I'm some of this anecdotal. So the answer to Dave is, unfortunately, I'm not a big huge, but I don't have a big project plan.
00:31:34
Speaker
That's got this whole thing laid out. I have big buckets. Rock Story Studios has another very traditional commercial
00:31:47
Speaker
Video production but we have a another little product called love letters films and it's it's live streaming to the funeral home industry and And we've done some research on it, but we don't have this big plan. What we know is everybody dies and what we also know is there's not enough care and feeding of the people who are responsible for capturing those moments of somebody who is really important to you and we don't
00:32:15
Speaker
have enough infrastructure to capture that. So we do it. I could call it live streaming. That's not really what it is, but when somebody passes, their life means something and we want to make sure that in the moment, we can be there to get those elements for them. So that product,
00:32:35
Speaker
I have big dreams for it. It could be national. We can do this from our studio, which is what I'm going to do today later. Then we can package it in a way that makes sense for the families later. I don't know. Maybe most people would want me to have a bigger plan.
00:32:55
Speaker
I don't know. That product doesn't exist. Right now, if you want to live stream or capture a funeral, you've got to hire a crew, which you can do for us. And we have to get a bunch of stuff together and go there. In an element we don't have any idea about. We don't know the lighting. We don't know the sound. We don't know anything. And it's not. It's expensive because we have to overdo it to get something.
00:33:19
Speaker
So, yeah. I have a couple of questions based on some of the things you said, Buffy. I think to start with, you used a really technical term that is used in production and I'm well familiar with it, but I want for the lister's sake, I want to have you explain what is A-B testing?
00:33:36
Speaker
Oh, yeah, you guys probably know that more than me. I mean, that's not me being funny. I genuinely is. But I think for those people who Yeah, I think it's a great question. What is A B testing? You know, A B testing is taking two things primarily, and trying it out in in different
00:33:58
Speaker
ways, whether it's a different group of in email, that's primarily used like a different subject matter or a different group of lists, you see whether or not people are excited about something or not, they click on it, they do it. I look at it, my A B testing is, if I say, here's a package,
00:34:21
Speaker
Here's how it's packaged. At the end of the day, you pay the same, right? Like it doesn't matter. But how do people feel about it? And you can try it out. And sometimes people surprise you. Something really boring catches their eye or sometimes you just, you can get snarky and, and clever. And that's the thing that catches people eye. And you don't know until you test it.
00:34:43
Speaker
The story that I give about that is that when I got married, we invited a whole bunch of people. And a lot of people we invited because we had to. We invited a lot of people because we wanted them to be there. And then we invited a lot of people because we knew they wouldn't come and buy really awesome gifts.
00:35:01
Speaker
And a good portion of the people that we wanted to come didn't come and then a lot of the people who didn't we didn't want to come but send a gift actually did show up. And so that's the AB testing model is figuring out, you know, I have good intentions for this group and this group what actually happens in real
Innovating Funeral Services
00:35:19
Speaker
life.
00:35:19
Speaker
The second question I wanted to ask, because you had sort of a jaw drop and gender neutral mic drop moment, which was about how you're servicing the funeral industry now. And was that one of the things that came out of your pandemic pivot? Because I think that's genius. It is because all of us experienced some kind of death during that timeframe and weren't allowed to participate in the same ways we always had.
00:35:46
Speaker
Now, the interesting thing is, years ago, I have always had this idea that funerals were broken. We do them that way, whatever it is, whatever your tradition is, whether it's a religious tradition or something else, and we just
00:36:04
Speaker
We just do it that way, and there's a speed method to it. How fast can we push people through this? And some of that is built—I mean, there are traditions in the Muslim community and the Jewish community where that speed is part of their religion. Like, how fast can we get you?
00:36:23
Speaker
through it. And I think we just, I've always just said, I don't understand that. Not everybody is loved, right? But let's assume most of us are. And we are on this planet for a certain amount of time. And what just makes me crazy is that we will spend more time, energy and money on a wedding that has a 50% chance of not making it. And we spend nothing on somebody's life.
00:36:49
Speaker
in time, energy, and finances. We're literally scraping the barrel. What can we get rid of so we can get this funeral done in this little piece? I'm super passionate about this, but it just drives me crazy. We were already live streaming stuff, and then people asked us. I actually participated in a funeral of a friend who was also in the business, so I was there just as a crew.
00:37:18
Speaker
member to help and realize that we could do this. We could do it affordably. We could do it expeditiously and we could fit the needs back to my gender thing. Women primarily do most of this heavy lifting of funerals, the emotional lifting and the actual planning pieces. And could we make it better and easier for them to be able to go back later when they're ready
00:37:49
Speaker
to actually participate in that event that they were rushed through to begin with. There's also a big tech project in this Love Letters films that we haven't launched, but it's a documentaries of life project where we could actually go even further and actually create a real documentary with voiceover and interviews for your loved one and then have this big
00:38:15
Speaker
you know film party you know in a movie theater maybe or in your home or whatever else so anyway i'm super passionate about it we do not spend at rockstory studios and rockwood you get we're not spending enough time on that we'll be in the next year
00:38:31
Speaker
But I will say the funeral home industry moves at the slowest speed of any industry in the entire planet. I'm not going to miss any kind of timeframe. And telling everybody on this podcast we're doing it isn't going to get a bunch of people to go do it. What makes it affordable to us is we can switch. We have a broadcast level.
00:38:52
Speaker
switching is moving cameras around and putting, like the newscast does. We have newscast level software. We can do it from here, anywhere in the world. And we install all the equipment in the funeral home, so we never have to put things in and out. And that's why we can make it affordable for people. Because if I have to send a three person crew, I need four hours and then there's all sorts of things go bad.
00:39:24
Speaker
I think that's amazing because Dave and I recently went to a funeral because I'm in the industry, one of the things that I was awestruck. It was the first time I've been at a funeral in a long-ish time and certainly since the pandemic. One of the things that was notable to me was that the AV in the room was at a different level than I had experienced before.
00:39:47
Speaker
as people fight down in this town.
00:39:52
Speaker
And yeah, okay, it's notable on the one hand, but on the other hand, what a great gift that these people are giving the bereaved because it's more, you can have a higher level of remembrance and a higher level of nuance and higher level of subtlety to make the celebration unique for the person who you're celebrating. It was really something else. And the bigger issue too is that we're,
00:40:22
Speaker
We're on this planet, we meet thousands of people along the way. During that timeframe, some of them becomes very, very close to us and they're not family.
00:40:35
Speaker
And our family does not know them. In some cases, those people love us more than our family does. And they do not get to participate at the same level. And that is what I'm keeping my eye on. You know, if you're, they don't ask you, can you attend? If you cannot attend a funeral, we even say the live streaming doesn't matter. Cause if they can't attend, they might not be able to come at that time either. So that's not what's important. What's really important is the experience that they could have.
00:41:04
Speaker
as part of being part of something. We can bring in speakers from all over the world. We can mix it into something else. We can create an experience for people, interactive experience. Anyway, it's all just an open way of how we participate as humans after the pandemic. Actually, this existed before. People getting on planes or can't make it or they got to work,
00:41:34
Speaker
and not being able to be a part of something has always been real.
00:41:37
Speaker
I had a cousin that I had fallen out of sorts with and we weren't really close, but we knew each other to talk and she passed away during the pandemic due to COVID. And at the end, she didn't want anybody to know because she was terribly embarrassed that she didn't get the shots and it was, she had a lot of regret. And I can remember I sat through the live stream of the funeral and I felt,
00:42:04
Speaker
I felt bad for my thing that I had never reconciled with her, but I was so moved by the fact that she had such a community that I didn't know anything about that she really was loved. And that was a great help and closure for me just because of something as simple as a live stream. Yeah, for sure. I'm sorry, Dave, you had a question. No, I was just adding on in that this is truly the more
00:42:35
Speaker
like virtual our world becomes, the more apparent it becomes that this is a real service that people really need. And people are doing it kind of already. And I had an uncle that passed away in COVID, not of COVID, but from cancer. And
00:42:55
Speaker
Of course, we couldn't have a service and it was in California and we were in Minnesota and they just did a Facebook Live over it where somebody was hanging onto their phone and at one point it got dropped and you could hear someone coughing in the background and all that. But to do a real service,
00:43:14
Speaker
to the memory of that person is incredibly important. And this just goes right back to our team, right? And it kind of brings us to a topic, the DIY crowd. I mean, you guys do professional services. I do professional services. There's always a DIY crowd sometimes. And there are tech companies doing pretty phenomenal things with video and, you know,
00:43:41
Speaker
you get out your camera, the quality is really great. What they haven't been able to fix is sound, which we started with. Having really terrific sound come out of your video and match it up with your mouth and being able to correct those qualities that create the difference between something that's professional level done and something that looks like you're
00:44:10
Speaker
in your basement, doing your stuff, matters.
The Value of Professional Quality
00:44:13
Speaker
Sometimes that's what you want, like this very authentic, I'm hey, I'm hanging out kind of thing. But if you're in business and you're at a certain level, sometimes you really literally have to tell yourself,
00:44:24
Speaker
this next phase of our business needs to be and look professional. We can still have fun with it. We can still get that authentic thing, but we must spend some money on it because that comes out in the quality of what other people think about us too. And so AI is a thing.
00:44:41
Speaker
There's some really great companies doing this video stuff like, hey, here's your teleprompter. Just type your stuff in and do it. It's good, but it's not the same. There's still places for all of us to recognize that the work we do and the services we provide are
00:44:59
Speaker
are important. You guys need to get an AI person on one of these. We have several robots that helped us in our daily life. We hired a project manager
00:45:14
Speaker
who was probably one of the smartest people i've ever met in my life and then he was we took him to meetings and we realized he couldn't take notes to save his life type yeah and so we got one of the first ai robots to help take notes and transcribe meetings there's been invaluable to our business and then he quit like a month later but we still have the robot
00:45:38
Speaker
Yeah, there's great helping people decide when it makes sense. We have robotic cameras and we can set them up and get and activate them remotely. That helps save us time too.
00:45:56
Speaker
And there's some really great business benefits to a lot of it. I think our next phase of business for those of us that do services for people is to figure out how we can continue to add value and still be profitable.
00:46:16
Speaker
Sub setting the things that really we shouldn't we don't need to do it and nobody wants to do it anyway and and so i don't know i don't know how the answer is but i think we're we're on this. Trip to figure it out.
00:46:35
Speaker
I think if I can make a gender-based comment, I think as we're talking about the funeral part of your live streaming business, I think that's something that has to be delivered with a certain amount of nuance and subtlety that I don't know that a man can necessarily
00:46:54
Speaker
Get to because then you get to the media. Well, what do you mean you're trying to profit over over my dad's funeral? Like no, no, no, it's not what we're talking about. It's Making it open and making it making it available to everyone which ironically Yeah, which ironically is part of your overall nonprofit mission is it's You're not making it equal. You're making you're giving the opportunity to everyone
00:47:20
Speaker
We could have a whole podcast just on, we did on ours. So I have a podcast called We're Gonna Talk About It, if anybody wants to go. I love it. It's very fabulous. But we had a funeral home. We talked about green burials. We talked, I mean, just to vary all the changes that are happening in there. But ultimately, funeral homes are still very paper-based. They sit down with a family, with a folder, and they literally go through it, right?
00:47:49
Speaker
And because that personal, they're sort of meeting people in this place, making it very simple still. And there are definitely tech companies trying to move them across the line, but it's very hard, including us. We can't talk any tech. We just say, hey, at the end of the day, this is what's going to happen. You'll have this nice little,
00:48:13
Speaker
Years and years ago, probably 30 some odd years ago, I was a teenager and my great uncle Carl drove his car into a tree and he was in the hospital. He was a big giant burly man and he ended up passing away. And I can remember my grandmother who was probably in her 80s at the time took her sister who was Carl's wife to the funeral home and they did the
00:48:38
Speaker
Arrangements and There is you know, okay. Well, here's the price for the earn and they say whoa, that's ridiculous. We're not paying that so the two of them Got in took the bus from Brooklyn Center, which is a suburb north of Minneapolis down to downtown Minneapolis they went to the department store down there and they got a vase and I could put car on the vase and
00:48:59
Speaker
They took the vase home, nice beautiful vase that they got. And then they got Carl. Carl came home in the box and they poured, they started pouring it into the vase. And the most important detail I told you at the beginning, which was he was a big burly man, they ran out. The vase was not big enough. They still had more Carl.
00:49:21
Speaker
So instead of getting a second vase, what they did is they poured Carl back in the box and then washed the box out and then took the vase home. So I've always been comforted by the fact that somewhere a very nice home in a very rich part of town is a little bit of my uncle Carl.
00:49:38
Speaker
A little more of Carl. So I want to wrap up, but this has been a fascinating topic. So podcast, video, nonprofit, equity and inclusion, a four time reinvention queen. I'll ask you the Bob Seger question, Buffy, is what do you wish that you didn't know now that you didn't know then? Oh.
00:50:04
Speaker
I don't know if we have enough time for all of this stuff. I wish I knew that. I know now that I will say this. I think the biggest, the biggest thing is that I wish, what I know now is that risk taking and making shifts when you just don't know what's going to happen, um, can be life changing in a really good way. And that I wish I would have done a little bit more of that earlier.
00:50:33
Speaker
as opposed to taking the very straight and narrow path that I originally took for 20 years. So being an entrepreneur, being in this business, but even shifting my current business faster. So yeah, I mean, in hindsight, there's a lot of stuff I could and should have done differently. One of them was maybe not by a franchise, but I never would have gotten to coach almost 300 people. And my last coaching client,
00:51:03
Speaker
just sold her business for multiple, multiple times what it was when I first started working with her forever ago. I don't know. Things happen and we make choices and we just have to live with it. But I tell everybody, make those changes faster. Pay fast. I love it. Thank you.
Contact Information
00:51:27
Speaker
Buffy, we always like to end on giving you as many cheap plugs as you want. So where can people find you? Where can people find your podcast? Where can people find the Buffy empire? So the big, big Buffy stuff, the thing, rockwhatyougotlive.com is our corporate, and all of our stuff is on there. But hey, there's a lot of businesses on here, and you need video. If you're not doing video, you should contact me at rockstoryastudios.com. And then if you are,
00:51:56
Speaker
lucky enough to be in the death industry, you can reach us at lovelettersfilms.com. Ultimately, Buffy at rockwhatyougotlive.com is my email, and anybody can contact me. Thank you, Buffy. I'm easy to find. Google, I'm on the first five pages, Buffy, please. Nobody's going to supersede my Google search. There's only one. Thank you.