ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In this episode Josh and Will discuss the current state of the cell phone repair industry, how part quality is impacting the industry and how to avoid the price-chopping race to the bottom.
What You’ll Learn:
Why the cell phone repair business is similar to an “Emergency Room” business, what that means when it comes to your marketing campaigns, and how to add additional revenue sources to expand your business.
AskWill+Josh 003 EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Josh: Back in the saddle baby.
Will: Back in the saddle. All right.
Josh: Hey, we’re rusty a little bit because we’re getting in the groove and getting this thing going again, but it’s hard because I’ve been off, I’ve been gone for the last several weeks, I’ve been all over the country traveling.
Will: Right.
Josh: Vegas, Florida, Atlanta, I mean I was all over the place the last couple of weeks.
Will: Yeah, yeah, if you guys saw the video. We had a video we posted not too long ago on our social media and it was Josh flying, right, it showed him traveling and being away from his family and talking about on a very important concept in success which is sacrifice.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: Right?
Josh: Yeah.
Will: And so.
Josh: Yeah, man, I was feeling it that morning like for real.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Because I don’t think, it was weird because I’m sitting on the plane. I got up at 3:30 in the morning to go to the airport, all right… And I’m sitting on a plane for what? For most people like oh this should be a fun trip.
Will: Right.
Josh: Man, I’m just tired. I haven’t had much sleep.
Will: Right
Josh: You know what I’m saying? I’m sacrificing time away from my babies. Man, I got a 10 month old at the house, my wife and my three and a half year old are at home.
Will: Right.
Josh: So in my mind I started thinking and I get asked that question sometimes, like man, how do you do, why do you do things you do?
Will: You do.
Josh: And that’s really what it was for me is I realized for me that morning I was feeling the sacrifice. I was feeling it man, because I was tired.
Will: Right, yeah.
Josh: You know.
Will: Yeah, for sure.
Josh: And that’s when I started kind of going deep and thinking about what we’re willing to give up to get what we’re willing to get?
Will: Right.
Josh: Because there’s always a trade-off.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody, no matter how successful, that ever says you get everything you want.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Right? No matter what it is, right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: If you want to be healthy you got to sacrifice eating junk foods.
Will: Exactly, exactly.
Josh: You got to sacrifice sleeping in late so you get up and work out.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: So there’s always some kind of sacrifice.
Will: For sure and you guys, I mean you guys follow us, your going to be seeing a lot of that kind of thing because it’s times like that, it’s the times when you can reflect, right? And sometimes that’s in the airport, sometimes that’s, I mean you’re doing some crazy things when you actually have that moment of reflection, and kind of think about those things, and obviously Josh was having one of those at that time. So again you’ll see us sometimes we’ll just stop and we’ll record and we’ll send you guys messages about things like that just because we’re feeling it at that time.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: And it makes a lot of sense, so that was great. It’s good to have you back in the studio.
Josh: It’s good to be back, man.
Will: It’s good to have you back.
Josh: We got a little rusty. We got to knock the rust of this thing and get back into it
Will: And with that being said I don’t even know if we introduced this show. Welcome back to Ask WillandJosh Show. I think we did
Josh: That’s how rusty we are.
Will: We just jump right in, which is all good because you know we love jumping right in. So what we want to talk about kind of in today’s broadcast guys is we want to, Josh has been getting, he’s been taking a lot of phone calls talking to customers because we always love to get feedback from the people we serve, it’s a very important part of identifying how to serve your customer the best way. And so one of the questions we’ve been getting quite often specifically about the cellphone repair, refurbish, resell, basal trade, business whatever aspect of this business you’re doing the mobility business.
Josh: Right.
Will: We’ve been getting a lot of questions about whether there is still opportunity.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: Which kind of surprised me, but at the same time it doesn’t.
Josh: It makes sense.
Will: It does make sense.
Josh: Yeah, it actually makes sense.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: For us, I mean when you can step back and you can see the whole picture, you can see why.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right, but at the same time on the other side of its kind of like why would you even ask that like oh my God, it’s wide open right now.
Will: Exactly, exactly, exactly.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: Exactly, so what we want to talk about today is kind of, we kind of want to talk about that because I think what we do do is we understand multiple sides of this industry, because we’ve served in so many different aspects of this industry, like I said it does make sense and it doesn’t make sense and it does make sense at the same time.
Josh: Right.
Will: Because and we understand that because of the experience we have in this industry.
Josh: Right.
Will: I mean we started as you guys may know if you’ve followed us, you know we kind of cut our teeth in the repair part of it
Josh: Retail.
Will: In the retail repair.
Josh: Yeah, retail stores. Yeah.
Will: And we’ve gone through many different levels which we will be talking about. But I just want to kind of Josh, I want you to kind of talk about some of the questions you get in terms of that opportunity question, and give your perspective on why you think that question is relevant right now, and why people are, people in the business and people who are thinking about getting in the business are both asking that question right now.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: And why is that?
Josh: It’s a great point man and I think, so part of what I’ve been doing over the last few weeks is you know we kind of removed ourselves from the retail side and even from the school a little bit, right?
Will: Right.
Josh: Now, it’s just high level management of this thing.
Will: Right.
Josh: So we kind of losing touch with the pulse of the street just a little bit while we’ve been focusing on building these things that we’re working on the last couple of years.
Will: Exactly, exactly.
Josh: So, for me I’ve been wanting to jump back in over the last month and kind of like just pick the phones up, bangs the phone out, right and kind of see what’s going on. See what our students are talking about, see what potential students are talking about.
Will: Right.
Josh: Guys I’ve been known in the industry for years, new guys with 1 store, with 10 stores, 20 stores, whatever it is, right?
Will: Right.
Josh: Just kind of get a pulse of what’s going on, and a very common theme that I’ve been feeling over the last month is does this even make sense, right? So does it make sense for me like as an industry if I’m not in it, does it make sense for me to get in to it? If I am in it, does it make sense for me to be in it, right?
Will: Right.
Josh: Or did I jump on the wrong bus here, did I make a bad decision with where I am going.
Will: Yeah and we can see over the last couple of years, we can see why people are asking those kind of questions.
Josh: For sure.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: For sure and if you’re in the business obviously the only reason you have that doubt is just self-doubt.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Right? That’s what it is. When you start doubting the industry you chose it’s because you’re not achieving the goals or the dreams that you set out to initially hit.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right?
Will: Right.
Josh: That’s when you start second guess in your choices, right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Where does that comes from? That comes from doing business the same way I think and not adapting to the times.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right? Sometimes you got to really be, this industry changes rapidly man, you got to really be on the forefront, and that’s not just like learning how to repair the new device, that’s like learning how to run your business.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right, like how to market.
Will: Right.
Josh: What was effective two years ago isn’t as effective today.
Will: And you know what I think that’s kind of universal because you’re not only seeing it in this business, right?
Josh: Yeah, it’s across the board.
Will: And it’s across the board.
Josh: You see businesses dying in all kinds of industry right now.
Will: Yes. I think if you’re asking that question about this business it’s because you’re in this business, but what you would see from a I think just a business standpoint in general across the board is everybody is struggling with that question.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: If they are not doing exactly what you just said, reinventing themselves, understanding how to change with times, how to evolve, how to be more diverse in what your offering is, it’s all of those things, so I don’t think it’s the cellphone specifically.
Josh: It’s not man. It’s not.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: But the cellphone repair business has some unique challenges to it that have really kind of got magnified over the last few years.
Will: Right. It’s definitely a different animal.
Josh: It’s a way different animal. It’s funny because there are so many things that are the same, but it’s way different, right? First of all, this thing, I remember us coaching years ago man. First of all this is an emergency room business.
Will: Yes.
Josh: You know what I mean?
Will: For sure.
Josh: Like it’s very hard to plan a business that’s an emergency room business.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Right? People don’t want to come see you.
Will: It’s interesting, I’ve never heard it described as such, but as soon as you said that I was like ding ding.
Josh: Yeah, light bulb. Yeah, because that’s what it is, right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: So when you’re building an emergency room type business, you got to build that business a little bit differently or you got to position it so it’s not just an emergency room business.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: And that’s just a service that you offer, right? So, I think that’s one of the things that is really different. So, I guess before we get into yes, let me answer the question. Yes, I think that unequivocally without a doubt I will tell you that I believe there is tremendous opportunity in this industry.
Will: Right.
Josh: As just as much opportunity, if not more to be honest with you than we first started this thing 10 years ago.
Will: Right, I would say that.
Josh: Right? And the reason I feel like that is because people are getting a better idea of the need for this industry.
Will: Right.
Josh: What’s changing that is a couple of things. Number one, these phones are getting expensive man, right? And they’ve actually always been kind of pricy, right? But now this new iPhone, the iPhone X or iPhone 10, I mean I dropped 1,250 on mine.
Will: That’s crazy.
Josh: 1,250 on mine, 1,250 on my wife, that’s 2500.
Will: That’s a lot of money. Yes.
Josh: $2,500, that’s a lot of money man.
Will: And the thing is wages as we know it and we talk about it sometimes with self-development, the wages aren’t increasing.
Josh: Right
Will: But
Josh: Part two though, right, part two of that though is I think us as consumers are more aware of the value of these devices.
Will: Yeah, for sure.
Josh: Right.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: And when you become more aware, you become more like okay,
Will: It’s worth it.
Josh: Yeah, I need to start looking at some options here.
Will: Right.
Josh: You know what I am saying?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Like do I take the insurance, do I not? If I take the insurance, what are my claims, what are my options, right?
Will: Right.
Josh: People don’t worry about just when it was just rolling into plan and you don’t even know how much the damn phone is.
Will: That’s true.
Josh: So that’s a big shift that’s happened over the last few years, which I think is awesome. I remember Nick actually, do you remember that webinar we did with Nick from Cellular Parts USA years ago.
Will: Yeah, yeah.
Josh: He predicted that back in like 2011. He said that that was the model that was happening in Europe, and he felt that was going to be the same thing here.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Right, so it’s kind of weird to see that, his genie, or his crystal ball moment.
Will: For sure.
Josh: Kind of came together, so I think that’s one of the big parts, but, so yes, again I believe that there’s tremendous opportunity more than ever honestly, because the devices are really expensive, they’re not coming down in price there going up actually, and at the same time the consumer is becoming aware of the need, the price of these things, and they’re not breaking their devices any less than they did. I don’t care what the manufacturers are going to call this glass and they are still breaking just as much as they always have.
Will: For sure.
Josh: Right?
Will: Absolutely.
Josh: So to answer that point blank. Point two though is I want to kind of step down memory lane a little bit and kind of talk about why we’re even in a position to talk about this with any kind of sense.
Will: Right.
Josh: So, years ago not to go down this whole road again, but years ago we were in the retail repair business, right? So, we had retail repair stores doing repairs for consumers, DTC, right? Direct to consumer, you’d walk into one of our stores, get your cellphone repaired, we would had accessories to upsell you handphones, basal trade, all that sort of stuff, and then we made a decision to move in different direction, right? This was about two and a half years ago.
Will: Right.
Josh: Broke up with kind of not really broke up, but our partners kind of decided, we all decided we wanted something different in our lives.
Will: Right.
Josh: And didn’t really want to go down that path of what the retail store demanded of us to build to where it needed to go. So, me and you chose to go deeper down the rabbit hole.
Will: Right.
Josh: And to understanding the supply chain side and really serving large businesses, tier 1 businesses, right. So, that’s what we’ve been doing for the last two and a half years is literally working with carriers, that’s what I do day in and day out now.
Will: Right.
Josh: I work with all of the carriers in some form or capacity we serve them, we write specs, we do testing, we serve handsets, LCD refurbishing, we do the whole nine.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Large insurance companies, so it’s really given myself and you, I’m not going to speak for you.
Will: Yeah, yeah, sure.
Josh: But for myself, it’s given me a well-rounded kind of view, because I understand the street level view and how the consumer needs to be treated and react, and the challenges of running and operating a store.
Will: We were very very naive in a sense.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: Very ignorant of the information, and again this is the reason why I can honestly say why I understand why people would ask that question if they don’t have the full experience of the entire industry in terms of what the opportunity is, right? If you’re looking at it in one vain or one aspect of what you currently do and that’s it, then yes, you’re probably seeing kind of the end of the road, so to speak or
Josh: They might feel that way.
Will: They might feel that way for sure.
Josh: But honestly a big part of that though is what we’ve experienced in the supply chain over the last two and a half years.
Will: Right, exactly.
Josh: Never man, like in the whole time we’ve been in this business, right? One of the things we’ve always taught people is don’t let your differentiator be your price, right? Price is not a differentiator, right?
Will: Right.
Josh: That’s when you become a commodity man, and one of the interesting things is on multi-sides of this business, right, the LCD manufacturers did it, right?
Will: Right
Josh: A race to the bottom, let’s chop price, chop, chop, chop, chop to get down.
Will: That used to frustrates us so much.
Josh: The China factories are struggling to stay in business right now, because there’s no margin left.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: They are putting out crappy products, crappy LCDs, the end user doesn’t know the quality of the LCDs, whatsoever, right?
Will: Right.
Josh: Not only the customers not know, because they are being educated by repair shops that don’t know and it’s no fault of you guys in the repair shops, you don’t know. You’re buying them from suppliers that they don’t now, they are just trading companies, right?
Will: Right.
Josh: So that part one of it is the margin has been squeezed out by this chop to the bottom and it happened two ways, it happened to the supply chain side, and when the margins got really healthy instead of people maintaining their margins, what do they do? Oh well William is set up over here and he’s charging a $100 with this iPhone repair, so I’m going to open my store and I’m going to charge 80.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right?
Will: Chop chop.
Josh: And then Josephine opens up, I’m going to charge 60.
Will: Chop chop.
Josh: Boom and then what happens? Miguel opens up, he charges 40.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: I mean you can see that’s a zero sum game man like that’s not going to last that long, right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: And if you play that game where you are price battling somebody that is literally the definition of a race to the bottom.
Will: Right.
Josh: Because it’s just a matter of who’s going to go out of business first.
Will: Right.
Josh: Because you guys are drying up everything that you could survive on.
Will: Now we were in that, like you said we’ve stepped away from that business for a while specifically the retail business.
Josh: Right.
Will: And so the repair business, and what would you say, how did you feel about that, because when we were in that game, I know when we were in that game we was so frustrated about the way that game was being played.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: And we kind of have always been a head of the curve with we worry a lot, right?
Josh: Yeah, we’re paranoid man.
Will: Only the paranoid survive, right?
Josh: ()
Will: Yeah, yeah.
Josh: Because that’s true.
Will: Yeah and we saw this like we’ve always been kind of the look out in the future to kind of try to be ahead of the curve to anticipate what the change is going to be and we kind of saw that coming with the behavior of everybody in this industry with the price chopping and like you said that’s a zero sum gain.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: So at what point did you feel like all right because, how do we change direction and how do we expand and how we do we come expensive, how do we learn more, how do we educate because we always had kind of an idea that there was something missing that we didn’t know.
Josh: Right.
Will: The lack of information that we didn’t know.
Josh: Right.
Will: But we needed to go figure out what that was, right?
Josh: Right.
Will: And if you want to talk a little bit about how we actually did that, like how did we actually transition away from just being a one trick pony, so to speak.
Josh: Right
Will: Right, which we see a lot of people being what we call one trick ponies, right? And then they talk about well this is not like what it used to be, right?
Josh: Right.
Will: And so it must be dying or it must be dead, and so what I want you to do is talk about a little bit about why that is not so much the case, right? And what are the opportunities now for a guy, right? Who is listening or a girl.
Josh: or girl, right.
Will: Who is listening right now and is kind of feeling that, right? Like hey I feel like I might want to stop this or I might be at the end of the road with this, or I might need to start looking for something different, what can they do to reinvigorate or change direction or to get back into the game of cellphone repair and add to what they currently do?
Josh: Right.
Will: To add more value to it.
Josh: You asked like seven questions.
Will: I know. I know it’s a full, it’s a full question, right? But you know what I mean.
Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Will: Because we went through it, we did it.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: What I know is you can speak from experience, so I know you can handle that question no problem.
Josh: For sure. So obviously a big part of it for us was we decided look, I’ll tell you man, I’ll tell you sometimes I look back and man we’re so ignorant.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: We’re like so ignorant bro.
Will: For sure.
Josh: Like it’s crazy, because to be so knowledgeable but still not to really know.
Will: Right.
Josh: The way the game is really being played.
Will: Right.
Josh: Is so ignorant. So but I look back on that and we decided we needed to really go down the supply chain side, right. So, let’s put a service together where we refurbish LCD’s and it’s not refurbishing LCD’s for repair shops.
Will: Right.
Josh: We are going to do it for the carrier.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Right.
Will: Big boys.
Josh: Boom, so that’s what we went down the road of doing.
Will: Right
Josh: And choosing to go that road opened up having to understand everything about the supply chain.
Will: Right.
Josh: Understanding everything around why LCD’s are even manufactured the way they are, they actually very complicated pieces of you know, people think it’s just swapping a screen out, but that thing is made up of like of 14 to 17 different layers and components.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: There’s a lot of stuff going on in those things. So and every aspect of that has quality that can be shaved somewhere.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right?
Will: Yes.
Josh: By unscrupulous people, who sell it and pawn it off on you as if it is still legit.
Will: Yes.
Josh: Right?
Will: Yeah and this is the part you guys who are in the retail repair business who really want to listen to.
Josh: So what’s crazy, what’s crazy, right, is I remember it, you remember this, you remember this man, some of the text, I think it was Ellie, shout out to Ellie, doing her thing.
Will: How are you doing Ellie?
Josh: But I think she was one of the first one’s in the store to kind of raise the flag years ago.
Will: Right.
Josh: And say there is something wrong here.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Because we were putting screens in customer’s phones, right? And then we had this rash of customers coming back saying man, I barely even drop my phone.
Will: Right.
Josh: A lady was like oh I just put my phone in my purse, I didn’t even do anything and the glass was cracking, and I remember the staff just going to war.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Oh yeah the screen, and blah, blah, blah and this is a while back before people were really candid about aftermarket screens
Will: Yes, yes
Josh: versus OEM.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: And even now like it’s candid but not really.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Right?
Will: Right.
Josh: So that was kind of part one and that’s where for me like the ignorance really shows because we truly thought that we were paying, we were buying upper quality, we were paying the money for quality screens.
Will: Yes.
Josh: But not getting quality screens.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Right?
Will: Exactly and we didn’t understand it.
Josh: At all.
Will: And we were actually, we were going to war like you said we were going to war with our customers calling BS.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: Right? We thought we were being played by our customers and we were like well it just didn’t make sense because it was kind of like you said it was a rash of.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: Of this thing that happened like over the course of the few months and we’re like what’s going on here?
Josh: Right.
Will: And you don’t want to believe, and this is a thing when you’re in that position, right? You have a business, you’re investing money, you’re buying product, you’re buying inventory, you don’t want to believe that you’re being taken, right, in terms of quality.
Josh: Especially now when you have relationships with vendors that are for years.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Right?
Will: Exactly.
Josh: And you feel like your vendors are being straight forward with you.
Will: Yes.
Josh: Right?
Will: It’s a relationship.
Josh: Yeah, yeah. So hey, I’m buying this thing, it says it’s OEM grade, blah blah, blah. You think that’s what it is supposed to be.
Will: Right.
Josh: A quadruple plus, A ten plus whatever they want to call it.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right?
Will: Right.
Josh: So, I think that was part one of kind of the awakening.
Will: Right.
Josh: But to go back and kind of answer what the second part of that question really was, right? So, one of the things that we did.
Will: Yes.
Josh: Is we started to really differentiate ourselves to our service, right? We never ever got caught up in the price chop.
Will: Right.
Josh: Deal.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: That was not the way we’re going to go.
Will: Yes.
Josh: And it’s interesting because I was always, there are some unique things about the repair space but at the same time business is business.
Will: Right.
Josh: And you can look at any business and you can see similar challenges, right? I think about this, I forgot who I was talking to, I was talking to somebody about this the other day, right, is would you say that the hamburger space is saturated?
Will: I would say definitely.
Josh: Right.
Will: Definitely.
Josh: But you look around and you see new hamburger places popping up all the time.
Will: All the time.
Josh: Right, there are new franchises popping up.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: That are doing really well.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: right.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: How is that possible if the hamburger space is saturated, right? And are they selling cheaper hamburgers?
Will: Exactly. You said something about pizza?
Josh: McDonald’s has a 99 cent burger, are they selling a 59 cent burger and being successful.
Will: Right, exactly.
Josh: Right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: So exactly, you can say pizza, you can look, I mean sandwiches, we love food, right?
Will: For sure.
Josh: It’s easy for me to go back there but.
Will: It’s a good analogy.
Josh: It’s one of the things that I was thinking about, it’s like in other industries you know what makes those guys be able to grow when you see a new chain pop up that can grow and capture market share.
Will: Right.
Josh: It’s because there is something unique about them.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Right, there is a new spin on that sub sandwich.
Will: Right. Nobody’s selling the sandwich at 25 cent.
Josh: Yeah. No.
Will: Right, you know what I mean?
Josh: It just don’t make sense, you ain’t going to keep chopping to a place where you are not making enough money, right?
Will: Exactly.
Josh: In fact, the guys that I see really growing are the premium men.
Will: Right.
Josh: That’s a 12, 13 buck sandwich for lunch, right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: So
Will: What is that about?
Josh: Yeah, exactly, what is that about?
Will: What is that about?
Josh: Increasing you margins, right? Increasing the customer experience.
Will: Yes.
Josh: So I think for us that was one of things that we learned years ago is to focus more on the customer experience.
Will: Right.
Josh: And the art of upselling things, right? Merchandising. For us we’re fortunate to have a store, it’s a little hard to do if you don’t have a store, but even if you’re mobile there are things that you can do to merchandise to allow you to get those upsells so you can increase your margins.
Will: For sure.
Josh: Right? Low costings that increased the ticket significantly with not any work.
Will: Right.
Josh: So I think that, but really at the end of the day this is a service business, so putting a focus on just wowing with customer service.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: That is the number one thing that I see missing. The guys that are really struggling, I would challenge them to really look at their customer service, because most people that I’ve seen in this industry and I ain’t trying to knock on you unless this is you.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right? If this is you, own it.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Own it.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: But if you are the bottom of the wrong price person, hardly ever are you the best service too.
Will: Right, yeah.
Josh: Usually for you, it’s like a carousel man, you’re just trying to run the numbers through, right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: I’m giving you this so cheap, what are you complaining about.
Will: Right, right, right, right, right. It was hard to be, I’m not even going to try to say it, but I remember this every time you say that, I remember this triangle, and at the end of each point of the triangle is you can’t be fast and cheap and good all at the same time.
Josh: Right.
Will: Something has to give.
Josh: Yeah, usually you can do two out of three.
Will: You can do two out of three.
Josh: You can’t do all three.
Will: You can be cheap and good, but not fast or whatever the case maybe.
Josh: Right.
Will: Right? And that reminds me of that triangle, so yeah it makes total sense and I think we figured that out before. We actually transitioned out of retail. We actually kind of figured out that service has so much more to do with being successful.
Josh: Right.
Will: In terms of what you’re talking about not chopping, not playing that game of chopping and running, literally running yourself out of business, right?
Josh: Right.
Will: We don’t want to play that game, and we saw it was very effective for us. We were very successful in doing it.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah.
Will: So yeah that’s a great example. So moving on, what was the next transition into what we’ve experienced in order to figure out that opportunity is alive and kicking in this industry and not dying?
Josh: Well, it’s kind of like we’re walking through Death Valley.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right?
Will: Right.
Josh: And then we walked up on the mountain top
Will: Yeah.
Josh: And we saw there is just green pasture.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: And for the last two and a half years that’s what we’ve seen. At this level at the tier 1, there is so much money. These guys are printing money man.
Will: It’s a different.
Josh: Like printing money. Now there are challenges in this side of the business too.
Will: For sure. Well, the expectation goes up way up until ().
Josh: Way more significant.
Will: Service and quality because service and quality is way different on this level.
Josh: But I say that not necessarily, and I love all our counterparts and everybody that we serve our customers and all that we serve on the tier 1 side.
Will: Right.
Josh: But, I’m not saying that to glorify the tier 1 business, right?
Will: Right.
Josh: There are unique things that they can do that would be very hard for mom and pops to do, but at the same time I think mom and pops can do things that tier 1 can’t
Will: For sure.
Josh: Because they are in the front lines.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Right? You’re the closest to the customer.
Will: One thing we always talk about, closer to the customer.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: And one thing we always talk about is the importance of, in this space, right? The consumer is the most important. It’s the end user, right?
Josh: Right.
Will: Is the most important because those are the guys who are spending the money for the service and the quality
Josh: Right.
Will: And one thing you can always kind of say is proximity and turnaround time.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: Is there’s always opportunity when you rap that around proximity and turnaround time.
Josh: That’s right.
Will: And for you guys that don’t know understand what I’m saying is obviously the end customer wants convenience in where, and proximity in terms of where to go to get the service, right? And turnaround time, everybody understands that, right?
Josh: Right.
Will: It’s I want it done at a relatively.
Josh: I want it, and I want it now.
Will: I want it, and I want it now.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: And one thing we saw like in retail is that for cellular devices the need is no longer a want, right?
Josh: Yeah.
Will: It’s a need, right?
Josh: Exactly.
Will: It’s part of the budget, it’s part of the family budget.
Josh: Exactly.
Will: And it’s just, going back to what we talked about in terms of whether the business is better, there is more demand for the service now versus then, it’s actually ten times more now than it was.
Josh: Yeah man, I think you can tap into a big part of it too that I actually forgot.
Will: Right.
Josh: Is the fact that these devices are way more engrained in our lives.
Will: Yes, for sure. 100%.
Josh: Like way more engrained man, I mean literally to the point to where like my wife is a photographer, dude she don’t carry that 4,000 dollars camera around hardly ever, right? Because
Will: And I’ve seen her Instagram with cows and I see lots of her pictures.
Josh: Yeah, and almost everything she takes is with the iPhone camera.
Will: Yes. Yes.
Josh: Because now it’s to that point that it’s that good that she can rely on it.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Right? Not to mention man, all of the apps that you got, ().
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Dude it is, it has made life so easy.
Will: Yes.
Josh: And it’s just an intrical part of our lives now.
Will: It’s a must have.
Josh: Yeah, it’s literally like you’re jouncing without it.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right? And I’m not just speaking for myself, I’m talking about for us as a nation.
Will: For sure.
Josh: Right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: And even around the world you see it.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: In developing countries it’s starting to happen too, because they’re starting to get on and they’re being able to communicate and you can change lives.
Will: Developing countries and that’s a topic that we can get into, we can go deep down that to developing countries.
Josh: Yeah, yeah, because we serve a lot of developing countries too, right.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: So we see what’s happening in those areas.
Will: Yes, it’s a world demand, world demand.
Josh: Yes, significant.
Will: Yeah. So just let’s keep it going. I mean have we, so we service, so kind of to reflect I mean we’re pushing about that 30 minute mark and we like to keep these discussions at about the 30 minute mark, so we’ve got about 3 minutes, but I just kind of want to take it back and kind of wrap up everything we’ve talked about for this, especially and so I think what we should do is go ahead and start with our journey. So, we started in retail like we talked about.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: Retail, we saw some challenges, right?
Josh: Yeah.
Will: We saw some
Josh: I mean it’s a good, it was a good run, right?
Will: Yeah.
Josh: There are definitely challenges in the retail. I face those challenges, any day I’ll take those challenges on man, because it’s just opportunity. Those challenges are just opportunities. That’s it.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Right? You just figure out how to do it smarter and better and you can win that game, right?
Will: Exactly.
Josh: There are a lot of people doing that game crappy.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Crappy man.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Because the barrier to entry in this business is so low and it lets a lot of crappy people in to this business.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Right? So, there’s so much opportunity in that.
Will: Yeah, you just have to learn how to differentiate yourself.
Josh: For sure.
Will: And we haven’t even talked about the Cellular Repair School, the school transition that we made which I think actually led us in the direction of discovery.
Josh: Well, it did actually. Yeah and you hit it on the head because what I was going to say is when me and you linked up my mission was to be this huge franchise.
Will: Right.
Josh: I wanted to have this huge retail presence, right? And then we linked up and we realized obviously one of the key parts of growing a large franchise is people development and training.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: So I say let’s start training.
Will: That’s true.
Josh: Right?
Will: That’s true.
Josh: Let’s develop this training side and then what it did for me is it just changed my perspective and it took the desire of building a retail front out of me.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Because I wanted to focus more on helping you guys.
Will: Right.
Josh: I wanted to help and I don’t want to have to help you by you paying me a 30,000 dollar franchise fee.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Right? I wanted to be able to help people around the world, right, with hardly anything. No matter how much money you have or how little you have, right?
Will: Right.
Josh: And that’s the vehicle that we saw in the school gave us the ability to do that.
Will: Yeah and we’ve done that, we’ve done that for thousands of thousands of individual people, we’ve had in class, on site, online, we service thousands of people in this business, new and experienced people in regards to education, information, understanding, and we continue to do that. So with that being said, I think it’s a great transition because as we wrap this up, what I want you guys to understand is this information we’re giving you guys, the plan is to educate you guys on how to change a lot of the negative that we talked about, because what we’re talking about is a lot of the struggle, we’re talking about, we’ve talked about lots of the things that we’ve seen that we don’t like.
Josh: Right.
Will: Or that we didn’t like about this industry and our initiative, I think we should talk about that a little bit.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: As far as what we’ve talked today is what is our initiative to change some of the things
Josh: To clean this shit up.
Will: Some of the things we just talked about, right?
Josh: Bottom line man is like is to clean it up and really it is to empower, it’s to empower people man to change their lives.
Will: Right.
Josh: Really at the end of the day, right?
Will: Right.
Josh: So, whether you’re working a job that you hate.
Will: Right.
Josh: And you want to be able to take control of your time.
Will: Right.
Josh: To do what you want, when you want, right? We want to be able to give you the tools to do that.
Will: Right, right.
Josh: Or whether you run a 200 store location, but you’re slave to the business.
Will: Right.
Josh: Right? We want you to give the tools to improve your people.
Will: Yes.
Josh: So again, you can get your time back and achieve your goals and your dreams and be able to put more focus onto doing good.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: To pay it forward.
Will: And what we understand is as you guys can tell we can empathize with a lot of the struggles that the people we serve have, because we’ve done it, we’ve seen it, we’ve been a part of it, it’s what we talk about, it’s part of our story, like buying these parts that are shitty crappy parts.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: And all the paying for these parts and not understanding where I’m losing margin, not understanding why I feel like I need to compete with the price chop game, right? You get sucked into that when you don’t understand what your options are.
Josh: Right.
Will: Right? And what we’re here to do is let you guys know that you have options.
Josh: For sure.
Will: You have options and we plan on providing you with those options.
Josh: Yeah, and on top of that we didn’t really touch too much on this today, but man there are so many different ways that you can slice this thing up.
Will: Right.
Josh: That’s what so awesome about this space too, is you don’t have to do it one particular way, right? You don’t have to go out and build a store or a chain of stores. You can do repairs from home.
Will: Right.
Josh: Man, you can buy phones, fix the phones up and resell them.
Will: Oh man.
Josh: I mean like that I actually I think is one of the best things you can do.
Will: Yes.
Josh: What we decided to do is you can do refurbishing on a scale for other businesses, you can do board level repairs for other businesses.
Will: Absolutely.
Josh: There are just so many ways to slice that up.
Will: It is.
Josh: So many ways. In fact, one of the things that we have put together through the school a while back is we put that seven step blueprint together.
Will: Right.
Josh: If you guys haven’t had a chance, I’m not that here to pitch anything.
Will: Right.
Josh: But it’s a great course that kind of open you mind up on different ways, and I’m sure we’ll put a link around here somewhere.
Will: Yeah, yeah.
Josh: Right? But it really what it is, it’s a
Will: Well, if they listen to a podcast it’s going to be hard to ()
Josh: Well, that’s right. Yeah, that’s right. But
Will: So, tell them, I mean where should they be ().
Josh: Well, they can go right onto cellularrepairschool.com
Will: Right.
Josh: Right? And check it out, it’s literally called the Seven Step Blueprint to Repair Success.
Will: Right.
Josh: And the whole goal of it, it’s a mini course.
Will: Right.
Josh: 7 bucks man, you can beat it, right? And the whole goal is to just educate you on a very deep level on all the different types of ways that we’ve seen people be successful all over the world.
Will: Right.
Josh: All over the world, because I think one of the things that is really unique about our perspective isn’t just the fact that we’re from the retails from now to carriers, but it’s also we served over 160 countries.
Will: Yes.
Josh: Me and you personally have been to several countries to train carriers and all different types of people.
Will: Man, St. Lucia, Aruba, I mean a lot of different, lot of different countries.
Josh: Yeah, all over the place, right? So we’ve seen all the different ways that people are really doing awesome things in this industry.
Will: Sure, yes.
Josh: Right? All over the world.
Will: Yes.
Josh: In developing countries and in obviously very developed countries.
Will: So I think with that being said, Joshua we’re kind of pushing out of the time limit, I think with that being said I think we really tapped on this opportunity, right?
Josh: Yeah.
Will: And so what you guys, if guys don’t, if you didn’t know now you should know a little bit better as to what the opportunity kind of looks like, what the opportunity availability is in this industry, you just have to make sure you’re listening to the right individuals such as Josh and myself and obviously you can ask us, it’s the name of the show.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: Ask WillandJosh anything you guys want.
Josh: And man that’s a good point too.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: Because how do people ask us questions, right?
Will: Right.
Josh: And so I think that’s one of the things that we haven’t addressed yet, because were getting the show going, but I mean how do they ask us questions?
Will: I mean they can ask us in multiple different ways. Actually what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be setting up a wait and answering, and actually some of our shows are going to specific to answering questions once we set up a medium to actually receive questions, but you guys can obviously go to, you tell me how at this point, right, because we haven’t really set that up.
Josh: Well, I think obviously we’re pushing people to the podcast. I would assume that they can hear us on the Ask WilllandJosh, #AskWillandJosh on Instagram.
Will: Oh yeah we got the Instagram.
Josh: () us right there.
Will: () right there, we got the Facebook, yeah.
Josh: Write a post on, I mean just post and what we’ll do is we’ll aggregate the questions and we’ll come around and we will answer them.
Will: Absolutely.
Josh: Eventually over the coming weeks though I do want to get to a place where we’re actually going to start taking live calls.
Will: Right, we will be doing that too.
Josh: As we get our followers.
Will: Yes.
Josh: So, please if you like what we’re doing, please re-tweet us.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Like us, subscribe.
Will: The one thing we love to do is we love to connect. One thing you’ll find with me and Josh is we are people people. So we love interacting with people which is what we’re talking about before like travelling, the guys in the industry that we love to see all the time, relationships, that’s one thing you’re going to find too that we’re going to be talking about in terms of self-development is how important relationships or relationship building.
A lot of people think they could just run businesses without really getting in the trenches and developing relationship, and you can. Don’t get me wrong, you can but what you need to understand is relationship building and understanding how to cultivate and strategize and go out and network and build relationships are a huge part of any business.
Josh: Yeah.
Will: So obviously you’re going to reap the benefits of that in this business too, because what we do know about this industry is its circles are really small a lot of times.
Josh: They are, yeah they are.
Will: And it’s who you know a lot of times in every industry in this industry is no different. So we love, again the point that I was making is we love to talk to you guys, we love to interact with you guys, so yes we will be doing live chats, live calls, answering questions live, we’ll be doing taking questions that we can answer on our show that won’t necessarily be live, but again we want to make sure you guys are getting the information that you want.
Josh: Yeah. We want to empower what you build to be able to make the right decisions for whatever it is.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Whatever stage you’re at, right?
Will: Yes.
Josh: Whether your brand new, whether you’re stage 3 business, stage 5
Will: Yes.
Josh: No matter where you’re at on your journey, we want to be able to be here to help you along.
Will: Exactly.
Josh: Help you along your journey.
Will: Support you in your journey, that’s what we’ve done. We’ve done the work, so you don’t have to in terms of the information ask us, we are here to answer your questions and give you guys exactly what you need.
Josh: That’s right.
Will: So Josh, I think we’ll conclude this one? We have another one.
Josh: Hey man, I’m glad we’re doing this again. This is fun man.
Will: We can kind of do this all day.
Josh: Yeah, literally.
Will: That 40 minutes goes by fast.
Josh: That was super quick man. I’m actually looking forward to really interact and engage with the audience again, you know what I mean.
Will: Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Josh: Yeah, this is fun man.
Will: Yeah.
Josh: I enjoy it.
Will: I enjoyed it too.
Josh: Good job for putting this together.
Will: Yes, sir.
Josh: I’m really enjoying this.
Will: Good to have you back and I enjoyed it and until next time.
Josh: All right, signing off. We hope to see you guys soon.
Will: All right. Ask WillandJosh Show, again if you want to contact us please reach out to any of our social media platforms, on Facebook, you can Google Ask WillandJosh, Instagram Ask WillandJosh, Facebook, Ask WillandJosh.
Josh: Check out our podcast.
Will: Check out our podcast, Ask WillandJosh and we’re signing off. All right until next time guys.
Josh: Until next time guys.
Will: See you.
