Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast, we're talking with Doug Spurling from Kennebunkport Maine. Yes, that Kennebunkport, the presidential, notorious compound of the Bush family.
It turns out Doug has some pretty great businesses going up there, including a personal training business, he coaches other people who own personal training businesses, and he has a budding hospitality consulting business. So he's got a lot going on.
We talked about this idea of using your business as the ’N of one study' for something you're going to duplicate. It's an ongoing theme I have: if you can create something you can document and then do again and again in syndication, you've got something pretty cool and scalable.
We had a great conversation, and there is a lot here for you to take away.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 185
Dean: Doug.
Doug: Dean, how are you man?
Dean: I'm good. So-
Doug: Thank you so much for having me on.
Dean: Well this is it. It's all very exciting. Are you any relation to Sy Sperling?
Doug: Not that I know of.
Dean: Okay.
Doug: I'm surprised you know another Spurling, it's not a common last name, so I'm surprised with that.
Dean: Oh, well, there you go. So where are you calling from?
Doug: Out of Kennebunkport, Maine, so Coastal Southern Maine.
Dean: Wow. Very nice.
Doug: Yeah, yeah.
Dean: Very presidential.
Doug: Yeah, I was going to say, we're known for the Bush complex and all that stuff, and our very short but busy summer, July and August is pretty much the only warm months up here, but very, very big guy tourist area.
Dean: I love it. That's great. You know, it's funny you talk about short summer, I was in London. I go to London every June. And this year, it was particularly warm this week that I was there. And I got in a black cab and the cabbie asked me how long I was here. I said, "I'm here till Sunday." And he said, "Oh, so you stay for the whole summer." Because it was supposed to get cold again after that... the whole summer is this week.
Doug: That's awesome.
Dean: That's pretty funny.
Doug: Yeah, that's awesome.
Dean: So tell me what's going on in Kennebunkport, Maine, and what we're going to focus on today.
Doug: So I've been following your stuff for a long time, big, big fan, and...
Dean: Awesome.
Doug: I kind of describe it as a tree with three branches up here. So my main branch is a personal training gym. We're a personal training gym with about 350 clients, full time team of ten staff, about seven or eight trainers and two support staff. So that's the main branch. And then I've had that for the better part of a decade. And that is running smooth and basically trying to build a really, really strong community here in Kennebunkport. So we have the fitness service, but what that led to-
Dean: What's the population of Kennebunkport by the way? The resident population?
Doug: Yeah, yeah. The real population is only about 12,000 13,000.
Dean: So that's pretty strong. You got 350 people in a 12,000 person universe. As far as personal training studios go, you're doing something right.
Doug: Yeah, yeah. That branch of it's... I really have no complaints, they're all doing really well. But that business is good, we're able to do a lot of things with it as well, which is kind of the -. We do much more than just... Our main service is small group personal training. So not one-on-one traditional private training, but kind of that small four to six group. That's our main service. But we've been able to do a lot of charitable work, nonprofit work. We want to get into kind of the retreats and kind of more the experiential type stuff. So yeah, it's been fun. That's for sure.
Dean: Awesome. And the second piece-
Doug: I guess the second branch, just to give some context, is as you mentioned, the personal training gym's doing really, really well. And we have a nice niche in the industry as being sought after for consulting and things like that. So I have a mentor of mine that I partner with for fitness business consulting. But I also have, and this is kind of that second branch, the consulting side, consult with him in the fitness business space but then also have developed this kind of interesting target market that's been a lot of fun. Which is kind of one degree over in the hospitality and tourism. So a lot of my clients - businesses, obviously that they can afford a little bit higher priced membership and things like that. And they started asking me just based on observing our brick and mortar gym, "Hey, I own a hotel," "hey, I own a marina, would you be interested in consulting on that front?" So that's turned into a nice little second branch.
Dean: Nice.
Doug: So yeah, that's kind of the second branch. And then the third one is the real estate piece on the gym building, and we're planning an expansion on that this year that is kind of 50% fitness, able to provide more fitness services, but also, as I mentioned, having some space for live events and consulting. And most of its in-person, in the tourism and hospitality, I don't do a ton that's not local. It's all kind of local business. So having a space-
Dean: Sure, well you're in a real tourist area. That's probably your number one thing, is tourism, I would imagine.
Doug: Oh, by far. Like we said, population's 12, 13,000 but I believe it goes north of 100,000 in those summer months.
Dean: Wow, wow.
Doug: It's big. It's big. I mean, by far the biggest businesses up here are hotels, restaurants, marinas, things like that.
Dean: Yeah, got you.
Doug: So those are kind of the three main branches.
Dean: Describe the real estate side again, what element of real estate are you doing?
Doug: The real estate for me has just kind of been like one, it's a hobby, but two, it's I guess a little bit of a McDonald's approach, where it's like, okay, I own the real estate at the gym, obviously we're going-
Dean: Okay, so real estate -
Doug: ... to work on expansion of that... Yes, yes, more holdings property, I don't have interest in being an agent or anything like that. It's more just for me making sure that even with the gym, I mentioned wanting to do retreats and more of that experiential stuff. Eventually, I would love to own one of those places. So kind of making sure that I can keep it all... my goal is not to have multiple gyms, when we look at -, that's not kind of my goal. My goal is to say, okay, how can I maximize the gym? How can I provide other services for these people i.e. retreats and more of the holistic, wellness stuff. And just making sure that we also try to eventually, might not happen right off the bat, but eventually own the real estate as a part of those ventures.
Dean: I got you. Okay. That's a pretty cool... there's a lot of intersection of that. And if we just take even the hospitality and the personal training, if you're looking at being able to allow hotels or inns or whatever it is, to have some personal training component to their property, that might be an interesting overlap right there. But it sounds like if we want to isolate just the consulting for the hospitality side, is that something that you want to grow?
Doug: Yeah, I think the consulting is definitely the... the gym, just from a logistical square footage standpoint is reaching very much near capacity. So I think if we're looking at the consulting, and even kind of the whole going through the profit activators, like looking at the target market, and I've listened to previous podcasts where you talk about just getting some clarity on how it's okay to have multiple target markets, but for me, it's like-
Dean: Yeah, they are all individual-
Doug: ... - struggle.
Dean: Yeah, that's right. They're all individual-
Doug: It's just the struggle of... go ahead.
Dean: Yeah, no, they're all individual, that's the thing. I talked about... [inaudible 00:10:05] Procter and Gamble as the perfect example, of a company that has multiple target audiences, multiple products, and they've got 23 individual billion dollar brands that are not related to each other. So that's a good model. But if we take your hospitality consulting business, or the side of that, how would you like to grow that? Are you saying that you'd like to consult with more local businesses in your area there, or to take that and do some consulting in other areas?
Doug: Yeah, I think I would lean towards-
Dean: - with different types of businesses.
Doug: Yeah, I would lean towards staying in that... For me it would go back to making sure, because the big kind of areas that I tend to be strong at is kind of building a team and providing high quality customer service, obviously coming from the personal training background. So staying within that lane, but definitely staying more probably obviously, outside of Kennebunkport. But I'm not awesome at the... I do the consulting for the fitness stuff via Zoom or via phone call like this, and I much prefer the in-person. So more growing it in the sense of either in-person coaching or live events and things like that.
Dean: And so let me ask you this, because there's a couple of things to match up a business model with your preferences. And so, I look at that and see, do you like the challenge of working with a different business, a different type of business that you haven't maybe worked with yet, and figuring out what they need to do, or how that could apply to them? Or do you prefer to work with a business to help them implement something you've already figured out?
Doug: I would say the second of those two, definitely much more of like, hey, this is-
Dean: This is what's working-
Doug: ... yeah, this is kind of what's working and not getting too far. Like I took on a client that was selling art, and that was great, but there was a lot of it that I couldn't apply from the gym business or from the customer service business or anything like that. There were some standards, business is business, but I was definitely more comfortable where it's like, I think of the marinas, the renting boats, they have time slots to fill, they have a team that has to deliver a high quality service. There's a lot of comparables from my 10 years in the running the gym.
Dean: Yeah. And that's kind of the same. So I look at it that, we're in a world right now where the one-to-one connection through the cloud, like you were talking about Zoom or telephone or internet or all of these things, you can reach a global audience. But where there's perhaps an opportunity, is if you were to develop a model and a protocol for a marketing system for a marina in Kennebunkport, that you could then have that model help other marinas all over the place install that model. You know what I mean? We call that kind of like a syndication, syndicating your solution there. Because it's easier to... if you've already figured out what the problems and challenges and opportunities of a marina are, 80% of it is transferable to a marina in Cape Anne, in Massachusetts, or in Cape Cod or anywhere where there's marinas that are non-competitive with your Kennebunkport one. Almost like a franchise prototype. But we call it a syndication, because it's not a franchise operation you're setting up.
You're just syndicating a solution that you've already figured out to many different things. That's been a model that I've used a lot, like I used that with our real estate agents. We've got real estate agents all over North, and all over the world really, if you include Australia and the UK and Europe. But primarily, that's been a model that I've used. Is figuring out how to solve the big issues or the big marketing opportunities for a real estate agent. And then licensing, coaching, teaching, supporting other real estate agents to apply those same models to their business in different markets. Because real estate's a very local business, just like a marina is a very local business. You can't digitize a boat slip, right? You've got a physical boat that you're going to have to pull into the harbor. And so you've made a distinction of a truly mainland business, they can't ship their product everywhere. Like a marina is definitely a local business. And so is almost, you would say all of the hospitality type of businesses are just inherently local. And so they would lend themselves to that.
Doug: Yeah, and I think that's what I've enjoyed. I've definitely not enjoyed the... I don't want to say not enjoyed, but enjoyed more the local, the being able to consult for a hotel that I can literally drive down, meet them in their lobby, see the space, see how the staff interacts with the guests, all that stuff. That for me is much more fulfilling than the kind of nationwide tours.
Dean: Yeah. And so what have you figured out then about this? Have you developed any magic tricks that you know are going to apply to these businesses? What's your model based on, and what kind of results are you able to get?
Doug: I think I've basically been able to take the kind of frameworks that I built out through the gym from a marketing calendar standpoint, and from a team development, staff development, team onboarding, and I would say the biggest results is kind of the chaos to clarity as far as the owners feeling less chaotic with still having to feel like they're doing everything themselves. I have a marina client who, he's in his 60s and he's still greeting every boat that comes in. And that's nice, but there's... I'm kind of working with him on the delegation and the roles and responsibilities. And ultimately, I would say his benefit has been freeing up a lot of personal time. And looking at, from a systems or a process standpoint, some operational efficiencies, developing processes for the business, developing the team and onboarding curriculums, things like that, for the staff. So those would be the main two areas that I tend to see success in, and enjoy doing.
Dean: And so you look at this, how much of what you've done for them would be transferable?
Doug: I would say 90%.
Dean: Yeah. And so that's an opportunity, maybe then. But is that something that, would you be as excited of working with 10 other marinas?
Doug: Yeah, I think if I can have, for me I've learned that, and that was kind of one of my questions, is like how do you blend, because I see you do it, but just kind of getting some insight into, how do you blend the coaching like this, or maybe there's another marina or another hospitality business where I'm coaching with them over the phone, maybe emailing them some of this, or they have access to the product. But I really enjoy the live events, and knowing that in today's day that's not going to be able to be 100% of what I do, but kind of building out a framework where from a fulfillment standpoint, even in the gym business, like I enjoy going to their gyms or having them come to our gym and that's part of our expansion. Is building out a conference room that's attached to the gym so we can meet there but then also have the gym right there to see and observe and that kind of environment is super enjoyable.
Dean: Right. And that's kind of an interesting thing, that if I'm looking at this after applying my model on how I would look at this, to kind of give you an idea is, the things that you've figured out with this one marina, I would look at that as your prototype. That as your laboratory, your working, your proof element here. That you're saying, this is what happened, you documented everything that you've done and all the results that that's generated. And turning that into something that is discrete, individual sort of processes or projects that somebody could as another marina owner install in their business. And look at taking other marinas through a coaching process that kind of helps them implement these things.
When you do the first one, the first marina that you started working with, you didn't know what you were doing in terms of specifically. You had a general sense that you could help them, you had your hypothesis around it, and you were able to set up a recommendation and it made a difference or didn't, and you were able to learn from that and document it. And now, the next step of that is to be able to package it in a way that it can be duplicated. If you take, and this is a good overlay, when you take... that's why the framework of A-profit activators and the before unit, during unit, after unit work universally on all businesses.
The before unit of a marina is everything that you do to find people who want to be a client of that marina. And the during unit is everything from the moment they pull in or make a reservation or however the logistics of it work out for a marina, and while their boat is docked there, that's the whole during unit of it. And then the after unit would be the ongoing relationships with people who long term keep their boats there, or go through the winter storage or whatever happens. And so looking at it like that, what you've described that you're doing is sort of systemizing and operationalizing the during unit to make it as predictable and seamless and more efficient for them.
But maybe also looking at how to maximize the revenue, just within that, through a combination of doing it more efficiently. So cost savings and leveraging the opportunities that you have while somebody is in the during unit of the business, to enhance the experience and to make more revenue. So what kind of impact have you had?
Doug: Impact, as far as... how would you kind of phrase that, I guess clarify that?
Dean: Well, first of all would be money. Are they making more money because of the relationship with you? Or how are they measuring success? What would be the impact of what it is that you're doing with them?
Doug: Yeah, I would say the two that I have right now, it's kind of funny because they're opposite as far as stages of life and goals. One of them is much more like, impact for them has been free time, being able to travel, not having to be there... summertime is so short as we talked about up here, so not feeling like he's had to live at the marina all summer long. And that's been the big impact for him, is just kind of clarifying the staff, roles and responsibilities, putting management in place, things like that. Less about really growing materially, compared to the other one, is more of a young owner just trying to get it off the ground.
So we're focusing a lot on kind of the before unit and looking at marketing calendars and marketing strategies and definitely increasing income. And for a lot of his, yes, there's some staff overlay, but a lot of it for him is just making sure [inaudible 00:25:20] a boat tourism, so there's both tours that go out every hour. And so he's making sure that there's not an hour there's only so many seats on the boat and just trying to maximize each hour, get as many of those... it's kind of one of those... Same thing again in the personal training business, like every hour, there's a timed hour and you want to be able to maximize each session.
So that's been the biggest impact with him is, monetarily, there's time to generate more income more business to fill those seats while navigating kind of the operations of it as far as only so many times. And then everybody wants to come during peak time, so how do you get... A big thing in this industry is generating income in the shoulder seasons. So helping them navigate that. So yeah, it's been fun. But what's been challenging I would say, the biggest challenge is on the marketing front for me personally. A lot of us, once we have the client, once we're in the during phase-
Dean: Yeah, exactly-
Doug: … - working with these clients, it's monthly coaching calls, it's some in-person stuff, going up, whether it's the marina or the gyms, going up and visiting them or going down and visiting them. I feel like that's strong and that's kind of, I would say, pretty typical. But what's interesting for me that I am challenged with and I remember hearing that in a previous episode, I love the Procter and Gamble example because that's been the challenge in my end from the before unit. I'm still marketing the gym, so I have a target market there. We have obviously natural churn every month, so trying to generate enough new business. And then obviously the two different target markets underneath the consulting.
So just navigating from really a bandwidth standpoint and just personal brand reputation. Am I the gym owner, or am I the hospitality consultant? But most of my consulting inquiries are actually from the gym business because that's the business that I operate. So just navigating that, and didn't know if there was any insight into that.
Dean: Well, part of the thing is that they're separate. That's the spirit of what I was talking about with the Procter and Gamble, is that treat them as independent brands. Because when you start especially looking at scaling the the hospitality consulting business, that may even go into the marina consulting division. You start thinking about it as a unique product unique. And I'll call it a product, but the suite of services or offerings that you have for marinas, that that's all that matters. You isolate that into a separate business.
I often talk about the photographer with the weshootbottles.com website and the sister site of weshootcans.com, even though they're the same thing. It's just that people with something in a bottle, only they'll feel like, this is the place for me. And people with a marina are going to think that this is the help that I need specifically, if it's marina-based. And compared to someone with a bed and breakfast or a local hospitality business, they're going to see something that this is specifically for them, rather than just the generalized term of hospitality consultant.
Doug: Yeah. And so from a...
Dean: Yeah. That's no more relevant than that Procter and Gamble is a packaged goods company. That hospitality is a broad umbrella term. Hospitality is a business that, we kind of make that name up to encompass all of the different flavors of hospitality. But a marina, even though it's a hospitality business, is a very specific thing, as is a bed and breakfast, as is an inn or a boutique hotel, or a restaurant. So from a strategy standpoint on my end is that, separate business names, separate websites, kind of like the We Shoot Bottles, We Shoot Cans, different name, different website, stuff like that.
Doug: And that's exactly right.
Dean: So the marina thing, what you would be looking at doing is treating the marina division, and let's just narrow our focus, for the conversation to the marina thing just for a little bit, to kind of go down that path of what that might look like knowing that everything we're saying about every time we're saying marina, we could just as easily be saying bed and breakfast. So it's the same sort of model. If we take the before, during and after of that, what is the marketing approach for a marina to find new boats, that is unique to what you've developed for people? Have you figured out a way, and when what is it that they desire? If you were to say, what do you want more of? I imagine if it's like the hotel business where they got a fixed number of slips, and they're renting them by the... I imagine there's a mix of day, week, traffic and ongoing, like permanent ones. So how does that split up for them?
Doug: So typically, currently so far it's mostly the one marina, they're less of a, let's park your boat all summer long, and more of a family comes up, it's actually on a lake, family comes up to the lake, and they're on vacation for a week and they have a line of boats that they can rent for vacation for the week. And so they'll have the residence there, and they can do daily rentals. And then the third revenue source was he does have some slips and moorings that are for people that live up there that are there all summer long for an annual fee. And on the marketing front-
Dean: There are some marinas that are like captive audience. Is it a lake that they're the only marina on this lake, or like the marina, or is it a big lake and there's lots of choices-
Doug: No, there's two or three more.
Dean: Yes, yes. Okay, so you do want to kind of have some competition around it. Yeah, exactly, I get it. But I'm thinking about, I grew up in Toronto, and in Muskoka, which is a couple of hours north, lake, cottage country. There are some lakes that are pretty good sized lakes but there's only one marina on there. And so they get all of the business on that lake. It's a pretty good thing, where you got a captive audience-
Doug: That's a sweet deal.
Dean: Yeah, exactly. A lot of the cottages are boat access only, beyond certain sides of the lake. So getting a marina is an important part of your gateway.
Doug: And the other revenue source in a situation like that, that I didn't think of that I know is true for this is fuel.
Dean: Yes, of course.
Doug: I mean, I know that's less servicy, I know for my client, that's a massive source of their revenue, is fuel.
Dean: Yeah. And it's fun when you look at the components of the... part of that that process is looking at all of the components of the business and seeing what is available. I have to talk about their Gamal Aziz, who is the guy who took over the MGM Grand several years ago, and there was a great article, so, so impactful for me that I still remember all the details of it because it was, I use it all the time, this thinking. And so what Gamal did was when he came into the MGM, he broke up the, in his thinking, the hotel into all of the revenue sources.
He would look at all the components, like the gaming, and the hotel nights, and the restaurants, and the entertainment, and the conventions and retail, all of the components of the thing. And the MGM is of course the biggest hotel in the world. And so he would look at these things. And then he would ask the question of how high is high? What could we be doing here? So for instance, he took all of the restaurants that were in the hotel, and he looks at them and says, "How high is high here? What could we be doing?"
An example, they had a flagship restaurant that was doing $4 million a year in sales. Not broken, very successful. And he would spend a lot of time in the evenings at the entrance to the hotel, watching people come out of the hotel and get into taxis and limos and he would just ask them, "Where are you going tonight? How's your trip? Where are you going tonight?" And they'd say, "Well, we're going to Spargo," or, "we're going to Nobu," or, "we're going here..." like they're naming these destination restaurants that they're going to.
So they're leaving the hotel that goes somewhere specific, and he recognized, thought to himself, if we had a celebrity, a destination restaurant in our hotel, we could probably be doing $8 million a year in sales. And he looks at that gap as a loss. So he's thinking we're losing $4 million a year, because of our $4 million everybody's-happy-with restaurant. And so he immediately goes to the board, and he gets them to agree to let him tear that out, partner with Michael Mena and make a high end celebrity restaurant in the same footprint, same amount of space, but they open up Nob Hill. And in the first year after doing it, they did $11 million in sales.
And so he did that same thing. They had a show that was doing $28 million a year, FX, was the show long running staple of the Vegas shows. And he took that out because he knew that if they had a Cirque du Soleil show, they could probably be doing $60 million in sales. And so he got them to rip out the theater, partner with Cirque du Soleil, they put a Cirque du Soleil show in there. And now they do over $100 million in sales, in the same size theater, just maximizing what's possible. Because he looked at it, that they're $28 million show was losing them at least $30 million, that they could have been doing.
And so if you take that same thinking, and overlay it on a marina, and you look at the components of it, is there a restaurant or a food service or prepared meals or groceries or fuel or rentals or service, all the components, and you kind of lay it out and look and see, where's the biggest gap? What would be the biggest thing that if you could maximize, would be a big win?
Doug: Yeah, that's a great way to look at it-
Dean: Yeah, that kind of thinking and that kind of exercise, especially in the during unit, would help drive revenue, which would then be able to allocate some of that revenue towards driving the before unit to attract the highest value new clients.
Doug: Yeah. I love how how we looked at it as it's, instead of a $4 million, he's like, we're losing $4 million, that's-
Dean: We're losing $4 million. And I mean, by the way, a lot of things, it's difficult for people to look at that, especially when things are profitable. Nobody would have been looking at the restaurant saying, "Oh, we've got to do something about that," because it was profitable and not a problem. So they may be thinking other approaches may have been to look at it and see how can we improve this by 20% or whatever, but that's not as exciting as looking about, like what's the most this could possibly do? And if it's not doing that, then we're losing that gap.
Doug: - mindset shift.
Dean: Yeah. And often if it's like many small businesses, that the handcuffing thing that happens is that they don't have capital to invest in marketing often. They're kind of just getting by or they're struggling operationally, that they don't have the physical or logistic capacity to take on new people. So you've got to fix those things first, operationally and optimize the revenue. That way, when you're bringing new people into the business, it's effortless, or less effort because it's streamlined operationally, and optimized economically.
Now your model for doing that, your observation and your thing, your goal as a consultant for this is to recognize and sort of systemize your solutions for that. The exercises, the helping people come to that conclusion, and then here's what to do about it. Because every time you're documenting, when you find a problem, or an opportunity, in your kind of prototype marina, your patient one, that you are thinking about, is this something that every other marina is going to run into? How universal is this? Or is this 100% unique to this marina? You know?
Doug: Right, almost building out the framework so that it can just be-
Dean: Have you read-
Doug: ... - across the board, on the tools.
Dean: Yeah. Have you read the E myth?
Doug: Yes.
Dean: Yeah, that kind of thinking, like looking to duplicate it 5,000 times. That's the thinking that you're looking at. You're, as a consultant, helping them work on the business to create the systems, and you're working on the systems that help the entrepreneur, the marina owner, work on the business.
Doug: So from a marketing standpoint, kind of looking at my, you said again, because we can stay on the marina track but apply it to any of these categories or target markets, on my before unit, so we got target market marina, is that something that I do? I've written one book, but it was kind of the mistake of, I wrote the book while I knew you, but before I heard the, make it about the title, it's all about the title. I did a message that we carry kind of across in my fitness business as well as in consulting is this whole, 1% better approach, small habit changes, kind of the small things make big changes. So I wrote a book about that. And it's good, the clients at the gym love it and it is nice to have as a lead for consulting, to say that you wrote a book.
But, as you will I assume say, it's not kind of niched enough to any specific industry. So is that something in my before unit that...
Dean: Yeah, absolutely, like what would be the title of a... if you could summarize in a in a book title, what this marina owner would definitely want? It's interesting, it just happens that I co-wrote a book with a guy in the hospitality business that we wrote called, Getting Bookings. It's for boutique hoteliers on getting bookings for their hotels. And so when you look at, it's the thing that they want. If you lined up 10 marina owners, and you asked them individually, "What do you want?" What would they say? If I asked real estate agents, like I know that what they want. I've got solutions for the big five things for them, which are getting listings and multiplying their listings, and getting referrals and converting leads and finding buyers. And so I know that I got solutions for getting all of those things. But what would a marina owner say are the top things on their mind of what they want? Would they like to get more bookings, or to sell more rentals, or do they sell boats out of their thing? What would they describe to you that they want more of?
Doug: Yeah, the biggest by far the biggest pain point is more bookings, if it's a tour type marina where they're doing tours, I wouldn't say more tours, and maybe there's a clear language to this, but, the tours are happening, but the... more tourists, exactly. So the tour goes off at 9:00 and it's going off no matter what, but if there's 50 seats on the boat, they want 50 people.
Dean: Yeah, fully booked. So that would be the title of the, in a way, that's the kind of thing, the sentiment they want is fully booked. And it's easy to point out to them, that if they've got 50 seats on the the boat for the tour, and they've only sold 30 of them, that they've lost 20 times whatever the ticket price is. What is the ticket price of a typical, like how would that, am I far off on what their thinking might be, and how-
Doug: Oh no, that's spot on. So for example, if a tour is 99 bucks, rounded up to 100 bucks. If they're not getting 20 people, they're losing a couple grand every hour.
Dean: Yes, that's right, exactly. And so that's the kind of thing then, in the hotel business, and this is where it's interesting to study other businesses. Some of the things I've learned in being involved with the hoteliers, is the driving metric of all of the things that they're doing is a number called rev per. Have you ever heard that number?
Doug: No.
Dean: So the rev per number is the revenue per available room. So that means that if a hotel has a 100 rooms, and last night they're 80% booked, and they sold the rooms at $100 each, they got $8,000. But their revenue per available room was $80 instead of that's $100. So that's how you see that the number works, it's a better indicator of things. So if you look at the revenue per available seat, if you take that kind of metric there for the number of tours that they have... How often are people doing these, how often are they doing the tours?
Doug: Typically there's kind of three to four recording, there's a little bit of a lunchtime lag and then three to four in the evening, so let's say an average of eight a day.
Dean: Eight tours a day, and they've got how many seats on the...
Doug: One in particular here has 50.
Dean: Okay. And so there's that much volume for these tours through the summer, that's pretty strong, that's pretty high. So, if you look at that, and if it's $99, so there's getting $5,000 for a tour for these things, can that be right on that?
Doug: Yeah, I mean, these boats are a lot of them are only running eight or 10 weeks. So that's why they try to run a couple tours in the morning, a couple tours in the evening, try to get as many tours. And also, obviously, another factor with this industry in particular is weather. I mean sometimes they'll have to call off the tour. So it's kind of like the restaurants where they want to maximize those busy Friday nights, because if there's a rainy day people are going to call and cancel and...
Dean: Yeah, right, all of those.
Doug: The revenue's high when it's kind of perfect scenario. But there's other variables that come into play whether being one, and they're probably not maximizing all seven days of the week. That's another big thing is, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, very, very busy, Monday, Tuesday, I know some of them, not any of mine, but I know some of them won't even open on Mondays and Tuesdays or Tuesday, Wednesday or something like that.
Dean: Right. So part of this thing is establishing that, like, how high is high? When you look at what the metric is, if you look at 100 times 50 times seven is 350 seats available each day that they're doing it. And so a total possible revenue of $35,000 a day for that. And what level of capacity are they at typically?
Doug: Typically probably 60 to 70%.
Dean: Yeah, so then that difference, that's where the opportunity is. And you look at that as an asset that you have available then right. It's a diminishing, I mean, a perishable, as soon as it leaves empty, you've gotten nothing from it. So you start to think, if we've got on average 20 seats available per tour right now, as a thing, and they're selling 30 times 100, they're selling $3,000 for what could be $5,000, right? They're losing $2,000 per tour. Now, are there other things in the during unit of this tour that are extra things that somebody might buy or purchase? Or are they buying drinks or food or photos?
Doug: - one thing that we're working on is maximizing those profit centers. Because a lot of the bigger ones will have, like the whale watching tours and the big, big boats that fit close to 100 people plus, they'll have kind of a mini restaurant on the boat, where you can buy food and drinks. But some of them are a little bit smaller where the boat is your seat and you're not really up and moving. Like I have one that's more kind of a adventure, fast paced, more of a thrill ride, I guess. And so they're probably not going to get to stop and eat or anything like that. But what we're working on is maximizing the...
Dean: Experience-
Doug: ... after you get off the boat, if there's some apparel they could buy, something like that.
Dean: Yes, yes, that's right. So, so many of those things. You've got the model of being able to document how you think about these things for marinas, and the thinking exercises to come up with, and document the journey that people go on. One of the things we talked about in the during unit is the customer experience. That process of doing the guest experience architecture to maximize the other opportunities that happen there, and then adding the metric to it that shows how successfully you're doing at that.
Like when I talked about in the real estate side, one of the things that we look at is what we call a listing multiplier index. Meaning, if you take a new listing, how many additional transactions can we get from that? Like, if I have a real estate side, somebody takes a new listing, there's five opportunities. That listing's going to get sold by somebody else, they've got an opportunity to find the buyer for it themselves. They've got an opportunity to find a buyer that inquires about that one, but ends up buying another house. They've got the opportunity to get another listing in the neighborhood around that one that they just sold. And they've got an opportunity to get a referral from the seller before the end of the transaction.
So if they go into it with this mindset of, how can I make more of these five things happen, as opposed to just put a sign in and put it in the MLS and hope that somebody sells it, we can translate that to this situation. By instead of just signing people up for the tour, putting them in the seats, taking them on the tour, dropping them back off at the marina, and then not putting any other thought into it, if you went through a thinking process of how could we optimize this experience for people? And maybe, what are the other possible outcomes that you could get? Are there any ancillary things that somebody could buy? Is there a little backpack or a water bottle or some... if you start really looking at the experience, how can you optimize that?
Who really does an amazing job at that is Disney does an amazing job at that. But who's also really winning at that is the Olive Garden. If you go to an Olive Garden restaurant, you see now all the things around that, they're maximizing that during the experience of while you're at that table. They've gotten - or almost like iPad type of things now, where there's games that kids can buy, you can place your order right on the thing, you can pay your bill and leave, so many different things. And they've got a situation now, which I think is brilliant, I've never seen it before, but if you go to an Olive Garden and you are there for dinner, you can buy an entree to take home for $5.
How brilliant is that, right? Like, while you're sitting there, would you like to get an entree to take with you for $5? So you could get lunch for tomorrow or whatever. Smart thinking-
Doug: Yeah, that's great.
Dean: I've never seen anybody else do that. But it has to come from that guided thought process, which is what you would really, I think, thrive at. And what you could imagine doing in your favorite way, is not leaving Kennebunkport, but bringing marina owners from all over to come to you, to do a workshop where you show them the laboratory, and then take them through exercises to apply this kind of thinking to their own marinas. They come with their marketing team or whatever. That could be a cool opportunity. So that's basically the framework, as far as structure is, coaching via video platform like this, phone or video. And then having these regular workshops from an implementation standpoint.
Doug: Yeah, right.
Dean: Yeah. Love it.
Doug: And then on the marketing front as far as getting more marinas, I know we need to wrap up here, but I do a daily email, with your, I love The Super Signature and all that stuff. And then we talked about the niched book. But from a scalability standpoint, any advice on how to kind of produce aside from email and maybe a book, is there a third that is worth looking at hearing all this?
Dean: Well, the great thing about... part of the thing is turning, you really only need one thing to do one job. We just need to do the... I drive everything... If I take the real estate side, I have two books that we use, I have a book called Getting Listings, which is focused on the number one thing that real estate agents want to get, is they want to get listings. So I offer on Facebook, a book called Getting Listings and for $2 and 50 cents per opt in, I get people to ask for the book. And then I build this big list of real estate agents.
On the entrepreneur side, I've got up a book called The 50 minute Marketing Sprint, that is the same thing. I run that on Facebook, build a list of entrepreneurs, and then it's all about profit activator three. Your whole thing is going to be about educating and motivating a bigger and bigger and bigger list of marinas. But you only need one way to get the right marina owners into your world. And the good news is marinas are visible prospects. You can get a list of every marina in the United States. They're not invisible prospects. Like people who want to take a tour are invisible prospects. You can't get a list of those. But you can get a list of marina holders.
Doug: Yeah, that's good. That's I think the takeaway from all this is, whether we're talking to marina or the gym business or hotels, it's almost separating them completely with that Procter and Gamble where they each have their own website, they each have their own book, and-
Dean: Yeah, because gym owners are motivated differently than marina owners, right? Gym owners want a different thing than marina owners want.
Doug: Yeah.
Dean: And building out individual tools, individual frameworks, and then driving to the workshops and the coaching.
Doug: That's right.
Dean: Awesome. Love it, man.
Doug: I appreciate it-
Dean: ... very exciting. Yeah. Love it. Love it. I love how it all applies. So keep me posted. I'd love to see what you ended up doing with that.
Doug: Yeah.
Dean: And watch it all unfold.
Doug: Yeah, yeah. And if I didn't, I have a nine week old at home, if I didn't have a nine week old I would be at one of your Orlando's or something like that. I definitely want to-
Dean: Of course-
Doug: ... at some point. So once - the wife allows me to travel.
Dean: Yeah, what's they're nine months old, you can come. That's great.
Doug: Yeah.
Dean: Awesome, well, I look forward to meeting you, that'd be great.
Doug: All right. Thanks, Dean.
Dean: Thanks, Doug. I'll talk to you soon.
And there we have it. Another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation and go deeper in how the profit activators can apply to your business, two things you can do. Right now you can go to morecheeselesswhiskers.com, and you can download a copy of the More Cheese, Less Whiskers book, and you can listen to the back episodes. Of course, if you're just listening here on iTunes. Secondly, the thing that we talked about in applying all of the eight profit activators are part of the breakthrough DNA process. And you can download a book and a scorecard and watch a video all about the eight profit activators at breakthroughdna.com. And that's a Great place to start the journey in applying this scientific approach to growing your business. That's really the way we think about breakthrough DNA as an operating system, that you can overlay on your existing business and immediately look for insights there. So that's it for this week. Have a great week, and we will be back next time with another episode of More Cheese, Less Whiskers.