Guest: Rick Elmore of Simply Noted - NFL to Innovator

0:02Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of the Epic Entrepreneurs podcast where we are all about helping business owners just like you achieve success. So we don't do fancy smancy. We don't do flashing lights. We don't do a lot of things that a lot of podcasts will do. These are just real stories about real people and their entrepreneurial and business experiences. We go into their wins, their challenges, and their learnings. So we hope you enjoy it.

0:37Welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs powered by Action Coach Growth Partners. You likely went into business to have more freedom and flexibility so that you could spend more time with your family, do more things or travel or enjoy your hobbies or whatever it is that you like to do in your spare time. We're here to help you find better ways to make more money, build better teams and get that time back so that you can have that freedom and flexibility. We'll help you simplify things and make sense of business, investing, and wealth building so that you can be epic and achieve all your dreams and goals.

1:10And now, enjoy the show. Hi, my name is Rick Elmore. I'm the owner of Simply Noted. Simply Noted is a handwritten notes platform, and we help our clients engage their clients in a more personal way to increase better relationships, drive lifetime value, get more referrals. And the way we do that is help send genuine handwritten notes. Boy, I really like handwritten notes. Tell us how you got into this business in the first place. Yeah, so I have a pretty unique background. I was an athlete growing up, played football collegiately and professionally, went to the University of Arizona and then was drafted into the NFL in 2011.

1:45Got to live out my childhood dream for four years, almost four years, and then got into the corporate world, like a lot of the guys do after playing sports. But about six years in, I was having tons of success, so top 1 % or top five sales rep in the company. but just had an itch I couldn't scratch. I went back and did my MBA. And about a year into my program, I had a marketing professor said that handwritten notes had a 99 % open rate. And I just thought that statistic was obvious, but yet mind blowing and how powerful handwritten notes were in the business world. So long story short, I sent out some handwritten notes to some prospects in my field and the response rate was amazing.

2:25My clients loved it. They told me how much they appreciated it. And fast forward almost six years now, we built a pretty amazing platform. I had no clue what I was getting myself into, but sales and marketing guy, athlete who started a robotics software and industrial automation company. We're the largest handwriting platform in the world now. We have 400 ,000 users on our platform every single month. We're the only company in the world that's built its own handwriting robot. I have six pending patents. It's been a wild ride to say the least. Hitting the Inc. 5000 this year was just voted 40 under 40 by the Business Journal.

3:05So it's been a pretty, you know, white knuckle grip roller coaster ride for the last five and a half years. Well, that's an awesome story. Let's let's talk about the handwritten note stats here a minute, because I think that's I mean, whether people decide to use your platform or write notes themselves. I mean, it is powerful. Give us more of those stats. You said 99 % open rate. What else? What else can we? Well, we live in a digital world, you know, since the internet boom, everything went online, social media, email, and now we're in the AI revolution, right? We're living in the world of chat GPT and augmented reality.

3:45So, you know, what is old is new again. We are making what was once unscalable scalable, where it's really The handwritten notes is the last form of communication people think can be automated or scaled, and that's what Simply Noted does. But what we're really trying to do is help build a better client experience. We're trying to increase your relationships, build more loyalty, because there's tons of stats. There's a Harvard business review that was done, I think it was about six or seven years ago, talking about customers who feel appreciated and how that affects your business. Customers who feel appreciated are five times more likely to make a referral.

4:21um there are five times more likely to forgive a mistake you know and especially in today's day and age when there's an alternative to every service having that loyalty is incredibly important um there's seven times more likely to try a new offering so upselling them is um you know a lot easier than you know acquiring a new client and then what i the stat that came from this study that i thought was incredibly powerful that people if they're going to take one thing away from this is just if you just cut your customer churn down 5 % a year, they found out your year over year revenue growth will be on average on the low end 25 % more and up to 95 % more.

5:01So if you can cut your customer churn down by just a simple 5 % in the way that we help them do that is make them feel appreciated, you know, say thank you, send them a birthday card, send them an anniversary card, a holiday card, all completely automated. And we're helping our clients, you know, cut down that churn rate, build better relationships, you know, start new relationships because the open rate is so high. So the prospecting tool, you know, a lot of people use it for marketing. So yeah, we're really excited. You know, to say this has been easy, it has not. So we're completely customer funded, no investors.

5:33We've done this with no loans, no debt, no investors. And that's another thing, any entrepreneurs out there who think, you know, I come from lower middle class, blue collar family, first person to go to college. I have no training in engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering development. I'm self-taught on Coursera and YouTube for web development. And then I project manage for a whole team of developers. And I figured out how to do this. And it's just from a sensational amount of drive and wanting to get it done. So I think if you have an idea, if you're passionate about it and your why is important enough, you can accomplish anything.

6:12So I want to come back to the why in a minute, but I got, I'm curious about, don't, you know, I don't, we don't have to get in all the technology and everything, but how, how, how does it work if I wanted to hire you to write my handwritten notes? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So anybody can go to our web app or our website and just send one, but really what we try to do is work with business owners and integrate into their system. So if you have a CRM, a payment platform, a website, and you want to automate off of people logging into your website like Shopify, WooCommerce, WordPress, we try to integrate into your systems and create workflows that help buyers along the journey.

6:55So someone who signed up for a meeting, we can automate a thank you note after the meeting for attending that meeting. We found out the close rate is over 300 % improvement versus an email. So just sending an automated thank you note after a meeting, just from our studies, a 300 % increase in likely of closing versus an automated email. But yeah, we try to integrate and automate or help people scale it. So say if you have a client list of like 500, 2 ,000, 10 ,000, we literally can use your handwriting on your stationery and we can create all this in-house. We have our own printing press. We're completely vertically integrated.

7:27Use your handwriting, your stationery, your signature. It's all custom. I mean, it's just like, hi, John. Hi, Sarah. and it's legit real pen written. The pen drags and digs into the paper. Pen indentations are super real. We use machine learning. It's a custom built handwriting engine. It's nothing's like it in the world. I mean, this is why we had to build our own handwriting engine because whatever was available was not good enough. So yeah, I mean, you can go to our website and anyone can send one. But what we really like to do is work with like a CEO, a business owner, a CTO, a CMO, and help you guys integrate it and automate it.

8:04So, you know, it's not being forgot about, if that makes sense. No, I love it. I love it. I think it's a great idea. So does it, I mean, my handwriting is terrible. Does it use my handwriting or does it use some other handwriting? Great question. We have like 900 handwriting styles that we've created over time. We only have about 30 available online because it becomes like analysis paralysis. Like I've created so many handwriting styles now that like my, my eyes just numb over to handwriting. Everything kind of just blends and looks the same. So it's like, you know, I look for things that people would never look for, you know, just like alternates and ligatures and how things connect to each other and spacing and kerning and, and rotation, like all these different terms and like how you create a handwriting style.

8:55But we have 30 available. We can create yours. Most don't because there's a fee for that. but someone will find something that they like a handwriting style that they like and just use it. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's really cool when you see a handwritten note in your handwriting that you didn't do, but you're like, that looks just like, it just blows people's mind. No, I'm a big fan. I mean, I've written thousands of handwritten notes over the years. I mean, we're, we're big fans. And so I love the idea of being able to automate that because I mean, you know, there's going to be a note, you know, I would generally do a note after this, but if I was doing podcasts, I could set it up where you guys could automate it.

9:35I could just say, Hey, you know, send Rick the note, you know, all you would do is on your, you know, signing up for your podcast form, you would set up, use like Zapier, Integrately or Make, or one of those automation apps. And then once this event is completed and it's marked as complete, you know, since all that data was on the form intake form, the name, the address, all that data is there and you just trigger it to send it. I think we're still like five years ahead of this becoming a mainstream thing. It's like people are just starting to come around to what automation is. Most people don't know it unless you're an executive.

10:11But yeah, it's just incredible the use cases. You can automate it after a podcast, after a meeting, when someone pays you. Oh, yeah. I mean, you can automate prospecting. A complaint. A complaint. Think about that. Like it's, yeah, yeah. No, I think you're, I mean, you're clearly on to something here. If you've got that kind of, that kind of uptake, well, let's, let's talk about your journey a little bit and maybe what you've learned along the way. Just, I think it's helpful so that people know who they're doing business with. You came out of athletics. So obviously you've taken the lessons in athletics and applied them to business and probably vice versa.

10:54What, maybe what are some of the lessons that you've learned along the way? Um, well, you, what you just said was incredibly important. My, my background in athletics laid the foundation for my success and well, the success I've had so far in my life after sport, you know, just the, the grinding, the hard work, dealing with failure, um, competition, perseverance, you know, showing up when you don't want to and doing something really hard. Like, like college and NFL is not easy. I mean, it's, you're literally competing on a high level every single day. You know, I did that for 12 years. So yeah, it really helped me after.

11:32But I think what's really important for most CEOs or business owners is to get out of your own way and constantly be learning. Really be honest about your product, your service, you know, is your product affecting their, like, do people need your product? If I can go back five years ago, I may have done some things differently. Does your product affect their health, their wealth, or their relationships? Is it needed in their business? You really got to take an outside perspective in your business and critique it. And that's what we're trying to do now. Finding product market fit, trying to scale it.

12:12Because the hardest thing about our platform is scaling something for everybody. and you can't do that. I've been doing this since 2017 and I'm really embarrassed to say this, but until about nine months ago, I was so ingrained in my business. I couldn't work on my business. And that's, what's that book? Everybody, the E-Myth, Michael E. Gerber. I think every business owner has read that, but that is so obvious. You have to work on your business. You have to set up systems. You have to automate things. You have to have SOPs for people just to do. You can't, everything can't go through you. And 90 % of business owners, everything goes through them.

12:50And that's the hardest thing about scaling your business. You can have a few hundred thousand dollar business that can pay your bills, but is your business going to grow, you know, big enough to take care of the dreams of all the people that have supported you to help you build your dream? You know, and that's where I'm focused on is like, how can I get this so big that everybody who's helped me in our team, who's been there since day one that, you know, when this sells someday? Is it going to sell at a big enough number to take care of them as well? So that's really what's hit me is get out of my own way.

13:21Building a seven-figure business was cool five years ago when I started, but then you start realizing the dream's not big enough. You want to help everybody who's helped you along the way. But yeah, it's get out of your way, work on your business, be honest about your product, pivot, even if you don't want to pivot because you got to find product market fit. Just because your ego thinks people should use this, you got to play into human nature. You got to solve a problem, make it easy. Like my first three years, I was like, everybody's going to use this for thank you notes, no matter what. I didn't want to use it for prospecting.

13:53But a lot of people use it for prospecting. Like the market is telling me how they want to use my product. Listen, like take the blinders off and listen. Yeah, yeah. You can't No, you can't. So it's like you can't really fight a market. Yeah, that's that's that's that's interesting stuff there. It's an interesting stuff. So, I mean, you know, as a as a coach, it's it's an interesting thing because I know in athletics, you always had coaches. Talk about the role of coaches or consultants or whatever you want to call them in your in your in your life. I think I'm a first time business owner. It's my first business.

14:32So I'm going through everything by my, you know, for the first time. And every business owner goes through those really shaky, crazy, you know, rollercoaster moments. Like when you're like, you feel like it's over. Yeah, yeah. It's going good. And I think for me, the mental side, not so much the business side. And I think people have to be really honest with themselves. No one's going to save you or your business. No one's going to come in and help you get a contract. No one's going to do any of this stuff for you. You have to do that. But where a business coach comes in, you know, maybe they, if they're experiencing like, you know, funding or something like that, they can kind of guide you through that type of stuff, you know, making smart business decisions.

15:09But where it's affected me the most is that mental side is like hearing somebody else has gone through this. What's the worst thing that can happen? You know, like, you know, like having somebody helping take you off that, you know, cliff that you want to jump off of, because it's just the pressure and the stress and the anxiety, right? Like the sleepless nights, like that is the hardest thing about entrepreneurship and the responsibility, you know, of going from me, I was a W2 to now being responsible for 11 W2s. Like that is a mental, especially if your team has kids, right? So that I take massive, yeah, I take massive responsibility.

15:45So yeah, I think the best thing for a coach is, you know, they can guide you to make better business decisions. They're not going to change your business. Don't think anyone's going to save your business. They may help you make a better decision if you have an A or B and you bring it to them. But it's the mental side. As you start scaling, the risk becomes so much bigger. The stress becomes so much bigger. I mean, I'm a first time doing this. Maybe somebody out there has done it like three times. Like, oh, that guy's a rookie. He'll get whatever. No, no, no, no. They're doing it again. The ones that are doing it three times are doing it again.

16:17I've had multiple businesses. We all do that stuff. And I, you know, I think that I think people appreciate the honesty. Well, listen, the name of the show is Epic Entrepreneurs and Epic is an acronym. So I want to get your thoughts on the letters in the acronym. So the first letter is education. Like, what is the importance of education? Well, for me, I'm doing something I have zero experience or knowledge in. So it's forced me to learn on so many different levels. You know, I have I mean, I'm I'm literally self-taught SEO. I'm self-taught Google ads. I'm self-taught CSS, like UI, UX, so like front end design.

16:53I manage a full stack developer. I know like what HTML is and JavaScript and like the liquid and Shopify. Like I've had to like educate myself to have educated conversations with the team to make bigger decisions. You know, I have a electrical engineer, a software engineer, a mechanical engineer. and like I come from a linebacker smashing my head into a running back, right? Using my body for killing, you know, tackling people to now having to use my mind to conceptualize big visions and break them down into small projects that link and work together with nine other parts of my business, right?

17:33To grow and push the ship down the, you know, a safer route. And I think that is a skill that's learned through relentlessly pursuing growth and education. And I'm a big person on Audible, YouTube, Coursera. I have to learn because ignorance, this is like another thing about growing a business. The thing you should be scared about the most is what you don't know. And I think it's obvious, but a lot of people don't realize that. I had no clue what I was getting myself into in 2017. For me, it's fine because I love challenges and it's forced me to grow. But we've invested over a million dollars into our handwriting robot and our technology and our handwriting engine.

18:17If I knew I was gonna have to do that five or six years ago, me being a rational person, I probably wouldn't do it because I was like, how do you do that? I've had to learn over time, but my passion, desire, and perseverance have pushed me through. But that's what drives me and scares me the most. It's like, what don't I know? And that's why I'm always constantly watching the new video on AI, watching the new video on SEO, watching the new video on ads. watching the new video on like the outlook for the business world. Like a lot of it's like doom and gloom, but like there may be little nuggets in there that I can add to my brain that can help me make a better decision going forward.

18:50So I am obsessed and relentless about learning. It becomes an addiction. I think I would say maybe half of a lot of business owners know, like you grow through what you go through. The more you know, the more you can grow. So and I have just become obsessed, absolutely obsessed with knowledge. Yeah, good on you. I think we could spend a while working on like how you do that. Like how do you learn all that stuff? How do you I mean, what's your what's your what's your plan? But maybe that's for another time. Let me see one thing on that. I think a lot of people relate to this when you're doing something for the first time.

19:26Like when I had a football coach, you know, a football coaching has been around for 100 years. There's kind of like systems that have been approved on. Right. And when you're starting something for the first time, what's really scary is you go from this big cruise ship that has, you know, 100 employees on it that work together to keep the cruise ship going forward. And then when you go from a W-2 to a solopreneur to try to grow a small business, now you go from that cruise ship to a dinghy in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And all your efforts just cause you to like to spin in circles and you have no clue what to do.

19:56Right. And a lot of times you don't know how to put things together, but you have to put things into buckets and then write it down. So if like you have a marketing bucket, you have a sales bucket, you have a product bucket, you have a people bucket, you have an education bucket, and then you have to write down things you don't know and start studying it and keep it organized. And then you have to come back at it and look at it. Like, you know, every three months I'll go back and look at my notes and it's like, how does this come together? Like, there's no one there to show me how it comes together.

20:24Like you have to learn and envision how to stick it together. So that's the hard thing about growing a business is figuring out how to coach yourself, learn, connect the dots, make it work logically, simplistically, you know, in a cool way for customers to interact with it and love it and become like a, you know, a brand that they appreciate to use. So that's a hard thing. Organizing, putting buckets, understanding there's something you don't know, seek it, come back to it and just like look at it. You have to put it down on paper and stare at it and try to figure it out. And we just don't have people who can do that.

20:58Maybe small things, payroll, SEO, but like we're building robots, industrial automation. We're making printers work with G-code. Yeah, it's interesting. So, yeah. Well, look, I love the concept of buckets. I've always liked the way you could. I think it's a good organizational skill to do it. So self-education is going to earn you a fortune, as they say. Formal education will earn you a fortune. Learn before you earn. There you go. There you go. Let me ask you, I'm going to move right down to the last question here, which is what do you wish you had known before you went into business? I mean, I'm so excited about all the hard things I've put myself through in the last six years, knowing that no matter what I do in the future, it's going to be exponentially way better than this.

21:51I've started this with no funding. I've started this with no debt. I took my sales ability and my passion, desire, and perseverance and drive to make this happen. But I've become so aware of what it takes to be successful. I didn't hire a full-time CTO, someone to manage like my backend, like full stack development, like manage all the orders until like nine months ago. And just doing that, putting someone on payroll to manage that and get that out of my head has literally felt like I've like put myself on like, like nitrous gas. Like it's allowed me just to free things up. So being able to delegate has been really important.

22:28Yeah. I mean, I mean, just the self-education, you know, I didn't start doing SEO or Google ads until two years ago. Like, and that's transformed our business. Like we, like most of our, or most of our leads come from organic sources because of what I've self-taught and what we've done to the website. Like I'm kind of like an SEO and marketing geek now, even though I come from a sales background, cause I just, I see how the internet works now and how you can create landing pages and use ads and drive it, track it, put a pixel, retarget it. Like it's become really fun learning this because it's completely awesome to how, how it is.

23:02And it, at some point it may be, well, like I know enough now I got to hire somebody else to do that because I got to free myself up to do the 20 % that's going to make this exponential instead of give us 30X growth instead of 30 % growth and that sort of thing. So, uh, that's super exciting. I, I feel like we could talk all day. Um, but, uh, you know, maybe we'll, maybe we'll, maybe what we'll do is just have another one and come back and talk about some other things. But I love it from the football field to handwritten notes. That's just an automation. I mean, really, you have an automation company that happens to provide handwritten notes.

23:41That's awesome. So if people want to get a hold of your business, how do they do it? Yeah, I would just go to Simply Noted. So it's S as in Sam, I M as in Mary, P-L-Y, noted.com. And we, I don't know why I don't have a sample kit, but just go to the top right hand corner of the screen and it says request a sample and we do a really good job at sending you this big free sample kit i mean we spend 25 on really nice presentation giving you all the samples i mean postage and we get that in your hands before you even spend one dollar with us and what happens i've been doing this for for six years people get this and their minds are so blown they're like oh i thought this was gonna be printed it's not printed we have robots that hold pens that write and they smear the ink and it's like it's real then they get excited.

24:26Their light bulb goes off. They call us and like, can you do this? And we say yes and we help them do it. So I would just say request it. Even if it's something you don't want to do right now, holidays are coming up. Everybody wants to send holiday cards or 12 months from now, you're gonna be like, hey, I remember that. We can use this, you know? So I'm gonna get one. I'm gonna definitely get one. So yeah. And then LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn all day. It's just Rick Elmore, E-L-M-O-R-E. That's the only social platform I use. It's LinkedIn. LinkedIn is awesome. well thanks for being on it's been a lot of fun yeah thanks for having me this is great yeah and until next time all the best thanks for joining us for this week's episode of epic entrepreneurs here's four things you can do first you can listen every week on biz radio mondays at one second you can subscribe to the podcast hey you get it the more subscribers we have the more cool things we can offer you three you can also go out and give us a five star rating everywhere.