173. How to Make ANY Business Go Viral (even if it's boring) ft. Kolin Jones (Amalfi Jets)

20:17Kolin Jones:You know, like we post a crazy video, everybody go to the website, you get all the traffic. So on all social media pages, I killed our website from every single thing. So in order to find Amalfi Jets, you had to go to Google and type in Amalfi Jets. Our SEO pumped for the next couple months. And we owned literally one through three on every single relevant private jet keyword. Because from Google's perspective, people that are searching private jets, hard and stuff, are directly searching Amalfi Jets. So if you Google even the names of our competitors, we would literally outrank them on some of their own keywords, which is amazing.

20:50Kolin Jones:Because if you go on Google Trends that day, huge spike. It forced everybody to search Amalfi Jets. So for businesses, when you have that platform, try something new. And that was a big risk. I was like, hey, for the next week, we're not going to link anywhere to our website. Yes, our forms dropped slightly, but our SEO increased like crazy. So I think being willing to take some of those risks, but again, like calculated risks. And that's because if you have your website linked, you don't get the SEO if they click from the Instagram or TikTok. Because it's a direct search. You're just going directly to emolfijets.com.

21:21It's so interesting because we actually stopped linking our podcast on Instagram stories a little bit different. You don't get the click-through rate if you click from an Instagram story to a YouTube video and uh the watch time if you think it makes a lot of sense once we figure this out someone's stopping their doom scroll to go watch the podcast the watch time is going to plummet because then

21:43Kolin Jones:you're going to want to get back to what you're doing you're going to close it whereas if you're on a new tab you have higher intent because you're directly searching yeah a lot of what you're saying is reminding me of the conversation we have with caleb so we have um a good buddy of ours caleb brouston he worked with gary v and alex formozzi and he's like a g when it comes to branding. So the first thing that he talked about was branding being the pairing of two things to be associated with that. So he's brought up like Nike and Michael Jordan. So Nike paired themselves with Michael Jordan to be in the basketball scene.

22:13So that's one. I lost my train of thought. The other one, um, find it, dude, land the plane, land the plane. Oh dude, I was on, come on, land the plane, please. I'm gonna have to come back. Yeah. Pick me up. I can pick you up. I can pick you up. What was the decision to make people in the office characters in the reels? Were people all on board with that?

22:35Kolin Jones:No. And I think that stuff had been an adjustment where it's funny. We'll be filming some content. We're asking the team like, hey, who's available for TikTok? And everyone's like, oh, I'm busy. I can't. I don't want to do it. It's like, well, listen, this content is providing the business for us. So it's also to the point where we kind of change culture. And I was like, listen, if you work in a mall fee, at any point, you need to be available to be in any video whenever we ask. No questions asked. You're just going to do it. Because there's been a lot of fights that we used to have where there would be fights.

22:58Kolin Jones:People get upset to the point where you'd have someone in the video who clearly didn't want to be there. And it would ruin the content. And it would just piss everybody off and just create this like really negative energy. So that's been hard. But I also think it comes down to at the end of the day, like if people see a video of me booking a private jet, like literally yesterday when we booked the jet for Libby Dunn to get her to LSU. Someone saw that video, called into the main line, you'll speak to Jaden, and said, hey, I want to work with Colin. It's like, oh, well, Colin's unfortunately not available, but I can pass you to Brian.

23:25Kolin Jones:We want them to be like, oh, Brian, I remember him from this video. He's really cool. well, yeah, I want to work with Brian. So people, like us getting their name out there is important. And then after they're done with Brian, they book the trip, then they're going to work with Daniel or Holly Reid on the flight ops team. Oh, I love Daniel. He's so funny in the videos. Yeah, I want to work with him too. That, you know, we've seen that be very successful. Like I remember a conversation I had literally last week where someone was like, hey, I have this quote from this other company. It's like 23K.

23:46Kolin Jones:Listen, I'm willing to pay 24K, but I just want to work with them all. I love the content. So there's that like brand equity that people still want to just work with you because you're that. And I think, I mean, again, Like, I don't want to refer to us as like celebrities or anything, but like when you have that, like kind of celebrity style brand, people want to be associated with it. People want to be a part of it. I think it's the built-in trust too. Like they already see the people in the vlogs, you know, they see all these different characters and like, oh, when you call in, you're like, oh, I remember you from this one video.

24:13It just automatically builds that trust. I mean, it's similar to if like, if we sell something, they're like, oh, I know you, or I can DM you. You have that level of access that is probably different than some of the big podcasters. You're never going to DM. Rogan's not responding to you. it's not going to respond to your dm you know but it's it's interesting i've been like pigeonholed

24:29Kolin Jones:a couple times because like for example like we fly a lot of same routes like you know la to new york is probably like one of the most popular routes in private jet uh in private jet same thing with like new york to miami where literally like someone called in i was speaking to him and he's like hey um you need a plane from new york to miami and i told him it was like 23k and he's like well hold on he's like three weeks ago in a video you said it was 18k and i was like all right well private jet world airplane schedules move a lot and he's like yeah you literally told this person in this tiktok here i'll send you the tiktok and i was like oh my gosh so it's interesting so So we've had to kind of review and I guess kind of explain this to people like, hey, listen, airplane movements move.

25:01Kolin Jones:So one day, maybe 18K, the next day, maybe 19 ,000, or maybe this day you get a great deal and now it's 5K or something like that. So it's been funny to be quoted my own TikToks to myself. Yeah, man. Last week's price and today's price. Exactly. Especially with jet fuel as well. Always fluctuating. You brought up, you're like, I'm not a celebrity, but I got to ask, man, you got a Ferrari. We're partying in fucking sick villas in LA. We're flying private. I went to the Amalfi Reserve party. It feels pretty sick. Do you ever like drive around in LA and you're like, this is kind of like entourage?

25:33Kolin Jones:No, but the way I describe it, there's a lot of out of body moments where I'll just be like, take a step back. I'm like, this is ridiculous. Like when we flew to Mexico for the taco, like on the plane, we're there, I'm drinking a Corona and I'm like, this is ridiculous. Like, this is just ridiculous. And I think for me, that's what, you know, kind of keeps it going. I think it's really fun and exciting. But yeah, I mean, again, and I don't ever want to refer to us as celebrities, but I will say the one thing there is like, as a kid growing up in LA, I always thought like, I always saw those parties in the hills and I was like, oh, I always wanted to go and get invited to those.

26:04Kolin Jones:And I always thought like, all these rich people were like a part of this club. And I like joined all these clubs, like a member of Soho House, like Equinox. And I'm like, God, you know, that's still not like the club that I thought it was. So that's why we launched the reserve membership on the app because I was like, there's gotta be like these clubs and these events where it's like, you get invited to these parties in the hills and it's fun and it's cool that you can just go to. so I was like well shit you know these clubs don't exist but we're going to build our own now that we have this platform so like reserve is kind of like my little passion project because it's fun I mean we throw around parties like on October 25th you guys totally should be there we have our Halloween masquerade party we have this gigantic brutalist mansion in Bel Air it's like 500 people black tie Halloween party so tuxedos dresses heels but like full Venetian masks and we have like these mermaids and the magician the fire breather and I was like literally like the inspiration I literally sent them the movie The Great Gatsby and I was like I want you to recreate this party it's just awesome and again like I remember like someone asked on the sales team like hey how does this help us sell more private jets and I was like well it creates a community that people want to be a part of so it builds that brand equity and it's just awesome at the end of the day you always have to consider when you do anything the cool factor of things like buying a Ferrari is that the best fiscal idea probably not but the cool factor of it was pretty awesome because I figured you know 20-30 years I wasn't going to look back and be like oh so upset that I bought that Ferrari no I'm going to be like I remember when I was 24 and under four, I was ridiculous.

27:25Kolin Jones:It's so funny. It's a good write-off. It's a good write-off. It appears in all the content. It's in enough TikToks. Yes. If the IRS is listening, it's irrational. I feel like the tax guy will approve on that one. Okay. Do you think virality is luck? Or like, do you feel like you can work with your team on something and you'll see it like calling my shot now or no? Yes. And I think at the end of the day, like I'm grateful that we've got lucky, but I also think that we are so data driven and our team works so hard and is so excellent. that yes and no, we also kind of create our own luck. I think that we post more than anybody.

27:58Kolin Jones:We film more than anybody. I think one of our competitive advantages is funny. I was literally like right before this, we had a really big corporate meeting of this person came in and we were trying to buy their product. And she was like, well, yeah, like it needs to go through corporate review and take about two to three weeks. And I'm like, oh, no, no, no. If we do something in a multi, if I have an idea that I want to film, I want to film it today. I want it edited by today and I want to see it live on her Instagram by tomorrow morning at night. And I think that's a big competitive advantage that we don't have that like some dinosaur company is going to want, oh, like our marketing team needs to review this, then maybe legal, then our CEO, and then maybe we'll launch in a campaign next month.

28:28Kolin Jones:By that point, no one cares. So I think the virality can be created to an extent, but also if you post more than anybody or more aggressive and just, again, more ridiculous, that tends to do well. But we also already have the platform and kind of the algorithm that I guess is kind of built up to that point. Yeah, you're giving yourself more at bats. I think a lot of people would try to get on social. Everyone's got five to 10 videos in them. And when you start, it's exciting. It's like shiny ball syndrome. Like, all right, I'm gonna give this a shot. And then they do maybe five videos or 10 videos at the most and they're like, it's not working.

29:05But it's because you haven't stayed consistent. You haven't tried different formats. You haven't found what works for you. Maybe you're not provocative enough. But I think at the end of the day, it's like you just gotta put out more content and people aren't putting out enough content to give themselves a chance for it to work.

29:20Kolin Jones:Yeah, I think Hormozzi said it, but you have to put out so much content. Like I always am so like, again, as a kid, I did all these different sports. Hated sports, was always terrible at it, but I'm very competitive with business. Like I know exactly how many employees all of our competitors have, how much money they make, where their employees live, how much money their employees make, everything. And on a business perspective, I think if you're so provocative, we can bury our competitors in irrelevance that we post so much that now, I mean, I don't really hate to see it, but if our competitors post to TikTok, all the comments are, oh, Malfi's better.

29:51Kolin Jones:You're just copying Malfi. I look at it and I'm like, oh no, that's terrible. But it's true. Like, I mean, you have to be louder and more provocative. I mean, again, it's like, I sound like a broken record, but it's so true that once you've posted so much, you've buried them in irrelevance that they can't even, like if anyone else in the private jet space wanted to post TikToks and wanted to copy our format, everybody I think would see through it. What did it look like day one though? Because now I mean, we're sitting here in this gorgeous office. Yeah, I think you guys saw the original like tiny, really small office.

30:22Kolin Jones:I know. This one's not nice. No, I did. I remember when I walked in there, I was like, we're in Jurassic Park. That's awesome. That's so cool. It's insane. It's stunning. But now the team obviously has grown. We have amazing creators. We have people that are helping you with stuff. Go back to day one though. And what do you feel like you've kind of kept that same philosophy on? I would say being impatient. Everyone knows that I'm very impatient. so if we want to film an idea i want to do it right now like our you know one of my favorite videos that we filmed was josh and i raced to vegas so we flew private he flew spirit we raced there the goal was for us to get to vegas and show him how much we could do and i remember we talked this idea on monday and they're like yeah when do you want to do this next month and i was like oh i booked the jet for friday so i need an entire shot listen we're just going to do it on friday we're just gonna see what happens the influencer trip that you guys flew with us on That was planned that Monday.

31:09Kolin Jones:And I already booked the plan. I said, we're just going to do it. We're just going to figure it out. Maybe you could tell, you know, being on the trip. But, you know, that I think is the energy of like, I always treat it like still we're kind of in that startup phase. Like I don't want to call us, you know, a startup. And I think we're growing fast. I'm very grateful for that growth. But I think if you take that startup mentality of let's be ridiculous, let's be fast. Well, let's also appreciate the value of a dollar. Like still today, like, again, we do literally like every month, tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

31:35Kolin Jones:and we still don't spend a dollar on paid advertising. I just wouldn't. Why would I spend$30 ,000 on a Google ad if we could charter a private jet, race to Vegas with someone and get more views doing that than we would trying to bid for keywords that everybody else is doing? I want to stay on this for a sec. Okay. Because we talked to Gary Vee about this and he's like, these fucking companies are so stupid because they'll pay to amplify bad creative instead of trying a lot, seeing if it works, if it's working, then you can maybe put some paid behind it. But it's like at the end of the day, he's like, organic is life.

32:13He's like, which is exactly what you're doing. It's like, we're going to have such a better ROI on crushing organic social, building the brand awareness, then trying to compete against all of our other competitors with the Google AdWords.

32:26Kolin Jones:I think it's also like the, I guess, like state of the world right now. Like there's so much content being put out. You have new streaming platforms every day. Funny, we bought this TV, the frame TV or whatever, and it's showing the different art. And I remember at one point there was an ad, and I was like, oh my gosh, your TVs are showing ads now. Everything is an ad. But I think people see the paid aspect of it. They see it being sponsored. They see the hashtag ad. People see through it now. That's such a good point. Because you're so trained that everything is an ad now. It's kind of ridiculous.

32:56Kolin Jones:That I think the organic sells, and even people can tell, we have a lot of great brand partners but people can still tell on some content when it's paid and when you're not genuinely believing like so many things that I talk about in our videos were not paid but I just genuinely love it like Fiji water, I always drink Fiji water this is great too, I love everyone and I remember literally we posted that video and it was just an organic thing I was talking about it and then they literally sent us this whole PR package of haha that's so funny, McKenna loves Fiji and then they sent us a t-shirt that said Amal Fiji which was really funny but like content like that i think people want the organicness and i think that there's been this culture shift less from paid into organic but into more authentic content where you can see that people genuinely care about it um so i think that's it as well as like i would say that our content quality improved when we stopped filming on an iphone and bought fancy cameras and bought lights and so forth interesting so that did help a big amount as well as when we got proper editors to edit it properly.

33:57Kolin Jones:And again, there's plenty of data of like, for example, like our content performs better. I think if I wear black and if we're in less of like a light background. So this is great. Versus if we're standing in our kitchen with terrible lighting, the content won't perform. Then my quality is really important. We're going to go viral. The first two seconds. Oh, 100%. Everyone's wearing black. We're set. Okay, we planned this. I knew it. Zoe texted me before and said, please wear black. Did you buy your ticket? Yeah, I bought my ticket. Did you guys get your ticket? To the moon? To the moon? We're going viral.

34:29Oh, perfect. Yeah, so we got you guys a three-seater, so don't worry. I remember the second Caleb point. Okay, you found it? He said that if you - It's a late, dude. It's a late plane land, dude. That was like 14 minutes ago, bro. He said that if you're trying to copy your competition, the best you can ever be is number two.

34:48Kolin Jones:Valid. Which I think is super interesting. So the fact that you guys are - What reminded me of it is you're saying like, is this person doing it? Is this company doing it? Is our competitor doing it? I don't want to do it. And having that outlook as like, I want to be as different from my competition as possible, because if I copy them, the best I could ever be is number two. And that's probably why these other companies are getting the comments of like, I'm off, he's doing it better. I think there's, and again, it's hard, like, you know, being an entrepreneur, and I think every entrepreneur can relate to this, of you're literally putting kind of all of your eggs in one basket.

35:22Kolin Jones:Like, you know, I went to college, I have a great degree, but I mean, once you have that entrepreneurship bug, you're kind of just head down, you know, betting on yourself. And I would like not to get kind of too deep, but I think there's two points here. The first is like, I feel like every business needs a mission greater than themselves. When we first started the company, our goal was to make money. Then after we saw the traction in the industry and the fact that people were mimicking our content, you had these really older traditional companies are actually now putting content out. It's like, well, listen, our mission now is to genuinely spread the authenticity of this industry and to share the world of private jets with as many people as possible.

35:56Kolin Jones:And then I think the kind of second point there is there's that point where you kind of need to go all in on plan A. For example, I remember we were looking at all the data and we track everything. We launched a subsidiary of multi-technologies to build it out. And the slogan of that is the future is certain. Because with enough data, the future is pretty freaking insert. And we tracked everything, all of our attribution, which videos perform well, which, you know, platform provides the most quality leads. TikTok provides the most number of engagement, but TikTok reaches the kids, right? We were very relevant.

36:29Kolin Jones:Like when we filmed content with Camilla and Libby Dunn and people in the Bophouse, that reached the kids who then told their parents. It was funny because I remember one of his dads called in and was like, yeah, my son was telling me about the Bophouse. What is the Bophouse? I'm like, oh, this is great. Explain what that is to you. But TikTok reaches the kids. Instagram is an interesting between because you have both kids and the actual end users. And YouTube is that older audience that are on YouTube short. So we track different qualification rates of each platform. But we were looking at this and we recognized that a good majority of our business was coming from social media.

37:02Kolin Jones:And prior to this, I mean, we ran a bunch of like EDDM campaigns or every door direct mail marketing. So we're like the junk mail in your mailbox because you can guarantee deliverability through the post office for the cheap second buck per postcard. But we were spending a lot of money on that. We were spending a lot of money on different events that we were going to. Never Google ads. We did it for a little bit, like a thousand bucks one day. And I remember we looked at it and I was like, well, shoot, most of this is coming from social media. Rather than trying to manage it both, we're just going to go all in.

37:29Kolin Jones:And we are literally going to be the best at social media. And I think that was a big risk because we were kind of betting the entire farm, betting all of our lead flow, all of our business on this one platform that, you know, thank God paid off. but I remember this was literally a conversation with Calvin business partner. I remember I was joking with him. I think we're at a bar and I was like, we're either going to be the leader in the private jet space or we will no longer be in private division because it's going to tank and it's going to fail horribly. So I think if you take that approach, your business, obviously it's a little bit scary, but you need to really look at your data on what's working and go all in on it.

38:03Did people saying the TikTok thing was crazy fuel you? Like when you look back to those comments or people like what people said on LinkedIn? Do you look at that and you're like,

38:10Kolin Jones:I'm going to show you like, I honestly was the opposite. There was a lot of people in this space that went to Ember et al. The school I went to that were in the comments saying, this is unprofessional and this, and I'll explain that story in a moment. But I remember reading the comments and actually discouraged me. I was like, Oh, maybe, maybe we should stop. You know, they're really like, they're really big in this space. They said we should do it. Maybe we shouldn't that. I was like, well, hold on a minute. As you said, if we keep doing what they're doing, we're just going to be just another private jet company.

38:35Kolin Jones:And I was like, we're getting recognized by people that I admire. Like there's this big CEO of really big competitor bars. I was at an event and he was there and I introduced myself and he's like, what's your name again? And he was like, I'm all few jets. I've never heard of you guys. And I remember I left that and I was so upset. And now looking back, I was like, oh, he's totally heard of us. Like there's just no way that in this space you haven't. So that I think was hard. And I also made the mistake of reading every single comment on every video never do that never i never read the comments anymore um because everyone's always willing to give your opinion there's so many people that want to give their opinion that i think at the end of the day bet on yourself i'm proud of the team i'm proud of what we're doing i'm proud of the kind of change that we've pushed in this industry and i think that is rewarding and i think that fuels me are you hoping to bump into that other guy again uh yeah i got invited to speak at nbaa their big bass convention in vegas and he'll be there so you're gonna tap him i'll dude i know you know you know brother no because knowing me i'm so petty i'm gonna be like i'm so sorry what was your name again even though we met before we shook hands before that's so funny you mentioned though that you know we're getting so many views a little bit earlier you know have a billion views in a 90 day span how do you actually turn that though into qualified leads because i think like we see i mean views are cool yeah but at the end of the day you don't pay the bills yeah there's not enough ad spend that you're gonna get through like youtube or tiktok creator fund to kind of pay for anything, at least that we found.

40:01Kolin Jones:I think this is when it comes to, like I call it like the whiteboard phase. I'm like, I'm the big whiteboard guy. We have whiteboards all in this office. And I'm like the only one that uses them. But it comes to top of funnel, right? So social media fills top of funnel. So let's take the like billion impressions that we get. Well, what do we want these people to do? Well, we want them to go to the website or we want them to download the Amalfi Jets app. So we'll have those two conversion points in our social media bio, either the website or the download the Amalfi app. And we'll kind of switch it.

40:28Kolin Jones:We find it better. You get better data just doing one versus doing like a split or doing like a link tree. It just doesn't. You're saying like a split landing page or like. Yeah. So we used to do a split landing page, but then literally now just the only link in our bio will literally just be one thing, either the website or download the app. And that converts a little bit better. So the goal of social media is to hear about the name you build that brand equity, but also what do we want these people to do? Well, we want them to go to the website. Great. Now they're on the website. Well, now what do we want them to do on the website?

40:51Kolin Jones:We want them to either request a flight or we want them to give us their data so someone from the sales team can reach out to them. So we did it in a couple of ways. You can go to the top right, the big button, the request a charter. The left-hand side, you have to tap the menu. Then you click contact us. Or if you're on the page for more than 15 or 30 seconds, our white paper pops up. And that actually was really good. That gets a lot of data. So great. Now we have all of this data of people. For example, let's take a video that got 50, 60 million views. If you look at that, that day probably be like maybe 8 ,000 to 10 ,000 forms.

41:24Kolin Jones:Great. Well, the problem in the private jet space is some people think that private jets are cheaper than Spirit Airlines, and some people have no idea how much it costs. So we kind of talk about our qualification rate a lot. Average that we've seen is about 15 % to 20%. So of 10 ,000 forms, 2 ,000 people can afford to fly private. That's a fucking high percentage. That's so crazy. Because, but now it's 20%. It's actually a little higher than that, but it used to be like 2%. And how do we change that? Well, we used to put first name, last name, email, and phone on the form. Great. Everybody would fill it out because they just wanted a quote, right?

41:57Kolin Jones:But then we changed it. Let's add your full address. You add the address. Now your forms are going to drop, your qualifications can increase because it's hard. We're creating more friction. And the people that are willing to give you their full address tend to have more intent to actually want the service. So that brought us from like a 1 % to like an 8%. Great. Now let's add more questions. So let's create more friction to reduce the number of people that fill it out, but increase the quality. So we added our qualifying questions. Are you currently flying private? Or no, how are you currently traveling?

42:29Kolin Jones:Commercial airlines is first. That autofills for most people. Privately, and then the different versions of a private check card membership. Then we ask a follow-up. How many times do you fly privately? One to five, five to 10, over 20. Great. Then, how did you hear about us? It's good to get the data. Not really the most accurate, but we noticed the more questions we asked, the harder it was to fill it out, the increase in quality. So we did that, and then we also even switched it too. Then we re-put where the forms were on the websites. We made it harder to find it. We have the big button in the top, but the contact us form in the white paper now only popped up for certain people, either only in the United States, only in certain regions, and only after a certain number of clicks or interactions.

43:10Kolin Jones:So you can get really granular with that to really look at the data and increase it. Because the big problem we had in the beginning was when their TikToks first started going up, we had at this point, I think three or four salespeople. So we had 10 ,000 forms, but across three people. So they would literally get 3 ,000 emails in a day. Their inbox was buried that we had to shove all of this into a separate inbox, like sales and Amalfi Jets, just to clean it up. And from that point, it was constant complaining from the sales team. Everybody knows it. Every two seconds, oh, there's too many leads.

43:38Kolin Jones:Oh, there's too many leads. It's crazy. I had like a 30-minute conversation with a 13-year-old today that's awesome TikTok that can't afford to fly private. So the more friction you've created, the more we've kind of wireframed it out, we can get better data. And then we launched the app. The app and the website are connected. So if you view us on the website, view us on the app, we know how many times you've viewed across each platform. And we can get really good insight there. So it really just comes down to like I describe as like a big game, playing a big game on how can we increase these different numbers.

44:05It's so interesting because it's rare that you hear a company say, we got too many leads. But if they're not qualified leads, it doesn't matter how many views you're getting or how many people are coming to your website. And I think that's such an important tip for business owners to hear is like sometimes adding more friction to how you get the lead is going to lead to a more qualified person. Oh, yeah.

44:31Kolin Jones:And it really comes out to like a lot of people I think are so afraid to create that friction because it's, I want to lose the leads, but really do the math, right? You'd rather have 10 % of 100 people than 1 % of 10, right? So yeah, that made sense. That math is out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're math. But essentially, it's funny. And that was a hard thing for the sales team of like, all right, we had too many leads. Then it was the opposite. Hey, the lead flows are down. But it's like, well, we know that because the qualification rate's increasing. So you're getting less people, but the people that you're getting are, I don't want to call it better quality, but better qualified people in order to actually book these flights.

45:10Kolin Jones:So that's something we track. And then you can look at the data. All right. Of the 2 ,000 people that are really qualified, what are the trends? And of that, what do they hear about us? And also like even further, how'd you hear about us? Oh, everybody on TikTok. Great. Which video? Which video did you hear? Oh, it was the one on golf. I thought that was funny. Oh, my friend sent it to me. We were golfing. We saw this. Oh, this video about like McKenna, one of your top customers. So you can get really granted that you look at the data. And then when you're looking at it, it's like, oh, the golf content performed well.

45:36Kolin Jones:Great. Brian, let's go get a tee time and let's go golfing and go film on the golf course again. So that's kind of how we make decisions. Like always data driven. Like I feel like sometimes externally people are like, oh, it's just a bunch of random stuff. but everything's very, very calculated. It's so interesting because I would bet that a lot of business owners have a very slim idea of how they're getting new customers, where they're coming from, and even to the video. Like that, it's like, oh, how'd you hear about us? And it's just asking. It's literally just sending a text. Hey, ha, thanks so much.

46:07Kolin Jones:That, you know, lovely to put you up with us. Which video? And then we'll have a conversation about it. Oh, like, you know, what do you love about our content? Oh, I love that it's engaging. I like that it's authentic. I love seeing the jets every now and then, but I love calling his energy or I love Brian or something like that. So it's like, great, Brian, now we need you for 10 more videos because we have a proof concept that it works. I feel like most business owners don't keep track of data. So many businesses that I talk to don't have a serum system. They don't attribute anything. It's like, oh, well.

46:34Kolin Jones:What is your favorite software? For attribution, I would say like a good serum system like Salesforce, HubSpot are probably the best. I would say in terms of data analytics, I mean, Google Analytics is great just to get some good insight there. But after we hired our software developers, we've been building our own stuff. I'm literally speaking to other software engineers and I'm like, all right, this is the problem we're having. Here's where all of the data is across these 10 softwares. I need you to centralize it into a system. So we built Zeus and Zeus is everything. You can see it better, get better analytics, better data that we can use to make better decisions.

47:07Kolin Jones:So again, I don't want to sound like a tech bro, but after we've launched our tech arm, It's been really interesting. And it's, I don't want to say easier, but it is simpler to scale when you have really good access to data that you can use to make decisions. So everything we do, there's evidence to support why we're doing it to the point where if we're seeing$3 million in revenue attributed from Instagram, great. Now the marketing budget next month, we can spend$3 million in whatever content we want because we already have the proof of concept that it will work. So it's been fun to spend a lot.

47:40Kolin Jones:Obviously, as a business owner, it's a little bit scary to spend a bunch of money on private jets and fancy stuff in order to do it. But if you look at the data, I don't consider it spending money. We're just investing in what's already working. So good. Yeah, but it's a marketing expense. And some people might say, you know, the original way is like, I'm going to pay for some sort of ad, whether it's in a newspaper or online, however it may be. like the way you spend money on ads is maybe different now than it was, you know, 10, 20 years ago. You're just doing it in a different way, but you have the data to back it up.

48:14Yeah.

48:15Kolin Jones:And I think that's funny when TikTok was going to get banned, I actually got interviewed by Fox and CBS on that topic. And the way I described it was social media is an alternative to your traditional billboards and print advertising because it levels the playing field. You can have a mom and pop shop that can open up their phone, open up TikTok, spend$0, reach the same amount of people as a$2 million TV ad during prime time. And that's the thing. It comes down to the business owners themselves of realistically what's stopping you. And I think Google keywords can be good, but it's so crowded and competitive.

48:48Kolin Jones:You have people bidding for different keywords. Your cost per clicks can get really, really high. And my wariness of that when we first started, because that's what everyone in our space does, it's always Google keywords, is for a business that doesn't have any investors, that we really didn't have any money, Google keywords, you can hemorrhage cash very, very quick. Whereas if you play it safe and kind of use that value of a dollar, we can post 30 videos on TikTok spending zero dollars. So what do you think it's going to be like now that people are asking chat GBT or like another AI software?

49:20Oh, what is the best private jet network? Do you feel like open AI is going to make some sort of situation where it ends up being paid to play on open AI in a situation like that?

49:29Kolin Jones:Because now that's a really good point. I keep asking, I keep asking Chad, I'm like, Oh, what is like, I was just in New York literally a few days ago. I was like, what's the best restaurant near me at hotel 32. Yeah. And it just, boom, showed me all the best sushi restaurants. And it's interesting because a year ago I wouldn't have done that. I would have went to Google or I would have went to Yelp and been like, or I would have went to Tik TOK. No, that's a really good point. I think eventually, I mean, that's a good way for them to monetize in the future. Dude, I might've gave Sam, I might call it Sam.

49:54Kolin Jones:Just give Sam a call. Yeah. That's, that's not a bad thing, but I think that that's when social media kind of is there as the like kind of leveling the playing field of that's great. But anytime I find a restaurant, like we're going to DC tomorrow and literally the restaurant reservations are made for on TikTok, coolest restaurants from Washington, DC. And then that social proof and that credibility. TikTok is better for what I will say. I went to, I went to TikTok after, but I was just curious if, you know, what that might look like here in the next year. I think that's a good point, but I think that also encourages business owners to be as aggressive on social media.

50:26Kolin Jones:So when you do Google that, your content is so relevant that OpenAI has to link to it because there's so much of it on that topic. Can you talk about copy on your website and how that plays into building brand equity and not necessarily attracts a different customer, but like the words you use and the copy that you have on your website makes your, is going to make your brand feel different depending on the kind of business that you have? Can you talk about the strategy you have for copy on your actual website? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a whole other kind of wild west because when you get into the world of SEO, that's where still a lot of people find it.

51:07Kolin Jones:There's still a lot of people that book chats with us every single day that have never seen our TikToks, that Google private chat companies. We rank well, so they book it through us. My, I think, approach to that is it's still such a crowded market that I still want our website and our feed on Instagram and stuff to look like that of everybody else. So if you have someone that has only seen that in their research, we blend in. But I think we spend a lot of time on copy, but our copy is nowhere near as playful and loud as our social media. I think that plays into kind of like my experience on like how can we be a very professional aviation company, but also set the center.

51:42I don't want to say that we don't gaslight our competitors,

51:46Kolin Jones:but on our copy on our website, we pose questions that we encourage people in the website to ask that we know our competitors wouldn't be able to answer. So we look at that. We also analyze the hell out of all of our competitors' websites. We know how many pages there are, what their site health is based on like some rush, what keywords they rank at. So if like one of our competitors ranks really well in a certain keyword, you best bet our homepage is going to be littered with those keywords. So when you search out, we rank too. Same thing with like image alt text. That's something that a lot of businesses forget your images have SEO that if you have really good image alt text, when you, like for example, if I Google one of our competitors and I go to images, our images rank on their website.

52:22What does that mean exactly? Can you explain that a little bit further?

52:24Kolin Jones:Yeah. So like, you know, first of all, you have SEO. So you have like your homepage meta description, your homepage title, your meta description. Image alt text is like SEO for Google. So Google is looking at the image. Google doesn't necessarily know what it is. So you're explaining. This is an image of a private jet. Like this would be three dudes wearing black, sitting on a green couch, like at the Amalfi Jets headquarters in Calabasas. So we use that and we use really aggressive keywords in our thing. For example, a lot of companies' names is blank jets. Some of their company names are also common things.

52:59Kolin Jones:So we put that in our SEO that allows our keywords to rank on very similar things. For example, if you Google like private jet charter to Los Angeles, you're gonna see the sponsors. you're going to see who's paying for those keywords. So all of my image, all text on our Los Angeles page is geared towards that. So when they're paying for that keyword, Google gives us more credibility because we have the website traffic. We have a good site health and we have more images on our website than their single ad. So we'll actually rank on their ad, which is great. And we still get their people. And I feel like most people still scroll past the sponsor because you think it's like a weird spam.

53:33Kolin Jones:So we still rank there too. It's interesting that it feels the same on social as it does on Google. That's so interesting. When I type in something and I see the first three sponsored, I'm like, get the sponsored away. I want the first actual. Although if it's ever our competitors, I always tell our team, click on it because you can cost them some money. So we can join the right budgets. Again, I'm very competitive business-wise. Because I think at the end of the day, there's so many brands, it's interesting. I've talked to, my girlfriend is a marketing agency and we share different views. It's funny, she's a marketing agency, but we're very separate.

54:04Kolin Jones:She doesn't, they've helped us a lot helped us a lot with our content, but it's so separate. We have very different philosophies on, you know, kind of the business aspect, but she is less angry towards her competitors than I am with ours. And it's like, in this world, you're dealing with people's lives. Like we have 23, 24 employees here whose sole job is this, right? So we're putting food on the table for people. So it's kind of a big battle of if we go bankrupt, then everyone is out of a jobs. I take that personally. So I consider it like a big war. So it's the war of who's getting the customers, who's making the money.

54:38Kolin Jones:And I think some people are like, oh, like that's our competitor. It's fine. Like literally like I got invited to a panel and one of our competitors was going to be on the panel with me. I was like, why? I was like, why would I sit next to them and talk about that? So I mean, maybe that's just me, but I think that when it comes to that, you need to be very aggressive. It kind of is like a kill the other person business, in my opinion. I think it is. I mean, if you want to grow, it's grow or die. There's no other option. When you were in the early days and you're trying to get to that first million, then the two, then the three in those first two years, what did you do to try to beat the competition?

55:12Were you more responsive? Obviously, we had the social at play, but what was it to get those first initial customers to trust you when in reality they were like, why would we go with you when we could go with someone who's been here for 20 years?

55:23Kolin Jones:No, that's a good question. I mean, Amalfi is five and a half, almost six years old. we all really started posting on social media like the first year, year and a half ago. So we have this three, four years of prior history where it was literally none of that. It was literally like, how can we get a better SEO optimized website? How can we post better graphics on Instagram? We had like two likes on them. So for us, it really was just putting in more work. For example, the average competitor of ours, most of them work remote, which I'm not a big kind of remote work person. So everyone in the office from literally day one, Calvin and I got our first office like the day we started the company, everyone shows up.

55:53Kolin Jones:It's easier, it's just better culture in my opinion. And then it was if we got to the office at six and we left at six, we're working for 12 hours, right? If our competitors are working, let's say, nine to five an hour for lunch, it puts them at seven hours. In one of our days, we're doing five hours more work than that. You're not taking lunch? So at the end of the week, no, no, no, no, we order lunch in. Super easy. So at the end of the week, we're talking five hours a day, 25 hours a week. Now, obviously, we're working seven days. We're talking 35 hours. So in our week, we could literally get a couple extra days on that.

56:26Kolin Jones:And I think that was really beginning of literally just outworking the competition. I feel like it's such a simple thing, but it's so true. Literally just always be working when they're not. And I think it's, too, being more data-driven. Like in the beginning, from day one, we tracked everything. Because at the end of the day, I was always wondering how these big businesses made these decisions. And honestly, I was really shocked looking at a lot of these companies. A lot of these companies don't really look at their data. They don't keep track of anything. So it's like, oh, why are you doing this?

56:49Kolin Jones:It's like, oh, well, this is how we've always done it. And I was like, that's exactly why you're going to fail. You always have to look at everything. So we've never done anything. Like this office is targeted. Kim Kardashian's house is literally 0.6 miles away. So if you Google private jet charter, we will rank before anybody for every single house in Hidden Hills behind the gates because it's like average 26, 27 million before anybody else because our nearest competitor's office is 30 miles away in Van Nuys. So literally this office is really expensive. We spend like$40 ,000 a month for this office rent.

57:15Kolin Jones:But in theory, we are so near all of these people in Calabasas that we only need to get, I don't know, a couple extra flights a month and now this is paid for. and it's a good place to be. And I also think, I mean, not to go down this other path, but when you're in that fiscal situation, spending more kind of just forces you to work harder because you kind of have no other choice but to work harder. But on terms of kind of what businesses can do, I think on that relevance aspect, I think it really comes down to... So, keeping track of the data and also staying aware of what your competitors are doing.

57:49Kolin Jones:So, if they're launching a promotion targeting like one-way flights, all right, well, how do we compare to that? So, always ensuring that you know where you stand. So, if any client calls in, oh, I'm comparing you with XYZ Jets. Oh, great. Well, I remember they ran a promotion last month, meaning their average call. Like, we have a binder of what all of our competitors are doing. It's updated every single month. So, we know everything. So, for any salesperson that hears a competitor's name, oh, great, easy. Go to page six. that's everything about their company, we already know how we can beat them.

58:15Kolin Jones:And I think that's something that a lot of people don't do. Yeah, keeping track on what everyone's doing. A hundred percent. What do you think that most new founders mess up with scaling? What do you think they're not thinking of? Now that you have 25 people here, I mean, you know, it's growing quickly. We have a great group around you. What do you feel like have been some of those key learnings? I would say not setting up things for scale. Like everything we do, like literally like stupid stuff. Like you never even think about it. Like having an office, all right, you need a dress code. You need like an out of office, a PTO policy.

58:41Kolin Jones:So I always look at it like, great, in five years from now, if we have 100 people, is the current way that we're doing it going to be ready for that? And nine times out of 10, for a business owner, no, this is not going to work. So try to put yourself in those situations where whatever you're doing, if you hire 1 ,000 people, you're ready to receive that. And again, broken record, data, keeping track of everything. So every decision that you're making is based in some sort of evidence and some sort of proof of concept. And I think three, like simply put, just replicating the wins. Like we have a full touchpoint map where someone will see us on TikTok, usually stay followed for about a month or two, then reach out, then have two or three conversations with the sales team the entire time they're getting enrolled in our email marketing, and then they'll convert.

59:26Kolin Jones:So if you look at that, it's like what, 15 touchpoints? Great. That's a game. Replicate 15 touchpoints. So if we can scream at someone loud enough and do 15 things that are relevant in their life, whether it's golf, cars, like going to Aspen and all these like, you know, high net worth places make content about that, that will reach them, that will convert them. And again, that'll lead to a sale. Is there something that you did that was able to take you from that three to 15? Because I feel like that one to$3 million a year in revenue, not that you can like will your way there, but there's a lot of businesses that aren't as dialed as you guys are.

1:00:06And they're still doing a decent amount in revenue, maybe a few million dollars a year, but you can't really use that playbook to get to, you know, eight and nine figures. So is there something that you incorporated or you did that allow you to scale from that three to 15 and now this year on track for like 85, 90?

1:00:24Kolin Jones:I think that's a really good, really good point. Like one of my favorite quotes is the first million is the hardest, but the second million is inevitable because the person that you need to become to make a million dollars is very different than the person that's doing two to 10. I agree with what you said. I think you can always blow your way. You can always outwork someone to get your way to one to three, whether you're literally selling, you know, like trays or books or something like that into private jets. Three to five or three to like 15 and 15 over, the biggest difference is who's keeping track of their data, who's replicating their wins, and who's setting up something that is scalable.

1:00:57Kolin Jones:Something as simple as your CRM system and the way that your website receives traffic. So I feel like most websites, you have a form on your website, then you just get an email, right? What happens if you get a thousand emails a day? You're buried in your inbox. So how can we have this data funnel into some sort of a system that can weed out the wins? Well, in theory, if you're keeping track of your data, let's say I have a company that's a year old, I know what the attributes are of my TART customer, like my ideal customer profile. Oh, it's someone that lives, like let's say I'm a plumbing company.

1:01:26Kolin Jones:Go back to that. And I'm in LA. So it's someone that lives in a house that's between 300 ,000 and 800 ,000 that has over two bedrooms, that lives in this zip code that gave us their full, complete, legit phone number and full and complete address. And you can even get funny and literally has a Gmail or a Hotmail or something like that. Great. So your system, when everyone goes into your website and fills out the form, filters into a CRM system that looks at those attributes. Show me all the data that's actually complete. Okay, great. Now the 1 ,000 comes into 800 people. Great. Now call every single 800 person because that data is going to be 10 times better than all the other 200 people that gave you incomplete information.

1:02:02Kolin Jones:And you only know that by looking at your wins. Like so many people don't do postmortems. Like we had a big meeting this morning because one of our flights went horrible. The airplane broke and couldn't control that. So we had to find an airplane to fly in from the Caribbean into Florida, save them weight, the cost because it's a big customer. You know, airplanes break, it's a part of aviation, but we did the postmortem of how do we handle it? How quickly did we tell the customer? The customer missed his meeting. Great. Well, did we get him a free hotel and a car service there? Looks like the catering also missed the airplane in this situation because the caterer is old.

1:02:33Kolin Jones:Great. So when he landed in that black car, was there already food waiting for him? Great. Now we have the kind of like SOP of how to handle it when things go wrong. And I think by doing that constant post forms of everything is really, really beneficial. What do you do to bring someone in here that's brand new, day one? I remember we've talked to multiple people of very large companies, thousand person teams. And what they do is so different than people that are at like 10 or 15. And how when they get in, they're running out of the gates. What have you implemented here? Because now you have a tight-knit, well-oiled machine.

1:03:07People understand it. They understand the dress code, all these little things. What does it look like though when someone comes in that you've developed over time?

1:03:14Kolin Jones:I think that starts in the interview process as well as like, we're very transparent. Like, again, like I'm really big about people working in office because if we want to have a marketing meeting or if I want to launch a video and then have it go live tomorrow, I can walk three feet to the marketing team versus having to slack and then schedule a Zoom call and talk about it. So I think we're very transparent about what, like we took it off because everyone said it was kind of petty, but one of our things said, Amalfi Jets does not do remote work. If you're looking for remote work and a flexible schedule, we encourage you to apply to our competitors.

1:03:42Kolin Jones:We're always hour. So bad he was stupid. But I think separately from that, like when people come in, in the past, it was literally, I would sit down with them, I'd meet them, I'd kind of give them that culture and let them go and kind of honestly like that trial by fire. I think as we've scaled, it's like, all right, this doesn't work. So I always meet with every employee for the first day, for the hour, go over who I am, why we started the company, what we expect, what we love, what we don't want. Then they'll go into either like our Embrittle, like the school I went for like our Embrittle kind of aviation one-on-one course.

1:04:09Kolin Jones:So here's how our industry works. Here's the need for industry. Here's the companies that we're up against. Here's how they're ruining the aviation industry. And here's what we're doing. And I think if people believe in that core mission, separately from the revenue, from the profits and stuff like that, I'm like, listen, like we're genuinely changing the way the industry is forever. That gets people excited. And then we look at the wins. So if they're on the sales team, looking at the best closed deals for the past 30 days, where they came from, what we said that closed the deal, looking at the worst deals that we've lost, why we lost it, oh, we didn't talk about this, or oh, they were really traditional and we took a more non-traditional approach.

1:04:46Kolin Jones:So we can kind of do it differently. For example, one of our brochures that we send to clients is different depending on who you are. So if you are a very conservative traditionalist person, we're going to give you that very traditional view in our company. If you're a younger entrepreneur, you're going to get an entirely different brochure. night and day, the photos, the imagery, the copy. But it all goes back to the same product. It's the same system. But we know that because in polling our clients, all of them came in from different people. And we literally bring this approach literally to our new employees of like, who are you going to be working alongside?

1:05:21Kolin Jones:Recognize that everybody's different. And I think that you need to show them a different view depending on who you're speaking with. So that's one aspect. And then just again, letting them get up to speed and kind of start working with clients. You often hear in sales, it's much easier to sell an expensive product. Yes. In a way, because you're not necessarily dealing with the friction of, can I afford this? It just comes down to like, is this the best product for me? Do you still get friction on price from people looking to work with you guys? That I think was the hardest part. And I'm glad you asked that on bringing on new salespeople.

1:05:58Kolin Jones:Because I feel like, and again, I love flying private. We fly private and we travel. But again, I'm not spending$250 ,000 to charter from here to London. And that was a hard thing for new salespeople to understand if they'd instantly go out on a price. Oh, well, we're cheaper. But if someone's going to spend$250 ,000 to charter a global$6 ,000 from Van Nuys to London, it's not necessarily about how much it costs. It's about the level of service that you're providing and who you're working with and how you're getting there. So our service offerings change on, listen, do you want the most economical aircraft?

1:06:29Kolin Jones:All right, well, it's probably going to be like an older G5. Okay, it's still a great, comfortable aircraft. It's very different than flying first class, but it's not a 2024 Global 7500 with freaking iPads built into the wall, right? Very different. So whether someone's going to spend$260 ,000 versus$280 ,000, it's less on like, I want 5K off. It's more on what you're getting beyond that. And I think rationalizing like the service offerings. Some of our clients, rare, that are entrepreneurs, do appreciate the value. Everyone wants to get a deal. So some people are like, oh, I want to say 5K. It's like, sure, depending on the trip.

1:07:03Kolin Jones:But I think it really is interesting because it's hard for new salespeople who instantly go at an enterprise that you have to understand that the people that are spending this money, it's not necessarily how much it costs. It's the entire experience, and it's why you fly private. Like some of our richest clients still fly commercially because if you live in like New York and you're going to London, there's a direct first class flight there. But what if you're going to Sicily? Well, now if you want to fly first class, it's a three stopper. It's like a 37 hour travel journey through multiple countries.

1:07:32Kolin Jones:It's different. So for there, they'll spend$250 ,000 to fly direct on a private jet because it's the convenience factor. Now I get my three days back. For a public company that owns a jet, maybe people are tracking it. So fly with us, you buy the invisibility. But if it's a public company flying between LA and New York, there's plenty of direct options via commercial airlines that, again, I'm not supposed to say this, that realistically like make more sense in this specific situation. Whereas if you're going on like a tour of middle America and you want to do it all in the same day and be back for dinner, well, that's where private jet can allow you to buy that time back.

1:08:05We were talking about maybe doing like some road trip and then we were like, dude, we should just fly. Yeah, we should just call Colin and fly him off.

1:08:11Kolin Jones:It could make sense. It really could. Dude, the podcast gear is heavy. Yeah, dude. That's a whole thing. Yeah, they put all the oversized bag fees. Oh my God, it's ridiculous. us hong kong maybe that's okay what would it cost to fly la to hong kong me and brayden roundtrip roundtrip like 400 000 but but it can fit up to like 14 people so if you get 14 other people the venmo request is gonna go crazy yeah maybe i sell them for a little maybe profit off this but then but then hold up what if you filled it with previous podcast guess. Gary Vee, high net worth people. He sold six seats for 50K. Now you're not spending 50K.

1:08:53Kolin Jones:Now you're buying the opportunity to network with these people. I would spend 50K on that, flying a private jet to Europe or to Hong Kong with a lot of like Hormozy, Gary Vee. I would do that, 100%. Because I'm making so much more in value than whatever you charge for a seat like that. That's really interesting. What have you noticed about kind of the group that does fly private? What are some of the things that they indulge in? whether it be cars, whether it be very nice luxury hotels. Let me tell you, man, I'm living a little different post-Lakers with the whole hotel thing. Really used to Four Seasons.

1:09:29I've really liked those hotels. Haven't stayed in Four Seasons since. How's that holiday entry? No, we're not at the holiday. We're a little bit up. But I was just in New York, and I'm thinking, I was at the Equinox Hotel last time I was here, and it was a little bit different of a bed. I didn't realize the Lakers were so spent on that.

1:09:43Kolin Jones:Equinox, that's nice. Oh, yeah. It was Four Seasons everywhere. Equinox it was Did you work better with that like I felt really a part of the crew You know when you'd walk down to the meal room and it would just be like Spread out I'm like let's go Come on you know But it was a different hotel experience What have you noticed about Some of the group It's funny like I feel like I always would have thought it'd be like Oysters, caviar, champagne like literally nobody Wonders that like nobody wants to eat Cold oysters on a 45 minute flight to Vegas Just nobody Nobody wants to do that The fresh fruit platter though that we got on your thing was great That was good.

1:10:17Kolin Jones:Simple. Fruit, sandwiches, Chick-fil-A is one of the most popular things ordered on board private jets because it's great. It's easy. And it's like every single place. And it's like 30 bucks. Have you ever had someone be like flying on a Sunday and they order or they want Chick-fil-A and you're like, can't do it? Yeah. Well, that's the thing. And we had that exact discussion that literally happened a couple weeks ago. I was like, well, hold on. All of our competitors would say, oh, they're closed. No, no. Let's buy it the night before. Let's freeze it. Let's de-thought. It won't be as good, but at least we're the only company that's serving frickin Chick-fil-A on a Sunday.

1:10:45Kolin Jones:So that is how we like to stay aggressive. But I think, yeah, I mean, honestly, it's like very simple. Like I always thought, like we literally had a, a long time ago, we had to have like these reps that we'd fly to meet a lot of our clients in the airlines. We still do it for some clients, like celebrities and stuff like that. There's paparazzi. But I remember one of our new reps met the wrong person in the FBL. This guy showed up with like a diamond encrusted watch, like a chain and like the Gucci and Louis and stuff like that. And our rep was like, oh, this guy looks rich. I'm going to do it.

1:11:15Kolin Jones:No, our client was literally there in jeans and a Fitbit. But on the other hand, I had like a Patek fully of like a$250 ,000 watch. So that's the thing of like, I'm sure everyone says this, but like the highest net worth customers are the most, I don't want to say frugal, but the most efficient, the most down to earth and the most understanding. And it makes everyone so happy. Like we've had a couple of clients whose airplane will get delayed. Like one of our clients got stuck. I think it was in Jamaica because the customs was closed on the weekends. We couldn't get a permit to leave. So they were delayed for another three days.

1:11:44Kolin Jones:We clumped the rooms or whatever, and he laughed. And he was like, listen, there's worse things to happen in the world than being stuck in Jamaica for three days. Center of Placement Airplane was very, very nice about it, whereas you have some clients that the sandwich is too cold and they're losing their head. But realistically, that's very rare. The wealthiest customers are the most understanding because most of them have started a business, so they understand the value of the dollar and their very understanding of the entrepreneurial aspect. Is there something that you've noticed as the company has grown in revenue and the circles that you've been able to be, you know, turn into, you've taken from another founder that you're like, that's something that actually really changed a lot of what we do.

1:12:20Is there anything that you can recall? That's a really good question.

1:12:28Kolin Jones:I mean, there's so many customers that we've met. I think that is one of the coolest parts about my job is the people that you meet in the circles that you're in and like being put in a group chat with some A-list somebody saying, hey, Colin's my jack. I help him out. It's like, oh, that's so cool. I would say the discipline and the work ethic. Like a lot of our clients have a very strict morning routine. So it's always up very early. They're always the first in our inbox is emailing, asking questions. They have a very strict, either it's the gym, it's Pilates, it's like some healthy diet, it's some sort of skincare routine.

1:12:59Kolin Jones:And they hard block their deep work time. So they're on the airplane, they need fast Wi-Fi and that's it. And they're working or they're on a work trip or something like that. So they really prioritize their time. Like a big part of the times when we fly private, you know, when people travel with us is literally to make it back home so they can be in the office on Monday. Because for some people, it's like, oh, why would you spend 80 grand and make it in the office? Well, if you think about a high performer, if they could be in the office, how much is one day worth? And for every person, it's entirely different.

1:13:26Kolin Jones:For some people, it's probably like a billion bucks. For some people, it's maybe 30 ,000. But if you're able to have that day back where you can be in the office and get work done, you can make a lot more than 80 ,000. And for some people, it's time with family. people that are so busy all the time that they're on a family vacation they always prioritize that time so it's really interesting but i would say strict discipline and very regimented in their ways um that they really protect their time do you have like a wild morning routine or do you feel like it's just quite normal i'm gonna be honest meeting some of our customers which i like because they always say like you always want to be like you never want to be the smartest person you want to surround yourself with people doing good every time i hang out with our clients who to do with them i always just feel so poor and so unsuccessful because they're just like i always leave it like so inspired because i'm like damn like i could be doing so much more um for me equinox by like 6 6 30 workout here to the office and i try to beat everybody here but everyone knows i've been a little bit later lately i bought a little puppy his name is napoleon he's been taking up all our times it's it's just crazy but he's really cute though so that's been affecting the morning routine a little bit.

1:14:30Kolin Jones:But for me, it's like the same kind of movement in the morning. Equinox is really big because I've met so many clients at Equinox because it's a good, high-performing place. And again, it's like putting yourself in situations where the people that you want to be like would be. So I feel like a lot of people are like, oh, country clubs. Like, yeah, but I mean, it's the other places. It's the like Equinoxes. It's the kind of workstations. It's the different places where you can be around, you know, those kind of high performing, achieving people. Have you noticed anything about the top 0.1 % of people in the way that they buy?

1:15:05Is it more like based off of emotion or logic? Like, is there, is there something you've noticed about super high worth net individuals? High worth net. High net worth individuals that buy differently than regular folks like me and Braden?

1:15:23Kolin Jones:I don't know I mean I think there's we have such a vast range of clients from exited founders we've had people that have sold companies like three times over for$100 million,$200 million, billion dollars A-list celebrities that we've had people that have never worked it in their life that it's their parents money or something like that and they will never have to work it in their life I think the buying amongst the richest richest customers is always for the convenience. Like literally we have a client of ours, one of my favorites, coolest guy ever, worth well over a billion dollars. And he still flies commercially.

1:16:00Kolin Jones:And he's like, it just doesn't make sense. Why would I spend a hundred thousand dollars if there's a direct flight that will get me there at the exact same time? But when he's flying to Sicily or if he's going to Africa where you need to stop three or four times, it's easy. You get in, have your meeting and you leave. And for them, it's about putting themselves in situations where they can buy back their time. And I think that's like ultimately a big reason why people fly private, right? If you, like for example, if we wanted to go to, like for example, if we want to go to New York tomorrow, the like LAX from here is probably like an hour, hour away.

1:16:33Kolin Jones:I mean, right now with traffic, probably like an hour and a half. I'm a big, you know, if you're flying commercially, you want to get to the airport like an hour and a half, two hours before. So it's three hours right there. Let's say it's a five and a half hour flight. So that's like eight and a half hours. And then JFK from the city is like an hour, hour and a half ways. We're at 10 hours. Whereas it's a 10 minute drive to Van Nuys. Van Nuys to Teterboro is four and a half hours. Wheels up, wheels down. And then if you take a helicopter from Teterboro to East 34th Street, you can literally be there and get full four or five hours back.

1:17:00Now we're talking. See, that's what we need to do next time we go to New York for the fun. I forgot about the helicopter. The helicopter is a big one. I said, I didn't know that there was a complete...

1:17:09Kolin Jones:Teterboro is also closer, like still in like 25, 30 minutes, but the helicopter is pretty awesome. I didn't even know about Teterboro. I knew about it. I just knew about JFK Newark. Yeah, it's okay, dude. Me and Colin know about it. Dude, I'm learning a lot. The helicopter, though. Yes. That's a play. People like helicopters, they're easier for getting places. Like the Hampton's really popular, Miami, LA. But the thing is, helicopters are a good Sikorsky S-76. It's pretty expensive to the point where it's actually sometimes cheaper to charter a smaller jet than take the helicopter. Because some of those helicopters are like$79 ,000 an hour.

1:17:39Kolin Jones:So like Teterboro to East 34th Street on like an S-76, you're at like$70 ,000. And you could drive. in our 70 what'd you say 77 it's like 7800 to like eight thousand dollars oh i see that's in the pocket yeah but again you're taking 30 minutes to four should we call art list yeah maybe that's our next partnership with them i'm gonna talk to my girl i'm gonna say leah what do you think about that what do you think about us doing it's cheaper than the jet there i mean you'll still get an hour back from kennedy if you're flying into the city best hotel in the country that you've stayed at You can give me top three.

1:18:13In the country. In the country. This country, specifically United States. What do we got? Equinox Hotel.

1:18:18Kolin Jones:My favorite hotel in New York. In New York? Really? Amazing. Dude, see, I'm telling you, dude, it was elite. And you got the gem. Yep. Nice gem. And it's Equinox 1000 yards. And it's huge. The barrel saunas, the pool. Overlooks the whole city. That's my favorite. I think the second's probably the addition in Miami. That's a really nice hotel. I've never stayed. Nice beach club. Really cool vibes. I like the addition because it's like - Right on the beach? Yeah, right on the beach. It's modern. It's funny, it kind of looks like our marble and the wood here. Everything's lit up. Very calming. Less like, I love a good Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons, but I feel like a lot of them, Beverly Hills Hotel is a good example.

1:18:54Kolin Jones:Nice hotel, beautiful, a lot of history, but it's very pompous in a way. The addition is very calm, very minimalist, and I can relax there. Now, is that something you help a lot of your clients with? Oh, all the time. Yeah, we have a 24-7 concierge team. so that that's the whole thing too is that when you book with us i don't want it to be oh we're the jeffy no no we're the everything people so through the amalfi app um you can book a car service you have a 24 7 literal like your own personal assistant so when you book a trip we'll book the villa book the hotel most popular hotel brand always say to have our clients amman everyone stays in an amman hotel okay the fucking amman in beverly hills that they're building looks awesome insane looks insane amman is like i've never stayed at one but it looks unbelievable.

1:19:40Kolin Jones:It's nice. The one in New York is really nice, but it's like, what, I think 35, 4 ,000 a night, like minimum entry level. Where's it? Where's it at? Um, I think other people would know better than I would really high up. Really. Yeah. Dude. But yeah, Amon always, always in Amon. Um, for new years, everybody goes to St. Barts always gets a villa in St. Barts. Um, that's one of my favorite hotels, late 20 hotels over there. Like also cool, really nice, like many little villas on the beach. Um, But yeah, it's interesting. We gather all that data too because I want to know when we're launching new partnerships, if all of our clients are staying in Amman's, we should partner with Amman's.

1:20:15I have a recommendation for you when it comes to a single hotel. Okay. I just proposed and we did it at the San Ysidro Ranch. Have you heard of San Ysidro Ranch? I've heard of it.

1:20:27Kolin Jones:I never stayed there. I've never had better service. It is one of the most special places. It's up in Montecito. Yeah. if you are working with someone or you have a client that is like, it's like a special occasion, it's fucking unbelievable. Okay. That's awesome. I would, I would write that one down. Highly recommend San Ysidro Ranch. It's, it's fucking insane. Amazing. Congrats on that, by the way. Thank you. Come on. I want to talk about the Amalfi Reserve. Yes. Uh, membership because it's awesome for people who don't know what Amalfi Reserve is. Can you explain it to us? Yeah. Yeah. So it's a$99 a month membership on the Amalfi app.

1:21:02Kolin Jones:And essentially it's like our kind of take on like a social club. So we have won a 24 seven literal concierge personal assistant and not like your typical credit card concierge. So let's say like you got a nail in your tires and a photo of your tire and say, hi, find me the nearest tire store that has these tires. Make me an appointment. Do that. Hi, I want Nobu on, you know, Malibu on a Friday night at seven o 'clock. Please make me that reservation. So literally anything you just chat us will handle it. So there's that we have events every single month. Most of our events right now have been in LA, but we're launching New York, Miami, Chicago, and Dallas next.

1:21:35Kolin Jones:That's our next biggest member growth. But it's like, we want to build this community of people that may not necessarily be flying private, but are entrepreneurs, high achieving people. So you can meet other people. I feel like everyone's always looking for that way to meet other people. Some people go to like Bumble Friends. Definitely not like that. Kind of this cool community that we're building. And again, this kind of stems from that. Like when I was a little kid, always seeing these parties in the hills and i was like i always wanted to get invited never got invited well now we host our own parties and we invite other people which is really cool to kind of foster this community of people so it's through the amalfi apps nine bucks a month you can cancel any time and literally like we just had our event um a couple once a couple weeks ago literally like this rooftop it was in west hollywood you were there um at the aster and literally it's like free drinks free food all for nine bucks a month so it's like if we keep having these events you know don't focus on nine dollars a month and the people you meet are sweet that i feel like that's the coolest thing that you guys are doing is it's not just the service it's this whole other side of the business is that something that surprised you percentage wise of what the reserve app brought in yeah i mean i would say like i mean again the reserve solved and i guess its goal was a couple like a couple fold so first kind of that like little dream i had when i was a kid he invited these parties two there's a such a big percentage of people like 99 of people that see us on social media that can't afford to fly private how can you be a part of the brand without spending a hundred thousand dollars.

1:22:56Kolin Jones:Well, you can spend a hundred bucks a month, be a part of the membership, get invited to the events, meet me, meet other founders and entrepreneurs there. So kind of fostering that community. And I think three on like just a monetization perspective. I mean, we have literally thousands of members that pay us a hundred dollars a month. So on an MRR perspective, it's good income that can cover fixed expenses and allow us to invest in, you know, kind of other areas of the business. Is that something you knew you always wanted to incorporate into Amalfi? Yes and no. I mean, I think that we always tried to target those kind of private jet flying folk.

1:23:32Kolin Jones:But I think through social media, it's like there's so many people that want to be a part of the Amalfi brand. Like we launched a merch store. We did that for a couple of months and we sold like$10 ,000 worth of merch and literally like the first day. And it was like people like the Amalfi brand and they want to be a part of it. So how can we make something a little bit more tangible to kind of build that community? So in the future, some cool updates that we're doing is like if I get a table at like, it's a good example if I get a table at maybe let's say Nobu at Friday at like 10 people I can post my table on the app so I can open up six seats and I can meet new people in LA so we wanted to have it kind of like a Raya meets like a Soho house meets like an Equinox membership so again building a community separately from the flying private kind of aspect of people but like a social community a business and networking community and just meeting cool people so we literally have so many different people at our events but it's really cool to meet new people every single month.

1:24:24I always forget that we have the membership and I'm like, I've yet to use it to get like a hard to get reservation. And I'm, it's great to use it.

1:24:33Kolin Jones:24, 17, literally anything. Like literally I got a nail on my tire, send me the photo. Hi, find this. They did anything. And that's the whole thing. It's literally like, find me the nearest, like someone's using it to literally plan a proposal in Paris right now. Like literally someone even was like, hey, can you help me plan our wedding? And I was like, well, I mean, in theory, yeah. So literally you can do anything. That's whole goal is like, Like in the future, I want to be able to be in LA or New York and Miami. And when I call a car, I don't want to call like an Uber. I want to call an Amalfi branded car that has the Amalfi logo with a guy in a suit that comes out.

1:25:03Kolin Jones:They think it's that premium service. So whether you're on board the airplanes, whether you're just in your daily life, you can have that same level of Amalfi experience no matter where you are. When you were first creating the app or the service, how did you go about locking in partners? Yeah, that was, it's a funny story. Like our first partnership years ago was the Ritz-Carlton. Because I remember when we first launched, no social media, this was years ago, we were, again, literally I was just emailing thousands of people every single day. I literally Googled like Los Angeles attorney. I'm like, I don't know, attorneys are rich.

1:25:37Kolin Jones:They fly private. I emailed every single attorney in Los Angeles, like guaranteed, and said, hi, we're Malfi Jets. Next time you need to fly private, please book with us. Here's my direct cell. Just waiting for someone to reach out to us. But I remember I was like, you know, speaking with Calvin about this. And I was like, listen, nobody knows who we are. And I was like, that's one. They don't trust us. It was some random cold email from a random company. And I was like, who do you trust? And we were talking about like luxury brands. And he was like, oh, the Ritz-Carlton. I was like, great, that's it.

1:26:02Kolin Jones:I trust the Ritz-Carlton. They're like the most like kind of pinnacle of luxury. And I was like, so we need to partner with the Ritz-Carlton. Maybe just one property that anytime our clients in LA, we can send them to that property. We'll be exclusive. We'll never book our clients at any other hotel except for that property. And we reached out to the Ritz-Carlton and we're like, hey, listen, we'd love to partner. We have a couple requests every now and then of people flying in LA. We'd love to offer your hotel as like our featured partner. Do you mind if we lose, like if we like use your logo on a part of our website?

1:26:29Kolin Jones:And they're like, yeah, no problem. I was like, great. So now we're not just Amalfi Jets. We're Amalfi Jets trusted by the Ritz-Carlton. Your partner. That was really helpful. I think now we've looked at it more in a data perspective. So we look through the concierge logs. So like, what's the biggest brands that people request? For people that fly private, it's Amman. For people that don't fly private, that are on the app, dinner reservations. It's black car service because a lot of people don't want just like your typical Uber black. This sounds pretentious. Hopefully this reaches the right amount of people, but you know when you call an Uber black and it's like a Tesla Model X and you just get car sick the entire time, like not an Uber black, right?

1:27:02Kolin Jones:So I was like, how can we build a program where you have that guaranteed standard? So it's a proper 2024 newer SUV, someone in a suit that opens all your doors. That's worth paying a little bit more than your typical Uber black. With the Amalfi logo on the ground with the light. Exactly. That's awesome. I mean, imagine pulling up to like a nightclub in Vegas with a bunch of black cars that say Amalfi Jets. Kind of awesome. So the fact that you can do that through the app in the future is something that I'm really excited about. What do you think the future looks like right now on the horizon for Amalfi Jets going into this next year?

1:27:37Kolin Jones:Yeah. Going into this, I think it's very big on our social strategy of like how can we continuously be more authentic? How can we share more about what we're building? but also how can we kind of encourage, not necessarily people in our industry, but how can we encourage business owners to literally be authentic, be on social media, and kind of like, I guess like revolutionize your typical advertising space. Like, it's funny, like I think every business needs to have a mission greater than themselves. And I think for us, it's changing the aviation industry, but I think it's also for me being a young entrepreneur, like I'm very passionate about encouraging people to try new things and to take that leap.

1:28:10Kolin Jones:And I think I'm really passionate about encouraging all business owners, regardless of what industry you're in, to be on social media and to be as loud, as aggressive as possible and to kind of attack a lot of your competitors to differentiate yourself. So that, and then I think the second point is building cool tech. We're building really fun stuff to aid, like we're building our own flight operations system called Maverick, named after Top Gun Maverick. So that is a big part of it, streamlining how we currently handle that. I think building our attribution software so we can know more about our current customers, where they're coming from, what we can replicate.

1:28:45Kolin Jones:And then some other fun stuff that we'll be launching in the future through Amalfi Technologies. Do you have a dream collab for Amalfi? You guys have started to do collaborations with other brands and stuff. Many. Rolex would just be cool. He's starting it now. Got it on the pod. I would love that, but I also think there's one entrepreneur that I've always wanted to meet because I read his book, The Write of a Lifetime, Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney. Oh, yes. Really cool guy. That's a great book. Probably the best book I've ever read. I need to read it. It was really good. Talk to me about the acquisition with Pixar.

1:29:22Kolin Jones:And it was a really, really good book. We'll see if he wants to fly to Hong Kong. We'll give him a call. I'll give Bobby a call. We're on a first name basis. Give him a call, dude. I'll call Bobby. You got lunch with him last week. Yes. That was awesome. We're going to give him a ring. Get him on. He's going to start doing animations for the pod, which is why. That's the banner that you're seeing. It's coming. That'd be awesome. Rolex would be sick. That would be pretty cool. I think that and just any other brands that want to get access to our clients, that I think kind of heightens that. I think on social media, there's so many different brands that are out there.

1:29:52Kolin Jones:I think it's interesting. You have all these different brand trips that keep happening. What's the Tarte Cosmetics? They always do that big brand trip. Love it if they flew on a mall fee next time. That would be great. You just got to let them know to not give the different gifts. Did you hear about this? I did not. What's the tea? They gave out different gifts to different levels of a creator that was going. there's one gal that I really her videos are super funny on TikTok my girlfriend always gets them and I'm like let me see what Ken's up to her name's Ken Urich do you know this gal, Ken Urich she just like goes she's hilarious, she just goes Tart gave me the fucking bee gift dude what is up with this?

1:30:27I saw someone got the little Hermes bag I feel like I should have gotten the bag they're giving Hermes bags? it was the bracelet not the bag they do fly private on their trips

1:30:39Kolin Jones:and every time I see it I get upset I'm like, God damn, you're not fine with us. Have you hit them up? I don't know. Have we, have we damned them? Immediately after this, we'll be DMing. I love that. I love that. What advice would you give to your 18 year old self before you go on this journey into other aspiring entrepreneurs starting out on the path? Ooh, big, big advice. I think first believe in yourself, but I think to find ways to center your emotional intelligence kind of random, but I think throughout the process of building a business. and it's funny, we made a video about this. I always used to watch entrepreneurship content when I was a kid.

1:31:14Kolin Jones:Ryan Serhan, Gary Vee, that kind of content. And it's always how to be successful. I've really yet to see any content that's like, great, well what happens when you actually become successful? What happens when you actually start making millions of dollars? I've never seen content like that. And I think it's really interesting to focus on that of how do you center yourself, but also how do you grow into the CEO? I think every little kid wants to build a business and become a CEO. Well, what happens when your company has 100 people? Now you have a responsibility to every single one of these employees to take risks.

1:31:43Kolin Jones:Because when you take risks as a business, you're risking all of your employees as well. So I think you have that responsibility to be responsible, to be smart, to be calculated, and to better yourself and have that emotional intelligence to stay calm and make the right decision, less be like there's erratic. And that's why a lot of those founder CEOs get fired, because they're not good to lead the company in the next phase. It's good to get you to that one step. But who are you going to be and how are you going to have that emotional intelligence to take your business to the next step. Eventually, if you go public, having 10 ,000 employees.

1:32:12I love it. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been episode 173 with Colin Jones from Alamafi Jets. We'll see you all next week. Peace. Back on the couch. They were asking for it. I think that this is the spot for us. It's comfy, dude. The more I think about it, I'm like, how do we get this? You guys really want to know what the office is looking like? Yeah. Non-existent right now. Yours? No, no, no. I'm talking about like our pod studio. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't have a pod studio. No, we're getting there. This feels, though, just incredible. Very comfy, very cozy. You know who loves it? Who loves it?

1:32:45My fiance. Really? Yeah. She loves bringing in the lights and the cameras. It just feels right. Yeah. It feels comfy. It's one of those things where I just feel like, you know, it's just for us. What'd you think of this app? I'll tell you what, man. I can't believe that 98 % of their revenue comes from social. when he shared that fact with us, I was shocked for any business, let alone a private jet company. Because I think all of those companies who sell a really luxury premium product, they'd be like, oh, that dilutes the brand or there's no way that we can post those TikToks and it'll actually lead to sales.

1:33:20Exactly. Listen to the episode, Captain, because this is where the world we're in right now. I think one of the smartest things he said, and it makes a lot of sense once I heard him say it, but I don't think I would have originally thought to do it if I was starting a private jet company. I think the obvious answer is let's flex the jet. Of course. And he took the opposite approach. He's going to show the office culture. And also, I mean, it's not like they're jet. Yeah, that's a good point. You know what I'm saying? It's not like they have a fleet of 100 jets. They're clientele jets that are, it's almost like an Airbnb for jets.

1:34:00Yes. You know what I'm saying? And I think that originally, like we were saying, it'd be like, oh, let's get a bunch of jets. And you're always showing them. It's like, you don't have the luxury of doing that. They're for your clients. They're not for you. You know what I mean? Yeah. We originally were like, dude, maybe we can record this app on a private jet. Oh yeah. We'd have to rent it. Whether it's in the sky or on the floor. On the floor. That's hilarious. But what I also thought was interesting too is he's making content talking about other luxurious things. like cars and golf, things that are aligned with a more affluent person.

1:34:39The watches, the cars, the golf. And so I think that's super important too. Like if you're a business owner thinking about wanting to create content or thinking about your brand, it's not only just your own product. What else can you bring into your content that's going to land on people's for you pages that is maybe like adjacent to the industry that you're in. I mean, I think it makes sense. We've been really familiar with this. I feel like with personal brands, because you have people who are like, okay, if I want to be, you know, there's two different types of ways to look at this. You could go, oh, I'm, I'm much more casual.

1:35:15I don't wear fancy stuff. Or you have the guys and girls that are like in the suits or wearing the fancy watches or driving the nice cars. And it's two totally different categories of people who are, maybe some people are like really turned off to that, but some people are like, that's very aspirational. So I think it just kind of depends. There's a different flavor for everybody. And you're not going to be everybody's cup of tea. You shouldn't aim to be though. No, you don't want to be. And I think that was also super interesting because Colin's young. Colin's 24 years old, right? Which is wild.

1:35:47They have one of the most beautiful offices I've ever seen in Calabasas. It's absolutely gorgeous. The company culture there is just humming. People are very excited to be there. And it's apparent that what he wants and the energy that he's putting out, he's attracting those kind of people that want to really grind and make something awesome and be a part of a company that's growing fast. The whole like, oh, if we're starting out, we need to be the competition. I'm working 12 hours a day and we're not taking lunch. We can order in. Wild. Dude, Uber Eats? Yeah. That's amazing. Straight startup culture.

1:36:22It's funny though, because I think about it in terms of kind of like what we were talking about with what we're doing and our ability to be able to travel with our setup because we don't have to rely on a third party company is an advantage for us. Totally. We can say to someone, yo, we can bring this to you. Or when Gary Vee was like, oh, can we change the day? It's like, sure, we'll change the day. It's like, we can move around things to be able to go out of our way to make it to people. And like, if we're going to travel across the country, which sounds like we might be doing pretty soon, which we're going far, we're going far in the ability to be able to do that.

1:36:57That was something that only like smaller companies can do when you have a 30 person fucking team. Yeah. It's really difficult to be able to like uproot them or something or like, oh, we have to bring all the lights and stuff. It's like we own all the stuff. It also allows you to operate faster. And I think that was one of the biggest takeaways I took from this episode was the speed in which he moves. He's like, I have an idea for this TikTok. I need it filmed this week or tomorrow. Or today. Today. Yeah. And it's being posted tomorrow. I think he said that. He was like, oh, we're going to film a ton of stuff that will be up tomorrow.

1:37:28And I think it's something that a lot of businesses or if you're a creator or whatever, you can take that and put it into your thing. Because I feel like so many times you're like, oh, I'm waiting for this product to drop. Or I'm waiting for this thing to happen. Or I'm waiting for the sun to be in this perfect spot. And it's like, just post the damn thing. Jayhawk just did something interesting when he was at the airport uh he was like the iPhone had just dropped he's like I could have waited till I got home to shy and like film this iPhone video he goes dude I just did in the airport just got the damn thing up like stop stop the bs of like oh this has to be I have to have my lighting in my studio he's like I'm at the airport dude I'm busting out the camera in a quiet little portion of the airport and I'm ripping this video and getting it up and I think that's something that we can take from Colin from some of our friends and just like get the damn thing up.

1:38:12We can put every, you can always find an excuse. We can find the excuse. Oh, we don't have our studio set up. Dude, I have found all the excuses. We love excuses. And there's a lot out there. I think I found them all. You can, dude, here, let me grab.

1:38:26Kolin Jones:I got a few in here, yeah. Save those for a rainy day. Keep those tight. Yeah, I think I've tried to use every single excuse in the book. I think another big thing is speed, but also volume. he's like we're posting more than anybody else and he's zigging when they zag and if then they try to copy him the competition's getting called out in the comments yeah and i think at first glance you think private jet you think super flashy and like we're saying earlier it's a lot of their content 90 something percent of it is in the office and they're bringing the team into the stuff so at least you have a better picture of like who is behind the scenes like who is building this brand i think that's super important so like whether you have an hvac company plumbing company a traditional like in quotes non-sexy business there are still so many different content pieces to make around a business like that i actually saw a gal who was making a tiktok about she she was going to laundromats like or dry cleaning businesses and was like i'm gonna just completely revamp this social strategy here and tell the stories of the people that work behind every video is just going absolutely off because you don't see that most i'd assume if a creator went to make something for a dry cleaning business it's gonna be slow-mo 60 frames per second throw us on behind it's like there's no humanization behind the brand at all here's a perfect example and this will be a really funny story if you want to go into detail of it okay my check engine light has been on for about two to three weeks i'll tell a story so i need to go get it serviced Granted, I'm going to go to a Jeep dealership because it's under warranty and stuff.

1:40:05But I'm thinking about, and granted, maybe my For You page isn't tailored towards car content. But I'm thinking you have a certain connotation with mechanics that is like scammy. Some of them are scammy. And they're going to tell you something that's wrong that's not actually wrong. They're just trying to get more money out of you. If there was a mechanic that was like super friendly and bubbly and like made it more inviting, I'm going to that mechanic over somebody else. And you might think that a mechanic is like a boring business, but there's a way to go against the grain and stand out. There's a bazillion cars out there.

1:40:44You had a great experience with a mechanic recently, right? Yeah. They basically planted a rat in my girlfriend's car. And dude, this is insane. I actually have to tell you guys the story because it burns my ass. So our good Carotek in West Hollywood never go to these guys. Anyways, AAA, like I got time today. Say their name again. Carotek. Don't go there. Yeah. Don't go there. Anyways, she gets a picture sent on like Wednesday of a rat that's under her hood. And I'm like, that's weird because I feel like I would have smelled the rat under the hood. Regardless if they place the rat there. Okay.

1:41:17That's up to the viewer discretion. You guys can decide for yourselves if it was placed there. If it actually wasn't there. there the car was just sitting in the garage she's we like she's been using my car for quite a bit because it was having trouble i feel like i would have smelled the rat got a big nose i would have smelled it dude anyways drop the car off say there's a rat under the hood go back to get the car we show up randomly on tuesday i believe or monday was it monday which is a key right you're supposed to show up on announce you're supposed to show up and announce to see what the hell is going on right so we're like we're gonna take the car back we'll pay your stupid little fee when i got there i noticed that people were kind of acting a little weird sure like one guy's kind of like making his way over the car but i'm just like watching like a hawk chloe's paying i'm like watching chloe and chloe's like watch these guys i'm like okay i feel like i'm doing like a cia mission over here to like get this car back you know and like everyone's kind of being weird and as chloe walks back over once she gets her keys this guy that's like yo uh let me just check something under the hood real quick and i'm like and then chloe's like no don't even touch my car get away from the car chloe pops the hood the rat is on top of the engine when she popped the hood wild so they literally have left this rodent there from wednesday to tuesday or wednesday to monday whatever it was and then i i was like i was like i'm gonna i got time today so just had to rip into this guy i was like is that customary just because we're not a rodent company and i was like so you're just gonna leave it there so then i flipped it off with a piece of paper i'm like this is crazy they're like you don't have any oil oil's full completely full it's just actually insane it's like dude like what is wrong with people i'm like you know what i have a podcast we're gonna talk about this on the podcast i remember listening to a chris d 'alea podcast a while ago and he had a really bad experience with a hotel and he's like getting into it and he goes oh i cannot wait to talk about this on my podcast and i've like been waiting for a moment like that and i feel like that's this this is this moment yeah it's just craziness it's crazy back back to what we're talking about though with just speed and all these good things i think that it's something all of us as as people who are posting content online can take away from this episode it's it's the speed factor it's the fact that doesn't matter what industry you're in social wins doesn't matter dude any industry that we can think of like humanizing the people behind the brand talking more about the behind the scenes.

1:43:40It clearly works. It's something that's worked for a long time ever since it really started. And I think that the longer form that you can do, I'm really excited for when they start to do long form. I think it's going to crush for them. Did he say that he's going to start? No, but I have a feeling once people crush short form, I feel like the transition, I feel like they use. I would have loved to have talked to him. Is that part of your strategy? I totally forgot. I was just, I was excited about the short form, but it could be sick to do long. Oh yeah, and they have so many interesting things.

1:44:10I mean, even if eventually one day if their clientele is into maybe potentially being in some content, because it could be good publicity for them, I think that could be also interesting. We'd be down to be in some of the content. I'd be down to be in the content as we're like flying and stuff. Yeah, while we're flying private. While we're flying private. By the way, the way we got connected with Colin is that me and Brayden actually got to do a partnership with them. what like a year ago about a year ago i think yeah we flew to vegas it was really sick we flew private got a little fruit platter yeah hung out on the plane did a little helicopter ride around uh around vegas yeah it was cool we just zipped up zipped down and then we came back home yeah it was pretty lit it was it was super it was super fun another thing that i forgot to mention that i think they do really well that traditional creators don't is they lean into data so much so much on the day so even after the pod wrapped we're chatting about like different things that they're thinking about and they're looking through on their content i mean dude even adam mosseri the ceo of instagram just came out and he was like number one thing dude is average view duration if it's like if something's going viral he's like it has a ton of watch time people are watching it like all the way through someone's not watching it for three or five seconds and i even noticed dude i can tell pretty quick if something i post is going to do well that average view duration is like 50 60 70 i'm like oh this one's gonna this one's gonna crush if it's below 25 you're done for yeah and you're no longer also what's what's really interesting too about social media for the most part you're not making videos for people that know you like if you have a sure if you have a business it's not like you're making videos for the customers that already know you exist like they're they're testing it right off the bat with people who don't follow you and they're deciding whether it's worth pushing out to another group.

1:46:02So we're getting this mindset. I feel like I'm like, man, if I post this, these kids from my high school or something going to like make fun of me from college. It's like, dude, they're realistically not going to be fed it for the most part. It's going to be people that don't know who you are, which is why the first second and a half or two seconds is so important. Like that hook rate is wicked important if people are going to stay. I think data when it comes to insights for how your video is performing, your content's performing is important. I also think data for how a customer found them, like down to the exact video, I think most businesses probably have no idea how their customer even found them or heard about them.

1:46:39You see the generic like, oh, social media, word of mouth, through a friend, website, Google. But knowing specifically like what video on social media, did you find me through? And if you're talking to a lot of your customers and there's a common thread of, he said this, he's like, oh, they like the golf content. They found a lot of my customers or clientele found me through the golf content. Okay, guess what we're filming on Friday? More golf content. He said that the certain is future with data or something along the lines of that. That feels right. And it's such a valid point because if you look at the data and you see what is working with for you, lean more in, lean into that more and do more of that as opposed to trying to like reinvent the wheel every single time or just kind of going at it with a blind eye.

1:47:32I also think that their format allows them to be super consistent because it's so run and gun and there is a format behind it. And so because he's figured out this format that works, he's like, okay, we can crush that. We know it works. Let's lean into that heavy. It's also almost like a show. You have these developing characters. You have Josh who's in their office or like the different people that work. Zoe that works on their team Tatum that works on the team. You're seeing them pop up in the content. It's not like it's just Colin. You get this like full circle of everyone that's in the office.

1:48:04And there's these like developing storylines and developing plot lines that make it like you're tuning back into a show. And dude, I read their comments like it is a show. People are tuning back and asking questions like regardless of those are some of the people that are end up maybe even like using their service. It's pushing it out to more people. It's more eyeballs and they're driving that attention into revenue. And in a way you're almost world building by bringing in the employees. It was so interesting. He said a guy told him he would pay him 25 ,000 instead of 24 ,000. I might be misquoting here, but he said he would pay him more if he could work with a specific member on the team.

1:48:44That's insane. Which is crazy. Yeah, it's wild. And super, super fun. Yeah. It's super interesting. Also, our last five episodes have all got over 10 ,000 views, which is a crazy milestone for the show. So thank you guys for hanging with us, sharing the stuff, commenting on the stuff, subscribing. It means a ton. We couldn't do without you. We can't go all around the country and eventually all around the world. bringing you guys these guests if you don't help us out. So we owe you guys a ton. If there are certain guests that you would like to see on the show, please leave them in the comments.

1:49:24DM them to us. Yeah, DM them. We have some really great leads on some awesome guests coming up. God. We've been doing some outreach, and I'm really stoked for the future. It's going to be an interesting rest of the year. I'll just say that. I mean, I can't wait, man. We're investing in different camera angles for you guys. Yeah, dude. We're about to cop another FX3. We're going to sell both the ZV1s, get an FX3. So we all look handsome. Yeah, me and Brandon were noticing. We were like, okay, we have the second angle on both me and him, but I think it's better if it's a second angle and third angle on each of us individually.

1:50:02I think it's going to up the production value. We'll have four angles. The struggle that we've had with gear, it was like - So many angles. First, we only had one angle. Then we had one Sony and two cannons. Which is great. Then we had all Sonys, but we had a ZVE-1, which has a 30-minute record limit. We're like, excuse me, we got to pause real quick. We got to do the ZVE-1 thing. And we're close to having it all set up. Also, shout out to Max for giving us the Rodecaster. Yeah, Max Tuning gave us a Rodecaster. I literally texted him about that yesterday. It's super cool that he had an extra one and gave it to us.

1:50:38It's actually made our workflow so much easier. I'm really interested to figure out how to do the Riverside remote pods with it yeah we should probably figure that out we have one coming up right we have one on Monday Monday we should figure that out we got dude we got guests from Australia we're about to bring you guys in the next few weeks I'm telling them we got Sabri Subi coming on the pod which is great he's a shark in Shark Tank Australia which is going to be so fun dude pre-show call Sunday night dude I was laughing so hard I sent you the the instagram really posted he's like yeah my gym cost two thousand dollars because i don't want to work out with broke people dude oh my god i was like and he said i think he said it in there he was like comments are gonna go nuts on this video i'm like but okay to circle it back okay that's a more provocative for sure thing to say you're eliciting you're going to elicit a reaction out of people which is a big thing that colin does colin definitely does that i mean i'm really curious to see how their new campaign goes when they attack the dinosaurs yeah it's gonna be a fun next few months i'm trying to think if i have any more updates for them for the rocks that i think though that we got to call the post pod debrief i think it's this is rock talk rock talk yeah this is where we just chill with the rocks and vibe we hang out and we're also thinking of doing a solo episode with just coast and i every like six to eight weeks probably every eight weeks what do you guys think about that i'm curious i feel like eight's perfect because it gives us enough time to be able to have things to talk about it's more so figuring out new shit to talk about 100 because we want to provide value but also have some fun i do want to shout out chris motions because he texted us and he posted in the dca um in the group chat that he had his first 30k month.

1:52:31Holy shit. Which is crazy. Dude. Because we're doing our third DCA. It's our last time ever doing it, which has been super fun. But it's been crazy to see some of the student wins. It's going to be, that's actually insane. 30k is amazing, dude. It's like, it's life-changing money. 100%. I think this is where we cap this one out. Yeah. This has been an amazing episode, episode 173. You know what could be fun for the Rock Talk? Tell me. Maybe some Q &As. we also didn't do a one-handed crack for the rock talk but it's all good for the what for the rock for this rock talk you want to do so to an episode dude the more one-handed cracks the better i think so too i don't know if we told you guys this too people have been dming me like yeah where the fuck's the one-handed crack it's because when we would start the episodes out with the one-handed crack we noticed that there was like a huge dip in retention so what we're gonna end up hopefully doing we're trying to find a drink sponsor like for the love of god if you your mother your grandma your friend has a freaking drink brand because we're getting views now we're getting a couple views a few views for sure 180k views i believe in the past 28 days it's wild the type shit we need a drink sponsor though and how we would do it we're thinking right you got the drink 15 minute mark in we hit them with the thing we do the one-handed crack sponsored one-handed crack with a fan submitted question.

1:53:53Oh, actually, I lied about that. It would be 15 minutes would be the first read. Like 35 minutes or something. Sure, sure. 40 minutes. We do the one-handed crack. I like it. After people are here, they're hanging out with us. We're like vibing together. And it'll be in the episode the whole time. Yeah, it'll be in it. Exactly. So I don't think that, I don't think you need to say that right off the rip. The goal was to turn the one-handed crack into a social specific piece of content. It's been really hard to balance everything. So our social. So I'll tell you what short form social games gone downhill.

1:54:23Our short form social game is kind of non-existent, but long form do long form. We're really putting the team on the back of you guys. That's what we're trying. We're trying to just keep this damn episode going up every single week. And it's been, it's been really hard lately, but we've been, we've been getting it done. Oh yeah. And it's just part of the game, baby. We're hyped. Love you guys. We'll see you guys all next week. Episode one 73, drop us a comment, leave us a subscribe button, do that thing. Right. And we'll see you guys all next week. Peace.