Sales & Cigars | The Science of Branding with Ethan Decker | Episode 221

[00:00:07] Hey everybody, Walter Crosby with Helix Sales Development, your host of Sales and Cigars, the podcast for entrepreneurs where the only smoke we blow is cigar smoking. Today my guest is Ethan Decker. I call him this episode, The Science of Branding. Ian shares some counterintuitive ideas on branding for entrepreneurs. This episode is tactical around branding. We talk about Ethan's speakeasy and our wrench that he converted to a cheese knife. And you get to see it.

[00:00:35] If you like learning about branding and a few different selections for a drink to pair with a cigar, you might want to go grab a cocktail, strap in for another insightful episode of Sales and Cigars. Thanks. Ethan, welcome to the program. I'm excited to have this conversation, our little preamble in the green room, if you will. I think there's a lot of interesting nuggets we're going to talk about here, so I'm excited. Me too.

[00:01:02] Ethan So let's start off with, you know, give a little bit of information, a little bit about your history. How did you, when you were 10, did you think you were going to be doing what you're doing now? Ethan Oh, hell no. Ethan What do you think you're going to be doing at 10? Ethan When I was 10, I did not dream of being in brand strategy and marketing. When I was 10, I had two dreams. One was to be on Broadway. And I actually had some runway to there. I was into music and musicals and musical theater.

[00:01:32] Ethan I play a bunch of instruments. I used to write music. I wrote it semi-professionally as well. Ethan What is something? Ethan Well, it means I was- Ethan Once in a while? Ethan Yeah, you get paid once in a while. You're in kind of secondary places. One of them, oddly enough, it's got a very modest name, the Bucks County Community Playhouse. But Bucks County in Pennsylvania is oddly a feeder for Manhattan for Broadway.

[00:01:57] Ethan Don't they have a theater there where they sometimes run sort of like a trial? I don't know what you call it. I'm not a theater guy, but where they do the sort of a couple of practice runs there and then take it to Broadway? Ethan Yeah, they workshop things. They workshop them a lot. That was one of my dreams. The other one was doing something environmental, saving the planet, being part of an ecosystem something or other. And that did lead me to graduate school. I actually got, of all things, a PhD in ecology.

[00:02:27] Ethan And did some ecosystem science, but fell away from that and fell kind of ass backwards into marketing and advertising, which is where I've been for the past 25 years. Ethan So you can fall ass backwards in the marketing just like you can fall ass backwards in sales? Ethan Bingo. Ethan Wow. Ethan Yeah. Ethan In sales, it's just because it's a low bar. That's how I got it. Ethan Yeah. Ethan Somebody said, what are you going to do? I was literally having a conversation at the Vanderbilt Club in New York City with this

[00:02:56] older gentleman that I was introduced to. And he's like, what are you going to do? I'm like, I don't know. He's like, well, you moved to New York City without a plan. Like I had a plan. Two months worth of savings. If I didn't figure it out by then, then I got to go back to Michigan with my tail between my legs. Ethan Right. When you're a young idiot, that's a plan. Ethan Yeah. He was an older guy who thought that was a terrible plan. And he actually helped me out, got me an interview with somebody who I walked out of the interview and got the job.

[00:03:26] Ethan And here we are all these years later. Ethan That's a great story and a lot of moving parts. Let's focus on the marketing piece. I read one of your blog posts, your website that just got my attention. And we chatted a little bit about it. And the big takeaway I'll save for you to drop. You kind of set this up for the audience. And then we start to maybe just navigate that data.

[00:03:52] Ethan Yeah. Because I think it's intriguing for the entrepreneurs out there to understand this concept. Ethan Yeah. The thing I do, having come out of the world of science and ecology, is I like to look at the research. I like to look at the data. I want to know what is the science of branding or the science of advertising or the science of how people shop.

[00:04:13] Ethan It's often a big disconnect between the science part and the practitioners. So I try and bridge that gap. I bring in some of the science. And as you say, I post a thing like once a week on LinkedIn and on my blog, usually a chart. But I make it really easy to understand, really clear what's the point. Ethan And in this case, the one I think- Ethan For people like me. Ethan Yeah, me too. Me too. I like simple things. Who doesn't like simple things?

[00:04:37] Ethan Yeah. But sometimes people don't, they can't take the complicated and make it simple. And if you, when you do that, you really get it, right? You really understand your craft. Ethan I like to say no one really wants to do toilet paper math. You know, how many jumbo rolls are in a regular roll? How many plies per sheet? Or how many sheets per roll or rolls per pack? It's, no one wants to do that, no matter how smart you are, because we got other more important things to do.

[00:05:05] Ethan So yeah, make it simple. Make it simple. And in marketing and in sales, you know, when you're representing a company or trying to sell a product, you have the curse of TMI, too much info. So in this case, I take the science, I boil it down to something really simple and hopefully helpful. And in this case, I think the chart you're talking about was about what really drives market share changes.

[00:05:31] Ethan Changes in market share. That's one of the lead metrics that a lot of brands want to know. And so there are different ways you can change your market share. You can get more customers, you can get more distribution, you can get people to buy you more often. You can have more variety, all that kind of stuff.

[00:05:48] Ethan Changes in packaged goods or, let's say, booze if you're selling whiskey or scotch. A couple of things that people think about often are things like make people think of you more and have your brand associated with something big and famous.

[00:06:02] Ethan Changes in market share. You know, so you get a celebrity to say, it's Appleton Estate. Special Appleton Estate time with Ryan Reynolds. Come have Appleton Estate. So you do that. Another one is this term called share of wallet, which is, let's say, if someone spends a hundred bucks a month on whiskey, which is a fair bit. Let's say a hundred bucks a year. They're not that heavy a drinker. A hundred bucks a year on whiskey. She went from a little bit to nothing. I know.

[00:06:32] Let's say you do that, then how much of those hundred dollars goes to your brand versus another brand? Because people like to buy a couple of different brands usually. And if you're really into whiskey, you probably buy a lot of different brands. You might have 80 different brands in your liquor kit. Correct. Correct. But a lot of people, they'll get three or four. You know, they'll get some Woody Creek, which is a brand out here in Colorado. And then they'll get a little bit of a Buffalo Trace or they might get a little old overholt or, you know, Maker's Mark. Isn't Tin Cup?

[00:07:02] Yeah. Tin Cup's a Colorado brand as well. Yep. Absolutely. Or Bullet. So they'll get a couple different brands. What percent of that hundred dollars goes to Bullet? And that's the share of wallet. So that's another metric. Are you getting more loyalty or more repeat purchase? And then another big one is just how many people are buying you? Because let's say Tin Cup, to your example, let's say only about 2% of whiskey drinkers currently buy Tin Cup.

[00:07:30] Well, maybe you want to get 5% of whiskey drinkers to buy you and get more people. There are some groups that study this all the time. One of the ones I found was from a professor named Bruce Clark. He was kind of a buddy of mine. He's a great professor in marketing and he studied like 100 brands in 30 countries.

[00:07:50] Some massive study, 18,000 buyers and found out that the number one thing overwhelmingly that influenced your market share and the change in market share was how many buyers you had. Way more than the number of buyers. The number of buyers. Way more than how much each person buys you, how loyal they are, how quickly they repeat, what they think of you, whether Ryan Reynolds is in the ad or Orson Welles to date us.

[00:08:19] You know, the number one thing is, do you have more people buying you? And in order to get more people buying you, you also have to be available in more stores. And Tin Cup actually is a great counterpoint to something like Maker's Mark. You know, you can throw a stick and find a shop that's got Maker's Mark in it. But you got to sometimes go out of your way to find Tin Cup. But that's more by their design, is it?

[00:08:41] Well, it's a mix. On the one hand, a lot of the times it's just they're limited by their supply, how much booze they make, how many barrels they're making. Sometimes it's very limited by the relationships they've got with distributors and retailers. And frankly, every shelf is a fixed, finite amount of space. And so if you're going to go to Argonaut Liquors down in Denver, you got to tell them to take something out if you want to put Tin Cup on the shelf instead.

[00:09:08] So it's a one-in, one-out kind of deal. But then there is this belief that, especially for upper-end brands or especially luxury brands, that scarcity and limitedness is really good. That is the exception, not the rule. It's for that luxury service, whether it be a bourbon or an advertising agency's services or somebody that does what I do.

[00:09:35] You have to be able to position yourself in that marketplace. Yeah. Which is a very specific methodology to get there. Yeah, the luxury market plays a little bit by different rules. But even in the luxury market, really you're looking at very high-end, very limited stuff that really just makes the rest of the products come to mind more and also get stocked more.

[00:10:00] So to your point about Tin Cup, let's say Tin Cup does a special limited edition partnership with Pappy Van Winkle, which is like the hottest bourbon in the world. Well, maybe not, but it's one of those super-duper high-end, sought-after collectibles. So it's a super limited edition collaboration between Tin Cup and Pappy, and they only have 2,000 bottles of it in the whole world.

[00:10:26] And they come with a special glass decanter in the box along with the bottle. Well, you could charge an arm and a leg, and the exclusivity and the limitedness does increase its value. But that also really helps drive the sales of $30 Tin Cup because people are thinking about it, talking about it. They think the Tin Cup must know what they're doing because they're doing a collaboration with Pappy.

[00:10:53] But what you ultimately do to grow is not sell a whole lot of Tin Cup Pappy Van Winkle limited release. You end up selling a few bottles of that, and then you end up selling a whole lot more Tin Cup to a whole lot more people. You grow the number of buyers you have. So if you want to grow your market share, if you want to have a healthy company, the evidence over and over says you just need a lot more customers. That's more important.

[00:11:19] I mean, share a wallet is important, but having just the sheer quantity of customers, getting your name there, getting them to buy something. Is it important? I don't want to cut the conversation off there, but once you have people buying, do you want to ladder them up to get them to buy different things, to get them to buy the next thing? That's often a pressure for sales folks, I'll bet. You want to cross-sell.

[00:11:48] You want to sell more stuff into your customer. They're only buying one thing. You want them to buy all the other products you got. It turns out that is incredibly hard to do. It's just like pushing water uphill. It's just a bit of a, you can do it with the right machinery, but it's a lot of extra effort. It turns out that it's a lot easier, oddly enough, to get new customers than it is to actively change how much people buy of you. I mean, think about this.

[00:12:16] You buy three jars of mayonnaise a year. What can Hellman's really do to get you to buy six jars of mayonnaise a year? Or to buy Hellman's mustard? Or to buy Hellman's ketchup? Or Hellman's new spicy aioli? It's really up to you. It's really hard to push people into that. So the research, and this is the science, and again, I like to simplify it because who doesn't like it simple? The research really shows it's hard to do cross-sell.

[00:12:46] You always want to leave an avenue open. You always want to let people know you sell more stuff than just mayonnaise. You also sell mustard and aioli. But ultimately, your time is better spent finding new customers. Take the pressure off the sales team on the cross-sell. And I think that it's not just, would you like fries with that? Which is what everybody thinks of when you try to cross-sell. I had a client for a long time. They sold promotional products.

[00:13:15] Some people call it trash and trinkets. Some people call it swag. But it was promotional products. They had sold one product to a business. This is B2B. They sold one product for 15 years. These people bought it regularly. They bought all of it there. It was, they were loyal. You had that penetration. When they went to their buyer and say, hey, did anybody ever tell you that we sell this? And they're like, no. Why didn't you tell us?

[00:13:45] So that, like, no, they couldn't, they had thousands of SKUs that they could sell. But they picked one that was really adjacent to, you know, what they were buying. They're buying something for a trade show. And they did 30 trade shows a year. If they added this one product to their trade show thing, their overall revenue with that value of that account went up 30%. How is that different than the Hellman's mayonnaise and the Hellman's mustard?

[00:14:13] It's not that different. It's the same basic principle, right? Hey, Hellman's, we make mayonnaise. Did you also want mustard? We sell mustard too. The notion, I think, is that people might love you for your promotional mugs, right? But they might not think of you for hats. They might have another supplier for hats. And they're happy with that supplier and they're familiar with them. So I love to say, the way I like to say it is leave the door open.

[00:14:41] Leave the door open, but don't put excessive pressure on your sales team to somehow get someone who buys one or two products from you to start buying four, five, six, or seven products from you. And don't ever assume people are going to see you as the one-stop shop and buy all their merch from you. It's like, it's just never going to happen. It's dangerous for your customer to put all their egg in a wine basket. Well, that too.

[00:15:08] Wells Fargo, the bank, in 2016, they had a huge scandal where they were found creating fraudulent accounts and fraudulently, illegally signing their customers up for more products because of sales quotas, aggressive sales quotas to cross-sell. Because here's one of the crazy things about banks. Banks, they sell 15, 20, 25 different products or services.

[00:15:36] They offer savings accounts, checking accounts, credit cards, debit cards, lines of credit. Mutual funds. Mutual funds, loans, all those things. Right? So a bank might have 20 or 25 different things it can sell you. The average person gets two or three things from their number one bank. And then they get the rest of their stuff from other random banks.

[00:16:02] I'll bet if you looked at your banking, you'd have some weird hodgepodge of six or eight banks that you do all your financial stuff with. But when we're in Wells Fargo, we somehow forget what normal humans do. And we believe we can make people either 100% loyal to Wells Fargo or miraculously double the number of products they buy. And in Wells Fargo's case, they started illegally doing stuff to hit these sales quotas because they were trying to push water uphill in ways that it just naturally doesn't.

[00:16:33] His study, was it a cross between B2B and B2C or was it all one or the other? Bruce's study was B2C. It was grocery products where we have lots of data. But the research I see over and over repeats the same pattern, whether it's B2C, B2B, manufacturing, finance, insurance. Over and over, you see these same global universal patterns.

[00:17:01] People have a little range of products they buy. You know, you have a few different bourbons or you have a few different financial products from different banks. Or you have a few different pairs of jeans from different jean brands. And that's normal. That's normal. The sales leaders out there, the entrepreneurs out there, we need to think about the time that we ask our salespeople to spend on that activity.

[00:17:27] I'm going back and remembering the conversation that we had, I had with this promotional company. The fear was like, we can't just go show them this catalog and they're going to buy everything, right? They don't know how to do that. But I think it was by more by accident than with intent. But it was like, they're buying this thing that's for this trade show process, right? They do all these other things. They buy this consistently and they spend a lot of money.

[00:17:49] So maybe they would add this one element, but it was tied to the same area of products, the same segmentation. So they could easily add that without having to go find another vendor. And they didn't have to get rid of a vendor to do it, right? They could take that trust and loyalty and slide a little bit more over. And it wasn't a big piece. It was a minor piece of what this customer bought.

[00:18:13] So, I mean, that's an interesting, it's an interesting piece for our entrepreneurs in the audience to think about what they offer and then who they can go add more business to and expand that. Yeah. A metaphor I use now for understanding attracting new customers and gaining customers is, do you know what Plinko is? You ever played Plinko? I know it. I don't, I've never played it. It's the wall or the board. You drop a thing in and they're pins.

[00:18:41] And the ball or the chip bounces around in the pins and then lands in one of the slots in the bottom. And it's kind of like some kind of different jackpot or some kind of game. And you never know exactly where the Plinko thing is going to land. I think there's actually a game show now called The Wall, which is Plinko except it's 50 feet tall. And they get a person to drop the little chip in or the ball and it bounces around the pins and lands somewhere. That's what it's like when you get a new customer.

[00:19:11] Let's say your chotch or merch supplier is looking for a new customer who wants to buy their baseball caps or their mugs. That person might be a one and done. That person might be regular forever but might get small volumes. Or that person might love you and instantly start buying large volumes and stick around forever. And it's hard to predict. But your best bet again is put more chips in the top of the Plinko. Get more customers.

[00:19:41] We often think we've exhausted the market. And that is so far from the truth. Because the market's changing always, right? It's always getting bigger. And there are new people in it all the time. And you probably, unless you're a very rare supplier of a very rare thing to a very small sliver of a market, there are probably dozens of providers and thousands or millions of customers. And you would be better off. Again, the research shows.

[00:20:10] Science seems to say you're better off spending your time bringing in new customers than you are trying to cross-sell and upsell your current ones. It seems counterintuitive because you already got the people there. They already love buying hats from you. Why aren't they also buying the thermoses from you or the insulated mugs? But you're probably better off bringing in a new customer. And then just leave the door open and remind them once in a while, hey, by the way, we also sell mugs. You can probably grow.

[00:20:40] But you're never going to have a customer decide, I'm going to buy all my merch just from you. That is rare and unlikely to happen for a variety of reasons. But your services, like let's put a little plug in, like who's your ideal customer? Who's the people that you really enjoy working with because you can help them move the needle? I enjoy working with people who enjoy fine spirits and fine cigars. That doesn't always self-select for the business side.

[00:21:09] But for the business side, I have two broad audiences given my background. I used to work in large agencies, ad agencies with very large companies like Procter & Gamble, Domino's, Nike, PepsiCo. So on the one hand, I do a fair amount of work with very large companies and large brands on their branding and marketing and brand training.

[00:21:34] On the other hand, I've created a few products for small companies and small brands. So if you're an entrepreneur or a startup or a smaller firm, I have some products that help get some of the wisdom I have and some of the brand science that I have. I give it to you so you can quickly just use it. It doesn't cost an arm and a leg. And it's not like you're AT&T wanting to do a whole brand revamp. I serve both of those groups.

[00:22:04] But then you do. You're actually helping that. We have a lot of founders and entrepreneurs that listen to the program. And they're looking for that edge. It's something that the big folks do, right? Not necessarily in their space, but to have access to those ideas with what you're bringing to the party here is what I'm hearing you say. Yeah. You can give them some of the same guidance and without the big, you know, multimillion dollar budget that they have. Bingo. Yeah.

[00:22:34] The best way, I want to get this out of the way, the best way for them to reach you, we're going to have all this in the show notes, but where do they click to get more of you? There are a couple of good places to find me. The easiest one is the website, appliedbrandscience.com. So that's in the show notes. You can go down and click on that and go dig around. You can dig around there. You can find out I do talks. I give keynote addresses. I do trainings and workshops.

[00:23:00] And then I've got my small brand services like the brand TuneUp, where you can bring the brand into the shop and it will change the oil, so to speak. Brokers tires. Rotate the tires. Doesn't cost an arm and a leg. It's pretty affordable. You get you out in about a week. But it's got some recommendations for some repairs down the road you might want to do that you don't have to do right now. That's a great one is the brand TuneUp is for small brands. And then the other place you can find me, I'm fairly active on LinkedIn.

[00:23:28] The Facebook for nerds, as I call it. And so I post some stuff there, which is, I think, where you saw my... Yeah. Yeah. Where I found this, the interesting stuff in the blog post, which caused us to have this conversation. So all that's in the show notes, go click on that, especially if you want some brand ideas. That resource is amazing. So let's talk about where you are in your, you called it a speakeasy.

[00:23:55] So let's talk a little bit about the speakeasy and some of the stuff you pulled out. But the relationship with cigars, past or present, like what, give us that as we, as you start to explain your speakeasy. I'm not a smoker, but I do enjoy fine spirits. And so when it comes to cigars, I've got a couple of nice overlaps. One of them is I recently, about a year ago, I went to Cuba just on vacation.

[00:24:23] My wife and I went, had a lovely trip, went for the Havana Jazz Fest because we're into jazz music. It is fantastic. It's incredible. And it feels like a small town festival. Everybody knows each other. They're all old friends. And then they bring in folks from around the world. It's an island. Yeah. Everybody knows each other, right? Yeah. I mean, they also do have guests, but the folks on the island, they know each other. It's great. So the funny thing is, Cuba is a central economy, centralized economy.

[00:24:50] So if you're into spirits, you have a big choice of spirits. They make one big thing on the island and it's rum. So you can have Havana Club 7. Or if you want a different thing, you can have Havana Club Especial. Or if you want something different, you can choose Havana Club Maestro. Or if you want something very different, you can have Havana Club Añejo 3. You can have any kind of rum you want as long as it's Havana Club.

[00:25:17] You know, it is a centrally planned communist outfit and they got to take care of their own. And they only got one of everything. They got the one. So that was one of my practices with cigars was being in Cuba and I went for the rum instead of for the cigars. But a nice pairing with cigars is a fine spirit. And there are a few different fine spirits which, you know, pair well because they're strong, they're bold in flavor and they can stand up to the strength and flavor of cigar.

[00:25:47] One of them, of course, is just a beautiful bourbon. It's not fair because this is a local distillery to you and the audience is going to have a hard time getting that. But it's Leopold Brothers. Yes, I did some things that will make me unpopular with your viewers and listeners. Leopold Brothers is maybe the best craft distillery in the country. And I know because I've had a lot of stuff from a lot of places. And Leopold, I am lucky they're right here in Denver. Todd Leopold does amazing things.

[00:26:16] And he just recently finally launched his eight year straight bourbon whiskey finished in his three chamber rye whiskey barrels. He's the only distillery in the world that has a three chamber still. I have not seen one of those before. It's interesting. It's from hundred year old plans that he uncovered. Now he's the only person in the world that has a three chamber still. So he makes fantastic spirits. If you can ever find any Leopold Brothers products, I'd say get them. If you can find his eight year old bourbon, highly recommended.

[00:26:46] Todd's going to owe you a couple bottles of bourbon. Yeah, yeah. I'm plugging Todd's work here. Another thing, which again is less common. And frankly, if you get a good bourbon or a good scotch, you're going to be happy. But this one is a recommendation from a friend of mine who is actually Scottish. Kevin said, if I'm going to splurge on a nice bottle of scotch, the most exciting thing he had in the past few years is Filey Bay, which I'd never heard of. So I had to order it online. I never heard of it either. So I'm in the same boat as anyone.

[00:27:15] It's not local. I can't find it. Buy it online. This is Filey Bay. What part is Scotland? It is Petey. This is a Yorkshire single malt, and it is STR finished, which I'd have to find out a little bit more of the detail. Shaved, toasted, and recharred. STR. Shaved, then toasted, then recharred. X red wine cask finished. It's beautiful stuff. Filey Bay does really delicious spirits. And then the third, this is pretty common.

[00:27:44] You can find it, but you might not have known it's even there. You probably didn't even notice it. This is an Armagnac from France. Armagnac is a cousin to Cognac. Cognac is, of course, a brandy, an aged brandy that comes from the Cognac region of France. And so you know Hennessy and Courvoisier and all the other nice Cognacs. Armagnac is a region adjacent to it that uses slightly different distilling methods,

[00:28:14] sometimes different grapes that go into it because it's all grape-based. And the difference in the grapes and the distilling makes for a different spirit. And in this case, it's a little bit more raisin and prune. It's a little more wood, astringency, a stiffer version of a Cognac in many ways. That's a really good word. The stiff is a good descriptor of that compared to most people have had Cognac. Yep. The first time you taste it, it's like, oh, this is wildly different than what I was expecting.

[00:28:44] But it does pair well with cigars, especially, you know, medium to bold style cigar. It's going to give you balance there. Yeah. If you've got a stronger cigar, you probably want a stronger spirit. And the Armagnac, this one is by Delord, which is a well-known Armagnac maker. And they're pretty easy to find because they follow the rule of increasing the number of buyers, increasing their penetration. And they're available in a lot of shops. I love it. It's a solid product. I think Armagnac's one of those things.

[00:29:11] You can find a 25-year-old Armagnac for under $100. And you can't find a 25-year-old Scotch for under $1,000 usually. No. And then 25-year-old... Well, that's a bad joke. I'm not going to go... Bourbon. You were about to say bourbon, of course, weren't you? Yeah, that's what I was going to say. 25-year-old bourbons for $10,000.

[00:29:32] So 25-year-old Armagnac, if you see a nice aged or vintage Armagnac, 1982, 1975, get it because it's going to be a treat. And if you do like cigars, it'll go well. I do a Saturday morning trip to my liquor store. That's what I'll be looking for on Saturday morning. Perfect. So you asked also about where I'm dialing in from. I run a little garage bar. It's the corner bar because it's in the corner of my garage.

[00:30:03] And it is truly just a place where my friends come and I pour drinks and I make cocktails. My number one customer, of course, is my lovely wife, who also indulges me in this fun little hobby. So I've got probably at this point over 200 bottles of different interesting or rare spirits. And I've gotten pretty decent at making cocktails, or at least so my guests tell me.

[00:30:30] The cabinet behind you, I'm assuming, that has a lock on it? It does indeed. We had teenagers in the house. And while we trusted them, they also have friends. So you never know. That's a good way to do it. Yeah. So yeah, it goes with the garage theme. The bar itself is a husky workbench. My cheese knives are old. They're old wrenches that someone beautifully filed down to become cheese knives.

[00:31:01] Did they forge those as well? It's just winding them down? I'm not quite sure how. They must have forged it because it's really bent and then it's really cut up. Holy crap. Maybe they just filed it. But yeah, it's the theme of the bar is that you're in the garage. There are a bunch of tools. I keep the, what do I say? Modest digs, good drinks. I love it. Modest digs, good drinks. And yeah, it's fun. It's a fun way to hang out with friends and share my booze.

[00:31:28] There's no sense in having that much of a collection. If you're not sharing it with people that you enjoy being around, it just kind of lubricates conversation. It's fun. You get to introduce things to people. I mean, it's the first time I've ever seen a wrench turned into a knife. And I have a friend who does, who makes knives. So I am going to send him a couple of wrenches and give him a couple of years and have him

[00:31:57] see if he can make me a cheese sniper. Do it. It might be terrible steal. He might scoff at it, but you know, it's not because it's some special Japanese steal. That's not why you do it. I'm used to him scoffing at me anyway. So this was fun. I knew it was going to be fun. It was educational. We got to talk about booze. Let me ask you this question. In your little garage speakeasy, if somebody wanted to light up a cigar, would you have to go outside? With the cocktail? I usually turn it to patio service at that point.

[00:32:26] I'm about this close to getting a patio heater, you know, one of those things at the restaurants. But yeah, in the summer, our patio is wide open. Very good with the marketing, right? Instead of saying you're kicking somebody out of the garage, you move them to the patio. Bingo. That's awesome. If you have some interest in learning more about Ethan, LinkedIn is where I found him. There's lots of great nuggets. He really isn't trying to pitch you on something. He's trying to help people think differently about their brands. And then go look at the website. There's some great tools there.

[00:32:56] Sir, thank you. If I'm in your neck of the woods, I'm going to give you a call and I won't come empty-handed. You better, Walter. Thanks so much for listening to Sales and Cigars. If you like what you heard or you want to share your two cents about the show, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Now, if listening made you realize you need a little extra sales help,

[00:33:22] you can check out helixsalesdevelopment.com where you can find free sales tools, blog posts, and an opportunity to reach out and optimize your sales team.