Mike Gunderson is the President of Gundir, an award-winning direct marketing agency specializing in traditional offline channels, particularly direct mail. Since 2003, Gundir has been helping businesses drive new leads and close more sales. In addition to Gundir, Mike is the Founder and CEO of PostReminder, a direct response platform that merges traditional direct mail with digital engagement through enhanced QR technology. This innovation allows customers to set reminders for upcoming sales and events, enhancing consumer engagement and driving action.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [4:14] Mike Gunderson explains how Gundir helps businesses leverage direct mail marketing
- [6:52] Why direct mail stands out in a digital-first marketing world
- [15:05] Common mistakes companies make with direct mail marketing and how to avoid them
- [22:44] The power of stealth versus promotional direct mail for optimizing response rates
- [29:04] Why targeting and data modeling are critical for direct mail success
- [37:58] Key elements of a strong direct mail offer, including urgency and exclusivity
- [46:18] How PostReminder helps businesses enhance engagement through QR-based reminders
- [50:35] Unique use cases for PostReminder in trade shows, subscriptions, and retail promotions
- [52:20] Mike’s biggest mentors and how EO helped scale his business
In this episode…
Direct mail may seem like a thing of the past, but in today’s digital world, it’s proving to be one of the most effective ways to cut through the noise and capture attention. While email inboxes overflow and social media ads get ignored, direct mail offers a tangible, high-impact way to engage potential customers. But how do you make it work for your business?
According to Mike Gunderson, a leading expert in direct response marketing, direct mail remains one of the most powerful tools for businesses looking to generate leads and drive conversions. He highlights how a strategic mix of creative design, data-driven targeting, and compelling offers can significantly outperform digital ads. By leveraging personalization, innovative formats, and even sensory elements, companies can create a memorable experience that boosts response rates. With careful testing and optimization, direct mail can become a scalable, high-ROI marketing channel.
In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Mike Gunderson, President of Gundir, to discuss how businesses can use direct mail to supercharge their marketing. Mike shares insights on common mistakes companies make with direct mail, the role of data in campaign success, and the power of testing different formats to optimize results. He also reveals how his innovative platform, PostReminder, is helping businesses merge direct mail with digital engagement.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- EO Silicon Valley
- EO Accelerator
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
- Dr. Jeremy Weisz on LinkedIn
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Mike Gunderson on LinkedIn
- Gundir
- PostReminder
- “[Direct Response Series] “But wait, there’s more!” – with Infomercial King Ron Popeil Founder of Ronco.com” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “[Direct Response Series] Life as a 50+ Year Old White Male and Other Copywriting Secrets With Carline Anglade-Cole” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- My Life as a 50+ Year-Old White Male: How a Mixed-Race Woman Stumbled Into Direct-Response Copywriting and Succeeded! by Carline Anglade-Cole
- “[Direct Response Series] Crafting Compelling Sales Copy with Paul Bigham Founder of Bigham Agency” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “What Inspires Bob Bly? How to Avoid Burnout…” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- Brian Kurtz on LinkedIn
- “Growing Up on the Wrong Side of the Tracks with Paul Jarrett, CEO of Bulu” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “[Sweet and Snack Series] Healthy, Flavorful, All-Natural Chips From Chicken Breast With Jason Wright” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “How To Start From Scratch With a Food Product Business with Peter Rahal Founder of RxBar” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- ZipRecruiter
Quotable Moments
- “The funny thing, though, is I just loved it. I loved the analytics. I like being able to have accountability.”
- “The biggest mistake that I see almost always is that everybody wants to go big first.”
- “With direct mail, you’re interacting with the piece. You’re seeing it, you’re smelling it, you’re feeling it.”
- “The biggest tech companies in the world are sending direct mail.”
- “We bring the brand to the prospects, not the other way around.”
Action Steps
- Test different direct mail formats before scaling: Starting with smaller, cost-effective mail pieces helps determine what resonates with your audience before committing to larger, more expensive campaigns.
- Leverage data to refine your mailing list: Using response modeling and demographic data ensures you’re targeting high-intent prospects, improving conversion rates, and reducing wasted spend.
- Incorporate sensory elements in direct mail: Adding textures, scents, or interactive components enhances engagement and makes your mail piece memorable in a crowded mailbox.
- Create urgency with time-sensitive offers: Including expiration dates and exclusive codes drives immediate action, increasing response rates and ensuring accurate attribution.
- Integrate digital tools like PostReminder: Combining direct mail with digital follow-ups ensures prospects engage with your offer at the right time, boosting conversions.
Sponsor for this episode…
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Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:13
Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of InspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Mike Gunderson. You can check him out at gundir.com and postreminder.com.
Mike, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of the top Direct Response Series. I love direct response Mike, and there’s no better way through the mail, in my opinion, to get people’s attention. And so some of the interviews in that category, I had the infomercial king. People have seen Ron Popeil on the podcast that you know who I’m talking about, right?
Okay. He’s a legend, right?
Mike Gunderson: 01:00
Oh, yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 01:01
Yeah. He’s amazing. But wait. There’s more. I think he came up with that phrase.
I had Carline Anglade-Cole. Life as a 50-Year-Old White Male. She wrote a book called that. Now she’s not white. Or is she male?
So that’s what makes it interesting. But she wrote copy for the that industry I think like prostate copy like other specific copy. So that was she’s she’s hilarious. That’s a good one. Paul Bigham talked about crafting compelling sales copy.
Jason, even though it wasn’t really about direct response. It is. I mean, he was talking about mastering the art of webinars, and he’s a master at webinars even, I think helped zoom taught zoom some stuff about webinars to to give people an idea. And I had Bob Bly on the podcast who we you know, both Mike and I mutually like Bob Bly’s stuff. There’s there’s so many more I can, you know, check it out.
We’ll hear some of Mike’s recommendations to. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help people give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in two ways. One, we help companies launch and run a podcast or an easy button for a company to do that.
We do all the strategy, accountability and execution. So kind of like we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the hosts. They can create amazing relationships and content and most importantly, run their business. Number two, we’re an easy button for a company’s corporate gifting program for us. You know, staying top of mind for clients, partners, prospects.
We want to make it simple and seamless and affordable. So we do that, you know, so people can keep in touch and, you know, build greater relationships. You know, for me, Mike, I’m always looking at ways how I can give to my best relationships. And I found no better way over the past Decade on both of those things, having my podcast send them cool things. I like to send food personally, just as a touch point so you can check everything out at rise25.com
I’m excited to introduce Mike Gunderson. He’s been at the helm of Gundir since 2003, so he’s really been at the forefront of direct marketing industry for for many years. He even earned the title of the direct, you know, top direct mail agency in the United States by clutch in 2024. And Gundir, they help supercharge your leads funnel with direct mail.
You know, they have a really obviously decades of experience of direct mail expertise. We will talk about post reminder, which is a technology which is the craze that people are talking about. So we’ll talk about that. Mike.
Mike Gunderson: 03:48
That’s right.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:49
And he’s also been a part of EO Entrepreneurs’ Organization Silicon Valley is past president. and dedicates his time to Inclusive Sports Foundation. So Mike, thanks for joining me.
Mike Gunderson: 04:01
Yeah, thanks so much. Great intro I appreciate it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:03
Let’s yeah, let’s start off with Gundir and what you do. I’m going to pull up your site because there is a video piece to this. And and give us a little snapshot.
Mike Gunderson: 04:14
Sure. Yeah. So what Gundir does is we, you know, essentially do direct mail marketing for some of the largest companies in the world. We also focus on well funded startups and fintechs to really bring direct mail to market. Oftentimes, you know, a lot of these companies are driving their sales funnel with digital marketing.
And so this is a way for us to actually pre-qualify individuals, get them a really great lead list, and get them to go out and start to build that business via the direct mail channel. As you mentioned, we’ve been doing it for, gosh, over 23 years. I kind of cut my teeth in direct mail working for a large credit card manufacturer called Providian Financial. Manufacturing credit card provider called Providian Financial. And if somebody was to tell me that I was going to be designing direct mail coming out of art school, I would never have thought that’s what I’d be doing.
The funny thing is, though, is I just loved it. I loved the analytics. I like being able to have accountability. I like being able to change a color, a logo, a photo, and actually being able to see the impact that it has on the overall marketing piece. And so with that, I just fell in love with the channel.
And so really from 2003 on, just been continuing to grow this company. We’re up over 30 people now and we are soup to nuts. We do everything from from strategy to targeting to creative to production to analytics. At the end of the day, you know, really being able to deliver back to our clients a successful direct mail program.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:51
I geek out on this stuff. And I know sometimes you have to convince people they need to do direct mail. And for me, it’s just like it seems obvious, right? Because you get something interesting in the mail. And especially now everything’s digital, right?
We’re getting emails and and I, you know, something in your hand. So I love to this really gets the creative juices flowing for me Mike. So I want to selfishly look at some of the stuff you’ve done so we can see people can get ideas like what can you actually do? Not in front of the computer, it’s landing in someone’s inbox and the responses. So, you know, and look at some of the pieces that you send because you have some unique things that you’re sending and how you send them.
So I don’t know which one. We’re on the portfolio page here. Which one would be interesting to pull up first? That maybe was something cool that you’re like, this is this is cool that we created this and it got a good response.
Mike Gunderson: 06:52
Yeah, well, triple A is a good one if you want to click on that one. There’s a couple of really great examples in there. Yeah. Triple A came to us you know really early on we were working with them trying to develop new creative. And they basically said, hey, we need a shot in the arm.
We need something to start to increase our response and conversion rates. And so they brought us in as a creative partner to basically come in, ideate and try to figure out ways to not only increase performance through design, copy and offer, but also is there a way that we can actually make some of these packages more efficient? Can we actually reduce some of the package components in our mail in order to drive up the ROI on that direct mail? And so that’s what we ended up doing for them. But we also got to do some really creative fun, some really creative packages for them as well as like this piece right here.
You know, this is basically a large window that has a very big window. And on that window is this little pop out car that you can pop out and you can kind of build this car and really interact with this direct mail piece. How Cool about this is you want to get inside of the of the envelope just to kind of pop it out, like it’s almost impossible to throw it away without going in and popping out this car. But what we did that was extra special on this is we actually added a new leather smell to the actual it’s a it’s a very interesting put onto the direct mail piece. And so when they’re interacting with this car, they’re getting a new car smell along with it.
And it’s just it was a very cool way to engage. Of course they’re then going to read the letter. They’re going to read the call to action. And at the end of the day, respond to the offer.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:21
That seems like a tough thing to do.
Mike Gunderson: 08:25
But that the I.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:26
Feel like you should like have a Cologne product or something with that. Like that should’ve been bottled. Maybe a deodorant, I don’t know.
Mike Gunderson: 08:34
I was just on a webinar with a company called Scent Sphere, and what they do is they do this, they they have these really great varnishes that you can add right to your direct mail pieces. So if you want something that smells like flowers for Mother’s Day. Or if you want something that smells like apple pie for for a Thanksgiving Day promotion, you can do that with them. And they have just a really cool process where they’ll actually send you samples so you can kind of go through all the.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:01
Incredible.
Mike Gunderson: 09:01
Scents. Yeah, it’s amazing. And that’s the thing, right? With direct mail, you can’t get that with digital. There’s no smell o vision with with digital, but with direct.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:09
That’s a good thing.
Mike Gunderson: 09:10
Yeah. Sometimes. Right. But at the end of the day you’re interacting with the piece. You’re seeing it your your you’re smelling it, you’re feeling it.
Right. And then even sometimes in the case of like a video mailer or a mailer that has like a sound chip in it, you can actually hear the direct mail. So it’s really come a long way. And all the different aspects of it and how you get these people’s attention in the mailbox.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:33
It’s really just engaging the different senses of the body, and that’s really cool. And I love how it’s like it’s very tactile, right? Because they’re popping it out. They’re there playing with it. It’s interactive because most of us like, okay, and listen, I’m a triple A member, I get it, I’m like, okay, but this is very unique.
I want to get to some other examples, but what are some of the crazy things when you think of over the years that you whatever the response is, but crazy things that you sent or maybe received?
Mike Gunderson: 10:08
Yeah. Well going from a because so, you know, we are a direct mail agency. So oftentimes printers want to get our attention right. They want to try to figure out how do how do I get their attention so we can get some of their business. And I had one guy send me I mean, they’d send me all kinds of crazy stuff.
But I remember getting a full hockey stick in the mail. So it was literally he mailed the whole hockey stick in the mail with a label. It came as a hockey stick. And I, you know, I had some clever copy attached to it, but it was impossible not to get my attention and get a laugh out of it. I just got something from American Express.
They just sent me a little tiny monitor that’s basically an add on monitor from HP. Basically thanking me for my business, for being a platinum customer and literally sent me this dimensional box. You pull it out, it’s got a second monitor and basically said, this is just a gift. Like, it’s just thanks for being a customer for over ten years. And so doing things like that, you had mentioned gifting.
I mean it’s so powerful because really okay, here’s an email. Maybe even you’re giving somebody say like a gift card through Amazon. Okay. Those are all really great. And yes, they’ll thank you.
And they’re like, well that’s really special. But when you’re sending things like, like specialized or personalized cookies in the mail or like right now we’re sending, you know, you can go on our website and request this book right now. We you know, it’s getting that physical aspect, you know, right to that, that consumer and getting them to engage with your product or your brand in a different way. You just you just sometimes can’t get that through on an email or a social media ad.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:46
Totally. Yeah. The hockey stick that you’re going to open it. I mean, whatever you do with it, but you’re you are going to be like, what is this thing? And there was another one which I thought was interesting, Swift Financial.
Yeah. Can you talk about that one?
Mike Gunderson: 12:04
Yeah. So Swift Financial we had built kind of took it. We took over their direct mail program. Now what they do is they offer business financing to small, small, medium sized businesses. And we developed a whole bunch of control packages for them, all of which that were working really well.
Well, about 2 to 3 years into it, they were acquired by PayPal. And PayPal basically wanted to have a business division. And so it was kind of a it was kind of a, you know, a shop in a box or a business in a box. And so they were able to acquire them and be able to get all that great targeting, all that great direct mail. And one of the things that was interesting is that a lot of our direct mail that we did for Swift Financial was stealth, what we call stealth in nature, which means it’s like a blind envelope.
So the idea is that it’s I don’t know if you can see this, but it’s like something that’s nondescript doesn’t really have a brand name. It’s not promotional. This, by the way, works really, really well, you know. So it’s this kind of stuff. No brand name, nothing.
Get the person inside the envelope, get them to read the offer, hopefully get them to respond with really great creative, really great copy on the inside. But we got to get them in in the envelope. But because it’s B2B, not only do we have to get them in the envelope, but we got to get the right person in the envelope. We can have an assistant or a secretary toss it out because they think it’s junk mail. Right.
So so they would they relied on a lot of stealth direct mail and until PayPal acquired them. So as they were going into transition, we started working with PayPal and the creative. And what happened was we started doing A and B tests. And so one test would be Swift Capital by PayPal. One one test would be PayPal only, right?
And then one test would be blind. Like nothing. And what we found through that testing is that leveraging that PayPal name really increased the open rates, you know. So when this is going to businesses, small businesses and medium sized businesses, that word PayPal and there was nothing else. No promotional envelope.
No no promotional copy on the envelope but just that logo. Increase the open rates, increase response rates and increase conversion rates. So leveraging a really great brand is a really good way to to get those folks inside the mail. And if you don’t have a well-known brand leveraging a more stealth approach, something with more blind in nature to really get them inside that envelope, deliver that value proposition super quickly, and getting them to respond might be the better approach.
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Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:25
You know, I know that you get a lot of companies and maybe some have never done direct mail. Some of them have, and they come with their own thoughts, ideas regardless. So I love to talk about some mistakes people make because I’m sure you have to talk people out of. Well, I think this will work, Mike. Well, you know, from 20 years I’ve we’ve tested things like that and maybe you have a best recommendation.
Hopefully they listen to you and they listen to this, right? What are some mistakes people make? And maybe we’ll break it down in the outside and the inside. Right. Because like you said, there’s mistakes.
If you make them on the outside, they’re never going to see the inside. So let’s talk about outside mistakes first and then we can go to maybe inside.
Mike Gunderson: 15:05
Yeah. Well the one thing I would say, and this is more from a package format perspective, is when you have when you’re doing B2B sales especially and say you’re doing A and B ab marketing. So your marketing may be a small subset, you know, maybe you have a thousand names, 1500 names, maybe 5000 names. Right. And by the way, the companies we work with, we’re doing 100, 100,000, 500,000, a million pieces of mail per month.
That’s kind of our volume happy spot. And then but there’s a whole bunch of people doing really great direct mail, you know, in under that 10,000 threshold. But the biggest mistake that I see almost always is everybody wants to go big first. I want to send a t shirt or I want to send this or I want to, I want to do a dimensional I want to do. In theory, it works.
Yes, that all sounds great, but but let’s figure out how much. Let’s get a baseline. How much will people respond to a letter package to a nine by 12 package, to a flat package? And then let’s get a baseline on that at say, $0.80 a dollar a piece versus this $30 or $40 a piece. And then from there, start to ramp up your efforts and see if you get better response, better conversion rates by having these larger, more expensive packages in the mail.
So that’s the first thing I would say.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:21
So the mistake starts with what to send. Yeah. First gotcha.
Mike Gunderson: 16:26
It seems like I should spend a lot of money because these guys are all very valuable to me. But you don’t have to spend all that much money. Now, the second thing, and this is the big one, always that we come up against is testing. Too often people want to test 5000 pieces, 10,000 pieces against, you know, another creative or another creative. Well, here’s the problem.
And this is a real problem. And every day we’re trying to to do a better job at it is we want to increase those response rates. The problem is, is an average response rate for an acquisition or prospecting campaign is going to be anywhere between a half percent to to 1.5%. So that means out of 100 pieces, you know, one one and a half people are going to respond, right? So when you take the folks that respond and then you track them all the way through conversion, you just simply don’t have enough volume to make a decision on what a winner is.
So if you have a small volume.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:17
And that’s probably even a good response rate, right? I mean.
Mike Gunderson: 17:21
1.5% is a great response rate, especially for B2B. Yeah. And which is another reason why you want to make sure you’re testing into those lower cost packages, because you want to be able to get more mail out there. And now Now the trick is okay, well, if it is a smaller volume and let’s say that the that that lower cost package doesn’t work, should I then go to a to a more expensive package. Yes, absolutely.
But just don’t do it the first time. Like just try to get the low hanging fruit and see who says this is a really great product. This is a really great brand. This is something that my company needs. The targeting is on point.
Let’s go ahead and do business together. And let’s do that for a dollar a piece versus $30 a piece. And just see where where does that land. And you might not get anything and that’s okay. Then you can ramp it up and just kind of keep testing up.
And on those smaller volumes don’t a B test. It’s impossible. You’re never going to be able to read the results on that. So just send out one mailer one month, send out another mailer the next month. It, you know, test into email strategies.
So so test, you know, remailing to same person twice, three times, four times until they raise their hand. So there’s a bunch of different tests that you can do that doesn’t require large volumes, but you’ll still be able to learn a lot from.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:32
Okay. So sending what to send. What about on the outside? The outside mistakes people make. Yeah.
Mike Gunderson: 18:40
Being promotional man, I hate to say it. I love to say that. That the design is the ruler of all. And that’s what’s going to get people inside the envelope. But ultimately, in our experience, especially with a lot of the brands that we work with, it’s really about getting them inside that envelope.
So if you’re doing a postcard or a self mailer that’s like a double postcard that folds, be promotional. If you have a very visual brand, if it’s retail, if it’s something that’s easy to understand or you have a really great offer, promotional works all day, every day, right? And especially when you pair that to a really well targeted list.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:14
I’m going to pull up ZipRecruiter for a second because it looks like that’s a good example.
Mike Gunderson: 19:18
There’s some good ones here. ZipRecruiter does a nice job of not only being promotional, but also being stealth. So they have a we’ve done so much testing with them that we’ve been able to kind of say, okay, well, stealth works, maybe this cohort, but maybe more promotional works for this cohort. I think currently their control package is like an invitation package. You know, it’s a it’s a five by or a five by nine inch package.
It’s usually got some really nice gold foil on it or something like this. And it gets a very good response rate and drives more people to convert. But we’ve tested like this is kind of a mix. It does have promotional copy, so it’s technically considered a promotional envelope, but it’s staid, it’s not overly designed. And if you click right, you’ll see there’s a couple of other packages.
You just click right on those arrows.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:03
And by the way, if you’re listening to the audio, we’re looking at ZipRecruiter. And you can see on the outside of the envelope well there’s a bunch here. But let me go back to the first one for a second. I lost it. Oh it says post jobs for free right on here.
And so we’ll go to a couple of these other ones because I like the, the one where you’re actually have to open it up, you know. So we’ll go we’ll go to that one too.
Mike Gunderson: 20:34
Okay. All right. It’s a cool things popping up okay. Yeah. So like this example right here is a closed closed faced envelope.
We call it an invitation package. And what’s neat about this is once you open it up, you get you get hit with this very visual reflective foil treatment on the outside. And they’re team designed this. They did a really great job. And then as you open it up you have some fun copy.
You’re able to to walk them through. It’s not too complicated. And we have this really cool tip on card that comes off. So they can save that for later. If they want.
They can go ahead and and reply instantly. And then that’s exactly what it is. Your first post for free. We as you know as much as entrepreneurs, it’s important to drive in really great applicants. And ZipRecruiter is one of those companies that just have done a really great job over the course of ten years of like driving a lot of value through their platform, including one of the first using AI.
And so it’s been it’s this has been really successful for them. But the problem is when they first started there wasn’t a lot of brand awareness, right? I mean, it was indeed it was monster. It’s these huge brands have been around forever and ever. And how do these guys break through?
And so what we did was we found the prospects for them. So we brought the brand to the prospects, not the other way around. If they were to to just pump and pay for pay per click, they would probably get drowned on the response on that because they’re just going to get outbid all the time. So by having a strategy to go after the customers themselves and bring the awareness to the customer, that’s where direct mail became very successful for them. And by the way, leaders in podcast advertising as well, they did kind of the same thing there, which is amazing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:13
You know what I and listen, I don’t sell direct mail like you do, right? But the way I sell people to like think about it is I asked them, have you ever gotten a direct mail piece from from Google for Google Ads. And they’re like, yeah, you know. And they go, well guess what? They own Google ads.
Like they could run unlimited ads if they wanted to. Right? So I don’t know if you’ve received it, Mike, I have you know, it’s a card here’s like $100 free or whatever for Google ads. And they’re sending direct mail.
Mike Gunderson: 22:44
The biggest tech companies in the world are sending direct mail. Amazon I don’t know if you saw they’re beautiful. I mean, ingenious catalog. I wish I could be the one to say that we worked on it, but they send out their catalog. First of all, my kids love it.
They like going through it. They like circling things. The second thing is, is all you do is take your Amazon app, point it at the image, and it automatically brings up the the piece in the catalog, not scanning a QR code, not scanning some other code, not putting in some kind of you just scan the image and it automatically brings up that image in your Amazon app. I mean, that’s a genius. That’s a really cool way to use new technology.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:23
This one. There was another one I wanted to show. There’s some obviously unique stuff here with ZipRecruiter. Playing around with the imaging and everything. But there was just stop.
Yeah. Go ahead. This one is the one I wanted to talk about. Yeah.
Mike Gunderson: 23:39
Yeah. So we call this a snap pack. And this is a this is a pretty awesome format. Now, what I love about this is most snap packs that you see in the mail are going to be kind of black and white. They’re going to look very official.
They’re going to they’re going to look like some kind of financial document or tax document that you have to take that you have to take seriously. Now what we did here was.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:01
And obviously I just like to I just like to make rip the perforations, you know.
Mike Gunderson: 24:06
That. You nailed it, Jeremy. You nailed it. Because what we realize is it just has to have that look and feel of something official. Now, if you look at this, this is actually a branded snap pack.
It’s it’s their brand is up front there. We’re using a branded color, a branded pattern. So it’s not this scary looking text document, but it still has. It still exudes kind of this I’m important open me before you throw me away type of situation. And so you print these off.
We’re allowing that consumer that prospect to interact with the mail roll, fold it open and then have all the information they need right at their fingertips in order to respond.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:48
Yeah, totally. And at what point, you know, when you’re rolling these out for ZipRecruiter, are they rolling out like different tests at once or do you progress. How did it work with with them?
Mike Gunderson: 25:01
Yeah. Well so at gander we actually now have kind of three levels of service right. So we have gander launch and that’s for a brand new brand a brand new startup. Somebody who wants to get into the mail. And we have a very strategic way of basically bringing that mail to market.
And that’s usually working with our leap and repeat strategy where we’re we’re able to test multiple elements. And then and then over the course of about 3 to 4 months, we’re able to test anywhere between 6 and 12 packages. And then from there we typically can start to identify the winner. And then from the winner we start to what we call roll out that mail. So we go from a couple hundred thousand pieces of mail to 500,000 pieces of mail to a million pieces of mail.
That’s exactly how we brought ZipRecruiter to market. Now that they’re big mailers and they you probably have seen, I’m sure, a ZipRecruiter, you know, direct mailer in your mailbox. But but now they can be very strategic about the testing. They can test, you know, based off of seasonality. They can they can test based off of data and, and demand.
They can test different formats to try to reduce costs. They can they can also they have we have what we call just a lot of kind of second in command control packages. So in case one fatigues, we can easily swap it out with another one that’s of parity and price. And so that they can get that increase in performance, especially on the emails that they might not be getting in other places. So so ZipRecruiter will typically test, you know, anywhere between, you know, 3 to 6 different packages, you know, monthly, sometimes quarterly to see if we can increase that response and conversion rate just a little bit.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:52
So you mentioned the Thunder launch. Yeah. And obviously as things go go you know over time I’m looking at Thunder lead. Are they then like hey we can you acquire like the list is important. So talk about the list piece.
Mike Gunderson: 27:12
Yeah exactly. Well I mean that’s probably you know, next to producing the direct mail piece and getting out the door. It’s really the targeting that’s the most important. And so if we’re if new folks are new to direct mail, we want to start to build out that list. We want to try to understand exactly, you know, who those customers or those prospects are and who’s going to convert.
So we oftentimes don’t know. We just don’t have any baseline data. So we use of course demographic and firmographic data will oftentimes utilize a co-op database. So we’ll be able to see retail and transaction history. We’ll be able to kind of correlate that and then try to build a list that way that works really, really well.
And then once these guys are in market for, you know, six months, eight months, we’ll start to utilize the response data, the people that actually responded. So not only are we going after the right size company, the right size revenue, the right size, or the right geography, but then we’re layering on top of that a model that basically says, out of all this great rich data that we’re targeting from who also responds to direct mail. And so now we can get really, really tight on the targeting, not only going after essentially pre-qualified leads, but then pre-qualified leads that also respond to direct mail. And that’s called a response model. And that’s been really successful for our clients to be able to continue to grow their direct mail programs.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:34
I remember Mike, and I don’t know if it’s a tribute, but I attribute it to I don’t know if you know Brian Kurtz. I think he’s he’s sent over 2 billion pieces of direct mail. He worked for boardroom and they were $150 million company. And he said, Jeremy, Facebook didn’t invent lookalike audiences, right? Like, really it started with with direct mail, like you’re saying, and figuring out who’s likely to buy and then replicate those people with targeted lists, right?
Mike Gunderson: 29:04
Yeah, that’s 100%. I mean, and there’s so many levers within, you know, building out a direct mail program. I mean, there is the creative aspect and the offer and the messaging and the copy. That’s all super important. And that alone can be a lever, right?
Then there’s your your data. And just making sure that you’re able to, you know, figure out exactly who’s going to be responding to that direct who’s important. You know, I was at I was at a mixer just a couple of weeks ago and somebody said, well, what do you do? I said, well, you have a direct mail marketing agency. And they go, oh, you’re the you’re the junk mail guy.
You send me all this junk mail and I go, no, you do probably get junk mail, but we’re not the junk mail guys. We don’t do that. Everything we send you, there’s a very high likelihood you need or may want at some point. Like, we’re very, very strategic about who we’re sending the mail to. Now, not everybody’s going to respond to it.
As I mentioned, you’re looking at a half percent to 1.5%, but the mail that we’re sending you is relevant. We promise we put a lot of work and effort into making sure that if we’re delivering that piece of mail to you, there’s a high likelihood that you you should be hopefully should be interested in responding to it. And so I always and when I say that, they always say, okay, well and they, you know, I think they feel a little bit better about it. You know, we’re not spamming them. Ultimately.
But that’s not to say that you don’t get direct mail. That’s spam. If there is a spray and pray method to everything with a lot of companies. But but we do, at least here at the agency, make sure let’s make sure who we’re sending this mail is relevant and that they’re at least going to be interested in opening it or interacting with that brand or service.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:38
Is it difficult, Mike, to scale this up? Right? Like if you find this okay, this is the perfect ideal person. You form a list and then you’re selling you’re sending a lot of mail. Like is there saying hundreds of thousands a month, potentially.
Mike Gunderson: 30:57
Millions a month.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:58
Or more, right. How do you find big enough lists for this stuff?
Mike Gunderson: 31:04
Well, so part of us bringing on new clients, that is a criteria for us because we do work in the large volume direct mail space. Okay, so as I mentioned, we’re not doing ABM marketing to 500, you know, clients that you really want to get in front of. There’s companies out there. Sentoso it sounds like you guys do that. There’s companies that that do really good.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:24
People who know that the account based marketing. So you’re really just targeting really very small numbers of niche clients. I mean, small I mean, a lot of the things are small compared to what you’re sending, Mike, but.
Mike Gunderson: 31:35
Yeah, exactly. And so what’s beautiful about our approach and our method is once we find out that winning combination of list, creative and format, we’re able to scale that with amazing accuracy. And one of the criteria of bringing on a client here is we do want to make sure there’s a universe for it, right? So we want to make sure that if it’s if it’s a ZipRecruiter, if it’s a triple A, you know, if it’s a SoFi, you know, if it’s a figure, you know, it’s a it’s a product or service that that lends their services to a lot of different people. And so that’s how we’re able to to scale.
And then, yes, when you’re building models, you are going to get a degradation as you start to increase your volume. And so it’s up to us to continue to refine those models, make sure that the creative is fresh, making sure that the offer is something that’s interesting to get people to respond. And then what’s great is you can start to see that really consistent, you know, performance as you start to scale. You shouldn’t see too much degradation on that. Now, there will be a point where your cost per piece goes down and everything kind of like levels out.
It’s usually about 1 to 1.5 million pieces, at least in our world, to where you really do have to push harder in order to make sure that you’re getting those people to respond. But what’s beautiful about direct mail, and unlike pay per click or other digital services, is as we start to scale. So we go from 100,000 to 200,000 to 500,000 to 1 million pieces. We’re actually our costs to deliver go way down, up to, you know, between 20 and 35% as you start to scale. And you just don’t get that.
If you’re doing that in pay per click, you’re starting to bid against bigger players, bigger players. Everything gets more and more expensive as you scale. This actually gets cheaper and cheaper as you scale, which is a huge benefit to to the folks that market with direct mail.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:30
So, you know, we talked about the package itself. We talked about the list being important. We talked about even the outside of the package, and we showed some stuff on the inside. But I want to go a little bit deeper on the inside because there’s a lot of pieces on the inside, like the messaging, the copy, the offer. And maybe let’s talk about the offer for a second.
I’m going to just you have a really cool and people want to check it out. You you can go to gunder.com and they have a if you go under portfolio creative library. We’re going to pull a couple of these up here. It’ll be fun. So on the inside, I don’t know if there’s any interesting one that we should pull up.
You have a lot of companies here that would be from the inside part. We can look at maybe the offer and the copy.
Mike Gunderson: 34:21
Yeah. You could go to the dish. Dish I think has a couple of, like, gift card offers in there that are interesting.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:26
Okay.
Mike Gunderson: 34:27
Yeah. I mean, the offer is key, right? Because if we’re spending the money and we’re trying to get people to respond on these packages, you know, it’s important to have a good offer. Now, free service is not really an offer. It does get people to respond.
But really what we want is an offer on top of an offer, if that makes sense. We want them to respond to this direct mail package. And so that means that these these are not these are not offers that are meant for everybody. You know, Sally, who lives in California, might get a $150 offer, but Max in Arizona might get a $200 offer. They don’t have to be one size fits all.
That’s what’s beautiful, is we can actually measure the data, measure the response and the conversion. And we could set an offer that makes the most sense for the type of customer that we’re going after. And that’s actually kind of a really cool feature that you don’t get. It’s not like an omnichannel offer where every every single channel that you’re clicking on gets you that $200 offer. Now, oftentimes that does happen, but we always push our clients to just go a little bit further, give us a little tiny bit more to put on this direct mail so we can say direct mail exclusive offer, visit this website, scan this QR code to get this offer.
And that’s a really, really powerful thing because that helps with our attribution, right? We want to make sure that we get attribution back to the folks that actually receive the direct mail piece, and we don’t want them to get this direct mail piece. And then three days later, go into Google and then search up, you know, Dish Network, and then just click on that pay per click ad. And now we’ve lost our attribution. Now we’ll still get a little bit of that back.
So we’ll do a match back, but we want them to respond with this offer on this URL, on this phone number, or on this QR code. And so offers are super, super important. And I always tell people like give them something kind of interesting, give them something good. There’s so many digital things you can do as well. Like a I know with with Easycare we do a, I believe we do an Amazon gift card when they sign up.
So there’s all kinds of things you can do that really can cost you like no money, where you can offer a better deal on the product or service, or you can offer something a little bit more interesting to maybe the person who’s who’s placing the order. So maybe this isn’t an offer to the company, but maybe it’s an offer to the HR manager that’s setting up the meeting for their next catering event, right? So we can make them feel special, entice them to utilize the product, respond to the product, and then once the product does its thing now they’re in, they’re like, okay, this is a very good product. This is something that that we want to utilize moving forward.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:01
Yeah. We’re looking here at the Easy Cater and you can see get your $50 Amazon gift card. I remember I had been settle on the podcast. I don’t know if you follow his stuff at all, but he’s, you know, direct response copywriter. He sends a daily email.
And I remember him telling me, Jeremy, if you don’t have a PS in your emails or in your copy, like if he used some, you know, stronger words, but that’s terrible. Like you should always have a PS they’re going to read the PS and you can see here in this copy, obviously the offer is in the copy twice, but there’s a PS here and that has it in there. And let’s talk about the offer. Break down the offer because like obviously you said exclusive helps really compelling. But there’s an expiration.
What are some other things that are in the offer that are are key that maybe you take for granted. You know because you do it so much.
Mike Gunderson: 37:58
Well, it’s it’s trying to make sure that they drive to that URL, that QR code or that phone number. So if we’re spending this money, we’re spending this time and we’re delivering this piece of mail, we want to make sure that they’re responding to this offer on the direct mail that’s going to give us our attribution, that’s going to prove direct mail is a great channel, and that’s going to allow, you know, obviously, companies to put more spend against this to drive more leads and more conversions. So it is important to have an expiration date. We don’t want people to be getting this offer and just think it’s open ended by having that expiration. It sounds really silly, but having that expiration date really allows them to take action.
Now, if you don’t have an expiration date, that’s fine. Make one. You know, if you don’t have an offer, still put an expiration date. You can say something like respond by, you know, May 31st, 2025. You don’t have to say to get this offer, just say respond by just by putting that in there allows people to say there’s a stop date to this, and there’s a reason why I need to care about it right now.
The other thing for attribution is if you’re not using a Perl or a custom or a custom QR code, personalised QR code, you know having an offer code is a really great way to have attribution back to that direct mail. You know, just saying, hey, put in this code. And then plus when you put that code, it makes the offer feel like it’s more exclusive. I have to have this code in order to take advantage of this offer. So having a code on there, I don’t know if this one has it.
I believe we might have. Yeah. Lunch. Lunch fill right there. Oh no I don’t know.
Maybe this one doesn’t have it, but most of them, almost all of our direct mail either has a customer code, a unique customer code, an offer code of some sort. And then we’ve gone so far. If you’re a serious direct mailer, it’s important to do two things.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:40
There is a thing that says easy care.com/vanity. I know that may be a custom URL. Yeah.
Mike Gunderson: 39:46
But the two things that you want to make sure you know, that that you’re doing is you’re collecting address. If you’re serious direct mailer now So many startup brands that I work with say that’s going to break the conversion cycle. We don’t want to put anything more on the landing page than possible. I say, okay, and that is a problem because we can still do a match back if they if they collect the address. But that address is key to attribution back to these direct mailers.
The second best thing would be the offer code, as long as they’re putting it in and the vanity URL, of course, the vanity phone number, all these things are really great. So making sure that you have that is is wonderful. Now, if you don’t have all that, almost every intake form that I get or that I, that I respond to has a dropdown, it says, how did you hear about us? So even if you have that, just add direct mail. If you’re doing direct mail, just add direct mail to that.
At least you’re going to get a little bit of incremental attribution back to the direct mail piece. If they are just kind of going through your regular sales funnel. But but our recommendation is always to have a separate landing page, something that really speaks to the offer, have a separate offer, slightly better than the one that’s out there for everybody else, and then making sure that you have some way to to to track that back. And that’s through an offer code, a vanity URL. Obviously, a QR code is beautiful because we get to see every scan.
And then of course, a when I say an offer code, a generic offer code like spring sell something like that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:19
And you could see here, Mike on the outside that people can see it, you know, promotional stuff on the outside of the envelope. Like, I don’t have to even open it to see, oh, I get it. It’s almost like a free lunch, right? Obviously they’re giving me a $50 Amazon gift card. If I order, I’m like, okay, yeah, I’ll check it out.
Let’s do it. Right. And then obviously inside you said, you know, all that, that stuff. But that promotional piece is right here. So it’s like prompting me to open it.
Right. You know, right right away I’m I’m interested. Do you find, you know, I had on. I’d like to hear some interesting use cases. I’m going to share, just like one thought, but like I want to hear what are some weird use cases for this?
Like I had the. The the founder of Wild Chips. They’re they’re made of chicken. Okay. I love them.
Jason Wright was great. And I can imagine he was like, you know, I met him at the CrossFit games, you know, because it’s a functional food. So there’s a very targeted list that would probably respond. Right. And I remember the Rxbar founder when I had him on, that’s where they started.
They started with like Crossfitters. Right. I’m wondering if like that would work for them, like sending to all the CrossFit or athletic people who are really want just a high protein, low carb snack and do a direct mail piece for like a coupon code or something like that. That would be. Dude, have you found that CPG companies are using this or.
Yeah.
Mike Gunderson: 42:56
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve worked with a couple of them. There’s a lot of big box DTC companies. You know, you have HelloFresh that do a ton of direct mail, maybe one of the larger direct mailers right before the pandemic. I mean, every box meal box company was doing direct mail, right?
There’s a lot of DTC brands like I know Fight Club we worked with to kind of bring that to, again, Fight Club. Like think about this for a second.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:24
I don’t know what Fight Club is. What is it?
Mike Gunderson: 43:25
So Fight Club is basically like.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:27
I know the movie, but yeah.
Mike Gunderson: 43:28
They give you a punching bag and then an app and then they basically can track your, your boxing and all this stuff. That’s such an innovative product. Nobody really knows what to search for. Like, hey, is there an innovative boxing like you may or may not even care?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:42
I’m not searching. Can I search an innovative boxing app?
Mike Gunderson: 43:46
Yeah, but I can bring that to you by basic demographic information and say this person in their, you know, 20 to 30 might be interested in an at home boxing kit during Covid and then be able to sell them on on direct mail that way. So DDC is very big for that one. Medical. You know, there’s a lot of different companies here. Nom nom.
Now you know bringing dog food to to pets. So you wouldn’t even know to to search for that unless it was brought to you. And that’s the beautiful thing about direct mail is it’s this is being brought to you. You are a pre-qualified prospect. I’m bringing my brand and my product and my service to you.
This might be something you’re interested in based off of your your demographics, right?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:27
I’m curious. Mike, this is just a selfish question for a second. Can people go to the creative page? And I don’t like, you know, I have a dog. I’m like, are these offers still good?
Like, can I go? And actually, can I actually use this offer, like to get $60 off or.
Mike Gunderson: 44:45
Yeah, I mean, almost everything I mean everything on, on our creative library won’t have any likely any real offers, maybe not even any real.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:52
Benefit of them working with you. They get people get you know, they can get sales straight from your website.
Mike Gunderson: 44:59
That’s so funny. Yeah, no, but obviously if you go to our crave library, if you’re interested in direct mail, our Crave Library is a great resource for for wonderful creative and then also our direct mail lookbook, which will ship out to anybody who wants to request it. It’s a hardcover book with a ton of examples, a lot of great tips. That’s been a really great kind of product for us to kind of give it to, to, to new folks in direct mail. And then even folks that are very established in professional direct mailers are finding a lot of really great resources in this book.
Totally. We’re just kind of switch it up and come up with some new ideas that might that might move the needle.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:37
No, I really think, in my opinion, like if someone’s like, well, I don’t do direct mail, whatever. Like you can get ideas for your website, you can get ideas for your social media, you can get ideas for your paid media on the social channels. Because, listen, people are spending a lot of money on these direct mail pieces. It’s cheaper to test it online sometimes just to throw it up and do a quick test and then go further. But I find this gets the mind at least creative juices flowing on on the online stuff as well.
I do want to touch on PostReminder and how you came up on that up with that and how that fits into the picture.
Mike Gunderson: 46:18
Yeah. So post reminder kind of came out of I was talking with my head of data, Alexa, we were just kind of, you know, we were just ideating on some ideas. And what we were looking at at the time was a chart, which was a response curve for I can’t remember what product or what service it was, but what we were. I think it might have been life insurance. And what we were realizing is we would do a response analysis, a match back report, 30 days in 45 days, 60 days in, and then we would continue it.
You know, even past that. And what we were realizing is we still kept getting responses off of the same exact direct mail piece with that offer code many, many months into the future. And what we had realized was what was happening is people were setting their mail to the side and then getting back to it at some point, which, you know, is we all do it, but oftentimes it ends up in a huge stack and we never get back to it. Or when we do get back to it, the offer has expired, right? So what I was saying to her is like, you know, what would be really cool is if somehow we could remind people of the mail that they’re not responding to in the moment.
You know, maybe they got a mail piece. They they looked at it, they were excited about it. And then they had to go pick up their kids. And they can’t respond to it in the moment. So they typically would just stuff it in her purse.
They’d put it in a, you know, on their bulletin board. They’d put it in the stack of mail. What if they could just scan the QR code and say, remind me in a few hours. Remind me next week. Remind me this weekend to take advantage of this offer.
And that’s where PostReminder came from. And so what we did was we built a platform that allows you to scan an enhanced QR code. This enhanced QR code not only allows you to respond instantly, which is what we want folks to do, but in addition to that, set a reminder for the advertised offer or event. Another use case is the gap. So the gap has been using post.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:10
I’ll do that with like restaurant stuff. I’m like, oh, I want to eat here. But like it’ll literally sit in a drawer somewhere and I’ll forget about it. And so it’s a perfect reminder.
Mike Gunderson: 48:21
That’s right. Well, so with the gap, what they do is, you know, friends and family. So they kind of invented the friends and family. So don’t quote me on that. But that’s that’s the first place I ever saw friends and family.
So was the gap. And it was kind of a big deal. The issue is, is that they send out these postcards to bring awareness to the friends and family. So just about 4 to 6 days before the sale starts, which is great. It provides awareness.
I’m excited. I’d love to be able to save, you know, up to 60% on clothing items. That’s fantastic, I love it. I want to pass it to my friends. Well, what we did with them is we added our enhanced QR code.
And then when those folks got that postcard just a few days before the sale started, they scanned the QR code to set a reminder for the day the sale started. So even though you scanned it on Tuesday and the sale’s not until Saturday, on Saturday, when you’re walking around your house drinking your coffee, you get an alert right to your mobile phone that says, hey, today’s the Gap Friends and Family Sale. Click here to get started and start shopping today. And this has been just a really great benefit to their prospects. There’s a lot of the mail that they’re doing is to their card members.
And so they’re getting awareness. They’re transacting in real time. They’re getting a warm up by getting that postcard, and then they’re transacting in real time when the sale starts, once they get that alert. So that’s been another really great use case is when you’re trying to promote a sale, when you’re trying to promote an event. This is perfect.
You know, think about voting. If you’re voting for something. Scan the QR code will remind you who to vote for when you get to the polls. So this has been a really great product of bringing this to market and then starting to see it grow and all these different industries has been really exciting for the business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:01
Yeah. I’ll take a look at this Mike more closely. I’m going to send this. I had a guest, Paul Jarrett of Bulu, and they do a lot of fulfillment stuff, and that’d be really cool for them, whether it’s subscription boxes, because you could see, you know, there’s a lot of use cases for this. You know, from a I see the subscription box thing, you put QR code set renewal reminders.
I mean, that could be a appointment reminders. So there’s really interesting use cases. Obviously I could see it with events themselves. There’s a lot of cool ways people are using it.
Mike Gunderson: 50:35
Yeah. The new one that that we just tested with a customer was trade show. So she, she was she had a trade show booth. So she got the trade show list. Right.
That’s what we typically do. We get an email list and then we also get a direct mail list oftentimes. And so what she did was she sent out a postcard to everybody who was attending that trade show to basically say, hey, come by trade, you know, booth number 387 and get your free sun cap. That’s what it was. And and like, okay, well that’s great.
What do I do with that? Well, before you’d hope to God that she could they come by your booth. But now she put a call to action. Scan the QR code and will remind you on the show floor to come by our booth. And so when they scan and they set a reminder when they’re walking the show floor, it says, come by our booth and get your free hat.
Bam! Redirects them right to their booth and they’re good to go. And what’s beautiful about PostReminder is we really built it for direct mail, but it works awesome for drtv anything with a QR code, you know, out-of-home. And then in addition to that, anything really digital marketing, if you’re doing emails, if you’re doing social media, you can set reminders for those offer and those events as well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 51:43
Amazing. I have one last question, Mike. You can keep it as long or as short as you want. I know we’re right at the top of the hour, so if you have to go, you keep it short. I’ll let you keep talking as long as you want.
But I want to talk about mentors and some of the, you know, really key mentors for you. And I know EO has been a big part of your journey. It could be distant mentors and EO mentors, meaning the direct mail people or you know, so talk about some mentors and some best advice you’ve gotten.
Mike Gunderson: 52:20
Well that’s fantastic. Well, so the my first and foremost my, my, my mentor as a guy named Don Capri, he was a excellent copywriter. And when I worked at this large credit card company, he kind of took me under his wing and he kind of taught me everything about direct mail, and I. Don Caffrey is no longer with us. But I tell you what.
That guy is amazing. And so. So I learned everything from him. He was he was so excited. He was as excited as I am now about direct mail.
And so it was just he was just always an awesome mentor. The other thing that you mentioned was EO, you know, when my business finally hit $1 million, it was me and a studio artist. That’s it. And we we grew the business. We got it there.
And I had a buddy named Jamie Keating who said, hey man, when your business hits this, you have to join EO. It’s like it’s going to change the trajectory of your business. And he told me this like a year. I was I think I was at like 500 or 700,000 in sales. And he told me like once a day.
So I saw him. We’re buddies. We rode motorcycles together. And I said, hey, man, my business finally hit $1 million a year. And he goes, good, you’re coming to an EO event.
So we went there and it was really amazing. And I met people like Hunter Elkins and a couple other folks, Scott Allison, who was also a mentor of mine who was fantastic. And from the day I signed on the dotted line and joined EO, my. My entire business trajectory changed. And I’m not just saying that like it.
It was profoundly different. I didn’t go to business school. I was an art major. I knew nothing about hiring anybody, about finances, about KPIs, you know. For the business, financial KPIs and EO.
And my forum has been in now for 13. Almost 14 years, and it has just been an amazing experience. And so from there I’ve. Been able to navigate a lot of different business changes. I’ve been able to grow.
My business from two people to 30 people, I’ve been able to grow my revenue from 1 million to 20 million. It’s just been a really, really great experience. So I say to anybody out there who thinks they can go alone and do it to themselves, there’s nothing better than having a peer group like that, not only for all the stuff that you learn and kind of what you learn about yourself and your relationships and everything else, but then also just the events that they they put on and the thirst for knowledge and being able to continue to grow yourself and your business. That’s just a really great organization.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 54:44
Love it. Micah. Yeah, I’m also in Chicago. My business partner, John Corcoran, is in San Francisco. So we are huge proponents.
And and just like you said, I’m in even specific peer groups for for different industries too, just because I learned so much. So first of all, like I want to thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey, your knowledge. It’s fascinating. Everyone can check out Gundir at gundir.com they can also check out postreminder.com to learn more. And thank you so much. Thanks Mike.
Mike Gunderson: 55:16
I appreciate it. Thank you Jeremy.
Outro: 55:18
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