Building a Successful Business With No Advertising

Special Guest: Dave Combs

You're working hard, but you're not getting ahead. You feel like you're stuck in a rat race and you can't seem to break free.

It's frustrating, isn't it? You work hard all day and at the end of the month, you still don't have enough money saved up. You feel like you're stuck in a rat race and you can't seem to break free.

The Chasing Financial Freedom Podcast is here to help. On this episode, we interview Dave Combs who shares his journey from his day job to selling his best-selling song Rachel's Song. Dave has been there and done that, so he knows what it takes to achieve financial freedom. Tune in now for some helpful tips and advice!

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Listen to Rachel's Song

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ryan: Hey guys, Ryan DeMent from Chasing Financial Freedom Podcast. I hope you guys are having a great day today on the podcast. I have a guest that I'm very honored to speak with Dave Combs, Dave, welcome into the podcast. 

[00:00:16] Dave: Thank you, Ryan. It's my pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to our great conversation.

[00:00:22] Ryan: Thank you, sir. We met on a matching website for podcasts, and you were able to introduce me into another one and I have to first thank you for that. But the beautiful thing about this is we've had some conversations prior to all this going on. Could you let the audience know a little bit about your background and who you are and then we'll get into your journey and your story?

[00:00:43] Dave: Sure. It'd be happy to. I'm Dave Combs. I live in Winston Salem, North Carolina. I'm married to my wonderful wife. Linda, we've been married coming up on 52 years, this June. Wow. That's quite a journey that we can talk about that too, but she is a wonderful lady [00:01:00] and I grew up in east Tennessee.

[00:01:03] Dave: Product of the mountains of east Tennessee. Erwin is my hometown. It's a little village there, nestled in the mountains of east Tennessee, right on the North Carolina border. And I grew up around music all my life. My both my parents, my grandparents, everybody around me, same played an instrument. And I just it was a natural part of my life.

[00:01:25] Dave: This is a part of our. I'm a Baptist. So in the Baptist church, we have a lot of him singing and choir music and organ and piano, duets, and all those kinds of things. So music was a natural part of my life. And I did not plan to be a professional musician to have my own music business. Initially I went to college and got a math degree and a physics minor and learn how to program a computer.

[00:01:50] Dave: So I started my career. With a company called Western electric, which is was a part of the bail system. As a computer programmer, I programmed with [00:02:00] COBOL programs. Some of your audience might be old enough to remember COBOL as a language, but that was what I cut my teeth on, but I T has been a part of my life also since college my whole career at T and T in Western electric, 22 and a half years was involved in various aspects of technology.

[00:02:19] Dave: So technology is part of my background 

[00:02:22] Ryan: and. So technology music, you have a full, you have a full gamut of life. And that's very impressive. The other thing I got to ask, can you share with the viewers? And I know we just talked about it. Can you share the beautiful beach that you just shared with me?

[00:02:41] Ryan: Because that is peaceful. And I think that's a great piece to segue into a few other things. 

[00:02:45] Dave: I would be happy to let me give myself a choose virtual background. Here's where I spent my last week at the beach. And. Pretty much sitting on my deck, looking out at the Atlantic ocean and the [00:03:00] waves coming crashing in spending, spending just some relaxing time.

[00:03:04] Dave: Get a little closer to the beach here. You can see that it's a very wide beach called sunset beach in North Carolina, and it's just very peaceful and it's a way to get away and recharge. Your your senses and make sure that everything is reset, it gives you a reset. So I'm a really fresh now back from my week at the beach and ready to write a role here.

[00:03:29] Dave: That's 

[00:03:29] Ryan: awesome. So I didn't mean to cut you off so continue, but I just, I digressed on that because I thought that was a beautiful thought process. 

[00:03:37] Dave: Thank you. You can interrupt me anytime. We're going to have a conversation here. It's not going to be dominated by my telling stories, hopefully.

[00:03:44] Dave: But which I can do. And my wife says I have throw in too many details sometimes. So I have to back off on the telling too much, but I started my musical journey. In the middle of my, my my professional journey [00:04:00] with Western electric at T and T it was in that teen in 81 that I sat down at my piano and just played this song.

[00:04:08] Dave: I might, one of my ways of relaxing is to sit at the piano and play. If you're, I know a lot of your audience are going to, if they play an instrument, they can, they will agree that, when they want to just relax, they pick up their guitar, go to the keyboard or Saks or whatever instrument that they play.

[00:04:24] Dave: Just play something. And that's a very relaxing thing to do. I sat down in 19 and 81 in January, one evening after work. Sit down at my piano. I just played this song and I didn't, it wasn't something that I tried to write. It wasn't something I'd heard before, but yet it was something that it seemed like I had heard it before.

[00:04:46] Dave: It was in my mind, it was just an inspiration to me. So I played this song. I didn't think anything about it. A couple of days later, my wife Linda comes home from work and she says, Dave, what is the name of this song? I've got [00:05:00] stuck in my head all day long. And she said, you play it all on the piano all the time.

[00:05:05] Dave: And I said, and she hummed a little bit of it. And I said it doesn't have a name. It's just something I made up. And she says, what you made that up? I said, yeah, I did. And so she said, have you written it down? I said no I've got it up here. It's not going to. She said, oh no, you got to write it down.

[00:05:19] Dave: Cause something might happen to you. A truck might run over you and that song would be gone. So I did write it down and put it in the piano bench. And that was where the songs stayed for a couple of years, we tried to think of a name for it, nothing ever fit. And then in 1983, some good friends of ours had a little baby girl named.

[00:05:40] Dave: And her parents asked me and Linda to be her godparents. So at Rachel's christening service, Linda and I are sitting there on the bench at the church and the listening to the minister say his wonderful words about little Rachel and at the front of the church was a grand piano sitting on the platform.[00:06:00] 

[00:06:00] Dave: It had caught my eye as soon as I walked into the place, but sitting there. And I'm thinking about that piano. And at the end of the formal part of the story, I said Hey Linda, why don't you think about me playing this little tune now, as part of this service seems like it might've fit. So she's held.

[00:06:16] Dave: Okay, great. So I went up to the front and approached the minister and the family and said, it'd be okay if I played a special little song. And I said, sure. So I went over to the piano, sat down and played this tune and I got most of the way through it. I hear some sniffles in the background and some Clare in their throats and it's getting a little emotional I'm back.

[00:06:38] Dave: Look, I had a few tears coming down my cheeks a christening service with a little quick sweet little baby is touching anyway. And so this just turned on the deer ducks, but at the end of the song, I looked over. The little Rachel in the arms of her mother. And I said, from now on this song will be called Rachel's song in her honor.

[00:06:58] Dave: And this, the [00:07:00] name of the song fit perfectly. And everybody was happy. And so that's how it got its name now little did I know what was in lay in the future for me, because of this little song called Rachel song. By as forward three years, I was doing some traveling for Western electric around the country to different factories and at and T or Western electric had a factory in Nashville, Tennessee.

[00:07:25] Dave: So I was having to spend some weeks at a time there in Nashville. We were cutting over some new software for the factory. And so Linda said wow, you're in Nashville. Why don't you go get a demo recording made of Rachael song? Oh, that sounds good. Cause Nashville is music, city USA. There's hundreds of studios there.

[00:07:46] Dave: So I said, okay, so one evening after work, I'd go driving around Nashville, looking for a second. And I'd go over to the part of town called music square. And for those of you familiar with Nashville, it's the two block square area, [00:08:00] basically that has everything musical. And it got the country music hall of fame, the songwriters hall of fame.

[00:08:05] Dave: And. BMI and ASCAP, lots of studio, RCA studios, the old studio that you can tour. And so I thought I'll should find one in here. It was about six o'clock, 6, 6 30 at night. Everything seemed to be closed, but I was driving down this one street called Roy . Now Roy clef, you may remember was a famous country music star in Nashville and grand Ole Opry.

[00:08:33] Dave: And so the name, the street after him. And so on the end of Rhett, Roy place on the right was. Building that looked like a barn that had the barn shape roof to it. And out on the street side, it had a great big waterwheel. I literally a wheel that they'd moved in from an old mill. And so on the side of the building, it said the music, male.

[00:08:53] Dave: Okay. This is encouraging. So I pull in the park. And I see that there's a man sitting at a [00:09:00] desk in the lobby. So I go over and knock on the door and he comes to the door and says, hi, I'm George Clinton. Can I help you? And I said, I sure hope so, I'm looking for a studio to record a demo of a song. And he said come on in.

[00:09:13] Dave: And so I come into this lobby and I look around the big room and over on my left and on the walls that life-size picture of Glen Campbell. And then here's a great big group portrait of the group element. And the Forester sisters. And then there was gold records and platinum records all over the walls around this place.

[00:09:34] Dave: So I thought, wow, this is must be a classic place. Cause I liked to, I liked all those musicians and I told George, I said I've never been in a studio before. He said come on now, I'll give you a tour. And there's nobody recording right now. So we went over into the big studio. So I go into this big room and you could fit an orchestra in this big room.

[00:09:55] Dave: And I had a great big nine foot grand piano over in the corner. And, it was just [00:10:00] obviously a place designed for recording. And he said come on, let's go into the control room. Let me show you where all the fun stuff happens. And so he, we, he opens this great big thick door. It's about eight inches thick soundproof door, and so he opens it up. We go into. Control room. And in there's a console is looked like about eight feet long with sliders and switches and knobs. And you've probably seen those in a studio that they're expensive pieces of equipment. And I think it probably had maybe 32 tracks, it was a long thing.

[00:10:32] Dave: And then he had recording machines around the wall and big speakers monitor speakers in there where you could hear what was being recorded. I said, wow, how much does a place like this cost? He said it's $125 an hour plus engineer. And that was 1986, which if you roll that forward to today's dollars, that's probably close to $400 an hour, which is very expensive.

[00:10:57] Dave: So he said don't worry about it. Cause I [00:11:00] probably looked a little disappointed. He said, the fellow who owns this shop, this studio owns a small one across the. And it's only $15 an hour plus engineer. I thought that's my speed now. All I need now, all I needed somebody to play it for me.

[00:11:15] Dave: And who would you recommend as a good piano player? A good musician to play it. He thought for a second, he says, I know just the right person. He says, name is Gary. B R I M. And he said, I go to Sunday school with him and to church, and he's a great session. Piano player of musician keyboardist give we'll we'll go over in the office and I'll look his phone number up for him.

[00:11:38] Dave: Give him a call. He'll do it for you. So he did wrote down a number for me and I went back to my hotel call Gary pram. Soon as I got. Now, remember this was before cell phones today, you'd I'd have picked up phone right then and called him. But this was before cell phones were even invented. And so I called him from the hotel and got his answering machine about 30 [00:12:00] minutes.

[00:12:00] Dave: He calls me back and says, Gary can I help you? And I said, yup. And told him what I needed. And he said, I'll be happy to do that for you. Anything for George Clinton that can do that just fine. He said, send me a recording of you playing. And I don't know, a lead sheet, a copy of the lead sheet.

[00:12:16] Dave: And I said okay, but what's a lead sheet. I didn't even know what a lead sheet was. I was really naive as I say, green behind the ears. But he splayed it, it was just the the notes and the chords written out on a piece of paper, which I said I have that, but I just didn't know what to call it.

[00:12:34] Dave: So I got back home, mailed Gary, the lead sheet and the recording. Two weeks later, we meet in the studio on Friday August the 22nd, 1986 at 6:00 PM. Never forget it. And Gary comes in this little studio carrying his synthesizer under his arm, and I made him for the first time. He sets up his synthesizer and sits down at the piano and they had a little baby grand.[00:13:00] 

[00:13:00] Dave: This little studio had a baby grand Yamaha. Which I later learned was the first Yamaha piano ever shipped to Nashville from y'all from. Oh, this would be, so this was a really historic piano. I didn't know that at the time. Of course. So Gary starts playing and pretty soon he's ready to record and I'm in the control room with the engineer and he says I'm ready.

[00:13:22] Dave: So engineer pushes record on there and says, we're rolling. And that was the key for him. Start. So Gary plays through most of the song and then he stops and he said I think I can do a better job than this. Rewind it. And let's start over second time through. He nailed it all the way through no mistakes, no problems.

[00:13:45] Dave: And then I was blown away. Now you remember, I had never heard my song played by anybody but me. So I had no idea what kind of arrangement he would do for my song. Anything. And I was blown away because what I was hearing sounded [00:14:00] as good to me as any piece of music I'd ever heard on the radio, it was just professional sounding quality.

[00:14:07] Dave: And so then I thought that's great. And then Gary says no, I'm not finished. He said, we're going to make this into something really special. He said, what I want to do is I'm going to take the piano part and I'm going to double it on the synthesizer on an electric piano sound. I'm going to play exactly what I did there over here.

[00:14:25] Dave: And that'll make it sound fuller and much richer. So after he, after the first verse, then he starts in the chorus with the electric piano party. He's got the headset on and he's listening to the original piano part in his headset and playing the electric piano. And then he says I need to add some strings.

[00:14:46] Dave: We want to give this song. Some, he called it. We want to give it some bottoms, some low strings and some top, some high strings. So he w two more tracks to record and we do the low strings part. Plays that along with the other parts. [00:15:00] Do the hamstrings. And then either out in the middle of the song after the second verse, the instantly changed keys, which I had not done.

[00:15:08] Dave: He changed keys from the QC to the POC, sharp up half a step instantly. And he said I won't right around that. He said, I want to put in some horns to give it a little more punch. So two more tracks and put some horns in there. And then he said, I will have to think that's it. So he comes into the control room.

[00:15:27] Dave: We all sit there and the engineer rewinds the tape and plays the whole thing back. And I couldn't believe what I was hearing this dude. Blew me away. Absolutely. So Gary says I'm happy with it. If you are happy, it's not, that's an understatement. I love it. And so I paid him, I wrote him a check for the agreed upon fee and he got his synthesizer and left.

[00:15:51] Dave: And when he left, of course, I had just met him. And I had no idea whether I'd ever see that young man ever again. It would turn out [00:16:00] that Gary and I would end up going into the studio and record over 170 songs, 120 or so of which I had written myself. And this was over a period of the next 14, 15 years.

[00:16:15] Dave: I would meet with Gary and the studio. He and I became so close. We're still close. We email or text or talk, very regularly. And he is just us. He and his family are just like, they're like brothers and sisters to me and my wife. So that's how the song got recorded. And that one demo song now, for those of you, that will listen to my music on my website.

[00:16:39] Dave: Like you did, Ryan, what you heard on Rachel's song. That was the original demo recording that I did in that with Gary in that studio, an unaltered that is the original recording. So what you're hearing is exactly what I heard that evening in 1986. Wow. 

[00:16:59] Ryan: [00:17:00] So that whole journey I have to ask you're recording and you're finishing it out.

[00:17:05] Ryan: What actually gets you from being somebody that's working for someone else to the point of entrepreneurship music and working full time. Is there a trigger in between all of this, to where. He records it, it gets released and some extra steps. 

[00:17:28] Dave: Yes, but perhaps I should back up a little bit and tell your audience that all my life, I have been somebody who has been enterprising.

[00:17:36] Dave: I'm not sure how you other, you would describe it was anytime there was an opportunity to do something extra. I was always wanting to do it, whether it was to make some additional money or whatever, I'm just a very inquisitive. Active kind of person. Even when I was in the sixth grade I grew our potatoes in our garden and sold them to my elementary school to make some money.

[00:17:56] Dave: So since I was a kid, I was very enterprising [00:18:00] and unlike probably a lot of people, you, even though you're working in a good job for a good company I was working for Western electric, an at and T for 22 and a half years. But even in the back of your mind when you're working for somebody else, you're not the boss, you're not in charge of your own time.

[00:18:18] Dave: You're not the master of your own total destiny. Yeah. You have a master of how well you do in the job you're in, but you can't just jump over into somebody else's job at your own. Somebody else has to make that decision. So I think in the back of my mind, I have always wanted to be independent.

[00:18:39] Dave: And perhaps I think my mother would probably tell you that that I was very independent as a child, which got me into trouble a lot, but but wanting to work for yourself, it was always in the back of my mind. And so anytime an opportunity would come along where I thought maybe I should do this, or maybe I should try that.

[00:18:59] Dave: So [00:19:00] I kept educating myself, it's important, I think to invest in your own self, even when you're working for somebody else, I have some books here that There, I think they're still in print, but like here's one out of it's called the magic of thinking big. It was a, who knows when this is probably in the 1970s, but whatever, but it's a great book about thinking big, think beyond yourself.

[00:19:21] Dave: And here's another one from a really great guy called Maxwell malts. It's called he's the author of Psycho-Cybernetics and the magic power of self-image psychology. So reading these kind of books about. Feeding your own mind and your own ambitions and learning beyond just your education in school.

[00:19:40] Dave: Yeah. I have my MBA from wake forest, but that'll only get you so far. What you really need is to put a lot of good stuff in here in your mind so that when the opportunities do come along, you'll be prepared. And so that's one of the things that got maced, at least [00:20:00] sensitized, I think, to an opportunity as it came along and you asked me, sorry, go ahead.

[00:20:05] Dave: I was going to say, now the music, how the music fit into that was what was the trigger was when I played the recording of Rachel's song for anybody, the response was. Overwhelming. It got played on the radio on a local radio station, which generated phones coming into that radio station. It overwhelmed them.

[00:20:26] Dave: And the station manager called me and said, I've never had this happen at my radio station before this song is just causing us, in today's vernacular. It was, it went viral. Now everybody wanted to hear, they wanted to hear this song. If you're a student of entrepreneurship and. The seeds of any kind of new business is when you have an overwhelming demand for something and people want.

[00:20:48] Dave: That should send off a big red flag to everybody that said, that's an entrepreneur saying here is an opportunity. I better jump on it and find out how I can deal for it. Go for it. Yes, that was the trigger. It [00:21:00] was when I had the recording. Got it played. And I saw the response from everybody that heard it.

[00:21:06] Dave: I said, okay, this is the seed of my, perhaps getting to do something for myself in the future. 

[00:21:15] Ryan: So that, that planted the seed to get you to where that started. How did the next steps play out in? And the reason why I ask is we're in a little bit of a different generation today to where unfortunately, we look for instant gratification because of social media and the internet, and it plays out differently in life explaining or giving some background of how you.

[00:21:40] Ryan: Took that step from there. Once you got that red flag and you're like, oh man, this is it too. Okay. This is the next steps. And taking, I say, taking the bull by the horns and making that leap. How does that play out? Because today that seems to be a little and I say this as is loosey goosey because we don't seem to take those [00:22:00] opportunities serious.

[00:22:01] Ryan: Because they don't come along very often. And if they're presented to us, sometimes we let them go. And I'm still trying to figure that out. And in today's generations of you're presenting an idea or a an opportunity to do something, but you don't want to really do it because it comes with a lot of hard work.

[00:22:19] Ryan: And I think we're missing some of that. 

[00:22:21] Dave: Yes. There's one rule I think for succeeding in any kind of entrepreneurial business. And that is to take action. There's a wonderful book written by my now my good friend, Jack Canfield called the success principles, Reddit. This is this is a wonderful, it's like a PhD in business really.

[00:22:39] Dave: And one of them. But you recall that he talks a lot about taking action. If you have an idea or something is something comes across your path and you just don't take any action nothing's ever going to happen. And so that was in my case, I saw that my music touched people. It, the title of my book [00:23:00] now is called, touched by the music.

[00:23:01] Dave: That was really the that's the, in a nutshell, Is the seed for my music business. It touched people, it touched me and it touched everybody that heard it. And so my mind was saying, how can I monetize this? How can I turn this into a business? And back then, music was sold and heard off of cassette tapes.

[00:23:23] Dave: And then in the late eighties, CDs came around and so I had to figure out how can I get my music? Sold to people that I knew if they heard it, they wanted to buy it, but I had to, how do I get them to first of all, to hear it? And then how do I provide them the product and distribute it to them so they can take it home with them?

[00:23:44] Dave: Basically I started to approach the big box stores that sold. Got nowhere. And as for any of your entrepreneurs that have tried to sell a product, a new product, if you go to a Lowe's or a Walmart or whatever, and you have a new product that is a [00:24:00] huge process to get their product carried by that big box store.

[00:24:05] Dave: Back then, they didn't want to have anything to do with me and my music either. I wasn't a big name. I didn't have a popularity of instant name recognition. Yeah, that was very discouraging. And it wasn't until a friend of mine that I worked with asked me if she could give one of my CDs of Rachel's song to a friend of hers who owned a gift.

[00:24:26] Dave: In old town, Alexandria. Now I was working at the time with 18 T in Bethesda, Maryland, real close to old town Alexandria. And so I said sheriff. So I gave her a CD to give to her friend Jane that owned this gift shop. The gift shops name was. She sold Americana things and it was, anything red, white, and blue patriotic.

[00:24:47] Dave: She sold it in that shop. Wonderful shop. I think they're still in business to this day. Wow. Anyway, so she gave CD to Jane at the America gifts. A couple of [00:25:00] days later, I get a phone call from Jane at the gift shop and she says, Dave, I'm Jane that I own, this is a gift shop. I have a problem. Every time I play Rachel song CD on my CD system and the store system.

[00:25:14] Dave: Everybody comes over to the counter and says, what in the world is that music you're playing? I want to buy that and take it home with me. She says I don't have it for sale. So what can we do? Can we do some business? I said I guess so now at this point I had never sold my music at a wholesale rate.

[00:25:32] Dave: Situation. So we have agreed on a wholesale price. I think it was like $8 for the CD at wholesale, and she was going to sell it for 14 or 15. And that sounded fair to me. And the cost to produce a CD was somewhere around a dollar and something. Margin is important by the way, if you've ever been going to do any business modeling, you better look at your margins because if you don't have any margin, you're going to have a hard time.

[00:25:57] Dave: Exactly. So I had a fairly [00:26:00] good margin at $8 from one, so I made about six or $7. And so she made about the same amount on the retail part. So that was a good run. And as she said, when can you bring him? I said I let my wife and I w we want to, we love to come to old town Alexandria. Anyway, we'll bring you a box tonight.

[00:26:17] Dave: So we did, and she called me about three or four days later and says, Dave, those are all gone in this time. How about bringing me twice as many? So we did that and we made that trip every week for over a year. And she sold thousands of tapes and CDs out of that one. Wow. And so there again was the impetus for, okay.

[00:26:40] Dave: And the idea of, once you see something that works, you think how can I do more of this? And I thought I made me a spreadsheet and remember, I'm a computer person. So obviously I'm going to do a spreadsheet. So I did the get her gift shop. I said, here's how many CDs she sold here made tape.

[00:26:56] Dave: She sold here much and much. I sold them to her for, and here's how much [00:27:00] it costs me. And the difference is what I made. He multiply all that out, down at the bottom. As you grow as profit. Over a period of time, she was, the numbers were really impressive. How much gross profit I was making on those wholesale.

[00:27:12] Dave: So I made another column in my spreadsheet, which is, I said suppose I could just find one gift shop in every state. Let's just do 50 as not agree. Let's just do phases. So I did that. And 50 times column on is in column two. Oh, okay. That's a pretty good number down at the bottom there. And then I said what if we just did five, five gift shops in every state?

[00:27:35] Dave: So that's 253rd, third columns, 250 times call them. And down here to the bottom of the. I said, Linda, come, you've got to look at this. I said, that's three times what I'm making at 80 and T that's it. I think we S it doesn't take a genius to figure out what we gotta do. We gotta figure out how can we duplicate this one gift, shop [00:28:00] America all across the entire country and get our number of gift shops playing in, selling my music up to that number.

[00:28:07] Dave: So that's when the trigger really. I saw that it could work for me that basically I could supplant my income at my regular salary job with my entrepreneur job. And you know that your podcast chasing financial freedom. I was that was my ticket to financial freedom in my mind. At that point.

[00:28:29] Dave: Now there was a lot of, as you said, there was a lot of work between at one gift shop and getting the thousand over a thousand that I ended up getting in the. But, and in today's time, it would probably be a little easier with the internet and Google didn't have Google, didn't have the internet, didn't have email.

[00:28:48] Dave: All we had was a telephone and us mail. So that's pretty limiting. I 

[00:28:53] Ryan: have to ask how many cold calls. 

[00:28:56] Dave: Oh, my gosh, I made so many and here's how the call [00:29:00] would. I would say I would call up a gift shop cold and say, do you sell any cassette tapes or CDs of the music that you play in your shop?

[00:29:09] Dave: They'd either say, no, we don't play. Thank you very much. Hang up. Yeah, we played music, bounce, sell it. I said have you ever thought about it now? I'd get into a discussion about people asking about the music and if they would seem to be fairly open-minded about possibly selling the music, I'd send them a sample, of A package of information or very rarely back then.

[00:29:31] Dave: Very rarely I would get somebody that, yeah, we sell the music and of course I'd send them a sample. I would have to make 30 phone calls to get one yes. That I could send them a package. So I had to get used to hearing no 29 times before I'd get a yes. Now that's a lot of phone calls. My phone. And I've got it in a paper bill and they atomized every call.

[00:29:57] Dave: Most of them were 13 seconds with all the. [00:30:00] And then you'd see one that was two minutes. And that was a yes, but my phone bill came in a box, the size of a shoe box. I am not kidding you. It was a ma unbelievable. And so I did make a bunch of phone calls, but 

[00:30:16] Ryan: see today, if we let's strip out the internet, strip out emails, strip out Google.

[00:30:23] Ryan: If you think about it today, There's not too many people that are going to actually pick up the phone in just, I call it dialing for dollars. I come from a background of call centers that come from a background of collections. So I understand the concept. I even did door knocks but today that's just not going to happen.

[00:30:44] Ryan: And that's what I'm talking about. This is a dying breed because there's that personal connection that you can make with potential connections or people you're going to do business with by just having a conversation. And that just doesn't seem to happen. 

[00:30:59] Dave: Yeah, [00:31:00] the we're in a very fast paced world.

[00:31:02] Dave: In some ways, things have gotten easier because like you said, you can find somebody's phone number, just Google them and boom, you got their phone number, contact, address everything. But. And there's also you and, millions of other people that can do the same thing. So you're in a, not only a crowded marketplace, you're in a busy, noisy marketplace.

[00:31:21] Dave: So how do you break through that noise? Today, if I had to start over today doing gift shops, I would fall flat because now everybody, all the gift shops, all of them play and sell. Most of them, the chains sell their own music. They go into cracker barrel and buy the CDs. Guess who've made this.

[00:31:39] Dave: Oh made by cracker barrel. They've reversed. What'd you call it backward integration. They've integrated backward and make their own same with some of the gift shops, so it's a very, it's still a lot of work. No matter what you're into with your business, your financial freedom is only going to be attained.

[00:31:58] Dave: Usually by a [00:32:00] lot of hard work and sweat and ex you know, you sweat equity into the thing you've got to spend the time and you got to figure out also how to do it. Smartly, you can spin your wheels and do something and confuse activity with accomplishment real quickly, just because I'm making 29 phone calls and getting.

[00:32:18] Dave: That was not very efficient. And I realized very quickly I had to do something to get that down to a much better hit rate. And I did. I'm a math major, a physics minor. I'm very analytical. I said, I had noticed immediately that the places that I called that I had the most success were in tourist areas, tourist towns, because in tourist towns, they're, they got lots of new people coming in.

[00:32:43] Dave: Wonder if people want to buy gifts to take home with them and that kind of thing. So I was having really good luck in tourist towns, but I didn't know where all the tourist towns were now. I sure I knew where Gatlinburg Tennessee was and I knew where Occoquan, Virginia. Places like that, that were [00:33:00] places I had been to myself, but I didn't know where the gift shops were in Missouri or Kansas or California or other places.

[00:33:08] Dave: And, but I knew that if I just didn't, if I just called it at random, I'm going to have to make 30 phone calls to get one. So I knew I needed to find tourist towns. So I wanted. Surely that somebody had a list, chamber of commerce, the state department of commerce surely had a list of their tourist towns turns out they didn't.

[00:33:29] Dave: That was a foreign term to them. There wasn't a data element called tourist town. And so I had to figure out another way to identify tourist towns. There's two characteristics that I came up with being an analytical person of a tourist town. Number one, how many gift shops does this little town have?

[00:33:48] Dave: Gosh, Gatlinburg, Tennessee probably has 75, 85, maybe my a hundred gift shops. And how many people have a permanent residence in Gatlinburg? 10. Not very many actually turns out [00:34:00] that may be, I don't know, 2000 w it may be more than that now, but it was a small number. The point is that there's no way that permanent population could support that large number of gifts.

[00:34:11] Dave: And so what I really need was a ratio of population per gift shop, right? And that ratio should tell you whether or not it's a tourist town or not. We go into New York city and do a population and a gift shop. It's going to be a tiny fraction, but it's a, in a tourist town. It's going to be a very few, New York is going to be a big number in a small tourist town.

[00:34:32] Dave: It's going to be a small. I needed the data today. You just go online and get the data very easily. Then the data nowadays. Yep. Back then I didn't have that luxury. So I had to purchase, literally buy a mailing list, a computer print out hard copy of all the gifts jobs in the United States, all 75,000 of them.

[00:34:53] Dave: It was a printout about four inches, four inches thick, single land spaced, alphabetical by town. [00:35:00] So I had now I had where all the gift shops. Now I needed to know the population. So I worked across the street from the public library. If you want to know any information these days, you can still go and ask a librarian.

[00:35:15] Dave: They know everything. If they don't know, they know where it is. So I've I asked the lady, I said, how would I find out the population of all these towns that I'm looking for? And she says we got this book, and I just happened to have the book with me. I want you to see this because this is things heavy.

[00:35:36] Dave: I'm telling you this weighs about 12 pounds. Wow. Then that teen 90 commercial Atlas marketing guide inside this. He has maps all kinds of wonderful maps of the country. But the big thing is in the back of it. I know you can't read this. This is every little crossroad in the country and the population from the [00:36:00] census.

[00:36:00] Dave: So you can look up any town in any crossroad, in any place and get the number. I ended up buying that book. It was like $125 or something. It was a lot of money back then, but boy was it. Then I had all the population numbers and I could go through my printout and count the gift shops Gatlinburg at 1 75.

[00:36:21] Dave: I've built me a spreadsheet with city state, how many gift shops and what the population was. And then I had the computer calculate. What the ratio of the population per gift shop. That's the last column. Then I had the database spreadsheet sort itself by that P that ratios so that I wanted the smallest ratio at the top from past ending order and lo and behold, the.

[00:36:50] Dave: Tourists towns came to the top of the list in every state. Gatlinburg was the top of the list in Tennessee. Bowling rock was the top of the list in North Carolina [00:37:00] Occoquan. And some of these other places were tops in Virginia. The, it was just obviously it worked. So then using that list. I started doing the telephone calls.

[00:37:11] Dave: Now, since I had the printout that had the phone numbers already, I'd go to write to that tourist town in Montana. Or in fact, I would start on Saturday morning on the east coast and call. And then as at 10 o'clock, when the shops open in the central time, I would start shifting to the central states tourist towns.

[00:37:29] Dave: And then as it got the mountain time, I'd do the mountains, zone say. And to the finally two Pacific time. And I called from 10 o'clock in the morning. So my voice had really didn't call until they all closed because my voice would actually give out. I made so many phone calls, like I said, my phone bill came in a phone in a box, but I made thousands and thousands of phone calls.

[00:37:52] Dave: And my hit rate went from one in 30 though to one in five. And sometimes even. Oh, [00:38:00] wow. So the point of that story is be smart about what you do, figure it out ways to use big data or data, or always constantly ask yourself when you're doing something. That part of it is totally non-productive. And now where you didn't have any hit, how can I do have a better hit rate or how can I be more efficient is what I'm doing and think about how that, how you can do that.

[00:38:23] Dave: And it may not be totally what I did with my gifts. But usually in most businesses, there is a way to, I think Eileen could call it in most buildings. They call it a sales funnel, right? You have a big prospects, and then you narrow it down and narrow it down and finally down, hopefully to a conversion at the bottom.

[00:38:41] Dave: But how to get that down to a really tight number that's very efficient is a real secret to success. If you're going to make a real go of your. 

[00:38:50] Ryan: And that's what makes all this tie this all into today's society is a lot of people are not wanting to do that hard work that you put in to get their [00:39:00] business to where they're at or whatever they're trying to accomplish.

[00:39:02] Ryan: It's, unfortunately there's some instant gratification there and that's why, chasing financial freedom is something I've gone after is just for the simple fact, it's hard work. The podcasts that I have. They were all Johnny side hustles. They were just passion projects behind three other businesses that, that kind of changed everything.

[00:39:20] Ryan: And now they've become more than just Johnny side hustles. They've become businesses. They're starting to flourish on their own and it's just for time now. But the thing that is that I take away from your story is the dedication, the time, the effort, the persistence that you've put into getting your song out to as many people as you possibly could, but you dug into.

[00:39:48] Ryan: The process to get the numbers to where they needed to be in today's society and in what we're doing, that's a lot easier to be done today. Cause you can, like you said, pull everything up, [00:40:00] but the dedication is the piece that misses today that you have that you were relentless because you were so passionate about something that you loved to put it out to so many.

[00:40:12] Dave: Exactly. And then that's really the subject of my book is that this the stories of how I made this journey or in my book. And I hope those of you that liked these kinds of entrepreneurial stories will go on Amazon and get my book. You can get a candle, a PayPal paperback, or you can get an audible I'm, I'll read it to you for eight hours.

[00:40:29] Dave: You won't look too well. 

[00:40:31] Ryan: We'll definitely put it in the show notes for you too. So we'll link it all in there for you, but those 

[00:40:36] Dave: stories. Even, it may not, you may not be a musician or whatever, but the lessons learned that I learned along the way are applicable no matter what kind of business you're in.

[00:40:45] Dave: And it's those lessons of persistence and ingenuity and always being looking for better ways to do something and putting in the time. Taking action, you, when you see an opportunity, You don't stand on your [00:41:00] behind or sit on your behind and think about it for two years. You better take some action.

[00:41:05] Dave: Now you don't want to take just bland action either because you can waste a lot of time and energy and money if you're chasing after the wrong rabbit. But you need to be smart about it but you need to at least be attuned and have your antenna up so that when an opportunity comes along. I better check this out.

[00:41:22] Dave: And we have ways of checking things out these days that we didn't have 30, 40 years ago. You can do a ton of research on your own, on the internet and check something out every which way from Sunday and and be smart about it. 

[00:41:36] Ryan: Yes. And it's being in tune, but also putting the time and effort into it.

[00:41:40] Ryan: And that's the biggest piece that I'm taking away from your story is the persistent. Pushing going after what you want. But then as you said, when the antennas go. You do something about it. And it's the action piece that is, I think is rewarding because that's what I live by is if I see an [00:42:00] opportunity and I don't at least check it out, I feel like did I miss something?

[00:42:03] Ryan: And I started scratching my head, so I try to be open to anything, but there's some times where my plate's full and I just, I can't do it. So I have to move forward. Ultimately taking action one way or the other is the name of the game. And that's really where we're at today in life as, Hey, if you want something better or you want to go after something it's taking action.

[00:42:25] Dave: Exactly. Couldn't agree more. 

[00:42:27] Ryan: Sir, this has been a great conversation. Your S your storytelling and what you share is inspiring one, but two, what you did was. Phenomenal because I need not being not, I grew up with the telephone and the rotary dial and everything, but not having to dial for dollars then, because when I got into the industry, there was dialers and we would manual dial and they were still help.

[00:42:54] Ryan: But I do remember Chris crosses and all that other stuff that we had to do to find people. And that was a pain. And [00:43:00] you didn't have any of those items when you were doing this? That is phenomenal. And what you did is remarkable and thank you for sharing your story with the audience. 

[00:43:09] Dave: Thank you for the opportunity.

[00:43:11] Dave: I enjoy talking about it. And my really my desire is that I will perhaps say something that will trigger a thought with somebody else that can take it and take some action and who knows where it may lead to. 

[00:43:23] Ryan: Yes. There's a lot to be taken out of that. I've got a lot to digest, but I want to thank you again for coming on.

[00:43:30] Ryan: I definitely look forward to having you on in the future. We can have some more conversation about all this because there's, I'm sure there's plenty more we can talk about. 

[00:43:37] Dave: Absolutely. Yeah, 

[00:43:40] Ryan: sir. Thank you for coming on and I will talk to you later. 

[00:43:43] Dave: Thank you, Ryan. It's been my pleasure. All right, bye bye.