Some of the biggest advances I've made in my business were from watching other people's products being a customer of other one of the biggest things

I always tell people in my program is that when I started out, the first thing I did was I called mystery shopped every other space in my area.

First thing I did because I was just like, look, first of all I didn't have a mentor, nobody was teaching it, so I'm just like, yo, I need to know what other people are doing right and other people are doing wrong so I can come into the marketplace and sell my stuff accordingly.

I'm mystery shopped every other business in a seven mile radius. How much you charge? What do you, what do you provide? How many customers? I want to know how booked you are. I'm looking at your views on Google, so I can come in and be like, all right, cool, the most book spaces in this area, they're charging this, they're providing that they have this type of level of customer service, they pick up the phone, their website is optimized like this, their Instagram bio looks like that. And from that point on, we were able to scale our business simply by looking at other competitors, even with my digital stuff now, I'm buying other people's products.

Absolutely. I want to know what your onboarding looks like. I want to know what your customer service looks like. I want to know how your product is laid out. I don't know how fast it takes. I want to know if you even communicate with me after I buy your product. Brian, did you work in corporate like eight, six months is so it. First of all, I don't want you to miss what he just talked about. I work at work with clients all the time where I get people students. In fact, and part of my training program is to mystery shop, right? And I don't call it mystery shop. I just tell them to shop their competitors do market research and people really

feel like it's highly unethical to do that. I don't want to go in there and pretend like I'm blah, blah, blah, blah, just to figure out what they're doing. It makes me feel a way. You're probably one of those people. I used to work. I used to work in property management, leasing apartments. And one of our weekly roles was to go and shop our competitors. Or maybe it was monthly, but we would have to go and shop our competitors. And what that meant because we were talking industry language. What that meant.

is if I work at a property, I need to go to be property act like I'm looking for an apartment, right? I'll take off my uniform. I'll go in there and I'll act like I'm looking for an apartment.

Act like I'm just. Well, because that's what that's what marketers do. This is what you have to do. You go in, you act like you're you're acting like this is the information we're taking back to our marketing team.

So we're acting like we're looking for this apartment. I am paying attention to what does your office smell like? What does the leasing office smell like?

Do they have cookies? Do they have coffee? Do they have lemonade? We don't offer any of those things. That might be a deal breaker. Let's get the cookies coffee and lemonade.

I am looking at the journey. How do I get from the leasing office to the apartment? Are they taking us on a golf cart or are we walking all the way through the buildings? Are they avoiding the dirty breezeways?

Or do they have a yellow brick road path that they take us by that they know is always clean when we walk in? Are they showing us fully done models?

Or are we having to use our imagination here with the furniture? All those things matter because if their presentation of their product is better, we need to do something with our presentation.

That information goes back to the sales team. I'm sorry to the marketing team. So sales can perform at a higher level. Brian, I'm interested in what you would tell somebody who says I get it.

I get that Pepsi probably sent somebody on their marketing team or they sent a see there's there's it before I get there there. I don't know if they do it anymore. I'm sure they do and what's that website, not back page. The other one where there's all kinds of listings.

Hey, what are you thinking about? Craigslist, Craigslist. Because back page was one too, but it was for some different kind of listings. Craigslist. You ever know something about it? Never. You know something about it.

I heard about back page. I don't know anything about it, but Craigslist. I'm too young. You're too young for this. Craigslist used to be like the spy. If you needed to hustle up some money, we knew how to go through some Craigslist listings. And there are these mystery shopper positions where you could go into like restaurants and dying at these restaurants or into stores and people send them into hotels and companies. You do that. Companies have like the Marriott has a department of

internal shoppers that will send you to their Marriott properties to make sure that you're presenting correctly or you'll be fired on the spot. So if internally you're being

shopped from your competitors, you're being shopped to I'm interested in hearing your perspective on if someone comes to you and says, I just feel like it's

let's just talk the Dave here because Dave feels like it's unethical to go in and shop somebody else. What would you tell him if I'm to be extremely transparent. And I I with with not with putting aside how most entrepreneurs would feel about this. There's a certain level of entrepreneurship where you kind of have to play the game. And I've noticed this.

I'm used to play the game. It feels sketchy to him. The biggest companies Amazon Tesla Apple they all have a certain level of I don't want to say tactics, but there are things that they just kind of have to go a little bit behind the

book to say like article you got to get the job done. For example, Amazon, what they'll look at is they'll look at all the top selling items and then they'll create their own product. Yeah.

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