Shawn Casey

Editor: Today, I am thrilled to have Shawn Casey join us, a former lawyer who made the bold leap from corporate America into the dynamic world of marketing. Based in Georgia in the southern U.S., Shawn has not only transitioned careers, but has also carved out a niche for himself in some truly unique markets. He's also the mastermind behind webfire.com, which I'm sure we'll talk about where he offers tools and strategies that help businesses get seen online. Editor: Shawn, thank you for joining us today. Shawn Casey: Welcome. Glad to be here. Editor: Well, I can't wait to dive in, so let me start by asking what motivated you to leave your career as a lawyer to enter the world of marketing? Shawn Casey: Well, that's actually pretty simple, and if you talk to a lot of lawyers or barristers in England, then it's not any fun in most cases. People only come to you as a lawyer like, "I got hit by a car," "Somebody died," "I'm getting divorced," it's generally something bad happened. "I got screwed in a business deal." You're not dealing with happy people, you're having a positive impact by trying to solve their problem, but it's just not a happy time and very negative energy. So it wasn't hard to convince me that I should be doing something else. Shawn Casey: But I was fortunate, early nineties I guess, to start working with a guy named Ron LeGrand. There was a gentleman named Ernie Kessler who said, "Hey, I need somebody to speak at a conference in Washington, D.C." I lived in Pittsburgh at the time and he said, "I just need somebody to talk on a legal topic." Shawn Casey: So I went down, my wife and I, to D.C. on the July 4th Independence Day weekend and spoke at this event and afterwards, people are coming up saying, "Hey, listen, do you have a course that you can... So I know how to do this legal stuff for my real estate investments." And I said, "No." Shawn Casey: I met Ron LeGrand there and I think I'd met him one time before at something in Pittsburgh and he said, "You need to make a course and if you make a course, I'll let you speak at my events and sell it." Shawn Casey: I went home and created an information product, and this is the days when you had a physical printed manual and you had a little square, three and a half inch or whatever, floppy disc and you had cassette tapes. Shawn Casey: We'd cart these things to events and speak at events and that's when I started selling directly to consumers and business owners information products. That was my first foray. Shawn Casey: And that led in 1995. I then moved down to Jacksonville, Florida, became a part owner and the CEO of Ron's company teaching entrepreneurs and real estate investors all over America how to do it, what to do, how to grow their business, how to protect their business, and everything else. Shawn Casey: That's how I got out of practising law and transitioned into marketing and the business of direct response marketing. Editor: Wow. Can you remember how long it took you to put that first course together? Shawn Casey: Well, I don't know. It was miserable. Shawn Casey: Creating products is to me like pulling teeth. People who want to be writers I think, God bless you, someone has to write all the great content, but I would gladly never do that again and have since created many courses and all of them I think are a lot of work, but having to physically type and write? Talking isn't bad. And now of course you can talk, record, get it transcribed instantly, and have a huge amount of content to start with. I'm much better at talking than I am at sitting there thinking about the next sentence. That's brutal. Editor: I understand. It is amazing how things have moved forward in such a relatively short period of time. Editor: You mentioned the physical products, the big folders I guess that you had to ship out as well. Do you ever get reminiscent about those days or are you really glad that now everything can be delivered online? Shawn Casey: I'm really glad it can be delivered online. Shawn Casey: And the other thing was at the time, so really this predates [inaudible 00:04:04] seminars when I was doing this, and the only way to connect other than a one-on-one phone call with customers really or a small conference call was to physically go have an event in a city. That meant I was on the road two or three weeks out of every month seeing customers, speaking at events, delivering followup, three-day training events and that's just... Shawn Casey: For those people who have actually done that, it's not as much fun as it sounds because you're not on vacation. You're just literally in an airport, in an airport, in a hotel, in an airport, in an airport, home, and back out again. Shawn Casey: Now, you can deliver the same thing eventually on teleseminar, which were an amazing thing at the time and then... Shawn Casey: And for those of you that are too young to know what a teleseminar is, that's where people get on the telephone and connect up and it's just audio only, there's no webinar component or Zoom or Skype or anything else that everybody's used to now, but that didn't exist back then. Shawn Casey: And then webinars came in and that was completely amazing that you could show your PowerPoint presentation and your content to people. And now, of course, you can stream live video. It's really a lot of changes. Editor: I can imagine. Editor: Going from a lawyer into this scary world of marketing, did you ever have any doubts that you were maybe moving in the wrong direction or perhaps even in the right direction? Shawn Casey: Well, I never had any doubts I was moving in the right direction as much as that the transition required thinking differently. Shawn Casey: When you go to law school, they just pound it. You got to think logically, take emotion out of it. And really selling is all about emotion. It's not about A plus B equals C. It's if you're experiencing and suffering from A and you would like to get to B, then our product C can help you transition from A to B. Shawn Casey: It's such a different thing and there's so much emotion and different way to look at things. I constantly have to remind myself of that because there are times that I would sum up someone's entire thing that they're trying to do for one of our consulting clients and be like, "Look, it's just this." And then I have to go back and go, "Okay. Let me give you the 10-minute explanation, but the summation is three sentences," but I've got to work them through the emotions of it as well as helping them work that for their clients. Editor: And your family and maybe your partners in your law firm, what did they think when you said, "Okay, guys, enough for me now. I'm going off in this direction instead?" Were they supportive? Shawn Casey: Well, I didn't have any partners, so I didn't have that problem. Shawn Casey: But my wife, who I was in business with, we had our real estate closing business, was and has always been supportive of all my efforts, even when it meant going on the road constantly and part of the time she was actually on the road with me handling the back of the room at events and checking people in and answering people's questions and that kind of stuff. She experienced a lot of that hard life too of doing that at the time. She's always been 100% supportive. Shawn Casey: Of course, now that we're successful it's easy to say this, but she recognises where that came from. Shawn Casey: We like to travel and... We've been in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, in different places, in Austria, all over the U.K., France. Let's see. We took a cruise that went through the Mediterranean and hit seven more countries all over Italy. There's not much of the U.K. we haven't seen. Haven't been in Wales. But other than that, pretty much top to bottom been there. Ireland, we've travelled a lot and in the U.S. extensively as well. Shawn Casey: We're gone a lot, but we're gone a lot because of this internet business where, hey, I can get up in the morning and while she's having a cup of coffee, I can check on stuff, manage stuff, answer questions, make things happen, and I'm not tied down and forced to be like, "Oh, I've got to sit here and run my business." Editor: So you've gone from being a lawyer, you've moved into online marketing. Can you remember the timescale of this? What year was this around? Shawn Casey: Probably in '97 or '98 started just dabbling, trying to just figure out because if you're in direct response marketing... Shawn Casey: And just everyone knows, direct response marketing is where you run a promotion looking for someone to respond, become a lead, become a sale, whatever it is. That would be before the internet direct response mail, that would be telephone calls, that would be infomercials, TV advertisements, all those kind of things. Shawn Casey: The internet, it's just another medium. It's just another way to reach people and you could see early on that if it got where you could push out to people that it would work. Shawn Casey: I started just playing around and then in 1999, I left what I was doing with Ron to focus primarily on the internet. You could see it was going to grow and be the future. Shawn Casey: I'll be the first to admit, I had no idea it was going to get to be where it is now and if I could go back 20 some what? 25 years now to the beginning and know this now, there's some stuff I would've done that would turn me into a billionaire, but I'm not that smart to be able to predict the future in that way, unfortunately. Nor can I tell you what is going to happen in the next 25 years or I'd position myself perfectly for that. Shawn Casey: But the great thing about something where there's a tremendous opportunity and there's so much money flowing, you don't have to get all of it. You don't even have to get a large chunk of it. You just have to get a little stream you can syphon off and there's still potentially hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in that small little percentage of the billions and billions of dollars that are getting transacted every year on the internet. Editor: You mentioned this was happening around 1999. Of course, around that time we had the dotcom boom and bust. Shawn Casey: Oh, yes. Editor: Were you affected by that or was that a bit of a reset for you as well, Shawn? Shawn Casey: It was interesting. Shawn Casey: One of the first things that we did online or I did online was we were generating co-registration leads, which is where somebody signs up on a form and they can sign up for multiple lists at the same time. We were doing that. Shawn Casey: We ran something called, I can't remember what was it, but whatever. We were giving away vacations and a cruise and different stuff to get people to come sign up, and we were selling the leads to companies who were funded by venture capitalists. They would buy the leads from us for a dollar or $2 or whatever it was at the time. Shawn Casey: Two interesting things happened at that time. Shawn Casey: One is that the guys that I was selling leads to more than one of them said to me, "We don't know what we're going to do with this, but we have X amount of money and we have to buy leads. That's our job. Our entire mandate is we raised a million dollars and we've got to buy $500,000 worth of leads because we're going to do something with them eventually. We just knew we should get leads." Shawn Casey: And then as those companies imploded, some of them didn't pay their bills and we ended up getting pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy court later on because they didn't actually have a business model. It was just, look, everyone's throwing money at the internet. They got some of the money being thrown at the internet and thankfully, they gave it to me, which worked out really well for me, but not for their investors. Editor: I'll say. Editor: This is your first foray into working on your own. This is after you've left Ron LeGrand, you've set up on your own at this point, is that right? Shawn Casey: Yeah. Really, the first full solo venture there, although as I said, my wife and I had had the title insurance real estate closing business, we closed house sales and mortgage refinances and that kind of stuff before that, so wasn't the first time that we'd been responsible to generate our own income. Editor: And here we are now 25 years on. You've had incredible success along the way. If we fast forward to your business or businesses as they stand today, Shawn, what are your businesses and what do they look like? Shawn Casey: Well, we're in a lot of stuff. Shawn Casey: I have a partner named Brian Koz who's been a partner with me I don't actually know how long, more than a decade. Before I met Brian and how we really got together was we were at a mastermind event and I was whining because I kept trying to get software developed, people to do stuff that I needed software for that I was getting horrible results. Shawn Casey: The way I developed software was somebody would say the project would cost $10,000 and I'd give them $10,000 and they'd give me something one day that never worked at all. Shawn Casey: Brian said, "I don't understand why you find this so hard." We got to talking and he started showing me stuff that his programming team had done. At the time, it was very cutting edge and that led in fact to us creating a product we should talk about in a minute. Shawn Casey: But why we got together because I could never get programmers to accomplish anything even though I knew what I wanted for the end result. He was great at... And had a great programming team that we still have, our two core programmers have been with him maybe 15 years now and are brilliant. Shawn Casey: As a result of that, the first major project we created, you mentioned before was WebFire and WebFire now has probably been 10 years out there? Shawn Casey: It's a suite of software tools that help you promote your business online, get better search engine rankings, find people who could become leads, find blogs where you could become a guest poster and post up content that would lead back to your website about your topic, just all kinds of different things, 20 plus tools in the original version, and we've grown and morphed. Now, we've added AI resources to it and different auto posting features to it. It's really a robust thing. Shawn Casey: We have customers who have been with us since day one as customers, even in the first beta version that are still thankfully paying us. Shawn Casey: One of the great things about a SaaS, software as a service, business is that people sign up and if you deliver and they're using it, they will stay customers forever. Shawn Casey: That's how we hooked up and we created that and we've created a lot of different products since. Some of them just informational, a lot of them software based. Shawn Casey: We have another product called Macrolead, which is a business lead search engine that we have more than a hundred million businesses that we have sourced and put into this database that you can find their phone number and their email address and their social media information and be able to contact them. Shawn Casey: Unlike in the U.K., in America, you can cold email a business just out of the blue and, "Hey, listen, I see you do this. We've helped somebody do something similar and be successful at it. Would you like me to set up a meeting or that kind of thing even?" So we built an actual email solution that integrates with Macroleads to be able to do that. Shawn Casey: We have another product called Increase Billing. Increasebilling.com, which is an advanced product for e-comm companies where we optimise the transaction flow that comes through their websites. Also, even more importantly for anyone who does recurring billing, we optimise recapturing the declines with the recurring. Shawn Casey: We're going to get down in the weeds for a minute here because people who want to grow their business are going to run into two issues that they're not aware of because you only find them out after you get to a certain size. Nobody says, "Hey, when your business gets big, here's where all your money's going to leak out." Shawn Casey: The first thing is that you go to start selling and you get a merchant account, so you could collect money and process credit cards. Shawn Casey: Excuse me. Shawn Casey: Maybe that's Stripe. Shawn Casey: The problem when you use Stripe is that Stripe automatically approves you, they let you run, and then in many cases, one day, they say, "Okay, you're shut off." It doesn't matter why, you don't have to have done anything wrong, they just decided something you did doesn't make them happy. When they do that, you're out of business, so that really sucks. If you have a membership product of the month, an information membership, a coaching club, you're really screwed because you can't rebuild anybody. Stripe has all the data. This clearly is a bad plan. Shawn Casey: It's similarly a bad plan if you just have a regular merchant account through whoever and you only have one merchant account because if they shut you off, you're still screwed because they have all the data because you didn't know you should collect the data. Shawn Casey: The first thing you want to do once you get to any size is you want more than one way to process credit cards, more than one merchant account. If you ask your merchant account broker, they tell you, "You don't need to do that. Don't worry about it. Everything's fine." But that's what they all say until it's not. Shawn Casey: The day you get shut down and you can look on the internet, there are millions of horror stories of businesses who have no idea what they did wrong but all of a sudden, they can't sell anything. Shawn Casey: Once you get multiple merchant accounts, you're going to discover if you did the research, which nobody generally does, that over time, some or all of your merchant accounts erode in their processing approvals. Shawn Casey: Day one, maybe a hundred people show up at your website, try to order and 90% of them it goes through. Year two, it might be 85%. Year three, it might be 80% because naturally you've created a negative response somewhere in the system of some group of banks who just decided they shouldn't let you get customers through them anymore. It doesn't matter why, it happens. Shawn Casey: You started at 90 and now you're at eight. Well, you're losing 10% of your entire business that you're spending money on doing everything else for and you have no idea because to you it's just, "This is what I get." Shawn Casey: Well, so what Increase Billing does for our clients is we manage and optimise across multiple accounts because not only can we find which ones process better and tell you which ones suck. Shawn Casey: We've had guys come in where they're only getting 40% approvals and they were making great money because they had a great product, great ad campaign but they didn't realise that they were missing out. Literally, they doubled their business overnight once we got them in better merchant processing. Shawn Casey: We optimised the transaction flow between someone placing an order and hitting a credit card company to which mid is going to work better, which one is going to be better for recurring billing, and we're able to optimise all of that and create an increase in someone's approval rate. That's going to be a lift anywhere from three to 7%. Shawn Casey: Now, if you're doing $10,000 a year, this doesn't matter. For our clients that do a hundred million dollars a year, it's a lot of money and most of that is going to their bottom line because they're still running the same ads, the same social media, the same SEO campaigns. All we've done is just make what they do profitable by another million or two or $3 million. Shawn Casey: In a similar fashion, when you have a membership programme, by definition, every month, not everyone is going to pay you. Credit cards are going to not get processed and the decline rate, which... Shawn Casey: We've had this conversation with so many people like, "No, we don't have declines." Yes, you have declines. You're only looking at the approval column if you think you have no declines because you have declines. It doesn't matter what your product is, doesn't matter what we're selling, somebody's declining it but especially, if you have something that's not essential like your internet connection or your utility or even Netflix, you have a decline rate that might be 20 or 30%. Well, if you're processing a hundred thousand dollars a month and you're losing 20 or 30,000 every month, it's just not that much fun. Shawn Casey: We built a whole incredible AI system that optimises those declines and recaptures them. We have an automated system we've built that will recapture 20 or 30% of that. That means you had 30,000 in declines, we're going to go get nine or 10,000 of that back for you without ever contacting a customer, without anyone ever having to contact someone in customer service, or anything else, we're going to recapture that. That's like free money because again, you have the customers already. Shawn Casey: But the secondary part of that is if you recapture those people, they're going to stay on average as long as anyone else that is a member. You don't only get them this month, you get them next month and month after month after that. You might get them three or four more months. You recapture 10 grand. It's like getting $40,000 back because you can't rebill a guy that you never billed this month, but now you get them. You start doing that for customers, even a million dollar customer that's annual. You in the end could recapture a hundred thousand, $150,000 in revenue that otherwise was just getting thrown down the toilet. Editor: That's amazing. It really is. Shawn Casey: Like I said, had to get in the weeds there a little bit, but no one here is looking to make their business smaller. When your business gets bigger, these are things that nobody talks about because generally people teaching stuff haven't done that kind of volume. Shawn Casey: We've done really big numbers, but we now have clients that we consult with that are eight, nine figure, a hundred million dollar companies, so we see data and volumes and things that happen in the real world that a normal person is never going to see behind the scenes what's really going on and what moves the needle. Editor: I think for most people listening or reading this, they may think in many ways, once you've got to that level, this is a nice problem to have and now we've got the solution as well, which is even better. Shawn Casey: Yeah. Well, it's definitely a good problem to have, but so many people, and this is the way... Shawn Casey: Look, when I started out, I was happy to get a merchant account, especially 25 years ago and be able to process credit cards. Shawn Casey: What happens is that as you're learning, someone says, "Hey, get these from Mary. She gets you a merchant account." Great. You get a merchant account and that's all great when you start, you don't need to worry about this. You have never sold anything yet. Shawn Casey: But once you start selling a lot of stuff, you need to figure out where you can optimise your business that are simple things you can do that will get you more money in the long run, but instead of having a leaky bucket approach... You don't even know that it's leaking. Shawn Casey: When we get someone to give us the raw data dump of all their credit card processing for the last two or three months, it's amazing what we find. We built a whole software programme to analyse it. The people are like, "We knew none of this." Shawn Casey: These are smart, successful people, so don't feel bad if you're listening you're like, "Well, I never heard that." Neither has anybody else. It's not that you're dumb or you're not knowledgeable or anything else, it's that nobody knows this because no one's ever said, "Hey, you should go analyse your merchant accounts. You need more than one merchant account." Shawn Casey: When most people find out they need more than one merchant account is the day they get shut down with the one they have. Editor: They always say down there that in business the scariest number is one, so it makes absolute sense to have more than one merchant account, especially if you're looking to scale your business as you say, because otherwise you are playing in the backyard of, as you say, Stripe or PayPal. Shawn Casey: Absolutely. Editor: Both of whom have got a reputation of being quite aggressive when it comes to shutdowns of accounts or at least freezing accounts for a period of time, and then you've got to resubmit lots of documents which of course, can really affect your business and the cashflow of your business. Editor: Shawn, I think one of the things I like about you most is the fact that you are operating in multiple niches as well, niches in many ways. Can we touch on that for a second? Because I know that as you've grown your business over the last 25 years, this isn't just about making money online, is it? This is about different styles of businesses and in different places. Can we just touch on that a minute and maybe explore that? Shawn Casey: Sure. Shawn Casey: When I started out online, really it was I didn't know what existed or what happened or was going to happen. We started off with really just being a service provider. Generating leads, building an email list, really being internally focused. That led to... Shawn Casey: After talking to some people who wanted to know what I was doing, I created a book called Mining Gold on the Internet, which I think was 22 ways, but some number of ways that you could generate traffic and build a list and make sales for free or low cost. That led to me starting to sell that book, and I think we eventually sold more than a hundred thousand copies of that book. Shawn Casey: That got me a big customer base and started connecting me with other people who were training people on how to do stuff online, and that then led me into creating more products that were really information products about just how to do stuff on the internet. Shawn Casey: Boy, I wish I could remember the year. Shawn Casey: You've probably heard of Frank Kern. Shawn Casey: Frank was my biggest affiliate at one point, and this is going back more than 20 years, because I've been in this house 21 years, so more than that. This is still the early days and Frank said, "Hey, I'm going to create this membership thing." And I said, "Well, I'm working on a membership thing." So we decided to create this membership together, and it's the first membership that we know of that was an internet marketing focused membership. In fact, we had to pay guys to build software so we could actually do this. Shawn Casey: Frank, who is brilliant, said, "What I really think we need to do is we need to give people these trainings with this screen capture software that I just found called Camtasia." Shawn Casey: Camtasia, first screen capture software out there. Shawn Casey: He said, "People are going to love this online video training thing. It'll be huge," which of course is exactly right. It's been huge. Shawn Casey: We created this membership called Cashflow Circle that was these periodic monthly training videos and whatever group we did, I don't know if they're weekly or monthly. We did interviews with top-notch brilliant marketing guys, Robert Allen and other people that we knew, was part of the content as well. We had that part as well as the very practical, "Here's how to set up a pay-per-click campaign," or whatever. Shawn Casey: We created that and built that and ran that for a while. And then I just did all kinds of different things that were really just information based. Shawn Casey: Later on, like I said, we became partners with Brian and I got into software as much as I wanted to do software before that, I could never get stuff that worked. And then we moved into all kinds of different software things. Shawn Casey: We created seven years ago maybe now? A business primarily based in the survival niche, which we sold information and training and products like flashlights and knives and tactical pens and all that kind of stuff. And in that business alone sold more than a million products. Editor: Wow. Shawn Casey: We've phased out of that to focus back on software now. We've got three or four more software products that are in the pipeline that hopefully we're going to release over the next couple of months, which range from things to help more with email marketing all the way to an incredible stock analysis programme that our lead programmer has developed over the course of years because he's not only a brilliant programmer, he loves investing and he's tied all that together. Shawn Casey: It is pretty incredible in part because we've got a server that he's done nothing but source as much data as he can off of corporate filings and everything else. That's a huge pile of stuff that no one else would ever be like, "Hey, we should go get however many terabytes of data and stick it in one place and then write a software programme that can analyse it." It's the kind of stuff that big equity firms on Wall Street would do, normal humans wouldn't even think about doing, but he's done it and it will be amazing when it gets released, what you can do with it. Editor: It's an amazing journey you've been on. It's also really inspiring I think for a lot of people. Just the fact that you left corporate America to effectively, I think, discover your own path in this world and even now 25 years on, you've still got those ideas, you're still coming out with new things, you're not resting on your laurels, you're still developing and devising new pieces of software. What is next for you, Shawn? What is it you're working on? What excites you these days? Shawn Casey: Showing up at my office? Shawn Casey: Really, it's... I'm going to turn 65, surely, we were talking about that before and I have no intention of being an old retired guy because I'd be completely bored. Shawn Casey: I live in a country club community. Beautiful golf course. I'm not that good a golfer. I have friends who have retired and they play golf five days a week. I wouldn't last two weeks if I played golf five days a week, I'd be so miserable and frustrated and I would hate myself. I'm much better off playing once every couple of weeks, hitting a couple of good shots that I can remember fondly and then not torturing myself again for another couple of weeks. Shawn Casey: This is fun. The challenge, the adventure, something new that you get to try. Certainly not everything that we come up with works. Some of the things that... We've built some things, both Brian and I, and with other partners that are colossal failures and we've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to build things in some cases that are colossal failures. Not everything works. But when you get something that you can work and you can refine it and you can work on the marketing campaign, that's really awesome. Shawn Casey: The other part of it is that we've been able to help so many people. I know from working with people over the years that there are people that never thought of marketing online or running a business that I have helped to sell millions and millions of dollars with products and services and training and everything else that we've created. We have people whose businesses we have literally transformed with different software programmes and with consulting. That's a great feeling. There's no question. Shawn Casey: Obviously, this is not completely altruistic like you might say in an advertisement, we get paid for it, but we get paid well because we deliver great results. Shawn Casey: Just like whether you are Microsoft or your Google or anybody else, you deliver great things, you get paid for it. Editor: Absolutely. Shawn Casey: But the future is more software and more ways to help people either who want to start a business, grow a business, refine a business online to be able to do more of that because there is still so much opportunity. Shawn Casey: People often ask me, "Well, is it too late to get started on the internet?" The answer is no. Shawn Casey: In fact, when I started on the internet, what was really hard is nobody knew what to do. Everyone was isolated. I was just trying to figure out on my own as was everyone else. And then some people met some other people and masterminds and conferences broke out and eventually, there became steady flows of information. Shawn Casey: But when we first... Twenty some years ago, people would teach that what you really need to do is find a niche on the internet that nobody else is in and then you just go fill that niche. That might've worked in the first year of the internet. Now, there's not a corner of anything that isn't filled with somebody, but none of that matters because now there's billions of dollars that flow across the internet. You don't got to get the billion. You can just get a small piece of that. Shawn Casey: Now, there's so much information, there's so many resources, software programmes to help you. We are, I think oddly enough, coming into really the second golden age of email. The early days was a golden age of email because you could send an email and the responsiveness was amazing. Shawn Casey: But I see now because you could see the data on the growth of email service companies, emails sending companies, how many people are now saying from a business perspective, "I need to build an email list." "I need to be able to reach out to my customers." Not mom and pop businesses, midsize, all kinds of different businesses and people that just want to start and build their own list because if you can send email every day, you can make money. If you've got a couple thousand people on the list, if you're not making money, you're just not sending the right stuff. Shawn Casey: The email opportunity is now completely come full circle. It's really interesting. For a while, it seemed like the response was declining but now people are coming back to it, for whatever reason. It's now becoming much more of a thing. Shawn Casey: In part, if I had to guess, it's that a lot of promotional ideas shifted to social media thinking we can build a free audience. But now if you're not massive on social media, you can't get seen because you're just getting dominated by the stuff that goes viral by MrBeast is killing you. Shawn Casey: I just took my... It's so funny. I've never watched a MrBeast video. I've read the story. He's brilliant. Shawn Casey: But those of you that don't know MrBeast is the beast. He's the king of YouTube. He creates amazing videos and now does stuff like, "Hey, I'm going to give a million dollars to whoever can do this. Stand in place for the next seven days, last person standing or whatever," and films all this and gets hundreds of millions of views on YouTube, who pays in the end through the advertising dollars for all of this. Shawn Casey: But I was on vacation earlier this summer and I took my grandson and his friend and my wife and I went to the beach. The friend, we get back to the condo. First thing, he's got the TV on, he's got MrBeast just streaming every single video on YouTube. I'm like, "Okay, well, these are where the views come from." I saw these videos and I'm like, "Okay, I couldn't watch this for two hours, much less all day long every day." And he knows everything that's going to happen and what's coming up, he's 13. Shawn Casey: But you can't beat MrBeast. So where do you go? Shawn Casey: You go to a playing field that you can play in and you can control your audience. You build an audience on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok that's free. Maybe you get some reach, maybe you don't. It's up to them. Shawn Casey: But hey, if you can push the send button and send email, you control whether that goes out, whether that message gets delivered, and that's still a very different thing than hoping that Facebook is going to show your latest post because they probably won't. Editor: I was going to say it's almost email is so much easier to create as well. You are writing an email as opposed to MrBeast who's got to make these lovely elaborate videos. Shawn Casey: Oh, yes. Shawn Casey: MrBeast bought an enormous warehouse and turned it into a series of film studios and sets that he can use. Shawn Casey: But for those of you that are just trying to figure stuff out, he was the YouTube guy, the video creation guy in high school. I don't know if you know his story, but the start of it's kind of funny. His mom said, "You have to go to college or I'm going to throw you out of the house." He decided to drop out of college to make videos and his mom threw him out of the house. Editor: Right. Shawn Casey: Now, his mom works for him. Shawn Casey: I'm not telling you, you ought to drop out of college and make videos and have your mom throw you out of the house, but it's not always easy getting started but look what some people can accomplish. Editor: Shawn, here's a quick question for you. In terms of AI, is it a big scary monster or is it the best thing ever or is it somewhere in between? Shawn Casey: No, I think it's somewhere in between. Shawn Casey: The interesting thing about AI, I don't think it's scary because there's a lot of people working on it to keep it from taking over the world and for anyone else to be able to create something that could take over the world. It's not like we're the only people that thought about this. We've seen the movies for a long time. Shawn Casey: But AI can be a great tool to help you do stuff. A lot of the existing tools right now, they get sold like they're magic because everyone thinks AI is magic. All I have to do is think. Shawn Casey: It's like Jarvis, Ironman's Jarvis. "Jarvis, explode this." "Do this." "Turn this." "Get rid of this." "Go make me that computer that we just designed in the air with my hands and I'll pick that up on the way out to get a burger at In-N-Out." Shawn Casey: Not quite there yet, going to get there, but not quite there yet. Shawn Casey: And for most people, if they learn to use AI to help them be more productive, that's great. Shawn Casey: Does it replace their ability to think? No. Shawn Casey: If I was coming out of college or university or going in and trying to figure out a career, I would certainly make sure that it's not something AI is going to run over. There are jobs that it is going to or has replaced, and there are more that that's going to happen to. Shawn Casey: It's really powerful for things like customer service where you can, not if you're a little mom and pop, but if you're a multibillion dollar company, you have all this FAQs and database and everything else, you can feed it to the AI and you can give it access to all your customer data and it can do a lot of stuff. It can answer questions and... "Where's my shipping?" and "I want to refund." "Great. Let me process that for you." And "How do I do this?" "Great. Here's..." It's brilliant at that because it's all just logical and it goes in that big AI brain and it's great. It is astounding. Shawn Casey: Again, what we've seen, and I think they talk about this a lot, but I still found is astounding that we put a man on the moon or men on the moon with less processing power than you have in your mobile phone. Editor: That's true. Yeah. Shawn Casey: Your mobile phone now, that was 10 years ago probably that was true. The rate of progress has been phenomenal. Shawn Casey: If you're young, you don't realise it as much I think as we do when you get older because you can look back and go, "Wow, computer used to fill a room just to have a basic computer." Editor: That's right. That's right. Editor: Even going back just 40 years where most homes would maybe have a Commodore 64 or an Atari 800 which of course, were primitive now in the big scheme of things but then were groundbreaking and the fact they could put colours on the screen and make sound and noises. Editor: Shawn, it's a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time today. Editor: For anybody who's listening or reading this who wants to find out more about you and the services that you provide, where should they go? Shawn Casey: Two places, webfire.com for our suite of tools that will help you promote your business online and get great results. And if you've got an e-comm business and you're processing more than a million dollars a year, you should look at increasebilling.com because that's where we can help you get more money from the transactions you're already processing. Shawn Casey: Love to hear from anybody. You can contact us through those sites and reach out, and we wish everyone great success starting building, growing, selling their business.