SBA Deal Structuring to Manage Risk in a Cyclical Industry

But, but for my slice of businesses, folks felt very quickly and I got some feedback from, from owners, you know, folks who maybe we didn't close the deal but you know, built a great relationship that they knew they were talking to somebody who was like them on the phone. That came through. So that for me was good feedback that it was working. I tried. So you talk about digital marketing.

First thing I did was I reached out over email. Turns out I didn't know about the concept of email deliverability. Like, I didn't know that was a thing that just, you know, some people get sent to spam boxes because I'd never done that before.

But even though, Andrew, you weren't doing bulk because usually deliverability is a problem when you're doing bulk outbound. But it sounds like you were actually sending a small quantity of, and manually sending individual emails.

Yep, Yep. Bespoke loved handcrafted emails, you know, but still, yeah, didn't get through. I think I got too cute. I didn't use a dot com email address.

My, my, the, the, the LLC that I created is called Triple Product Enterprises. So I had the brilliant idea of doing, you know, andrew@tripleproduct. Enterprises. I, I think that in hindsight was a really dumb choice that, you know, email systems don't know what to do with a unique top level domain, which is what that Dot Enterprises is, is a, an unusual tld.

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Okay, don't, don't know myself, but I.

Hear the logic and I'm still, I am by no means an email marketing guru. I'm sure there are some folks who are just rolling their eyes at, you know, my, my lack of even basic knowledge. But basically what it did is it forced me to say, well, this isn't working.

What are you going to do next? So I started writing, you know, the, the beautiful, you know, letter hand signed and then put it in a priority mail envelope. Because everybody opens a priority mail envelope.

Right.

And that was a reasonable customer acquisition cost for me if it closed a deal. I think I went like over 15 on those. Just completely.

Yeah.