Interview with Jeff Dussich and his Best Dang Product

In this episode of Cleaning Processes with Jerry, Jerry interviews Jeff Dusich, the founder of Best Dang Products. They discuss Jeff's journey in the cleaning industry and how he came up with the name for his company. Jeff shares insights about his background and his experience in the chemical and cleaning industry. Tune in to learn more about Jeff and his innovative cleaning solutions and the name you will never forget!

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Jerry Bauer
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Jerry@hospitalitycleaning101.com

Transcript

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00:00 | Welcome to the podcast, Cleaning Processes with Jerry when he interviews a chemical veteran who has designed a product and solution that everyone should consider looking at. Jerry works for ChemStation of Boston and runs the blog Hospitality Cleaning 101. Let us join the podcast.
00:18 | Good afternoon, everybody. As promised, we have Jeff Dusich and his company is Best Dang Products. Am I correct, Jeff? You got it all right. In the website, normally we give contact information at the end, but the website is just called Best Dang. Bestdang.com. Yeah, you were lucky probably to get that website. I would have thought someone would have grabbed that or be happy for a while.
00:45 | I had to pay a premium for it. I originally I have Best Dang Products dot com too, but Best Dang is clearly better. So almost definitely.
00:53 | But it's worth it. OK, so yeah, I was going to say that somebody probably had that for sure. So they're willing to sell it for the right number. Well, thanks for joining me today. I've been following you actually through LinkedIn. I I believe before you've started this company. And I what I'd like you to do is to go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us your history. I did look up. I didn't realize till last night. I realize you were practically practically neighbors. You're in New Jersey. When someone says New Jersey, I'm in New York. I'm on Long Island. When someone says New Jersey, I was thinking south, you know, south. And you just right across right across Manhattan. I was in your neighborhood actually yesterday. Yeah. So go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself
01:42 | and about your company and how you sure you how you have gotten there. Absolutely. So my family has been a has been in the commercial cleaning products distribution business in New York City since the 1950s, supplying office buildings and apartment buildings with cleaning products. And at the same time, and that company obviously is doing well and it's kind of your typical Jan San house. You know, we bring in tractor trailers from Georgia, Pacific, Kimberly Clark, Spartan Chemical, Rubbermaid. And then we have our own sales reps that hit the streets and and sell into those buildings. And we have our own trucks that deliver it. So it's almost like a last mile delivery, you know, for the labyrinth of New York City. And then at the same time, we had a business that was actually spun off, but inspired by that company, a company called Mintex, M.I.N.T. Dash X, where my father invented the world's only at this point, patented an EPA registered rodent repellent trash bags. So I was in charge of heading up sales for that company and I was able to get us actually through a private label, which was interesting. And we were doing a lot of our own manufacturing into Walmart, Home Depot, Costco, Lowe's, Target, all the Dollar General, you know, all these retailers. So I kind of had this commercial cleaning products experience. And, you know, when you're a company of our size, you had, you know, people were eager. Obviously, we're at ISSA every year, but people are eager to kind of show you the latest and greatest, greatest both in terms of cost efficiency, you know, eco friendly or whatever they wanted to phrase it. So I was I was familiar with that world. And then I spent also that that 15 years in the cleaning aisle of consumer products. And I long had an idea to basically cherry pick what I felt were products or technologies or from formulations that were underrepresented in the consumer space, but that I've seen work in one of the toughest cleaning environments in the country. So best thing products were born. So as of January 1st, I split off from my family businesses. And this is a, you know, a Jeff Ducich venture only. But what I did was my very first product. So obviously the name Best Dang products is kind of cheeky. I really came about probably about more than a year ago now. I was looking for a degreaser for my grill and I just searched best degreaser. And I said, man, wouldn't it be so funny if, you know, there is a product called Best Degreaser? And I said, well, it had to be better than that. I have to be like, you know, this is the best dang degreaser I've ever seen. So that's what came up with Best Dang. I love the name and I've had a lot of fun with it. But our first and only product so far is called the all purpose any surface cleaner. So it's a peroxide based concentrate, which, you know, for, for any listeners that you may have that are in the commercial cleaning products business, they're going to say, yeah, you probably just pop it on the wall. You're a slop sink. It'll be really easy to dilute. Well, it's a peroxide based cleaner that cleans everything. Right. So it's all purpose, any surface. It's safe for anything. But the key was dilution, not just the fact that there's not a whole lot of dilutable products on the market because, you know, they look at the back of a simple green bottle, for example, I'm not bashing those guys, but they'll say, you know, you should dilute it. And diluted product, you know, can be used in certain applications. At the end of the day, they really don't want you to dilute it because diluted products last longer. And if they last longer, they're, you know, they're not going to take longer to reorder. So I found a, it's called, I grabbed a bottle. It's called a betix bottle. You're probably familiar with it. I was actually inspired by act mouthwash and the way that it works is you squeeze the bottle. It fills this little measuring chamber to your desired line. You pour it into, I have two dilution bottles. And this was also something unique rather than just selling, you know, blank bottles. I have the hero, sorry, the hero, which is two ounces of liquid to 16 ounces of, and I know we just jumped right into the product, but I'm going, I want to go up to 32 ounces or effectively 30 ounces for the hero. Hero is used for heavy duty cleaning, grout, grease stains on clothing sidekick. It's a quarter ounce to 30 out 32 ounces. So what you're basically getting is a quarter out of this 16 ounce concentrate bottle. This is, this makes 64 sidekick bottles. So it works out to be about 50 cents per bottle. So you're talking about your glass cleaner, your neutral cleaner, your floor cleaner, wood, literally anything, stainless steel, anything that can get wet sidekick can clean effectively. And so there's, there's a couple of different, obviously value propositions here. Number one, perhaps most importantly, at least to a certain faction, there's a huge plastic savings here. So as you know, if you were to buy an R2 bottle off the shelf, ready to use bottle off the shelf, you're paying for 95 plus percent water. Right. And so there's just no reason that we need to be shipping water around the country. So the idea behind the Bex bottle is this little bottle with this kit, I should say for 1999, it packs a serious, serious punch. So, you know, for 64 bottles, if you can imagine what 64 bottles of plastic looks like, we're just basically replacing that with just this one bottle. If you were to just use it as, you know, a light duty cleaner. Here's the cost savings, right? 64 bottles of Windex probably costs you $280 or so. Again, this costs you $19.99. Not, and again, not that you need 64 bottles of Windex in a year, but not only is it your Windex, it's your stainless steel cleaner. You could pour some in a mop bucket. You could pour some in a, a mop sprayer, almost like that, like a Swiffer or an O Cedar, something like that. It's actually something we're coming out with as well, our own version of it. You could pour it over some spun lace wipes to make your own, you know, wipes on the go. I mean, there's, you have a lot of different opportunities. So you have a cost saving, you have the eco saving, and then just the product safety standpoint, not only is it not going to harm anything that you spray it on, but we took the extra step, especially with sidekicks, since that's the one that gets the most usage. And we did a skin sensitivity test with the Consumer Products Testing Company in New Jersey. And they did a full blown test of trying people with all different types of skin conditions to see if there was, you know, any sort of reaction when they basically do a patch of the product and they leave it on them. And there were absolutely no reactions. So you have, you know, safer homes, you know, safer cleaning up your kids' toys, but also, you know, has some, some solid cleaning power behind it. So that's what we're coming out with. And we're doing it with, not what, that's what we're out with. And, you know, I, I feel that I have the credibility coming out of a long, long history of commercial cleaning products. And obviously understanding the way that consumer products, the consumer cleaning products business works, and just bringing it together and saying, look, stop the skew proliferation. You don't need a different product and a different scent for every possible surface and every room. Like, let's just cut out the nonsense. You know, these will replace about 95% of the cleaning products that are home. They save you a ton of money to do.
09:01 | Right. Now I did go to your website a couple of times, but I decided, you know, I did my due diligence before coming on today. I went to your website and dove into it. Yeah. I'm of course, I'm looking at it differently because I'm a chemical guy and I, this is, you know, then I, then I had to put on my different hat as the consumer as well. And it was my fault, but at first glance, I got confused and I was wrong because this is a plus and I'm bringing out the plus. You have, you have the two different bottles and it took me a minute to figure out maybe 30 seconds why two bottles, but then what you're doing is in layman's term, or now I'm not, I'm a layman on chemicals in, in the, the homeowner, you're getting one product, however you're doing a smart marketing tool of you're having it there at their fingertips in two different dilutions. Correct. And it took me a minute, me a minute to figure it out. But I thought, wow, because I have 40 years experience chemicals and chemicals aren't created either. They are created equal in many ways, but then they're not because of the dilutions and not all dilutions mean the same thing. So a great idea. I, that was, that's fantastic. It took me a second to figure it out.
10:32 | Yeah. I'll take it a step farther because I knew, and this happens a lot with introducing not necessarily a new product, but a new concept in cleaning. Right. A lot of people don't, they don't, they don't play in the dilution world the way we did in the commercial cleaning products business. Like I said, where you have a, you know, a command center or something, you know, like you can put in a rain dance and whatever else you do. And then it automatically dilutes. So that's why we took the extra step of really giving each bottle and each dilution, their own identity sidekick. It almost sounds like it's going to be, it's going to be by you the entire day and you're going to spray it and you can spray it to clean anything. Like I said, that, you know, your kids trade for their food or the floor and hero hero. Sorry, this one, hero is going to do all of your heavy duty lifting. I think that sidekick is just not getting done. That's where hero comes in. And it's eight times the, the dilution. So you're a hundred percent right. It is, they are the, the bottles themselves are the same. But in order to kind of have some fun with it and really start to ingrain in people's minds, this concept of one concentrate, two dilutions and really starting to understand where these two dilutions fit in your house. I had to take that extra step. And, and you're, you're not the first person to kind of have to scratch their heads about it. But that's, you know, as they say, kind of like first one through the wall always gets a little bloody. You got to expect that there's going to be a consumer education process and curve, which we're okay with. And I think that, when someone eventually gets it, they love it.
12:15 | It's just a matter of consumer education, which we're having fun with. The light bulb goes on. Now, one of the things with, I'm not sure you're aware that, I mean, you were aware that this podcast is a hobby, a, a tool for me in my real job, because my real job is I work for a company called chem station. We sell refillable tank programs. So there's nobody who understands the savings of plastics, shipping than myself. Absolutely. There's a huge waste of plastics from anywhere from spray bottles down to 55 gallon drums that end in landfills and stuff like that. Plus that creates pollution. And I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but there's a, there's a big, there's an overuse of plastics. Totally. And you're addressing that problem as well. Now, are you, am I correct? There's as of today, there's one product. Are you going to come out with more products or are you just trying to do your groundwork of getting this? Because I know the one can do many different things.
13:30 | I know. So more of the latter. So it's, it's funny. I mean, obviously there's, there's ancillary products that are coming out and coming out with a, you know, being able to offer spun lace wipes on our site and a bucket so you can make your own wipes with the same product. I just mentioned the mop that I designed that is kind of like an OCR or a Swiffer or like a trigger that sprays out the mop in front of you with the, the washable reusable microfiber pad on the bottom. In terms of, so that's so ancillary products. Yes. I have to kind of be careful though, because I, part of my, not part of, a big part of like my shtick is that these two products can replace all these other products. So in order to, you know, and people say, well, what other products? So not really products that I would consider cleaners, but obviously we can have two or three podcasts on disinfectants and what EPA registration means and when and where they should be used. Some people say if at all, I'm not even wading into those waters, but then you have the specialty stuff. You have a furniture polish or a, when it will be stainless steel polish or cleaner, like there's, there are these specialty products to get into. I'm just not, I haven't even scratched the surface of the surface yet and getting my message out there. So I looked into a, a botanical disinfectant, which I felt, you know, EPA registered and I've used it before. And, and you know, there's a private label opportunity. And that, that was something I was considering, but I need to continue to kind of focus the message on the all purpose, any surface cleaner. And then once that brand equity is established, once that, that brand trust is established, I'll kind of take a look again. And I'm always, the reality is I'm always keeping my eyes open, but I'm not in a rush to introduce anything else. You know, if I were to sell pre-made rights, pre-made wipes, pre-moistened wipes, sure.
15:30 | But that's, again, I consider that an ancillary product of this formulation. Now who, and there's a follow up probably question is, but who is your market? Who are you going after?
15:44 | Yeah. So strictly at this point, not strictly, I would say the majority of my time is spent through social media marketing to homeowners, to people that are, are tired of having, you know, aggressive potentially abrasive chemicals in their home that there's a lot of, you know, overspray as an example, you know, when they're cleaning their, their windows with a blue liquid, and all of a sudden their curtains now are discolored. People that are trying to save money that care about the environment and that care about the simplicity of having one product to clean everything. So, you know, you know, Nielsen tells us that that's generally the female of the household that she is normally responsible for purchasing the cleaning products. However, I, I gotta be honest, my customer mix right now is about 50 50 in terms of male and female. And it's really, it's interesting. And we're starting to kind of get some feedback in on, you know, which of our videos really triggered you to purchase. And it could be a grout video. It could be a, a grill cleaning video. It could be a, you know, a glass cleaning video. So when I, when I say that my market is everybody is truly anyone that, you know, cleans their home. But what we're trying to hit on, because that is such a big market we're trying to hit on is focusing on people for whom our core value propositions, money saving, eco-friendly and kind of like decluttering. That that type of thing would be most appealing to you. Most appealing to you just kind of try to, rather than going for a shotgun approach, we're really trying to use a rifle approach first to try to, you know, get, get a toehold into that market. And also just as you can appreciate with this, the world of social media, you know, the tighter your, your, your, your target is the more reasonable your cost per click or your ads are. If I say, Hey, I want to advertise with this many people, this many people might see it once this many people and I save dollar amount might see it four times. And it's usually taking, you know, five, six, seven times before someone ultimately places the purchase. So you kind of have to kind of have to, especially in the beginning where you're trying to be, you know, capital efficient, you kind of have to keep that market narrow to who you think is going to be the
18:14 | lowest hanging fruit. So I have seen, and I, I, I truly love like your videos. Okay. I've seen them on LinkedIn. I've seen, so I did my due diligence for today's meeting. I went to YouTube. I saw a whole lot more that I hadn't seen before. I'm not sure if you'd posted them on LinkedIn because LinkedIn, LinkedIn you can post all day long and your best friend's not seeing it because their algorithms is that's the way their algorithms is right. They show you what you want. They want you to say, so, all right, but here and I didn't do this. I didn't go, are you on Instagram? I mean, yes. Yeah. Okay. Because I would think that's a good place to put out.
19:02 | I mean, wow. That, that's, that's actually where the majority of our resources is Facebook and Instagram, mostly Instagram. You know, it's funny. And then you go into TikTok, TikTok still to me is like the wild West. I don't totally understand it, but what I do know is there's a lot of eyeballs on it right now. So we have to have some sort of presence, but the majority of our customer engagement and interactions is through Instagram. I generally post every day and I try to do kind of like a, a Monday is kind of a straight down the middle pitch or maybe some user generated content with, you know, someone making a video on their own. Tuesday is kind of a potpourri, whatever it is that, that's on my mind that day. Wednesday is generally either a demo day or a, I do some swabbing with like an ATP detector, which has been kind of fun. And then Thursday is another kind of potpourri day. And then Friday, I just kind of go all out for comedy, you know, try to keep it about the product, but you know, at the end of the day, there's a lot of noise on social media, LinkedIn too, but there's a lot of noise on social media. So I'm kind of using a little bit of my personality to try to, to try to break through. And ultimately, you know, it's interesting. And I know I'm answering the question longer than you maybe wanted, but no, what's interesting about learning on the fly about social media marketing is that, you know, people truly do buy from people, not companies, at least in the consumer space. So anything that you can do, even though it, you know, maybe I put out an ad and it doesn't necessarily generate the return on ad spend. I want it in that moment. It is continuing to build this foundation of brand tone, brand trust. You know, I think there's, you know, I think I underestimated the importance of that. I was kind of looking at it much more transactionally in that. I mean, if I'm going to spend a hundred dollars on an ad and I better get $300 in return, and if I don't, it's a complete failure. And it's, you know,
20:59 | there's, there's a little bit more nuance than that. Right. Well, and there's so much I don't understand about social media. It's beyond, I don't understand how you're going to watch Instagram. And it's a TikTok reel. I don't, I don't, I mean,
21:16 | I don't either. All I do know is that, you know, the good people at Instagram want to make it as easy as possible for you to stay on their platform. So if there's something interesting on TikTok, they want to bring you over. So the best thing I can describe, which I think is really, really neat is, you know, as opposed to the kind of the, the look at like the linear television advertising world. And it's just, again, shotgun approach. And that works. If you've got a lot of money and you're a recognizable brand, but what's really, really cool about social media marketing is that I can, you know, I put out an ad, let's say 10,000 people, 10,000 people engaged with it. They either watched a certain amount, maybe they even clicked through to the website. Maybe they liked it. And maybe that's 10,000 people. Well now you take that 10,000 people and you know who that is and you're able to serve them another ad, you know, kind of like, Hey, are you still on the fence about best thing products? Use code best thing deal at checkout for 10% off. So you really, you kind of have these sales funnels going at all times. And a lot of it is, is dynamic. A lot of it is automated. So it's not a world that I was terribly familiar with. But just the efficiency with which you can, you can spend is pretty incredible. And then also testing, right? Testing hooks. We can have the same video ad, but a different hook every time to understand which messages, Hey, are you tired of having, you know, a cleaner's claim that they can take the pet stains out and not work? Or are you tired of all the plastic in your home? Or are you tired of spending the same amount, you know, a ton of money on cleaning products? So you have now you had, you know, you had the pet, you had eco-friendly, you have cost savings and you sort of test those and say, wow, the cost savings is really resonating. Well, now let's shift our budget spend to go after the cost savings. Since we know that seems to be resonating the most with people right now, obviously, and we'll evaluate in a week, but that's been really being able to adjust on the fly and being, you know, a relatively small, nimble company. I've, I've enjoyed it coming out of kind of a big brick and mortar type, you know, environment. It's been really neat to see how, you know, what you can do with the data. And then obviously, you know,
23:30 | what sort of ads and posts, you know, people are interacting with. Right. Right. Well, I appreciate the time you've given us today. Can you please, and this is going to be easy. I asked this to everybody, but your name should be easy to remember. How do, how do people follow you and how do people get ahold of you?
23:51 | So sure. So, at best thing products, I'm pretty sure on Instagram and TikTok is actually the same. It's at best thing products. And then probably same thing as Facebook as well. Just look up best thing products and best thing.com. In fact, I'll set up a discount code for anyone. If you, if you set it up, actually, let's go Jerry 10, Jerry 10, Jerry 10 for 10% off your order. And I'll leave that up. You know, if anyone wants to give it a shot, you know, will you appreciate it? We have a money back guarantee. We think you're going to love the product, but at the same time, we can't stand buyers remorse either. That's great.
24:29 | Jerry 10 at checkout at bestthing.com for 10% off your order. That's great. I do show notes. I will put all of that information into the show notes because it takes me about a week to get all this together and stuff like that. So don't be looking for anything today or tomorrow on it, but hopefully a couple of people take advantage of it. It's been a pleasure talking to you. It's, it's, it's a great industry to be in. We're constantly learning. And, I appreciate all the time you've given me. Yeah, you got it Jerry. All right. Have a great day. Thank you. Thank you. Bye now.