Justin Williams | Carolina Marketing Company

Today’s guest is Justin Williams, CEO of Carolina Marketing Co. With over 20 years in regional publishing, Justin’s portfolio includes lifestyle magazines that spotlight communities from Oak Island and Southport to Wilmington and Topsail. His team specializes in graphic design, digital marketing, geofencing, and delivering media and services that connect people and tell the stories of locals and businesses in coastal North Carolina.

www.carolinamarketingcompany.com
Address: 1010 Evangeline Dr, Ste 201, Leland, NC 28451
Phone: (910) 207-0156
Email: cmc@carolinamarketingcompany.com
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Co-Produced by Topsail Insider and Cape Fear Ventures
Edited by Coastal Carolina Network

To learn more about Amplified CEO, visit www.topsailinsider.com/aceo
To learn more about Topsail Insider, visit www.topsailinsider.com.
To learn more about Richard Stroupe, or Cape Fear Ventures, please contact Christa at (910) 800-0111 or christa@topsailinsider.com.

Transcript

ACEO-E03-Justin Williams

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Amplified CEO with VC and serial entrepreneur, Richard Stroupe. Today's guest is Justin Williams, CEO of Carolina Marketing Company. Justin has over 20 years of experience in regional publishing, and his portfolio includes lifestyle magazines that spotlight communities from Oak Island and South Carolina.

to Wilmington and Topsail. Yeah, I actually have some next month. So I'll put it you live in Leland now. Ye a place in surf city. Yep I love coming to surf cit Nothing against Leland, anybody's seeing this, but it's, it's fine. It's just, uh, once you've been to Surf City, you know how it is. Like it's just a great vibe and great people, great community.

And it's getting better. Absolutely. Yeah. I was just talking to somebody this morning. Cause we're going to print on our winter edition. We did an article on her [00:01:00] and I was just trying to get some facts looked at. And, uh, she was just saying like how, you know, she likes the content in it. And I was like, you know, it is, I hate to say it again, but it's my favorite magazine to produce out of all the ones that we do.

I don't know why exactly it's like that, but could it be the vendors and the people, I think so. I just, yeah, everything is just, each community has a different vibe to it. And I'm not saying like there's a bad vibe in one community over another. It's just something, everything's so positive and surf city for the most part.

And. Like everybody kind of seems to support each other as well. Well, you know, it's different in other communities like that. Yeah. So my mom lives in Chilote. So I commute a lot when I'm here back and forth from Pinder to Brunswick. Yeah. Of course, hanging out Wilmington. I agree. It's the, the community here is different.

It's it more cohesive. Yeah. More permanent. I think there's a lot more permanent people that live here. Yeah. Full-time residents. And you can feel it even when you like go to downtown, probably you can feel, and that's a great community too, but that's its own [00:02:00] community. You know? I mean, Wilmington has its own sectors of their own communities.

It's just funny to live in a region and have all these different vibes from like the Southern Brunswick County, like Ocean is shallot area. South Port Oak Island, Leland, Carolina beach, Riceville beach, downtown, and then you got Popsle area. You know, it's just, it really is different feels and you can, if you visit those places enough and you're involved in those communities, you can feel the difference.

Yeah. Growing up. I spent a lot of time going to Carolina beach and the culture there was, was unique, but you know, as a kid you're like, wow, this is a lot of fun. They had like carnival rides. Of course, the Brits donuts, you know, everybody loves the donut shop and the boardwalk, uh, before it burnt down the first time.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Going through a couple of those. The old arcade, you know, it was kind of like an old school arcade. Yeah. Yeah. I used to love that. So the funny thing about, you mentioned Brits donuts. I was eating lunch in Leland yesterday at one of my clients, it's called Locals Tavern, but they also own a Bernie's.

Bernie's, it's like sweet [00:03:00] treats. Yeah. So my daughter about a week ago was like, Hey, can you meet me at Bernie's? She's like, they have croissants and they kind of taste like donuts. And so I was like, all right, there's no way, you know, like, I'm all about croissants, but I'm sure it's not going to be a doughnut.

So, uh, I go there and I like have a bite of it. And it actually tasted very similar to Brits doughnuts. I was shocked. So if you were a buyer, I'd highly recommend try like get you a 12 pack of those. Then go run afterwards, I guess. Because the problem with Brits is like, after 24 hours, they turn into bricks.

Well, that's the, if you don't eat them all in the car on the way. Well, it makes you sick if you eat them. I know. Who cares? It's worth it. Right. You got sugar all over you. Yeah. Like all over your face. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I mean, like, honestly, I can eat four or five of those right out of the bag. Like, I mean, quickly.

Like, it's, it's, it's a problem. So. Yeah, I can remember my grandfather took me when I was like five or six. Down there. And of course, nothing has changed. Yeah. You'd pull up your stool [00:04:00] at the counter and order your couple donuts and a glass of milk. You know, and think about the business model there, like how, how they've been able to continue to thrive is amazing.

Like one donut, four selections of a drink, and I think it's still cash only. It is cash only. That's a whole nother conversation, but, um, wow. Oh, it's amazing. Don't you wish you could do that? Serve one thing and do like 2 to 3 million a year. I actually tried to buy Brett's donut. Really? Yeah. When? Probably eight nine years ago.

How did that go? Not very well Do they kick you out with like a broom or something like No, I mean I told him my story and you know tried to make an emotional connection with him and he resonated with it But I think he wanted to kind of leave a legacy to his family. I think his daughter took it over.

Okay, mr Bivens I believe Interesting, but it's, [00:05:00] it's a family run business and of course it's seasonal when you look at something like that, though, that's, and I know you probably looked at it like this, just knowing you, but like you probably saw the expansion on that and other locations, other areas, for sure, like, because it is totally like you could put one say in surf city or like an ocean aisle or wherever you want it to really.

And it would be, Plus, people are very familiar with it that come and visit. Um, so if they're living in other areas, they would be. Yeah, it's got a great brand. Yeah, it does. And it's fairly, I say simple, nothing's simple, but like as far as like what they're offering, it's again, a donut, one donut. Yeah. So, just kind of an assembly line type.

Absolutely. So are they one of your advertising clients? No, they don't need to do anything. They don't need to advertise. I don't think they do. I don't think they advertise anywhere. Honestly, I think we've approached them for like our discovery map a few times. And, uh, like I did it once when I first bought it and it was just very like, you know, standoffish, not in like a rude way, but just like.

We're good. You know, we open in April and [00:06:00] we close in October and yeah, you know, people know we're here. So, yeah, that's awesome. All right, cool. So you're from Virginia. How did you manage to move to North Carolina? What's the connection? So, uh, graduated high school in 99. Wasn't really sure what I was going to do.

I thought I might do communications. And the reason for that was Me and my high school friends made this video. So our senior project for this class was to make a movie, a mini movie. It was so ridiculous. I just found the VHS of it the other day, I'm gonna burn it over to A DVD and upload it to a YouTube so I can send my friends a link for Christmas, because they're gonna get a kick outta that.

Um, so I was, I edited it like through the vcr. Mm-hmm. And like then I had like this, like organ that I had like. LinkedIn with and like was making like, you know, the musical stuff and I was like, oh, this is really fun I can't think I kind of want to do this And so I didn't know if I was going to college I guess I was my mom like kind of really pushed me thankfully And so I went visited like five or six [00:07:00] colleges and I don't know why I landed on Barton College But I did so I went there and then I end up changing the business.

So thankfully, I don't know It was just that's just kind of how I ended up there from there. I used to go to So my uncle and aunt had a, they owned like a advertising company in the Outer Banks. They produced a restaurant guide, wedding guide, a couple other publications. And I would go down in the summertime in college and like do the deliveries.

Okay. So, um, that was kind of my first, so this was like 2000. I got my first like kind of touch of the marketing business and advertising and publishing business. It's kind of cool. I mean, I wasn't like super interested the first time I was just like trying to get the racks full, keep them full, keep them nice.

So you would deliver the magazines to the racks or actually go out and generate sales? Yeah, so not yet. So the first thing I did in college was just delivery to the racks, you know, go to the warehouse, fill up the van, run my routes. I had five routes a week. Just that was my job. And then when I graduated they had like [00:08:00] a sales position open and they're like, hey Yeah, are you interested in this position?

And I was like, I have no idea what that even means I don't know what I would be doing. So was this a family business? Yeah, it was. Yeah, so I So I went there and I got involved in the process probably within the first month I was like man, I really like this from start to finish especially I think Doing the deliveries, seeing the final product, and then kind of going backwards.

I was like, oh wow, this is really cool. So this is how you pay for this through advertising sales. Right. So this is how you come up with the content through brainstorming with meetings. Or this is how you lay it out with the. Really talented graphic designer of really talented writers. So I just really was intrigued with the entire process.

So I, I remember I used to sit with their graphic designer, like when I would be in the office, like it'd be some downtime in between meetings or something. I'd be like, can you just show me like a couple things on like Photoshop or something? Like, I just, I just want to know a little bit about like how this works.

So I would just kind of learn that. Um, I learned the [00:09:00] skill of. Sales is an interesting skill. It's different now than it was then, but it used to be like, you know, like I remember when I first started, I had a list of like 30 clients that I inherited. And so I made all my calls and I left messages and I was like, okay, cool.

And then I remember my uncle like saying to me, Hey, did you call you? How's it going with your clients? I was like, Oh yeah, it's going good. Um, I left everybody a message just waiting on a call back from everybody and then we'll be rolling. And he was like, And then this is something that really stuck with me for the, you know, until now, well, they're not going to call you back.

And I was like, why? I was like, that's so rude. Like, why would they do that? You know, naive 22. Um, and he was like, well, because they're running their business and they got other stuff to do. And I was like, surely they have time to make a phone call. He's like, no, you need to follow up. Like that follow up this week.

And so I did. And then I was like, I had to get over that, that stage of like feeling like you're being too [00:10:00] annoying, you know? So once I overcame that and then figured out the flow of the process without trying to be annoying, you know, hit him here and then maybe show up here if you see him, like that kind of thing.

Just figure out a strategy. I just really enjoyed that part of it once I figured it out and then meeting the new people. There is no other job that, at least I'm aware of, um, and I talk to my sales guy now about this all the time, where you meet so many different people from so many different backgrounds.

When, when would you do that? Right. I mean, You're out on the street walking on a business. You have no idea what's on the other end. You have no idea of their background. You have no idea where they're from or their family. And then you get to learn all this stuff and, you know, some become friends. It's pretty cool.

Right. So, uh, I just, I think I really enjoyed that part of the process. So that's kind of how I got to North Carolina and then got into this industry too. Okay. Yeah. That's a very interesting background. Yeah. So you're, you're family. Well, your aunt's family, was it your mom or dad, sister, dad, your dad's sister.

Okay. So they ran this [00:11:00] magazine on the outer banks. So they had a, it was an ad agency per se, and they, they published like five, five or so different publications for like. One was like niche in restaurants, one was niche in weddings, one was geographically specific to visitors. I think we did a chamber guide while I was there, similar to what I've done for Pender County in a way.

Yeah, I got to dive into a couple different realms of it. It was just that the Outer Banks was a very, I love the Outer Banks, but it's just a very limited, for that point in my life at 22 years old, 23 years old, I thought I was just very limited on my growth and nothing against them, but working for family, you know, it does have its limitations.

Now, I want to get here and, uh. It's like I couldn't get past here is what it seemed like to me, um, you know, maybe looking back or maybe with some, like, we're just talking about the wisdom when you get in your forties and maybe by the time I'm 50, I'll think differently. I don't know, but, uh, that's just where I was.

I [00:12:00] mean, I, you know, and I think you can probably see it now from what I'm doing with all the different products that I have. Like, that's how I want to operate. Yeah. I want to do. More stuff, want to do it better. And you know, like I just felt limited there. So that's kind of why I moved here to the Wilmington area.

So after college, you, you worked in the outer banks for the family? Yeah. So I was there for like two years. Okay. Um, I moved to Leland and 2005. Okay. And there's kind of a, it's a, I don't know if I've told you this or not, but it's kind of a full story and a cool, like my cool little moment in time here. I was hired to move here at Launch Topsail Magazine in 2005.

And basically an advertising agency was contracted. from the publisher. And so I was hired on a contract basis. So I bought a house in Leland. I got myself a big old, you know, U Haul driving down and I get somewhere. I checked my email or something and the guy had like [00:13:00] fired me basically on the way. He's like, Oh, we can't contract for your services anymore.

Wow. And I was like, Oh my God, what the heck is happening? I just bought a house. Like what am I going to do? So I just started cold calling when I got here for like another job, like trying to like, Cold calling other material type situations like magazines and a lot of those paid like commission only as well And I just wasn't super sold on all of them And I mean it's from what I wanted to do what I wanted to do was something like top slow magazine local lifestyle products Mm hmm.

So I decided to start one in Leland. It's called North Brunswick magazine and From there, it was just like, it was, that was the growing area, you know, it's like, man, somebody's going to do this, I might as well do it, I'm 24, like, I'll fall on my face if, if, and then I can recover if that's the case, uh, or it'll like thrive and we'll do well and go from there, you know?

So we did that and then launched a couple other, more products in between. And in 2018, I was at this business [00:14:00] expo in Wilmington and one of the guys that was, worked closely with the last publisher of Topsail Magazine. comes up to me and he's like, Hey, uh, have you, have you thought about maybe revamping Topsail?

And I was like, Topsail what? Like, what do you mean? And he's like, Topsail Magazine. It's, it's grown a lot since, you know, like 10 years ago. And I was like, And, uh, no, no, I haven't thought about it at all. So he's like, well, you should really talk to BJ. She was the last publisher. And so her deal was like, uh, she stopped publishing in 2014 or 2015.

So it went three years and it wasn't publishing anymore. So I was like, all right, I'll take a look at it. Like, you know, and so we met and I, I got a good feeling about it. Like got a good vibe. I was, you know, like, maybe we should just do this. Like what's another one. So we kind of like. Basically 2019 and I was so it was like a cool full circle moment for me I moved down to launch Topsail magazine got fired had to adjust and then [00:15:00] it came back around in 2019 and I just I was pretty proud of that moment Not every moment's a proud moment, even though it might be a successful moment, but like For that moment, it's just one of those, that edges in time, you know.

The publisher fired you. So it was, the publisher had, didn't even know who I was. Okay. So she actually had contracted through an advertising agency. And the advertising agency is who hired me. And they own the rights to Topsail Magazine? Yeah, so, so she still, she always owned the rights, but she had some kind of contract with them to produce the magazine.

Um, which I'm sure looking back for her was probably a mistake just based on the history of that company because they didn't last very long. And there was a couple of things that were, not to be negative, but there was some not so great stuff that was happening. So yeah, so it was just a very good accomplishment.

I figured even though it wasn't like, you know, I really worked so hard to get this. It just, it kind of happened how it happened. But, um, one thing I was very clear on though was I didn't want to just. Redo another magazine for tough. So I wanted to take the old logo. [00:16:00] I wanted to make sure that she was given credit as the founder and we still do it to this day and always will as long as I have ownership of it.

I just think it's very important. The first publication that we did, I did a little timeline of when she launched it, when it went defunct for a little bit. When we got it, I kind of just. And I wrote some history about her, like, you know, that I was thankful for her for having this idea originally, I thought it was important to do.

So going back to when you were 24, moving to Leland, how do you launch a magazine? Like, how did that work? So, that was interesting because there wasn't much in Leland at that point, so everybody was asking me what I was going to do for content. And I really honestly didn't know. I was just, I had four story ideas.

Like Orton Plantation Gardens was one of them, you could still visit that at that point in time. Town of Leland was doing this beautification project, which never, that particular project didn't come through exactly how that vision was. They were doing this thing in Leland, which if you've driven through there, you've [00:17:00] seen, it's called the Michigan Lift.

So, uh, at that point in time, they hadn't had that yet. They were, you know, it was regular intersections and sometimes there weren't intersections and people were trying to jump across the traffic and there was a lot of wrecks and some deaths. And so that was one of our stories. Then the local animal shelter, you know, so those were the four articles that I had.

In my bank to do when people asked me what I was doing content on the rest. I didn't really know So I was going around actually got a printer to give me some paper that was stapled that would show the exact size of the magazine So I would go around and say this is what's gonna look like, you know, touch it, you know I'm like and some people just thought was absolutely Stupid, I think, because I got a lot of the feedback I got during that time was you're too early.

And so, I mean, maybe one wise moment in that 24 was like, if, if they're saying I'm too early, maybe I'm just right on time. Cause as I've gotten a little bit older, when people say [00:18:00] stuff like that, I don't take it too much to heart unless. It depends on who it is, you know what I mean? So it's like, all right, well, why are they saying that?

Maybe I'm not, you know? But yeah, so I, I had to, I just went around and cold called on Leland on foot. Like I went to all the businesses, came with this little magazine that was mocked up. Had my little rate sheet. And, um, I think I ended up like giving everybody like 50 percent off or something for that first issue just to get it rolling.

And, um, I think our expenses were like. Around 11, 12, 000 for that issue and we'd sold 12, 400 so I covered all my costs, but I mean I busted my butt to try to get some of that stuff done. How long did that take though? What was the time frame? Six months. So six months to basically pull in your advertising.

It was only 14 advertisers there. 14 advertisers and a couple of articles. Yeah. That was the first issue. Yeah. And, uh, I remember one of my really strong writers at the time actually went with her to Orton Plantation Gardens to do the [00:19:00] story. And she was sitting there on the ground and trying to write the story.

And she just did not understand what I was doing. Do you outsource the journalism? Yeah. So all of our, uh, writers are, uh, freelance writers. So we actually assign them on a per project basis. So it's like, Hey, we have a story that we want to do on Saltwater Suites, then I sign that one story out, that writer would contact you, get all the information and then get it back to us and then invoice and then we pay them per project.

Same with photography too. Is it the same writers? No, we have a bank of about 25 to 30 writers and about maybe 15 photographers. And do you put that out for bid and say, we have a story, we'll give you 300 if you want some? No, no, we have a flat rate that we pay. Okay. And it's like, hey, you know. And some people know our rate.

Sometimes it's too low for some people and sometimes it's perfect. And they know the exposure they're going to get to. Have you ever thought about auctioning it off? I could, I just don't know that I could. Our pay is not super duper great. The competitive spirit [00:20:00] between the I mean, I would love to do that, honestly.

Um, but you know, the thing is, is what I find is the writers that are more persistent with me, I end up giving them more. I have one that emails me every two weeks. I love her to death and she doesn't even live here. She lives in Raleigh. So, you know, the ones that are persistent, like it helps me because I, you know, I'm involved in a lot of different things in the business probably should be involved in a couple of less things, but like, nonetheless, I love it.

So, you know, I'm a part of all these things. So when someone is. You know, up in my inbox reminding me, it's going to be helpful for me to be like, Oh yeah, I need to sign this out. And we try to stay ahead of our articles too. So it's all about, like, for example, if something's in the spring, like we might start assignments now, you know?

And that's sometimes that's a problem for some people because what you, what you'll find with newer writers, like, Oh, when's it going to be out? And you already told him it was going to be out in spring, but it's like February, you know? Do you have a word count that you target? Yeah. So typically a word count, it's changed over the years.

So when I first started, we used to do like 1200 to 1500 words. Okay. Okay. Now, [00:21:00] since 2005 though, our attention spans have shrunk very, very small with technology and the way we consume content. So typically we're around 500 to a thousand. It depends on the actual article. A thousand typically is. Thousand words is typically like a feature story.

We'll do a couple of those and then the rest will do like 500 to 750 Yeah, how many stories do you usually target per episode? So we have about 10 that we do in every single issue I try to leave a section in the front four pages for like like when you had your ribbon cutting so so to speak like those kind of things that we try to partner with with a Topsail Chamber of Commerce or all the chambers for all of our other magazines, too.

And then in the back, we try to like have a little bit bigger on coverage. Like when events happen, like for example, Surf City Live that just happened or the Real Housewives of Topsail Island, that bike ride. So we try to do like either a half page or a page with multiple pictures that kind of showcases those events to kind of get the word out about that.

And that kind of stuff is cool because it's community based. You know, [00:22:00] it's important to have in there as well. Absolutely. It's like a shell. It's like, you know, the front is these specific ads. We have our table of contents, got a couple of teaser pages. We've got the events. Then we got the chunk of stories and then we got the more in depth stuff of, uh, events that have taken place in the back.

And, um, you know, it kinda, it kinda works. We're, we're looking at tweaking a couple of things to add a couple more, uh, quick read type stuff. Um, cause I think that's just. The direction we're headed and yeah, talk about the current industry standards with chat GPT and AI. Yeah, so how's that impacted your honestly?

I love it And I think I've talked to you a little bit about this I think one day I was on a webinar or something I think I sent you a link when I was like live on the web, but check this out. This is awesome I'll back up a second because Chad GPT or AI what whatever people refer to it as People are of this mindset that it takes jobs, and I'm not saying it doesn't, but what I am saying is we are working at a much rapid [00:23:00] pace now than we were even in 2019.

So that's five years. In order for us to keep up with that pace, we need tools to help us keep up with that pace and, uh, something like a chat GPT or AI. And if you start doing your research and watching videos and sign up for webinars, paid or non paid, whatever. You, you start to learn these things that can help you.

For example, we have a program called Centra, and it's awesome. Like you can actually, it has, its, has a brain, so like each one of my employees has a brain, so when they sign in, they choose their name, everything they've typed in there, it just goes into the brain. So it, it learns how they talk or type. It learns, uh, the questions that they ask.

And what people don't realize about chat, GBT too is like, you need to talk to it. Like you're talking, like we're talking right now. Mm-hmm . You don't need to, people overly. It's over technical for a lot of people, you know, they're like, well, it's not what I meant. Oh, how should I say this? Well, then you say, that's not what I meant.

That's what you say back [00:24:00] to chat GPT and it'll literally talk to you. So for example, if we need like a quick write up on an event, so let's say, uh, surf city live had an event. Okay. Well, I can type up something really, really quick. This is what happened. This is how many people attended. The sponsors were the, this, this, and this, these were the acts.

Can you make this sound like I'm professional and I know what I'm talking about and I'll spit something back to you. And then you just tweak it from there. And it also spits back. I mean, you know me well enough by now to know that, yes, I'm a professional, but I'm very also kind of laid back too. So like I have a laid back tone to me, so it, it, it spits it back.

Exactly how I would type it. It's kind of, it's kind of wild, honestly. And I agree with you, by the way, I don't think AI as it is today is going to replace people. I think the difference is going to be individuals that understand the tools, the technology are going to replace the ones that do not adapt the technology.

Because as you mentioned, it increases productivity, you know, and it [00:25:00] amplifies, uh, the efforts that you're putting out. So, I mean, this is what I told everybody. So I've been experimenting with this stuff for over a good year and I didn't really, I'm not enforcing it on employees or anything like that, but I am making the tools available.

And I did that recently because I wanted to make sure that. The trial and error I was going through worked efficiently for me. So if it works efficiently for me, I feel like it could work efficiently for them. So about a month or so ago, I introduced them to it. Like, hey, I'd, I'd start messing around with this.

Even if you're just messing around a little bit, you got to learn this or you got to get off. It's like get on or get off type situation. And that's, that's, it's going to be like that at some point. Now, the, the, the advantage that we have as like local lifestyle products, like Topsill Magazine, North Brunswick.

ChatGPT can't write about these communities the same way we can, uh, they can help us do it faster, but I mean, we still need our writers, we obviously still need our photographers, still need an editor, [00:26:00] we still need sales people, we still need our staff, we just gotta be able to move forward. Quicker if we want to stay in the game and I do so.

So when you launched North Brunswick magazine, walk me through over a period of time. When, when was it that you launched Topsal magazine after? So we launched North Brunswick in 2005 and then Topsal in 2019. Okay. So in between there, I've launched South Brunswick magazine. I bought into two Discovery Map franchises, one for Wilmington and one for Brunswick County.

We've done a real estate magazine for Brunswick County. That's once a year. I bought out a hardback book that goes in the hotel rooms for Wilmington. It's called Wilmington Today. And then right after that is when I bought Topsail Magazine. Uh, from there. Last year, we launched a magazine for South Port Oak Island, too.

It's called SBT OKI. So how many products do you have 10. Okay. And we do a lot of other stuff too. Like, like, you know, we [00:27:00] picked up the project for Pendrick County tourism. And we do their guide. We actually revamped their guide. The size we tweaked a little bit. We tweaked the graphics. Um, it looked, I was pretty happy with that project from last year.

So we're, we've got that. And we also do digital stuff too. Like, you know, like weekly newsletters. We'll, we can do geofencing. We can do programmatic advertising. I have several clients where I'll do Graphics for them, press releases, and we can do a lot of different things. Uh, our bread and butter is definitely our, our local lifestyle products, but, you know, we have the capabilities to do lots of other things.

I do custom projects for people. The town of Leland used to have an arts magazine. So we did that for them for 10 years or so till they stopped doing it. But see that then that's another example with them too. So they were doing it for 10 years. We were doing a direct mail. And a new regime came in and thought, Oh, we should cut this back.

So then they started stopping the direct mail. And I'm like, well, you might as well not produce the product though, because they thought you could [00:28:00] just put it places. I'm, I'm so not a firm believer in just putting like small stacks and that's it. You've got to have like a direct mail procedure. You got to have.

Like the grocery stores, where are people going? The grocery stores. Yes. Where are they also going? They're mailboxes. So that's, yeah, those are the two important things. So, um, and I guess they learned that cause they're not doing it anymore. Yeah. So, um, but yeah, so we'll do stuff like that. We'll do custom projects.

We've done one for financial companies. Like I'll hustle and pick up anything just about, yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah. Who are your primary competitors? So that's a, that's a funny word because, um, it's all competitions, all how you look at it to me, I don't feel like there's an exact apples to apples comparison for what I'm doing in my communities that I produce the products.

You know what I mean? There are other people that do things that like, you know, for example, there's a publication in Leland. It's newspaper [00:29:00] print and it has its place and purpose and I'm nothing negative at all there. But, um, you know, it's, it's newspaper print and it's just more like tabloidy in a way.

Um, so I guess that could be a competitor maybe, but I mean, at the end of the day, when you think about it, we're all. Anybody that's producing content's really kind of competing because we're all competing for ad dollars at the end of the day, so it could be anything, you know, I mean, billboard could be a competitor, but I don't, I try not to, I try to work with people that are, if they're not in my exact industry, or if we have a similarity, I try to work with that because I think there's synergies that can be created from, um, I like tops is a good example of that though.

I mean, if you look at the top choice that, you know, Christa and the chamber and we just did like, I mean, that's a good example. Like the, the, the chambers of marketing arm for Topsail or tourism and visitors, you know, she's doing content that's on video now and also podcast and we [00:30:00] do some. Print stuff and weekly newsletters and all that stuff can play together if you have good relationships in your communities, as long as it's respectful, like, and it, it aligns with your brand, I think.

Um, and you just don't like partner with anybody, you know, but, um, yeah. So, I mean, that's kind of how I look at it. So we're, we're all kind of competing, even like, so I went to a conference a couple of years ago and, you know, so it's always the talk about social media, like, and one of the key things I took away from that was, You're competing with your friends whenever they post something on Facebook or Instagram or whatever social content they're producing, you're competing with them when you produce your, when you publish your article on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever it is, that just is what it is.

I was like, ah, I guess you're kind of right though. So we're all producing content. You know, now, but as far as the direct, I mean, it's basically, you know, I guess local advertising companies would be the competition. We just got to try to find our way. Where can we fit in with that particular [00:31:00] company's vision?

Like, I use this as a very loose example because we've never done business together, but like Perry's Emporium big on the radio. Big on TV, love some billboards. So we've never gotten them, you know, in print. And I think it's obviously they're spending a ton of money. And so there's only, but so much to go around and what they have done there works for them.

It doesn't work for everybody the same way it works for them. Right. What I try to do in a case like that, though, is like, we have stuff that can work for you. We just got to get you to think a little bit differently than how you've been thinking. We can still do things that can help get the word out for you because.

What I think we are is like more of a consistent long term advertising situation because we like, I'm not thinking about like you do an ad with me today and tomorrow a hundred people are going to come through your door. That's not, I would never promise that, but I can tell you this, we're going to sit around for a while and we're going to get to the mailboxes, 14, 000 of them every [00:32:00] single time.

We're going to be at the right high traffic areas for pickup. We're going to be in some of the rental. We're going to get the word out. I mean, it's just, you know, it's a longer game than it is some of the other advertising mediums. So your subscriber database is 14, 000. So it's, it's really funky. So our paid subscriber database is about 1200.

That's people that have second homes here and live out of the area. So those are paid obviously postage. It's, it's a must have break even situation for us. Locally, we actually direct mail 14, 000 out to specific neighborhoods. We don't charge them how we make our money on that is sometimes we'll sell a front cover sponsor, like a sticker or a poly bag or a insert into the magazine.

We don't always sell them though, but we still do the direct mail. It's just the direct mail is part of the. It's part of the whole program. It's part of the business model. I do pretty good research on other publications and stuff like that. I don't know of any other publication in at least four states that direct mail is [00:33:00] 14, 000 at their own cost.

So either call me insane and dumb. Or, you know, effective, uh, pretty expensive. I imagine. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, each one runs about 5, 000 just to mail out every single time. Yeah. And you got to think about, we have four quarterly magazines. That's a lot of United States Postal Service money that it's not exactly appreciated when you go to the post office.

Like, Oh God, he's here again. No. So it was kind of funny when I started North Brunswick, the whole way I was trying to stand out was like, how can I get these to homes? So I had this vision that. So like the new home communities have like the mailbox and they have like a little paper box under there. So I was actually, I literally thought I was like, you know what?

I'll just drive around and put them in the newspaper box. I'll do it everywhere in Leland. Not a problem. And somehow I got this odd random meeting with the postmaster in Leland. And I was telling him about that. He's like, no, you don't need to do that. You need to do it this way. And he's like, it costs, you know, and at that time it was going to be like 29 [00:34:00] cents per.

piece or something. And I was like, for a magazine? I was like, I've been mailing these out for like 2. 75 or something. He's like, no, the way you do it, you got to break down the route, but you got to break, you got to do the work yourself. I was like, all right. So when I got my first shipment in my garage at home, I actually took all the boxes into my living room and I had all these bins and I was counting out the routes.

He gave me the count of each route. And I counted them out every single route and took them to the post office myself. And that's how I learned about that direct mail method, about how to get it cheaper. And as we grew, and we actually had a little bit more money than 12, 000, you know, the printer will do it for you, and it cost you, you know.

A couple hundred dollars for them to do it on a machine, but, so I've learned some of those things the hard way, but I've done all of it too. So I kind of know how it works. You know, the way the postal system works, the more work you do for them, the better rate you're going to get is basically what it ends up being a postal system hack.

It is. Yeah. But you know, they, they still hate it though. You put 14, 000 copies of a [00:35:00] magazine in the back of a post office and you want to see some pissed off people. It's, it's real. It's not every post office is like that, but I used to try to, I don't, I shouldn't say this because they might require it now.

I used to give them like bring gift cards or there was 10 bucks to a local subway or whatever it was. Appreciate it. Thank you. I know this sucks. I get it. I've had situations too where like, like they don't make it to the, the homes. I'm sorry. Well, I guess somebody had a bad day that day. I always, always joke around.

Well, it's funny. I used to always ask, like, when someone lived in Leland, like, oh, where do you live? And it sounds like super invasive, right? I don't care where they live. Exactly. I just want to know what neighborhood they live in. So they'd be like, Magnolia Greens. And I'd be like, okay, so did you get the North Brunswick Magazine in the mail?

And if they said, no, I'd be like, what the, so I just used to joke around. It's like, well, if he didn't get it, I guess the carrier is having a bonfire with him. I don't know. Sorry. Like, you know, yeah, and it happens. I've seen, there's a, like a recycling [00:36:00] facility in, uh, Brunswick County, but when we come back from down South, we'll put our cardboard boxes in and I've seen like stacks of magazines of other local publisher stuff in there.

And I'm like, Oh God, if that was me, I'm glad I didn't find that for, for my stuff. And I hope it's never happened, but you know, chances are it probably has. But, um, makes you sick. Gives new meaning to being lost in the mail. Absolutely. Yeah, and there's so many factors that go into the mail too, but when you, the other thing is too, is the way you, if you mail the way I'm mailing these things, you fall into a different class of mail.

You fall into third class mail. And, you know, first class obviously takes, and then second class takes the next. And then third class, they can sit around for 14 days in the post office. They have like up to 14 days to deliver those things. It used to be 14 days. It might be different now. Yeah. So that you could go there today and they got delivered yesterday and then, you know, 10 days from now and they still might be there.

It just depends on what's. What their volume is or what they want to take. They just have to take it by a specific [00:37:00] day. So that makes it a little bit tough on a, like an ad message if you were trying to get it out timely. So, wow. So most of your products are on a quarterly basis. Yeah, so, um, Southport, South Brunswick, North Brunswick, and Topsail are all quarterly.

The rest of the stuff we do is once a year. Those are your maps and things, right? Maps and the hotel book, uh, the Pender County guide, real estate. And do you have a time frame for each one where you're not like super stressed out trying to get multiple products out the door? You used to, yeah, not anymore.

We pretty much stack them. Like for example, we're going to print today for like South Porto Island. Friday will be Topsail and next Friday will be South Brunswick. And then I'm not sure how North Brunswick is going to work because of Christmas, but it'll be right after that. So we just got to stack, stack, stack, stack.

And then we get a little bit of a breather to kind of catch up on some things. It's not very long though, because the first shipments about to come in, right. We're trying to get them out. It used to be. I miss these days in some ways, like, you know, I would [00:38:00] send North Brunswick to the printer and I'd just be like, Oh God, it's like a vacation for like a week.

And then you get it and deliver it and just start working on the next one. And this was before you social media though, you didn't have to do all that. Basically you went to a business, sold an ad, collected the ad copy and you were done. And those days are long gone. So how big is your enterprise? Like how many employees do you have?

Really full time. We have about seven of us, but some of those, uh, employees are subcontracted. And the reason for that is just cause they do have other projects, um, outside of what I do and, you know, I just think it's important for them to maximize their incomes as well. So your full time is more administrative.

Yeah, so, um, I have a full time salesperson, delivery, also does delivery, and then someone that does accounting, production. We all wear a lot of different hats too. So when you, when you take a sales job, it ain't just a sales job. Or if you take an accounting job, a lot of other stuff falls into that. And I make that very [00:39:00] clear in the beginning.

One of the things that I try to do though is, knowing that I'm going to be stacking you with some stuff is, We're flexible. If you got kids and a family, we have a pretty laid back environment in terms of, I mean, it ain't slack, but it's like, you know, if you need to take off this afternoon, take off, like get, get that figured out.

You know, we do have our fun too. So it's, it's, it's, it's cool to produce. Everybody seems to be equally passionate about what we're doing to producing something from nothing every time. Absolutely. So, you know, as long as we can all keep that going and we probably have the best staff that I've had probably since 10 years ago.

Yeah. So, you know, you, you know how it is, you kind of ebb and flow with that stuff and sometimes you're just kind of like, Oh my gosh, like I wish I could fix this or I wish I could fix that. But now we just have a really good thing going right now and just want to keep it for as long as I possibly can.

Yeah. So, and even like, uh, even with, uh, bringing on some interns, like, you know, like they've been super helpful on our digital side of stuff. Like there's all these things I want to do, I just don't have the bandwidth [00:40:00] to do. So they're helpful with, with that sort of thing. And they're helping me see things in a different way.

I like. I try to ask questions because, you know, I still think I'm young, but then you talk to a 20 year old and I'm like, what does this word mean to you? Is dope still in? No, people don't use that. Okay. Yeah. I can kind of just get into their head and how they're consuming content because at the end of the day, like when I started this, we were kind of catering to baby boomers and now that the Gen Z is kind of coming up, they're going to be the next people we're going to need to start.

Trying to cater to, so we've got to start breaking up our content to get our content to them and shorter messages through Instagram reels or what stories or whatever it is. We've got to start breaking up our content. It's in so many different ways. Do you, do you do TikTok at all? No. I think I need to, I was just talking about this with my intern the other day, but we were trying to figure out if we were gonna put our efforts into YouTube with YouTube shorts or [00:41:00] TikTok next, because the reason I wanted to do YouTube shorts is because the pay is better.

Back to you. Mm-hmm . As a publisher. Than TikTok. TikTok is more trends and stuff like that, right? So it's like, God, do I want to, if I come into the office that day and do this trend, maybe I don't feel like it that day. I don't know. Yeah. So I, I feel like we would need like a bigger staff of people that would want it to do that.

Yeah. So. I don't know. I honestly, I don't hate social media. I just hate that we have to do all these things to like try to keep, you know what I mean? So, you know, we basically choose Facebook. That's a big part of our audience. Instagram. It's another big part. I'm a fan of Instagram over at all. And then of course, LinkedIn is more business related stuff, which we haven't really dove into as a company yet, but we should be.

We should like any article that we do on a business should be on LinkedIn and it just should. So, you know, we need to start utilizing that platform a little bit better. You know, we have X [00:42:00] accounts, but like, that's another one. So, so, so many accounts it is. And like, you know, I used to joke back in 2014 too, because that's when people were starting to hire like social media managers.

And I thought, you're nuts. I can't imagine ever. Paying someone to do social media, that makes zero sense to me. And boy, that's, that's some words that I've definitely eaten, like, several years later. Cause I get it now. Once you, once you dabble in it a little bit, you realize how much work it really can be.

Keeping up with comments, making sure you're met, like, messages. There's so many different things, you know. Yeah, it's a full time thing. It is. And people have an expectation that if they send you a DM or a message. Yeah, you better be on it. You better respond because within an hour or two, hello, is anybody here?

Yep. Yeah. And I, I really, that's one of the things that I really dislike about the business economy today, if it's that important, again, this is me. This is why I asked 20 some year olds questions like this, because I need to evolve from this mindset. I [00:43:00] must feel like an old man in the room sometimes because.

You know, an important business question is an email or a phone call to me. It's not a DM to my Facebook messenger or Instagram. Um, because if you, if you take a business owners, you know, day to day, and let's just say you have LinkedIn messages and Facebook messages and Instagram messages and. Emails and phone calls and texts and it gets, I mean, that's a lot to maintain, like, it's just, we need to centralize this somehow.

Right. 100%. But that's why you hire people to do the social media. So if some messages like that comes through, they can screenshot it and send it to you or whatever they need to do. So I don't know. It's just one of those things. And I don't think the like Facebook, for example, doesn't help you with that because let's say somebody sends you a DM, you see it.

Something happens in real life. Yeah. And you forget to respond. Yeah. And then you get into that conversation and then say you get a phone call. Okay, well now your phone is not on that message anymore. Mm-hmm . So [00:44:00] you don't know when you're gonna remember that message again because you don't know what other stuff is gonna come at you after that, right?

Mm-hmm . Well, if you don't respond, say 24 hours, that hits you on, if you ever notice that when you go to somebody's business page or, or you try to send them a message, it'll say, typically responds. Two days or one hour, or so they kind of hurt you with that a little bit. So that kind of makes you look as we keep evolving, evolving into that world.

That makes you look a little bit, I'm professional in a way. So, yeah, and we've had in our channels, we've had to put automatic responses. We don't monitor this box. Yeah. Here's our phone number. Give us a call. You know, we're glad to talk to you. I hate to say, I don't know if we have that or not. We do have somebody that maintains these accounts.

I think if something came through, I would see it. But again, Hey, add that to the to do list for today. See her and throw out some more ideas. Yeah. Yeah. So what's your annual income? So we actually just broke a million on revenue last [00:45:00] year. So for the first time ever, I made that my goal for that year because we were so close for so many years and I was like, why aren't we, why aren't we getting there?

And what I kind of found kind of comes back to me personally, I wasn't fully focused on the business like I should have been, I had some distractions going on and so when I got it together. I just honed in on it. I was like, how can we, how can we get here? All right. So I figured that out, pick this project up.

That's when I added the South port version of one of our magazines, really put some effort into building Topsail during that time, spending a lot more time at my place up there and with the community and all that stuff really did pay off over time. And so I was noticed our revenue went up. So I think this year we're going to hit 1.

2, which is pretty good. That's fantastic. Now for me, it's, it's. I love it. Like, I just feel so good about it. And I know a lot of other businesses would look at that, you know, and be like, eh, well, that's great. That's cute. You know, but to me, it's, it's a heck of an accomplishment and right for to, to be in the, you know, 75 percent of our revenues [00:46:00] print it's 2024.

Yeah. So I'm pretty happy about that number. So it's just a matter of maintaining or. Evolving from that, though, this is where, you know, a lot of the other stuff comes in digital stuff that integrates into our print, which is what I've shared. I've shared some of that with you. So, yeah, I mean, it's pretty, I'm stoked about it.

And especially when you reach it before the end of the year, when I just did my sales for November and calculated everything, we have like a board where we keep track of sales, you know, just to kind of keep it like fun. And we hit it and I was like, Oh, it's awesome. And I still got December, you know? So it's, it's, it's cool.

Like I'm, I'm just, I'm very proud of everybody that's contributed to this because it doesn't just go back to like. Um, me or sales, we have Sandy in the office that is the backbone of our production. Brian's out there meeting people and selling and delivering, getting the product out. Our graphics, the people that design, they have one designs, the ad Sam and the other lays it out, Teresa, [00:47:00] their creativity with sometimes collaboration with me and sometimes not.

And so it's like all. And then our editor, which is. Uh, Molly, who I'd put her up against anybody on the East Coast, really, she's just so great. Between all of that, that synergy together, it just really is creating a great product in everything that we do. Absolutely. You know, so I mean, honestly, it's just, I owe it to all of them.

It's funny too, though, because There's that weird range when you're at a revenue of 750, 000, for example, an annual revenue and you think, Oh my God, well, we hit a million awesome, but you're not really making any more money because there's the expenses grow with it. So there's those, after 20 years, you think, you know, all this stuff, but as you evolve through each step, you start to learn, like, you really don't, you can look every day, you learn something new.

And so what I've learned from this is there's these tiers of revenue that. You've got to break through these barriers if you really do want to make more money, not that it's all about the money, but we need it [00:48:00] to obviously produce the products. So it's just an interesting, between the 750, 000 here, I wouldn't say I'm any Better off financially, but what's cool about it is that we're creating more content, which is creating more projects for writers, photographers, you know, the, the printers, like, and so that it's still the, the, the flow of it is still helping everybody.

So I'm not dissatisfied with it. It's just, uh, it's an interesting challenge that I didn't think would. I just, I didn't picture it like this, you know what I mean? So basically as your revenues increase, your expenses are also in parity increasing. Yep. And so if you notice with, uh, and everybody thinks, I get this all the time.

Like say we are about to, we're about sold out on an issue. Say we have our advertising to our editorial balance is. Just where it needs to be and we sell an ad like say last minute or something. Well, let's say we sell four ads Well, we can't fit four ads in there without unbalancing that like it's it's very important to keep your [00:49:00] editorial balance with your advertising balance So really what we have to do is go up four pages and four pages is very expensive to do So really you need to go up eight pages because that's way less expensive But in reality, you need to go up 16 pages because that is the actual cheapest way to do it.

Yeah. But it also creates weight for shipping and it creates weight for the postal service. So there's a lot of factors that go into that, you know, but you can't just add a page, you know? So you have to think of it like that. You have to think of things in four eights and sixteens and, and if you get stuck in a 12 pager, you don't want to be in that range.

Right. So , so it's just, it's interesting. Plus you gotta think about a reconfiguration of a layout. Where do we move stuff? You can't just. Throw something in, it's got to have a flow to it. I mean, I'm sure maybe you've seen this before. If you pick up a product, that's a print. You can see where that's happened.

If somebody's done it, it's very obvious. Are there specific markets that outperform individually? In terms of, uh, out of those four products? Topsail is doing the best. Okay. [00:50:00] Um, so your margins Topsail. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're getting the most revenue from Topsail. And again, it goes back to, I think the content. I really think it comes down to the content.

Of course, the community is. Supporting it very well, which I'm so thankful for but the content there's always something cool going on Yeah, there's always a cool person that you meet a cool story like I mean I don't know where this stuff happens, but I'll just give you an example. So last year we did a article on Little pink houses of hope.

I don't know if you heard of that. Basically, what happens is it's breast cancer survivors and they get a beach house and they get some activities to do and the community kind of chips in and helps out. I don't know if it's for free. I don't want to say that, but it might be. So we had an article done on it.

I didn't have any pictures and it was just like a coordination thing because I was talking to one person and then we were talking to another person. I guess they have a corporate headquarters or something. So we had to go through that and I was like, man, I'm going to have to pull this story. We were like two weeks away from printing [00:51:00] and, um, I had a meeting.

Actually, I had a meeting with you that day that, uh. Sundial. Before that, I took a walk on the beach for like 10 minutes. I was like, let me clear my head a little bit. And I see these people wearing pink shirts and I see a photographer shooting them. And I was like, do I know her? Like, cause I feel like I know most of the photographers, you know?

And so I was like, I don't think I do. I think I need to go introduce myself. So I was like, Hey, um, it was Amy Fowler Shores. And I was like, Hey, uh, I'm Justin. Um, Hey, I do the Top Soul Magazine. Um, are you shooting Little Pink Houses of Hope? And she was like, yeah, I was like, this is gonna, this is weird, but we're doing a story on this and I cannot nail down any photos.

Do you think I could like, we could work something where I can get some photos from you? She was like, absolutely. I was like, oh my gosh, thank God I took that walk on the beach. But where else does that happen at? Right. You know what I'm saying? Like, I'm not saying it wouldn't [00:52:00] happen in Oak Island. I'm not saying it wouldn't happen in Ocean Isle or Leland, but like, that's just a great testimony right there.

So like. How friendly people are and approachable and they weren't get the heck away from me. Like what are you doing? You're walking up to me on the beach asking me for my photos. It's stuff like that And there's a lot of little stories like that too that help bridge this thing together. I said, I mean the community is great I can't say it enough and I think I said it I don't know if you were at the I think you were the Topsail chamber

I mean, when I was up there, I was, I said the same thing. I was like, you know, it's, this community is just so great and supportive and the volunteers that make up this community. In the other beach communities, you don't feel the same way or doesn't have the same. Cause I think the, the next comparison to Topsail would be Oak Island and Southport.

They have a really very similar community, different vibe than Topsail, but very similar. I used to feel the same way about Leland, [00:53:00] but I just think When I was first in Leland, it was a smaller area, and there was a lot of us at that point in time, I was doing a lot of volunteer stuff too, like Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, like all this different stuff, and so it felt like a community type family, and I think as it's grown, it's just been harder to maintain that maybe, or it's, it's, It has something to do with something I'm doing wrong or not finding.

I don't know yet. And in Ocean Isle, that's just a different area. I mean, if you've gone down to Shillode, you know that. Yeah. It's Holden Beach. Yeah. It's great. It's a great area. It's just, I didn't have as much luck there getting the support I needed. There's been great supporters of me. And South runs a magazine for a very long time and they're awesome and they understand, but like the vision of what I was trying to do.

But, uh, in some cases it's just been very difficult. Like the bigger companies, um, and bigger companies, meaning they're still local, but [00:54:00] they own a lot of different things. It's just hard to get them to. Yeah. To support the products. I found Holden Beach very similar. Yeah. Holden Beach is like that again.

Um, I like it. It's just, it's that like hidden place that you almost forget about sometimes, you know, when you're driving back from like say Myrtle Beach or something. Yeah. This seems to be their small faction that kind of run most of the things there. Yeah. I wanted to buy a piece of property and build another saltwater there.

Really? But there's no buy right. It has to be like individually approved. Yeah. And they wouldn't give me any, you know, kind of a. Yeah. Sounds right. You and then we'll talk about it? No. Like, yeah, it sounds like a good deal. Yeah. So are you looking at doing like a saltwater anywhere else? Not right now, but you know, I would think about it in the future.

If we can find another surf city type market, you know, and Holden would be perfect because, you know, to my knowledge, I don't think there's a lot of hotel motels there at all on the Island. I mean Oak Island's different. I know there's several there, but, [00:55:00] but Holden would have been, would have been nice, but the city council just, they have some specific rules against that kind of stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, uh, they're, uh, I will say this about Holden though. They're a close knit community as well. It's just, it's tough to break through as what I would be. I guess I could, I must be an outsider there. Like I said, just that, you know, I mean, good for them for protecting it, I guess. I mean, they don't have a lot of infrastructure on that Island for sure.

Uh, I think Brunswick County as a whole, you know, still decade behind where you're, you know, is currently, cause there's still a lot of work has to happen there before you see the explosive growth, but it's, it's a good opportunity for the next 10, 20 years. But yeah, one of the, um, the first like five years I lived in Brunswick County, like the big rumor was Disney was coming.

Like I kept hearing that over and over again, and it was. Between Myrtle beach and Leland was going to be this big Disney world type thing. Like they had bought land and I don't know how true it was [00:56:00] or I never confirmed it, but I was just like, Oh, it's exciting. You know, but then it never really, nothing happened.

So, but you never know. That would be interesting. Disney would put something there. I mean, I could see like, like outlets or something like that. I could see that as a draw, but I don't know. Well, it's an interesting observation because there's not a whole lot of entertainment. Available. 'cause I know talking to some developers here, they were thinking about, let's, let's build a boardwalk.

You know, something like you have in Carolina Beach. Yeah. Where you have shops and arcades and things that kids can do. I mean, we have a few pup places and, but there's really not a whole lot to do for families. And I think that's part of the desire and appeal. Yeah. Because when you come to vacation, you wanna spend time with your family.

Yeah. And then sometimes those other family members wanna get away from those family members. Right. I mean, Wilmington's still roughly 30 40 minutes away. Yeah, you can get there. You know, then if you want to take a day trip down to Myrtle Beach, it's only Yeah, hour and a half, two hours. Well, I think that new, uh, bowling alley.

Oh, yeah That'll be a huge help for stuff like a rainy [00:57:00] day or even burnt or you want to get a little break from your family I think that'll be the way that I've seen the design and everything looks like a really cool hangout night place They they tried that not exactly that but they had there was gonna be a bowling alley coming to Leland and Brunswick Forest This is 15 years ago.

That never happened And this other guy built a bowling alley in Magnolia Greens, it's where WWAY TV3 is now. And it's the cleanest bowling alley I've ever been in, but the, the weird thing about it was, for a bowling alley this is weird. Well you couldn't smoke in there, which was good. Um, and then they didn't serve any alcohol either.

So, and I just thought from a business standpoint, it was very interesting because I feel like a bowling alley and beer kind of go hand in hand, you know what I mean? Like, you buy pitchers of beer and you bring them back. Like, I just, that's the way I feel about it. So, I'm sure like that's a huge revenue source.

So, I mean, I really commended them on the thought process of it, but it was, you know, it's like a. $4 [00:58:00] million building or something. Um, I don't know about you, but if I'm gonna build a $4 million building, I'm probably gonna try to maximize that revenue. Mm-hmm . With about, just about anything I can. That is still, you have to classy just to keep up with it.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now it's a TV studio, so 1.2 million total top line. What's the, what are your margins as far as expenses? Gosh, if I didn't have a printing bill, man, I'd be in good shape. Is printing your largest expense? Oh God, yeah. Yeah, we, we probably spend about 30, 000 per issue. Where do you outsource that?

So, it's different publishers, or different printers. So, I print Topsail with a company out of Ohio. It's called Freeport Press. And the reason I use them is because The sales rep actually lives in Sneets Ferry. Okay. I just felt like that was kind of a cool connection. I'm, I'm, I'm really weird about these little small things, you know?

Like, so he called on me for my other magazines years ago and I was just, I was fine. I was happy where I was. And then when I started launching Topsail, I was like, well, maybe it's good [00:59:00] to like, maybe diversify the printer a little bit in case something goes wrong here, goes wrong there. And he lives in Sneets Ferry.

Everything was just trying, it was connecting, you know? And he'd always come take us to lunch. You know, once a month or after work drinks or something, he'd meet us in Wilmington. So he was really making an effort and I really did appreciate that. So I ended up using him since the beginning of Top Salon, I have ever since and they do a great job.

I mean, the product, I'm, I'm very happy with it. For my other products, I use a company that I've been with for probably 15 years now. And it's almost like some of them. Have become family in some ways. My sales rep, he'll come down, we'll go to dinner. Sometimes we go to conferences like he's there. We always have fun.

Um, they flew me into Missouri and yeah, give me the tour of the plants and yeah, kind of put me up in a hotel and made me feel like I was. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty cool. So there that's a company called Wallsworth. They're actually the number one yearbook printer in the United States, them and, and this other company.

And [01:00:00] then the maps we have to use a company out of Iowa. It's a franchise, the discovery maps are a franchise, so we only have three printers we can use. So I have a couple of different ones that I, But that industry is very, it's another industry that's consolidating to like, you know, like this printer is buying out the small printer, like my printer from 15 years ago was a small town, Ovid Bell press.

So they snatched them up and now they're part of this bigger corporate type situation. So, yeah, I was having breakfast with another entrepreneur and we were talking about how private equity is and other large corporations are snatching up all the small to midsize and eventually you're going to have.

Three, four or five, which kind of skews, you know, the pricing and everything else you're pushing the small guys out. I mean, well, you can look at it even on a local level with say restaurants, for example. I mean, you're seeing more and more franchises opening up in these smaller towns, or you'll see like somebody that started as a small, like restaurant going into franchising.

I [01:01:00] understand why, I mean, it's. It's either that or you try to add 27 locations and then you try to maintain them all, right? Like, it's not the same thing and then the other people are not vested in the company like you are. Like, I understand why people do it. I just, I hate to see small business go away. I don't think it'll totally go away, but it's certainly not like it was 10, 20, 30 years ago for sure.

But I do understand it too. I mean, you know, they have. They have a model that they, they work off of, you know, it's, it's one to 20 follow these steps. So, you know, you don't have to figure it out on your own. That's one thing, uh, with my disappointment and Leland a little bit is like it's, it's franchise central right now.

It really doesn't help me for my local. Oh yeah. It just doesn't help me. Like I probably spend. This is embarrassing. I probably spent like 1, 000 to 1, 500 a year at Panera Bread Company. My daughter loves that place. So, not that I don't. But, um, yeah, so I was like, you know, I should call on them. Like [01:02:00] my 1, 500 is really going to matter, right?

So I, I get. Linked with this dude in Atlanta, I guess he either worked for them or was with an ad agency and I was trying to pitch them on this like, uh, sponsorship of our, um, we had this thing called Feature 10 in Brunswick County, where it's like a young professionals showcase, but it includes some print advertising, includes some digital stuff, but yeah, the logo was across the board and all that stuff.

And I was trying to say, he's like, uh, yeah, we don't do stuff like that. I was like, I said, well, what is stuff like that? What do you mean? Because, well, uh, we just don't do local things like that. We'll do some billboards maybe, or we do some national buys. But now it just kind of like rubbed me the wrong way because I'm like, well, I mean.

You kind of are like in a local community though, there could be a little bit of support of something. I'm not saying it's got to be me, but like, you know, this is kind of a, it was a bad, maybe if he could have gone and rephrase that, he might have, but you know, really like [01:03:00] it, I haven't forgotten it. And that was five years ago, which is kind of weird, you know, because I have a lot of information coming at me.

So I forget a lot of stuff. So you're a big Panera fan. You know, I probably scaled down to about 700 a year after that in a comment. Are you trying McAllister's deli? Yeah. Yeah. It's just not, I have this other weird thing about me and I guess I think the pandemic helped with this and efficiency. I'm all about efficiency, right?

So it's almost like if you don't have an app, I'm not going there, especially during the work day. So I know that I can be in my car and my office in the parking lot, order my Panera or Port City, Java or Starbucks or Tropical Smoothie or whatever has an app. And I know by the time I get there, I can walk in there, grab it, walk back to my car and then go back to my office and eat it.

Like I'm just not a big wasting time during the day, most days. I do the same thing with Chick fil A. Yeah. I mean, and that's an easy thing to do. I mean, the one thing about the pandemic, if anything. Is the innovation behind what the [01:04:00] restaurants did with, um, you know, ready made order using the digital apps.

No, I love it. Honestly, I'll give you a good example. I have this, this weird drink that I get from Port City, Java, and it's, uh, I'll just say it cause it's just so weird. Um, it's an Americano, 16 ounce, a splash of almond milk. It's sounding all like uppity here, but I'm not, um, one or two stevias and, uh, two pumps of sugar free caramel, unless it's a Starbucks, cause they don't have sugar free caramel.

They have sugar free vanilla. So I forgot, I've ordered it so many times on the app. Like the other day, the app was down for Starbucks and it was like five in the morning and fortunately Java doesn't open until six. So I had to go in and order it. And I was like, like, uh, the, I Americano, I like forgotten what the order was because I just ordered on the app all the time, you know?

So I'm like, wow, this app is also making me like, you know, definitely not any [01:05:00] smarter for sure, but, uh, more efficient. Yeah. So, um, but yeah, and I think restaurants that don't have apps, that's a big disadvantage. Just about everybody. I don't want to say everybody. A lot of people have jumped on to the DoorDash ordering or like a, you know, you can order online.

It'll go through the third party. So at least they do that. But the problem with that is the menu prices are inflated. So I know too much about online ordering way too much. The real thing is too, is like breaking down. I know we've talked about health stuff before too. Like you're not gonna Eat those things though and be eating healthy either.

So you got to kind of balance it out a little bit, but you got to prep your meals and have good stuff for at least the first four days of the week in order to feel better, you know, and run efficiently. Like if you don't, that stuff will weigh you down if you eat. If you could do an Americano and a bacon, egg and cheese at breakfast, and then you do like, say, Chick fil a or whatever it is at lunch and then the dinner, you're, I don't know, whatever it is, you're just like, oh my God, like, [01:06:00] ugh.

Well, I joke to people because sometimes we're like, well, how can you eat that stuff? I'm like, I work out a lot. Yeah. I work out to eat. Yeah. Like a teenager. No, absolutely. Yeah. Like I'm, I started to notice the last year or so is the, um, I have a real chocolate chip cookie. Issue. I mean, I will eat. I'll bake a dozen and I'll take them right off the pan, hot, and just, you know, like, I'm like, oh, this is so good, and then I've got, like, a stomachache afterwards, but the sugar is starting to hit a little bit different.

If I You know, I know, like I do work out, like I have a trainer three times a week and then I do stuff on my own twice a week, but I noticed if I haven't had enough cardio or if something's lacking, something's different, maybe sleep. Do you sauna? Yeah. Um, and I just started the cold plunging recently too.

Yeah. So I have this like, uh, above ground pool in the back. Um, a little deck. Do you cold plunge? Oh, so I've, I've been trying to start it since September, right? So it was still kind of warm in September. Yeah. And. We got into October and [01:07:00] I was like, all right, so it was like in the 60s. I was like, okay, it's not too bad.

It still kind of sucked at first. And then we got into the 50s. I'm like, all right. Okay. And the other night I did 48. Wow. And it was so different. Did you make it three minutes? I got one minute. Okay. And it's so weird because it's, it is a mental game. I was sitting there psyching myself up. Set my timer for two minutes for when that went off then that next timer was gonna go off for one minute for me To stay in there.

I need to make a minute. So in that two minutes I'm sitting there on the deck like just walking pacing back and forth like oh, okay. I'm just gonna jump in. I'm gonna jump in I take this little like baby like little leap in and get right to here And I just, I just stopped and I, I just, I was like shaking my leg, making these weird noises and they tell you to breathe, you know, and I'd been practicing that prior, but I hadn't been in 47 degree water either.

Right. So I'm sitting there making weird sounds like breathing. And then I could not wait for that timer to go off. I was. I [01:08:00] tell you, I did feel better afterwards. And I did read something where when it drops into the 30s, if you're in a 30 degree water, it does something like 250 percent like, uh, like endorphins or something like that.

Yeah, it increases your testosterone. It's kind of crazy. Um, which, you know, I'm in my 40s, so maybe need it. Have you tried chirotherapy? Yeah, so I did. So I have a membership to a place in Wilmington. I do a lot of wellness stuff too, like massage. Where you get in the tank for cryotherapy, the cold, it was rough, uh, the first couple of times, but it's, it's the great thing about that is you put stuff on your feet and on your hands, right?

That's the difference with being in the pool. And then I've done the floating tanks at the same place. Funny story about that. The second time I did cryo. So the first time, like I did, I survived the three minutes. I'm like, yeah. So I came back next week and they were like, Hey, how high do you want to raise the thing?

I was like, yeah, just raised up size. You can go. It's fine. So it was over my head and I was like, breathing it in, I was like, [01:09:00] ah, you know, just like, and then all of a sudden, like I passed out for the first time in my life, never passed out ever like that. And like, all of a sudden, like, I guess my knees collapsed and I hit the thing and I fell out and all of a sudden the, the girl's like, are you okay?

And I was like, yeah, why I'm on the floor, like what is going on? Everybody was freaking out and I was, I was fine. I was just like, what happened? Oh, you, you, you passed out. You were out for about six seconds. I was like, what? Wow. So now when I go there, I'm like, like breathing Like high above? Yeah. Like, do not put it above my, uh, my, uh, your neck.

Right. So the one in my gym I work out in, in Virginia, it's like a phone booth. Okay. You walk in and the whole thing shuts down and they program it. You know, the setting I use is like negative. 350 degrees. So they crank it up and once it hits that door opens and all the smoke comes out and you get in and close the door.

And they can crank your music, whatever song you want, and then three minutes. [01:10:00] Really? But you, like you said, you have your mitts on. Yeah. It's, you know, your socks. I do, I do find that easier than the, than the water plunge. Yeah. And I don't know if it's just because maybe I need to try like one of those like baths, like they have at some of these spas.

I mean, I will, I mean, I'll try just about anything when it comes to the wellness stuff. So, um. But the, I'll tell you with a floating tank, have you done this? My mind is constantly turning, right? It's hard to shut me down. And a couple of things that I found that shut me down are floating tank, which actually helped me this summer.

So I would float in the pool. Sometimes I would go home at 1230 in the afternoon and sit on the float for an hour and just play some like instrumental music, like hip hop meets indie instrumental music, to be exact, and just kind of float around and just, and you could, I could just feel my thoughts just like flowing out.

Yeah, my body. And so how I learned that was going to that cryo place that also has the float tank, right? Yeah, when I was in that float tank for the first time I redid a layout in my head of one of our [01:11:00] projects, like in an hour and I got, I got out of there. So when I got out of there, I was like, I got to get to my office.

I got to get this down. Right. It was amazing. So I strongly believe in all that stuff. Um, Do you have problems sleeping or staying asleep? I used to, I don't anymore because there's a few reasons. Well, probably in the 2015 to 2018, I was going out way too much. So there was a little bit of partying and. I was trying to figure out why I was so tired all the time.

It was because I had drinks and I was staying up too late. And you're getting older. And I was getting up at like, you know, five, six o'clock trying to roll on in. I'm sure I looked great. 

But that was very distracting. It distracted my sleep. Once I figured all that out and cut back on the partying and started like. When you cut back on that, the diet comes with it, the exercise, I was still exercising, but still that's counterproductive in a way. So all that stuff started to fall together.

And then my sleep fell right [01:12:00] into place. It was amazing. So now I need six hours straight. Sometimes I don't get it and I'm a little rough around the edges in the morning, but like, yeah, but it used to be, I would go to sleep at say 10 and I'd be up at 1230 and then I'd be up at 230. And I used to worry a lot more too, and I don't as much now, I don't, again, I don't know if it's a forties thing.

I have no idea what it is, but I used to worry myself like a lot, a lot of stuff. But yeah, so I just try to go to bed, shut it down, wake up, get rolling. But sleep is the number one important thing for everything from your diet to your thought process, to your productivity exercise. I mean, and people said that to me.

For years and years, and I used to just, nah, I'm good. I can sleep all four hours. I can sleep all three. I can do this. I can do that. And then I couldn't anymore. In college, I was on the four hour cycle. Yeah. No, it's easy. Yeah. Yeah. And so, but the thing is, and I don't know if everybody thinks this, but like.

Unless it's just me and you, but like, like you take that [01:13:00] same mentality from college though, and you keep bringing it up and up and up with you and yeah, I can do it. And then until you can't, and it kind of sucks when you can, cause you feel a little bit defeated, but you're like, all right, well, I just got to adjust some things to make sure I'm running like at a thousand percent.

I don't know. That's, that's the number one thing I definitely hate about the aging process. It's like, you can't do that kind of stuff like you're used to and still crank out. Like. You could. Yeah. But I think you're, you're doing it right. You're taking care of yourself. You know, what you put in your body and exercising and doing all those really cool things.

Yeah. I mean, I've noticed myself, like I do some blood testing and other things and try to find different. Yeah. Supplements to take and I think as long as you can stay proactive and take care of yourself, you can absolutely, I mean, I've gotten really bad. I take this, uh, it's called a G one athletic greens.

Yeah, it's not cheap, but it's just like a religious ritual. Now, like I do get used to it. Yeah, so I'll take that in [01:14:00] the morning and then I do, uh, a shot of elderberry that I get from, uh, there's this place called Panacea. It's a kombucha place in Wilmington. So I go there like every two weeks and get my bottles refilled.

So I do that. Have you tried ashwagandha? Yes, but not regularly and consistently. Yeah, so there's a lot of things in this AG1 though, so I'm not sure if that's one of them, but like I know it's missing a couple things. I've been trying to figure out the correct balance because I did, I had a blood test last year and my cholesterol was a little high and I was thinking I, I just automatically thought about chocolate chip cookies and I was like, eh, okay, cut those bad boys back a little bit.

So we'll see. We'll see this year. But I try to do that. I'll do my own blood tests throughout the year too. Sometimes I do two outside of my doctor just to make sure, you know, things are running. I'd rather catch something before something and take care of it than have something happen. I mean, I know things are going to happen if they happen, but.

Yeah. Um, [01:15:00] I'm all about like trying to be proactive about that kind of stuff. Yeah. The other guy I work out with, he's got me on some amino acids like BCAA. So I started taking that too. It's a, I try to get everything in a powder. It's so weird. Probably looks like a breaking bad or something. I'm in my house in the morning, but.

I actually got these containers where I can just mix them all into the container and then put it in the fridge for each day. But I had that, uh, the creatine for, you know, working out something for, uh, joints to, and beats for, you know, circulation type stuff. Uh, and then the AG1, that's all in this, these different powders.

That's pretty good regimen. Yeah, I mean, if you, if you miss one, you feel it. Are you taking peptides or any of that kind of stuff? No, at least I don't think so. Yeah, I haven't either. I've just noticed some, you know, other bodybuilder type people, you know, looking for longevity is there's just one guy. He spends 3 million a year trying to reverse the age process.

And I think [01:16:00] he's in his. 50s. Wow. But his blood work says he's in his 30s. Dang. Yeah. The body's an amazing thing though. Yeah. I mean, how it can heal itself and if you treat it right, I mean, it'll, it'll treat you back right. It's amazing what stress and bad diet will do to your body. I mean, it will accelerate the aging process.

Absolutely. Because I mean, you've seen people who are in their 30s who look like they're 50. And then you see people in their fifties who look like they're in their forties and thirties. So that's, that's the weird thing. Uh, me and a couple of my friends will talk about this sometimes about our age range right now.

Yeah. Like how you see somebody and they're like, Oh my God, they look really good to be like 43 or whatever. And then like, you'll see the same person that is 43 and they look like they're like, I'm a 60 or something. And you're like. How's that happen? Like, I mean, you know, I guess some of it's hereditary to it's living, man.

Yeah, I guess so. I don't know. It's just, it's kind of amazing to see that. That's it. Cause [01:17:00] another weird thing about being in your forties too, is like, you know, you have like people that have kids that are graduating like high school, I guess the, the younger. mothers that were in their early 20's or maybe even late teens and it was just like, Jesus, like, what the heck is happening?

Like, or if you run into somebody that's got grandkids. Yeah. That's still have kids are in high school. Yeah. How does that work? Like you're a grandmother. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's it's just a weird. I don't know. Again, it goes back to my mentality I still think I'm in my 20s, you know, so but I hear that's also half the battle to the mental game You know, it is yeah, there's a mindset.

Yeah, you know, I had totally have a mindset you wake up and like, you know, what? I'm not 40 something. I'm actually 30 something and your body will respond. Yeah, I mean. Until it tells you it can't. Right. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah. Why does my shoulder hurt? I had a little back issue like a couple years ago. I just, I wasn't working out correctly.

It could be years of driving with posture or years on a computer, but like, I think I was just, I was working out specific parts of my body and not every part [01:18:00] of my body. And I think it just slowly broke down. That's why I ended up getting a trainer to help me work on like, you know, corrections and like working all these little weird things that I would never do by myself.

I just wouldn't, but I had like a herniated disc that was like creating sciatica. It was miserable for probably about 18 months. That's when I was like, I can't just bend down and grab something now. I've got a collapse the knees go down and grab it You know, those are little things like that will let you know, you're not in your 20s.

But um, yeah, I was able to help like Get over that. Thank God. But, um, yeah, it's rough. So I'm like, man, I don't, I don't want to feel like that again for hopefully a very long time. Well, and then the music preference you, you talked about hip hop and some indie. Yeah. Cause that's another common thing that we have.

Yeah. Is you, have you seen any, any good concerts lately or? Oh yeah. Yeah. Um, I think I told you about one. So this summer, So luckily I've played like a pretty good range of music in my car like when my daughter's been growing up [01:19:00] So she's kind of adapted to some of my stuff. She's not very big on the hip hop, which is fine Yeah, she likes the like indie stuff and classic rock and 80s and some of the 90s too And I talked to my dad in May and he's like, oh, yeah me and Chris his wife we're going to this concert for the Rolling Stones in Orlando and this is like Ten days out, you know, I thought you know what maybe I should go and so I thought about it for like a day They had already booked their tickets like that night and I mentioned it to my daughter and I was like, hey So I think I'm gonna go to Orlando next week.

I think you might be with your mom though Just wanted to make sure I'm not gonna come back till Monday. So, you know, just be extra day You'll be there and she goes I want to go Cause she likes the Rolling Stones cause I played Rolling Stones in the car. I was like, really? Okay. So I booked it. And so we got to see the Rolling Stones.

We got, there's an app called Game Time. I think I might've told you about this before, but you can get some good last minute deals and really good seats. So we got like four seats. We were like probably 10 rows from the [01:20:00] stage. I want to say for like 250 bucks each or something. And it's not bad. Not at all.

And we had like just two seats. We were just in this row that had two seats. It was just us two. Yeah, it was awesome. Uh, so we went to that and that was kind of cool because we had like three generations at the Rolling Stones concert. We got a picture with the background and all that. That was very cool.

A few weeks later, we tried to go see Stevie Nicks and, um, she loves Stevie Nicks. in Hershey, Pennsylvania, another little last minute trip. I ended up being a flop. So spent all the money on the airfare, the hotel, and then we got in line and they actually, some band member got sick or something. So they had to postpone it.

Oh, wow. So I got the money back for that. But that was like. 130 bucks each or something like, no mention the 2, 000 that's spent on the airfare and the hotel and all that. So you know, we tried on that one and then, um, we went to see Cage the Elephant in Raleigh at the beginning of August. And that was one of the best concerts that [01:21:00] we both, like, I remember we were driving down the road and she said, I think I have like host concert depression.

And I was like, yeah, that was a good one. Like we knew every single song. We were actually in the front row for that one. And like, so they were just like right on us. Oh my God. It was so great. I can't wait to see him again. Actually. I took my daughter to see glass animals. Yeah. That was her first concert.

Okay. Wow. Up at the Anthem in DC, which is a pretty nice venue. Yeah. Now that we, we, we love them too. Like, um, and we also, we saw Hozier, I think sometime in between that, but that, that cage, the elephant concert was just. That's awesome. Like, I was just, I don't know, that's the best concert I've seen in a while.

Well, I've got, um, tickets to Deftones in April. Okay. Where's that? Up in DC. Okay. You'll have to come to that. Okay. Yeah. So, um. I know the guy that, cause we do a bunch of sports tickets through the company I had before. Okay. Technically still have, but no work there. So he calls me sometimes, like when Tool was there, a guy, Sweet, he's like, Hey man, I know [01:22:00] you like hard rock.

You know, you want to see the DevTones. I'm like, yeah, that's awesome. So I got like a break on the suite. God, that's great. I mean, basically you get a whole suite for the price of like three tickets. Yeah. You get like 23 tickets. So I'm like, who wants to go? Yeah. That is awesome. Yeah. I mean, there's no food or drink.

It's just, you show up, you sit. Yeah. I mean, you're right above the pit. You're at an angle. That's cool. So, I mean, if you want to jump in the pit, you can go down there and do it. Last year, I mean, one of my friends, a couple other friends, uh, went to see, um, who did we see? It was in Raleigh, but we were in the pit.

And I was a red hot chili peppers. No, gosh, I think it was three 11, like, but it was without, yeah, yeah. So it was, um, we were, that was a great experience in the pit. Like I always thought the pit was like, Oh, they're standing up, but like I'm a stander anyway, so it fit me perfectly. And, um, you know, they, they would come out into the pit and hang out and play.

And I was like, Oh my God, this is. [01:23:00] When you say pit, you're talking about a mosh pit. No, no, no, no. Just like the, I guess they call it the pit. It's like a little area where they let like a hundred people in there or something. I think it's like the person that we had went with, like, I think they have like some lifetime access to this because I think the company, the family company had helped like construct the place or something.

I'm, I'm really paraphrasing on that. I don't really know if that's totally accurate, but she was able to get some like last minute like tickets to this thing. I'm just like. Okay. Yes. Let's go. That was awesome. But yeah, I've been to quite a few. We, uh, me and a buddy from Raleigh too went to see Blink 182.

Okay. That was cool. I've been pretty busy on the concert end, I guess. I know. Yeah. Yeah. And it's weird cause it's been like, other than the last two years, I haven't been to a concert in several years. Right. So. Yeah. Especially during COVID. It's like when you take something away, it's when you want it more.

Yeah, absolutely. Oh man, I want to go to a concert. Oh, I can't. And I was wondering about that, if it was going to come back or not, like [01:24:00] in full force, you know, because, uh, during that time of all that confusion, it was, you just kind of wonder, like, if everything's going to be normal again, like it was before that.

I mean, I wouldn't say it's been the same since, but it's at least that kind of stuff did come back. I was just picturing like, you know, like if, if a stadium 20, 000, they were only going to let 10, 000 in from that point on. You know what I mean? Like that kind of stuff. Yeah. So what's the future vision look like for you as far as expansion?

Are you looking to buy more products or? So, I mean, I do want to evolve a little bit in, uh, South Carolina, but You mentioned Charleston. Yeah. You were looking at some Yeah. So there's somebody I've been talking to there about some potential products that are currently in existence. The thing is, is what I'm trying to do is make sure I have my new new ish style of how I produce print publications.

Here down to take that same model in another area. I'm not coming into the market to print a magazine only. That's not, not what [01:25:00] we're, we do anymore. We have to be community involved with, you know, weekly newsletters, daily social media stuff, different types of sponsorships within the community. Like. But we, the whole point of what we do is community based and we want to be a major impact of involvement in those communities.

And if I can't do that efficiently and effectively, then I don't really want to do it. It's not about getting a quick dollar. It's not about just buying something because I have a huge ego or something. Like it's not about that at all. It's not even about me really. At the end of the day, I want to be able to come into these communities.

Um, and produce the best possible products, lifestyle products for that community that I can possibly do. Right. And that requires a lot more than just printing now. Um, now the printing is I think the, the mothership piece of it because it's out and about everywhere. It gets mailed, it looks good, but there's other parts to that that you have to do.

Right. In order to [01:26:00] connect all these things together. Um, which is what I want to do is connect all these things together and be a, just a community. You know, organization, is there a potential exit for you? Like, would you end up selling? Yeah. I mean, the thing is I'm, I have so much fun doing this. Yeah.

Cause you've wrapped your lifestyle around it. Yeah. And, and honestly, I've, I've made a lot of friends this way. Like, uh, I, I never wake up and like say, Oh my God, I got to go to work today. I like being. Out and about or doing something or just how I am. And, you know, it's just, again, you learn more about yourself as you get older and you just realize that's just how you are.

You can try to adapt to these things, but it is what it is. So, yeah, it's, it's just one of those things where it's, I'm still having so much fun doing it. I haven't really thought too much about it, but I guess if the opportunity was right. The opportunities, right? You know, I don't know what that is or what that would involve.

It's funny because I've been watching, uh, Succession on HBO. Yeah. What a great show. And, uh, it is a great, it's a cluster, man. This family's [01:27:00] manipulating everybody. And he has a definite older school thought, you know, of his business, but I'm like, man, like I need to. You know, at least start having a thought process of that at some point, like what, what would be next?

I'm sure I could get into something like, I love real estate, not to say I would be a realtor. I don't mean that, but like, I love investing in real estate or just. Being involved in something with it. Yeah. So there's other things I could do. I've thought about doing different things. Like, like I've kind of been creating the process of how to create these community guides.

Mm-hmm . Where I could go into like a town and consult with somebody for a fee and help them kind of open theirs. Uh, if they follow these, you know, this is how it works. Right. That kind of thing. I've thought about that. That could be kind of fun. Maybe you could franchise, you could come up with an I thought about that too, and it's just, there's a lot of, uh.

Federal rules for that. So, uh, that would definitely change the. The mindset a little bit, so I'm not, I have looked into it and I think I connected you with my friend from [01:28:00] Raleigh, Alyssa that did the franchising. I mean, she's doing well with it, but like, you know, it's, it's definitely different. Yeah. So I don't know.

So I was kind of watching her to see like how she was doing with it, to how, what the challenges were every now and again, we'll text and be like, so how's it going here? Yeah. What's going on here? And, you know, but it still falls back though. Her main business though were about, you know, finding the right person, like general manager type situation.

And that's kind of the hardest part with stuff like that is finding those people that are going to be 70 percent invested of you. And that's, if you can get 70, you're doing good. Yeah, exactly. So, uh, again, another thing that took a long time to learn. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And then finding people's strengths.

Everybody has weaknesses. We all do. Just trying to like capitalize on strengths though, like, all right, so, you know, this person has that weakness and this, they don't do well with this. How can we take their strengths and just mold around that a little bit better to help them [01:29:00] thrive, which in return will help our business thrive, which in return will also make my life easier.

You know what I mean? Right. So stuff like that, you just try to learn as you go along. But, um, I mean, a lot of management, like you see in some companies, they really do focus on. The non strength part of the place. And that creates a different work environment. That's not very fun. You said you had the apartments in Western North Carolina.

How did that go for the storm? Yeah, I had a big sinkhole in one of the parking lots, two different buildings and boon about a mile from campus at app state chief and it's behind a big mountain. And so the water came down and a pipe busted and created a. 20 foot sinkhole. Oh my God. I had to spend 30, 000 repairing that.

Obviously insurance is not going to cover it, but I was lucky. Okay. Because I went there and, you know, organized some supply run from my neighborhood and we made a major donation [01:30:00] to Samaritan's Purse. So that's the one. So this is a specifically on donations. You hear about all this stuff, all these organizations become like, Oh, donate here, donate there.

And there's, that's the one that you're supposed to donate to. And like a time of need like that though, right? A hundred percent. Okay. Yeah. Because. I volunteered, I signed up to volunteer, but when, when I got there on Sunday, all the supply areas were shut down. And so I wasn't able to deliver my product until like 10 the next morning.

But to volunteer at Samaritan's Purse, you had to be there at 7 AM. It was like a military precision where you show up at a certain time, you get briefed, sign documents, you go through like a strategy session where they broke you into several groups of 20. And like, but I went through the night before to meet him and they were basically getting all the field Intel, basically creating a map for the next day, [01:31:00] a plan, a battle plan for the next day.

So they knew exactly where these volunteers are going to go the next day. As far as like, we're going to clean up mud or we're going to do whatever. And they had like these trucks, vans that would actually take them to. So you had a, a small army of volunteers, but in the world, do you clean up all that mud?

Like I saw it in some of the interiors or some of those buildings. And I can't imagine like what that process is like, well, we even had mud under our buildings and apartments. And so I had to painfully hire somebody to clean that out and then put the underlayment, you know, you know, just to make sure, because it's going to start snowing soon, but there's still a lot of.

A lot of things to do there, you know, as far as yeah, I've heard about that. But the first thing that went out was comms, you know, because of the people I've spoken with were angry. It's not that they didn't know exactly a storm was coming. They just didn't understand the magnitude [01:32:00] or the alerts, like the alerts went out.

But by the time. Um, you know, it's coming, you know, seek shelter. How much, how much time do they have that like a tornado type situation like that? They didn't have much time. That's hard to, I mean, and if you think about all the people that ignored tornado warnings, right. Think about that. Yeah. So, I mean, that's some crazy stuff.

I've never seen anything. Of course, I wasn't there physically, but I've never seen like a house float down the road like that. But then a lot of people, they said, seek shelter, higher ground. So they, they expected flooding was going to happen. So a lot of people went up into houses on the hills and then when all, you know, everything happened, those people were cut off.

So you have no ways to communicate with them. Wow. Yeah. So it was a major problem. That's scary. Yeah. I mean, I thought like we've had some bad stuff on the coast with hurricanes, but I've never since I've been here, I've never seen anything like that. We're better prepared for it. Like we understand it as far as [01:33:00] like cleanup and.

And, you know, I remember one hurricane came through and it may look like a battlefield, people's insulation, appliances, furniture, anything that got flooded, big mounds when you drive down the road and they had these big garbage trucks with claws that would take it and. You know, clean it up. None of that exists in the mountains there.

I mean, there's, I mean, obviously roads are flushed out. So it's like, how do you get there? Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. Oh, I mean, I guess it's like a situation like when, you know, everybody that moves here from the North and like, if it's snow, if it like flurries or something, they shut down schools or whatever.

And they're always like, well, you know, they kind of make fun of it a little bit, but. It's the same type of thing in terms of like, we're not set up here for snow, like New Jersey or New York is or whatever. Buffalo, oh my god. Yeah, I don't want any of, nah, I'm good with all that. Did you see the feet of snow they had last week?

[01:34:00] Nah, whenever I see snow on my like feet or something, I just keep going. I'm like, nope. Although yesterday I was on a phone call at my office and um, I was just making a joke about snow. I was like, yeah, it's snowing, haha. I mean, cause it felt so cold. I look out and there's like these little flurries. And I was like, Oh my God, like I'm actually serious for once.

Like it really is snowing. Oh my God. Yeah. So, which rarely happens here, you know, as you probably know, but yep. I mean, are you, you get snow where you're at though? In Virginia though, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Usually the, it dips down to Richmond typically. I mean, obviously in the high country and boom places that get snow, but Northern Virginia gets almost the same amount of snows as Western Carolina.

Maybe a little bit less. Okay. When I grew up in Hampton roads, like. It's, it was rare that we got snow, we would get it, but it wasn't very often from my memory anyway, like, you know, it was definitely like colder there than it was here, but like, yeah, so I just, I don't really, I don't [01:35:00] have like big snow stories, you know, I don't know what it is about that area that it misses, but for whatever reason, so yeah, one year we got 25 inches of snow and two day breaks as soon as you dug your way out, snowblowers, shovels, you Another 20 inches, it was like back to back with the two day break.

I was like, you know what? Screw this. Yeah. I'll tell you one thing though, about snow, like here, like would be, I think one thing is like, people would probably be fine because a lot of our utilities and some of these new communities are buried underground. So they still have their internet or something.

So they're like, Oh, this is great. You know, we're like, you know. Like when I was growing up in Virginia, they didn't really have that many underground utilities at that point. Everything was on poles So like, you know, there's icicles on a pole and it pulls it down or whatever like everything's out, you know But yeah, it's all switching the star link Yes all that.

Yeah Do you have that? I don't I thought about getting it [01:36:00] for my barn. I have a little barn next to my house and Basically, it's where my gym is. Really? Yeah. Okay. For my ATV and my gym. Nice. I used to mine cryptocurrency, so I sold some to pay to renovate the upstairs and I put four different ACs up there and I had like 18 rigs going at one time.

Dang. Yeah, so I kept it going for a couple of years. Like where, why haven't we seen dad in a couple of days? He's busy changing out GPS. You come in and you're like, I'll just shovel on the shower beard. Like, yeah, I was able to network them at least in my office. I could like, you know, RDP or remote desktop connect into it.

So restarted if it crashed. That's awesome. Yeah. I will always overclock them. So of course they would run hotter. And then it gets too hot or whatever, then it crashes. So I was, um, listening to some podcasts the other day. I don't know if you've heard of, it's called Daily Brew or something. It's these [01:37:00] two dudes, like they're in their late twenties, early thirties.

And they give you like a 30 minute synopsis of like, just kind of what's going on in the world, mostly business stuff. And, uh, it was Thanksgiving day cause they weren't actually on air that day. So they did an interview with Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank. He was talking about. I just, I just didn't, I didn't really know this much about it, but I guess like data centers and power centers are actually like very hard to come by right now.

And with AI coming in, the chips are requiring more power and there's not going to be enough unless somebody figures out how to build these things like. And then the correct places and if the laws in specific states are actually different on how you can build these things, like in Virginia is very limited or something.

Well, there are now. Okay. Yeah. And in Northern Virginia, Ashburn is like data ceiling capital. Yeah, that's why I thought, but he said you can't build anything else there anymore or something. You can, it's just more expensive and all the people are pissed off because [01:38:00] it makes a large amount of noise. It generates heat.

I mean. You can drive from Leesburg to Ashburn, which is only like five miles away. And the temperature difference is about three to four degrees. Kid you not, it can be 30 degrees in Leesburg and 35, 36 in Ashburn because the data centers are generating that much heat and there's water. Cause I mean, water has to go in to cool the computers and then the heat has to come out.

So they're, they're talking about eventually using nuclear power. Okay. These SMBs are small, modular, you know, nuclear reactors. Um, I think China and Russia are using them now, but they're not operational in the U. S. But he was saying something like the cost for one was like 4 billion or something like that.

Yeah. I mean, Amazon, Google, all these other data center companies, they were buying land for like a million, 2 million an acre. He said something about like Midwest land [01:39:00] to like, uh, cause it's just out in the open or something. There's data centers in Ohio, Colorado, Texas. I mean, there's some North Carolina.

I mean, Facebook has a data center in forest city and I know Apple's got data centers in Lenore and just North of Lincolnton near Hickory. And I think one of them bought more land to expand. They use solar. So again, you need fiber for internet and you need power source, which Northern Virginia is perfect for it.

Yeah. They have plenty of that. These rural areas, either they have power constraints or, you know, no fiber, but we're catching up. This is stuff that we really, I think the general person probably doesn't think about the, they're consuming all this content on the internet. No, because everything you do on online now generates, you know, content or data.

And that data is stored in a data center. Think about how quickly that could go away though. Like a disaster. I mean, that's scary to think about when you really like break that down a little bit. [01:40:00] Oh, my God, that's a whole, whole new world of stuff. Yeah, but, but I mean, again, the, the, the whole AI thing is great.

Like we kind of talked about in the beginning, but I guess it's requiring so much to do it too. So it's like, I mean, how does that level out? I don't know, but I mean, they, they seem to find ways to make things like as time goes by more efficient, smaller. Yeah, I mean, they talked about the data centers replacing or recapping the computers with higher processing power and the storage is getting better so you can store more data, less compact, more compactful data.

So if that happens, then the footprint of data centers. It should be smaller, but the fact is, is everybody still generates a lot of data and we still need more data centers. They're not in my backyard. Yeah, right. Exactly. It's in the middle of nowhere where no one is. Yeah. The other thing too was, uh, I [01:41:00] learned during that was, I guess, Intel had the chance to do the chip for the iPhone and turned it down in like 2005 or something like that.

And now, God, I bet they're just like, well, the CEO just resigned. That's what I saw. So like, obviously it's amazing how that decision in 2005 eventually, like, I'm sure there's other stuff in between, but like, I was like, wow, man, talk about really losing out on a opportunity. Wow. You gotta be kicking yourself in the butt for that one.

So, well, thanks again. Yeah, nah, I enjoyed it.

Edited by Jim Mendez Puget and sponsored by Cape Fear Ventures. For more information about Amplified CEO, Richard Stroupe or Cape Fear Ventures, please contact Christa at 910 800 0111 or [01:42:00] christa@topsailinsider.com