In the Loupe
In the Loupe
I Went to the FOURTH Punchmark Client Workshop and All I Got Was This Podcast Episode
Join Mike for a behind the scenes look at Punchmark's annual Client Workshop in Charlotte, NC, offering a glimpse into what makes this educational event special for jewelry retailers from across the country.
If you missed the Workshop this year, make sure to mark your calendars for next May to attend our two day educational workshop in person! It's a lot of fun!
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Welcome to In the Loop blog of this year's client workshop in Charlotte, North Carolina that's put on by Punchmark. Every year. I've actually been documenting this for the past, I think, three years, and every single year it's a little bit different, but I think it's like a fun way to look behind the curtain at what goes into putting on one of these workshop events, and also it allows me to interview some people a little bit more casually. Do some man on the street content, and it's also just a really kind of fun different episode, and this is something I hope to do more of. I plan to do this when I go to JCK next week actually. So be on the lookout for that and please enjoy getting a peek behind it and see if you made the cut. All right, Thanks everybody.
Speaker 2:See you next time. With decades of experience and long-lasting industry relationships, punchmark enables jewelry businesses to flourish in any marketplace. We consider our clients our friends, as many of them have been friends way before becoming clients. Punchmark's own success comes from the fact that we have a much deeper need and obligation to help our friends succeed. Whether you're looking for better e-commerce performance, business growth or campaigns that drive traffic and sales, punchmark's website and marketing services were made just for you. It's never too late to transform your business and stitch together your digital and physical worlds in a way that achieves tremendous growth and results. Schedule a guided demo today at punchmarkcom. Slash go.
Speaker 1:And now back to the show. All right, from sunny Charlotte, north Carolina, we are all set up for the client workshop for day one Actually, it's day zero, it's the first one we always have this welcome reception and we are just at the hotel where everyone's staying at and for this year I actually got a hotel room, which is super cool and that way we don't have to commute out of town or anything like that or stay with any friends. So, yeah, we got a spot and this time we always have a little welcome reception with some drinks and some sponsorships. Everyone gets like a goodie bag with like a whole bunch of cool swag in it, like coffee mug and a name tag and all sorts of different things and like different like tissues and mints and stuff like that. I think it's really a nice touch that the design team always does and Jason, but yeah, we're just going to have some welcome drinks. We're still 30 minutes out, so we've got everything all set up. Hardest part of the entire thing is setting up this step and repeat banner. It's like one that you see like fighters in front of at UFC events with like all the sponsorships on it. So we always have to set that up and it's always like a 37 step process, but we got that done, so hopefully the next thing is just going to be having everybody show up and having a good time done, so hopefully the next thing is just going to be having everybody show up and having a good time.
Speaker 1:The first event that kicks off the client workshop is the welcome reception, and we have played around with this a couple of ways and we've had in different rooms and it's actually relatively new. But what's really cool is it's a way for people to get there and pick up this goodie bag that we build out and allow people to kind of I don't know mingle a little bit more and sort of ease themselves into it. Instead of having the first like start of the event be like right into education, this allows people to I don't know chat a little bit more. There's a lot of drinks. It's really fun, and this was sponsored by Obaku Watches and it was really cool. I loved how people came and just really just kind of eased themselves into it and mingled for the entire time. We had a you know, a really nice time, super fun, super cool.
Speaker 1:This is like the opening reception. It's like everybody came and is beside the stay, which is really nice, in years past. Sometimes we have this and people kind of in a rush or the weather's not nice and they end up kind of moving away and going doing their own things. But for this one we actually got a slightly smaller room than we expected and it's made it so it's kind of like a little bit tighter and more people have to sit next to each other. There's fewer tables. It's just one of those things. That kind of the unexpected results of different decisions makes it so that people you know have a different experience. It's been really cool. You need to cut the questions for me, yo. Opening reception. Be cool, don't be weird. Come on, jason, you need to tell me the questions before you ask. I'm including all of them. He's not good.
Speaker 3:He's not behind the scenes. He's not hard knocks. Training camp with the punch mark team.
Speaker 1:Opening reception has been great Good turnout.
Speaker 3:Everyone seems to be mingling really well. I'm really happy.
Speaker 1:You chose really good food, really like it. You know I have great taste and also the whiskey of choice is kind of classy no well drinks here. Honestly, that might be the tagline of the entire event.
Speaker 2:That's true. Thanks, Jay.
Speaker 1:So we just wrapped up the welcome reception. It was super fun and we changed a lot of things about it and I really think it paid off. But now we're just walking over to this other place and we're going to watch the Yankees play the Mets and sorry, I meant to say we're about to watch the Yankees beat the Mets. Jason just showed his displeasure about that, but it's really cool because I think a lot of the participants are going to go meet us there, and that's always nice because it's a little bit more casual and a little bit more um, it's kind of something that's I don't know a little bit more extracurricular and kind of fun. So we'll go there and then we'll be back and we got bright and early start tomorrow. This next clip is our administrative assistant, d Diana, telling the story about this crazy dust storm that rolled in as she was waiting for one of her child to graduate college. It's kind of a funny story, so I thought I'd include it.
Speaker 3:Is that like the tornado? It was a dust storm Like.
Speaker 7:Illinois has not had a dust storm since 1934. It was like a full out Arizona dust storm. Illinois has not had a dust storm since 1934. It was like a full-out Arizona dust storm.
Speaker 7:And so we're walking to the assembly hall like the auditorium, where the wind is just whipping and whipping, and so Steve and I went and saved seats. And then my two daughters went with Brian back to his dorm because he didn't have to line up, so they were just going to hang out for a while. We're like, yeah, they just go get seats. All of a sudden you look outside and the trees are literally like I'm like what the hell? And the dust was whipping around.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it gets in your teeth.
Speaker 7:Yeah by the time we got back in, the girls were like what is going on? It was delayed. The ceremony was delayed for like 15 minutes.
Speaker 5:Oh, wow.
Speaker 7:Because traffic was all stopped. The people had to pull over. I'm like, okay, this is nutty. We'll never forget this.
Speaker 1:And really quickly. I want to say a very special thank you to the sponsors for this year's client workshop who helped us put the show on. We want to say thank you to the following sponsors put the show on we want to say thank you to the following sponsors Podium, obaku, ijo, the Edge for Jewelers, jewelcraft, national Rarities, brightco, brevani Gems by Pantsys and Ospy. Thank you so much for your continued support. And now back to the show. Okay, it's the morning of day one and we woke up around 7 am, got ready and then we had to bring all of our stuff from the welcome reception all the way down to the Dubois Center, which is like this cool building that we used last year, but I really like it. It's really like modern and like lots of light. But yeah, we got home, man, just short of midnight and got everything all set up and prepped everything. So it's kind of a late night, but, man, I slept really good. I was really tired, but I had a really good time after reception. It was really fun. We had a lot of people from the event come out with us and we watched the Yanks win. It was awesome With a Bellinger Grand Slam to seal the deal on the 8th, which was awesome, and then I got a chance to talk to a lot of jewelers. But what I always love about jewelers is there's no like fear of talking only about work or not talking about work. Sometimes people are okay with, like you know, talking about what they're passionate about. And I talked with uh Vincent from Morezzo, talked to him about like uh, what he does for watch repair and Cole was from Wares, was talking about like the things that uh like watch batteries and like why do jewelers do watch batteries and why do jewelers not do watch batteries sometimes? And hearing them kind of explain like the inner workings of like how a jewelry business actually functions was very interesting. It was really neat hearing them kind of explain oh, watch repair can be really dirty and gross, but it's also really good business and really good stream of revenue. So I thought it was really neat. But today is just the first day. Our first session is site manager, new features. So all about our new page builder tool that just released and I'm really excited about that. Jason spent a lot of time working on it and we just released it last week, so it's like should be really fresh and I'm thinking everyone's going to be really engaged, and then I have to conduct a whole bunch of one-on-one interviews for these testimonial videos we made last year that we're going to do again this year, and that's kind of my big project for the day. And then I'm hosting a vendor roundtable, which will be at the end of the day, and that's new this year. But I'm also going to be doing a retailer roundtable the next day, but the vendor roundtable is going to be tonight and I'm interviewing Jordan from Bravani and Craig from OSPI, and I think that that'll be really successful and they're really easy to talk to. So I'm just going to go and find a cup of coffee After Jason's big presentation about Page Builder 3 and like a big demonstration about it all.
Speaker 1:The following one was about AI and about how you can leverage it to market and also boost your own website and also some of the borderline scary capabilities of it currently. What's cool is we actually did this conversation last year and it was completely different, because AI is progressing at a very alarming rate. This was put on by our CEO, ross Cockrum, and his brother, our CTO, brian Cockrum, and it was a really cool conversation. They, of course, bounce off each other really well and I thought it was one of the better presentations. It was very fun.
Speaker 2:California, all over the place, and I just want to say we are very honored that you guys would come all this way just to see us in little old Charlotte. We, years ago, really wanted to. You know, we have a lot of clients who've been supporting us for 17 years and we were thinking what can we do to give back?
Speaker 2:So this workshop is our attempt to give you back some value in some form. So I really, really hope we all hope that you guys get a lot from this, that you can take something home tangible to apply to your business and really, really grow, whether it's things that are technical, like site manager, venue things, or whether it's marketing or some fun AI stuff that we're going to get into today.
Speaker 4:Some things that we've been building and then we'll try to inspire some questions out of you guys, because any ideas that you have, anything custom, I'll show you something custom that we're in the middle of building for someone.
Speaker 4:But that's where we get to have fun, roll up our sleeves and also help you and make your website shockingly cool to customers at the same time. So we'll get into an AI-stated union. What's changed over the last eight months? That's your first question. So that has now gone up this year to one million tokens. So what is that? That's about a 500-page book. So the implications of that are insane. You can upload an entire course curriculum from GIA and just have ChatGPT be your teacher and have it not only teach you stuff but answer questions for your staff.
Speaker 4:So if you have a question about anything have them go to that same ChatGPT session ask a question and get an answer from somebody who's effectively a graduate gemologist, because they know everything that's in the whole body of text.
Speaker 1:I'm with Savannah designer at Punchmark.
Speaker 6:Hello.
Speaker 1:Running our Instagram content. Pretty cool. I like that you're sharing it. If I didn't come to this, I would definitely be following along.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you've been running our Instagram for a while. What have you learned along the way?
Speaker 6:I've learned that videos are really taking off. I didn't believe people until I saw the analytics and stuff. So trying to utilize a balance of static posts and then the dynamic video posts and just kind of evolving your style as you go along, I've made some changes and then, even with the aspect ratio on Instagram changing, just kind of make sure you stay like present and you're keeping track of all that stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, honestly, the posting on Instagram it definitely makes you also learn for a business, makes you also learn how to post for yourself better too, which I always think is so funny, kind of rubs off a little bit oh yeah but the reels, uh, I always tell all my friends and like, as I'm trying to like teach some of my fellow artists, I'm always like you know the videos, man, that's the only way to reach new audiences right now.
Speaker 1:And they're always like and then I show them, like a little bit of metrics on, like you know, a live or a reel. I'm like, yeah, you get, you know, 10 times as many interactions or views off a reel than you do off just a static post. Then you show it to them and they're kind of their jaws hit the ground.
Speaker 6:Oh yeah, I've started to like pick up on video content and like my personal stuff now Not so much on Instagram, but really on TikTok, like whenever I go on a trip, I'll do like a little travel vlog. So I'm really kind of learning about my own personal socials as well from all this.
Speaker 1:Definitely, Nope, so we're just having lunch. It's presented, or I guess it's sponsored by IJL. So I think that there's like a little presentation here in a second, but we're just kind of hanging out. We'll break Everyone's milling around. It's cool that. I like that it's a smaller room than it used to be, because it kind of forces people to sit next to each other and chat. Yeah, it's been cool. Well, savannah, thank you so much. Appreciate it, thank you. One of the longtime sponsors of the client workshop is the Edge, and Lenny from the Edge comes every year and he really brings a great presentation. He's a really awesome presenter and here he is talking about ways that you can leverage the edge point of sale system. I thought his presentation was really interesting and data driven, so here's a little snippet.
Speaker 3:Postcards to each of these 701. My budget is just under $3,500. Okay, just math, pretty straightforward. The results that we see from variable printed postcards that are oversized are what we're seeing here.
Speaker 5:So we take those 701 times by five we sent out 3,505 postcards.
Speaker 3:Our return on these type of postcards, based on all the people that are using, is 10%, and that's low. I use the lowest end of that average.
Speaker 1:Punchbox Digital Marketing Program is one of the areas we've really shown the most innovation and growth in the past year or so. I think a lot of that credit goes to Hope Belair, our digital marketing team manager, and what's really cool is she went into this presentation to really kind of get people onto the ground floor and get people to kind of start to understand how they can start marketing whether with us, or why, and how they can start doing it themselves. And a lot of people took this presentation really kind of felt like it set them up to start making strategic decisions in the future. I thought this one was really great. So if you haven't yet, I'd reach out and see if she can do an audit on your website. It's definitely worth it.
Speaker 8:Google and Meta both love to spend your money, so we want to make sure that they're being advantageous with it right. We want to be sure that we're getting the right customers in front of your ads so that we can bring them into the store and ultimately make that first sentimental purchase, oftentimes between a customer and his fiance.
Speaker 5:In addition, if you let Google run wild, they will show your ad all day every day with $5 cost per click keywords and all of a sudden you're up to a hundred dollars a day on certain marketing efforts which we don't really need.
Speaker 8:So first let's go over some of the basics. These are going to be the ad metrics that you're going to be looking for when creating a campaign.
Speaker 1:that is going to signify whether your campaign is doing very well, how much you're spending and where you're spending it on years of the workshop, but this one is the vendor roundtable and I wanted to get a chance to sit down with some of these leaders of the jewelry vendor kind of facet of the industry and talk to them about what's important to them. Their needs and kind of sights are set on something slightly different than what retailers are focused on, as well as what tech companies like Punchmark are focused on, and getting a chance to speak with them pretty openly was a really illuminating and interesting conversation. This is a standalone episode so I'm only going to share a small snippet of it If you're interested in listening to it. It'll be two episodes previous to this one, so this is with Craig McBean from OSPI and Jordan Peck from Bravani. I definitely highly recommend that you go and listen to the full episode, so enjoy this snippet here.
Speaker 10:Well, good question. So my father retired in 2007 and he did a sabbatical where he was going to leave for a few months and then come back in a different role, so it was going to allow me to kind of take over the leadership of the company. But I knew when he left that he wasn't coming back because he was pretty checked out at the time. So when he retired in 2007,. He's been gone. He comes in for copy paper on occasion and we still charge him for that, but what's scary is that I'm now getting to the point where I need to start thinking about the next generation.
Speaker 10:And I've got a 24-year-old daughter who I don't think we could work together.
Speaker 4:I've got a 22-year-old son who's going into cybersecurity and I've got a 17-year-old son, so I'm still a ways from anyone from, say, a fifth generation being ready.
Speaker 10:But thankfully we've got a good team in-house that can run the the business, and I've got to figure some things out.
Speaker 1:Hopefully you got some time with that. And, jordan, we actually did an episode relatively recently a couple of months ago and you were talking about working with your sister, but also navigating what it's like working with your parents Just an estimation. You guys can go back and listen to the episode, but what is it like having to navigate, dealing with family and sibling matters as well as, you know, business matters?
Speaker 9:Yeah, we were just sitting and talking about work.
Speaker 9:So, we had to kind of find that balance, I think my sister in my case it's good because things I'm good at she's not necessarily as good at, and vice versa I'm good at she's not necessarily as good at, and vice versa. She's great at design, marketing and brand direction, whereas I'm much more of a back-end at sales operations, things like that. So we have a really good balance and we're well together in that respect. And then we share the commonality of trying to convince my father to take a step back and let go of the reins a little bit. But you know just the type of person he is. I don't know if he's ever going to be pulled out and just come in for paper. He's someone who's probably going to be there for the long haul. We are just kind of adapting to how that looks, and you know how we're going to go about taking over and stepping into his role while he still maintains some sort of involvement there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this is one of the topics that I've been covering quite often is family dynamics and kind of you know, business relationships, because you know, businesses aren't like this cold, heartless sort of corporate being. For all of you, as independent jewelers, there's a lot more at play. Okay, so we just finished the day at the workshop first day, and it was a really good and busy day. I'm pretty cooked. I'm definitely a little bit of an introvert pretending to be an extrovert, podcast hosting notwithstanding, and whenever I finish having to be in a crowd and being really extroverted, I always feel really tired afterwards. But we just walked back to our hotel room to just drop off some of our stuff and then we have to go over to Fahrenheit, which is a rooftop bar in downtown Charlotte, and it's super cool. It's right on top of this beautiful rooftop and luckily it's going to be incredible weather again. It's like 87 degrees outside, so it's pretty warm and everyone has a really good time. So I'm looking forward to that.
Speaker 1:The live vendor retailer episode went super well. I'm just really pleased, and Craig uh, craig and Jordan were so kind and they did such a good job that I'm just really happy with how it all turned out. Tomorrow is going to be a little bit easier. I had to schedule a lot of one-on-one interviews and I think that took up a lot of my time and handling with the um, with the photographer and the videographer, and tomorrow should be a little bit easier, which will be nice. But you know, I think same thing with when you go to jewelry trade shows a lot of the times. You know the point isn't just to sleep, you know you gotta just be out there a lot and, yeah, today went really well. So I'm really pleased, really proud of the team. Like I said, we always have this cocktail hour on Fahrenheit Rooftop Bar and it is just such a highlight of the show we can't change it because everybody looks forward to it and kind of expects it at this point and who would we be to change things that are just such a hit? But one thing we added last year and we continued this year is this series of little awards that we give. This year is this series of little awards that we give. We give a couple to Punchmark employees and it's important to us to highlight our employees in front of our clients and I think that this is a really cool opportunity to do it, and we also highlight some of our clients who attend and we shut them out for things like, you know, being loyal or traveling there Not so much as to you know how big of a store they're a part of, but this is just a cool way to kind of highlight some of the really interesting retailers that are part of the Punchmark crew. So I hope you listen to a little bit of the transcript, but it's a little loud up there, so I hope you understand.
Speaker 1:Go ahead. The first one I want to recognize. This person is for Punchmark. Sorry, this one's with Punchmark. Go ahead For the person who's grown our Instagram by a whole bunch and done a really great job. This is Savannah Kell with the Instagram. Shout out to Savannah hey, if you don't follow us, make sure you do. It's Punchmark Websites. If you're not following and you're here, you guys are fake. Come on. Okay, we've grown through this thing. All right. Our second Punchmark Growth Award. This one is someone who took on an entire department. It was really impressive. She did an incredible job and we're really proud of her. This one is for Hope and the digital marketing program.
Speaker 9:So congratulations Hope.
Speaker 2:And this one.
Speaker 1:My last Punchmark one is our Rising Star Award. This is just a shout out to someone that has really stepped in and built a whole bunch, both figuratively and very literally. This one is for Tom Moore, our front-end developer. He built all the websites. You probably never got a chance to meet him, but he does an incredible job. That's what I found All. Right. Now to the client ones. You guys can start paying attention to these.
Speaker 1:All right, this one we did this last year, but this is for the longest-standing client in attendance and they've been a client for I can't do math this fast 12 years, just short of 12 years. And this is for Holiday Jewelry. Thank you so much. Sticking with us throughout the years don't go anywhere. This one is also our second one. This is very important to us. This is our.
Speaker 1:Whenever you guys close a ticket or open a ticket and then it gets closed, you get an option to leave a review for us, and it's very important to the CS team. It's part of judging how well we're able to service you, and we want to say thank you to who's left the most reviews, most reviews left, and this is also for Holiday Jewelry Nine reviews, thank you so much, of course. Of course Also, we're in beautiful Charlotte, north Carolina, right now and we know that not everybody lives in this proximity, but you guys are all here. We really appreciate it. So we wanted to recognize someone who traveled the farthest distance and that goes out to Holly McCone Jewelry in Astoria, oregon, and that is, by my calculations by CatchyPT's calculations 2,753 miles right this year. Shout out to them.
Speaker 1:We always appreciate when you guys go to bat for us. We know how hard it is sometimes. We know that. You know the internet can be very easy to be anonymous on. We understand that and we want to say thank you to all the people. Whenever someone JHJ or IJO exclusive or RJ exclusive or all the different, various exclusive Facebook groups, whenever someone says, hey, who should I go for a website and believe me, I have lots of alerts that whenever the word website is mentioned, it gets pinged to me and whenever I go in there, this person is always in there recommending Punchmark and I really want to say thank you so much for our Punchmark Champion Award, and this goes out to Vincent Spillaccio and Arezzo Jewelers. Thank you so much, vincent.
Speaker 5:Thank you for battling out for us man. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Okay, last one, but this one I asked the CS members here. I asked them hey, who is the client that really is down to learn anything and is down to try anything you recommend and is down to learn the new tools and take on new roles and better their website the best they can? And this is our, the first one that we've ever done. The Innovation and Termination Award, as picked by the our CS team, goes out to Wears Jewelers. Congratulations. Thanks so much, paul. All right, everybody, that's the end. Enjoy your drinks. Enjoy the cocktails. See you again next year.
Speaker 1:All right, it is pretty late and we are walking back to the hotel room, but we're at the end of the Fahrenheit um happy hour. We always go to this other uh rooftop bar, which is novelty house. It's just cool spot and it's like a seven or 10 minute walk or so and we actually had a ton of people come out for it. It was super fun. And now me, jason and Diana are just walking back to the hotel and yeah, it was a really successful day, really long. But now we got one more day of education fun. Hopefully everyone makes it out for it and then we can. Yeah, we'll wrap it up from there, but so far it's been a really good one. It's a really good group of a really good group of uh jewelers. Everyone seems to be really enthusiastic and fond clicks, so it's been a good time of clicks. So it's been a good time all right dawn of day two or day three overall, but day two for lessons and sadly last night lost my lavalier mic, so now recording it right out of my phone, but no, it was good time. Had some breakfast downstairs at the uh the hotel restaurant.
Speaker 1:So I think that this one, dan's going to do a talk all about AI, which I think, or building your own GPT, which I think will be really cool. Yesterday morning Ross and Brian did a really awesome talk about the powers of AI and what it can be used for in the near future. So I think that the GPT one is going to go really well. And then I think I have a retailer roundtable and I'm still kind of dialing in who I'm going to have for that one, but I think it'll be really good. And then I fly home, so we have a busy one.
Speaker 1:Day two was kicked off with Ross talking about marketing and standing out, but one of the things I really enjoyed was he actually pulled up everybody's Instagram accounts, including Punchmarks, and kind of did like a little flip through on it, and I think that a lot of people had. It was sort of like kind of illuminating. It really allowed you to see where you stand and also maybe you should put in a little bit of effort or maybe your stands out really well and looks better than average. I always really enjoy these conversations and like getting a chance to look at how to capitalize on what makes you different, and Ross kicked it off at nine in the morning with some really good presentations, so I thought that was really fun. Just be yourself.
Speaker 2:Okay, it's those. It's that personality, the identity that you have and that even your quirks, right, the weird part of your business those things are what people remember, Like do you have a? Dog in your store. Do you have right and do you have like?
Speaker 5:a section over here for kids to hang out and play Um do you like what?
Speaker 2:what kind of things do you do you bring to the office? Do you? Are you a guitarist and do you have a guitar hanging up on the wall in your store? Those things actually make you unique and make you memorable.
Speaker 1:One of my favorite presentations from day two was actually by our CPO Danceroy. He's my boss, but he actually isn't kind of presenting very often. He doesn't go to as many shows. He's usually the man behind the curtain sort of building things that clients get to enjoy, but he doesn't usually take credit for it, and he's one of the co-founders of Punchmark. But today he was talking all about GPTs and how to build a bot model, you might say, and what these are is kind of like a super hyper-tailored AI version of ChatGPT and you can go in and train it on these and give it guardrails on these questions, and he also kind of leverages it to show how you could use it around your store. It was a really interesting presentation. It's something I had never done before and I was taking notes right alongside of him, but it was super interesting to have someone so hyper-intuned with the development of AI kind of show something that is very much on the on the bleeding edge of of AI.
Speaker 5:So I would highly recommend asking him about it next time you see him, you guys what are the solutions we're coming up with, and then we'll get into actual custom GPT methodology. One thing to note is last year we had this conference where we were talking about AI and a lot of people were just you know, how much of adoption is actually going to happen? Are people going to use?
Speaker 7:AI.
Speaker 5:Are you going to lose your job? It was a lot of that kind of conversation. Fast forward one year later. Everybody has AI in their pockets all day long. Every single thing has AI.
Speaker 1:The final segment of the last part of the client workshop is a leadership roundtable and I host this, but the three guests are the leadership team at Punchmark. So this is Dan Ross and Brian and they talk about kind of the roadmap and we've kind of learned from our mistakes in the past. We don't say anything about when things are coming out, and we used to do that and no longer, because sometimes things arise and also sometimes things are so pressing that we have to fast track them and then it throws everything off and as soon as we come out and announce a date for something, a lot of times that date is no longer accurate. So what we've learned is that it's better for us to talk about what we're working on and what we've released recently and what we're proud of, and then people can kind of follow along with those. But it's pretty interesting because there's a lot of things that are released that we build for one or two or three customers that everybody can benefit from.
Speaker 1:And that's part of like what the whole SaaS software as a service model is about is you're not paying for these updates, you just pay a monthly service plan and then you get all updates in perpetuity and there's a lot of these updates that we don't even publicize that much because they don't sound that sexy. In a press release, you know, when we say, oh, we made it so that your products load way faster, it just doesn't really kind of ring through as much and we've never really kind of been able to jump that gap to make it so that some of these less sexy releases are kind of received as such. But when we go in these guys they could talk about anything and I think a lot of our clients would be really excited. So that's how we end this one up. And here's Ross talking about what he's most proud of releasing this past year.
Speaker 2:I am actually most proud of the seamless loop that we create between your website and the store. I've personally been talking a good game about a lot of these things since 2018. A good friend and mentor of mine, dick Abbott, the owner of the Edge, we share a common vision on what the industry needs for the new era of retailing. One of those things that released on May 22nd, just after last year's workshop, which I talked about sitting in this exact seat was customer invitations. As soon as someone makes a purchase in your store, they're invited then to go to your website, claim their account and there's a big claim, my account link and then, the minute we launched it, we had like 87 accounts being claimed like within five minutes, and it was pretty awesome that the proof of concept was out there. So we want to engage customers and get them 24 seven right.
Speaker 1:Man. We just finished the second day and, oh my gosh, that was a long day, but I think everything went well. Just grabbing a drink in the hotel lobby and then I'm going to take an Uber to the airport and we'll call it right there, but everybody else goes to dinner, which I unfortunately skip. I have to get home. I'm painting a mural on Thursday and I have to get home in time for that. So it was a really fun day.
Speaker 1:I think we get better every single time we do it. I'm really proud of how it turned out. So I think overall we get 10% better every year, but it's compounding. So who knows Next year will 10% better every year, but it's compounding. So who knows, next year will be even better. I thought it was a good time.
Speaker 1:Thanks everybody who came out, though I seem to miss the final event of the client workshop. Every year it's this beautiful dinner at Finanfino that the Punchmark team puts on and it sort of kind of wraps things up, and I had to get home. I was painting a mural in my hometown and construction was set to start in just a day and a half, so I needed to get by, but someone recorded this final toast that Ross did at the dinner and it sort of encapsulates the vibe and energy of this year's client workshop. This year's group was so excellent. They really were open-minded down to learn new techniques and tips and talk about AI, even if they weren't currently using it or familiar with it.
Speaker 1:I'd really hope to see you at the next client workshop. We have it every year in May in Charlotte, north Carolina. Clients, I believe it's included for you to go with your first employee, with your first member, and it's such a great opportunity and it kind of gets you jazzed up for the next rest of the year. So I hope that we see you at the next one and get a chance to shake your hand, have a drink with you. All right, cheers.
Speaker 2:Success happens when you go outside your comfort zone. It wasn't the people who were super comfortable that were successful. The fact that you guys jumped on a plane, booked airfare, jumped in a hotel just to come to Little Old Charlotte, get to learn on, mingle with us, that means a lot and it says a lot to your success and the type of people that you are. There's a lot of stuff. I hope you go home and implement things that you learned. More importantly than that, I was talking to Oscar about this and Anna was on camera talking about this. We do business with the people that we would hang with. We just love hanging with you guys. You guys are awesome, awesome. You guys are fun to be with and, like craig said today. Craig said a lot of things about values and it seems like your values are aligning with our values, right? So in the sense of that, they say family and business doesn't mix, but just like ijo says, yeah, we're all family here right, let's sing the song.
Speaker 2:Let's sing the song. Here's to you guys.
Speaker 3:We are family Come on, let's hear it.
Speaker 8:Look at all my viewers and me.
Speaker 2:Anyway, here's to you guys Letting family succeed and to your success. Thank you guys. Yeah, yeah, all right guys, cheers, cheers.
Speaker 1:Cheers. All right, everybody. That's the end of the show. Thanks so much for listening. This episode was a big compilation episode, so a very special thank you goes out to our editor, Paul Suarez, for looking through my GarageBand recording layout and making it make sense. Thanks, Paul. This episode was brought to you by Punchmark and produced and hosted by me, Michael Burpo. This episode was edited by Paul Suarez with music by Roz Cockrum. Don't forget to rate the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and leave us feedback on punchmarkcom slash loop. That's L-O-U-P-E. Thanks and hopefully I see you at the next client workshop, Same time, same place next year. Cheers, Bye.
