Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Rick Elmore, Founder and CEO of Simply Noted

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

Rick Elmore is an entrepreneur, sales, and marketing expert, and former college and professional football player. Following his football career, Rick translated his competitive drive to sales and entrepreneurship by founding Simply Noted, an automated handwritten letter company founded on the idea of making it easy to create simple, scalable, powerful, and meaningful real pen-written communication.Rick Elmore is an entrepreneur, sales, and marketing expert, and former college and professional football athlete. As the founder and CEO of Simply Noted, Rick developed a proprietary technology that puts real pen and ink to paper to scale handwritten communication.Learn more: https://simplynoted.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-rick-elmore-founder-and-ceo-of-simply-noted

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Rick Elmore, who's the founder and CEO of Simply Noted. Rick, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me on the show, Mike. It's great to be here. You're welcome. I'm excited to learn from you and find out what simply noted is. I think that our minds tend to gravitate things that are concise and simple.

So I love Simply Noted the name. But get started with your story. What's your background? And how did you get into this type of industry that you're in currently? Yeah, it's a great question. So my background's in athletics. I played Division I football and then was lucky enough to be driving. into the NFL in 2011. Got to live out my childhood dream, playing the NFL for three years. Had the typical NFL career as a journeyman, kind of bounced around from team to team. But, you know, eventually had to hang up the cleats and shoulder pads. Made that transition to the business world in 2000 and, like 13, 2014. And do basically what a lot of my peers were doing after sports and got into corporate medical device sales or just corporate

sales, had a lot of success in the business world or the corporate world, basically just transferred everything that made me successful as an athlete, you know, the hard work, passion, desire, perseverance, strength, grit, you know, get knocked down seven times, get up eight. I was rookie the year of my first year. The next five years in my corporate like sales job, I was either top 1% or top five sales rep in the company. It really just came down to just all that, all the effort I put into was out, I was willing to outwork everybody.

In 2017, I kind of had an itch that I couldn't scratch. And I went back and did my MBA at like as a full-time evening class. And about a year into my program, I had a professor in a marketing class that was going over all the success rates in marketing. And this is what's really important for anybody listening to this message is that what you're looking for is going to come to you when you least expect that. You just got to keep looking. And that's what I was doing, you know, in my mid-20s. I was just looking for what my purpose was, where my place in the business world was. I was just doing new things.

And luckily, when I was in my MBA in this marketing class, about at the end of a three-hour-long lecture, my marketing professor just said something that changed the direction of my life. And I couldn't be more thankful for it. He was going over all the success rates in marketing. Everything was super nominal, all the traditional marketing things that we know, email, direct mail, digital ads, SEO, all that stuff. He ends this lecture kind of jokingly saying, hey, guys, you know, it works better now, if not better than ever, is a good old fashioned handwritten note. Mailboxes are empty. They get opened 99.2% of the time.

They're rare. No one does it anymore. It makes you stand out. And he just kept talking about how great handwritten notes were. And at the time, I had 400 clients. I was like, man, that's a great point. Like, if I can get in front of my client 99% of the time, that's going to make me more successful, but I have 400 clients. How am I going to do this efficiently? And fast forward,

you know, from there, we got started, started kind of dabbling around with some technologies. We've built a company that makes it really easy for companies to scale and automate, sending genuine personalized penwritten notes. These aren't printed. They're really penwritten. We have 400,000 users on our platform every single month. We have six pending patents on the robot technology that we've spent nearly $1 million building. 11 full-time employees. You're all in, man. Yeah, it's been an incredible journey to say the least.

Wow. So let's talk a little bit about that because I think if we could go back in time to sit in that marketing class and talk a little bit more about why that works, why handwritten notes work more than better than ever, is because we're busy. We're inundated with marketing messages. the more cool whiz-bang techy stuff that we get exposed to, the more each person's attention is drawn away from anything that is put in front of them. So we've got instant messages and text messages and emails and chat bots, all of this stuff.

But yeah, when I go out to my mailbox, yeah, you get your bills and you get a few junk mail. But if you've got a larger, you know, different sized envelope and you open it up and it's a handwritten note, that stands out. And I think in marketing, if you were to say define marketing in one sentence, it's how to stand out and get noticed. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's about everybody's in and David, like you said, we live in a digital world. We're all bombarded, you know, daily with emails. The average office worker gets like 150 emails a day. I wake up in the morning and I immediately delete 60 or 70 emails before 7 o'clock. I mean, it's an absolute nightmare. doing TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, you know, all push notifications from your

apps. I mean, it is, I want to take my phone, you know, before I even get to work, before I even get to the office and just throw it out the door or out the window because it's just such an annoyance. It's literally a distraction. So like you said, marketing is about engaging somebody, connecting with somebody, standing out, being remembered. and there's just no better way. I mean, the best way, in my opinion, is to sit down with someone face-to-face and build that relationship, but obviously we can't do that scaled. So I think the best next way to do it is to put something in writing because what you're

doing is you're showing that person that you're giving them, you know, five minutes of your time. And that to them is incredibly valuable. And that brings up an aspect that I think. that this mode of communication lends itself nicely to versus technology. Now, guess what? I don't do paper. I'm all digital. I'm techie. I do automation. Love, love, love it. But at the end of the day, we have to recognize the fact that sitting behind the computer clicking like on a social media or sending a text or all these things, that's easy. That's hiding behind the computer. But let's talk

about relationships. So relationship building, relationship marketing, if you want to think of it like that, if you want to stand out, it's getting to know someone on that personal level. And maybe that handwritten note is going to open up a door to build that relationship a little bit better than the bot that sent them a Facebook message. Absolutely. So business, we all know it's all about relationships, even though we're entering the AI world and we were just in the digital revolution for last 20, 25 years, you know, since the dawn of the internet, um, relationships will always be a part of business and now some really interesting stats. Um, you know, this was actually some studies that American Express ran. So, you know, they have, you know, millions of dollars are

thrown into these studies. But they found out that, um, you know, relationships with customers, or customers who feel appreciated are five times more likely to make repeat purchases. So just Think about the lifetime value of your clients. If you have better relationships with your clients, you're obviously going to get more repeat business. They're five times more likely to forgive a mistake. Everyone's human. We all make mistakes. Like, it's just a part of the process.

There's a lot of growing pains. But if you have a really good relationship with your client, they're going to be more willing to forgive you and stick with you. And especially today, there's a competitor or a choice for every business. So it's really important to make those clients, you know, feel, you know, you know, like you appreciate them, so they're loyal to you. Also, customers who feel appreciated are four times more likely to make a referral. I don't know about you, but they get a referral is a lot more exciting than paying all the advertising costs that you have to do for SEO, you know,

ads to, you know, get like an organic, you know, lead. So I would much rather get referrals. Referrals are much more likely to be better clients. And then also upselling your current clients, if you have great relations with your clients, they're more likely to try a new offering. So really at the heart of business, successful businesses, get their clients, they connect with their clients, they build great relationships with their clients. Their clients are buying into their brand. And handwritten notes, a really great way to, you know, attack all those categories with just one simple, effective tool. And while we're talking statistics, there's one that I've familiar with and it might be outdated by now, but probably the concept remains the same, which is it costs five to seven

times more money to get a new client than to retain a current client. Absolutely. So maybe creating that deeper relationship with handwritten notes to retain your current customers, current clients, just puts a little bit of an asterisk or a gold star by your name in their mind to go, all right, you know what, everyone else sent me that automated whatever. And now, hey, this handwritten note came. So I think that's another big thing that people need to realize is you're out there, you know, foraging for new clients and you're ignoring your current ones. You might be losing them.

You know, it's kind of like having a hole in the bucket. Yep. Yeah. And as an old time sales rep, you know, leaky bucket syndrome, that's the, the worst way to build your business. If you're just constantly adding new business to your portfolio, but you're losing old clients, you're just basically running in circles. So you've got to find that fine line about trying to keep your current business happy, your current clients happy while going out there and growing your new business as well. Now, if I remember correctly, do you know the name

Joe Gerard? Sounds familiar. I'm sure. So you can Google this to verify, but I think he holds a Guinness of World Records for selling the most amount of cars in a single day or a month or whatnot. And he was an old-time car salesman. And one of the techniques that he used was he would literally sit down and grab a pen and a piece of paper and write handwritten notes to his current customers and his prospects. And that's the thing that he, and this was way back in the day. So way before emails and text and all that. But talk a little bit now about what you have developed because it sounds good. You've sold us on handwritten notes.

But, oh my word, I go right from one outlawful. mini to the next to the next and the Zoom and a meeting. I don't have time to sit down and write notes. Yeah, so it's Simply Noted it is. We're an engagement platform or we're a handwritten notes platform. We help our clients connect with their clients in a more personal way. The way that we do that is through automating real genuine personalized handwritten notes. You can either go to our web app at Simply Noted.com.

You can send just one card out of time, 10 cards out of time, 1,000, 10,000. All of them are custom, personalized, have their name. They're written in pen. We don't put our logos on it. We put a real forever stamp on it. I mean, we make it look like you sat down from your desk and sent a handwritten note. If we're doing our job, which I think we do a really good job, your clients will never know that you used a service. We're the only company in the world that's truly built their own handwriting robot.

There are some other players in the space, but I like to believe that we are the best. We put the most time effort, research and development into our handwriting robots. You know, some of our competitors use pen plotters or, you know, some older technologies that've been around since the 80s. But we've felt our own handwriting robots, our own handwriting software, our own handwriting engine. And the best way to see this is either request a sample kit from our website. You just go to Simply Noted.com, top right handquarter, you can request a sample or just go to the video section. We have videos of all of our robots. There's nothing like this in the world.

I really do think, you know, we're five to ten years ahead of anybody in this. space when it comes to technology. There's just no better, you know, technology out there that can produce the type of products that simply noted can produce at scale. So I think that's a big piece is automation technology using that to accomplish this, but I think a lot of people will go, come on, I get these things all the time in my mailbox saying, come to this dinner seminar or whatever the case is. And it's like, it looks like it's signature type handwriting font, but you can just tell that it's not. So you're saying that you guys have got, cracked the nut, you figured it out.

Well, absolutely. So if you see those like Renewal by Anderson, like marketing campaigns, what they'll do. So like they'll write a handwritten note, then they'll just like laser print it, you know, make it look like it was handwritten. But then there's also some other of our competitors. They use those pen plotters. But, I mean, they're just so old. And the plugins that they use to create the handwriting just aren't as advanced as our handwriters. as our handwriting engines.

Like we use like custom built algorithms that actually manipulate and stretch and rotate and add real genuine handwriting nuances as it writes to the handwriting styles. So if you've seen some of those really like old auto pen handwritten notes, like I guess you'd see that. But the only way to really tell the difference is to request a handwriting sample kit. So when you see it, we use we use weighted pens. We use downward writing pressures. Like our pen actually digs into the.

of paper so you can actually see the indentation. The ink smears, we actually created our own pen two years ago. We worked with an engineering company here in Gilbert, Arizona, but then we manufacture them in China. Our pens hold 300% more ink, so they last longer, plus their wetter, have more viscosity. So the ink smears more than a typical pen, so it's more realistic. So, I mean, we've overthought everything and over-engineered everything to help our clients, automate or send just a simple two or three dollar handwritten note.

I mean, it's just not the amount of technology that's gone into this. So that's awesome. And I think that that's a great thing is like, okay, okay, sounds good, but let's test it up for ourselves. So get that pack. From a marketing standpoint, I know that you would agree with this with automation.

You want, when someone downloads your case study or white paper, you want to have an email follow-up series. Do you have any way that when you, can you create a handwritten note follow-up series so that once a month your clients are getting something from you like that? So, yes, Zapier, we're really into Zapier. Zapier solves a lot of problems. You can set up campaigns to where every 30 days you automate sending a handwritten notes.

We like doing that through Zapier just because it's a little bit more flexible. You know, when it comes to marketing, there's really cool ways to track this with QR codes or call rail or phone tracing numbers. So when people actually interact, you know, with the call trace, call tracing or QR code, you can set up automations based off their activities there. You can send them to landing pages and fill forms. I mean, there's a bunch of ways, you know, really it's sitting down talking about, and this is what we do with each of our clients. They bring us their ideas, like, hey, can you do this? And we help them solve it and set up the workflow to accomplish what they want to get done. That, I think, is the icing of the cake because all the conceptual research methodology makes sense.

Now it's like, okay, I don't have time to do it. I want to automate it, but you've cracked the nut to figure out how it looks as close to human as possible with all of the indentation and the downward strokes. That's amazing. And then, oh, we're not just a place that just would help you send one. We can put it together in an overall campaign, talk about how to help you get more clients. And when you start talking about Zapier and QR codes and tracking phone numbers, that's a, that's a full-on marketing campaign. So that's a really smart integrations that you guys have.

Yeah, handwritten notes, you know, I don't say it's the end-all be-all to your business. It's just another tool in your belt. You know, I'm a business owner. That's simply noted. I can, I use every tool possible. We use email. We use call, like calling, cold calling. You know, we use ads, SEO, social.

I mean, we use everything, but handwritten notes are just another tool that you need to have in your tool belt. It's a great way to attract new clients just because the open rate is so high. It makes you stand out. You're building trust with them right away and also retain current clients. Building on that relationship, telling them, thank you. I mean, we try to tell our clients, every business should at least think their clients once a year. If it's during the holidays or at least, you know, at the beginning of the year, try to get ahead of them, make sure they're thinking of you when they're going to buy, right? So attract, you know, high open rate, build trust, connect with them personally, and then retain.

It's all about attract and retain. Attract and retain. And the handwritten notes are a great way to do those two things together. We have a lot of technologies that help you make that efficient. I love it. Well, Rick, if someone is interested in finding out how this could benefit their business and getting a sample pack, what's the best way that they can learn more and reach out and connect with you? Yeah. Yeah, so just go to simply noted.com.

It's just how it's spelled S as and Sam, I am as and Mary, P-L-Y-Noted.com. In the top right-hand corner of the screen on the home page, you'll see Request a sample. And we do a really good job. We spend about $20 per sample kit because we want to make sure that what we send you is answering all your questions and you're just seeing the quality of our technology. When you get it, you're going to smile, you're going to laugh and you're like, no way, was this written by a robot? And then you're going to call us with your ideas.

and we're going to, that's what happens. People call us, you know, a week later, two months later. I'm like, hey, I got this. This is great. Can you do this? Awesome. Let's set it up. Perfect.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. I appreciate you. Have me on a day, Mike. Thank you. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.

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