REAL AF with Andy Frisella - 70. God Bless This Average Home

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

What's said about you when you're not around? In life and business, every interaction you have can positively or negatively affect your legacy. On today's episode, Sal explains how word of mouth marketing can help build your business as well as dismantle it.

I told my teacher, dumb bitch, I'm gonna get millions. Watch this. In a project living, spoke it to existence. Voila. Mode changed to 50. Got more cars than did. I only weigh 180, but my watch cost 250. What's up, guys?

I'm Sal Purcell, and you're listening to the show for the realists. Say goodbye to the lies, the fakeness, and delusions of modern society. And welcome to motherfucking reality. What's going on, ladies and gentlemen? New voice, new mic, new you. No? How was it? It's okay? All right. Got the sign of affirmation from my two helpers here, my two homies, Juicy Joe, Madat, not so juicy. Hey guys, what's going on? It's Sal Frisella. Obviously not Andy. Andy. It's weird calling him Andy. I call him Andrew. Everybody always thinks that's like, like who? Like Andrew. Who? Andy.

You know, that fucking guy, my brother. I don't know why everybody thinks that's like the biggest thing in the world. Like, why do you call him Andrew? Cause that's his name, Andrew. Hey, we, uh, we, uh, wanted to bring you guys, as you can see the last couple episodes, trying to bring value. And we recognize on the long episodes, although the topics are extremely relevant in today's society, we wanted to bring you as much value as we can as a group of individuals and as a podcast. And being real AF, like trying to provide real value to your life, whether it's personal, professional, being a dad, being a husband, business experience, leadership experience. We just want to make sure that as a group, we're providing as much value as possible. And so we decided to do some clips.

I'm a story guy, a lesson guy. And one of the things that I take a great deal of pride in is always sharing stories with my team and trying to help develop them through my lessons and usually failures. And we thought that, hey, maybe you guys would like it. And so any feedback that you guys have, like, shares, even if it's bad feedback, shoot it to me. Let's see what you think. But hopefully I hold my weight here in providing value and having a little fun together. But, uh, you know, something that's important to me is, is that legacy and sharing stories and bringing value. And hopefully I can add value to your life through a little business education with this one. And this is

going to be, uh, we refer to this around here or with my staff. I always, we always quick line. It is called God bless this average house. And God bless this average house is a funny story, one for the ages, at least for me. And it's a lesson around, you never quite know exactly who you're talking to. And you need to be extremely careful because we live in a society where information travels extremely fast and you never quite know where that information is going. And so, you know, through this story, I'd like to teach you a couple, maybe not just business lessons, but life lessons. And one of those is going to be word of mouth marketing and how important or how detrimental it can be to your business. Secondarily, you know, never quite know exactly

who you're talking to. So it's extremely important to make sure that you treat every individual with class and character and respect. And thirdly, if you want drama in the world, you want drama in your life, the world will give you exactly what you put into it. So if you put drama into the world, be ready for it to give you a little bit of drama. So be careful what you wish for. And so I share with you this story. We as a group at First Form are a very, very, very tight-knit community, specifically here at corporate. Furthermore, our family, whether that's Andrew and I being brothers, my dad, my mom, Chris, our business partner, our network is extremely tight and we are very loyal to one another. And it's not that that network is unique.

It's that the importance of making sure you tap into good networks and take care of those networks is the lesson that I'd like to share with you. And so we used to all share the same cake lady, as weird as that sounds. And a cake lady, for those of you who don't know, is somebody who makes these highly decorative cakes. And we try to make really cool cakes at all our events so that we have, it's like one of those things, the differences in the details. And the cakes are always designed to be some type of conversation piece. And we had a great cake lady. She really was. She made unbelievably awesome tasting cakes, but the visual aspect

of them was amazing as well. And they were always points of conversation. So whether we were having a birthday party for the kids, whether we were having a special event here at HQ, or maybe it was our banquet for our entire company, we always had this cake lady have a piece, whether it was cupcakes or cakes, just a decoration because they were always topic starters. And so one time we had a, I believe it was father's day and it was at, it was at my house. And, um, so we had ordered a cake just like usual. And, um, you know, the cake lady dropped off the cake and, you know, set it in, set it on our, our kitchen Island, walked in the house, you know, walked around to buy, you know, whatever. And I walked back outside, I was icing down the beers. I'll never forget. I was running a power washer and my wife had just this look. She was beelining towards me. And I thought, uh-oh, what the fuck did I do? And she had her phone in her hand and she's like,

read this text. And I'll never forget it. The text said, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's pretty close to this. Hey girl, I just left Sal and Raquel's house and it's nothing like Andrew and Emily's house. It's, it's a normal house. There's nothing really special. I had the opportunity to go inside and you know, it's just a plain house. Right. And I remember thinking like instantly like this kind of rage. Cause if you follow me on Instagram at all, like I take a great deal of pride in my, especially like my yard and my house and this house for me has a great deal of character. And although it's not like this huge mansion, it's, it's still my home. And you know, we, we, we have, you know, slowly over time rehabbed our home into, you know, what I would like to think is where we're going to raise our, where we're raising our family and something that's a dream home for us. And,

and I remember like, I got pissed, fuck this gal. And, you know, and I read the text again and then Raquel wrote back right then. She's like, excuse me, question mark. And it was really funny at that point. Cause you knew that the dance was on, right? Bubble up, bubble down, bubble up, bubble down, bubble up, bubble down, pause, you know, and now we're sitting there. Now it's like, now we're going to watch, you know, bubble up, bubble down, bubble up, bubble down. And after like five minutes or 10 minutes, it was a long time. Text came firing back across and it had some like weak ass excuse. It was like, oh my God, sorry. I sent that to the wrong person.

Funny thing is we actually have a brother and sister-in-law with named Sal and Raquel. And I'm saying, Oh, you do, you know, like, I don't know any other Sal's and I don't, I know, like I've met like one other Raquel and you just happen to have a brother and sister-in-law also named Sal and Raquel. I get the fuck out of here. And, uh, so Raquel wrote back. He's like, I'm sorry sorry that my our house is average and doesn't live up to your standards but it's our home and we take a great deal of pride in it and you know we left it from there and then i screen you know screenshot it send it to myself and then i you know immediately i'm like all right because i start getting mad but i think all right well how can i i try not to bring drama into the world but i also want to make sure like you know this message is sent and

you know obviously the first thing i want to do is tell her to fuck off. Right. But I'm, I'm, I'm, I don't do that shit. So I got to work and my, my value was like, I'm gonna get to work and I'm gonna let everybody know she ain't our cake lady no more. Like homegirl, just, she just dropped the ball, fumble. And, um, you know, so I went to work. I, first thing I did is send over to my brother and you can see it bubble up, bubble down, bubble up, build down. You know, the bear was out, he was coming and he's like, Oh, fuck her. You know, fucking house is average. Like what the fuck, you know? And so, but I mean, he's protected over me in that sense. Right. And I was pissed and he, you know, but I wanted him to know. And of course, then, you know, he tells Emily and then Emily tells her girlfriends, right. And I texted over

Aaron Summers here at HQS, hey, we need to find a new cake lady, right? Aaron's my guy, handles a lot of events here. Guess what? Aaron, we're not using her anymore. Roger that, no problem. Cut her out of our events. Well, we had like 10 people coming over. Okay, Father's Day, guess what I did? Threw the cake away. Why? I want to have a good story to tell my 10 people. See that cake in the trash? That's because our cake lady was talking shit on us. So guess what? It became a topic of conversation. Well, these people are in my network too. It's my mother-in-law, father-in-law, my sister-in-law, all these people use the same cake lady because

we've turned them on to her. And it was a talking point. And it's a funny story, right? In the grand scheme of things, a little pissed, so a little vindictive in a sense, like I'm gonna make sure everybody knows a real story. And, uh, you know, here's this lady, you know, who, who was talking a little shit on us and she got caught slipping. And so I was going to make sure that everybody knew that I, that people that I had referred to her, which is my entire friend network, they were going to know how she treated me, which is, you know, and, and I think this is the value of a network too. It's another lesson. And, you know, good, bad, or indifferent, if your people are loyal to you, they will follow you up the hill, down the hill, into the water, into the snow, it doesn't matter. And so, you

know, I was going to make sure that I was calling these people to let them know how, you know, how she treated myself and my family. And, you know, so to take that a step further, you know, how she treated myself and my family. And, you know, so to take that a step further, the, you know, instantly what happens, well, we're not going to stop having events. You know, we don't have to stop having kids' birthdays and, you know, mother's day and father's day. So we had to go find a new cake lady. And, you know, and this is, this is one of the lessons in word of mouth, like word of mouth can be bad or it can be great. And we sought after, here's a plug, shameless plug. Lindsay over at Cake House Design here in St. Louis, Missouri makes, she's our new cake lady. And the reason she's our new cake lady is because our first cake lady talks shit on me. And now we have Lindsay who not only makes a better cake than the original cake lady, she treats us with the utmost of respect. And she has become a part of our network here at First Form, Supplement Superstores, our family, all of our friends, their families. And

guess what? Now all our friends are having kids. So here's more kids cakes. Guess what? Now I feel obligated whenever we have a kid's birthday party, I'm going to put that shit on Instagram and I'm going to tell a little bit of the story or tag her and show her because I appreciate it. And so the lessons here are really what I would like to think pretty clear, but let's start with word of mouth and how important it is. In the grand scheme of things, how imperative word of mouth marketing can be to either building your business, but how imperative it can be to destroying your business. And I think we live in a time now that's so much different than it was like in 1850, right? Word of mouth still worked and it was still equally as important, but with as fast as information travels in today's world, it happens like this. I mean, it happens in an

instant. And back in the 1850s, it took you a while, right? So if you had great interactions over time, it took you a while, but you can build your business and you could insulate it. But if you treated your customers like shit, again, it just took a while for people to experience. And you ultimately have the same result, but in today's world, it's different. And in this case, it happens in a text message. And you got to think how much business that lady lost in one fucking cent text. She fucked her entire business up. And you think how hard and how many cakes she's made to get us to a point where we were all ordering from her. She had to deliver 100, 200, 300 great products and it all went away in one fucking push of a button. One.

So you think how fast negative word of mouth travels in today's world, it's fucking instant. And so you need to make sure that you are not only fucking crossing your T's and dotting your I's, but you need to learn to care about your customers. And I think that bleeds right into lesson two is you never quite know who you're talking to. And I think that bleeds right into lesson two is you never quite know who you're talking to. And that person that you're interacting with, that person just may be the person that you, that controls the destiny to your fucking future of business. And you probably don't want to talk fucking shit on them. And although I might not live in the biggest house in the whole motherfucking world, I just may be the fucking glue that holds the network together. And when she shit on me, she shit on her network.

And it's a great lesson to make sure that you treat all of your customers with respect, not your best customers. You treat all of your customers with the utmost respect and understanding that that's their hard-earned money that they are choosing to spend with you. And they have a choice whether to spend it with you or whether to spend it with someone else. And that decision is going to be made based off of the interaction that they have with you. In this case, I had a bunch of great interactions, but I had one really shitty one. She insulted the pride and joy of my life, which was my home, where I planned to raise my family, something

I take a great deal of pride in. That one text message took it all away. The third lesson, you need to be real careful what you put into the universe. And I think whether you believe in law of attraction or not, law of attraction is real. What you believe, what you put in, the energy, the positivity, if you put that into the world, you'll get it back. And then it's not saying you just wish for it, but I'm saying you got to work for it and be genuine and intentful and understanding that you got to care about people if you want them to care about you. And you got to show them the love if you want to receive the love. And in this case, if you want drama, you give it drama and guess what? It's going to give you

right back a little bit of motherfucking drama. And although I'm not a drama player in the sense, like I'm not going to go back in the tick for tack, but she gave us a little bit of bullshit. I don't know. The world's going to return the favor of a little bit of bullshit. And I think the lesson here, right? The lesson is not just a business lesson. It's a life lesson. And understanding the simple fact that the conversations that are happening about you when you're not around are the most important conversations that you could speak about you. And making sure that you learn to care about these people is how they talk about you when you're not around. And I think that's the most important lesson is, I quickly realized that we have spent tons of money with this gal and she didn't respect it. She didn't respect my home. I worked really fucking hard for that house. And whether this is a business lesson or not, it's treat people how you want to be treated. It's make sure that you leave a positive imprint on somebody so that they

can have a positive thing to say about you when you're not around. And if you want your business to grow, you need to learn to create positive word of mouth so that you can control the conversation when you're not there. And from a business aspect, this is one of the most important lessons that you can control the conversation when you're not there. And from a business aspect, this is one of the most important lessons that you can ever have. And if you want to create sustainable growth, you have to have positive word of mouth marketing. And what we tell people around here is the fastest way to double your business is to have such a good interaction with that customer that they cannot help on just go tell one other person how great that interaction was, whether it's with a person and or a company, it works the same fucking way. And so that was the lesson for today, guys. I hope, I hope, and I like to think that we added

a little bit of value or maybe a little bit of entertainment to your day, your drive, your workout, whatever that case may be. And if you enjoyed, if you learned something, if you found a little bit of value, if you found a, just even had a laugh, if you could, if you could do me one small favor, share the episode, tag me in it. Let's create a positive word of mouth experience just around this episode and make sure you leave a review. If you found the episode funny, do me one quick favor, take 30 seconds, pop over to iTunes, write us a review. I'd love, I would love the interaction. I would love the feedback. Let me know if you guys enjoyed the stories, but until next time, I love you guys. Thank you for your time today. God bless this average home.