The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Dave Erickson, CEO of ScreamingBox

Episode Date: November 7, 2021

Dave Erickson, CEO of ScreamingBox Screamingbox.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks is boss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with a great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being being here with us. Of course, you can go to see the video version of this on youtube.com. For Chess Chris Voss, hit the bell notification button as always.

Also go to goodreads.com for Chess Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there as well. Go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those crazy places the kids are at. You can Google the Chris Voss Show and find it or me just anywhere. Today, we have a very interesting guest on the show. He is the CEO of a company called Screaming Box, and we're going to be talking to him. Sometimes, I think the podcast has been referred to in years as The Screaming Box. Ah, Chris Voss is screaming, but I'm sure his thing is more professional. He is the CEO of the company, and he has 30 years of very diverse business experience covering marketing, sales, branding, licensing, publishing, eSports, gaming, software development,

PR, social media, advertising, SEO, SEM, contract electronics, manufacturing, and international business. That's a hell of a tinder profile right there as a serial entrepreneur he has started owned and run business in the usa and on and europe as well as doing extensive business in asia prior to screaming box he was a primary partner in building the fatal one fatality gaming brand there you go and licensing program i need to get out more. And ran an internet marketing company. I was referring to me getting out more. That wasn't in his bio.

He founded the internet company marketing 2002. His clients include Gunther, Ranker, Qualcomm, Goldline, Tiger Text. CEO of Streaming Box. He focuses on running of the business, strategic vision, marketing vision, operational efficiency, and business development, growing his large personal network. Welcome to the show, Dave Erickson. How are you? I am doing mighty fine. And yourself?

Mighty fine. I'm doing very mighty fine. We had a lot of fun with your Screaming Box. I feel like I should introduce it when I say the line. Give us your plug so we can find you guys on the interwebs. Sure. You can find us at ScreeningBox.com. You can also find our podcast at Podcast.ScreeningBox.com.

And obviously, if you go into LinkedIn, you can find our company page by typing in ScreeningBox. And I must say, you have the most extraordinary background. People who aren't watching this on the YouTube version need to go watch the YouTube version. There's a lot going on back there. Yeah, I started my first business when I was 20. Screenbox is like my 12th company that I've owned. Some have gone for three months and some have lasted 15 years. I've always been entrepreneurial. My family is entrepreneurial. And so I just grew up doing that. Wow. You got to love it. Are those Hot Wheels that I see on the left? Oh yeah. I happen to have a collection of Hot Wheels, maybe not the most valuable in the world. The ones I like are the ones I collect. There you go. I grew up with Hot

Wheels. So that was the era. I even remember Mattel and Hot Wheels were better, but the Mattel was interesting. I don't even know. Does Mattel still make die-cast cars? No. And if you say they've really taken marketing of Hot Wheels to a high level, there are many Hot Wheels groups, and they are out promoting Hot Wheels in some very innovative ways. There's a lot to learn from how Mattel is doing that. They're doing a great job on it.

There you go. You got the Star Wars, I think, background there. I see a Beatles yellow submarine. I built that with my daughter. Oh, did you? Wow, man. Quite the job. It's amazing all the toys they have. I grew up with Legos, too, and Hot Wheels.

Nowadays, the stuff they have these days, I feel like I got ripped off as a kid. I don't know about that, but the marketing definitely makes it feel much bigger uh and more expansive and and now it's really interactive on many levels and we've actually done some development where we've helped toy companies develop interactive ways of looking at the toys or integrating them it's pretty amazing so tell us about your company screaming box we are a digital development company we focus on developing people's websites or mobile apps.

And if they have any kind of digital infrastructure, running an e-commerce platform or even doing AI and automation, we help companies do that. We do it either as a project or as a product where they want us to do a specific type of work, or they come to us and say, look, we have all the development in-house. We just need more developers. And we basically do team extension with those larger enterprise companies. That's awesome. And so what type of clients usually fit your service? We have a whole wide range, everything from enterprise clients who basically utilize our team extension services or ask us to participate in some product development. But most of our clients are SMBs, small and medium sized businesses who either currently have a digital product or website and need help modifying it, updating it, developing new feature sets, or startups who are developing a new product and they need an MVP, minimum viable product, or they need something that they can go to market with.

And we help them with that. So I know in your intro, we covered some of the services you guys provide. Did we cover everything that you guys provide? It would be a really long list. We have a pool of about 150 developers, pretty much every type of tech stack. Beyond websites, if somebody needed AI or robotic process automation, data science, or anything like that, we can basically accommodate them. Wow, man, you guys do it all. And it seems like it's all.

So there you go. What marketing channels do you guys promote on Screaming Box? We basically use our LinkedIn platform and we have a podcast channel. We do a monthly podcast, mostly talking about technology and how to apply it to business challenges. And you can find podcast.screamingbox.com. And then we also have our Twitter channel and Facebook. And mostly we also do a lot of guest podcasting and going to events. Nice. What sort of size of projects do you guys most of our projects? A small project for us starts at the ten thousand dollar range.

And that can be a hundred hour, two hundred hour project and go all the way up to half a million dollars. But we have a partner company who takes business that is larger than half of them. They have the infrastructure for that. We just pass that business on to them. Wow, that's pretty amazing. What is team extension and how does that work? Team extension is basically we take one of our developers from our developer pool and we basically let our client deal directly with them, do the project management, and they integrate into their team. So we have clients, some of the larger enterprise clients,

like Mercedes-Benz or Barracuda or somebody like that. They basically have an internal team and internal project management, and they need additional developers. And what they look to us to do that is we qualify the developer. We do a lot of personality behavior assessment of not only our developers, but our point people at our clients. And that allows us to match up the right developer with the right person so that those relationships run. And so our team extension clients really look at us to qualify developers and find the right people for them and then integrate them into their process. And behind

the scenes, we manage the developers, make sure they're happy and give feedback to the clients if there's issues or other things. That's really smart. Yeah. It's really smart because make sure you don't have any conflicts or worst thing you can do is have everybody butting heads. Yeah. And people are very different. And so putting an example, we do a lot of business with marketing agencies. And so they're very creative and very visionary and excited and a little bit loose. And their projects require somebody who's like super detailed, oriented and very focused and want stuff very precise and scheduled.

You put those two together and it's just one problem after another. They can't communicate well. So if we do the personality behavior assessments of both sides, we can say, OK, on this project, we need a point person who's this way and they can interpret for the other people and make sure the communication between the two of them are effortless and flawless. And it really makes a big difference. We've been doing this since 2012. And in the beginning, I can tell you, we have a lot of experience of people not matching up correctly. And that's a waste of time and money and energy on both sides. So we found that this has been the best way. And a lot of people in the industry, they only test the developers and only in a limited way. And we've really boiled this down to a science for us. There you go. So for SMBs and startups, what advice do you have for them concerning their

digital products and using digital development companies such as Screening Box? I think the best thing that these companies can do, they don't have as many resources as larger companies. They really need to focus on getting some kind of statement of work. If they want to deal with a development company, they got to have an idea of what they want. It doesn't have to be precise. One of the advantages, or I guess the added value that we have is the founding partners of Screenbox have a lot of business experience. This is like my 12th company that I've run in a wide variety of industries. And most of our better clients, we spend a month or two on phone calls with them really getting to understand their business and really determine how are they trying

to solve their business challenges. And so a lot of our work is done in just trying to understand the client and trying to understand what they're trying to achieve. And so if lot of our work is done in just trying to understand the client and trying to understand what they're trying to achieve. And so if these clients are able to communicate with us fairly quickly on the front end, these are our business challenges and this is what we're trying to do. And then work with us. We're able to provide them all kinds of technology solutions that will help automate their business, make it more efficient, allow them to grow faster.

That's freaking awesome, man. That is awesome. That's real key is understanding what the client wants to try and accomplish and stuff. What are some of the key things that make digital product development projects successful? There's kind of stages. The first part I described, you got to understand what the business challenges. The second part is bringing in a really good UX team user experience who can talk to all the stakeholders, the clients or the customers,

the end users, the management, the people doing the processes and understand what people really need out of. And once that's done, the developers then have a really good guideline for developing the product. And the other thing is a really good guideline for developing the product. And the other thing is to bring quality assurance in from the beginning. A lot of people make the mistake of they try to bring in quality assurance after a bunch of the code has been developed, and then they're just trying to fix bugs everywhere. We try to bring in QA from the very beginning to know what the goals are and to know how to make the product in a quality way and to work with the developers to make sure that is communicated clearly with

everybody and the client. And that's really important to bring all that in and to really organize the project in the beginning. That way, as it goes through, it just runs much smoother that way. Yeah, it keeps from creating messes that you end up having to clean up. So what do you see as the future of your company and where your guys' growth is headed? We think that the people right now are reeling from the global pandemic and they've discovered that they really need to strengthen their online presence. And we see we're really banned. We see that people are looking for someone who can really help guide them in addressing their business challenges and making their products, their presence digitally sound and of high quality. And for us, we're growing the business based on small business, small and medium businesses. And a lot of our clients, they started with a digital product and now it's aged a little bit and they really need to update.

The technologies are moving so fast that you really need to update stuff on a fairly regular basis. And we see for us our growth in that area, helping SMBs grow their business with the new digital technologies that are coming out. Yeah, it's been really frustrating with a lot of people got caught with their pants down because they hadn't quite flipped over from brick and mortar to being fully online. A lot of restaurants got caught where they're like, oh crap, we need to get online ordering going and different menus and stuff. And even then I was just reading, I think yesterday, this morning, they were talking about how more food delivery, people want more food delivery. They're into that. Last night, I went and worked out it.

This has been happening a lot on Yelp lately. I've been going out to places and they're closed and they haven't updated their online hours. I went out to Denny's after I worked out at 3 o'clock in the morning. And I went out to Denny's, which claimed on yelp it was open 24 hours and it was closed at 4 a.m and i'm like you guys do you guys understand what's going on in the world the internet needs to be updated on what the hell you people are doing and i went to another store recently and they closed they changed their hours to close an hour early and part of it is because all this employee situation too.

Yeah. And people really got to get their online crap together, if you will, get their websites right, their apps from there. They got to make sure everything's like you said, updated because you lose business when you don't because you're like, well, I'm not going there. I don't know what the hell they're doing this week. Yeah. And even the more important is people aren't used to having to display their products or their food or anything in such detail. But now a lot of the sites, because the technologies are like 3D, doing 3D photo scans of food or products and putting up really good product with great product descriptions. We do a lot of content. I've had a marketing company since 2000. And all we specialize in is just writing content for businesses, product descriptions, technical content, white papers, all that type of stuff. The contents, we've actually had projects

where we got involved in the project and the limiting factor of the project ended up being the content. We finished all the development. We were limiting factor of the project ended up being the content. We finished all the development. We were just waiting for the client to bring on the content, to do the content. And sometimes they come back with pictures that aren't that professional. And we have to say, look, if you really want to do business, you're going to have to make really professional photos and other things. So we try to help businesses do that and provide that content. But that's really important for businesses nowadays. If you have a physical product, it's got to be really well documented,

well photographed, described nicely. That whole industry of content development is just as important as the digital development. Yeah, it's quite extraordinary how people just are not up to it. And even we've been in this coronavirus thing for almost two years now and like i've just been having the worst time lately and it sounds like i eat all the time yeah on yelp i'll usually look for their menu and i'll click the menu button and yeah i'm usually looking for pictures in fact if your pictures are good i'll go to you on yelp but if your pictures really suck or the food is presented poorly

but yeah it's probably in a case now it's going to taste and that's actually usually right but I'll go to you on Yelp. But if your pictures really suck or the food is presented poorly, yeah, it's probably an indication of how it's going to taste. And that's actually usually right. But I've been going to people's websites. In fact, I went to one recently because I couldn't find their location. They have really bad signage, and it's hidden between a bunch of different things, other competing businesses. And I went to call them, and their phone number was disconnected.

So I just went to the five guys just right across the street from them. And later I found out where they were at, the five guys, yeah, they're over there. They're just, it looks like an office entrance and they're signed so fricking high, no one can see it. And so I ended up messaging him and I was like, Hey man, are you guys like open and stuff? And they go, yeah. And I'm like, why is your phone number? I looked on their website and they'm like why is your phone number i looked on their website and they didn't even have a phone number on the website i'm like what the hell's going on like are you guys a company or and and so i had a conversation with them over instagram that's finally how i they didn't have an email on their website and i go uh hey man what's going on with you guys i tried to find you guys and ended up eating at your competitor place across the street.

They're like, oh, yeah, we're switching to online orders. And I'm like, so you took down your main phone that people can call you and they can't find you? I'm like, what? What's going on, people? And they actually told me, they're like, we're transitioning to online orders. I'm like, you still should have a main phone. It's just insane, man. Just insane.

You go to these websites and they'll have, you still should have a main phone. It's just insane, man. Just insane. You go to these websites and they'll have, oh, we make chicken. And you're like, oh, do you have a picture of that? It just sells. But it's also even businesses that are focused on B2B businesses, they're dealing with supply chain issues and other things. But at the same time, they need to sell the product they do have. And they're not able, a lot of B or a lot of B2C business is now consumer direct, right? It moved from retail into consumer direct. And a lot of companies, they said, oh, we'll address this. And they put up a minimum e-commerce site to sell directly to the customers, but they don't want to piss off their retail. So they can't make the prices too low,

but then they didn't, they got more business than they expected. We have a couple of clients where their e-commerce site was just completely overwhelmed in the last six months with orders. And now they're trying to gauge their business and grow their business through their online presence. And now the retailers are having a balance issue. So it's pretty tricky right now. We've been able to assist companies by giving them a little bit of predictive sales ability to try to figure out how they can manage their flow of product and manufacturing.

It's all a lot of really interesting business challenges now. And we look forward to using technology. And for us, it's a challenge because it's moving so fast. We're having to learn all the time. We have a lot of our developers. We say to them, you got to spend 10 hours, 20 hours a week, real looking at the new technologies, playing with the new technologies, seeing how we can integrate them into our processes. And our clients are the same. We were able to bring to them, hey, there's this new technology and then have a discussion with them.

Hey, is it worth trying? Is it something that we have experience with? Is it something that would help their business? But it's just moving so fast. It's very interesting and quite challenging as well. Yeah. And I don't think the genie is going to go back in the bottle. I think more and more people are going to want to be ordering online now than ever. And once they're addicted to it,

they're addicted to it. Yeah. And the technologies are all pushing it that way. They don't want to go back to a lot of others. So now that the restaurant's got good POS systems in that can manage their online orders, the restaurants are finding it's more profitable to do that than to have a bunch of people in staff and to have large square footages. There's other restaurants who are the exact opposite. They got a great patio. And particularly in places like Southern California, they do a lot more business on their patio than they do online, depending on where they are. But if you're in the Midwest, wintertime shuts everything down for sure. And then it's all online. The business are going to be flexible. We have a client who does inventory for bars and restaurants for liquid inventory to make it so that the

owners can do their inventory really fast and have a lot of predictive inventory tools in there so that they know what to order and when to order it and to manage all that inventory. That's just get more and more precise for more and more industries, not just liquids, but solids, but also objects and other things. Inventory control is now critical because the supply chains are so screwed up. Yeah, the supply chains are going to be screwed up, I think, till mid next year. At least that's what they're saying. Oh, I wouldn't be surprised if it goes longer than that. Yeah, most likely. It is interesting. I've seen that, well, the consumer price or the consumer confidence index,

I think, was the thing that fell, or consumer spending. So I think they're starting to pull their money back. I guess we'll see how it goes. One thing that has been interesting to me that I think more businesses need to talk about is how secure their places of business are. Correct me if I'm wrong. I literally was going out to my favorite spaghetti place, and I'd been meaning to go out there for two weeks. So I'd been trying to go out there, but they actually had to cut their hours down to four hours a day because here in Utah, we're really having problems with the thing.

And they're here in Utah. We're really having problems with the thing and their new business. I was literally driving over there and I looked on their Instagram to check their hours because they'd been moving around on me. And they literally said the whole place came down or with one of their employees came down with COVID and of course exposed the employee base and they were shutting. And I was just like, wow, I could have been over there any day this week, sitting in their lobby and stuff. And so now what I'm just like, wow, I could have been over there any day this week sitting in their lobby and stuff. And so now what I'm looking for if I ever go over there again, because that was like someone getting shot in a store, in a restaurant. People don't come back. And I think if I do go over there, I'm going to just have my stuff sent out to me on the patio,

which won't work in winter. But what I'm interested now is what have they done to keep that from happening again? And what are they doing to protect me? I wonder if more businesses need to put online what sort of security procedures they're using for COVID. I think it's important because I'll be really honest. I kind of going into a restaurant and seeing all the cooks in the back and all the waiters wearing masks because I know that they're not sneezing in my food. They're not putting their whatever. That's just standard hygiene. And now that everybody's doing it, if I go into a restaurant, I don't see the cooks wearing

masks and stuff like that. I'd rather not eat there. It's just my personal preference. I like the cleanliness of it. And to be really honest, as much of a drag as masks and all that stuff are, I haven't had a cold or flu in two years. Yeah. I haven't been out of work for sick laying in bed because of it. So it's kind of nice when it relaxes, it's going to, people are going to be sick all the time again. I don't know. I like the idea of going into a place to get food and not have to worry about that as much. Yeah. I've had a few friends that are starting to get the roundabout cold flus that are coming around and everyone freaks out because they're like, this is cold or it's COVID.

You know? Yeah. And then you got to go stick a brain scraper up your nose and that's never fun. So yeah, that's Fridays around here. That's fun for us. Yeah.

We get bored. We get bored easy. But that security also goes beyond that. And now that a lot of these places are putting all their business online and doing e-commerce, getting hacked and having basic security protocols in place, a lot of businesses, they don't know how to do that. Or they just do the basic development. And afterwards, they don't have a DevOps expert come in and really lock down their website

and make sure there's no back doors and all their password processes are there. And people are going to find more and more online crime. And they're seeing that. And that's one of the things that we work with our clients on a lot is really making sure their digital products are secure. Nobody likes to get hacked and nobody likes to have transactions stolen and data messed up and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's really embarrassing for your business whenever the hacking takes place. I know ransomware is really huge, too. Yeah, that's a real big problem that's really growing much faster.

And they build these systems where it's based on a single platform and they shut that platform down with ransomware and their business is dead. Yeah. And they don't have backups. They don't have the ability to move the business to another URL or anything. They're just completely locked out. But there are ways to deal with that. And there are precautions that can be taken and technologies that can be utilized to make it secure. Just a business has to think about it and have to make it a priority.

And if they're working with a development partner, they've got to make sure that the development partner can help them with that. Prevention is the best cure. That's always the thing. Anything more we need to touch on or plug about your business? We're here to advise businesses in how they can use technology to grow. And we look forward to working with any kind of SMB and enterprise company, either digital development or team extension, and to help them develop digital products. And the world is not as dark as it seems. And we look forward to building good product that make the world a better place for everyone. There you go. And what's the best way for Dave, for people to reach out to you

guys and ask about, inquire about doing business? Send us an email at inbox at screamingbox.com. There you go. Screaming Box. Yeah, you got it. That would be the commercial. If you guys had a commercial, that would be the commercial. Listen to the intro of our podcast. You'll get to hear some screaming.

Oh, there you go. There you go. Use Screaming Box to keep from doing more screaming than you would if you didn't. I don't know. That's how the name worked. We were all tired of the frustrations of bad development, and we wish we had a box we could just scream into, and all of our problems would be solved.

Well, that's how we do it. Screaming Box. That's hilarious, man. Thanks for coming on the show, Dave. We certainly appreciate it. Give us your.com so we can find you guys on the show dave we certainly appreciate give us your dot com so we can find you guys on the interwebs sure uh screamingbox.com quite simple there you go screamingbox.com thanks dave for being on the show we certainly appreciate it thank you very

much chris thank you and thanks for tuning in go to youtube.com for just chris voss you want to see the cool background dave has uh also go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. You're going to want to see the cool background Dave has. Also go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. See everything reading over there. Also go to our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those great places. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other and we'll see you guys

next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO entrepreneurial toolbox that

I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away.

Different collectors, limited edition, custom-made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold.