114 - What's NEXT for Making It In Asheville?

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Making It in Asheville podcast. I'm your host, Tony Ubertachio. This week we're going to put a bow on the last couple episodes where we talked about the launch of a new business here in Asheville, South Slope Pilates. If you are starting with this episode for some reason, and welcome. Good to have you. We've spent the last several talking through a very exciting, and I'll call it an important milestone for making it in Asheville, for making it creative, the business that kind of powers making it in Asheville, and it's in being a part of launching a new business in town. And so, in hopes not to be redundant, I'm going to give you a quick overview of the last couple of episodes. But please, if this is even remotely interesting, go back and check those out. Making It in Nashville is largely a passion project. If you want to get very business jargony, you could call this top of funnel activities. We've made a couple hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, probably all aggregate in money, in revenue and advertising, sponsorships through the podcast over the last three years or so. And that's not enough to live on. And so we've kept the lights on at the house. My wife and I started the podcast together. We kept the lights on with our marketing business. And so the marketing business sits behind Making It in Asheville. And marketing is a very particular thing. And so there's lots of different styles of marketing, lots of different ways you can approach marketing. The way that Sarah and I have loved marketing historically is storytelling. And so what better way to have opportunities to tell stories than to sit down with business owners and share their story on a podcast? 100 episodes and dozens, probably 75 or 80 interviews. And we've had an incredible opportunity to meet Asheville business owners and to share their stories with this podcast. And because of those interviews, we've also had the opportunity to help some Asheville businesses with slightly more traditional marketing and marketing services. And we were able to, I guess, have conversations, sales conversations, have the opportunity to even provide marketing services because we existed, because this podcast exists. And so the collaboration, the project here with South Slope Pilates has been, I would call, the high point so far in our making a creative career. When I think of the vision that I've had for Making It in Nashville, largely since the beginning, is like, I hope this allows for connection to happen at a scale beyond just Sarah and I getting to meet great people in Asheville. I hope to be able to connect Asheville with Asheville, connect business owners with business owners, because of all of these conversations that were afforded to have some of them recorded on the podcast, often coffee back when pre pandemic. And again, the amount of coffee meetings that we were having, the amount of maker mixers that we were having to get people in the same room together. I've always seen connection as this goal, and in connecting people, there's an opportunity to provide service that is, let's say, creates a more explicit or concrete value. That value is marketing services or some sort of strategy or some sort of, like, partnership in building businesses, in growing businesses together in more partner like than service provider way. And so launching South Slope Pilates and being a part of this business from the very beginning, even though it's just as a contractor relationship, is directionally the thing that I've been dreaming of and most excited about for years. And so when we got connected to Andy and Sydney, heard about the story, like, warm fuzzies are going on, this is an opportunity to be there at the very beginning. And so spent the last couple of episodes talking through a framework that we attempt to bring into all of the marketing, storytelling, and strategy that we like to show up with or I like to say, excavate while working with businesses. And I think that the last couple of episodes, if you're a business owner, aspiring business owner, there should be value in there. And just some of the questions that we're asking are some of the language that is shared on how to communicate your why even ask questions about what your why might be, how to communicate what it is that you're doing and differentiate and carve out new territories and then how to tie those things together with a how that is also unique and has your own kind of fingerprint on it. What that's left me feeling now is like, okay, let's talk about some of the tactical blocking and tackling that has happened over the last it is the last week of January at this point, over the last five or six weeks. And it's been a lot. And so when thinking about, you know, launching a new business, starting something here in Asheville, there's a there's a lot of ways that you could potentially think about it. And so the ways that at least in the near term, or at least in this particular case, the way that I'm thinking about businesses is real estate, both digital and physical, depending physical might have an asterisk, because not everyone necessarily needs brick and mortar. If you're starting a service business, let's say I'm thinking about marketing, I'm thinking about operations, and there's a lot to it. And so starting a business out of thin air, the way that I always think about is that you want to think about either a problem that you love solving or endeavoring to solve or a customer that you want to support. And by supporting a specific type of person, the problems that you solve for them are subject to change. Right? So if in the case of making it in Asheville or making it creative, the customer that we're endeavoring to support, if that's an Asheville based business owner or community member. There's a lot of ways that we can move forward in attempting to serve that customer in the highest and best way. If our goal is to make electric vehicles a viable option, that's the thing. And there's no wrong answer between are you serving a person or a customer type or are you solving a problem? It, it allows you to get specific. Because if you're solving a problem, there should be people who need that problem solved. And if you're serving a person, the more clarity you have on who they are and what they care about, the more likely it is you get to solve problems that add value in their world. And so real estate, when I think about that, is some version of where will you live in their brain, where will you live on all of the platforms that matter? And where will you be in the city specifically? And so vacuuming up digital real estate is often a first step for people. Grabbing instagram, handles, grabbing domains is probably a right first step, but it is often kind of a distraction, right? If left to my own devices, I can quickly run down rabbit holes on buying a domain, setting up a website and doing a bunch of activities, moving, but not necessarily moving anything forward. So when in doubt, make sure that you have customers or figure out ways that you can test the viability of what it is that you think you want to do before you go out. And I'd say spin your wheels on a lot of real estate, whether that's digital or physical. If there's a way like you want to start a restaurant, if there's a way to do a dinner club dinner party series, if there's a way to start by buying a food truck or doing collaborations at other events. Where you are providing food. If there's a way to see how people will feel when they eat your food, that is a better first step than buying a restaurant. When in doubt, test it out. So that is my, I'll call that my asterisk my caveat. When it comes to grabbing real estate, I think it should happen quickly. Don't overthink it. This is the same with like a name or a brand. Making it creative was quickly thought up behind the podcast idea of making it in Asheville. At the end of the day, it's the value you provide, it's not necessarily your name. And if your business is doing enough business, you can always buy a better name over time. And that's a problem that can be solved for in the future. Outside of that, it's marketing. And I think marketing is different than advertising. Advertising is, in the words of Seth Godin, it is hijacking other people's attention, stepping in front of them when they didn't necessarily ask for it. Marketing is storytelling in a lot of ways. Marketing is allowing opportunities for people to pull on these threads. And these threads lead them to you, right? To follow a trailer breadcrumbs back to you. And marketing often takes time. So knowing what stories you want to tell, knowing where those people who you want to hear the stories are, is often a long game. And so marketing is in terms of content creation, is always to me, incredibly important for a brand, but it is not necessarily something that's going to flip a switch and there's a line out the door. And so how do you attempt to create a line out the door? Oftentimes to me that comes down to relationships. And so I think marketing is a lot of relationships, especially in Asheville. Who do you know? Who can you get connected to? What other businesses are complements to the service you provide? What other businesses are complements to the product that you're providing? How can you create relationships with those other businesses such that it would make sense in some way or another for those businesses to tell their customers about you? And so while that I hear myself saying that, I think maybe it sounds a little tacky if it's give and take, there are ways to create those relationships authentically. There are ways to be, I'd say, to share value or over deliver value to these new friends and to these complementary services and business owners in such a way that it is not a big ask, it is not even necessarily an ask. It's just such an obvious fit that they say, yeah, we have to do something. I can't wait to tell people we've needed this. And so that to me falls into marketing. It is in the Venn diagram. It probably gets overlapped with a little bit of sales, relationship based selling, consultative selling. But marketing and sales, the thing that they always to me rely on is a great story. And I often can see stories being the owner's story or the businesses story or our founding story. And I think there's an opportunity to just call out that when done at its best, we're thinking about the story that our customer gets to tell, that our partner gets to tell. And that story is not necessarily always the founder or the product story, but it's something different. It's this other thing. So when thinking about storytelling in your business, when thinking about selling, right? And when thinking about marketing by way of storytelling, the story, it can be your story, but you really want to try to create a story arc where your customer is the hero, where it's their story and you just happen to be some form or another of like a role player in their story. I don't know, Gandolf, what your wise? You are supporting character to Frodo Baggins and Frodo is just trying to do their best and that's your customer last thing are going to be like operations and think about all of the details and all of the I's that need dotting and the T's that need crossing. And there are many of them, especially knowing that there are tons of different types of businesses. Some of them are, let's say, more regulated than others and need more attention to those operational details. The obvious lowest to me hanging operational details is like how will people find you on the internet? This could be, I guess, loosely marketing as well. How will people find you on the internet? Is that information accurate? How quickly does a message that comes in get seen and responded to? Where are your processes and your systems? What technology is underlying all of your processes and your systems? And so, when in doubt, I'm a big Google suite in G suite, google Products user. I think that being able to kind of lean into a single technology for document sharing at a minimum with your team makes for a lot of efficiencies when it comes to task management. There's a lot of ways to do it. You just got to choose one that works, whether it's Asana, trello, emails, text messages. I think that it's often helpful to have a single repository where everything lives, but that is going to be business by business. And then I think the other thought is like what technology are you going to use to show your business off? What technology is going to be the CMS Content Management System or Customer Management system, depending I think of specifically with South Lopelates interviewing and having demos from a number of different fitness booking technologies. It's a time suck, but it's a worthwhile time spend because that's going to be the backbone operationally of the business for, let's say, ever. Because switching after a year or two when you have all of your customer data in a single spot is a bummer. That's a hard thing to do. Switching costs is a huge part of understanding operational. The operations of a business are huge and are the backbone that support growth. And choosing what you need now with an eye on the future is very important. The amount of time to rebuild, to use the next best thing next year is going to be real. And so trying to keep costs low and think really short term but also have a vision for the long term is a balancing act. It's hard to do. And so thinking about the right website, I think to my wife Sarah, who runs QB Cucina, she was an interview not long ago building her website on WordPress. That the concept. Two years ago or more when she started was that WordPress. Especially then and especially more than two years ago, it was the de facto, this is where you go to build a business that is content driven. If you're going to be writing blogs or sharing recipes, you do that with a WordPress type site. What's also true is if you're going to be doing ecommerce retelling products online, you probably want to be on Shopify. It's hard to argue that something else is better out of the box or has more support or that there's another technology that's getting more attention when it comes to ecommerce right now. And if you're a thought leader, guru, expert, there's technologies that allow you to sell information products. And there's if you're a yoga instructor or a service based business, do you need to be on WordPress or Shopify? Should you be on squarespace? The technology backbone of your business as something as simple as what your website built on is an important question to answer. If you're building robust sales processes and you have customer relationship management, that's going to be critical. And your deal cycle is months or sometimes years long. And if the dollars at stake are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions, you probably want salesforce as your backbone and you want to start there because switching in and out is going to be a pain in the future. And if you kick that can down the road, it doesn't become an easier problem to solve necessarily over time. So those are some of the whats some of the whats that have happened here. And I think solving for those problems, thinking through those problems both in our business, in Sarah's business and my business, and in making it in Asheville, making it great, have been very fun. Thinking about these problems and how these pieces all come together with South Slope lattice. Thinking about whys and hows and whats and trying to find language for them, trying to create a story that has people reaching out and inquiring about Pilates instruction roles and thinking about having people inquire about is there a role in the front desk that I think this is interesting, and how do I become a part of it that's, you know, that lights me up, makes me very excited? I'm excited about 2023. I'm excited to kind of lean even further into this strategic partner role with making creative making it in Asheville. I got to say, with the birth of my son 16 months ago and the couple of months before that, there was a quiet period in making it in Asheville. We also had a technological hiccup on the Apple side. We had a five star review with like 25 or so reviews on Apple podcasts, and at some point they disconnected us and we lost all those reviews, which is a bummer. But we got a message in the mail just the other day in our inbox, in our Facebook inbox, and I'm going to read it because it reminded me about why it is that we're doing what we're doing. The feelings that I hope to provide you, our listeners. Hey, guys. Wanted to drop a line and say thanks. My wife and I are in Florida, and we're committed to making the move to Asheville this year. Your podcast has been a wonderful resource. I have a job where I can listen to podcast during the day and I keep a notepad handy for your episodes. Thank you so much for all the work on this podcast. I'm stoked after listening to an episode. I love your style and the questions you ask. I'm way back on episode twelve, but I'm loving the conversations. Keep up the great work. You have made a difference in my life. I am sweating as I read that. I am a little, I want to say choked up, having got a message like that in a little while, in part because we've been pretty quiet. But hearing this has redoubled my commitment to sharing Asheville stories and sitting down with other business owners and community members and providing a platform to kind of shine a light on their work and the work that's being done. In this small city that punches way above its weight class, that gets a lot of love on a national and regional scale and certainly has its problems right when you dig in. This community is a work in progress and I am excited to be a part of sharing some of the best bits and some of the best people. And so with that, if you have any questions about South Slope Pilates, the next couple of months are going to be really exciting. As we begin to launch, I'll say thank you for making It to the end of this episode. We're doing our next Maker mixer at South Slope Plottis. And that'll be mid February. If you haven't signed up for the Making It a Nashville newsletter, please do so. We're going to start there with the announcements for Making It in Nashville Monday, maker Mixers or getting people together. We try not to say network, but to build relationship, to be in relationship with one another. Next event is mid February and it's going to be at Salazar Plotty, so you get to see behind the scenes in real time. Some demo classes and trials are going to be coming up, so if you're interested in the demo classes, I would go to South Lopelates.com and subscribe to their newsletter or at least the class demo waitlist. And then if you have projects that you're particularly stoked on or have friends that are doing exciting things, our DMs are open, Instagram, Facebook my email is tony at Making [email protected]. This has been a really exciting miniseeasing. I think it's directionally. The thing that is giving me the most life is thinking more about partnerships here in Asheville, thinking about being either ground floor or involved in the next evolution of a business, whether that's from incubation into real life, having the shell crack and the chick be born, or thinking about another metaphor is Pokemon, right? Evolving from a I don't know, what is it, man? I used to know all these Pokemon names, but evolving from a bulbasaur to a level two of whatever a bulbasaur is if you made it as far into the episode, comment on instagram with what Bulbasaur grows into blastoise. I don't know. Anywho, until next week, be good and take care of each other. Cheers.