Ethan Giffin — The Death of the Free Proposal: How to Monetize Your Strategic Expertise

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to Becoming Preferred, the podcast dedicated to helping you level up your game and become the best version of you.

Every business professional or owner reaches a critical crossroad.

You keep chasing every revenue dollar by trying to be everything to everyone.

Or do you have the courage to go narrow, dominate a specific niche, and build a truly scalable revenue engine?

Our Guest today spent 15 years running a broad generalist agenc before he finally made the hard call most founders avoid.

He went narrow.

Today he is the founder and CEO of the B2B E Commerce Agency, author of the definitive guide Closing the Digital Revenue Gap, and an elite event producer who has commanded high stakes stages since age 16.

He's here to share the blueprints on how to turn deep expertise into a powerful book, stop giving away your strategy for free, and discover the highly profitable niche that is likely already hiding inside your current client roster.

Join me now for my conversation with Ethan Giffen.

Well, hey, Ethan, welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you.

Thank you for having me, Michael.

I'm excited to be here with you today and have a wonderful conversation.

Yeah, me too.

I'm excited, actually, and chatting about your book Closing the Digital Revenue Gap.

And you're going to be talking all about blind spots, which I think many of us as entrepreneurs and business professionals, we, we have them.

We all have them.

And so you help identify some of those.

I want to talk and unpack a lot of those as well.

But before we get into it, Ethan, I always like to start with, you know, how did Ethan become Ethan?

So we're back in high school.

So you're living in Maryland.

You're, we're talking to you today.

I believe you're in Baltimore and you're, you decided, hey, what am I going to be when I grow up?

And if you're like the rest of us, we probably had multiple careers.

So let's go back to that high school days.

And how did Ethan become Ethan Giffen?

Well, it's funny, I actually got a letter in, in high school that was sent to me from the Ringling Brothers Clown College.

So I brought that to my guidance counselor and to my f. Father.

And, you know, you can imagine the type of response you get, you get to that.

But I've been an entrepreneur.

I've always enjoyed business.

And so from a young age, I started having yard sales for my grandmother to help clean out her house so she could downsize.

And I was 8 years old back in the early 80s.

And then I started a DJ company when I was about 16 years old and ran that through my early 20s and kind of paid for the beer budgets of my friends and I and bought lots of music and, and did lots of fun stuff.

And then I evolved from that, learning about the Internet and learning about desktop publishing, like.

Cause I had to create flyers and all the pieces of this.

And so when the Internet came in the, in the mid-90s, I got very involved in that.

And so it's just been this, like, constant entrepreneurship.

I took a break in my twenties to go work for one of the world's largest staffing companies and learned a lot there.

But I was an intrapreneur.

But it's just, I've always.

I've always had something going on with this since I, you know, for basically the last 42 years of my life.

Did you have mentors?

Were your parents entrepreneurs at all?

Or did you see them working or multiple jobs or.

My dad did some.

Did some thing.

He was a.

He, he.

He did his carpentry was his hobby.

So from time to time he did some carpentry and other things for people that kind of.

The older we got, the less of that he did.

My UN was an executive for the Sears Corporation.

He graduated college at the University of Maryland and went to work in the Sears executive program where they moved them all over the country.

I was always way into that.

I was always like, oh, that's.

That's my dream.

When I got into music and things, I told my dad that I was going to move to Las Vegas and go to hospitality school and work in a casino.

That didn't work.

That didn't work out.

But, you know, I've had people around.

I've.

I've actually, from a young age, I've been able to like, meet people and find mentors that have.

That have helped me very strongly in different areas.

And so sometimes I've sought them out and sometimes I've bumped into them in my, in my travels.

But I've always had mentors around me to ask questions and figure out how to.

How to move.

So you've always been curious.

It sounds like always exploring.

No, I think that's huge.

Well, let's talk about your book, Closing the digital revenue gap.

10 Revenue blind spots that are costing you more than you think.

So digital transformation.

There's pros and cons.

We hear good things, bad things.

Some companies hate it.

It's been around for a little while.

You say it isn't failing because of technology, but it's failing because of how the businesses are built.

In the first place.

Can you unpack that a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, one of the things that we're saying, and we work a lot with manufacturing and distribution clients where they're modernizing their factories.

Right.

But they've got industry 4.0 is kind of the touch phrase that we're kind of in the fourth industrial revolution.

That's right.

But when you actually go into the front office, into their sales process, they're still taking orders on notepads over text message, via email.

Often it's still a very manual process with either a person in a call center or a salesperson.

And so as we're seeing an evolution, we're seeing that like we think companies should be thinking about this as a true revenue channel for them and not just a project.

And so oftentimes when somebody tries to go down this path of digital transformation, they'll, they'll send the VP of marketing to go do it, or the head, the VP of IT or someone and just say, go figure this website thing out for us.

When literally we say that digital revenue takes the sales team, the marketing team, the operations team, the IT team and the finance team.

And you've got to put that together and have the CEO really say, hey, this is a direction that we're going.

And so like traditionally a company will just say, hey, VP of marketing, go look at this, find a software and try to implement it.

When it's a much bigger conversation.

It's a much bigger conversation about how you're going to operate, you know, going into the next generation.

Yeah, well, we've seen whether they're moving from an ERP system, automation, operations.

There's so many variables.

Like I know in our small boutique we use certain software and it's evolving all the time.

But no, I remember back in the day, starting with CRMs and I consulted to the CRM industry, wrote for the magazines.

It was evolving.

It was all done single unit systems.

If you remember act and you remember some of these things.

I'm dating myself and then became peer to peer.

And then we bring in, you got companies like HubSpot, Marketo and all these different things that bring it all together and where is it evolving to.

So as the technology is evolving, sometimes we spend millions and hundreds of thousands and tens of thousands on technology.

And I'm a big technology guy, I love technology.

I've wasted more on technology, but it's also given me an advantage.

Where do you see it going, particularly in the light of AI?

You talked about the industrial Revolution, number four I call it the fourth Great Disruption.

And because, you know, we had the mechanical looms, then we had electricity, then we had computers, and now, voila, we have AI.

How is AI fit?

Because it seems like many of the AI tools, they're all starting to cross over.

Like even just in the last six months, I'm saying we're.

They now do this one as well.

Don't need this anymore.

This one does.

This one.

It's almost like they get the base model.

So it's a complete system.

Is that what you're seeing as well or.

And where do you see it move into in the next 12 to 24 months?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So AI touches every aspect of what we're doing.

Yeah.

You know, often in our industry people are talking about something like, called a gentic E commerce where the agents are actually going to just work together and shake hands and you know, like trade dollars and products back and forth.

And I think we're seeing a true evolution, but I think we're a long way from that.

I think if you're crawling, walking, running, I think that's running an ironman, you know, type situation.

But I think AI has helped us significantly to, you know, we come upon somebody that doesn't have a fully built out catalog for the public.

We think leveraging AI to help ingest spec sheets and other data and information and create product descriptions and product specifications and information, as long as that's manually check checked and edited, that we think that's a fantastic use of AI.

We think we're going to continue to see an evolution of AI with product recommendation.

We use AI to read and analyze data.

And really I think that it's going to be significant as we continue to go.

I don't think, I don't think it's the end of people, so to speak, for work.

And I think like, I think there's always a human component.

Yeah, I think actually that's the competitive advantage in the future is that H to H, human to human and focus on the things that are only human.

For instance, responsibility, who's going to take, be accountable, who's going to show empathy, who's going to read the room, who's going to, you know, I can write a poem, it'll make you cry.

But it's never had its heart broken.

So we're always going to want that wisdom.

And it's about, I think it's collaboration and partnering.

So you ran an agency and I want to talk about that because you spent 15 years running a broad agency before making the decision to go narrow.

And there are so many areas that you can go narrow.

So let's talk about what does narrow look like.

So for business owners listening who are currently terrified that narrowing their focus means turning away money, and that's a good concern, what was the exact breaking point of realization that made you say we can't keep serving everyone?

Well, like for me, I was, I was turning 50 a couple years ago and I was kind of thinking about every aspect of my life and my work and thinking about like, was I happy with where I was?

You know, am I happy with.

With every part, like from top to bottom?

And I realized that there were certain parts of what we were doing at work.

And at this point, you know, my company is attached to me.

You know, it's been my life's work at this point.

And I was just unhappy with how we were maybe perceived in the market.

I was unhappy how aspects of our business had been commoditized and people trying to strip away our expertise or downplay our expertise and thought about how I really wanted to be a much bigger thought leader or within the industry.

I hate words like thought leader and guru and stuff like that, but I wanted to play a bigger role and have a larger voice in the industry.

And I found that there was a subset of the work that we were doing that was just healthier for us.

It was customers that respected us.

We had like decent margins.

Our expertise really kind of showed.

You know, myself personally, I'm a little bit CRM, a little bit E commerce, I'm like a little bit marketing, a little bit it, a little bit business.

I've got all these kind of multitude of skills that when, when, when I apply overlaid that to this particular sector.

It just like all the boxes checked and I'm like, you know, I'm thinking about turning 50 and I'm going to work another 15 or so years doing this.

Hopefully I need to be happy.

It doesn't need to be my favorite thing.

It doesn't need to be my passion because I have other things that I'm passionate about in my life.

But it needs to be something where I'm respected and we can generate revenue and like kind of check all the boxes for that.

Yeah.

What's it.

When you started the agency business, you know, you probably had an Adobe suite, you do ads, you work on creative and that that old models kind of died as you know and it's a buy and you came in later in the game, I think around 20 2007.

Or so, you know, for almost 20 years you've been doing that and involved.

And now people can get ads created on AI.

They can get, they get some really good advice.

What they don't have is wisdom, but they don't have is the insights.

What they don't have is the, is this the right tool for that?

Because, you know, AI likes to value itself.

It's very complimentary.

It's going to tell you what you want to hear in a lot of places unless you instruct it otherwise.

And it can then be mean or critical.

So when you're seeing it from a focus point of view and getting rid of and shaving, how does that translate to other companies?

Like, let me set it up this way.

I've always taught a principle of smaller the niche, bigger the market.

So, so who makes more money?

The dentist and the.

Or the orthodontist?

I believe the orthodontist does.

Who does the marketing for the orthodontist?

The dentist.

So how do we build a practice and a business and a niche or niche that the market actually does the marketing for us or does the advocacy for us?

Yeah, I think that's another great, a great question.

And so I really turned into that in terms of we wanted to just understand, you know, and show our expertise to the world.

And I wanted to be kind of consulting first.

And we will do the implementation for you, but the front door is through the strategy.

Right?

Like that's how you get to us first and then we'll line all this up for you.

But I think about it like a couple of different ways.

I want to have people that refer us business and we do that through our technology and platform partners.

They refer us, you know, business.

I want to be able to talk about and understand and show that expertise to the world.

And so that's how we started thinking about it, even down to our go to market strategy, which is built around some in person events and some virtual events.

We think that especially in a world of AI, people are looking for greater degrees of trust that they're not getting digitally that happen in person.

So those are, those are all ways that we think about that.

Yeah, I think so.

It's always challenging because if you're giving away revenue.

But do you have any examples that come to mind where maybe you had a client beforehand, you developed a good strategy for them and then the execution came out of the strategy where maybe they shaved off some SKUs, maybe they got rid of some product mixes.

And because I wrestle with this one myself, because we want revenue so we're looking at different mixes.

And as an agency, oh, yes, we can do that.

And you want to figure it out versus focusing on something that you can do just extremely well.

And then as they followed your advice and they closed that gap by shutting off all those other things that all of a sudden they built something that was stronger, bigger, better.

Yeah, I think that regularly happens with when.

When we're working and engaging on projects, somebody will say, well, we have access to a million products through all of these suppliers.

We want to get all million products on our website.

And I'm like, oh, no, no.

Like we'll be here for five years waiting for that to kind of happen.

And so we regularly say it's the 8020 rule.

Right.

Let's either focus on a dozen of your top clients and the specific products that they purchase first, or let's focus on the 20% of your catalog that is the most commonly purchased.

Get that right.

Then have a game plan for adding more.

Right.

But often things create clutter too.

Right.

So.

So you've got to find the right amount of things to offer, you know, and it allows us, we regularly have to push on folks to say, hey, like, let's dial that catalog in.

Let's pick this specific thing.

Because that's the difference between this.

The faster you get going, the sooner you start to generate revenue.

And we've had clients where, you know, they literally have a hundred percent revenue growth from the channel because it's all new.

Right.

And so, you know, they.

We have countless examples of how people have gotten to market faster and started to generate revenue earlier from them.

Yeah, well, interesting.

Well, one of the core concepts that is a company's best niche that you talk about is usually hiding inside the clients they already have.

So how can an entrepreneur audit their current client roster to uncover those hidden gems?

Yeah, I think there's a couple of ways that you can as an entrepreneur.

You should be looking and evaluating what you're doing at least annually.

And I think you can look at print out.

Go into QuickBooks and print out a descending order of your sales by customer for the last year.

Right.

You start to look at that.

And can you find any trends?

You know, we found that the bottom third of our customer list didn't generate it.

It was when you combine the bottom third of our customer list, you know, out of about 35 customers, the bottom third didn't even equal the sixth largest.

The total revenues that generated from the six largest customers.

And we started to look at that and just to say that if you think about that, that was a third of the resources internally going to manage this group, you know, in some capacity.

And so I think that you should be evaluating your customers on an annual basis and figuring out are there ones that aren't a fit, are there ones that you need to renegotiate, are their customers evolving with you as your business evolves?

Or they kind of stayed from 10 years ago.

Right.

In that, in that process.

And I think that you should look at that and have some tough conversations if necessary.

And I think there's probably a group of customers that are your lighthouse customers.

I think you have some in the middle that that may all.

They may be good and great and consistent customers, some of them, but half of them you might be able to push up into lighthouse customers.

And I think there are some ones at the bottom that either need to kind of, you know, maybe they're using you more tactically and at some point evaluate, do we need to raise our rates?

Yeah, it's looking at that.

And no.

And those are all good suggestions.

I've always been a fan for 20 years of niching down or niching down, however you want to say it, niche, niche.

And focusing on those because niches I found tend to trend and they.

There's correlations of, of niches as well.

For instance, I started off in the oil and gas industry and I, we were in, I'm in the Calgary, Alberta, Canada office.

We also have a Phoenix office.

And back and forth.

Oil and gas isn't a big thing down there, but here it was.

So it was a natural starting point.

Well, now who is in the vertical so at oil and gas companies.

And I started looking at, you know, Shell, Exxon, BP had all the majors and then golf.

And then it was like, well, who services those companies?

Because they all have something in common and that is networking and communication patterns.

They meet together, they talk together, they go to trade shows, they go to events, they go to corporate events.

So I started getting the service companies, the Baker Hughes, the Halliburtons, the Precisions, the all the everybody in the supply part.

And then.

And I've done that with each vertical.

So I try and work the vertical deep.

I try and work the vertical wide.

Now to your point, looking at the last for two years, three years, customers put them into buckets and go.

Which was good, which was bad, which was.

And you can find who you don't want to work with.

I, you know, I'm sure you'll appreciate this.

I was doing a speaking engagement to an insurance Company had a thousand of their reps, so.

And a guy puts his hand up, this is about a decade ago, and he says, I got a problem.

And I said, what's your problem?

He goes, people can't afford my premiums.

And I'm like, holy cow, how expensive are your premiums?

Like now I'm curious.

And he goes, 50 bucks a month.

And I said, well that's your problem.

I said, you're quit selling to poor people.

I, and I, I said I'm not trying to be mean and please listen, I'm not trying to be mean or you know, disparaging, but it's a bad vertical.

It's about, you know, birds of a feather flock together and so there's a market for them.

If that's your market, great, go after it with a vengeance.

But if it's not, don't be surprised.

So you can figure out who you, you don't want their friends either, you know, you don't.

So if you get a bad client, can you think of any examples where as you were shaving in your own business and you got rid of one and it was like, was it a clear line for you?

Was there some that are on the fence?

I mean there was, there was, we had a client and that no one wanted to work with that just had gotten passed through person after person because they were kind of disrespectful like across the board, right.

And at some point, at the end of the day, if they're your smallest client or your second smallest client, like, you know, I was, I was tired of dealing with assholes, right?

Like, and pardon my friendship and I deeply love my customers.

But as I was turning 50, I was like, I have these kind of things in my life, both personally and professionally that either don't respect our expertise or our time, or they don't respect me as a friend or it's one sided.

And so we shed some clients in the process of doing this and it was very healthy.

And quite frankly, the revenue that was lost was quickly, quickly found with existing customers.

That was my next question to you.

Yeah, like the time that was being spent on it was so much more time than I had even recognized being spent with some of the folks in the bottom rungs.

And so by creating a transition period with them and assisting them and you know, just saying, hey, we may not be a good fit anymore for you and maybe this might move on, you know.

And so we, we found that the time that we had available was so much more productive and quickly existing accounts wanted more from us.

And so that makes sense.

Well, there's always that momentary panic, but the market actually, as you're saying, responds with speed when your messaging targets that specific pain point.

So you, you have everything to gain.

And as an agency, we really only need 6 to 10 new customers to have a fantastic year.

Right.

And so we can be much more selective about picking those six that we think we can be successful with.

And we think that are a good fit and we think that it doesn't mean they can't be challenging or tough or have a high level of expectation.

In fact, we actually respect that.

Yeah, but it can we as an organization be like successful?

So we're not a quantity business.

We're a quality organization in terms of that.

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And now back to my conversation with Ethan Giffen.

Let's talk about stopping the free strategy trap because you talked about strategy and I want to explore that a little more because I'm seeing that more and more and I like the model.

But a major trap for professional service providers and consultants is giving away the strategy for free during the sales process just to prove they know their stuff.

You had a specific moment where you stopped doing this.

How do you draw the line between a great sales conversation and giving away the farm?

Well, I think, you know, we kind of got led into the the RFP trap, the pitch presentation trap, the free advice Trap with things.

And what we found was that people would take our deck or our ideas and go to a lower price vendor and say, can you, can you do this?

And quite frankly, they would never get what we had envisioned for them in the process of doing that.

And so our process is now you book a consultation, we'll ask you a handful of questions about your business, where your frustrations are, where your challenges are, where you think some of the problems are.

And if there is a desire and a willingness to solve those challenges, we will put them through a three week paid work diagnostic workshop with us where we go so much further than we did with when we would pitch, when we would do like a pitch presentation.

We spend more time, more surveys, more conversations, and we produce both a presentation and a written report that is so much deeper in terms of what our ability to do is.

And so that's just under 10 grand to do that workshop.

So it's a smaller amount, a lower commitment, it's an easier way to get into a conversation.

And so we have no desire to kind of scope.

If somebody says, here's an rfp, will you scope this implementation?

We, we just don't even have the, we don't even mess with that.

We're, we're, you know, we're trying to, we want to talk to you, we want to hear where your, where your challenges are.

You know, think about if you went to a doctor, right?

Like when you go to the pharmacist, you put an order in, right?

Like you kind of just hand the slip and they kind of, I want.

To execute this prescription.

Right?

Right.

Where a doctor sits and kind of asks you how you're feeling.

They, they run diagnostics and they come back with a diagnosis and a treatment plan.

And we believe we're the same way.

After doing this for 20 some years,.

I think prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.

And I see so much malpractice in the marketplace.

So 100%.

When you, so you're leading with diagnosis and you feed for it, how often does that convert into, hey, can you help us execute?

So let's say you did 10 of those.

Are you winning?

I'm assuming you're winning most of them.

Yeah.

You're winning a high degree.

Generally, our pricing is somewhere between, you know, 350,000 to 700,000 to a million dollars to implement a system like this.

Right.

And we have a three year kind of system that we put people through.

So there is a commitment to doing this.

And sometimes they say, hey, I don't have the commitment yet from our leadership.

But I will.

I can get that for next year.

Right.

Or I can do the strategy now.

Right.

I can do the strategy now and I can come back next year.

Right.

Or, you know, something may happen.

But a very high percentage of those convert over into larger engagements.

Like four out of five, three and a half out of five.

Really depends.

You may also meet some along the way that you don't want to convert into.

Yeah, exactly.

The larger thing as well.

Somebody that may not be ready for you.

Hey, you've got to go do this homework first.

Like, you've got to go.

Your ERP is three versions behind.

You don't have a API, you know, that we can communicate with.

Right.

So you gotta go do that first or you're not able to make decisions and you kind of spin the wheels.

And we think that this is gonna be a disaster.

We don't say it like that, but.

So you'll meet people along the way that, that are perfect fits and you'll, you'll close a high, close a high percentage of those.

You'll have some that are future.

You're planning seeds for future.

That's fine.

Then you have some that have some prerequisites they need to go get done.

Or you have people that just say, hey, you know, maybe we're not a fit.

It's maybe a little bit of oil and water and that's okay.

Like as well, you know.

Now, if I'm a solopreneur, if I'm an entrepreneur solopreneur, and I don't have 350,000 in order to put it, but I read your book and I want to get the strategy down.

And my execution is going to be at a different scale level because that's what we're paying for for that level of client you're going for.

Is it something they can do themselves if they read the book?

Are they getting enough in the frameworks in order to take their small business to the next level?

Well, I think there's enough like, think points to think about, you know, within that.

I think at the end of the day, what we do is, is private buyer portals for manufacturers and distributors who want to give their customers a way to buy from them electronically.

And so you've got to be a certain size manufacturer to be able to like that work, to make that work right for it to be worthwhile for you.

So we start to see it when people are in the 5 to 10 million, our average customer is in the 50 to 500 million.

But depending upon what you're doing.

If you're a manufacturer especially that has commodity type products or products that you can kind of cash and carry in a box, I would be thinking about how to create an online system for yourself in order to do this.

Well, let's, let's turn into the book and turning deep expertise into book and sales engine because I think this will be helpful to the entrepreneurs and the solopreneurs that are listening as well.

Because you, you have your skill levels, the client that you after I have a certain client I go after.

It's not for the majority of my audience.

That's who my client is.

And similarly, your book is titled Closing the Digital Revenue Gap.

So for entrepreneurs listening who want to write a book to build authority, how do you ensure the book doesn't just sit on a shelf, but actually functions as a literal sales engine for your primary business?

Well, you know, again, if I were to do anything over again, if I were to go back in time and start over, I should have niched down, written a book and taken our system, created a signature system around our sops and processes and put it into the market.

That's the biggest mistake that I didn't do 15 years ago.

Right.

And so I'm a part of something called EO Entrepreneurs Organization and I'm helping, you know, was talking to one of the companies in the accelerator program that can't quite join yet and I was like, the one thing that you should do is you've got kind of a niche here.

You should dial in this niche, take only clients in this niche, even if it's painful, write a book and figure out how to get yourself speaking opportunities to get out there in front of folks.

I actually, you know, from my point of view, while we do sell some books on Amazon, our industry is pretty specific and niche.

So I'm actually happy to give away more books.

Yeah, exactly.

Then I it's the best business card ever.

Like best business card ever.

You and I talked ahead of time.

I took delivery of my latest book and on the bookshelf behind me are two of my books.

But I've in 20 in my first book was Becoming Preferred, which is the name of the podcast I built to your point.

I built a franchise out of that.

So we're in season seven of Becoming Preferred.

If you Google Becoming Preferred, the first two pages is all us and I haven't paid for a single ad.

All organic, just from our content and from our shows.

And you know, what I made off of the book is like a Good salary for a year for a good executive in 20 years.

But over 20 years, seven figure business that's provided for our company and organization to your point.

And so when we're going up against somebody, you know, and I bring now the third, I bring all three books to the meeting and I'm up going against Joe over here or Sally and she doesn't have any, I win.

And if price is the same, I really win.

And so that's the whole point is to credibility and authority.

So books still work to your point.

17% Of people finish a book.

I do, I read them.

I read them.

One a week, I'll read.

I'm going to read your book and finish your book.

And it's available, I'm looking at the Canadian store, but it's in hardcover there.

But I believe it's in all formats in the United States.

It's just hardcover.

So hardcover only.

We, we, we haven't released the Kindle version yet.

I guess we should.

I did on the first two.

That's exactly how I did cover on that.

Let's talk about the B2B digital revenue gap in 2026.

So speaking of the book, what is the biggest digital revenue gap you see mid market manufacturers, distributors leaving on the table right now, especially as B2B buyers increasingly expect Amazon like seamless digital experience.

So you're competing with some of that.

What are you saying?

Yeah, listen, so Mackenzie Gartner, all like Forester, all these folks have done big surveys and it's glaringly across the board that your customers want to buy from you digitally.

They want to have some type of e commerce situation to buy from you.

They buy from Amazon like personally, they use Uber, they use the Target app, they use the Starbucks app.

You don't have to be Amazon, but your customers want to be able to have a shopping list of the things that they get from you on a regular basis, log into a system, see their terms, their pricing hit, add to cart, buy it all and go about their day.

They still love their salesperson, they still want to have a conversation.

But a cost of buying of an order over E commerce is around five bucks.

And the cost of doing it over the phone with a B2B organization is somewhere between 50 and 70 bucks.

Right?

You've got errors and issues and all the things that kind of happen when humans touch things.

And so you know, I like to say that the average 23 year old college graduate entering the workforce was just 5 years old when the iPhone was released.

Right.

And what's going to happen when they become the director of purchasing in the next five years, when the 23 year old entering the workforce was zero, when the iPhone existed.

Right.

And so I'm not one of those people that say, oh, it's coming or the end of the world is here.

But I'm going to say that your buyers tendencies are changing and they want digital systems to purchase from you.

And I've been in plenty of factories where they've got the latest IoT devices and they're using AI to tell them what the challenges, what the faults of their systems are, but they still take orders out front in a spreadsheet and we've got to figure out how to get, get past that.

Yeah, well, that's where you're going to lose in that weak spot.

You know, there's five generations of buyers, as you know, and each generation has its values and the way they like to purchase.

I'm baby boomer.

I like to go.

I love Amazon.

I mean, we're on it all the time.

It makes it simple.

I compare it, I go shopping.

If I see the item in a store, I always double check and see what it's going for on Amazon and can I get it better and with the return policy and whatever.

So I use it as a tool.

How do you see AI fitting into all of this?

So the AI technology is killing a lot of.

Well, let's just say it's amplifying the good things, but it's also killing the obsolete and redundant things.

How does it fit in to your strategy?

How are you applying AI now to help close that digital revenue gap?

So we're leveraging AI in terms of product recommendations, engines.

We're leveraging AI to write content and product data and analyze CAD files and sell sheets and other things to kind of capture that.

We're leveraging AI in the assistance of email marketing.

And like every aspect of what we're doing, we're leveraging AI to assist with and we think that's going to continue to grow and evolve.

Yeah, no, I think so too.

I, you know, since it came out, we started using it more and more and the tools are evolving and we're trying to stay up.

And I mean, you go home for the weekend on Friday, it's already smarter on Monday, and what have you done lately?

And so it's really about staying up.

But I see it as an amplification tool.

I see it as a way to get rid of that boring, redundant stuff.

It can do the analytics, it can do that, but we still need judgment we still need authority, we still need accountability, we still need responsibility, empathy.

AI is never going to do that.

So it's bringing that, how can we maybe align a human element into that E commerce solution?

How are you employing that?

Well, I think, you know, a great example of this in my personal life, I just bought some new speakers.

I'm a DJ for fun.

And so I bought some new speakers from Guitar center.

And so I've got a salesperson, a gear advisor there.

And when I added those speakers to my cart just to see what the cost would be and what the shipping would be, my salesperson reached out to me and said, hey, I saw you looking at those.

Wow.

Looking at those speakers.

Right.

And so what I, what I say about that is that like that is that type of feature set is within arm's reach of a mid market organization if they have the right team to know about that and know how to implement that.

Right.

And so we need continued human intervention in every aspect of this.

So we would never put a product catalog out that had been, AI generated that, that the customer hadn't reviewed one by one.

Right.

You know, and, and looked at.

So you need that continued human intervention in each stage of this.

I, I, I think that that is how, you know, I see things where people use AI to write their wedding vows and I'm like, well, what was personal?

What was personal in that?

Yeah, right, right, right.

Like, you know, and what, no, honey, I wrote mine.

Honey, I, I wrote mine myself.

It was too long ago, way before AI.

Let's talk about what I call lessons from the main stage.

So DJ Opie and corporate leadership.

So I love the side of your background.

Since you were 16, you've run a highly successful second business producing massive non profit galas or galas.

As DJ Opie, what is, you know, what has command over a crowded room in managing high stakes live event production and taught, taught you about leadership, reading people, managing client expectations in the corporate world.

I appreciate the, that, I appreciate that.

So what I do is I've been a DJ since the 80s and I worked in the mid to late 90s and early 2000s.

I did work as a DJ in a professional capacity in large nightclubs.

I did a big events and things and then as I was kind of going, as I've, you know, been around in business, I'd been asked to get on the boards of these various nonprofit events and galas, give money, do all the things which I love to support.

But I got tired of going to these events and having a bad DJ or just having somebody like the room is, you know, 40 to 70 in terms of age group, but they're playing music for like an 18 year old, right?

So, so I said to my wife, I gotta get involved.

And she's like, do it.

Now.

I have a nightclub worth of equipment in my garage.

But it's really helping to read the room and understand like where people want to go, right?

And it's about elevating energy.

So you start with some great chill music these days.

A lot of yacht rock.

Then we kind of move into some 80s, like 90s.

Then, you know, then the dance floor gets going and then you kind of reach this inflection point where you're able to kind of like bam.

And get everybody kind of moving in the, in the same direction there.

So being able to harness that momentum and get it moving has been fantastic.

I also feel like I bring a lot of entrepreneurial and business type experience to these galas.

I'm like, if we're not going to figure out how to raise the most money, money, too much work goes into this to not to not, you know, raise as much money for these causes as we can.

Well, there's a correlation between that and your business, really, because you're working with three or four segments or verticals, demographics, if you will, and it's appealing to it.

So it might be time for an ABBA song.

And then, you know, you might have to throw, you know, pretend you're Avicii or David Guetta, right?

Throw it.

Throw in something for there.

And you know, and I've seen these.

And that's a whole different vertical all to itself.

And better if you're probably using some substance abuse of some sort.

So it wasn't my kind of thing.

I was a classic rock guy.

So to me, anytime you're bringing on anything from the 70s or 80s, you're getting my attention.

We have it constantly playing, but I think you're, you're still reading it because you still have to sell that vibe.

You still have to create that vibe.

And really what you're doing is you're creating an experience.

So just to kind of wrap this full circle, how can we, as you're creating experiences, DJ Opie, and for a gala where you're, you know, it's an experiment, they go, this was great, let's do this again.

How can we create that same experience?

And you give an example with Guitar City.

But within most businesses, what kind of things can we do so that we, we have the commerce, we can make it simple.

Order but at the same time, we can bring another human element to it and create a better experience.

Yeah.

We have to understand that these digital systems are not meant to take commission away from your sales team.

Right.

Like you'll hear that somebody say, oh, well, we can bring the commission back.

They're meant to, to be a tool for your sales team to be able to go out and sell more.

And Instead of spending 30% of their time selling and 70% of their time doing admin, they're able to spend 60% of their time selling and 40% of that on admin.

And they're able to put the time in to maybe your long tail customers and try to turn them into lighthouse customers.

Right.

And so think about as you're implementing a system like this of how it's going to touch each department to either grow revenue, cut costs, or increase customer satisfaction.

And this is a project that kind of generally does all three, you know, within that.

Yeah, no, makes sense.

The book's called Closing the Digital Revenue Gap.

Anywhere you buy your books, get on Amazon, you can get it in hardcover.

Lots of good wisdom and insights in there.

The website.

Yeah.

Thanks, ethan.

Is ethan giffen.com.

We'll have all of those coordinates and your contact information in the show notes.

They can, I know, can reach out and follow you and connect with you on LinkedIn.

I know you're fairly active there as well, and lots of great, lots of great insights there.

So congratulations on the book and I know speaking opportunities.

If they want to get engaged with you, I know they can reach out to you and contact and they can start that assessment process if they want to explore that conversation with you.

And thanks for being our guest today, Ethan.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you, Michael.

Really appreciate it.

As you're listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that has caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you?

And who is one person who you can share that with, either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you were listening.

Perhaps it is the realization that your best niche is already hiding inside the clients you already have, and all you.

Need to do is look at the.

Data and listen to it.

Or maybe it is having the courage to be irrelevant to 95% of the market so you can become absolutely indispensable to the 5% who truly need you.

Thank you for listening, for learning, and for investing in yourself so that you can become the best version of you.

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Goodby.