The Future of Employee Communications

Curt Anderson  00:02

Hey, Damon, what is up, dude,

Damon Pistulka  00:04

we’re ready to go. It’s Monday. Curt,

Curt Anderson  00:06

it’s Monday. Let’s rock and roll. Hey, how about good football weekend, wasn’t it?

Damon Pistulka  00:10

It was a good football weekend.

Curt Anderson  00:13

It was a good, good football weekend for some people, right? Probably, yeah. I mean, I guess in football, it’s like maybe 50% right? Either, either one good, or it didn’t go so good. So 50% of the

Damon Pistulka  00:23

football fans, it was a great weekend. It

Curt Anderson  00:25

was a great right? We’re

Damon Pistulka  00:25

going to flip the coin. That’s how it’s going to be every weekend, every Monday from now on.

Curt Anderson  00:30

That’s right. So hey, I am just absolutely honored, thrilled to dive into this conversation today. Man, we’ve got a dear friend. We go way back we were, as a matter of fact, Bobby, we were just at the gym this morning together. So Bobby Angilella

Bobby Angilella  00:45

Angilella, hard

Curt Anderson  00:48

to say no, it’s funny. It’s like, I’ve known Bobby for 12 years, and I’m like, You know what? I’ve just, I’ve always, I just, I just go by Bobby. So Bobby is a co founder, just a tech guru, entrepreneur. Through and Through I’ve had, we have a wonderful history together, Bobby, how are you, dude? What’s happening? Hey,

Bobby Angilella  01:05

I’m doing great, man. I appreciate the opportunity to be on here, and I’m, I’m grateful for it, and thanks for having me.

Curt Anderson  01:12

Yeah, next time we come, I told Bobby, I’m like, Hey, we need to do this together in person. We were just at the gym, and, man, you should see this dude. This guy is cut, man. He’s working out with a mutual friend of ours, Jude and man, these guys are just, you know, I’m the old guy just watching an awe demon, you know. So, anyway, so Alright, Bobby, let’s go back in time a little bit, but I so I’m going to go way back in time first. Okay, so my friend, Bobby, and so I’ve known you since 2012 I’m going to go back a little further than that. When Bobby, when you were a little guy growing up, okay, when you were a little guy growing up, who was your hero? Who was your Oh, who did you look up to? Who did you admire? Who was your hero as a little guy growing up?

Bobby Angilella  01:56

That’s an that’s an interesting question. I wasn’t ready for that one that

Curt Anderson  02:01

was planned. Hero, that was planned for you to not be prepared. Yeah?

Bobby Angilella   02:07

Hero, you know, that’s tough, you know, I think, you know, unfortunately, I don’t, I don’t think my father was a hero of mine in the state he was in back then. But I did have an uncle who was has acted as a mentor throughout my life as I got into adolescence, teenage years and beyond. And I do owe a lot of who I am and the way of thinking to him and like me. His name is Bob. Everybody’s got an Uncle Bob, right, yeah. So my uncle, huge in real estate in the state of California. His name is Bob Angilella. You can find him on LinkedIn, and he was always an influence for me, you know, just encouraging, you know, speaking words of life into me like, oh, man, you’re going to be a millionaire by the time you’re 25 and you’re going to do great things. And, you know, I can just see it, you know. And, and that always, you know, really motivated me and helped me kind of push myself along. I’d say, you know, from my father, I got work ethic and, and many other, you know people in my life, but I’d say my uncle was a pretty big hero mentor of mine. So yeah, I’d probably, I’d put him as number one.

Curt Anderson  03:30

Awesome. Alright. Well, hey, your uncle’s name, please.

Bobby Angilella  03:33

Bob angelella,

Curt Anderson  03:36

that’s right. Oh yeah, you just said that. So hey, we gotta we’ve got a couple friends here. So it now, hey, we’ve got MDS in the house. We’ve got semu is here. So okay, alright, Diane’s here too. Oh, Diane’s here. She’s

Damon Pistulka  03:50

got Diane’s here too. She says, Go Eagles. I got, I just have Eagle South while they beat the commanders Thursday. That’s awesome.

Curt Anderson  03:57

That’s right, yeah. So alright, Bobby, so shout out to your uncle. And so you were, you named after your uncle.

Bobby Angilella  04:02

I was not. I was named after my dad’s uncle, who was Robert angelella. And they didn’t call him by Bobby, but they did for me, so that’s how we differentiate among all the bobs. Okay,

Curt Anderson  04:17

so you had Uncle Bobby, who was just, just unconditional love, just you know, boosted you with confidence. Just you know, saw something in you, and you carried that and again, you know, great entrepreneur career. When you How did you talk about when you started your entrepreneurial career? We’re going to dive into a company that you were co, co founder of. It’s called slick tax. Please share like, when did you decide, like, hey, this entrepreneur thing is going to be for me. Yeah,

Bobby Angilella  04:43

actually, you know what? I wasn’t thinking about this question, but I got a really great story. You know, I saw, I saw my dad working in a factory setting his whole life. And, you know, I saw work ethic, but I didn’t really spend a lot of time with him. I. Wasn’t his fault. That’s just what the demand of his his job and role. But one day I was walking somewhere, and I was with my father. I know that we were in downtown Jamestown, and I remember seeing a man, and this man’s name was Bernie, and I don’t think he would, you know, mind if I mentioned his name, but Bernie was a garbage man and Curt, you might know who I’m talking about. And one day, I’m walking downtown Jamestown somewhere with my father, and I had to have been about five or six years old, and my dad waves at this guy, and he’s picking up trash in this truck, and he’s throwing it in the back of his truck. And I go, dad, who is that guy? And he goes, Oh, that’s Bernie. He started his own business, and he collects garbage. I go, I thought to myself, what? He started his own business. He doesn’t work for a company. You mean, he’s not an employee. He’s out there doing it for himself. And it was a, it was a foreign concept to me, but I think from that day on, I thought a little bit different about what you could do in life, as far as either working for yourself or somebody else, which there’s no dishonor in working for somebody else. It’s an honor to serve a company and be loyal there and reap the reward of that. But sometimes you start to grow a little bit different mindset when you’re exposed and experience different situations in life. For me, I also, you know, we didn’t have a ton growing up. We didn’t have the nicer things so, and I think that’s a pattern that you see a lot in in people who are quote, unquote successful in in their jobs and careers or businesses. Is they have a desire to improve their past or current state? Yeah, and they’re looking for a better state, whether that be monetarily or any other form of of prosperity. It doesn’t have to be money, but I knew that I wanted to improve my current state as a child and a teenager, from what my parents were leading to what my future would be. And it’s almost like I wanted to succeed and do something so well. It was like I wanted to succeed as much as I wanted to breathe. And this really helped me in my Drive, when, when we when we started slip text, my drive was, you know, my passion was my drive, and I wanted to succeed as much as I wanted to breathe, right? And that can be good and bad, but so I tell you that story about Bernie because it really changed my mindset as a child, and as I continued to grow older, you know, there was a lot of I could see a difference between, you know, hey, there’s, there’s people who work in businesses, and then there are people who own businesses, and they build structure and processes so that other people can run them, and they focus on scaling them. And I started getting that mindset, like I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to own something. And just having that mindset will help you get to an opportunity, or you can start an up. You can create an opportunity yourself. So that’s kind of where that spirit came from. And, you know, to kind of segue into something else. It’s funny because my business partner, Matt Bagley, and I, this is not our first attempt at a business, and when we were about 10 years old. He may or may not remember this, but we’re about 10 years old. We we attempted to start a bike shop in his parents garage, and we, I can remember we had one customer, right? We’re 10 years old. We rearrange his his parents garage, we get this like tool bench, and we have a couple tools on the bench, and we had this one friend, and he’s like, I’m going to be your first customer. It’s going to be awesome. I want my brake pads replaced. We’re like, okay, we can do this. Wait, we don’t have any brake pads. So we go to the local bike shop. I ride my bike as fast as I can down the street to the local bike shop. I buy some brake pads at their price, their sales price at retail. I get back there, and we charge the kid double. We put these brake pads on his bike, and then that was it. The business was dissolved. We went and played, you know. So that’s, that’s our first attempt at a business. Our second attempt was a little bit more serious. You know, in high school, when I was a junior and he was a senior, we, we had this idea among another, third, third friend, we wanted to create a snowboarding based clothing company, which we called Renegade. Coalition, and Matt will remember this. I mean, heck, I even had shirts from this clothing company that we started in high school and we we designed all the clothing. Matt worked out the details with purchasing. I did a lot of the design of the graphics, created the logo. We sold product before we had any product. It was great. We we created these order forms, and we solicited in our high school, all the students, all the teachers, and it worked really well. I mean, we probably had over 100 orders, and we were telling people we’re going to have it done by this date. Here’s what it costs, fill out your order, give us your money. And we collected all these orders. We collected all the money. Matt did the purchasing with a supplier locally. We had them all printed. We delivered all the product on the same day. And this clothing company was born, right? So then we go next year, we make round two. We take all that money, we buy product, we stockpile it, we sell it at all these like little venues and concerts and throughout the schools and stuff like that around this area. And then the third year, it kind of just, we’re starting to get into college. We kind of dissolves and nobody wants to do it anymore. And, and that was the end of that, you know, so a couple, a couple failures, and, and, and then a couple years later, many years later, actually, you know, we’re out of college. There’s a need in the industry for something like this, in the marketing world, to be easier to use, more affordable and innovative, because everything seemed to be complacent. You know, yes, Matt and he was tasked with the job of finding an alternative marketing for him. And what, what he found was that a lot of the stuff out there was just, it was trash, it was really expensive, and unless you were a large brand, you couldn’t really utilize it if you didn’t have the marketing dollars to to actually use the product itself. And so he kind of said to one of our friends who was a partner at that time, I think we could build something better. And they started building it. And then it wasn’t too long after a couple months later, then that I came on board, and there was a conversation about how that came about, but so then we got into slip text, and we dug in, and we had the perfect synergy of what it takes to make a startup happen. And there was a lot of learning along the way too. So that’s that’s how we got to that

Curt Anderson  12:41

point. Excellent. So Alright, hey, we’ve got a couple people here, something by so we got Viraj here, George, give us a thumbs up. We’ve got Amar here. And so guys, happy Monday, do us a favor. Drop us a note. Let us know that you’re out there. Connect with Bobby on LinkedIn. And so if you have any questions whatsoever, great time to start chopping those in the chat box. Bobby, let’s go here. Let’s go ahead. Damon, well,

Damon Pistulka  13:04

I’ve got you say, Bobby, you’ve had a few tries at this entrepreneurship. And I was just listening listening to a book I was walking this weekend, and it was talking about the fact that I forget who it was. They interviewed a lot of successful entrepreneurs that had multi million dollar businesses and exits and everything else and and on average, most of them had started over 10 businesses before they got to the one that actually was the one that they were able to scale and exit. So I think it’s a common thing in entrepreneurship is, is to really start and try learn. Start, try learn like you were doing, and it really pays off in the end.

Bobby Angilella  13:45

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s some other ventures that I didn’t mention, but yeah, I think all of that adds to the experience. You know, one, one thing that also helped me out too, was, especially if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, like, there’s, there’s a different mindset with an entrepreneur, because they think about they just have ideas running through their head all the time. Some of them are great visionaries. Some of them are idea men and women, and they’re always thinking about the next thing that they could make happen, yeah. What could they capitalize on? And what could they innovate? What could they create? And one of the things that really shifted my mindset was learning about, oh, gosh, I think the guy’s name is, like, Robert Kiyosaki. I think he’s big in real estate. But, you know, there used to be this quadrant they would draw, and it would show you how to create wealth. And one of them was employee, business owner, stocks or, like, I don’t know, independently wealthy, or something like that. And reading some of his books really changes your mindset. You’re not just limited to, you know, working for somebody your whole life. You have the opportunity to create something. You have this thing called free enterprise. In America, which is a great thing, that you can literally do whatever you want to earn a living and create a business. You can compete with whoever you want to and choose whoever you want to do business with. I think that’s really important, that opportunity to do whatever you want and be successful at it if you try. So he wrote

Curt Anderson  15:21

the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, if

Damon Pistulka  15:23

I’m not, oh yeah, yeah, yeah,

Curt Anderson  15:24

that’s yeah. So he’s written a number of great books. So Bobby, so let’s dive into slick text. Okay, so you’ve met your co founder, your friend, Matt Bagley, multiple times, so you and Matt get going on slick text. Please share with everybody what is slick text? How do you and the team make the world a better place? Yeah, and

Bobby Angilella  15:45

real quick, I just want to mention Ryan kennel too, because without all three of us, the company would have not got off the ground. Ryan kennel was the third founder, co founder of slick text, and he was a pivotal part of starting the business as well, and we each had our own great little components that came together as one and made it work. But yeah, so could you repeat that question for me? Larry Curt, sorry,

Curt Anderson  16:11

sure. So slick text, how do you and the team make the world a better place? What is slick text and what problem do you guys solve?

Bobby Angilella  16:18

Yeah, so slip text is a mass messaging platform. It’s a communications platform as a service. Some people might know what a SaaS is, a software as a service. This is a communications platform as a service. It is technically a SaaS, but more specifically, we call it a C Pass, which stands for communications platform as a service, and what soultex allows you to do is simply communicate to a small or large quantity of contacts via SMS in a short amount of time. That solves the problem for a lot of organizations out there that need to communicate with employees. You know, if we take the manufacturing setting and we look at that section of business, you need to communicate with all the employees on your team, you know, HR, individuals or executives will use that tool to communicate with their team members. That’s essentially the what the platform does. And it just

Curt Anderson  17:21

excellent. Okay, so let’s, if you don’t mind, I’m going to take a look just and go back. Let’s go back in time. So it’s 2012 and taxing is, you know, still new. Ish, if you will share with us, like, you know, getting some traction. You were just sharing with Damon and I, like that first customer in Hawaii. Talk about the early days of slick techs and, you know, like, you know, the scrappiness trying to get this thing off the ground. You know, I had the honor and privilege I would demon. So I was at an event these guys won the New York State, I believe, like new entrepreneurs of the year for all of New York State, at an event that I was at the entire, the entire state, that was 2013 ish, if I’m not mistaken. So Bobby, just share a little bit of the early stages of of your entrepreneurial journey of slick tax.

Bobby Angilella  18:07

Yeah, it’s, you know, especially with a startup, it’s, it’s all about getting up and running right, gaining some traction. And nowadays, it’s, it’s a lot about your marketing and SEO, your search engine optimization. If you can drive that traffic to your site and convert that traffic, there’s a good chance you’ll have some subscribers in the early days. Yes, we did. We did win some awards. We won a $500,000 grant that went to small businesses in western New York to start their business. We didn’t get to use any of that money. Surprisingly, you know, we got a flag from the president at the time, we got the technology Innovator of the Year award, you know, letters from the state senator, all that stuff, which was kind of cool. And in the early days, it was all about getting the word out there and convincing and telling people that their current state is not as good as their future state if they were utilizing the service and back then so tech texting was going through kind of like a second wave. There had been SMS marketing platforms like ours, but again, they were all they were too complicated. They were expensive. None of these small to medium sized businesses, even to large size businesses, enterprise size, were utilizing it as much as they could. I would argue that less than 20% of the small and medium sized businesses across the country were even even knew about SMS marketing at the time. So we really saw a resurgence of the technology being used as a marketing tool. So in the beginning, it was really about going door to door. I mean, surprisingly, we I went door to door for almost a year and a half, two years, talking to business owners and helping them see the value and how it can. Benefit their business. I mean, we we broke even the first month because we went so hard on sales, which was a huge relief, and then we paid back our initial investments to ourselves after the third month, wow. So we went really hard. And, you know, after we started gaining some traction, you know, you can talk to Matt, he, he focused. And we, actually, you both focused heavily on doing our own SEO at the time. I mean, I would write articles. We would write articles night and day. Because if you know anything about SEO, one of the things during that time was to position yourself as a subject matter expert. And you can have backlinks to your site. You can have on page SEO from your site. You can have articles and third party sources pointing to your site all referencing that you’re a subject matter expert in a certain search term. And I probably wrote more more articles and essays in in a short amount of a couple years than I had ever thought I would in in college, in school and my whole life. Yeah, right, it was a pain in the butt. Yeah. I would on my off time I would be sitting just writing articles until I would fall asleep just writing articles and and we publish these articles, and we’d start building up a presence of content out there about SMS marketing and text message marketing, all positioning us as a subject matter expert. And we had a great product. We did. We had amazing customer support, and still do, but we had to gain the traction other than beating down people’s doors. And that was SEO. So that’s, those are the real early, early days of slick text. And then, as we continue to grow, you know, we expanded out of our apartments, we got an office. We hired our first couple employees, which, you know, I had some great connections who I found, and then we hired those people, and they really helped us get the foundation started and everything rolling in in the space. And then, as we continue to scale, obviously, we took on more and more talent. We opened a second headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, so there’s dual headquarters, one in Jamestown, New York, and one in Nashville, Tennessee. Obviously, we service a lot of customers. Now you can go and see the numbers on our site, and it’s it’s really evolved into something very large. Yeah, there it is. Well,

Curt Anderson  22:42

speaking of that, that’s a perfect segue. So let’s So walk us through a little bit about, you know, slick tax, the marketing services. Let’s go there.

Bobby Angilella  22:50

Yeah? So, like I said, anybody who has a need to communicate to, you know, their subscribers, whether it be your customers, your employees, or, you know, church members, or anything of that nature, the platform is designed for that. We’re heavy in E commerce, like I mentioned before, employee communications, conversational messaging as well, is something that we’ve gone really heavy on in the past couple years. So there’s been a shift. And I don’t know if we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but we talk about how you can utilize a service like this to send a mass message to everybody, but you can also utilize this service to have conversational messages with your subscribers on a one to one scale. You can also do that at scale, all right. So not only can you have one to one conversations with everybody, but you can actually build tools inside the platform, using things like a workflow, to actually automatically engage your subscribers as they communicate or as they send messages inbound to the platform. It’s a really, really robust capability. So it’s, it’s really going to be your mass messaging, your conversational messaging, and it’s heavy on the marketing capabilities. There’s going to be things that no other platform out there has. There are some that try to copy some of the functionality, but it’s really unique platform. So yeah, that’s so Bobby.

Curt Anderson  24:28

Let me ask you this, do you feel if looking back, would you credit, was it more of your relentlessness and sales? Was it because you had a superior technology? Was it a combination of the of two, what was really, what would you credit the main success for slick techs,

Bobby Angilella  24:46

you know, I think we had good vision. Good vision was number one. The focus on creating a great product was number two. You know, we just had, you know, Ryan and Matt. Matt just amazing. Amazing design skills. You know, a great artistic guy, he understands design very well. And so on top of that, we create a great product. But really it came down to a couple of things. The product was amazing. Product should always be number one. But the customer service was outstanding. Every interaction that we had, whether it be on the phone, in person or on live chat, every interaction we had, we tried to build a relationship and get to know them, all of our customers. I mean, there’s hundreds, if not 1000s, of customers that can easily tell you about our customer service. If you go on Google and just look at the reviews, you can go years back and even current reviews, and you can just see the expression of gratitude for the customer service that we provided and that that comes down to, you know, Matt, Matt and I, we come from small business, you know, we come out of this area, and we knew small business, and small business is all about customer service and relationship. That’s all it is, yep. And I think a lot of people, a lot of these platforms that get funded, and they create themselves, and you know, they start selling, they just don’t have what smaller brands have. Not to say that slow pace is a smaller brand, but a small business has something that larger brands don’t, where the owners are disconnected and not involved, small businesses have an advantage, because they can create a relationship, get to know you, and then have that personal connection that makes you want to support them. And I’m a strong believer in that. And we applied those same principles to slip text when we were creating it, when we founded it, the first couple years, you know, it was and even now, every single person that you talk to, like if you hit that bubble right now, you’re going to have a real human that chat bubble, you’re going to have a real human not AI. Yes, AI is very beneficial, but you want a real human interaction as a customer. There are so many platforms now that are transitioned to AI for support, for help, center questions, and it’s just not something that slip text has ever believed in. You know, it’s great at scale if you really need it, but there’s got to be that connection. Without that connection, nobody really wants to do business with you. So that’s one of the key things, customer support, customer connection, the product, the experience, not to mention we were more competitive on pricing when we launched the product. So it was easy. I think it was an easy if you got it in front of people and you compared, it was an easy decision for those looking for a service like ours because it was competitively priced. It was just it was like Apple to Mac. I don’t know if you guys are Apple user or Mac users or PC, you know, but as far as simplicity and elegance, it was like using a Mac product. It was just elegant. It was simple, it was competitively priced, and, holy smokes, we care about the customer, and I think those things really differentiated the brand. And now our technology, the product still is hands down, I think number one, and that really helps differentiate between competitors, and that gives us an advantage. I mean, not to mention that SEO is is core to any business online, so I think that’s just a given.

Curt Anderson  28:50

All right, so I want to hit this for a second, because, like, right here, you know, our support is fanatical. You know, you’re not talking to talk, you’re walking the walk. How, at such a young age, or, like, what instilled that into you as an entrepreneur, to kind of bring that relentless, unapologetic commitment to your customers? Like, how did you How did you know to create that culture? And again, it’s one thing to practice. It’s one thing to preach it, but then to institute it the way that you did. Any tips? Advice for anybody? Chiming in? Any, any. What are your thoughts there?

Bobby Angilella  29:20

Yeah. So, you know, customer relationship is is key in any business. Not only does it reduce churn, but you know, there’s so many benefits to it. Repeat business is huge too. But where did it come from? You know? So, Matt, that’s a good question, because, you know, growing up, you always hear this stuff, you know, the customer is always right. The customers are always right, and sometimes they are sometimes they’re not right. It depends on how you handle the situation. But Matt and I come from small business, and one of those businesses, it was called Holly loft, ski and bike. You might know him. Curt les. I know

Curt Anderson  29:56

Holly lock very well, yeah, yeah. Even they close. During COVID, man, I’m still lost without him. So I know, I know you

Bobby Angilella  30:03

got to go to Eric Chapman upstate cycles.

Curt Anderson  30:05

I love Eric. Yep,

Bobby Angilella  30:07

he’s great. So, you know it’s, it was easy for us, you know, Matt and I had the customer centric understanding coming out of that business. When I exited college, I took on a role with a pharmaceutical company that was innovating revolution, revolutionizing the pharmaceutical industry in the way that pharmaceutical reps interacted with doctors and influencers in the sense that I got to participate in a team. A blended sales team consisted of a salesperson, a phone support personnel, and then what they called a customer service associate, which was basically a pharmaceutical rep that did not directly sell, okay? And what we were able to do, and there’s a reason, there’s many reasons why I went with this company and and why they picked certain people for the role, but needless to say, customer service was at the center of it, and what they were able to find this company called AstraZeneca, is that when they indirectly focused on sales, all of a sudden, they sold more. When the customer service associate focused on the relationship with the doctor and the staff and making their lives easier, all of a sudden they wanted to prescribe the drug more. We helped AstraZeneca win the Trailblazer award for 2009 2010 and I think 2012 or something like that. The Trailblazer Award is an award given to pharmaceutical companies that show innovation in whatever sector of their business, sales or support for doctors offices. And we were able to make Nexium the number one drug in prescribed in America. And then the following couple years, we made their second largest performing prescription drug. Crestor number one in its category as well, and this is because they took on an unconventional approach, which I firmly believe is founded in the Customer Service relationship aspect, not in direct sales. So number one, they had an awesome product. Nexium is a great product in its category. Crestor was also a great product in its category. Two, so to be able to then go in there and not focus on pushing it, and just focus on the benefits and the reasons why it makes more sense to use something like those two drugs and help them out, get to know them. It made an easy choice for a lot of doctors offices, and they looked at that and the perception was gone when when you go into a doctor’s office and and you’re not there to sell them, all of a sudden, the barriers are gone, and you’re there for the relationship, you’re not there for the sale. And so I went through some intense training with that company to fulfill that role. And you know, we went through, it was worse than anything I had ever done in college, this training. It was just two weeks of hell. That’s, that’s all I can say. We, we did training on drugs. We did all that stuff at the end of it, and at the end of my, my life cycle with, you know, AstraZeneca, we get into the founding of slick text, where I take the same principles of customer service over to the company, right? And Matt already has these principles instilled, too, and we’re just in agreement on how the customer needs to be treated. You know that they’re number one and we need to be there for them. There are people looking for this product and service, and if they can’t find that relationship down the street, because it’s highly competitive. This industry is so competitive, we’re talking 1000s of other services out there. Not as good, definitely not as good. So you have to have some kind of edge, and the relationship is key.

Curt Anderson  34:40

Dude, that’s a phenomenal story. Bobby, yeah, I didn’t know about your big pharma back well,

Damon Pistulka  34:45

and that is such a competitive industry that that you know you literally. I mean, if you if you know what you’re looking at when you walk into a doctor’s office, you can tell the farmer reps that are sitting there waiting to try to meet with doctors. Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s just a. It is. It is super competitive in that relationship. I can imagine not being there to sell, but being there to, Hey, how can we help you today? And, yeah, lot different.

Curt Anderson  35:10

It’s a lot different. Yep, lots different. So David, couple comments. Nader says, Nader, how you doing? Love that story. Bobby And then Harry drops. Hey, we got uzman here. So

Damon Pistulka  35:19

who’s been here today. Hey, uzman, thanks for stopping by today. Thanks, uzman,

Curt Anderson  35:22

appreciate you, my friend and Harry. Harry, great comment here your story, Bobby, on how you built your business would make the sharks on the Shark Tank, give them give you a standing ovation. So hey, I agree with you, Harry. Thanks for the comment. That’s a wonderful and I’ll tell you, Harry is a is a powerhouse, so getting a compliment from Harry like that, Bobby, that’s, that’s Thank you. We won’t take that one lightly. So thank you, Harry, Bobby, so let’s go here. I believe you’ve got a we’re going to take a peek at your dashboard. Do you have that ready? And I can pull that

Bobby Angilella  35:51

1. Yeah, check it out. Give me a second here, guys,

Curt Anderson  35:55

I think I got it right there, right? Oh. Do you see it? Yep, we got it pulled off.

Bobby Angilella  36:04

Yeah. So this is what it looks like on the back end, right? So again, I mean, we could, we could do another call at some other time, or we could get into this a little bit, you know, on this call, I think, if I’m not mistaken, correct me, if I’m wrong, a lot of who you connect with, Curt are in the manufacturing industry. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  36:26

a lot of, lot of industrial and I think, you know from our conversations, where this really hits home is, you know, you mentioned it. I can’t remember if you mentioned it before we went on or during the show, but say, you know, if you’ve got 1020, employees, and it’s just, you know, there’s pieces of information that, you know, it’s really tough to go around to each person. Maybe there’s an upgrade on health insurance or something, you know, what’s our holiday schedule going to be? Is a perfect example coming up in the next few weeks, you know. So there’s a lot of communication for that small b to b manufacturer. It could be nonprofits. You mentioned churches, you know, so, you know, I think this totally hits home. Damon, what do you have? Well,

Damon Pistulka  37:04

yeah, I mean, even in, even in my history, back in the baseball clubs, right? You got, when you got 200 players, and you got the families and blended families and all the people that you’ve got, everybody needs communication and it and as there’s a lot of people at and you mentioned churches before, too, Bobby, how many you know, members are there in a church? And you want to, you want to get that communication out, or some other organization. And then the one that that you mentioned too in our space, you know, obviously we’re talking towards the industrial B to B in manufacturing, but there’s just so many other places where this kind of thing is real important to be able to build these relationships.

Bobby Angilella  37:45

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, one of the things I wanted to mention is, when COVID hit the section, the category of business, that exploded for us was employee communications. So if you think about it. How do you communicate effectively to all your team members when you have to shut down business, yeah, and you have to reopen and shut down and test people and and all this other stuff that you had to do during COVID? We had an influx of employee communications category, customers come in. We had manufacturers from all over the place. But even you know, you think about, what is the benefit to any company communicating with a tool like this? Yeah, it’s a simple fact that you can reach your entire employee base within seconds. If there’s an emergency, you know, think about, let’s say you have the slip text app on your phone and there’s an emergency in a factory, you know, heaven forbid that happened. I know of cases of that happening, by the way. You know, it was at Columbus, Indiana. There was a guy who was shot at a Toyota factory, and they had to go into lockdown. And it spurred, you know, it spurred interest of manufacturers in the area looking into communications platforms of this nature. There’s just so many things that that that could happen that there’s a need for something like this. Just in general, you think about hiring employees. Yeah, you can, I mean, you can do an onboarding journey that provides resources to employees. You can communicate to all your team members. You can separate your list of contacts based on your executives and your floor managers and whether they work at this location in that location. You know, if you’re an organization that has employees all over the country, maybe in Canada too, you know, you can say, Well, hey, get me everybody who’s in the US 50 states. Get me everybody who works in the state of New York at this location in building number A, we’re missing 52 people that didn’t fill out their benefits forms. You know what’s a big headache for manufacturers and. Anybody when benefits have to be updated and there’s deadlines and penalties for all the employees to complete their paperwork, how are you getting what are you going to do? Are you going to cross you’re going to have a huge group meeting among all your employees when you can’t be there physically? Are you going to like, Oh, you’re going to email them snail mail. Like, is that really effective? If you need to provide a link to a registration page and you’re expecting everybody to fill it out, there’s nothing better than being able to send a message to them, track that link, know who clicked or who did not. This is where it gets really interesting. Your HR department could send a message to all your employees and say, Hey, we need this benefits package filled out by the end of the day on Friday come Thursday, if you can retarget your list and say, Okay, we know that you didn’t fill this out, please click the link and you just keep on reminding the people that didn’t click it and complete it like there’s power in that, and if you’re not getting the penalties from the missed deadlines for the new benefits enrollment and the employees aren’t missing their enrollment deadlines, yeah, how much time and money does that save a company? You know, it’s a huge headache, not that I have experience with stuff like that. But I’ve worked with probably 1000s of companies, employee using it for your employee communication, so that’s one of the key benefits. So let’s, let’s take a look at how it works, right?

Damon Pistulka  41:31

So there’s always the important. We’re barbecuing Friday at noon. Get that out to everybody, right? That’s hot. Look. Don’t

Bobby Angilella  41:40

forget, yeah,

Curt Anderson  41:44

David, bring the potato salad. Yeah?

Damon Pistulka  41:46

Like, everybody got what you’re supposed to rig, because this is going to be good. No, that’s right.

Bobby Angilella  41:51

That’s funny. I visited somebody. I visited a sign company in Fauci or New York called Hanson signs, like two weeks ago, three weeks ago, and it was on a Friday or some day where they were doing a potluck. I’m like, Okay, anyway, that reminded me of it. Yeah, all right. So you want to communicate to your team members. You know, there’s free trials for this. You could sign up for a free trial for slick text, but this is really good for HR teams, high level executives, we talked about the pharmaceutical industry. So you’re what you’re seeing now at these pharmaceutical companies is that the CEO will have their own slick text texting number, and they’ll communicate to all the reps, all the personnel in the entire company using the service like this. And it’s really beneficial, because it’s just, it’s just so simple and easy. So we want to send a message to a couple folks, right? Assuming that you have all your contacts added in here, which there’s many different ways that you can add team members. You can manually upload a list. You can add them one at a time. They can text a word to the number, they can scan a QR code. They can submit a web form. They can punch in all their information on a tablet and hit submit, and they’re added to the list. Right during new employment processes with HR, they fill out a little form, and it just gets added to the list. It’s as simple as that, right? So assuming we have our contacts loaded in here, we can go over here and see like, Hey, here’s Damon, here’s Bobby, if we wanted to see, like, what they’re a part of, I have some fields here that I’ve created for employee level and whether or not they’re part of Team A or whatever. And you can see here, see here that I’m actually listed as an executive, and Damon is listed as floor level, right? And what that allows me to do is, if I want to target my employees based on what level of employee they are, it’s very easy to do. So when you go to create a campaign, you can actually select and a campaign is just a fancy word for an outbound message, but we’re going to say potluck right Friday. Since you got you got me talking about this, we’re going to select our audience, everybody on team A and we’re going to go ahead and compose our message. Right? If we want to put a link in there, we’ll put a link in there. I can also track, shorten and track that link, and I’ll give this a name of, you know, potluck link, and if you don’t click it, I will know. Alright. So now you can schedule these messages for a later date and time, or you can recur, schedule these on a repeating basis, but we’re just going to send it now, right? So we’re going to review this campaign. It’s going to go to two people. There’s the message, and we’re going to, oh, I sorry, I think I hit schedule. And there it is, right? So it goes out to you on. A date, whichever date and time I accidentally selected. Let me switch this. We’ll go to now instead send now, if you got your phone turned down. Oh, did I miss? It might have went too fast. Oh, there it is. Ding, did you get it?

Damon Pistulka  45:17

I did not yet, but I will.

Bobby Angilella  45:19

There’s my maybe I got your number wrong. Somebody else just got you a message. Yeah, David,

Curt Anderson  45:26

somebody else is going to go to the potluck. Yeah. All right.

Bobby Angilella  45:33

So there it is. That’s that’s as simple as it is. Now, if I wanted to go ahead and reply to this, there’s a couple things you can do. You can shut off in boxing altogether so they don’t reply. Or you can leave it turned on. And maybe you want to communicate with those folks because you’re in HR, I don’t know, you know, so here’s my message right here, and you can see I just replied to it with a bunch of incense. And this is even great for teams. So I remember we used to work with traveling nurses associations, yep, and be it was huge or truck logistics companies, yeah, anybody who is in logistics, this is amazing. I’ve worked with a handful of companies and logistics, you need to communicate to all your drivers like there’s no better way or easier way to do that, so you communicate to them, but if you think about it, if you have a team of sub users, right people who, sorry, I got a glare coming in my eye from this. Let me see if I can shut it. Give me one second here. Yeah, that didn’t help but think about sub users. So you have a team of, I don’t know, administrators that need to be assigned access to this inbox feature. There’s so many capabilities inside this where you can assign conversations, mark them, unread, open pending. You can close them. You can tag conversations. You can have private notes for conversations right here inside the inbox, you know. So you can have conversations with teammates about messages. You can create notes down below your chat thread right here. You know, it’s a great way to, you know, just Converse on a team so you can have unlimited users. So like we talked about the traveling Nurses Association, one of the things that they would do is they would have top level sub users below the administrator on the account, and they would converse about shift changes and an open client and all this other stuff for traveling nurses and home health aides, huge. I mean, what a convenience to utilize it for that. And we talked about logistics, that’s another big one for, you know, the inboxing feature. But there’s just, there’s so many different uses. Again,

Damon Pistulka  47:57

you think about where you’ve got mass amounts of people that have a phone in their hand at all times, right? It’s not the traveling nurses don’t have computers pulled up in front of them. Home health people don’t have computers pulled up. Contractors don’t have construction people. If you had a large construction company with, you know, 1000s of employees across the United States, which there’s a lot of those now, you know, how do you get the word out to those people, or word out to even some, you know, the 200 that are working on this one project, right? It’s, it’s insane, what you could do with this kind of communication tool through text, which is very hard in other methods, yeah,

Bobby Angilella  48:36

and there’s a convenient app, and it’s all mobile friendly. So, yeah. I mean, people can take it on the go. I mean, super cool. We, you know, there’s, there’s use cases with, I mean, even HVAC and plumbing companies, oh yeah, about how many, the larger ones, yeah, I know a couple personally in this area that utilize our service, and they used to communicate with their team members in the field. Think about how useful that is, right?

Curt Anderson  49:01

Or even communicating with your customer that, like, Hey, I’m on my way to, you know, I’m going to beat your house for the appointment. Diane even says, you know, employee communications, it sounds like it’d be great thing for schools. Education systems couldn’t agree more. As matter of fact, my daughter’s parents, I just got a text my daughter’s school right when, right before we went, we went on. So alright, Bobby, man, I’m keeping dude, I’m keeping you way longer than I

Bobby Angilella  49:26

awesome normally.

Curt Anderson  49:28

So let’s start winding up, man, dude, this has been gold. And like you said, we could go for hours. We’re going to have you back on. Let’s start winding down. A little bit. Is words of wisdom, parting thoughts for folks that are, maybe manufacturers, small business owners, HR departments out there of like, taking that first step, they’re like, Oh my goodness. You mean I don’t have to call, we don’t have to have, like, a whole team meeting. I don’t have to, like, rally, you know, kind of the herding cats expression. What’s a great first step for folks? Take that are looking that are really excited about this process.

Bobby Angilella  50:04

Yeah, great. First step. You know, if you wanted to utilize something like this, and I’m not trying to plug slip text at all, my goal was to talk about employee communications on this call and the importance of it. I think at some point we should also talk about churn and customer success as a component to help increase valuation on businesses. But first steps, I think, you know, you go over to slow text.com, you can get a free trial set up, and you can play with it. You can see the dashboard and utilize the dashboard. You won’t be able to send any messages because you do have to register a phone number in order to send with the carriers, and that’s just a required step to use and send messages using networks and send messages in the US. But there’s great options out there. You can pick a toll free number, like an 800 number. You can pick a local number, or you can utilize a five or six digit phone number to send your messages if you’re doing a much greater scale now, the majority of all folks in this industry, I would probably say you can utilize an 800 number that’s probably going to be your best option for communicating. But you do have the option of utilizing a landline, and you can enable that landline, even if it’s with another service, like spectrum. You can enable the SMS component with slip text, so you can control all the texting right through the slip text app. Just a just a side note. So easy first steps, get a free trial set up, tell them Bobby sent you, and they might treat you a little bit better. No, they won’t. It’ll be you’ll have amazing experience no matter what. The team’s great. And you know, just think about how you’re going to communicate with your team members. Like, what’s, what is the pain point of communications for you, whether it be as an executive, communicating to company, an HR person communicating to employees, company, onboarding employees, what? What are the pain points? What do you need to communicate? Out? And why is it important that you have your message read within seconds, delivered within seconds, read within minutes, almost 100% open rate. What could your future state look like if you utilized a tool like this? And is it worth it? Is it worth it to have? And, I mean, there’s different size plan. It’s just like a cell phone. Basically, you know, if you, if you go onto a paid plan, you acquire a number and you want to start sending. It’s like paying for a cell phone. Yeah, you know, could be 100 bucks a month. Could be 1000s a month, depending on how many messages you’re sending. Each method message does cost money, and so does the phone number, you know, but we’re talking like a buck a month or something for a phone number. So awesome.

Curt Anderson  52:46

Hey. And Harry drops another comment, the speed of customer churn moves faster when employee churn takes place, and with internal communication being so critical on what’s cited for by employees who leave this is gold, and our friend Jeremy says good morning or good Monday to you. So hey, Jeremy, thank you for the courage. Thanks for the comment. So okay, I know we’re coming to the bottom of the hour, Bobby. We have so much more to cover. We gotta have you back on Yeah, we’d love to another round dude. So hey, first off, demon, about I want a big round of applause for Bobby just absolutely smashing it out of the park today. Big Damon takeaways for you today.

Damon Pistulka  53:25

Well, I mean, you look at the way you can communicate, I just it’s running through my head, the different applications for this, and then and then how critical this is for these organizations to be able to get that almost instantaneous communication in some of these situations, like you said that when people aren’t around a computer, you still need to talk with them. You still need to do that and and it’s so much faster. Yeah? Just awesome. Yeah, you

Bobby Angilella  53:53

know what? I just thought of real quick, not to go backwards, but the ability to deliver documents and PDFs, yeah, if you have to get a document out to your entire team, yeah, that needs to be read. If there’s a process change or a delivery change or something important, you can actually deliver that through SMS. You can attach a PDF, a JPEG, a PNG, I mean, right inside the message there, and I didn’t show you that, but there’s a little paper clip. And think about how effective that is to not only message them within seconds, but also provide that that attached document as well, 100%

Curt Anderson  54:33

because, especially for our manufacturing friends, because so many of their employees, I’m sure they do have an email, but they’re not active on email? Yeah, they’re just using it for, like, personal shopping or whatever it might be. So the reality for that manufacturer to communicate with all their employees through email, and if they’re on their shop floor, they’re not checking their email, if at all, you know, and some people might not even check it for days. So Bobby, I couldn’t agree more. I mean, it’s just such, it’s not even a. Nice to have. This is like a must to have, you know,

Bobby Angilella  55:02

yeah. So okay, all right, Bobby, dude, we

Curt Anderson  55:06

gotta have you back on. So I’ll see Bobby at the gym. And Damon, I got you gotta see this guy at the gym, man, I’m like spears, so Alright, Bobby, I appreciate you, man, more than you can possibly imagine. Uh, thank you and I and I think the big again, we could go on and on. I think the biggest thing that I’m so impressed with, and I’ve had the honor and privilege I had a front row seat of watching you guys as two young entrepreneurs, build this thing from scratch and watch what you guys turn it into. I didn’t realize the the fanaticism and unapologetic commitment to customer success, yeah, has been such the driver for your success. And I’ll tell you, there’s a that’s that might be even as big, if not. You know, bigger takeaway for everybody out there is that commitment to your customer success in over top customer service, and that was really impressive. So Okay, let’s wind down. We’re going to close this out. So Damon, like I always say, man, just go out there and be someone’s inspiration, just like our dear friend, Bobby. One more round of applause for Bobby. Thank you everybody. Jeremy says, Good work. Nice work. Thank you Harry. Thank you Diane, thank you everybody. Uzman Nader, everybody that dropped comment in the chat box. Bye. Everyone. Connect with Bobby on LinkedIn. Go to slick. Slick tax check out the website. Sign up for the free trial. Check it out, and you will thank us later, Bobby, hang out with us for one second. We’re going to let everybody wrap up and have a great rest of your week. Man, see

Damon Pistulka  56:38

you. Everyone. Yeah.