Before you go into the ground and You're Dead Forever try one store, your dream, your Aesthetics your menu, your formula, your product. just go for it. Once attention is the number one asset, let's kick it right off. Uh, the Arbitrage is here is: I spent all summer selling cards on eBay to join a Fanatics live stream and win an auction to what I think I stole to grab 15 minutes of your time.

So uh eBay I mean I've been following you for years. We're obviously all in on the vending. we're all in on the cards, the books, the the whole nine. So uh, we we run a podcast and we want to give back to our our people, our staff, our employees and we've got you know, a couple questions teed up for you I want to just like introduce ourselves real quick? um and and go from there and see where that takes us and uh, just holy crap we're so blessed to even uh, you know have a little bit of your timeon Justin's voice is shaking.

You guys are being very very sweet. Thank you for the all the swag that's on the tables and everything I'm ready to rock and roll I'm excited to be here with you Got the black cat got the 10 ants that I know you saw earlier today and I launched on Courage stream last night. So um, this is Chris Alexa our CEO we're aspire to be Hospitality 16 restaurants Buffalo Wildwing Starbucks and this is Kimberly Alexa our CFO So uh, we wanted to be sensitive of our time. We each kind of have a question teed up for you.

Um, you know, kind of specific to our industry and your expertise. and we wanted to rock and roll. So Kim us off? Yeah so and forgive me I Wrote my question down just because I I'm so Star Struck I Didn't want to get preoccupied but my question really is evolved around like our podcast and Next Level and we have this. We have run this for a very short time, around 10 months our podcast.

but my question is what are some strategies or tactics that you recommend for Us increasing our podcast audience engagement and and increasing our loyal customer um base. Right now we're at around 500 subscribers and over the next six months we have a goal to reach a thousand. So what strategy specifically that you can help us out with to reach F Go from 500 to a th in a six-month pretty short time span. Um for uh, many things.

One, how often are you doing the podcast? We? Well, it's once a week. we are releasing our our podcast once a week and then we have episodes. So Tuesday morning we release one. yeah, our episode.

This is our third episode. No worries, how did you get? How did you get the original 500 Just originally? Just organically organically organically. I mean we're gaining 5 to 10 a week. Every episode We've done 30 episodes and 290 shorts which are just basically shorts or Clips within the episodes.

Yeah, makes sense are and you're filming the episodes. Yes sir, Yes sir, and are you? This is our studio without the lights. this is. And so for me, the way I would do it is you film the episodes and I would chop up the highlights and I would focus on LinkedIn and I would target employees I would run media to amplify that content of employees of other Hospitality groups on LinkedIn Okay, yeah, that's that's a we haven't hit LinkedIn we're on every other one, but not LinkedIn So LinkedIn to me is is disproportionately the most fruitful platform for y'all because you're A B2B conversation more than a B Toc conversation.

So people's mindset in consuming content in LinkedIn is much more business content oriented. Plus the way that LinkedIn ads work, you can post a con piece, go 37 second clip, or two-minute clip that you think is really great from the show, and then you can literally run $1,000 in ads or $500 in ads against employees of these seven different Hospitality groups who clearly would be more likely to be interested in what you're talking about. You could also pretty cool, but think about it, you could also go broader than that. Obviously, you can run against employees of this restaurant group or that one, but you can also run against employees of Marott.

You can run it against employees of Taco Bell Like there's a lot of different ways you could Target your media and these are like three four $500 Media spends not 400,000 Okay, yeah, good, totally makes sense. y thank you. Yeah cool, thank you. That's a good.

that's a good question. A good answer that helped out a lot. So Chris has a I've got one more for you. All three of you need to go to your phone and you need to all go to your phone one weekend.

grab a glass of wine, go to contacts, start at the letter A and hit up Aaron Anderson and text him and say hey, Aon Hope you've been well, we haven't spoken since high school. Here's a link to my podcast. It would mean a lot to me if you would listen and I would end with Zar Zaron and do that for a week or two until you're done with a Toz, but literally directly sending a link to the podcast and then obviously adding a sentence or two because some people you haven't talked to in a year and it might seem out of touch and other people you might have talked to last week, but you're just very transparent. I'm really been I'm doing this podcast I'm really pass about it mean the world to me if you listen to it.

Okay, yeah, that's great. We thought about that but never pulled the trigger on that. Yeah yeah, we're kind of intimidated by that, right? We don't want to thend our friends. we pushing ourselves off them.

That's right. That's right. You don't spam them. That's right.

This is why you have the link and you have to take time and write a custom thing. you're not control C Control V And and spamming everyone you're literally going to Barry Bond and saying Hey Barry You know, like and don't forget this. in your contacts, you have a lot of former employees, former business associates. By the way, you may want to say to one of them or 10 of them or hundred of them.

Hey, would love to have you on the podcast. oh yeah, yeah. I Love it. Yeah.

I Like the thing about drinking the wine too at the same time, that's good. Yeah, love it. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah.

all right. cool. Uh, let's Chris is our fearless leader. He's got one teed up for you.

Yeah! so Gary Um, as you can see, this is my Nft right here. The bullet schol and that's who I am right? Me and Kim started this company back at we were 26 and no college education and bought my first franchise as Quiz Know and me and her work those stores to death every day of the week until we grew to two and then we sold those and grew this this brand and this we changed our company name to Aspire to be and that's what it is aspire to be more. We're just out here trying to change other people's lives too, just as you're doing too. So but we're We're part of six different brands.

Starbucks Buffalo's Arby's as a CEO I'm always sitting in my office I spend a little bit of time of always dreaming and visionize what's our next step. what are we doing next? We are so saturated with the restaurant as when Covid hit I mean it killed us all right and it was like I've always tried to diversify what can we do next and I'm always looking out there and I want to kind of want your advice I've looked at other things too and I'll use this for example like energy drinks. I mean we sell a lot of Red Bull in our bars and and and a lot and then one of the things Kim Envision was was a slip resistant shoe. Can we get in a Sho line because we have a thousand employees if not more that are buying these you know Sketcher shoes and is there anything that you can throw at me that you might can let us look at that we should be looking at in this business? I Believe the natural step for you to go for the Grand Slam is to become the franchise or yeah I believe if I'm if I was.

If you guys were my first cousins and we were always family vacationing at the level and scale that you just referred to I'd be bothering you on that one week at the grandparents Lake every year saying listen, with the money you're making cuz you've got the successful thing. Once a year, you need to try a concept that is yours because what will happen is either. it's just a good ontore execution and this is a muscle you don't have I Always say to franchisees you know I I speak at a lot of franchisee conferences through the years and I'll get off stage and I'll Crush because I'm good like that like Gary like I love you. You and me are you know we're the same.

We're entrepreneurs and I always say this and this is not disrespectful I need you to hear this because this is the most fun way to answer your question. I Go. We're not the same my friend. I'm an entrepreneur.

You're You're entrepreneurial You got when you're a franchisee. You are an entrepreneurial person with training wheels on. Because when you're an entrepreneur, you do everything when you're a franchise. e Yeah, you do most things, but not everything.

I think the next step for you versus using your infrastructure which is smart I see the the energy drink I see the slippers. My gut is you've built in a ridiculous core competency over the last decades. You're educated the way I'm educated from the streets, from the stores in the trenches I Find it inconceivable that the two of you, the three of you, whoever else is in the Inner Circle don't have some idea of a taco, a pizza, a hot dog, a Philly cheese I Don't know what you think, but there's always new Concepts It's hard. but I think it would be wildly fruitful and enjoyable for you to try because I believe you have too much operational knowledge that even if it's not a great concept, you'll have a one-store unit that does well and you can just sell it off or you might just want to have it for yourselves.

And if you really made the Qsr that you really wish existed, it will also be enjoyable. Yeah, true, that's true. Thank you. Um, because that that is something is, you know.

I've always told people that I'm not an entrepreneur I'm mean I'm a franchisee I'm just following the blueprint, but we've always had that Vision to do our own thing and and we would love to do that and it is at this point in life it's I want to do something enjoyable? Really, it's just like you know, take one like that like and invent something like maybe you love watermelon juice like you can go for it. You know this because you've been in the game. How long have you been in the game now? Uh now I'm 50. We've been doing a since I was 26.

Yeah, so 24 years you've seen some Concepts that people did not think were gonna work right. you. You've seen some stuff that is now H scale right that you know when you read it in the magazines or you heard about it or I'm sure both of you look at each other and be like we shouldn't have. We shouldn't have passed on that one.

That one did Well Yes, a ton of times. Yes sir. game. I Would say that before you go into the ground and You're Dead Forever Try one, store your dream, your Aesthetics your menu, your formula, your product.

Just go for it once. Yeah, thank you my friend. You just watered the seed. Brother thank you.

You know why brother. Here's why God forbid you hit it God Forbid it's gamechanging. That is right. the energy drink or this.

that's solid but like you could CH And and you know what? As a franchisee at this level of success, with this many units, it's inconceivable to me that it hasn't crossed your mind. So it and use the amount of money that you can go to zero on when you do it. A million bucks. Five million bucks.

Two million bucks. Three million. I Don't know you but do it at a level where it can go to zero because it is very hard. But remember that the three of you have and two of you for sure and I don't know have all the relations but you have the operational capability.

Yeah, I'm done. Yes W I Gotta get started Gary finish this up here I Got to get to work on my dream so uh, go ahead Justin let Justin get his question in. Let Let me end here with you know Hospitality franchising uh we we have a niche audience and uh I do LinkedIn I've got 10,000 followers and we go to conferences and people just kind of. they rant and Rave about what we're doing but it's not necessarily resonating into like call it our subscribers or viewership or impression.

so like as someone who's got an inner circle of some you know what we say. best-in-class restaurant folks. and Hospitality you've got any ideas on the of short form content that as an operator I can excel in I'm I'm super connected into VRI I've read the books could doing that's that's kickass I think you should do Ask Gary ve tea with Gary ve I think you should do your version of a Q&A show because then it it will go deeper and then that concept will resonate with who you're talking about because it's hard to self-start on details that we're talking about. but if you answer questions from this universe you will get to the nerdy content which will then make you go further.

Yeah the nerdy content that's what we were talking about. Yeah very cool. We just started that it's hard for me I'm great at this to just come up with the nerdy content which is why I've always done Q&A there's a reason I did ask Gary ve there's a reason t with Gary ve worked. Got it? Yeah yeah I have I have two.

Let's wrap it up with this: I like your like the vibe I'd like to get to know y'all better and get closer. Oh% yeah thank you Heck yeah!.