How To Succeed With Laser Focus with Author, Patent Award Winner, #1 Bestselling Author & CEO William Benner on Episode #0082

Intro [0:00]  

EA interviews Episode 82. Inspiration, transformation, success stories, and the Imperfect Action Round seven days a week. Join Mario Fachini for today’s Expert Authority Effect interview. Have you ever looked at lasers and thought these are an amazing thing? Have you ever wondered how they work? Do you ever wonder all the different purposes? I mean, what really makes them? We’re not talking about freaking sharks with laser beams on their heads or anything, but look around at laser pointers, displays when you’re at concerts, all of those different things. I’m very excited to have CEO of Pangolin Laser Systems here, William Benner. He has done work with companies like Disney, DreamWorks. So many, I can’t even name them all here and he has dozens and dozens of patents. He’s also the author of the book, Laser Scanners. And he is going to be sharing with us how he did it all. How do you pull all of this off? What — why did he want to get into it? I’m very excited to bring him up right after we thank our sponsor.

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Mario Fachini  [1:20]  

Ladies and gentlemen, here he is, Mr. William Benner. William, how are you doing today?

William Benner  [1:26]  

I’m doing great. It’s great to be here. You know, you and I met at several light training events where I was introduced to you as Super Mario and you are too, you’ve always been a mover and a shaker. And it’s great that you’ve started this podcast. I’m so grateful, so glad to be a part of it.

Mario Fachini  [1:41]  

It’s great to have you here. I’ve been excited to have you on the show for some time. And like I was saying earlier, I know a little bit about your background, but obviously, not everything. So I wanted to start off with how did you get into this? What made you say, I want to start building lasers and laser beams? And then, how did you turn that into such a successful company working with such well-known brands around the world?

William Benner  [2:05]  

Well, I’ll tell you what, you know, when I was in high school and also in college, I was in a rock band. I played bass and synthesizer, and we had a guy named Bob Orello [phonetic] on guitar and Nick Hansel [phonetic] on drums. We played top 40 songs at parties and stuff, nothing for money, just to entertain ourselves and our friends. Now, for us, it wasn’t only about playing the music, we also wanted to look as legit as possible. So while in college — and also for college credit, I made my own lighting rig. Now, it consisted of a whole lighting desk and the lights and everything. Now, made all this stuff on a college kid’s budget in the ’80s. So there weren’t, you know, American DJ and all this other places that you buy this stuff. We’re talking about things that I made out of PVC pipe and wood at Radio Shack and Home Depot. So we had the band and the lights and that worked out well. But one of the things I noticed was that all the most famous bands had lasers as a part of their act. We’re talking about Pink Floyd and Blue Oyster Cult that had amazing laser shows. So for me, that was the next thing to tackle. The problem was, in those days, lasers were just unobtainium, we’re talking about tremendously expensive. So kind of like the lights. It was just kind of like, well, if we wanted a laser show, we’ll just have to build it ourselves. And so, I did. So at the end of the 80s, we had a rock band with lights and lasers, all basically made by myself. So what happened with the band was what always happens. I moved to Ormond Beach and Nick moved to Jacksonville, so the band kind of faded away. But my love for lasers and music remained. So I met — a little while later, I met another fellow named Patrick Murphy [phonetic] who had similar interest in music and lasers. And we decided to form a company with the idea of creating software and hardware that people can use to make laser shows because that’s what we were passionate about. So basically, what was the inspiration is just like we wanted to do lasers, but we could — it wasn’t something we could even purchase at the time. So we made our own and then, we decided to sell it to people. And the business just kind of grew and grew from there. You know, at first, we thought we would still sell a limited number of these things. But what we found was that as we kind of like the more stuff we made, the more people, people bought. And it just kind of grew and grew and grew organically. There’s not too many people doing this, so there’s not too many choices people have, but that’s kind of how we got started.

Mario Fachini  [4:34]  

Well, it’s very impressive because I’ve looked at your stuff for years and was always astonished by it. And hearing more of the story, I mean, it’s just fascinating. I’ve always liked lasers, I’ve always liked computers. I’m a geek at heart. And you know, I built computers and stuff and so many people take it for granted just looking at something going. I plugged it in, why isn’t it working? Well, there’s a lot more that goes into stuff than just plugging it in. You have all the circuitry, the boards, you know, the sensors, the capacitors, transistors, all that stuff. And when you were, when we’re doing stuff with your book, I remember seeing some of the diagrams and I was just like, you built this stuff.

William Benner  [5:14]

Right, right.  Yes.

Mario Fachini  [5:15]

It wasn’t just — you know, you’re not just a middleman that’s, you know, buying it at wholesale and reselling it, you have been building this stuff from scratch since day one.

William Benner  [5:23]  

Yeah, it just, it didn’t exist or didn’t exist in a form that I could afford to buy it. So you know, the only choice was either go without or make it ourselves. So — 

Mario Fachini  [5:32]

I love that, create it. And that’s what I always really admired about you is you just come up with stuff and I mean, you have all the accolades to prove it. So tell me about who you help and how you’re helping them. I know, you’ve worked with companies like DreamWorks and a lot of big ones, you know, what are you doing for them versus someone that’s like a mid-sized company that wants to put on a regional, let’s say, a booth at an expo or something and just spice it up a little bit? What are the main differences of those?

William Benner  [6:02]

Well, sure, it was — you know, fundamentally, what we do is software equipment used to create and perform laser light shows, we help a range of people, you know. So at one end of the scale, there is your single DJ who just wants to spit, add some pizzazz to a party. And then, at the completely opposite end of the scale, there’s things like, you know, Disney, SeaWorld, Universal, and Six Flags, who do nightly laser shows to entertain your guests for a longer period of time and ultimately keep them in the park longer. So the difference really is it’s the same software, you know, we do have several kind of what we call levels of software, but it is ultimately the same software package that allows you to create and perform laser shows. And the difference is in this scale. In other words, the number of lasers — your mobile DJ would have maybe only one or two lasers, Disney and SeaWorld and that kind of thing. Yeah. So that — so for your single sole practitioner DJ, you know, they might have just one or two lasers, whereas Walt Disney World might have 10 or 12 lasers very high powered different places in the park to strategically position to create the overhead beam effect or whatever they’re going for. And then, you have these rock concerts and tours and they have upwards of 100 laser, so that’s really the difference between what’s happening with a mobile DJ, a single sole practitioner, and you know, a large scale production company that’s doing something for a touring concert or something of that nature.

Mario Fachini  [7:39]  

Wow. So upwards of 100. I actually was anticipating the Disney and Sea World and the parks having the most, but you’re saying it’s the rock concerts?

William Benner  [7:46]  

Yeah. What happens is that the rock concerts have lower power lasers but they have more of them and they want to create a show that has kind of tremendous scale, where no matter where you look in the in the theater, you just see this laser effect, while with Disney and the theme parks, they use fewer lasers but they’re higher power and it’s just kind of a different game and oftentimes, the theme parks will combine lasers with other media such as fireworks, video screen effects, and what we call a water screen effects where you’re projecting video or various multimedia in the middle of a lake with a screen that is — just becomes a part of the show. It’s just there’s just a lot of different ways to create the pizzazz and the buzz.

Mario Fachini  [8:41]  

It’s always fascinating because I remember when I was younger being at Disney and seeing the lights reflected on the water. I love water, I grew up on the water, I live on the water, I love boating. And just seeing the lights, I also like special effects, movies, animation, and stuff like this. And even at the concerts one Kid Rock opened the Little Caesars here in Detroit, I was actually thinking about you at the concert because sure enough, when you just said it right now, they were projecting lasers across the whole place. It was just like, how are they doing this? Because there’s a big difference, I’m sure from a laser pointer that you know, you’re going to just put a red.dot on someone across the room versus however big a whole stadium is. How — can you go into little detail? How do you pull that off? Is that where you’re saying higher power or the frequency?

William Benner  [9:27]  

Yes. So the difference is these days, people are really lucky. You know, when I started a laser tube with six feet long required 280 volts of three phase and water cooling. And these days, you can get laser projectors. I should have thought that I actually have one here, but you can get one that’s about this big, maybe smaller than a shoe box actually. It plugs into regular hundred 20 volt power. It could connect up to the same signals that are used by lighting desks. So often, these places at concerts have a lighting desk because there’s not only lasers, but there’s also lights. And so, that same lighting control desk using the same protocol that controls lights can control lasers. So for concert, what they’ll do is they’ll string a bunch of these shoe box size laser projectors on to a trust, they just kind of tighten them on their special clamps involved and that sort of thing, just like they’re clamping lights on, they clamp these lasers on and they wire it and almost the same way as the lights and plug it into 120 volt power and kind of a way to go. There’s — it’s pretty easy these days, it’s a lot easier than when I started that for sure.

Mario Fachini  [10:36]  

You got me thinking because, are you familiar with NDI?

William Benner  [10:42]  

The network video distribution thing, is that what that is?

Mario Fachini  [10:45]  

Yes.

William Benner  [10:46]

Uh huh. Yeah, you know, our —

Mario Fachini  [10:48]

Do you know if any connect to — any lasers connect to that?

Unknown Speaker  [10:51]  

It doesn’t do that but we do have network. You know, so our lasers can be connected via a network protocol by Ethernet protocol. And so, although it’s not NDA — NDI protocol, it is over Ethernet cable and so our lasers can run over the same Ethernet cables that NDI is running video over, so you can have lasers that would be running over the same network cable.

Mario Fachini  [11:15]  

You got my wheel spinning. What I’m using right now to broadcast this live, it has NDI support and I can also control remote cameras. And I’m sure there’s a way we can plug some lasers into this system.

William Benner  [11:29]  

I’m sure there is too, definitely.

Mario Fachini  [11:32]  

Okay. Okay. That’s exciting. That’s very exciting. Thank you for paving the way and making that possible. Because same thing with computers, I know they started up the size of a room and now, we got a supercomputer in our pocket. And again, most people just go, why isn’t it working? I didn’t charge the battery. It’s not plugged in. It’s like you gotta respect where this came from, because this wasn’t even possible 10 years ago. And it sounds like it’s very similar with the background of the lasers because when you said three phase water cooling, I’m like, yep, same as computers.

William Benner  [12:01]  

Yes, exactly. Either that — the network protocol was something that we started in 1997 for a big show for the 850th anniversary of Moscow where we had an amazingly, at the time, 15 lasers spread all over Luzhniki Stadium, which is the stadium that the 1984 Olympics happened in. And so, we did this show for the 850th anniversary of Moscow, used 15 lasers overhead network. We were the very first company to do that, the biggest laser show at the time, I think it was 450 watts of laser power. So very impressive at the time, but that’s where we pioneered that, for that show. And then, we just kind of extended it and kept on going from there.

Mario Fachini  [12:42]  

I’m sure I could ask you all day long all the different people and the cool scenarios that you’ve done over the years. Let me ask you, what’s the biggest transformation you were able to give someone whether it was SeaWorld or the DJ or what’s the — what’s your favorite project you’ve done or client?

William Benner  [13:00]  

Oh, gosh. That 850th anniversary Moscow was very big. You know, there’s all the theme parks that they — I tell you one thing that was very impressive was just the concerts, you know, the Muse concerts, Childish Gambino. There’s just so many. Jennifer Lopez, these concerts have just such a broad spectacle. And the artists, it’s not just us guys dreaming up what we would do at a concert, the artists themselves. You know, Jennifer Lopez, and people like that, they come with their vision and they tell us what they want us to accomplish. And then, we have to go out and you know, and sometimes, do even custom programming to accomplish their vision. So that winds up to be pretty satisfying, you know, to help them to fulfill their vision and then, to have them on stage and even the places like Saturday Night Live, the performance at Saturday Night Live, they have a vision of what they want and how they want the lasers to look. And so, it’s just a lot of that. You know, we just tried to help people and make their — we help people to make their dreams come true.

Mario Fachini  [14:21]  

I like that and that’s got to be a lot of fun. I’m also thinking of — have you ever worked with deadmau5?

William Benner  [14:28]  

Not directly. Yeah. So what we do, you know, we make the equipment. And so, we help to — we sell equipment to, in some cases, the show production companies who then go off and do the shows. So although we ourselves haven’t worked with deadmau5, it could be that we’ve sold equipment to a big show production company in UK or somewhere else in the world who has done that. There’s big show production companies in UK and Netherlands and you know, of course, around the United States that just support these big concert event type things.

Mario Fachini  [15:05]  

Yeah, when you were talking about all this, I know he’s famous for that, the helmet he wears.

William Benner [15:10]

Oh, exactly. 

Mario Fachini [15:12]

And with the custom programming and when you were saying, you know, you got to help them bring their vision to life. It’s the same for any musician or entrepreneur because you have this vision, how do you make it possible? And like I said in the beginning, what I love about you is when it wasn’t possible — well, it was possible, but when it wasn’t mainstream, you made it possible. You just create it. And that’s the fun thing about all of this. So appreciate you for sharing those stories with us. Tell me, how has your book helped your business? What made you want to write a book on laser scanners?

William Benner [15:45]  

Well, you know, what’s interesting is that is really kind of coming at it from a different from a different aspect. So what my company does, you know, we make the equipment, we make software, but we also make the stuff that goes inside the laser projectors. I’m talking about what we call laser scanners. This is — I’m holding one up here in my hand. Here’s my finger, you could see how small this is. This is the whole product that we sell right there. Right. And so, laser scanners can be used not only in laser light show projectors, but also in 3d printers, and self-driving cars and scanning microscopes that do pathology and helps to save people’s lives. So we manufacture these things and we know how they work. But the thing is that this is not taught anywhere in school. It’s not taught in any college. So what it means is if we want to sell these things, we got to help people to understand how to use them and that sort of thing. So I wrote this book on laser scanners here. It’s more than 300 pages. And it shows you all aspects of laser scanners, what they are, how they can be applied. And there’s even a product section in the back that talks about how to create products with it. So what we’ve done with the book has helped to educate people on what laser scanners are, how to use them, how to create products with them. And so, because there aren’t very many books on laser scanners, basically, mine and a couple of other obscure references. But what this does is of course, this makes me the expert authority on laser scanners. And there’s my name right there. And I wrote the book, so I must be the expert authority. Now, what’s interesting is this, so if you go into, you know, a meeting, right? And you have you and your competitor, and your competitor puts a business card on the desk, and you put your book on the desk, which one’s more impressive, right? So — and also, what I like to do is not just place the book on the desk, but actually kind of not really throw it but just make it go like that, right? And so, what I do is I kind of make it go thump on the desk and I say kind of a — it’s a very powerful statement. And so, that’s what we done and it has been very good. We’ve written stuff smaller than this, such as kind of a quick ebook on laser shows, how to get started in laser shows, what you can — what kind of effects you could do with a laser, but this is kind of the main thing that we’ve done with business publishing. And thank you very much, Mario, you know, basically, I came up with the content inside and my mechanical engineer Ryan came up with all the illustrations, but you were the one that helped me with the cover and to basically turn it into something that people can buy on Amazon. So I thank you very much for that. Couldn’t done it without you, that’s for sure.

Mario Fachini  [18:20]  

Well, it was my pleasure. And it was a lot of fun. Honestly, I remember those illustrations, and I was looking at some of them just like, I’m glad I can just plug it in but much respect to building the actual thing.

William Benner  [18:31]  

Yeah. Well, we thank Ryan to for helping to make the full color illustrations.

Mario Fachini  [18:36]  

Yeah, it’s a a great book. Why don’t we drop your website right now where people can get it, your website and what they should look up on Amazon?

William Benner  [18:46]  

Yeah. So LaserScanningBook.com is the website for the book, but I think what’s more generic is what people would want to learn about lasers and laser shows and we have another website called GetALaser.com and people can learn about lasers, how laser shows are done and that sort of thing. There’s actually a link to a free ebook there, they go to GetALaser.com, scroll down a little bit, there’s a place where they can just kind of click a button and get a free ebook that I just mentioned.  It talks about laser shows and how to do laser shows and you know, what kind of different effects that can be done with lasers?

Mario Fachini  [19:26]

Well, I’m going to check that out personally, honestly, because you got my wheel spinning about how can I incorporate some of those into live events that I do also, because —

William Benner [19:35]

Well, Mario, I tell you what, and I’m not joking around about this, we are willing to put our money where our mouth is when we talked about how lasers can make event special and when you –you pick an event that you want to do and we will make the lasers happen for you gratis, and I’m dead serious about that. I want to show you what lasers are capable of.

Mario Fachini  [19:58]  

I sincerely appreciate that and I will take you up on that.

William Benner  [20:02]  

Okay, then deal.

Mario Fachini  [20:04]  

That sounds like fun. I was thinking of when I did my VIP book launch for my book, my party. And I know lighting and I’m all about, you know, lighting and composition and you know, all of that, but you just keep talking here and I’m going how many of these can I hook into what.

William Benner  [20:23]  

Yeah, it’s a whole other game with lasers, that’s for sure. It basically makes things spectacular. Lasers, you know, I was thinking about writing a book called, Just Add Lasers, because when you add lasers, things are just naturally going to become spectacular. The water makes things wetter, sugar makes things sweeter, and lasers makes things more spectacular. That’s just what happens.

Mario Fachini  [20:45]  

There’s so much — okay, I’m supposed to be asking you stuff, you got me in brainstorm mastermind mode.

William Benner  [20:50]  

Okay, that’s fine. I got all the time in the world.

Mario Fachini  [20:55]  

I did want to ask you one more thing before we go to the Imperfect Action Round. So this is what I’m calling the expert authority roller coaster because that’s what building a business is like, sometimes. So I have stuff like, what would you do if you were president or was the moon landing faked? Where are you feeling today, you want to — out of one to 10, whereabouts are you?

William Benner  [21:17]  

On which like —

Mario Fachini  [21:20]  

Oh, I didn’t tell you which ones which.

William Benner  [21:21]

No, no. 

Mario Fachini [21:22]

Well, shoot. Both of those are actually like a 10 for controversy. One would be like, who’s your favorite musician?

William Benner  [21:32]  

Oh, gosh, you know, I really like Rush. What I’m listening to these days is a lot of Russian singers that do kind of techno music. I’m listening to somebody right now called Lima Osta, which I think is that like 19 or 20 year old girl who was — who had a YouTube channel, played like little things and then, she was picked up by a couple of techno groups and she’s just doing some amazing work right now. So that’s what I’m listening to right now. I’m really enjoying that.

Mario Fachini  [22:02]  

Excellent. Well, I love learning more, not just the business side, but it’s been great to learn a lot more about you in the music side. I also played tenor and alto sax and piano and I have music on all the time. 

William Benner  [22:17]

Oh, that’s cool.  

Mario Fachini  [22:18]

And it’s a lot of fun. I actually found some people on YouTube recently I never heard of before. And you know, that’s the great thing about the world we live in now is if you have an idea, you can not only think it up, dream it and do it, like you did, but now, you have these mediums to get out there and get in front of people like with pennies on the dollar for free. 

William Benner  [22:38]  

Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah, we use YouTube quite a bit to make tutorial videos and to show people what lasers are capable of. Many of the people who wind up being our clients learn of us first on YouTube because of a YouTube video pops up with a laser show and say, “Wow, that’s amazing.”

Mario Fachini  [22:52]  

So let me ask you a little bit deeper. How is the video helped your business? Tell me — take me through a story of, you know, how that’s worked with your YouTube channel and what you’ve done?

William Benner  [23:03]  

Yeah. So, you know, I think we might have probably 500 videos right now on YouTube, but — which is quite overwhelming. But you know, well, we use YouTube for two things. One is to create kind of usually short round three minutes videos to show people what we do, and how we’ve done it and to showcase different people who have done laser shows whether it’s what’s called projection mapping, where you take a laser and projected onto a building, and outline different things about the building and animate those outlines. That’s one of the videos we have. We produce people to — you know, they buy it. In many cases, they are starting from nothing. And so, they want to learn how to use it. So we have a series of tutorial videos, which shows them how to create the various effects that the system is capable of. And so, it’s — for us, it’s kind of a two prong. It’s to show what is possible and also to highlight the great work that’s being done by a variety of people and also to teach people how to use our products. So that’s the two ends of what we use YouTube for and video. Before it was YouTube, we actually made tutorial DVDs and we would put a DVD in the package. And now, we just have links on our website to go to YouTube. So makes it easier.

Mario Fachini  [24:16]  

That’s so reminiscent of what I was doing too, because I would shoot stuff out like I do with my private clients, you know, one on one with my crew. But 10, 15 years ago, it was the same thing. We were — we shot a commercial that we turned into the DVD to put in the package for the product. Now, you can have — I mean, you could get business cards and slap them in there and say, hey, go to some, you know, Mario Fachini.tv and go get the information on this. So —

William Benner  [24:43]  

Exactly.  Yeah. That’s exactly it. Yeah, exactly.

Mario Fachini  [24:46]  

It’s great to hear your leverage in all of this and I know it’s why you’re growing the way you are. So congratulations on your continued success.

William Benner  [24:54]  

Well, thanks. You know, it’s due to folks like you. You know, you and I go to these events and we learn things and then just apply them, it’s all about execution.

Mario Fachini  [25:03]  

Absolutely. I tell my clients every day, that’s actually a perfect segue for this because we’re going to go to the Imperfect Action Round right after we thank our sponsor.

SPONSOR – Business Book Checklist  [25:13]

Why every business needs a book, including yours? Would you like to say five plus hours with every prospect generate more leads and profit in your business now? Visit BusinessBookChecklist.com and learn how you can implement this in your business today.

Mario Fachini  [25:28]  

And we are back with the Imperfect Action Round. William, are you ready to take imperfect action?

William Benner  [25:35]  

We’ll see about that.

Mario Fachini  [25:36]  

First question I have for you, what is the fastest path to the cash in your experience?

William Benner  [25:43]  

Oh, definitely marketing. It’s just, it’s always marketing, getting the word out there. Start marketing on a larger scale. Just push as much as you can. You know, what I think about is the book, The E-Myth, which teaches that the people who often create businesses don’t really know all of the aspects of the business, they know their craft very well they know, for example, the technology or something like that, but they don’t really know the marketing aspect and systemization and organization that’s needed. And so, there’s a lot of places fortunately, just like you mentioned, these days that people can go to learn the marketing, which is, you know, you can watch YouTube videos or podcasts or books or something like that. So that’s what I would say is that marketing is the fastest path to cash.

Mario Fachini  [26:42]  

Excellent. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way they can fix it?

William Benner  [26:52]  

Oh, you know, there is something to happen. So — which is that you know, lasers can be used for a lot of different things. It’s digital signage, product launches, corporate events, concerts and that sort of thing. And so, what happens is people wind up becoming aware of these great things that have happened and they watch the media and they say, “Wow, you know, I want to become a part of that, too.” So what they do is they try to find out information about lasers. And they sometimes wind up stumbling onto a website that gives them misinformation or they’ll just be so excited, did these quickly and without much thought, go and buy something on eBay, and ultimately become dissatisfied with it. So what we’re trying to do to solve that problem is education. So there’s already a lot of education on our website, we have a section called Powered by Pangolin, where we highlight particular ways in which lasers were used, and we highlight the specific pieces of technology that were used to create these shows, the software, the hardware, but also special equipment that they might have used to create the effects such as fog machines, and different screen technologies and that sort of thing. So we’ve also started exhibiting at trade shows that aren’t — that, you know, we — historically, we go to laser-related and lighting-related trade shows. Well, we most recently started going to trade shows that have nothing to do with lasers and lighting shows. We’ve most recently gone to a trade show here in Orlando called InfoComm. So it’s just about information. So we’re, basically, we’re trying to get the information out there to help people kind of — try to contact them directly and help them to understand what these stuff can be done, rather than have them kind of stumble around and you know, ultimately, make some mistakes along the way.

Mario Fachini  [28:38]  

I think it’s great that you’re doing that because I see a lot of people regardless of the industry, the greatest thing is we have all this information available to us. You can literally look up anything on the internet, you can watch a video of it on YouTube, and even if you wanted to start a company even as much as yesterday, I was doing some things for a client. We have a shoot for this week and there was these sites where it was like they had all this stuff just available to you. And it’s just so easy accessible nowadays. But the one thing that will always be the differentiator is what is the information you have access to? And are you applying it in that right order? So I’m glad you’re making it available the right information, because you can look up all kinds of stuff online.

William Benner  [29:28]  

Yeah, exactly.  

Mario Fachini  [29:29]

You don’t even know if it’s right or wrong. And then, if you’re putting — it’s like putting a puzzle together in the wrong order, it’s not going to work. 

William Benner [29:35]

Well, exactly. Yeah, the information is available, but if you don’t apply things in the right way, then you wind up kind of doing a false start or something like that.

Mario Fachini  [29:44]  

Yeah, and you’ll end up wasting more time. And you know, people say practice makes perfect, but perfect practice makes perfect. If you’re doing it wrong, doing it 1000 times doesn’t really matter, you’re just learning how to do it wrong. 

William Benner  [29:55]

Sure, exactly.

Mario Fachini  [29:56]

So number three, what would you say is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value in your experience?

William Benner  [30:05]  

Well, I’ll tell you what, as the saying goes, it’s a lot easier to sell to an existing client than it is to find a new client. And I’ll tell you about what my partner, Just, the chief operating officer, Just done. So over the past three months, he’s worked with our web designer and our CRM guy to do a study and the nature of the study was this. So okay, we have lots of ads out there on Facebook and YouTube and that sort of thing and Google. We got these ads running. And so, people with the idea being people click on an ad, it takes them somewhere to create some action, you know, they sign up for a newsletter or something like that. And then, they get served several newsletters and they may or may not click on them and then, what happens is they sit — so then, eventually, the person picks up the phone, they call us. We — there are several phone calls, we educate the customer, they buy or they don’t. If they buy, then there’s post-sale education and support that needs to go on. And so, the purpose of this three-month study was to say, you know, kind of what’s working, what’s not working. And at the end of the day, we had this conversation just yesterday, he said, “Bill, I tell you what, we done this three months study.” We’ve ended it, it just — it’s so expensive. The lesson is that it’s so expensive, it costs so much money and take so much time to get a new customer. We got all these, we got the whole pool of existing customers who already know us, like us, and trust us, the lesson of this last three months study was just cater to the customers we already got, you know, and so that really is the lesson. So the main thing is to maintain those client relationships and to try to nurture the existing relationships. To that end, what we’ve started doing is using more sophisticated programs, such as CRM systems, to engage with our clients more, basically applying the techniques and systems that are used by larger corporations.

Mario Fachini  [32:01]  

Sounds like it’s going well.

William Benner  [32:04]  

Well, we’re always learning. It’s a constant. We didn’t think that — we thought that the lessons of the three-month study would be okay, how to refine things or which ads to double down on, which ones did this to discontinue. So you know, we may go into something thinking we’re going to learn one lesson and come out of it with a different lesson. So —

Mario Fachini  [32:25]  

Well, I know you know how to implement whatever you do learn. And even if you don’t have the information, I’m sure you’ll create it. So the last thing I want to ask is, what is the best book that’s impacted your life and business?

William Benner  [32:41]  

Oh, gosh. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. If — what I say is if you’re a religious person, that should be the second most expensive — most important book of your life and if you’re not a religious person, that should be the first important book of your life. So it’s that impactful.

Mario Fachini  [33:00]  

Wow. Very good recommendation. Well, William, it’s been an absolute honor and privilege to have you here. You absolutely nailed it. Just give everyone the website again where can they find you to learn more.

William Benner  [33:14]  

Well, our main website is www.Pangolin.com and that’s what — the website that covers a bit the software and systems and some of the lasers that we produce. Another website is GetALaser.com and that focuses more on the lasers for the show. So Pangolin.com or GetALaser.com.

Mario Fachini  [33:36]  

Very good. Well, expert in authority world, we have another great episode here. It’s been a privilege to have William on the show. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I have. Have a great day and God bless.

SPONSOR – Business Book Checklist  [33:47]  

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www.EAInterviews.com  [34:03]

Hey, thanks for listening to today’s episode. I hope you got a lot out of it. I know I sure did. If you haven’t done so already, I invite you to subscribe to the show. And also, be sure to check out EAInterviews.com for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned and more. Have a blessed day and I’ll see you tomorrow.