This is why Pipedrive is essential to Front Desk and their mobile client management software.
In this show, Nicki Violetti, co-founder of Front Desk (mobile client management software) talks to us about their inner workings, what makes Front Desk an awesome app for small businesses and the apps they use to keep their team in touch.
Visit our guest at…
In this show you’ll learn why Front Desk uses…
*excuse typos this is a machine generated transcription*
Jimmy Flores: Welcome everybody again to “How Apps Help Me Grow My Business”. This is the GetApp podcast and before we get started, we would like to introduce you to what GetApp is in case you don’t know. Basically GetApp is a resource to help people save a lot of time whenever they’re looking for just the right business application. This means that, for example, lets say you were searching for an application to help you manage your mailing list or something like that. Well, instead of going to Google and searching 100 times how to manage a mailing list, mailing list software and ending up with a million different results, you can come to GetApp.com, search mailing lists and we’re going to serve you a bunch of results that are just the right companies in that space. You can go through them, read the reviews that people have left for them and eventually you’ll be able to make that decision and discover the right tool, the right application for your needs, for your company, for your size. That’s what GetApp does. GetApp really is a tool that helps lots of people save lots of time searching and helps people find just the right application for their needs really, really fast. With that being said, I encourage to to visit GetApp at GetApp.com and now I’m very pleased to introduce you to Nicki Violetti, who is co-founder of FrontDesk and co-owner of Norcal Strength and Conditioning, which if you listened to the previous podcast, we were talking to Peggy, who was the founder of Primal Parent and now we have another person in this paleo-world. Exactly like I said before, I’m not going to evangelize about diets or anything or how you should eat. I just want you to know there’s wonderful people doing amazing things in the paleo world. Go discover Norcal Strength and Conditioning. From there you could go down this rabbit hole of heath, fitness and nutrition and see how good you feel. With that being said, Nicki how are you?
Nicki Violetti: I’m great Jimmy. Thanks for having me.
Jimmy: Like I said what we talk about here, we talk about your company, which you are the co-founder of, which is FrontDesk and then we’ll get into some of the stuff that you use at FrontDesk internally to help you better manage and run your business.
The first question is what problem does FrontDesk solve for its users?
Nicki: We built FrontDesk for service businesses and we’re bringing sort of the technology to a small business owner that allows them to manage their clients and all aspects of their business. You can imagine [unintelligible] or even a practitioner that does webinars or seminars or events and they want to manage their clients and maybe they need to schedule appointments or classes or courses. They need to have some billing built in. They want to be able to track contact information on their client’s notes and so it’s a scheduling tool that includes billing. You can track staff pay, so basically it’s an all in one solution for the service based businesses and the great thing about FrontDesk is we built it mobile first. As you know in today’s day and age everybody is doing almost everything from a mobile device whether it’s an iPad, iPhone, tablet or whatever and so whether it’s the client who is looking at the business and wanting to schedule an appointment or sign up for a class, whatever device they’re on, they have a great experience and then for the staff or the owner, you also have a great experience and you can do stuff. Maybe you run your business in the park and you need to take a payment from a client in the park you can do that with FrontDesk.
Jimmy: From the customers that you’ve been in contact with, what would you say are one or two of these happy super success stories that you’ve had this feedback from?
Can you go into a little bit about what these stories are and how FrontDesk helped them do something better?
Nicki: Yeah, one of our first customers that we actually onboarded with was actually a franchise called Fit For Moms. Basically it’s a franchise, each of these franchisees, they operate typically out of parks and they are providing fitness classes for moms with their kids, so it tends to be with a stroller and they’re out in the park and they’re doing exercises trying to get their body back after having a baby and these business owners as you can imagine, they’re outside, they don’t have a physical location, they need to be able to have their clients sign a waiver, they show up in the park. It can be windy and they need to have this paperwork that they collect and they need to charge their client, so Fit For Moms has been a great case study for us. One who is really happy with the product because 1) it’s easy to use. They’re coming up close on 200 franchisees now and each of these franchisee owners can learn the tool quickly and then they can hand the device to the client and the client can sign their name on the waiver with their finger. We’re actually integrated with DocuSign for digital signatures so if their business requires a waiver or digital documents, they can do that with the finger anywhere and then of course taking payments. Fit for Moms has been one of our big success stories for sure.
Let’s say they’re at the park. How does payment processing work there? How would that work?
Nicki: We have an IOS app for staff so if let’s say the instructor had their ìPhone out and they had a new client that comes in, they can take payment either with a card reader that plugs into the audio jack or we actually have built into the app something called ‘card IO’. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that.
Jimmy: Explain it to me.
Nicki: Card IO allows, it’s built into our app and it allows the person to hold the credit card behind the camera on the phone. It’s not taking a picture of the card, it’s just capturing those card digits so you don’t have to key them in manually. You can key them in if you like, but obviously it’s much faster and there’s a big wow factor with it also. People are like I can just and the numbers are just there and the expiration date and the CVC code and the receipt is emailed to the customer on the spot so it’s really nice.
Jimmy: Would you say that there’s more or less a lean towards fitness companies that might be using FrontDesk or have you seen just a more broad adoption of FrontDesk?
Who is the main market that FrontDesk is helping?
Nicki: You know, probably a third of our customer base is fitness oriented businesses I would say and that just stems from my background and some of my co-founders being in fitness. We have a big reach in the fitness community so we do appeal to a lot of fitness and it’s jot just cross fit and strengthening conditioning gyms. It’s yoga and pole dancing is a new thing so we’re getting a lot of those kinds of businesses. We also have quite a few music schools so I’m not sure if you’re familiar with School of Rock. They’re another one of these big franchises. They have about 160 franchisees. They teach kids how to play musical instruments and they do like cool band groups and you’re in the Beatles group or Led Zeppelin group and you do these performances. Not just fitness, music instruction, we have a fair number of obedient dog trainers, people who teach obedience classes for dogs.
Jimmy: Wow! I think for me personally this is so cool because all of a sudden you start getting some insight into tools that are helping so many people. I think that we take for granted tools like FrontDesk that are actually – what would you say is the thing that FrontDesk would give people that use it?
What is the biggest value that you see Front Desk giving users?
Nicki: Oh goodness. I would say time number one because most of these people if they’re not using this solution when they come onto FrontDesk, they’re using Excel, paper and pencil. They’re just using a lot of different tools to try to track all of this stuff so consolidating it all in one tool really saves them a ton of time and then of course you have the ability to get a lot of insight by using FrontDesk too. You can quickly run reports and see the number of clients, the number of members, revenue across different revenue categories so there’s just a lot of information that you can get. Like I said, if you’re just trying to tackle all of this stuff in Excel or taking attendance with pen and paper, you’re desk is probably a lot more cluttered than somebody who is using FrontDesk.
Jimmy: Taking a step back, let’s say we’re talking about someone who has a small gym or something like that. How does FrontDesk integrate into their website? Let’s say they built a website with WordPress, they’re with whatever service. Does FrontDesk replace their website? Does FrontDesk integrate into it? How does FrontDesk kind of become a part of their lives? What I want is for people who might not know, they might feel like FrontDesk is a website where everything happens so how does this integrate with that?
How does FrontDesk integrate into a clients website?
Nicki: Some really new businesses who are maybe starting on a more limited budget, they can use FrontDesk as their website. There’s two parts to FrontDesk. There’s what we call the FrontDesk website, which is where the clients interface, where your clients are going to book appointments into your schedule and then there’s the staff side of the software. The FrontDesk website is customizable to match the client’s brand and so we have five different templates. They can add colors and logos and digital images and customize the navigation so there’s a lot they can do, but more sophisticated businesses will have a primary website and then link to FrontDesk to direct people to sign up or enroll. We don’t offer blog capabilities or photo galleries and thing like this so if you need those for your business, you’re going to have your primary website and then we make it really easy to get links and buttons that match your branding so that let’s say I have a workshop, a paleo workshop coming up this Saturday. I can say “enroll now” and it will be my colors and put that on my main website and when the client clicks on that, it takes them to that enrollment page at FrontDesk to sign up for that event.
Jimmy: So this is pretty cool. You can help somebody who might have an idea of “how do I start selling my ‘x’ skill, but I don’t have any idea about how to build a website, how to market or anything”. They can kind of jump start that with FrontDesk?
Nicki: Yeah absolutely and you can post those links on Facebook. Say you don’t have a website, but you want to post an event or you want to have people book online appointments with you and teach them whatever you teach them. You can post links to that on Facebook and people can go right there and book with you.
Jimmy: What was it because it’s really interesting that as a co-founder and co-owner of Norcal Strength and Conditioning…
What happened to sprout you into the land of co-founding FrontDesk?
Nicki: Different in some ways, but when we started Norcal, Rob had actually started right when I met him and we didn’t have any systems. We weren’t using technology to do anything. We were having people pay us on PayPal. I was taking attendance with paper and pencil, trying to manage stuff in Excell and then in QuickBook. It was just a mess and I didn’t have a really good sense of whose payments were failing, who was coming, but hadn’t paid. It was just a big mess and then we started using another tool four years in and that worked quite well and although it was pretty challenging to train staff on and it wasn’t mobile. I think we started moving in this mobile direction. One of our friends is the CEO of FrontDesk actually. John Zimmerman is a friend of ours via CrossFit Seattle. He was an early investor in CrossFit Seattle and the owners of CrossFit Seattle are really dear friends of Rob and mine. John and I got to talking and John is an early Expedia guy and had a good network of folks. We got to talking and we thought that there was really a need in this space to provide tools to small business owners like ourselves that 1) it had to be easy to use because I would do a lot of consulting with folks with their gyms and the biggest thing was if it was too hard for them to use, they don’t have time to learn to use a complicated tool, so they would just not use one and then they wouldn’t benefit from what a tool could provide so we wanted to make something really easy. Wanted it to be mobile first and so we set off on this path.
Jimmy: So did you kind of start like solving your own problems first and find that along the way more people had the same problem or kind of what was that launching point to where you began to hit the nail on the head to what FrontDesk should really do for people?
Nicki: Well there are other tools out there that will allow like a small gym or service business to book appointments or book classes and do recurring billing, but in our opinion none of them were doing a great job. That was sort of the ‘aha’ moment and none of them were mobile. Now these tools are playing catch up and they’re moving in the mobile direction because they have to, but 2011-2012 they weren’t really there and we would get people saying like “man when I talk with business owners I really want something I can use that’s really good and easy” so we knew there was a market for it and we knew that there was just a big need for a tool that was just really going to simplify and reduce stress for these owners. We started down that path. Norcal was actually one of our first clients that we migrated to the public FrontDesk platform and since then we’re accelerating and the feedback that we’ve gotten is really great. People just saying like “this is just making my life so much easier”.
Jimmy: Would it be that you kind of worked out the FrontDesk kinks basically on Norcal and everything that its evolved into kind of after that beta test with Norcal?
Nicki: Yes, definitely my staff at Norcal definitely took a bit of pain in the early days for sure, as did the folks that were early adopters and that’s how it goes with early adopters. They take a little bit of pain, but they can also shape the product and they’re right there close to the source. They can give a lot of great feedback. Hey, this really isn’t working for us, we need it to do this. We’ve gotten wonderful feedback from the folks that joined us early and we formally launched in March, 2013 so we’re coming up on two years, March 2015 will be two years. Everybody who is on is still relatively an early adopter, but our product is just coming so far.
Jimmy: Along the evolution of FrontDesk, what has been the biggest surprise? It can be in dealing with a user and/or just a feature you never thought was a need.
What was that biggest surprise you came across in the evolution of Front Desk?
Nicki: That’s a good question. The feature thing, you always have a long list of features you want to build and then you get feedback from customers and usually it’s stuff you already know you want to build and there’s just this finite time and so it’s just like tension between we want to build it right and we want it to work beautifully and be beautiful right from the get go so there’s this dynamic tension between moving quickly, but also putting out a great product. The biggest surprise, gosh that’s a tough one. Nothing is popping into my head right now.
Jimmy: For example, dealing with customers and getting their feedback, how have you managed because I imagine that customers have to be giving you, especially people running small service based businesses that are very near and dear to their heart. This isn’t something like you’re part of a massive corporation. They’re doing it because it’s a real passion to them. Across the board you have to be receiving a ton of feedback as features that they want right now. What is kind of your process to see actually what you can do? Obviously you can’t do everything, so what do you kind of do to go through that process with your customers?
How do you decide which features to build?
Nicki: Most of the features that we’re hearing are things we know we need to build. Obviously we’re a new company and we want to reach feature parody with an existing solution people might be wanting to migrate off of. There are a handful of things that we still need to build to reach that feature parody. Things like [unintelligible], which we’re building this quarter, promo codes. There’s a handful of things like that that hear all the time, but we already know that and they’re already on a road map. They’re things we’re working to build as quickly as possible because of course once we have those features then it opens up more folks that might migrate to us that are using another solution. Aside from that, we get features and we want to build features that are going to be most useful to the biggest segment of our base and we also want to build things that might open up a strategic opportunity maybe with a franchise partner. If someone has 200-300 locations and they might need ‘xyz’, if that’s going to unblock that sale, then we’ll consider doing that too. We kind of balance things between what is going to really benefit our base, what are people asking for, what is really going to delight them and really make their lives even easier and then what is going to unblock potential sales for us so that we can continue to grow the way we need to grow.
Jimmy: Along this evolution you’ve decided to integrate with other services to make FrontDesk even more useful.
What are some services that FrontDesk integrates with?
Nicki: As I mentioned, we integrate with DocuSign Digital Signatures and that allows for our businesses that have documents to be essentially be paperless so they don’t have files of file drawers filled with waivers or documents they need to store on each client. It’s all stored on the client profile and people can sign with their fingers so we made that really easy for folks. We also have integrations with Mailchimp and Emma, both of which are email marketing tools. Lets say Jimmy: you come to town and you want to take a class, you create your profile, you find our kiosk in the gym and you basically create your profile in FrontDesk, you sign the waiver digitally and then your contact information all pushes to Mailchimp. Then we can also push different fields to Mailchimp, things like the first visit to a [unintelligible] class or the last visit to a [unintelligible] class or different custom fields so then I can segment my mail list in Mailchimp so when I’m doing an email marketing campaign, I can send something to anybody who took a [unintelligible] on this date or send this email three days after their fist day so I can do a lot within Mailchimp with that integration or with Emma.
Jimmy: This is so valuable. I think some people, especially when you’re starting off, I think that this completely goes over your head sometimes as to the value this really adds because I think the easiest way to understand it is having a feature like that and being able to integrate with Mailchimp that way or with Emma, you’re put in the position that anybody who walks into your business, you can get back in touch with them after they leave regardless of whether or not they signed up. This for small businesses is fundamental because sometimes it’s like people just didn’t feel in the mood to make a decision at that moment, but if you tap them on the shoulder like a couple of days later, they’re like “hey, that experience was actually very good. I should sign up” and that’s one of the things I think is something that’s really a missed opportunity for a lot of small businesses that would be like “mom and pop shops” where they really don’t understand the whole scope of technology, but I think that’s really good. What have you seen, what kind of feedback have you had from users regarding this type of integration?
Nicki: They like it, obviously they like it. They don’t have to manually export the lists and import it into their email marketing tools and the fact that we’re able to sync a lot of these fields, we can link purchase fields too or even custom fields. Let’s take a martial arts studio for example. Let’s say they track all of their students and they have a custom field in their profile that tells whether they’re a black belt or a blue belt or whatever color belt they are and maybe when you have a belt promotion and people move from a purple belt to a brown belt you automatically want to send an email to them congratulating them on their brown belt. You can have that all kind of configured in Emma or Mailchimp and as soon as you make that change in their profile, you go into their profile and say “no longer purple, they’re brown” as soon as that trigger turns to brown, a series of emails will fire off that say “congratulations, you’re now a brown belt”, “this is what you can expect with being a brown belt” or whatever you want to say and a lot of that stuff is automated and it makes it really nice for the owner. They don’t have to think about it and have manual tasks to do some of these things.
Jimmy: This is really neat. This is really neat to hear because I think it’s something that, I have friends here who have prospect studios, who have martial arts studios, who have boxing studios and people walk in, they walk out and there’s no easy way for them to get back in touch. You’re not going to ask them for their phone number, but a lot of times they sign up and their email just ends up God knows where. That’s very cool. The last question about FrontDesk, we’ll merge over into the stuff that you use internally for FrontDesk, but the last question is…
What makes the FrontDesk team awesome in your opinion?
Nicki: Oh goodness! One, we absolutely have an awesome tree and I would say that the number one characteristic is humility. We’re all open to feedback, there’s very little ego in our company, which is great so we put it all on the table and people can give feedback and say “I don’t like that” and we can just discuss it and move forward. That’s really awesome, but then talent would be the next one. I think that we have one of the most talented engineering teams and I’ve heard that from people that we’ve brought on kind of in the last six months who have worked at start ups and the feedback has been – the skill set in this team is just mind blowing so that’s exciting for obvious reasons. We can build great things and move quickly, but even down to our account executives and the folks who are answering support tickets and really supporting our small businesses, there’s just a real desire to help people and we’ve done a great job of hiring people. They really want to help people. They want to make these small business owner’s lives easier and it really is like a family. Even though we’re headquartered in Seattle and some of us are remote, I live in Reno, Nevada and have a handful of folks in Dallas and in Colorado, but we still have that kind of family feel when we talk about the different tools that we use, I’ll talk about how we kind of stay tight knit with being remote. We’ve got a great team and I’m really excited to be a part of.
Jimmy: It’s a bunch of black belts. Moving on with, what are some of the premium applications that are used internally by FrontDesk for either team collaboration or even your own stuff that you might use for tracking customers or leads? What are some of the things that you’re using internally?
Nicki: We use a handful of things. The first one I’ll mention is Slack, just because we do have some remote folks and so Slack allows us to communicate across the whole organization. You can have private channels, one on one channels if you want to just message one person on the team. We have a channel for sales. We have a channel for support. The engineers have a channel where they’re just having conversations. We have a random room where we can post random gifts or funny things so even though we’re not in person and we can’t go to somebody’s desk and tell them a joke, we can throw something in there and everyone can have a little fun with whatever that is. Slack is just really great. Even for the folks that are headquartered in Seattle, we’ve got probably close to 30 people in the Seattle office now, they all use it too. It’s just a nice way to communicate with people, it’s not email and it keeps you connected during your work day.
Slack allows us to communicate across the whole organization.
Jimmy: Do you remember how you or whomever it was came across Slack? What was that moment of “hey what is this”? Do you remember? Do you recall?
We were using Facebook messaging when it was just the six of us and then we moved to a tool called HipChat.
Nicki: When we first started out, we were using Facebook messaging when it was just the six of us and then we moved to a tool called HipChat, which is similar to Slack. You can chat message people in your organization. I think it was probably only about nine months ago, not quite year ago when one of our developers, one of our engineers and co-founders was like “I think we should try”. I don’t know how it came across his radar, but he and some of the [unintelligible] started using it before they asked the rest of us to kind of give it a shot. At first it was a little different from HipChat. It takes awhile to get used to any tool, especially if you’ve been using another one for awhile, but we all really love it. Like you can upload images and documents and the search functionality is great. If John and I had a conversation a month ago and I remember him uploading some kind of a document, I can search and find it relatively easily. I think we’ve fully adopted it and it’s fully a part of our culture.
Jimmy: From a communication point, that’s really good to know. What about from a more of an operational point to where it’s like okay, this actually lets us grow the business because Slack helps you communicate internally, which is fundamental, but what do you think is a tool that you’re using that is actually helping you to grow?
Asana so we use that for basically project management.
Nicki: Another tool that is across the organization and everybody has their hands on is Asana so we use that for basically project management. You can have your different projects. Before Asana we played with Trello a little bit and Trello is nice to kind of drag and drop cards and things to different people and upload files to it, but Asana makes it nice because you can have your list of tasks under a project, you can assign them to other people, you can have sub-tasks, you can have comments back and forth, you can [unintelligible] things, you can link to GoogleDocs, you can attach anything to it. All in one spot you can have everything. I’m on the product marketing team and do a lot of art creation stuff so we have a whole section on content, stuff that’s active content, stuff that’s upcoming that we’re brainstorming on so it’s just this repository way you can keep all of that stuff in there. Even on the product side, that’s where we’ll track a future request, enhancements that people are looking to see and then the guys can start scoping that out. They use another tool called Pivotal to kind of really flush out the stories around the different features and adding wire frames and a schedule and get in there and spec out everything that needs to be done to build that, but [unintelligible] is great. We use that a ton. Additionally to that, we use ZenDesk to track customer support and that’s a great tool as well. You can have macros in there, you can assign tickets to different people, you can track how long it’s taking you to respond to people, you can get a whole host of data on which customers are sending in the most support tickets, how many support tickets are coming in in a given period of time. It really allows you to see how well you’re doing, managing and helping your customers with any issues that might arise.
We use ZenDesk to track customer suppor.
Jimmy: Out of all of the tools that you’re using, is there one that has really been that one break out that has helped you solve a very big problem within FrontDesk or have they just been like these minimal improvements and incremental improvements or has there been this one moment of like “thank you. This is the thing we were looking for”?
Nicki: Goodness, we’re currently using Pipe Drive to track our leads and our frontal management. We started off with Sales Force. None of us had used it before and we had somebody help implement it and they didn’t do a good job. We weren’t able to get the data we wanted simply because we weren’t well versed in the tool. Then we moved to a tool called Base and then Pipe Drive. I think Pipe Drive is especially for John, our CEO, giving him “aha”, I can actually see the data I want. I want to see all of these leads and when are they expected to close and what’s the dollar value of leads that are expected to close this month versus next month, how many people are in the wings, how many people are waiting for ‘x’ feature. They’ve seen a demo and their interested, but they’ll move over once we have wait lists. There’s a lot of filtering you can do to get a sense of how deep your pipe line is so Pipe Drive I would say has sort of been that tool for us at this point.
We’re currently using Pipe Drive to track our leads.
Jimmy: This is really interesting because all of a sudden you’re getting like a different picture of like what is actually useful, what’s helping and what people really don’t mind investing in. This is really cool. Personally, what is one tool, whatever it is, premium or free or whatever, that every day you use it and maybe you don’t reflect on it when you’re using it, but right now you say “man I couldn’t do without that”?
Nicki: You know, Jing is actually, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Jing. It allows you to really get a screen cast of your screen. That has been really, even though I do content creation for the most part, I still have a lot of people who will email me questions about how to do things and really quickly instead of having to type out go here, click on this, blah, blah, blah, I can open Jing, take a quick screen cast of how you do this, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s thirty seconds long. Post a line in their email, they open it up and it’s like I’m giving them a little tutorial.
I use Jing for screen casting.
Jimmy: This is super interesting! This is kind of a call back to a question that would be what’s kind of your customer service for your users and so is there some type of you know central place where videos like this are that you answer like some similar questions along these lines with a video from this tool?
Nicki: So yeah, we’re working on building other video tutorial library. Those we actually record with Camtasia because with Jing you can’t edit. It’s meant for really quick screen grabs so that’s more if somebody, and there are as you said, there are some that they type of question that you get really frequently and so those we’re working on to quickly move those on to YouTube tutorials so you don’t have to do those over and over again.
Jimmy: At least for me because I’ve used a ton of tools, I really like what you say that it’s much easier to show somebody how it’s done instead of try to go type it out with bullet points and steps. I think it’s that little added value to customer service and it’s helping a user really understand what they’re supposed to do that could really mark the difference between choosing or not FrontDesk. I think that that’s something that people should consider is that quality of you know how engaged is the person that is going to try to help you discover how to use the tools of FrontDesk. I like that. Just a brief emphasis here. That’s really cool to see.
Nicki: We’ve actually had feedback. Sometimes the client will write back “oh my gosh, that it the coolest thing ever. That totally helped me. I get it now”. Most of our clients, they’re not familiar with all of these apps. They’ve never heard of these things, but when they’re presented with it and can click on a link, there’s your voice “here’s how you do this Susie”, it really does add that little bit of personalization and then they feel really well taken care of and now they know what to do and how to do what they were trying to do.
Jimmy: The last question about the tools that you use, is there something in your day to day that is an annoyance that a tool just can’t seem to get right? If you don’t feel like naming names, you don’t have to, but if you do that’s fine. All types of feedback is good and should be accepted. So, is there something that’s a recurring annoyance that either you have the tool and it doesn’t do the right thing or you just can’t seem to find the right app for?
Nicki: You know what? My biggest annoyance on my day to day is just my email. I would guess that’s what a lot of people would add. Actually I know there’s an app and it’s come across my desk. There’s something and actually maybe you will know the name of it, it’ll roll up kind of all your marketing emails that come to you so let’s say I get emails from Amazon, I get emails from paleo-treats and I get emails – I’m on all these mailing lists. Every morning I go in and I could unsubscribe from them all, but some of them I want to see, but it just takes me awhile to clean out all this clutter. There is some sort of an app and I can’t think of what it is, but it will roll over so instead of getting fifteen different emails from these people, you’ll get one and it gives you the highlights.
Jimmy: That sounds super familiar. I can’t, I feel like there’s a blog post that I came across and this was mentioned. I just can’t.
Nicki: I can’t think of it either. Somebody, I think one of our [unintelligible] threw it across my desk.
Jimmy: This might lead into something that I don’t know. So being very involved with two different kind of customer segments, one with FrontDesk and the other with Norcal Strength and Conditioning, marketing is essential. We all know that. How do you think a person should structure let’s say a promotional newsletter so that when it reaches Nicki, she wants to read it at that moment? What is it that you would like to see in a piece of content like that?
Nicki: That’s such a hard question, right? Everybody, not just me or you, everybody is getting so much email these days and everybody is time crunched and so I think everybody has a similar routine where they open their phone in the morning and they’re like delete, delete, delete, delete. It’s a really tough problem. The subject line obviously has to be killer. You can see who it’s from and if the subject line grabs you then you’ll actually open it and see what else is there. Whatever it is that you’re marketing, like you have to really spend a lot of time kind of curating that subject and then I think it’s tough because so much of it is a timing thing too. You might send the greatest subject email to me this morning, but my kid was crying and I had this thing at 8am and so I just don’t have time for it. It’s tough. Email marketing is tough because everyone is bombarded.
Jimmy: So, I think that we can call this a wrap. I really enjoyed it. I think there’s a lot of things that you mentioned that are very valuable about FrontDesk, getting people to understand the value of FrontDesk, how it can help them. Also helping them to identify themselves with, if FrontDesk is a solution for them because I think that the examples that were given were spot on to kind of how a person can use it. Before we wrap up, is there anything that you’d like to tell people about FrontDesk?
Nicki: Oh goodness! FrontDeskHQ.com is our website and feel free to go there. We have a demo video, we have a promo video and you know, again our main mission is to really make your life easier running your business, getting you the tools to do that wherever that might be.
Jimmy: You have a team full of black belts!
Nicki: We have a team full of black belts!
Jimmy: Trust them.
Nicki: Yes, exactly.
Jimmy: Before we go, I just want to say thank you Nicki and invite everybody to check out FrontDeskHQ.com and go to GetApp.com and leave a review for FrontDesk. So, if you’re a FrontDesk user and you love FrontDesk and you think that you want to give them a bit of love back, going to GetApp and leaving a review is not only useful for FrontDesk because it helps them show up a little higher in the search results, but it’s very, very useful for other people and other users who are trying to make a decision, trying to see if FrontDesk might be the right tool for them and it’s these reviews and it’s these opinions and it’s these insights that can only come from a person using it for their day to day business that will help other people. I really encourage users of FrontDesk. Nicki if you can encourage them to go and leave a review because in the end, I think a lot of people make their decisions based on reviews. So go to GetApp.com and leave a review for FrontDesk and yeah, go check out GetApp again and that’s pretty much it on my end. Again Nicki thank you so much.
Nicki: This was great!
Jimmy: And don’t forget to also go check out Norcal Strength and Conditioning and to Google the paleo diet.
Nicki: You’re awesome!
Jimmy: That’s the last thing I’m going to say. Thank you so much Nicki!
Nicki: Thank you Jimmy!
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