Barbara Wardell & Ernesto Cullari

0:01 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

 Hello everyone and welcome to the shades of entrepreneurship. This is your host, Mr. Flores. Today I'm here with a tag team duo of Barbara and Ernesto. I'm excited about this because it's kind of talking about trafficking, about using marketing and again how we can get better as entrepreneurs in our own growth. So, but before I get into all that, Ernesto, Barbara, to introduce yourselves. Please give us a little background. Who is, first of all, go with Barbara.

0:43 - Cullari & Wardell

Who is Barbara? Who is Barbara? Well, I'm Barbara Wertell. The Wertell. I'm in the group. Anyway, I'm an entrepreneur. I've been around entrepreneurs for probably about my whole adult life. And between, you know, being married and having an entrepreneur husband, and then, you know, raising my children on my own, and then going on my own, in my own business. But before, in between all that, I was a specialty medicine rep. So that was just, that was about a, almost a decade of my life. So imagine 2,000 miles a month in your car into offices. So then we started this, and we've been excited and it's been a great ride so far. Nesta. I'm Ernesto Kalari. I'm co-founder with Barbara of Kalari Wardell. We're an international geofencing ad agency. And we specialize in using GPS data, location based data, smartphone data to drive 5,000 satellite verified visits a month in a post-COVID world. So essentially, we use satellite

3:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

and they have those filters, I think of the geofencing like that, for example, when I got married, sent in a thing to Snapchat, and so we had our own little filter or during our marriage. However, it was only within this little circle, just a little circle around our wedding, our church. So basically, again, like from a marketing perspective, folks, you don't really want to be marketing to a folk as your brick and mortar location, know, barber you're in Portland Oregon, right?

3:31 - Cullari & Wardell

I mean, that makes sense, but it might not make sense, right? Yeah, you want to go in that three mile radius and definitely you can do it drive traffic to websites as well, not just brick and mortar. Oh, tell me little bit more of that. Why the three miles? Because that's basically your foot traffic, your mobile foot traffic study is pretty much your business model, unless you're doing like a pickup and delivery or something like that that could be 15 miles depending on your business. But we have brought I thought the three mile pinpoint because of the ad spend money as well. We want to make the best of that ad spend money and the three mile radius seems to be that pinpoint.

4:16 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Interesting interesting. So that's really good. It's right now Ernesto question for you. How, you know, again, thinking of the retail space here, how do you drive retail growth and conversion with the geofencing?

4:29 - Cullari & Wardell

So the most important part about how to make this work is Barbara and I will conduct a mobile for traffic study and say we own a clothing boutique store and you know through the mobile traffic study we can tell that within the three to five mile radius there these are all the stores that customers who would go to our particular boutique would go to on the way to a shop like ours. So whether our stores new or not, we can conduct studies on nearby businesses to determine where a lookalike audience would be. So once we determine these targets, we're then able to send ads to these virtual fences. So if we know that there are shoppers in another boutique, if we know that there's Mercedes-Benz dealership or four dealership or Range Rover dealership, and we think that's our lookalike customer, we can capture all those devices, we can anonymize all those devices, and we can draw an inference like, hey, people shop for luxury products, they're most likely to come to my store if we also sell luxury products. And then we track the phone after they're anonymized, and we can track them up to the point where they come to our location for which the satellite then sends us a thing like, hey, that's how it's showed up.

5:57 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

It's like the Ring doorbell, right? you know, when Amazon kind of comes to dang it with the wife order again because I know I think they're adorable. There's a notification on my phone. Now I got to ask to take a step back. How the heck like you guys are talking about like satellites, right?

6:12 - Cullari & Wardell

you have an app. Yes.

6:13 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

We have to do like like how do you start a geo fencing business like that? Well, take us to the beginning of the start of like how did you start that?

6:22 - Cullari & Wardell

All right. You want to say good enough though? Because you started first. We have a mutual will you start at first? I'm kidding. We have a mutual friend who had a problem, right?

6:32 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And this is what the mother of all inventions come in every every great entrepreneur starts.

6:37 - Cullari & Wardell

We solve the problem. All about problems. His name's Charles Meezly. He runs a very successful laundromat business. And but this this technology applies to anything where you need people to come to your shop or to your office. So he's like, you know, COVID really has messed up dry cleaning. It's messed up the laundry industry, even though they're considered an essential business. restaurant. Yeah. Small boutiques. But he was like, if you can master this technology, because it's we can really find an agency to do it. And we were already doing marketing and advertising in a traditional sense. He's like, if you can sort this out, if you can determine how to drive in person visits, I'll refer everyone in my industry to you, which you've fulfilled that promise. So I took a deep dive. I did a full year immersion in all the technologies that were out there. I determine, know, so how do you get access to a satellite? That's our little secret. But it's it derived from a problem. And it's really it derived from COVID and another small business entrepreneur coming to us and saying we need you to drive traffic to our doors. And geofencing is the only way to assure that people are actually showing up. It's the only way to see that you have an actual return on ad spend.

8:01 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Sorry, go for it, Barbara.

8:03 - Cullari & Wardell

Because we actually can see where they came from and where they went. And when they come into your store, we already know where they came from. Our reports are set up by details.

8:14 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

It's interesting because I think that's something we've been talking about pretty consistently on this show recently is how the digital world is really about tracking even down to the point where where does your eyeball go when you first open up that phone? What's the first ad you see and having to add place perfectly in that line of vision? Even to the grocery stores, having the shelf lines, having specific items versus the ones on the low and the high ones. And it's so interesting how quickly these things are starting to evolve. Barbara, you, why is location, for small businesses, why is it so valuable?

8:56 - Cullari & Wardell

Because it brings them into your door, right? It's so important that when you're advertising, do you really know what's coming in from that advertising? You really don't. Whether you're on Facebook, Google, Instagram, they're even a walled garden. There is such a bigger web out there that you can advertise on instead of in their little area that they're just making the money, So this is why it's so important because when you walk into that fence, I don't care what you close, there's always something open, right? And we have over 150 apps and web, just the open web to advertise on, right? Because we're in a bidding service. when that app is opened, they're getting an ad if they're walking into that geo fence. So they're looking at it. It's crazy how much we're on our phone, right? That's prime real estate, right? So that's how important it is. You're driving that kind of volume and you can do clicks in all that stuff and we have ton of them. But my main thing is bring them in the door. And if you can bring them in the door, you better be ready to upsell them. Know your customer what they're worth because when you're getting that report now, say 50 customers, 100 customers, depending on how it comes in that month, you should know how to keep them and upsell them. Yes, I expect.

10:31 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Oh, you please?

10:33 - Cullari & Wardell

Well, one thing I was saying is like one of things we've been talking about pretty consistently on the show is the sales funnel, right?

10:39 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

think this product in particular, like what you're talking about, this folks is really important to really begin to think about your sales funnel because what this team, what Barbara and Ernesto helped you do is identify where those individuals are on that level, right? So for example, are they engaging in your brand enough to. click on your ad on the Facebook page, right? Or are they just enough that they actually kind of scroll by a little slower, right? And how much of engagement now? Now Ernesto, you guys were kind of talking about reports, right? These reports that you kind of, let's take me through on the client. We're working with your team. What kind of information should a client expect to receive regarding the data that you're able to kind of provide?

11:25 - Cullari & Wardell

We're able to determine if you get a new visit or if you get a repeat visit. So if you're retail location and this month, we sent you 100 visits. Our reporting breaks it down where it says 75 new visits, 25, sorry, 75 new visitors, unique visitors, and 25 repeat visits for a grand total of 100. Then it breaks it down to what ad creative they saw. So what size the ad was, what the message of that ad was. Then it goes down to what website or what app they're on. as Barbara said, actually on 150,000 different websites and apps, then we're to determine which of your competitors or which other location, physically, they were at when their device was captured. And we're then able to make smarter choices. We're able to, on a weekly basis, go, okay, these locations or these websites or these apps are not delivering high number of ad views, but very low number of visitations. So we then were able to go through, remove what's wasteful and put more resources behind what works.

12:40 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, one thing I love about this, like especially from a small business perspective, right? look at, think of the podcast, take the podcast, for example. I try to identify one who's listening to the podcast, like one of the things about myself, Barbara, and I have to discuss before this was, what are the demographics of the individuals who listening to this podcast, the age, right, the . where they listening from because I wanted to get Barbara and so kind of a general sense of who our audience is. One, two, I'm also looking at who are my converting from those listeners, individuals that could possibly get to my webpage, right? And then when I get into my webpage, can I get and become a patron, which is a great time to plug it for $5 a month, folks. You can join our Patreon page to support the podcast. But again, it's again, going back to that sales funnel, right? It's trying to get the individuals, because again, we're as small business owners and entrepreneurs, you don't have enough time to really just focus and give every single person the concierge You want to, which really do, but we just don't have that time. So it makes more sense to focus on the folks that are really engaged in your product and your brand and provide them that concierge service.

13:48 - Cullari & Wardell

And again, this tool is just going to allow you to help you get to that point. And that point is very important. Location is indicative of someone's buying potential. And so you're only sending ads to people who actually are interested in you. So if you own an Italian restaurant and you want people who really like good cuisine, you would target other Italian restaurants or bakeries or delis or even clothing stores where you know that people with really good taste, really refined taste would be interested in what you have. So location is indicative of true buyers in 10 and true buyers interest. Therefore, we're able to only reach people who are only interested in you and what you have to offer.

14:42 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That's very interesting. Okay, now let's do a little kind of exercise, Barbara. going to pretend I am a brick and mortar business.

14:51 - Cullari & Wardell

Okay, how do I determine my business strengths and weaknesses with the foot traffic data? Well, that's easy. So with the A foot traffic study, we see an hour before and an hour after that they come to your establishment. So we know where they go before and after and that is indicative of their behavior. So those are our targets, right? Because if that one person comes from there, there's more because that's just behaviors, right? And that's how we determine a huge part of what we do from the standpoint of where we're going to advertise. Of course, there's more to that, but that's the basics. Words of a feather stick together, right?

15:38 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I'm telling you, you build it, they will come. If you build it, they will come, but if they don't know about it, nobody's going to come.

15:46 - Cullari & Wardell

Yeah, absolutely. How many business owners will open up a law firm or open up a doctor's office or open up a satellite office? And they look out at the parking lot, they're like, where the heck is everybody? If you don't really, if you don't literally draw your client a map, you can't expect them to show up. America is, you know, the greatest country on earth with the greatest road infrastructure on earth. So there's a road to everywhere, right? But if you don't draw them a map, then it doesn't matter that you put a shingle on the door. You really have to lead the right person to your door. And with what happened with, you know, COVID, we feel very strongly like, you know, we're not, none of us are made of money. The value of a dollar must go further and further in an inflationary world and a post COVID world. And, you know, we're fully capable. We've done TV commercials for the soup, Nazi, from Sival, tons of makeup, you know, photoshoots. we were like, you know what, this may not be glamorous, but it's going to put food on the table of hardworking Americans. Absolutely. This we got this is like why we do what we do. Not only is that important, make sure you have a marketing budget. It's so important. All these businesses that are starting up, that they don't even put that money aside for marketing. And that's part of it, build it and they come. It's not really how it happens anymore.

17:14 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, no, I agree. It depends on kind of like, for example, your brand, right? If your branding is part of your marketing and having those brand guidelines are important. So people kind of know exactly what you're trying to do. In fact, you know, in to ask you, you mentioned you guys work with a lot of clients and you had a lot of experience. Give me some of, what are some prime examples that you've seen, you know, business makers or entrepreneurs consistently make in the past when you're thinking about branding and marketing to their consumers? are some of the mistakes that you've seen pop up in your experience?

17:47 - Cullari & Wardell

I think Barbara's point of not planning on, you know, you build a great brand, put, you know, a million, two million dollars into, you know, beautifying this restaurant or this. boutique, you run sewer lines and all, know, everything you put into it. But then, as Barbara said, you didn't plan for advertising. then when you speak to an agency, you're like, you know, you skimp on the advertising. And that is a business. mean, Barbara, part of our culture of our company is we go out to retail locations. know, we spend money in businesses and our wherever we are traveling in our local area, we happen to be the Jersey Shore. And there's a lot of restaurants we have gone to and were like, they didn't plan on any advertising. know, they bring in chefs from Italy, which was a recent experience of ours. Yes, that was that was sad. It was a beautiful, they did a beautiful job on the restaurant. Oh my gosh, it was absolutely gorgeous. It literally, you walked in and it was so comfortable singing in the back cooking. They didn't make it because they didn't put anything. They put everything. thing into the business and nothing into the marketing. Not, you know, and for marketing, that's, that's huge. And also you should do a foot traffic study in the beginning when, because that's how you're going to know. That's how you're going to know how many people that you should be getting. That would help you with your marketing, because now you know how many people you have to hit that, you know, you have to put that money towards that for marketing. Otherwise, you're not going to even hit the people that are around you just because they're in the parking lot. Doesn't mean they're walking into your store. And you're in the Pacific Northwest. So the geography in the country in the Pacific Northwest is very different than what it is on the, on most of the East Coast. So for example, you have giant differences in elevation. You have bodies, beautiful bodies of water that innervate, you know, the land. So you often do need to drive a map, you know, draw map for your clients and or your customers and doing that. So say you want to open up a new location, right, and the geographical challenges that you would have in the Pacific Northwest. If you want to open up location, you can look at and it's virgin Earth, you know, on untapped retail space. You can look at the gas station across the street. You can look at the gas station a mile down the road and get a snapshot of what that business is doing. That's been around for a while. And then you can make an educated decision like, hey, if they're drawing business and I'm a quarter mile, half mile, mile down the road, same side of the road or across the street, you can make certain inferences. And judgments based on on raw on the good data. So, you know, a lot of businesses don't plan for the most important part. Even Jesus had 12 disciples. I mean, you know, know, was enough that God gave us a miracle. But he, you know, he had 12 messengers. And without those messengers, it's not quite as robust. So you need messengers out there. A good agency is important, good branding, as you were talking about before. geofencing, we believe, is a giant future of how to help small businesses and large and small, but really small business owners need something like this. It's an advantage over, as Barbara was saying, competing in those walled gardens, where Facebook owns the territory, you don't own that relationship. Google owns the territory and owns that relationship. Amazon owns it. But in geofencing, you can bring them to your door, and then it's up to you to give them that customer experience. It's up to you to get their contact information, so you can keep that relationship. is very important. No, no, it's okay, and keep that relationship going.

21:49 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Exactly. I agree, and I think information is very important as Barbara's point now. fact, Barbara, you guys were kind of mentioning how you guys grew this business and getting out and meeting with your customers. customers. You know, Joe Fencing is one thing, but how important has networking been as well for your team?

22:08 - Cullari & Wardell

Sorry. Um, you know, we did old school Ernesto and I, we literally went out in the beginning and started knocking on doors. Believe it or not, we did. We went down the Jersey Shirk, it's around the Jersey Shore. He's a little north of me and we actually went south and we went into businesses and tried to explain to them what we did. And we got, um, we actually got customers. It was great. You know, it was. But reach. Yeah, with national reach and it was, you know, we still, you know, do all the technical stuff for ourselves, but I still love the one on one, the going in the, it's a feel of that. It's a human touch to it of marketing, even some flyers we did and we just dropped them off and then we're. One day we got a call from it. We still talked to them, but the one that was great was we walked in. We kind of it was funny because he kind of said, I don't know about this. And we were talking to Nesto and then I ended up talking to him and we he was like, all right, maybe maybe this might be good for my business because he had a couple locations around New Jersey and we convinced him to try us. And then he actually did. And he was like, oh my God, each one of his locations, it just the business started exploding and he was like, wow, this really works. So now so he was like, well, what can we do for this national thing? So yeah, so it all starts at the bottom. You know, you grow that you grow that base, but if you grow it smartly and strong. You can compound that and it stays.

23:52 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah. Yeah. Nobody at the end of the day that the base is usually the one that helps the most weight, right? that thing is kind of the longest. once. to kind of get the foundation, everything's a little bit easier after that. Now, Ernesto, starting with you, what's one thing that you say that you're really glad you kind of learned throughout this process that you went through because it helped you become a better success entrepreneur?

24:14 - Cullari & Wardell

I think I'm not, you know, I know it's a week from Bountains, but Barbara, since Margaret, I would say is the most critical because not all, there's no way that a company our size that one with our reach can, there's no way I could do it by myself. And I understand, know, people warn me, hey, before you go into business with anyone, you know, before you accept money or from, you know, an investment bank, you do, you know, pause because you're generally not going to be happy, you know, with a partner or if you partner with an investment bank or group. And, but I do want to say the biggest contribution to our society. Success is finding a partner like Barbara who works with integrity loves the clients as much as I do who Maybe little more Barbara's definitely the nicer of the two like, you know, we're on the Jersey shore So I'm more like I think of like a mafia mentality of I don't like someone like I'm roughed up Barbara's like we'll get more with um, you know sugar than with vinegar or whatever So, you know, but someone with integrity really helps Um, and you know, I think a lot of small business owners can relate to the to the same exact thing if I want to grow What's the wisest way to do it? I know what my weaknesses were and we happened to have been friends and I knew what her character was and I knew what her strengths were Boy, he was wrong And I and I think that's that's our other than having You know a brand algorithm And technologies it's really picking the right people to work with him and I'm very blessed Barbara was the right partner For us for our company and for me and we built it with using family members We are truly a family company is truly it's Kalarian word Yeah, and her son is a chief technologist of our company and you know My brother is one of the other technologist master programmer and my other brother There's a junior programmer and her other sons a master programmer and technologist. We just have technology all over Outnumber that I'm the only female I heard a lot of brothers and sons That's all right. I stand my own we're good I love it and you know Barbara same question you what's something that you've gone through throughout this process that you felt You're glad that you've gone through this because it has helped you become more successful entrepreneur. I think Patients as well with new technology sometimes you're working with it and it's not working the way it should work because we had that in the beginning because when you're relying on technology there's things that are out of your control that you can't fix because you're not getting that data that you're supposed to fix and in the beginning we had a little bumps we went with with platform and it's frustrating because you know it's supposed to work and it's not doing what it should and the thing that I can tell you the most that I think I learned the most is always be ready to learn more to look at technology and don't be afraid of the technology it's so important because we're not going backwards though I do still want to have that human touch I do love hogs but you got to embrace it but balance it so that way we can go forward and use it to our advantage but not overuse it where we're missing that personal touch. I would say that.

28:04 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, no, and I agree. think, you know, having that still let human interaction with folks is very going to be very important. In fact, speaking of human interactions for the folks listening, how can they contact you if they're interested in learning more about your guys team, maybe want to become clients of yours? How do they find out more about your team?

28:22 - Cullari & Wardell

They can visit us at collarymedia.com that see as in Charlie, u l l a r i media.com. They can see all the various verticals we've worked with and all the brands big and small we've worked with. And we have plenty explainer videos on there to detail the science and the technology and the techniques. And yeah, so we're here for you. Yeah, we love to talk to you. And just explain what we do. And if we can help, we're always here.

28:55 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Perfect. And again, folks, if you forget any of that information, this is a great time. the shamelessly plug the shades of entrepreneurship newsletter, which you can subscribe to at the shades of e.com will have all the information for their team. Again, their contact information, their websites, will also have them on our social.

29:15 - Cullari & Wardell

So please feel free to follow our social media accounts as well. Before we go, is there any last words you would like to let the listeners know? I would say that we feel your pain after COVID. We understand inflationary pressures and to take out a loan nowadays, the debt interest rates are really high. we understand that. we believe wholeheartedly, which is why we focus on geofencing, that geofencing will give you a great return on your investment. you don't have to spend, you don't have to break the bank to do it. You do it on modest, very modest ad budgets, but your return on investment will be very high. Our average cost per visit is $5 a visit all across the country. It's awesome.

30:01 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

It's great. No, that's great. Especially if that $5 turns into acquisitions and transactions. mean, that's the goal.

30:09 - Cullari & Wardell

mean, it's amazing. Barbara, was there anything you'd like to say before leave? I think overall, I think that if you do marketing, really look into the marketing company that you are going to use and get some knowledge before you have that conversation so that you have an intelligent conversation with them. I think it's important because some people just come in and say, okay, you know, just do it. But then when they get the reports, they don't know how to read them. I mean, we take the time. We always show them how. But I just think that's important that you put that effort into your marketing so you understand it. So when you get those results, you know, it's coming from. That's very important that you're not spending in every direction and not knowing where it's coming from.

31:01 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And I mean, it's so true. And thank you again. I feel like this whole conversation is really useful for those listening because again, it's really starting to kind of start to drill down on who your true target audiences and target market is. I think a lot of the times as entrepreneurs we tend to run our heads against the wall because we do the shotgun strategy approach, right? visit every single location, visit every single person and see what made the biggest impact and that burns everybody out.

31:28 - Cullari & Wardell

Right. And so this is just a great way to kind of streamline your outreach, so to speak, be a little bit more strategic in that sense.

31:38 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Again, this is really going to help you narrow down your focus and help you build your target audience. And again, focus on that sales funnel, right? How to get from the awareness to a loyal consumer. Barbara Ernesto, thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it. think this is a really good conversation. I'm very interested in the geofencing myself. I have to dig into it little bit more. Again, I'm more of the podcaster right now, not selling a product. But I think once we get into that product realm, I think it's, I think it's going to be very important to kind of get in there. Again, folks, cool. How do you pronounce your business again?

32:13 - Cullari & Wardell

Clary, Larry media with a C C U L L A R I media.

32:19 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Perfect.

32:19 - Cullari & Wardell

It's Clary and more down.

32:21 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And again, this information will be on the shades of entrepreneurship newsletter.

32:25 - Cullari & Wardell

So please subscribe. Thank you and have a great night. You too. Bye.