Branding with Heart, Generating Milions After Cancer & Giving Back with Logo.com CEO Richard Lau on Episode #0267

Richard Lau [0:00]
Hi it’s Richard Lau from Logo.com, and you’re listening to EA Interviews.

Intro [0:04]
EA interviews Episode 267 inspiration, transformation success stories and the imperfect action round seven days a week. Join Mario Fachini for today’s Expert Authority Effect Interview.

Mario Fachini [0:19]
Have you ever thought about your business? Sure you have. I know I have. Have you ever thought about what it represents? What does it mean? Have you ever taken into consideration your logo? I have just a time or two you may have noticed. And that’s why I’m excited to have Richard Lau, founder of logo.com. On today’s episode, we’re gonna dive into why branding and your logo is important and what it means I’m going to bring them up right after we thank our sponsor.

Sponsor – Free Business Book Publishing Course [0:50]
Every business needs a book, including yours, visit freebusinessbookpublishingcourse.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that’s freebusinessbookpublishingcourse.com.

Mario Fachini [1:05]
Here he is. Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Lau. Richard, how are you feeling today?

Richard Lau [1:09]
Excellent. Mario, thanks for having me on the show. I’m glad to be here.

Mario Fachini [1:12]
Oh, it’s it. I’m excited. You’re here. Because what you have to say is so important. And what would you say to someone who goes, well, I just made a logo or just threw something up or they don’t really see the importance of it. Why would you say the logo is so important?

Richard Lau [1:31]
Gosh, you know, your logo, you have a microsecond to just transfer the feeling who your potential customer. So you’ve got to send through professionalism, ethics, integrity, goodwill, you need to translate that and memorability right and clear communication of what your name is. So I see logos that have been thrown up together, and logos that have been over designed. And so there’s definitely two ends of the spectrum. And the antigen in logo design is, when you can’t take anything else away, then you’re done, like people tend to… I see a lot of people over designing, but we can get that into that later in the interview.

Mario Fachini [2:28]
I would love to get more into that. And it’s interesting, you use the same phrase theology, terminology, I don’t know which one’s the correct word doesn’t really matter. But you said, I’ve seen people just throw their logo up there. And it’s interesting, because I’ve seen a lot of logos that look like they’re just thrown up there. And…

Richard Lau [2:49]
Yeah, I mean…

Mario Fachini [2:50]
Sometimes vanishing to me, because they’re saying, Look at me, I’m professional, I want to charge this premium price, I want to do this, but it’s like this inconsistency in congruence, whatever. And I want to know why you think that they’re over designed.

Richard Lau [3:10]
So you know, when as humans we’re surrounded by logos and media constantly in our current culture and you’re seeing whether it’s a dozen logos, if you’re staying home, you’re probably seeing dozens of logos to hundreds to 1000s of logos, like if you go to a sports event, you’re just bombarded with all kinds of different logos. And you as humans, we have this blink,there’s that blink book, but you have this instantaneous reaction to either a brand name, a logo, a situation, a piece of art, when you’re looking at something, you know, you like it, but you don’t necessarily know why you like it, or why you don’t like it or you it translate something, transfers something or a feeling to you, but you’re not exactly sure what that is or why that is now at logo.com we’ve analyzed millions of logos, because we’re trying to compartmentalize and put into an algorithm, human creativity. And my goodness, it’s been a multi year process. So what we’re doing is we’re looking at all these, these logos and what do they transfer what is behind each one of those. And what we’ve found is what you would think is the exact opposite. When you are looking at the logo for Samsung. It’s very, very simple. It’s beautifully simple. You know, you’re looking at the ones for Rolex. It’s a very simple crown and a beautiful word by itself. You look at Canon, why is there not a camera in their logo? There is no camera in their logo, there’s no icon just you. And if you stopped someone on the street, you said, can you describe to me the Canon logo 9 times out of 10, they’re going to say that there’s a camera in there, there is no camera in there. Now, if you then continue, you’re out on the street, you’re walking down Main Street of your town, and you see your friendly neighborhood plumber, chances are, he’s either thrown something up there, and it’s just the letters that he found at Home Depot that he’s stuck literally onto the size of his van, or he’s gotten a friend to do it. And they’ve spent a long time trying to include a wrench, a toilet, an eagle, the state flag, a picture of himself, a guy running to show that it’s fast. And you’ve got all of these elements that they’re trying to put in there, because they’re like, oh, I need to communicate all of these things. And at the end of the day, it looks like a cartoon versus you look at someone like A1 plumbing, right? They’re A1 because they want to be first in the Yellow Pages, right? But look at someone like A1 plumbing and they’ve got a very simple logo. And you’re like, oh, it’s too simple. Well, it’s got black and red, because red denotes emergencies. Black denotes safety and seriousness, and it just says,A1 plumbing and 24 hour on call as their slogan. And you’re like, wow, I could have done that in two minutes. Well, actually they probably put more thought into it than the one that was just thrown up with the toilet, and the wrench and the guy running, they’ve probably put more thought into it. And so when you come to logo.com, and you put in your name and your slogan, and we present to you all of these hundreds of different logo designs, some people are like, oh, it doesn’t have the toilet, it doesn’t have the running man, it doesn’t have a cartoon. It’s like, no, it doesn’t. And that’s by design. That’s the whole point, we can include those, but we don’t, that’s not delivering value to you. Like we have analyzed millions of logos. So what we’re presenting to you is simple for a reason, we could do the cartoons, but we don’t want to just take your money, we want to deliver value, we want to deliver something that is going to be useful for you. So yeah, we have analyzed and really dug deep into why… You’re going to see a logo, right? If we flashed up a logo and said, hey, you know, Mario’s plumbing, and we’ve got a nice cartoon logo, you might think, oh, it’s beautiful. It’s got six colors, I’m gonna buy that I can see why they’re charging.

Mario Fachini [8:06]
What do we have to license this from Nintendo?

Richard Lau [8:10]
Maybe. But the person that’s walking down the street sees that on the side of the van, and they see Mario’s plumbing with six colors, they won’t even be able to put their finger on it. But they’ll think, oh, this is a small business is probably a one man operation. But if you had Mario’s plumbing, simple black and red 24 hour on call, they’d look at that and like, I wonder if that’s a nationwide company or statewide company and it’s just that feeling they have, they don’t know why. But we know why. And so that’s why we can say, people are over designing their logos, thinking that they’re accomplishing something, and they’re accomplishing the exact opposite.

Mario Fachini [8:55]
It’s interesting, I’m hearing a lot of parallels to photography. And I’ve always asked people I go, when you see a bad picture, and they’re like, oh, yeah, all the time I go, do you know why? And they’re like, the two common ones that I say civilians have are too orange or too blue. And that has to do with the light temperature. And when we are getting ready for this member the magic trick? Yeah, that was exactly to adjust those readings. So that way everything’s level and I’m hearing a lot of parallels to the logo design because it’s like you know, when you see a bad logo, but you may not know why. I want to ask you what is the importance of typography in a logo.

Richard Lau [9:39]
Oh my goodness. So when you’re looking at the font pairings or even just this the font of the business name itself. There was a trend to having it being very scripted and looking at some elements of calligraphy or some elements of handwriting. And if you even take a look at Google, their previous logo versus their current logo in terms of just the typography, forgetting about the colors that they’re using just looking at the text, they’re all logos, the G was very stylized. Now, it’s very simple. And it’s just very simple and very clean. And the reason for a much simpler typography, especially just in the business name, eBay is another one that instantly comes to mind the busyness of their typography of the A being higher than the b and the y. And now it’s all straight. And it’s just eBay. You know, before they used to say you’d have three seconds to make an impression, you have a microsecond to make an impression on your customer. And you have a microsecond to transfer your name to the customer. And so if you have a complicated typographic, if you have outlined letters that look like you know, animal, balloon animals, you know, where you’ve got that outline and the puffy letters like Airbnb…

Mario Fachini [11:19]
Oh, but the stroke is so cool.

Richard Lau [11:22]
Airbnb used to have that.

Mario Fachini [11:23]
What about drop shadows?

Richard Lau [11:26]
Oh, yeah. oh, my goodness. So those views? Yeah, that’s rule number one, we’re tossing those up. But yeah, you know, I can go on, Pinterest had a very stylized P. And now their new one is just a straight Pinterest. And it’s because you have a fraction of a second to communicate your name. And so, when people are like, oh, you just sent me a simple, stylized, non stylized wording of my business name. It’s like, yes, that’s the point. We’re trying to keep you from making your own mistakes. So we don’t just have a logo maker editor that you can just pop in and in five minutes destroy a design. Our designs have confines and the reason they have confines is to keep you within the bounds of the research and development that not only logo.com has done, but all of these high end companies have done and so you can come to our blog, you can check out a great piece that we have just released about Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Airbnb, Pinterest but also non tech ones like Burberry, St Laurent, Bertolucci, Balmain, and how they’ve gone from these stylized logos, that they probably spent $150,000, on to these very simple logos that they also have probably spent $150,000 on. And so what we’re doing is we’re taking all of the lessons that they’ve spent their hard earned money on, as well as combining it by analyzing millions of logos, and saying, okay, this is a logo that you’re going to be able to use for the next five years, because it’s going to be with the current trends, and it’s going to serve you well, based on all of the lessons that these guys and ourselves have spent many years and bucket loads of money, researching. So for 20, 50, 100 dollars you can get a package at logo.com and just pick the benefit of all of that research.

Mario Fachini [13:44]
How long would you say a logo should last for you just mentioned, you’ll be able to use this for five years? Do you ever get 10 or 20 out of a logo? Should you be switching them ever so often, to keep it fresh?

Richard Lau [13:55]
It was a very interesting question because you can have a logo, depending on your journey in your business. So if you are a solopreneur and you’ve got a side hustle. And you’re like, you know what I want to go from being an interior design brand that I just give advice to friends to actually having a business, you can get a logo and from logo.com and 20 minutes and have that up and running. Just so that you can get your website up because we want you to know, the first step is to get online. Now that logo may not be your forever logo, you know, let’s say you’ve gotten your website on, you’ve gotten your first couple of customers, you still haven’t printed any business cards right now you’re like okay, now I’m going to get my business card. I’m going to put it on my own. I’m going to put it on the side of my SUV. Well maybe take a pause and be like okay, is this the logo I want? You know, I’m back to logo come spend another 20 minutes, say, Okay, you know what I decided I didn’t like this color I didn’t like this, you know, come in, edit it, you know, redownload it, and then get your place your order for your business cards, look at a comment where your logo is gonna live, right? So you can come back after two years, after six months, after five years come back, you know, your files are here, you then can edit it, you can buy a new one, you can you know, change your your company name, buy a new one, or don’t and just edit what you currently have. But in terms of how long should your logo last, I think your first logo is almost a throwaway logo, it’s like, it’ll last me until after my first two paying customers, right? If you’re doing a design job, and then you can take a reassessment. So then after that, come back, we it’s a no charge for edits, on logo.com. Come back, we edit your logo, and then keep that one, and that one’s going to last you two to five years. And then at that point, you can take a look at the trends, you can take a look at your coloring, you just reassess, it doesn’t mean that you have to change it, just means that you should take a look and reassess.

Mario Fachini [16:19]
What’s the importance of colors? You had mentioned, the red and the black signify this? And I know that every color has a different tone to it.

Richard Lau [16:31]
Absolutely. So yes there’s trendy colors. And so orange and black right now are very trendy. Orange and yellow are very trendy. But if you’re wanting to have something that’s going to last the test of time, then you want to make sure that the colors are going to communicate not just the trend, but also communicate the feeling. And there’s more meaning that we have time for, but I’ll just throw out a couple of them I mentioned, you know, red being for emergencies, but blue transmits trust. And so for me, I’ve had various different businesses, the last resume.com was a blue, low blue and white logo. And if you come to logo.com, you’re going to see it again, it’s a blue and white logo. And you know, we have no slogan.

Mario Fachini [17:26]
I take the right time for this one.

Richard Lau [17:28]
Exactly. That’s blue and white. And again for your logo, we can see it on your mic master, your mic flag, it’s black and yellow, it’s not black, yellow, orange, red, green, and blue, right? Don’t go for a lot of different colors, maximum of three, but preferably just two because you’re trying to communicate very simply, you want it to be able to present well on various different platforms. And so we’re going to provide you a logo in black and white, white and black and your colors. So yeah, different colors have different meanings. And yeah, we could spend all day chatting about that.

Mario Fachini [18:16]
I was just gonna say, I know, we could do a deep dive with all of this. And I was debating about asking you this, I am gonna throw it in there real quick. But you had mentioned the multiple colors on here. And I’d like to think it’s just black and yellow. But there’s some white in the text here. So when you said the multiple platforms, when you’re designing the logo, would you say you should do it rectangular or square nowadays.

Richard Lau [18:43]
That is a really, really tough one to to do address. I prefer square because whether that’s a circle or a square but when you’re trying to have these platforms, we used to be designing logos just for business cards or just to go on the side of a van or to go into my yellow pages ad, that I’m dating myself, I turned 50 last year. So now your business cards are like, fifth down the list. Number one is your website, then your social media, right. So when you’re presenting your logo on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, they’re going to give you either a small square, or they’re gonna give you a small circle. And so your logo needs to fit well into those confines with Facebook, you’re also going to have a nice, horizontal, you know, vertical landscape oriented, cover cover photo that you can upload, and we’re going to provide your logo in a size that fits all of the different social media platforms. But definitely if you can keep your name short, or put your on to two lines, so that if it’s, you know, yeah, Mario’s plumbing, you don’t have to have it as Mario’s plumbing all spread out, you can have Mario’s and then…

Mario Fachini [20:11]
On top of each other, so you can keep it in that square.

Richard Lau [20:13]
Exactly in that square, the circle and then it has so many other options, it’s going to present well, when you putting it on a baseball cap, it’s going to present well, when you’re putting it onto your your T shirt, your polo shirt, your golf shirt, your jacket, that square presents really well. And it makes a really good use of that microsecond that the person when they’re looking at it, they don’t need to move their eyes, their pupils don’t need to scan left to right, they just scan at the center and they can absorb all of the information

Mario Fachini [20:52]
That’s powerful stuff and like I said, I know we could go deeper. You got me thinking about stacking them on top of each other the colors you know the whole should you design it with color black and white. And also keep in mind, if you’re doing the rectangular, it might get truncated if you don’t design it the right way. So you want to have variations and all that good stuff. But I want to know the backstory. How did you start off with the logo and graphic design you mentioned resume.com and I know you have an impressive background. But how did you get into all of this?

Richard Lau [21:25]
Well, you know, as I said, I turned 50 this year so I’ve been a serial entrepreneur since I was 21. And so to date myself, my first business was in beepers buying and selling beepers and I’m in Canada and we launched the first company that actually sold beepers up to that point you had to be 21 had to fill out a rental contract, etc. And we were the first ones to sell beepers, we got them into Costco, and the department stores up here. And we sold 10,000 pages in our first three months. And so from there, I got into technology and got into the debate domain name business and launched one of the first 30 registrar’s that are Go Daddy’s up today. And I launched that had a health scare, where I was diagnosed with colon cancer. And so really, I feel like punching me in the face, and everyone has a plan till you’re punched in the face. I had a three month old, I just moved out of the country. I merged that with a company in California, and kind of reset my life. And so that part of that reset was starting to buy and sell domain names and get into the power of a short brandable domain. And so I did that for 10 years helping other people get these powerful one word domains. And then I saw firsthand what they were doing and the power it added to their businesses. And so I launched a conference in the domain name space called namescon, which is now owned by godaddy. And also took one of the names that we came across, raised some money brought in partners, it was called resume.com. And we knew, okay, look, if you build a resume builder, and you have resume, then if you’re just as good as your competitor, but you have that wind at your back every day of having a few 100 people typing that in and having Google say, oh, you know what, when someone’s typing in resume or resume services or resume templates, you’re going to reward resume.com, because obviously, if they’re in the business, they must be all in. And so we saw that power, and we had a successful exit, we built that up to 10 employees, 4 million users, and that is now part of the indeed.com family, which is the largest job board service in the world. And based out of Austin, Texas, but their parents are a multi billion dollar company based out of Japan called recruit. And so we took the summer off and looked at the domains that we had either available or in our inventory. And we did an analysis of each one thing, what’s the market? What’s our interest? What can we be passionate about and what fits under our heading of being helpful? Right. Our names con conference was about being helpful to the domain community, whether that’s the registrar’s the registries, the end users, the investors, resume was about being helpful to the high school graduates, college students, university students, we wanted them to have a tool that allowed them and enabled them to simply and easily get a better resume that would allow them to get a better job than if we didn’t exist. And so then we looked at that on the different domains that we had access to or owned, and logo.com fit that bill perfectly for us because we’re like, okay, it’s this established evergreen market, everyone’s always going to need logos. It’s a large market. There’s a lot of money being spent. It’s a challenging market in terms of how do you take something that is very, very human oriented, that the way the average small business, medium sized business spends between two and $15,000 designing their logo, and turn that on its head. And we started to see that with some people in the industry, like 99 designs and others, where they were running contests. And it was bringing the price down to under $1,000. But it was still taking upwards of three weeks. And we’re like, if we could compress that down by using the Google philosophy, right, the Google philosophy as you bring in an engineer, first day, you sit them down, you’re like, if you had unlimited power, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited resources, what would you create? And so we had the same thing with logos, if we had all that processing power, if we could spin up 300 web servers when you type in your business name, what would we do with that? What could we do, and we’re like, we could hold all the conversations, having gone through logo designs, as the end user, ourselves, dozens and dozens of times, personally, as well, and then the people in the room hundreds of times, we’re like, we know what these conversations are going to be. So let’s compress those human conversations into algorithms that we put out onto Amazon Web servers, that we spin up and have those spit the results back immediately as if we’re just pulling them out of the drawer. And quite frankly, when we had the idea, we weren’t able to match that up with the software and services at our disposal. So we actually put logo.com on hold for three years, we had the plan, but we’re like the software development kits are not available for us. And the programming and cloud services are not available for what we want to be able to accomplish. So we had to wait for the technology. And then okay, dust off the plan two years ago. And we’re like, okay, we’re ready to dive in. And we spent two years building it. And I’d say three years prior to that waiting on our hands until we felt that we were…

Mario Fachini [27:40]
What year did you officially launch it?

Richard Lau [27:43]
We officially launched it in the fall of 2019. Okay, so it’s been under two years. But even then, when I say we launched it is that we took our website public, so there was no press release, there was no grand launch, there was no party. Because I also believe in, if you’re not embarrassed by your code, you’re not launching fast enough. And so we’re always iterating. And so because we had logo.com, we had people just naturally going into their web browser and typing in logo.com. Because they figure, there’s got to be someone that knows about logos and logo.com. Same thing with resume.com, we would have 1000s of people every day, just type in resume.com. Because they’re hoping to find a website that does what it says on the label. And sure enough, we would be able to have customers just come in by sheer typing in logo.com, and we could watch what obstacles they were having , we could interact with them, we could learn from them in terms of what they were happy with, what they were not happy with. And so, you know, we launched in 2019. But really, we didn’t launch until I would say this time last year. Where you know, was when we started to, to go on podcasts to spread the word, invite people to the website, instead of just have people stumble into the website.

Mario Fachini [29:17]
Yeah, I love when I’m doing guest interviews, and I’m on other people’s shows. And they’re like, when did you start the company? And I’m like, which time? I mean, it’s like, when did I have the idea? When did they implement it? When was it officially registered? When? I mean, at what point it’s like, it’s always ongoing. I’ve been, you know, I’m still launching it. Yeah. So thank you for that. I want to ask you, and you gave me this idea. This was real early on, we’re gonna do the Wheel of Whatever and then thank our sponsor, and I hope you say yes to this. So this is always a fun question. And I was gonna ask you, and it wasn’t a good one. There we go. Well, there’s no motor on here, it’s just me holding it. Okay, that’s gonna keep going. So my question for you is, when we were talking about the logos, and you’re like, heah, it looks like it was drawn with a crayon and you don’t want to mix black, white, yellow beige, like the whole Crayola 64 box of whatever is in there. Would you be willing to do something like Google this year? Like maybe April Fool’s day you have the site, like, someone goes in there to actually get a good looking logo and you just have like the most crazy jacked up photos, images, and maybe make it look like it’s drawn with crayon.

Richard Lau [30:42]
It would be a lot of fun, but it would be a tremendous amount of work. In the backend, in terms of your comment about how many times have you started your business? You know, when I look back on resume.com, we rebuilt the system from the ground up three times. On logo, we’re on our second iteration. So you know, no, I’m not willing to do that. But it would be a lot of fun. But we’re also very conscious,

Mario Fachini [31:11]
Sending an email was saying, here’s the top designs from the weekend. You just grab some photos.

Richard Lau [31:18]
Yeah, I…

Mario Fachini [31:19]
When you’re talking about that I’m like, oh, this is too good. Thank you for giving me one early on.

Richard Lau [31:24]
Yeah, I think on April 1, we could definitely do something like that.That would be hilarious. Yeah.

Mario Fachini [31:34]
Okay. You got my wheels spinning now. We have to thank the sponsor, and we’ll be back for the Imperfect Action Round.

Sponsor – Free Business Book Publishing Course [31:44]
You’ve heard me say every business needs a book, including yours. And it’s true. And that’s why you should visit freebusinessbookpublishingcourse.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. But you know what, don’t take my word for it. Take it from a few of my authors like Lorie, “I went from having an idea and the possibility to actually getting my book published.” Or Katherine, “Thank you for making my mom number one bestselling author.” Or Maryalice, “What he got done for me in three days regarding my book launch, unimaginable.” Jon Cody, “I’ve worked with Mario over the phone and online and he’s been very helpful in getting me where I needed to go with promoting my books.” Rosio, “There’s no way in the world I would have been able to do this with somebody else. Again, I’ve attempted it in the past, it didn’t serve me. As a matter of fact, I ended up more frustrated than anything. So this has been a very seamless process.” Adele, “If you’re looking for an amazing business coach, I highly recommend Mario Fachini.” Or Bill Benner, “I can’t make a higher recommendation than to work with Mario Fachini. He has been great for me. And right now, I won’t work with anybody else except for Mario.” Hey, their words, not mine. Visit FreeBusinessBookPublishingCourse.com to get started now and I look forward to hearing your transformation as the next video success story. Once again, that’s FreeBusinessBookPublishingCourse.com.

Mario Fachini [32:32]
And we are back with the Imperfect Action Round. Richard, are you ready to take Imperfect Action?

Richard Lau [33:20]
I’m sure I am.

Mario Fachini [33:22]
Three questions for you. 60 seconds or less answers. First one is what is the fastest path to the cash

Richard Lau [33:28]
The fastest path to the cash is to get online. If you’re not already online, get yourself online. If you’re doing a side hustle, get yourself online. II you’ve got your a you’ve got your ID or your Instagram, you’ve got your Twitter, you maybe you’ve got your Tiktok Get yourself a website so that you can build your brand around your own property.

Mario Fachini [33:50]
Excellent. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way for them to fix it?

Richard Lau [33:57]
And we’ve covered it a lot, but the biggest problem is over designing your logo or asking your buddy to do it for you. You know, don’t do that. Just so you know, the cost is not prohibitive. You know, you can get a logo from us for $20. It’s a you know, it’s a loss leader for us, but you can get yourself a logo for $20 in 20 minutes. You know, stop asking your buddy next door, your friend or your son or your uncle, your aunt to do it. Honestly, I try to put a nice face on but I’ve seen some that I want to just cry when I see it. They’re like, oh, yeah, I got my ad to do it. And it’s got a you know, literally had a dog handbag and a lady in the logo. Nice. It’s terrible. But what do you say, you know, I’m just like, Oh, well…

Mario Fachini [34:41]
You know what this is? This is a somewhat serious idea. It would also give you a big pool to pull from for the April Fool’s joke. But if you did a campaign that said send us your logo, we’ll send you a real one.

Richard Lau [34:54]
Oh, that’s fantastic. Mario. I love that idea. And that’s really what I was doing. I offer them free credit to like, here’s a free logo, please. We didn’t do the design. We just gave them a credit to use on our system. But yeah, I mean, yeah,

Mario Fachini [35:11]
You could get a lot of data from that. Use it for examples, testimonials, a whole lot of sales and marketing.

Richard Lau [35:16]
Yeah, that’s fantastic.

Mario Fachini [35:17]
And track the case studies. Here’s what it was before. Here’s what it did afterwards.

Richard Lau [35:21]
Yeah, we can have a whole campaign before and after. Fantastic.

Mario Fachini [35:27]
Number three, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Richard Lau [35:31]
Customer lifetime value is to do either an upsell within the cash flow, the checkout process. But ideally, is to add and create a subscription. So you know, with logo.com, yes, we can sell you a logo for 20 bucks, but really, the lifetime value for us is that logo.com becomes a home for your logo and all of your logo files forever. And we’re going to charge you a very low annual subscription fee. But that way, you know, three years from now you’re like, where’s my logo? And you’re like, oh, that was three laptops ago or it’s like, no, it’s just safely residing at logo.com. And that’s what we’re doing. And it’s definitely a subscription business recurring income.

Mario Fachini [36:17]
Excellent. What books would you recommend that have made a difference in your life?

Richard Lau [36:21]
You know, I mean, there’s a lot of different books, you know, I’m reading a very simple one easy read called Million Dollar Bedroom by a fellow podcaster. And a serial entrepreneur, very easy read and takes you just through his raw journey. But the most impactful one, I think a lot of people have read, and if they haven’t, they absolutely should. It’s the E myth, or the E myth revisited. Because I see so many people that call themselves an entrepreneur. And really, they’re just self employed. You know, my father was self employed. There’s nothing against that. Some people, they want that lifestyle. But you need to decide, are you self employed? Are you a lifestyle entrepreneur? Or are you an entrepreneur who’s building a business with an exit in mind? And I’m not saying one is better than the other, but both who are thoughtful present in your business, be mindful of what it is you’re building, and what it is you’re building towards? Because so many people think of themselves as an entrepreneur when they’re really self employed. And then they find themselves 10, 15 years later, and they’re like, what happened?

Mario Fachini [37:33]
And yeah, it’s a mindset shift.

Richard Lau [37:34]
Yeah, what happened is you didn’t read the E myth.

Mario Fachini [37:39]
All right. I know we mentioned it a couple of times throughout the interview, but where would you like people to learn more?

Richard Lau [37:46]
You know, it’s simple logo.com. We do what’s on the label. I’m always a believer in building your network. You’re only as powerful as your network. You’ll find me on LinkedIn, Richard Lau, L A U or richard@logo.com. Just easy to find. I’m an open book, hit me up with a connection or with any questions, and I’m happy to help.

Mario Fachini [38:12]
All right, well, Richard, it’s been a pleasure. And I thank you for your time and insights.

Richard Lau [38:17]
Thank you, Mario. appreciate being here.

Mario Fachini [38:21]
Alright, Expert Authority World. We have another great episode here today. I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a great day. God bless.

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www.EAInterviews.com [39:02]
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