IAM894- CEO Helps Businesses Build Meaningful Relationships

Rick Elmore is an entrepreneur, sales and marketing expert, and former college and professional football player. As Founder and CEO of Simply Noted, Rick developed a proprietary technology that puts real pen and ink to paper to scale handwritten communication, helping businesses of all industries stand out from their competition and build meaningful relationships with clients, customers, and employees. Founded in 2018, Simply Noted has grown into a thriving company with clients of various sizes across the country including in hospitality, real estate, insurance, nonprofit, franchise, B2B, and others.

• CEO Hack: Hiring a personal assistant
• CEO Nugget: Persistence, patience, and consistency will always prevail over short-term energy
• CEO Defined: Servant of people

Website: http://www.simplynoted.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/simplynoted/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SimplyNoted1

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Transcription

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00:18 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:43 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Certainly, I've noted down the text “Rick Elmore” of Simply Noted. Rick, it's awesome having you on the show.

00:54 – Rick Elmore

Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

00:56 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely, I'm excited to have you on as well. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Rick so you hear about all these awesome things that he's doing. Rick is an entrepreneur, sales and marketing expert, and former college and professional football player. As founder and CEO of Simply Noted, Rick developed a proprietary technology that puts real pen and ink to paper and scales handwritten communications, helping businesses of all industries stand out from their competition and build meaningful relationships with clients, customers, and employees. Founded in 2018, Simply Noted has grown into a thriving company with clients of various sizes across the country, including hospitality, Real Estate, Insurance, Nonprofit, Franchise, B2B, and many others. Rick, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:37 – Rick Elmore

Yeah, I'm excited, let's go.

01:39 – Gresham Harkless

Let's do it. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more about how you got started. Could you take us through what I call your CO story and we'll let you get started with the business?

01:47 – Rick Elmore

Absolutely. So my journey, I have a twin brother we started, we grew up in California and we got football scholarships to play at the University of Arizona. Growing up, in a middle-class family, both were really small business owners. My mom owned a medical billing practice and my stepdad was a contractor, but I kind of always just wanted to get into entrepreneurship at some point in my life. But after college in 2010, I was lucky enough to play in the NFL for 3 years. I was drafted in 2011. And then when I got done, just like many athletes, their life has been structured for so long I didn't know what I wanted to do so I just looked around and saw what other people did and that went through a similar transition that I did when they got done.

And a lot of people that were similar to me got into medical device sales because it was competitive and it kind of still fed that competitive spirit that we still had in us. So, I was doing it for about 5 years. I knew I wanted to do something else. So I went back and did my MBA in 2017. I still have a couple of semesters left but left because of what I'm doing now. However, I had a marketing professor go over some marketing rates in a lecture one class period. And when they ended the lecture after going through all these nominal success rates and marketing through email and direct mail and cold calling and all these things, everything was just so small. And they ended the lecture kind of half-heartedly joking, saying handwritten notes had a 99% open rate.

And I was just, I was like, yeah, there's no big deal. I mean, that's a no-brainer, but who has the time to sit down and do it? And I mean, Nobody these days even knows how to sit down and pull together an envelope and a stamp and a card and put your thoughts down on paper. It's actually a laborious thing to do. And you mess up and there's just so many things about it. But yeah, you know, long story short, I worked with a cohort classmate of mine. Found technology for all over the world, South America, the US, and China, blew stuff together, brought it here, worked with mail houses locally, and developed a robotic writing technology that holds a real pen and puts your words down on paper to scale easily. So yeah, that's, I guess, the quick 2-minute overview.

04:08 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Absolutely love that. And especially, I remember every time I got a gift when I was a kid, My mom forced me to write a handwritten note to everybody who gave me a kid and it made a really, you know, big impression on the people that got it but also taught me how important it is to kind of give thanks for what you have and I think you have been able to take something laborious that takes a lot of time and been able to kind of scale that out and create a solution for something that a lot of us want to do, but may not have had a way before you to be able to make that happen.

04:39 – Rick Elmore

Yeah, no. And that's the thing we all want to do, but we live in 2020, it's a digital era. We all have cell phones. I mean, I can't my phone goes off every 90 seconds with an email or a text message or a Facebook update or something, right? It's just impossible to find the time to do it. And I know people want to do it. And that's really why we're here. We want to help companies, we want to help people, you know, bring that personal level of communication back into the world, you know, what is old is new again. I mean, everything comes back around. And I really think that handwritten notes are something that really can be used, not just only in business, but also in people's daily lives.

05:23 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And definitely, you made it so much easier for people to be able to do that. So I know you touched a little bit upon what Simply Noted is. Could you drill down a little bit deeper and take us through the process and how exactly it works?

05:35 – Rick Elmore

Yeah, so, no, we kind of a software company, kind of a robotics company, an e-commerce company, but really the heart of what we do is wanna make it efficient for companies to automate sending thank you cards or birthday cards or holiday cards. And how we do that right now is through software applications such as Zapier or Integromat. Or with our robust RESTful API, companies can take our API and use our API in any way that they want to send handwritten notes.

And APIs can kind of get a little brain-numbing for some folks, but essentially it's just our service broken down into a code for other software to use it how they want to use it. So that's how we are scaling our business through software and the software sends in orders and then our robots fulfill them. So that's the deeper part of what we do.

06:33 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, absolutely. So people can have the existing software that they might use and be able to connect that API and still get that win-win opportunity.

06:40 – Rick Elmore

Yep, absolutely.

06:41 -Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So what would you consider, and this could be for yourself personally or your business to be your secret sauce? I think you feel kind of set your part and makes you unique.

06:50 – Rick Elmore

I mean, on a personal level, I think my drive for anything that I do is it's relentless and it's pretty daunting how hard I work and how passionate I am about what I'm doing. When people see how, you know, the amount of time I put into this, or the energy, or, you know, just what I've done to build, I've simply noted over the last 2 and a half years, it's pretty, it's pretty, yeah, I would say exhausting. But yeah, I'd say personally, it's my drive. It's something that I can control my attitude and effort. But like on a business or software side, something that's really helped me be successful is understanding what technologies are out there.

With my sales background, we weren't taught that, and we were just taught to go out there and talk to people and build relationships, which is a very important part of business. You need to have the ability to build and maintain relationships. But since becoming an entrepreneur, there's software out there that makes life easy. And you know, software like Zapier or Integromat, you really can integrate those types of platforms into your guys' sales processes and make things a little bit more automated so you can scale your outreach or scale your follow-up or scale your prospecting. So I would say understanding what tools are available to you, and then really diving deep into them and understanding how to use them.

08:08 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's huge. And I was going to actually ask you because I heard you mentioned, you know, having the routine, you know, as a, as a, you know, college and professional athlete, if you felt like that kind of led into our fed, that competitive spirit that you had, as far as like having that realness for being able to build and grow this and to learn all that technology and skills that you need to help the clients.

08:30 – Rick Elmore

It absolutely does. I would say when I played football there, there was a, I loved working out and competing, but what I mean, something that lit my heart and my soul on fire was pass rushing and getting into a quarterback and getting a sack. And I played outside linebacker and I really loved it. It, I mean, it's hard to put into words, but everybody has that one thing. And when I was an athlete, that was it. When I put my hand down in the dirt, it was me versus that guy. And he either beat me that rep or I beat him that rep and I hated losing. And since becoming an entrepreneur, I was kind of figuring it out for 5 or 6 years when I was in sales.

But since I figured this out, I have that same passion and that same fire. My heart is on fire. My passion is relentless. I love what I'm doing and I believe in the purpose of what we're doing. And when you have that behind what you're doing, it makes it really easy to go and work 12, 14, 15 hour days and do it 7 days a week because I love it. I literally dream about what I'm doing. We're so involved with developers and engineers and what we're doing, like I'll wake up at 2 and like have to go write down thoughts because like I'm literally that invested in what I'm doing and I just love it.

You know, this, we started tinkering around in 2017, but I'll be in the office or a warehouse at midnight and just staring at the machines. I'm just, I have no software background, no robotics background. If I can do this, anybody can do this. And it's pretty awesome.

09:55 – Gresham Harkless

I appreciate that. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple Book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:06 – Rick Elmore

Something I've really started leveraging recently, there's like personal assistance and like platforms like, you know, people by the hour or, or fiber and offloading a lot of that busy work because early on, you know, we still are early on like stage company. We're only 2 years in and you have to be aware of where your finances are going and you have to be able to manage the people that you work with. So having platforms like, yeah, I would say 5 or, or, people by the hour are people by ours.

10:39 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. And so now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you happened to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

10:49 – Rick Elmore

So when I first started, this company, my business partners, just some of them known me since I was 8 years old. So my business partner came out from California to help me start this. So I've had a lot of support. I remember promising how I was like, give me 100 days, like give me 100 days and this company will be completely different than what it is today. And I guess the little nugget I'd like to share is that most people overestimate what they can do in 100 days or 6 months versus, underestimating what they can do in 2 or 3 years. And that is the truth.

So anybody who's listening to this, persistence and consistency will always prevail over that short-term burst of energy. And I'm just passing last month, 2 years full-time doing this. And we are just like starting to get over some really big like mountains and big hunks and. My gosh, it's for me patience is something I've had to learn to do, especially in entrepreneurship because you have to coordinate with so many people and 1 thing breaks, you have to get this guy involved. And it's just, it's hard.

It is really hard. So I guess the nugget I would share is patience and don't overestimate what you can do in a hundred days, but you know, or whatever. Yeah, don't underestimate what you can do, but estimate what you can do in like 2 years. Yeah. So, yeah, that's something I would definitely want to go back and tell myself for sure. And anybody who's thinking about starting this journey.

12:08 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely appreciate those nuggets. And so now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping our different quote-unquote CEOs are on the show. So Rick, what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:20 – Rick Elmore

One thing I've learned recently because our team has grown is as a CEO, you think that you're gonna run your own business and you're gonna be your own boss, but really as a CEO, you just become a servant of people. You become somebody that is constantly, you know, thinking about your employees or your clients and you're really just working for them. And that was one thing I thought when I was leaving the corporate world is like the man I'm going to get away from this I'm going to be doing my own thing like I'm going to be able to call the shots But the further you get into it if you want to build the right type of business and build the right type of camaraderie or the right culture, the mindset is your people first in your clients.

And you really know you're putting yourself on the back burner. And you really do become like, what I need is last, right? So, yeah, I would definitely go back and tell myself or anybody who's doing this for the first time, if you're doing this because you think you're gonna be able to call shots and you don't have to deal with headaches and you can just fire people and it's easy. Like, no, like, no, run the other way, stick to what you're doing because this isn't for you because becoming a business owner, you even, you have to work even harder for your people and you have to work even harder for your customers because if you don't, your people will leave and then you won't be able to make your product or push out your product or sell it or you'll lose your customers. You won't have the money coming in. So you're going to become a servant of people, that's for sure.

13:41 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And that raft definitely will flip over if that is your mindset. And Simon Sinek has his book, you know, I think it's Simon Sinek, A Year's Leap Lasts, and that hits home with the servant leadership that you talked about is that so many times you realize that you're giving of yourself to so many different aspects of what it is that you do and that's how you know you're able to be successful. So Rick, truly appreciate that definition. And I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know and of course how best they can get hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

14:14 – Rick Elmore

Yeah, I'll just add these 4 words that meant a lot to me in college. It was passion, desire, perseverance, and strength. If you can find those 4 things and hold on to those 4 things, no matter what you're going through, you can get through it. In college, it was really hard. I played for 4 coaches in 4 different years, in 4 years. I had to earn my starting spot every single year. And you know some days when you're doing those 12, 14, 16 hour days and you're getting beat up mentally and physically on the field like you know a lot of people quit. I came in with 32 guys my freshman year, I think we graduated with like 12 or 13 of them.

And you get those thoughts about quitting, you know, if it's a sport or in life, you just got to remind yourself, find the passion for what you did in that for me it was a past rush desire for me I wanted to go to the NFL desire for somebody else you may want to get a promotion or you may want to go start your own business perseverance is just with anything right it's you know you got to push through no matter what you're going to have obstacles you know big waves you're going to have to go through in that little thingy by yourself, and then strength.

That's something I've always held myself accountable to being mentally strong, and physically strong because if I can do that, those other things I felt like I can do mentally pretty easily. So yeah, let's say passion, desire, perseverance, and strength, find those 4 things in your life. And I feel like those words can guide you. And then, yeah, I mean, if you guys want to check out Simply Noted, it's just simplynoted.com. We're releasing tons of updates. I'm all over LinkedIn. I do a pretty decent job on LinkedIn trying to engage with people who reach out to us. But yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. This was fun.

15:56 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely. I appreciate it as well too. We will have the links and information in the show notes and I definitely appreciate you for reminding us of those 4 words and how important they are. I think through the ups and downs of business and the roller coaster ride, we wanna make sure that we have those 4 questions, and answers, and they become our North Star. So definitely appreciate that again, Rick, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:17 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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