60: Obsess About the Customer with Brian Burke

15
Aug

Brian Burke is the founder and chief “Mac Man” at SellYourMac.com, the world’s most trusted and highest-rated Apple trade-in company. We talk about the booming market for second-hand Apple products, the benefits of exceptional customer service, and LinkedIn profile optimization strategies. 

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Obsess About the Customer with Brian Burke

Our guest is Brian Burke, the founder and chief Mac man of sellyourmac.com, the fastest growing company committed to reusing, repurposing and recycling used Apple products. Welcome to the show, Brian.

Well, thanks for having me on, Steve. Excited to be here and chat with your audience. Hopefully you can share some good nuggets information to help them on their entrepreneur journey.

Well, that’s the idea here. That’s the idea. And you have such a special business and I like the energy that you are projecting through your marketing and your persona. So we’ll talk all about it. But let’s start with kind of the standard question that I always ask because I’m curious about entrepreneurs and how they how they make it in the world. How did you end up owning a business, you know, buying and selling and repurposing and improving secondhand Apple products?

Well, I say I started pretty young on my entrepreneurial journey. I was buying and selling stuff on the sidewalk by age 10. I was making products to sell. And then I started doing stock trading at 13 and trading car parts in high school. But the reason I actually started buying and selling Macs was during college, I saw that a lot of my friends were too lazy to sell their technology, so I wanted to have an outlet to help them out, so I was buying and selling their stuff on eBay for them.

And that turned into a really nice side hustle. And then after college, I didn’t get the finance job I wanted in New York City. So I came home and started doing more eBay. And I was flipping a lot of phones at the time and making good money doing it, working for myself. So I decided to turn into a real business. So, you know, I started hiring employees and growing it organically. So it kind of happened from my knack of wanting to help people out and also just seeing that opening, that I didn’t have a job. So, it kind of forced me into it.

That’s awesome. Well, you know, some of us are unemployable to begin with, so might as well start the business as soon as you can, right?

That’s funny. Haven’t worked very many places.

That’s right. So, you know, it’s a really interesting business to me. When I first saw your LinkedIn page, I wasn’t sure what to think about it. And then I read a little bit deeper and I don’t know, I somehow felt like it cannot really be a real business to do this kind of stuff. I didn’t think of technology as something that had such a second lease on life. So what does this market look like in terms of market size and who are the players?

Pretty massive market these days. I would say in the last 15 years, becoming a lot more prevalent as people are spending more money on technology so they can get more money back for it. And even companies as big as Apple are offering buyback services. So whether you’re at, you know, Apple or Best Buy or Verizon, you can trade in your phone in any of these places. So really, all size players are in this market. There’s a lot of competition. And there’s even a lot of just individual people doing it, you know, on Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. So competing at all angles. So, we’re always trying to be the best and most customer centric, and that’s allowed us to continue to grow over time.

And then, I mean, like are you an omnivore in terms of buying all kinds of Apple productor certain products have a secondary market and others not really? What does that look like?

Pretty much everything has a secondary market. It does have to have an Apple logo on it. We’re only buying some Apple, Apple devices. The only Apple product we’re not actively buying right now are AirPods, because we don’t want to clean them for the next user. We think people should just buy their AirPods now.

Well, most people don’t get to sell their AirPods. They get to use it. They get to lose it before they can sell it.

That’s true. A lot of people lose them, but they are going to come out with new AirPods next month, so I’m sure a lot of people want to sell their old ones or just have a secondary pair. I have a lot of pairs of AirPods, I don’t know about you.

I’m on my second pair.

I practically collect them, I have four pairs.

Good for you, well, you have the in this market, so it’s probably easier for you to build up the inventory. But I’d like to ask you about this concept of management blueprints. So this is kind of my obsession, management blueprints, frameworks that business owners discovered, got inspired by, and implementing their business. And I’m looking for these frameworks ideas and want to learn about it. And the audience would like to learn about it as well. So what have you applied, if anything, any systems or any concepts from a book that inspired you. Can you tell me about that?

Sure. You know, I’ve read a lot of these different frameworks from scaling up to traction, and I don’t have any of those actively employed, but I do love some of the ideas. You know, especially like in traction, you know, you pick a few rocks to work on each quarter. And the idea that I use from that is really trying to focus on one bigger project at a time. In the past, when I was trying to do too many things at once, I definitely got scattered and didn’t get anything accomplished.

So trying to focus on different initiatives on our website and stuff like that, kind of more systematically has been helpful. My overall framework has been always just focusing on the customer and wanting to leave them having the best experience. And if someone looks us up online, we’re the number one rated Apple trading company in the world on every single website they would find us. And that has really led to a lot of repeat business, a lot of word of mouth and customer referrals, and not having those negative reviews out there helps us win more business. So really it’s a spiral effect.

And there’s so many horror stories when it comes to anyone trading electronics about being scammed or not paying the same amount of money or everything like that. So we try to be as upfront and honest with the customer as we possibly can. If there’s anything that goes wrong in the process, we share very detailed things with the customer about what happened and trying to be transparent around why the price changed. Their device was damaged in a way they didn’t represent or something like that. But always being right by the customer has really led to a lot of great customer experiences and a lot of good feedback to continue to grow the business.

In the world of electronics trading, transparency is key. We strive to be upfront and honest, avoiding the horror stories of scams and discrepancies that others may face. Click To Tweet

And what is the, what is the secret to this? Is it about a philosophy that you imbued into the company or is it certain practices or is it both?

Yeah, definitely both. I mean, I always tell our customer service team and everyone else that we’re always focusing on the customer and that anything less than 100% is not good. And, you know, most companies would be fine if they were in 98% of positive rating, but we have to be a hundred percent. And the methods behind that is if there is ever a negative review, which we have had those in the past, we reach out to the customer, we make it right.

So if you felt something was wrong with your device, you might not even tell us. Then we just find something on the internet saying, you know, cellular Mac, you know, sent me a device and it was scratched and they didn’t tell me. All right, well, we’re going to reach out to you and we’re going to say, you know, we’re really sorry your device was scratched. We’d be happy to replace it free of charge. And by doing that, most of the time the customer is going to revise their review and say, Oh my God, they went above and beyond, you know, originally I left them a three star. Now it’s a five plus.

And they’re going to go and tell their friends of how amazing that experience was and how much we helped them out. So it actually turns, turns on, you know, some upset customers into raving fans. So that’s, that’s always been fun. And, you know, a lot of those times it’s might be even me personally reaching out to the customer and telling them how much our team cares and that we want to make it right. So they don’t think we’re just, just reaching out, you know, for a review or something, you know, we truly want to make it right by the customer.

Maintaining a 100% positive rating is not just a goal; it's a necessity. Anything less is not good enough, and we consistently strive for excellence. Click To Tweet

I mean, I had this experience that actually a negative can be turned into a positive. So if everything works fine, the customer basically doesn’t even notice often. If something goes wrong, they have an emotional reaction. And if you can reverse that, then they have another emotional reaction, which is the opposite.

Passive positivity.

Exactly. So this is very powerful. This is very powerful. Now, is this process scalable? So as you grow the company, can you maintain this? I mean, I don’t know if it’s processes or culture or it’s a philosophy, but is this scalable how you do it or you will have to change it so that you can scale it? And what does that sound like?

I do think it’s scalable, but I think most companies as they grow, they kind of lose sight of the customer and they’re maybe more okay doing a burn and churn, but I don’t ever want to have that approach. So, you know, for 10X the company we’re at now, I would still want to have the same amount of customer service people, you know, per customer to be able to maintain those touch points more frequently and to be able to reach back to them independently and make it right. And that’s probably why a lot of larger companies don’t ever try to fix the negative reviews or make people happy, is they just don’t care or have the manpower to do it. So yeah, I definitely will continue to invest in the right amount of team members to make it happen and to make sure it’s still in them the same culture that we better be 100% positive and if not, we’re losing.

Investing in the right team members is crucial. Scaling doesn't mean compromising on customer service; it means maintaining and enhancing the positive culture we've built. Click To Tweet

It’s great to hear that. And indeed, you get this experience that some companies, they feel because they are so big and they are in a monopolistic position or oligopolistic position. I don’t want to call out some mobile phone service companies and stuff like that. But they basically just don’t… They basically squash reviews. I don’t know what they do, but sometimes you’re not able to leave a Yelp review because it’s somehow not available for you to do that.

Oh, interesting.

Or they just ignore it?

They turned it off.

They only send you a review when they feel like they hit it out of the park, then they immediately send you a net promoter score. And it’s just so funny. That’s the only thing that’s funny. So let’s switch gears here a little bit. What I’d like to understand is what is the lifecycle of a Mac or an iPhone? And is it something like cars, you know, where some people always drive a car only the first 50,000 miles and then they sell it and they want to buy a new one. And some people never want to buy a brand new car because it’s going to just lose value and they ride it between 50 and 200.So, what is it?

Run into the ground.

Or into the ground. So is this similar or are there differences?

It’s a little bit of a tricky question to answer because it depends on the user. So if you’re a really big power user and you’re doing video work and a lot of graphic work, you probably do need to get a new Mac every couple years because it’s going to be that much faster for you so you’d be losing time and productivity and money if you didn’t upgrade. For someone that’s just doing emails and occasionally looking at their photos and internet, they can probably get away with a computer that’s seven to 10 years old. It probably does everything they still need.

And then there’s also just some physical limitations from a battery standpoint. You hear people that get really upset that their phones slow down. A lot of it is just that use, that their memory’s been stored and wiped so many times and their battery has been charged a thousand times. Over time, it just degrades the quality of your phone and it won’t work as well. So there is that kind of physical limitation. And a lot of times it’s around that thousand charges for laptops and for phones, that batteries aren’t meant to be charged more than that.

So if you charge your phone once a day, I mean, that’s three years, which seems like a pretty reasonable amount of time to use a device. If you use it every day for, you know, four to five hours a day or something. But yeah, you can have a Mac that could last, you know, 20 years in theory. I mean, I have people bringing old Macs to our shop all the time that are 20 years old and still working. So it’s pretty crazy how long they can live if you treat them well.

So, what do you do? You put a new battery in or you upgrade the memory?

If you brought me an older device that needed a new battery, I would probably tell you just upgrade the whole thing. From the standpoint, it’ll be that much faster. And I always try to explain to people, you know, if you save an extra few minutes a day, it really adds up to hours. And if you value your time, it’s probably worth spending a little bit more money to get a newer device. And then it’ll work for that much longer as well.

So I mean, I recommend people upgrade every three to four years to kind of stay a little bit current with the technology. They can have an operating system that accepts all the latest updates. You know, once you hit that kind of six, seven year mark, Apple stops supporting all the updates, and it’s not because they don’t want to update it, it’s they physically can’t have the newer features on that older machine. So at some point, they kind of have to hit end of life in terms of a software standpoint too.

Okay, so for whom does it still work? Who are the people who want to buy the second hand, the old iPad and the five-year-old MacBook? Who are the people that it doesn’t matter that it’s still?

I mean, a lot of times it’s a student. If you need to go to high school or college and your goal is to be able to write papers and do research, an older Mac is perfectly fine. It’s going to do everything you need. It might be a tiny bit slower, but that doesn’t really matter. And also, you know, for kids, like, you know, I don’t want my little kid to think she has the best, newest, fastest Mac. We got to start off on something so she understands, you know, how computers work.

You know, back in the day, man, we were actually accessing the internet and it took us, you know, a day to download a movie. Now, now they expect it to happen in four seconds. So I think there’s a pretty wide range of, you know, who these might work for. And even on my personal side, I mean, I actually just upgraded my iMac at my house. It was a 2015 upgraded to a 2017. So it’s, you know, I went from a six year old to a four year old, and that’s all I need to be really productive for that type of work.

That is interesting. Yeah, that’s true. And I told you, I’m of the mind that if I can save any time with it, I’m going to get the newest one because I want to be as productive as possible. My time is the most valuable and it’s well worth paying for a computer. It drives me mad sometimes that my wife who works in a big organization and she works with very big Excel sheets and they would not replace her computer and it slows down and she loses a lot of time and frustration.

The exact same thing for my wife. That’s so funny. She works at a Fortune 500.

It’s a Fortune company. It’s a huge company and they don’t invest in their people, in their equipment. It’s crazy.

It seems so easy to buy them a newer machine that doesn’t cost that much money. It doesn’t make any sense. If you are buying a newer machine, the newer Macs right now are unbelievable. You know, the M1 chip on the MacBook Pro and Air and the iPad Pro is incredibly fast. So if someone’s upgraded to those, they’re gonna be set for a while.

Well, I just bought mine a year ago, so I’m gonna sit tight for a couple more years.

All right, next year, we’re gonna get you.

I’ll call you, I’ll send it to you. So other than customer service, what are the success factors of sellyourmarket.com? What would you say differentiates you from all the other companies?

It’s probably the personal touch is that we’re willing to go the extra mile to help the customer exactly what they need. You know, for someone like yourself, you know, you’re a professional has a lot of data that you wouldn’t want to get out. If you told me, hey, Brian, I need you to remove the hard drive and send it back to me. You know, we’re willing to do that. And not a lot of companies are willing to do anything outside of the kind of standard scope of their work. So we’re happy to take special requests.

You know, we might charge you for the work, but we will go to that. They’ll go to that length to do anything the customer needs. And ultimately that just wins way more customers. You know, we try not to say no. It’s kind of that mentality from Zappos is, you know, when you call up and you ask to order a pizza and they don’t sell pizza, they help you figure it out. And, you know, we do the same. If you want to get something that we don’t offer, we’ll refer you to someone that can make it happen.

So how do you perpetuate that culture? What are your methods? Is it a company size thing or you?

Size helps, you know, we’re only 21 people. I’d say over time, every company meeting, I always talk about company culture and values. And our values are the acronym SHIFT. And the S stands for speed. The H stands for honesty. The I is for ideas. And the P is for passion. And each one of those has more information behind it, but the P, for example, is passion for people and for Apple products. So by having that passion for people, we’re always going to go that extra length to help them out. And just telling some stories and sharing customer feedbacks really goes a long way to drive those points home. And I probably share a good customer story with our team every single week.

Company culture is perpetuated through regular discussions on values. For us, SHIFT—Speed, Honesty, Ideas, Passion, and Trust—guides every decision and action. Click To Tweet

So, these are, it sounds like, great values for a company like yours. What about the purpose? I mean, you also have a powerful purpose, don’t you? What is it that you’re trying to, how are you trying to change the world? I mean, Steve Jobs was very big on this idea, changing the world. So what is your version of it?

I mean, our purpose is to be the most trusted buyer and seller of used Apple products. And that also helps show the customer that, you know, we’re doing things to build trust. You know, we’re being transparent on everything that we do. You know, we have the top ratings to prove it and we all the customer testimonials behind it and stuff like that. And so, you know, we always, by having the team members think about building trust, we’re kind of always doing things in the right way and saying yes and, you know, doing everything we can to make it right.

That’s very cool. So it sounds like you already accomplished your purpose to a great extent, if you are the most-

Yeah, every day we accomplish it, but we’re not the… I used to have another part of that is that we were going to be the most known. And I realized that that was, you know, a really long-term goal. I did pull that out. So we figured kind of most trusted. And if we are the most known as part of it, that that’s great too.

Okay. So what about the vision? So purpose is one thing. It’s kind of eternal. You never quite get there. What is your vision? Where do you see the company evolve in the next, I don’t know, 10, 20 years?

Probably work a lot more closely with larger companies and schools and government and stuff like that. You know, we were always focused on doing consumers first and our business is now about 50% consumer and 50% business. So the fastest way I think to grow the company is through more large business deals. And they’re a lot harder to come by, which is why I’m working a lot on LinkedIn to make connections and grow the business through new people there. So I think that’s probably a lot of our time and effort we’ll go towards. And I also want to make the website the absolute fastest, easiest and safest trading platform. So constantly coming up with new ways to make that process faster. And, you know, this last year we added a thing that we call the trade-in serial tool. And when you put your serial number in, it gives you an instant price quote from there. But trying to figure out, you know, can we drop questions we’re asking people? Can we make that form even easier and still get the information we need to run the business properly? So that’s something we’re always optimizing and testing for.

Okay. That’s really cool. Now, you mentioned LinkedIn, and I noticed on your LinkedIn page, actually, I was checking out one of the posts. I don’t know if it was your daughter with the hockey stick and on this roll, writing that, but a very cute one. And you wrote in this article that your two obsessions, one is your company, second one is helping other people be more impactful on LinkedIn. So what is it that you do to help people do that?

Oh, about two and a half months ago, I became a Visage speaker and I talk about optimizing people’s LinkedIn. So in that format, I’m doing a masterclass workshop and we’re basically helping people, you know, tweak their headline and their about section and teaching them a lot of tips on how to create content that’s engaging, and just a bunch of other things on the process of how to do well on LinkedIn. I’m doing classes both for Vistage and also for companies directly. Then I also do personal coaching.

I just signed up my fifth client recently, and I work actively with them weekly to help optimize their content, give them tips and feedback on what’s working and not working, and just new things happening with LinkedIn constantly and what you should be looking out for and what’s working and kind of trending right now. And for instance, polls, polls are getting the most views of any type of comment, any type of content currently. My poll last week is my highest viewed post ever. It just hit over 600,000 views.

Wow.

And it’s so hard to get another type of post to go that viral currently. So if you’re someone who’s trying to find more people and just create more engagement, polls is a great option, but not enough people are doing it. So trying to constantly encourage people to try new content and stuff like that, then actively working with them on their content is something that I love to do. And you can really change your life by being successful on LinkedIn. I’d say every single day I get one to two leads through my LinkedIn posts. So that makes it really worth it for me to continue to put the effort in there. And you saw that one post, you know, on the, with the hockey stick and that hit 3000 likes,

Yeah, it was crazy. I thought it was 3000 views, but then I said, yeah, but there are 270 comments. So there’s gotta be something else.

It’s going crazy.

It’s going to be 300,000 views.

It just hit a hundred thousand views on that one.

100,000, so it’s a very high number of likes. There’s nothing not to like about it. It was really fun.

Appreciate it. So yes, sharing fun content’s one of the biggest things. I mean, if you’re too business-like, too formal and not fun, it’s not gonna be content that people find fun and wanna engage with, so you have to be a little bit outside the box.

Well, it’s too bad for me. 

Here’s my tip since you said that. So be yourself, you know, below the fold and talk about it the way you want to, but above the fold, give a one-liner in there that helps bring people in, otherwise it would not engage with your content.

Everyone else is already taken, so I’ll try that. Okay, so that’s really cool. So what is it that you would like the listeners to do? Is it about the LinkedIn work that you do? Is it about Mac? Is it both? What should they do? Where should they go if they want to build or learn more about your work and your company?

Sure, well, definitely both. You know, I do a lot of things, I can’t do them all on this podcast today. I’m also a sommelier, so if people need any wine recommendations, I love sharing about wine too. So if you want to find out more about my business, I would just go to sellyourmac.com and you can use the promo code MacMan to get a bonus. And if you wanted to buy an Apple product, you can go to renewedmacs.com and you also can use Macman to get a discount. And then if you want to learn about LinkedIn, you can just go to linkedin.com/in/BriantheMacman. And if you look up Brian the Macman on LinkedIn, I’m sure you’re going to find me on there too.

Okay. Well, that’s a great note to finish on. So if you listen to this podcast, definitely check out Brian Burke and he’s the Mac man. All the permutations of it, it’s going to all be in the show notes. I don’t know if I can pair them back to you. And if you enjoy this podcast, please rate and review it and subscribe on YouTube.

I give Steve 5 stars.

Yeah, give me however many stars you think we deserve. Hopefully it’s more than three and stay tuned next week. And Brian, thanks for coming on the show. It was a really fun episode.

Thank you so much, Steve. I look forward to helping people out, buying self-snapple products and optimize their LinkedIn. That would make me very happy to help out your viewers.

I mean, who doesn’t need a few hundred thousand followers on LinkedIn, right? So definitely, I think a lot of people will take you up on this offer. So thanks for coming and see you all next week.

Cheers. Bye bye.

 

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