Mr. Mixer with cohost Lisa Robbin Young

Leela Sinha 0:01

So I love how he's on a mission to educate people about their kitchen aids, like it seems like, yes, he repairs them, but his real passion is to help people know about them,

Lisa Robbin Young 0:11

right? Right. And I've learned, I've learned a ton about this mixer that I picked up at a yard sale, and and I'm like, oh, mind blown. So yeah, one

Leela Sinha 0:22

of his recent, one of his recent recordings was of like, pick this thing up at a yard sale for 40 bucks, let's tear it apart and fix it,

Lisa Robbin Young 0:30

right, right, yeah, I got, I got mine at this lady who was like moving out of state, and I'd always wanted a KitchenAid mixer, but I was like, I don't have the budget for a kitchen mixer, and I think I think she was selling it for like 80 bucks or something, 50 bucks, and I was like, I will, I will go check this thing out, and and I went, and I was like, it's got all its parts and pieces, it works okay, I'll take it, and then I found out that it doesn't power off unless you unplug it, and I learned that through mr. Mixer that the reason why it does is there's a screw that's loose inside, and I was like, I'm really worried about taking it apart, and you know, I might break it and ruin it, and he made it so easy, I fixed it myself, so

Leela Sinha 1:20

ta-da, which I love. So, I love this about him. So, welcome to Power Pivot, Season Three. This is our best bosses episode, and in this case, while he does have his employees, we're really just going to be talking about the good that this company is doing. The company is called mr. Mixer, like the last company we profiled. He is all over social media making long videos and short videos about KitchenAid mixers, specifically KitchenAid, specifically mixers, and he's he's doing good work. I'm here. My name is Lela Sinha. I'm here with my host, Lisa Robin Young, and we are going to talk about all the great things that a company like mr. Mixer is doing,

Lisa Robbin Young 2:03

yeah, one of the things that, and we talked a little bit about this in our last episode about sharing content for free, and how it could be just marketing, but in the case of mr. Mixer, his YouTube videos, in particular are so informative, so helpful, and so easy to digest, that I had, and I'm, I am not a technophobe, but I don't mess with electrical stuff, like that is not a thing I do, and he was like, "Here's how you break down your mixer. Here's what it looks like on the inside, and I felt so clear about what what the guts of my mixer look like before he even took it apart, that I was like, oh, I can do this. And his level of instruction and care comes through in the quality of the videos that he's creating, and how informative they are for just the regular lay person who, like, uses a mixer and may never ever think about what's going on inside.

Leela Sinha 3:12

Yeah, yeah, and, and you know, from a marketing point of view, he's building trust with his audience, right? People are going to pack up their grandmother's kitchen. People do this all the time. They're like, I'm gonna pack up my grandmother's KitchenAid mixer that's been like ancestrally in our family that made my wedding cake, and I'm going to ship it across the country to you. Where is he again? He's like in Missouri or something, Kansas, Kansas, and I'm going to ship it across the country to you and trust that you are going to fix it, and or soup it up. He almost treats these mixers like they're cars.

Lisa Robbin Young 3:46

Yeah, I noticed that, like, he has some interesting add-ons that, like, like a tail fin and a handlebar that really give it this mid-century modern retro Jetsons effect, and that's one of the things that when we look at business models that I think is really telling and important about how this repair company is really more than a repair company, he started by fixing mixers, but it's grown into not only do we fix these mixers, we support them with with augmentation and enhancements that actually make the mixer better, prolong the life of the mixer mixer. They're not just merely cosmetic, I mean, if you want to get a special powder coat that is kind of cosmetic, but and he does that, he does that too, right, and all of the other things that he has, the product pieces that he has developed to enhance the quality of the mixer itself, that KitchenAid probably could never do, because it wouldn't be cost effective for them, because they're just such a huge company to slide into a market. And offer specialty things that enhance the life expectancy of the product gives him a foothold in the repair industry that other repair techs just can't have because they don't have the pieces that he has invented himself to make available to enhance the product

Leela Sinha 5:18

e like, well, do you have the: 1940

Lisa Robbin Young 5:49

p at a yard sale was built in: 1994

Leela Sinha 6:11

right? All I really need to know, and, and what's so, what's fun about his story is that he started with a spring, and not even a big spring, it's like this bit, the part that he started with is literally this big, and what happened was the company that makes KitchenAid, which used to be Hobert, but I think somebody else bought them out,

Lisa Robbin Young 6:27

it's Whirlpool now, yeah,

Leela Sinha 6:28

it's Whirlpool, yeah, so they decided and announced that the spring was no longer necessary. Now, what this spring does is it keeps the attachments on the mixer from bobbling up and down as you, as it mixes, and so he was like, that is not actually an optional part. It does something important. I want it back, and that's a fairly easy thing to manufacture. So he started making and selling just the spring with the instructions on how to like twist it up onto the stem of your mixer, and it kind of grew from there.

Lisa Robbin Young 7:02

Yeah, now I have that spring on my mixer, and I will tell you what a blessing it is to like just snap and twist and know that the spring is gonna hold the attachment in place. Yeah, like I've watched his dime video to see how my pieces spin and do they move the dime like they're supposed to, and all that stuff? I never knew about a mixer. He's, he's, he's given me a little bit of, like, passion for, oh, now I understand why. When I bought this thing, you know, the, the enamel coating was coming off on this one attachment, and I just, you know, replaced it with a new one, and so now I have both of them, and I'm like, but now I know why, and now I can prevent that from happening to my new attachment, you know, and to find out that the attachments are interchangeable, and like all this stuff I did not know I needed to know,

Leela Sinha 7:56

but it's like you never knew you needed to know these things, but you did, yeah, his tagline now is the one stop shop for all your KitchenAid mixer needs.

Lisa Robbin Young 8:05

Yeah,

Leela Sinha 8:06

so he's really grown from being like, I will stop your attachments from banging against the bowl of your mixer to I will give you everything you need, and when he says everything, he means everything, like you said. He has this robust YouTube channel where, like, and I really do feel like it's like a vintage car vibe. He's like, oh yeah, we're just gonna show you, just pop the hood and we'll just pull this piece off and pull off these springs, don't lose them, and then we're gonna take this little ring off, and then look how gunk it gets, that's pretty normal. We're just gonna wipe that off, it'll be fine. And then, like, and then he's like, and look at how this grease is, look at the quality of this grease. This is what the quality of this grease tells you. If it looks like this, then it's got metal shavings in it, which means your gears are a braiding. If, if it looks like that, then it's fine. And aside from the whatever we're in here to fix, it probably could have stayed like that for another 40 years, right? He's just, and he sells kits, right? He sells repair kits, so he, he's, he's got, again, like, yet last time we talked, you know, he's got this spirit of generosity about, I will, I will give you all the information you need to do this at home, if you don't want to do it at home, I will also give you my mailing address,

Lisa Robbin Young 9:19

going to be in my kitchen for: 1020

Leela Sinha: 10:30

my children,

Lisa Robbin Young: 10:31

right? Maybe they'll want it, right? Or at least I'll be able to sell it at a yard sale for more than $5 Do you know what I mean? Like, it's going to outlive me, and the thing that I really appreciate about how he demystifies everything and makes it feel like you can step into and do this yourself and you're not gonna, you're not gonna ruin anything, it's not gonna be fine, you're gonna be okay, and give you the confidence to have more sovereignty over the things that you, the tools that you are using, and the investments that you are making in the quality of your life, right. And we don't think about that when we think about repair people, they come in, they fix a thing, they get on down the road. This guy has really established his company as the company that cares, right. And then he stands behind that brand message with all of the things that he has done, from I'm going to make this screw to you really want to soup this thing up and create something like we won't powder coat it in star spangled purple space dust. I

Leela Sinha: 11:44

was just thinking about the purple

Lisa Robbin Young: 11:47

one. Yes, right, like there's so many cool colors, and, and, and make it really yours, right? Like, let you take ownership and really own it. Now, historically, way back, KitchenAids were made by Hobart. Hobart is known as an industrial kitchen food service supplier. If you walk into a professional bakery, you'll see those giant drums with the giant mixer heads. Those are Hobarts, right? When I lived in Salt Lake, I had a friend who worked for Hobart, so I was very intimately familiar with all of these big industrial kitchen kitchen pieces, and so when they sold off the KitchenAid component line to Whirlpool, there was a lot of question about, well, what's gonna happen to the quality,

Leela Sinha: 12:32

right?

Lisa Robbin Young: 12:33

Because Hobart pieces last forever,

Leela Sinha: 12:36

forever. I used to work in a commercial kitchen, a commercial bakery, and we had, you know, a Hobart that came up to my nose, so it wasn't like huge, but it was pretty big. It had, you know, a bowl we could make, you know, nine batches of cookies, barely barely pushed it. It was like, yeah, okay, nine batches of cookies, what's next, like at once. And, and I don't know how old that was. I know the person that I was working for got it used from somewhere, and I know that any mechanic on the on the peninsula could have torn it apart and put it back together, because straightforward mechanical thing.

Lisa Robbin Young: 13:15

Yes, Hobart built their products and designed them to last and had a whole repair division, so when your Hobart equipment needed updating, maintenance, repairs, you called Hobart. Hobart went in and took care of everything. Whirlpool is not that kind of company. Whirlpool hasn't ever been that kind of company. Whirlpool is, we make and sell home appliances, and they last as long as they last, and then you go buy a new one, or you maybe call a repair person, and they're not affiliated with us, and they'll go, you know, take care of it for you.

Leela Sinha: 13:50

And Whirlpool's equipment, by and large, has gotten worse over the years, like a Whirlpool thing from the 1950s could reasonably be able to be expected to last, you know, 20 years, a Whirlpool appliance now, maybe five, maybe me, if you're lucky, 10, if you're lucky, yeah,

Lisa Robbin Young: 14:09

they really went hard on planned obsolescence, I remember when I had a Whirlpool dishwasher in probably the late 90s, early early aughts, and I had this washing machine for maybe a year or two, and it started not doing what it needed to do. I called the repair guy, he's like, "You know what, like they put these things together with glue, and I have to tear it all apart, and you can't put it back together. It's designed to not be

Leela Sinha: 14:43

repaired,

Lisa Robbin Young: 14:43

disassembled, and reassembled. So, you need to buy a new washing machine before you came over here, but okay. And so this is one of the things that we've talked about before, this idea of deprecating. Useful life of something before it's time, just so that a company can then sell you something new. And to me, the short sighted nature of that is, do you really think somebody's gonna come back and buy another one from you when they know that it's doing that? Like, okay, if you think so, but I mean, we talked last time, I never bought one.

Leela Sinha: 15:23

We talked last time about loyalty, right? Loyalty of the of the employees, pride of the employees in what they're producing, and also loyalty to the brand itself. And what mr. Mixer is doing is to bring him back to him, because we started talking about KitchenAid, which, which, which is fine, like I think that's important, and and mr. Mixer is really capitalizing on the historic brand,

Lisa Robbin Young: 15:52

yeah,

Leela Sinha: 15:52

and saying, okay, you want your KitchenAid to still be a KitchenAid, by which he really means be a Hobart KitchenAid, and and he's like, we can do that, we can do that, even with these newer models, we can do that, even with, you know, the last video I saw, he was ripping apart something that had a circuit board in it, and he's like, you just get this kit from us, and it has a new circuit board, and it has entirely new guts, because the guts they put in this one are terrible, and now you've got a great machine, and it's a $350 kit, but if your mixer was $600 and then you bought it for $40 to the yard sale, and you spent $350 you're still coming out ahead,

Lisa Robbin Young: 16:30

right? Right. And it's gonna last a whole lot longer,

Leela Sinha: 16:33

right,

Lisa Robbin Young: 16:34

than it would have otherwise,

Leela Sinha: 16:36

right.

Lisa Robbin Young: 16:36

Yeah, and that to me, that to me really sums up what doing good business is, right? Like, if you, if you remember Miracle on 34th Street, yes,

Leela Sinha: 16:51

yes, yes, the

Lisa Robbin Young: 16:52

most recent version of that movie, there's a lady who Santa Claus tells her, "Go down the street, you can get the toy at this price, and she turns to the manager and says, "I'm coming back to this store for everything but toilet paper, because your Santa is the best person on the planet. He told me where to go to get what I need, and it wasn't here. You know that kind of doing what's right for the people, because that means it's also right for the company, and right, yeah, and that's what I see with mr. Mixer in spades.

Leela Sinha: 17:24

Yeah, yeah, because what we have is, we have, I think, we have a rising tide of consumers who are hungry for trustworthy commerce experiences, right? They want to be able to trust who they're buying from, they want to be able to trust the thing they bought to do the thing they bought it to do, they want to be able to trust that they can get help or support or repairs if they want it. I mean, we could go off down an entire rabbit hole about John Deere and the attempt to take repair away from farmers, who are some of the most salt of the earth. I'm going to fix everything with my screwdriver and my trusty mallet people, right, like, like, of all the populations of all the customer populations that I would never try to tell couldn't repair something, farmers are farmers, are it like, if you're telling farmers you can't repair something, you have lost track of your market,

Lisa Robbin Young: 18:18

right, right, exactly,

Leela Sinha: 18:20

and mr. Mixer is this very like, no, we can, we can repair it, we can fix it. Yeah,

Lisa Robbin Young: 18:28

yeah, they're standing in the gap for their customers, right? Like, there's, they're standing in the gap of not only, not only are we going to fix it for you and give you something that's going to last, get it back to its old glory, but we're also going to develop these enhancements, because we know that that's going to give you an even better experience, right? Like, we're just

Leela Sinha: 18:51

not going to do

Lisa Robbin Young: 18:53

it, right? Exactly, exactly, like the the handle that goes on, like, like the thought that went into, how do we make this easier? Because kitchen aids are not lightweight, they're not, they're heavy. How do we make this easier to pick up and move and carry and make it safer, right? Like to really put the thought into here's an adjustment that we can make that does not impact the original design in any way, it slides right over the top of the nose, and it secures in place with the same screw that's already there, like you don't have to do it. Just makes everything better. It just makes everything easier. It's those kinds of thoughtful touches that we can apply to any business, right? I mean, we're talking about mr. Wra here, but this is really about as you look at your business, as you look in your industry, what are the enhancements and touches that you can enroll into your business that are going to make things better for your customers and ultimately for you, for your community? Like this is this is that ripple effect that moves outwards, so that people are speaking highly of you, etc. Like, we need to be thinking about what are those little touch points for him. It started with a spring. What's your spring right now? When you're looking at your business, what is that one little thing that you could start with that might grow into some other things that you could do,

Leela Sinha: 20:21

yeah, yeah, and some of it is watching and listening to your customer base. I feel like, especially in software, recently the ability of software companies to listen has really just fallen off, and I don't know if it's VC or what it is, but for whatever reason, like when a new piece of software comes out and it fills a hole in the market that was not previously filled. The beta testers and the early adopters will be like, "Oh, this is great. Could it do this? What about that? And it used to be that if you submitted to their roadmap or their feature request, or whatever, that you would see a lot of those things, especially the things with a lot of co-signs or upvotes or whatever, you would, you would see a lot of those things come into the software, you would see a lot of those things show up, they'd be like, okay, yeah, that's on the roadmap now, because 8000 of you have asked for it, and that seems like a reasonable number of people to respond to, we have a lot of priorities, but that's important, and that has stopped happening, it has stopped happening, not entirely, but the amount that it happens is so small at this point, and I know adding features takes person power, it takes hours, it takes computing time, you know, whatever. Sure, I used to work in software, I understand what it means to say, I just want you to do this right, just

Lisa Robbin Young: 21:42

right with my

Leela Sinha: 21:42

developer friends. I try really hard. If I'm, if I'm looking at their software, I try really hard never to use the word just, because it's almost never just, especially if it looks simple. But, but when we have this opportunity to get direct feedback from our clients or customer base, and they're telling us, I want this, or I miss this, or why did you change that? Like, listen, listen. In fact, Dell recently, of all companies, Dell recently rolled back a bunch of their changes because people shouted so loudly, and I was shocked. I don't want to be shocked, I want that to be normal, but they Burger

Lisa Robbin Young: 22:20

King did something similar, right? Like everybody was up in arms about the Whoppers, not the Whopper anymore, and so enough people got the message to the President, and he was like, "Yeah, I mean, like, did a commercial and said, you're right, we screwed up, so we're gonna fix it, and so they're actively, you know, in the process of doing that, and my cynical self wants to believe that this isn't just a marketing ploy to get people to go buy Whoppers again, that it's like, legitimately, we listened to our audience, they made some really good points, we're making changes, this isn't a new Coke thing, this is really a commitment to coming back to what we believed in when we started making the sandwich in the first place, right. And to your point, more companies need to be listening, instead of nope, we know what we're doing, we've always done it this way, this is the way we're going to do it, we're going to just keep moving forward, because that kind of command leadership does not allow for innovation, new ideas, original entries into the marketplace, places to win that you might not even even thought about, because you weren't paying attention,

Leela Sinha: 23:35

right? Or if somebody is really like the last couple of cases I was talking about were company and Burger King too. It's like you had a thing that worked. Why did you break

Lisa Robbin Young: 23:45

it, right?

Leela Sinha: 23:46

Could you please stop breaking your stuff? It's.. it was good. It was already fine, right? And, and so mr. Mixer was like, well, we know that shouting at Whirlpool is not going to help, but I can get a hold of somebody who can make a spring that'll help, so I'm going to do that, and to their credit, as far as I know, Whirlpool has not tried to stop him.

Lisa Robbin Young: 24:11

Yeah, I didn't see anything to that effect.

Leela Sinha: 24:13

No, which, which means that somehow some, because he's got a big enough name now, somebody must know about him at KitchenAid headquarters, but, but they've also recognized the benefit of being kind of unofficially in collaboration with somebody who's making their product better in ways that they're not going to focus on, because they're too big, right? So they're not going to be like, oh, I want to carefully hold these KitchenAid customers like the precious people they are, even though KitchenAid loyalty is a very special thing.

Lisa Robbin Young: 24:47

Yeah, I, I am a new loyal KitchenAid user now, because of mr. Mixer. Like, honestly, it is, and I didn't even know about him until you. Started talking to me about him, and I'm like, oh, oh, okay, all right. There's, there's something to be said for the companies that listen, right? And you, you, you just said, well, Whirlpool, you know, he hasn't gotten in trouble with Whirlpool. There's, there's an interesting space in business where you can fill a niche, and they really can't do anything, like there's if you, if you're familiar with IKEA hackers, right? Like, there's a whole IKEA hackers website where you can take this IKEA thing and this IKEA thing, and you can create a Franken IKEA thing that's completely different, or more functional, or whatever. I bought the thing from IKEA. IKEA can't come get mad, right? Like that, you can't, right? And he is not, he's not selling KitchenAid mixers that aren't KitchenAid mixers, right? And he's being very clear that he's selling souped-up KitchenAid mixers, or enhanced KitchenAid mixers, or refurbished KitchenAid mixers with these special parts, so I think he's not a lawyer, but I think he's pretty safe as far as that kind of stuff goes, but but the innovation that he had, like the Everdim, I thought that was like the most brilliant, I'm like, really, just this little spacer is going to change the quality of the mix and keep your attachment. I want to explain to people what

Leela Sinha: 26:28

that

Lisa Robbin Young: 26:29

is. Yeah, so there's this little spacer that, if you flip up the head on your mixer and you set it in on the screw back there, it adjusts the height and the security of the head, so that the head doesn't bounce, and when the head bounces, that's what causes the chipping on the bottom of the enameled attachments, because it's bouncing on that stainless steel, and eventually it just stress fractures, and it starts to chip away, so that ever dime holds that locked head in place, so that it's not even jiggling a little bit, and keeps everything moving the way it needs to move, and it keeps it from the head from getting too close to the bottom of the bowl, which is where the scraping happens unnecessarily, right. So this little invention that he created, and he doesn't bill it as a KitchenAid part, he just says this is something that's going to make your KitchenAid mixer work better, if you're experiencing this problem, these are all things aftermarket parts, right? Aftermarket parts on cars, GM can't come at you for an aftermarket part, you just have to recognize it's an aftermarket part, and they hold there's no warranty, because they don't, they don't provide it,

Leela Sinha: 27:39

right? Right,

Lisa Robbin Young: 27:40

all of that has to go to whoever your aftermarket provider is, and so you don't see a lot of repair services offering aftermarket anything,

Leela Sinha: 27:50

right?

Lisa Robbin Young: 27:50

And so this is a really great thing, a great niche for him to have stepped into in service of his audience with something that he knew already had a great lifetime value, because of, you know, KitchenAid. I think of another product that has a lifetime value of rabid buyers, and that's Jeep, right? People will buy a Jeep, and they will customize the heck out of that Jeep, because they are so committed to and loyal to their vehicle, and when you have that kind of loyalty in an industry, software kitchen appliances, vehicles, I don't care, it behooves you to pay attention to those rabid fans,

Leela Sinha: 28:35

right?

Lisa Robbin Young: 28:36

Right, if you're not listening to those rabid fans, you're missing out on great opportunities, not only to expand your customer base, but to really surprise and delight those folks along the way, right.

Leela Sinha: 28:47

Surprise and delight, that is such an important concept in this kind of thing, because they will be with you, you know, potentially for generations, literally, in the case of the Kitchen Aids, right?

Lisa Robbin Young: 28:58

Right,

Leela Sinha: 28:59

and, and, and Jeep, like KitchenAid, like Apple used to be, is a personality, right? Like, you are a Jeep person. There are behaviors that Jeep people.. I dated a Jeep person for a while. There are behaviors that Jeep people do with each other. There's like insider stuff, their codes, there's like, I don't, I don't even know all of what goes on, but there are just people who like these sort of Lego cars, and they, that's how I think of them, is like, because they're meant to be pulled apart and customized, and so again, we have this like, you can soup up your vehicle on your own, basically, just order these parts and screw them in, and then you've got to, and those are the people who are going to be like, I don't care what anybody else thinks, I love my Jeep, and that's what you want, because if you don't care what anybody else thinks, then you are not going to be persuaded away by some slick ad campaign, you're just going to become more dug in and more stubborn that you're. Jeep is the best thing on the planet,

Lisa Robbin Young: 30:01

right? Right. And we do see that, for better or for worse, in several different industries, and to me it's very telling who is listening and who is not listening, and who is staying loyal and who is not staying loyal, and that's one of the things. When I was going through the mr. Mixer website, like just looking at the testimonials and looking at the comments, and looking at what people are saying, like this was my grandmother's mixer, and you know it'd been sitting in a closet, and you know it works again, and we're making cookies, and we're, you know, like those kinds of stories are legacy for the family, but also the company, right? Like mr. Mixer is building this incredible volume of testimonials and reputation and third-party proof, which we all know in the business world is like the gold standard. When you say you're great, it's it's bragging or marketing, but when everybody else says it, then it must be true, right? Like that, that line of thinking, and so when you've got third-party proof and you've got all these glowing testimonials, there's a couple of things I want to say about this one. Yay, because it means you're doing something right, and also it becomes the benchmark, it becomes the standard for you to continue to live up to, and what I have witnessed in the last 20 years is that companies that had been established in the 20th century just stopped rising to the occasion,

Leela Sinha: 31:38

right,

Lisa Robbin Young: 31:39

which is really disappointing.

Leela Sinha: 31:41

It is. I feel like, you know, like the 10th grade teacher looking at the student who turned in a piece of writing that I know they could do better, and I'm like, I'm very disappointed in you. Like, we know you know better, we know you can do better. You have a history, you have a legacy, you've been doing better for a long time. Why did you suddenly decide to stop, and of course, the answer to that is late stage capitalism, and a lot of other things, but

Lisa Robbin Young: 32:06

sure,

Leela Sinha: 32:07

but I also think that that creates this market gap into which mixed or mixer is is very, very deftly stepping, where he's like, okay, but people still want a company they can be loyal to, I could be a company they could be loyal to, they could be loyal to Kitchen Aid, like on the side, because I can make Kitchen Aid still worthy of loyalty.

Lisa Robbin Young: 32:30

Yes, yes, yes, and and that opportunity exists in a lot of spaces, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna go back in time, years ago, I owned and operated a candle company, and I made and sold candles out of my home, and I was in direct competition, sort of, with a major candle manufacturer called Party Light, and they were a home party candle company, and they used to make these clear candles that you could see through. Well, those candles were made, I think, in Guatemala. They were made in South America, and that factory burned to the ground. And when the factory burned to the ground, they said, 'We're just not going to make them anymore. And I'm like, 'Are you kidding? There are so many people who love this candle, like they want. So I went out of my way to figure out where were they getting the wax from. How do you color this stuff? I did all kinds of experiments. Finally figured out how to make several different shapes of this candle and started selling them actively online, and I had people coming out of the woodwork going, where did you get these? I'm like, made them myself. How did you make them? Can you get more? I'm like, yeah, I can. I can make. And so I was, I was busy making lots of candles, selling lots of candles, and I also recognized it was a niche that I could fill because it wasn't big enough for party light anymore,

Leela Sinha: 33:53

right, right,

Lisa Robbin Young: 33:54

right, like it was plenty for me as a small time candle manufacturer operating out of her house, but if you need a factory to make hundreds of 1000s of these in a month, like the costs aren't the value isn't there, the ROI is not there for you as a company. So there's an opportunity for smaller businesses to step into these markets and say, hey, that thing you used to love, we can do this. We can offer something comparable. We can fill a need for you that they can't fill anymore, because it's not cost-effective for them. It doesn't make good ROI for them. Whatever, whatever. The only problem that you can run into sometimes is patents, trademarks, copyrights, right? Like those kinds of things, you still have to watch out for, but there's plenty of opportunity to step into those spaces and be that hero for these people who are craving that kind of support, that kind of deep trust that you were talking about earlier, that kind of commitment to the thing that they are passionate about and the result that they want to achieve,

Leela Sinha: 34:58

right, and mr. Mixer. Is mostly like buying parts that KitchenAid still sells, so the parts that are under the patent or the copy that are protected are still protected. KitchenAid is still making their money off of them. And then, in addition, mr. Mixer is like, 'But you don't make this part, but I

Lisa Robbin Young: 35:21

do, that's right, find those ways to hook that loyalty, and then make things even better, right? right, I think to me that is one of the big lessons of everything that mr. Mixer is doing, is find the ways to make things even better, and then do more of that, and then do more of that, and then people are going to talk about you, people who don't even know you, people who don't even own mixers, are going to talk about you and talk about all of the ways that you are making people's lives better.

Leela Sinha: 35:48

I do not own a mixer.

Lisa Robbin Young: 35:51

Yeah, I know,

Leela Sinha: 35:52

like, and I just.. I got so fascinated after watching a couple of his videos, I was like, that kind of looks like fun, like I do every craft under the sun, right? I weave, I knit, I build things out of wood, but I haven't really ever gotten into mechanical stuff or mechanical repairs. And I watched a few of his videos, and I was like, that kind of looks like fun. Maybe the next time I see a broken KitchenAid at a yard sale, I'll pick it up, start taking apart mixers, because wouldn't that be a fun little sideline? Because that's the thing, right? Like, he has so much work, he's moved warehouses, like workspaces three times in two years, or something like that. He keeps having to make his space bigger because he just can't fit his business in anymore, and he keeps thinking, oh, this will be plenty big enough, and it has not been so. If somebody else starts learning this stuff, I don't think he's gonna care.

Lisa Robbin Young: 36:45

No, no. In fact, any day, like, he might be a helper,

Leela Sinha: 36:49

or you'll be like, "Let's start a KitchenAid fixing convention.

Lisa Robbin Young: 36:55

Y'all come, we'll just.. we'll talk best practices. It'll be fun. We'll do a whole day of tearing down and reassembling demos, and you guys can watch and learn and ask questions and participate. Like, I could see him really, because, as you said earlier, he has the passion for it, right? Like, he really cares about these these mixers and the quality of experience that people are having with them.

Leela Sinha: 37:19

Yeah, and you know I could see him being like, and here's how you spec out a part that you've decided should exist that doesn't exist yet, and here's how you talk to a manufacturer, so that you, because, like, imagine a world, imagine a world like the Jeep world for KitchenAids, right, where if you want, like, Jeeps, if you want to screw anything onto a jeep, you can find somebody who will help you screw that thing onto a jeep, even if it's never existed before in its life, and and I can totally see him being that person who's like, I have figured out how to produce these things, and I'm going to produce them. So, let's talk a little bit, actually, about this repairability thing, because I think that's like a really old-fashioned value that that he is really upholding, but it gets sort of subsumed because he makes it, as you said, he's a great teacher, right? He's got incredible teaching skill, and he just makes it easy and accessible, and like, no big deal, like he's not like, okay, so this is really important, you got to put down your non-static cloth, then you got it, like,

Lisa Robbin Young: 38:22

yeah.

Leela Sinha: 38:22

No, I know you're doing this on your kitchen counter, so let's just get right down to it. Even his short videos are like, I felt like I could have followed the short video that I watched last time and replaced the guts of a 1994 mixer with something that would actually work, and, and so let's talk about repairability, because I think that's a business value that that has gotten lost, and, and that we really, we really need to consider the value of that as business owners, even if you're not making stuff

Lisa Robbin Young: 38:59

right, right, so my grandpa was a carpenter, my dad was a mechanic.

Leela Sinha: 39:06

Okay,

Lisa Robbin Young: 39:07

and fixing things were, that was, that was like the, that was the family business, like that's that's who we were, and what we did, you know? If something got a hole in it, you sewed it up. If something had, like, fixing things was like how we got by, and so, as this, for lack of a better phrase, disposable mindset around business development of things, planned obsolescence, right, like the ROI of repairability wasn't there for the businesses, and so let's make things that we can dispose of that are cheaper, so that people will buy them because they're cheaper for them to buy, but on the back side of that, you get what you pay for, right? Like it's this vicious cycle of well, we can drive the cost down, but that means you're not going to be able to repair it, you're going to have to buy new, which is actually good for us because it makes more money, but you're spending more money in the long hall. Because you're so there's this thing that goes back and forth around how do we create offers that give us the ability to have longevity in the marketplace from a business owner's perspective to have longevity in the marketplace and keep our customers happy and not cost us a whole lot on the back end, right? Like we've seen this with online courses, right? In the online course world, there are two camps that I've seen kind of emerge, one that's like you pay for it, you have lifetime access, and one where you pay for it, and you have limited access, usually six months to a year, but not always. And then, if you want it after that, you got to pay again, right? So, there's these two different competing models, and there are two different mindsets around why you would do that. For the person who's offering lifetime access, it's usually, I just want to be hands off, I don't want to have to chase after this anymore. I got my money on the front end updated. Great, and if I don't, then that's fine too. The other one being, hey, I am providing this, but I know that things are going to change, things are going to update, and I want to be able to do those updates in ways that are sustainable for me, and not have to push another launch every six months, because things have changed, and I got to record the videos, and there's costs associated with that, et cetera, et cetera, right. So you have to look at your business model and how you're set up to operate, and think about what's really going to work for you, but you can't stop there, and that's what I see a lot of companies do, is they just stop there. What's going to work for us? Yeah, and what's going to work for your people over the long haul? What is that word of mouth reputation going to be like in the long haul? Do you even plan to be around for the long haul, or is this just a pop-up thing that you're going to offer, and then it's gone? Right, we have to think about those things as business owners, and sometimes the answers that we come to aren't always the answers that give the most longevity to our buyers,

Leela Sinha: 42:15

I think. Let's go back to the courses for a minute, because I think that's an interesting case study. So one of the rationales for giving limited access is that they're being honest. There's a certain amount of dishonesty in saying lifetime access, lifetime of what, lifetime of who? Like, if I give you lifetime access to this course, and then I pull all my stuff off AWS because I'm mad at Amazon now, do like, are you going to remember you have this course? First of all, and secondly, if you do remember you have it, and you want to access it, what if I haven't made it publicly available because you were one of three people who bought it, you know, 10 years ago, right? And, and so, like, yes, I could remedy that as a business owner on an individual basis. You contact me, you say, "Where is this thing? I say, "I took it off the internet. Here, I'm just going to mail you the files, like you take them, you store them, it's yours, fine. But, but the honest thing to do is maybe not to suggest that you're going to be there forever, and these files are going to be there forever in this ephemeral digital world. And so then the other option is to say you will have access to these for this period of time, at which point I will maybe take it down

Lisa Robbin Young: 43:25

right,

Leela Sinha: 43:26

and then the other, the other thing is a lot of people just collect things and let them sit on their shelf, and there is a reasonable argument to be made for this is going to expire if you don't use it,

Lisa Robbin Young: 43:40

yeah,

Leela Sinha: 43:40

because sometimes that motivates people to use the thing they paid for, and I think most of us in the course world, not everybody, but most of us in the course making, coaching, personal development world, really do want people to use our stuff. We are, we are actually actively invested in people using our stuff, and if people would please use our stuff, that would be great, and so, so when people don't use it, even after they've paid for it, it's like, oh, and so I think there, there is some desire to like push people a little bit to actually open the file, and and and so there is there's that interplay with like what works for them right it's like will this actually make this more effective if I if I kind of push you into using it by the deadline

Lisa Robbin Young: 44:34

sure sure and and I mean I could go down a whole rabbit hole on course design and instructional design and all of all of those kinds of things and I think you make a really good point about that can be applied pan industry right like what are we being honest about what are we. Are trying to hide or diminish or downplay or not let our people in on, and how does that impact things? Right, so when we look at it from a repairability standpoint, if what we were really saying is we just want to sell stuff and not have to deal with repairs on the back end, so the best way for us to do that is to just make things that can't be fixed

Leela Sinha: 45:27

right.

Lisa Robbin Young: 45:28

Then you're not being completely honest with your people when you're putting it on offer in the first place, right? The reality is we make disposable things, right? People do not get upset that they can't reuse their baby wipes,

Leela Sinha: 45:44

right? Right,

Lisa Robbin Young: 45:45

they're meant to be disposable. We know that they're disposable, we use them, we pitch them, move on. Now, there's a whole environmental thing, I'm not going down that path, but we don't get upset that we can't reuse our baby wipes. We don't get upset that we can't reuse disposable diapers. We get upset when we buy cloth diapers, and they don't hold up for two or three washes, right? Because we have an expectation that the company has hidden from our reality, right? So they don't match up, and I think that's the invitation here, is for us to really be honest and genuine about the things that we're putting on offer, and how much of a life expectancy we genuinely expect them to have, right? Right, so that people can make an informed decision.

Leela Sinha: 46:33

And I think that the more transparency we get from a company in general, the better those processes work. I'm thinking now, foreshadowing, foreshadowing, because I want to talk about this company later in the season, but Lil Helper is an absorbent product maker out of Canada, and Uncle Mo, which is what the proprietors like screen name is, his name is Mohammed Gandhi, which is complicated for reasons, so he goes by Uncle Mo online, and he is making, you know, reusable menstrual products, he's making diapers, cloth diapers, he's making absorbent pads to go on your bed for all kinds of liquid absorption reasons, right, and and in his product development cycle, we'll talk about him more later, but in his product development cycle, he brings to social media, okay, what are you asking for, he's like very clear, we're developing this product because I got a bunch of comments that looked like this, right, and then he's like, so we started developing this, we're working with our manufacturer, we tried this, we tried that. What do y'all think, right? And he's doing this back and forth, like on social media, and I think that kind of a deeply interactive, deeply transparent corporate process can be incredibly useful in building trust.

Lisa Robbin Young: 48:00

Agreed, agreed, especially in the era that we're in right now, where, and you hear a lot of people talk about trust deficit, but I think more than a trust deficit, it's a trust question mark, it's like Who can we trust, where can we turn, what's believable, what's been generated that's not true, like where is the allusion and where is the truth, and I have to be in the room to see it to believe it now, right? Like, there's a lot of that starting to happen, and these are great opportunities for business owners to say, I know there's been a lot of mystery around these things, or I know that you know it's.. it seemed very obtuse for decades. Let's demystify, let's clarify, let's make things more obvious, so that you can see what's really going on under the hood here.

Leela Sinha: 48:56

Let me put it on YouTube with a disassembly video, and then you can see that I'm not like scamming you, I'm not just pulling it off and polishing it up and putting it back together, I'm pulling it off and like pulling all the guts out and cleaning all the grease off, and you know, like I think that when we see enough of that, and then when the comments are full of testimonials from people who have had a good experience with it, and then when you're on there, being like, I'm sorry, we're going to be out of commission for a week, because we got to move warehouses again. Thanks, you all, but like, this is a lot, right? I think I think that that the trust that's built when we understand that the underlying values of a company that are being represented in the company's behavior are things like honesty and repairability and longevity, like I want those things, I want them enough that you know, about 510 years ago I started saying there's going to be a market for vintage appliances that don't. Have fancy circuit boards in them, and don't break. There's a, there's a growing mark. I know there's going to be a growing market for this, and there is now a growing market for that. And, and people are really excited about the vintage esthetic, right? It becomes this whole like cool thing, but it didn't start out as a cool thing. It started out as I want my toaster to last for more than two years. This is ridiculous. It's a toaster. It's not complicated technology. Why are we making it complicated?

Lisa Robbin Young: 50:29

Yeah, you

Leela Sinha: 50:30

put the button down when the, when the metal heats up to a certain level, it releases the lever and it goes up. Like, we don't need a circuit board for this to happen,

Lisa Robbin Young: 50:40

right, right, right, right, yeah, there's there's a lot that can be said about that, and I keep thinking about, I keep thinking about my grandparents, right, like I keep thinking about how, you know, they, they were born in the 20, so they experienced the depression, and they, they had that whole, like, we save every piece of tin foil, and we, you know, and, and things don't last like they used to, they don't make them like they used to, and it's like, but they could, right, and there are lots of reasons in capitalism why a company wouldn't, but I think you make a great point that we are ripe for, we are desperate for companies that will.

Leela Sinha: 51:31

Yes,

Lisa Robbin Young: 51:32

we really are. Yeah, yeah,

Leela Sinha: 51:36

I actually think that's a great line to end on. Okay, so this has been our mr. Mixer episode. You can find mr. Mixer online at mr. Mixer dot store. His phone number is 316-530-7002 but it all of the information you need is on the website or at his YouTube, which is findable very easily. I will put it on the screen, and definitely come by and check out Lisa's, Lisa's channel, and the rest of my channel, and the other things that we do. We have both have a lot of projects, usually in the air, so make sure you stop by and check us out, but we will see you in two weeks with another episode of Power Pivot. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening. This has been Power Pivot Season Three, a podcast about using the power in your business for good, with host Lela Sinha of the Intensives Institute and Allegianto Consulting with Zim, you heard co-host Lisa Robin Young. The podcast is produced by Leela Sinha, with support by William Jameson. To support our podcast and other related work, please consider joining our Patreon at patreon.com/lela S.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai