Brian Cox: It’s actually an assistance to the owner operator, whether they’re behind the counter or an hourly clerk is. And what I mean is, sometimes when you have a chain store, your success at that store really depends on the clerk. And they’re — if the clerk doesn’t make money on every dime that goes through that register, they’re not incentivized to push other products or talk to the customer, engage them. “Hey, Michael, how are you doing today man? Hey, you’re on EBT. Man, let me take — hey, let me help save on your wireless bill” They don’t have that engagement. They’re just trying to clock in, clock out and go home. So having that LCD screen, promoting the products is going to make that store owner more money. And it’s also going to reduce the amount of time we have to train someone if that LCD will allow the customer to input some information, if they’re inputting their number, if they’re doing some type of activation inputting their name, inputting their e-mail address.
That will allow that clerk to be more focused on being a clerk doing things at a convenience store that can rep things out quicker, get people in and out and allow consumers to carry a little bit more of the burden of that transaction. So the reception so far by convenience store owners is actually very receptive, especially with the products that we’re bringing in a crazy world where they are getting squeezed on their lines of credit per inventory, and we’re presenting them with a way to make money transactionally that does not cost them out-of-pocket money. Every transaction, every time they take a payment, a part of that is theirs. And they’ve made money while putting money in the register. They don’t have to come out of pocket and hope that things on the shelf sell when they’re dealing with SurgePays.
So I think that’s a very unique. Something I can’t say enough in the relationship. We’re one of the few vendors that sell into the store, where all of our transactions are positive for the store owner.
Michael Diana: Yeah. No, that’s all very, very interesting. So if you can disclose it for competitive reasons, sort of what percentage of your total ACP sign-ups last quarter or in the last month or whatever the appropriate period is, have come through convenience stores?
Brian Cox: As we’re phasing — that’s a good question, Michael, is we’re phasing down the field sales and if you want to think of it like a soundboard where you’ve kind of got your trouble in your base or we’re phasing things in and we’re throttling the field sales because of the cost for acquisition and other things we’ve talked about, competition, et cetera. I don’t have that number in front of me, but I would suspect less than 10% because this has been something that we’ve gradually been going store by store, really watching. There’s a compliance component to it. There’s a lot of other things where we have to white glove this rollout. So we’ve been very, very, very careful with how we’ve done it. And there’s certain things where we look and we see shrinkage or let’s say, lost leads, which we talked about before with the ATM.
That drives me nuts. I want to make sure that if somebody is qualified and they’ve raised their hand and said, I want it, I want to do everything we can move hell and earth to get that customer signed up. So that’s one of the things that we’ve been working on how to perfect it. So as we roll this out, and we add these stores. And we’ve added salespeople — excuse me, we’ve added folks here in Memphis just to try to keep up with sending the fulfillment of the point-of-sale materials, sending things out, helping train stores. That’s one of the really, I’d say, burdened areas of our company right now the sales intake, which is but and business that’s the best part of your company to be burdened for sure. But that’s one of the areas where we’re looking at hiring, looking at bringing folks on and how to better bring stores on.
