How Small Businesses Escape The Price Trap, with Joel Miller

Most businesses do not have a marketing problem. They have a clarity problem. If you cannot explain why customers choose you, what lever actually drives profit, and what you deliver that competitors cannot, no amount of digital marketing will save you for long. That is why The Dead PIxels Society sat down with Joel Miller, a business coach and marketing expert at The Sky Floor, to get practical about what makes growth repeatable.

We talk about why Joel resists “niching down” in the usual way, and how curiosity and learning across industries can become a real advantage. From legacy businesses that assume online marketing should be cheap, to brands that chase change for change’s sake, we unpack the moment when a company loses the plot and starts confusing tactics with strategy. Joel shares concrete ways to define positioning, build a competitive advantage, and sell value instead of competing only on price, with specific examples that translate well to photo printing, local services, and creative businesses.<

You will also hear hard-earned lessons from the wedding photography world on pricing ladders, audience fit, and social proof, plus a sharp take on the “fail fast” culture: learn from setbacks, do not celebrate them. We finish with the human side of business, including humor as a trust builder, why marketing cannot cover for broken operations, and how to use AI for repetitive work without trapping customers in automated loops.

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Transcript

Welcome And Sponsor Credits

Erin Manning 0:00

The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is brought to you by Media clip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers. Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast, the photoimaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau.

Gary Pageau 0:18

Hello again and welcome to The Dead Pixels Society Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Joel Miller, who's a business coach, advisor, marketing expert, and a recent transplant to my own home state of Michigan. So we got a lot to talk about. And there's actually some photography stuff in there too. So that's gonna be fun to talk about. So hi Joel, how are you today?

Joel Miller 0:44

Doing well. Thanks for having me on the show.

Gary Pageau 0:47

Joel, tell us a little bit about the Sky Floor and your twin brother and why you're in business with him.

Joel Miller 0:53

Sure. Yeah, I mean it's so we're we're actually leap day twins. Okay. Oh God. Yeah, there's not that many problems. What do you like? What do you like? So the Sky Floor is our our digital marketing business, and we come alongside as partners with businesses who have a problem they need to solve or a new outcome they want from their business. And we'll do everything we can to help them succeed, that we can learn how to do. But we have done everything from creating sales enablement tools for their sales teams to you know designing billboards and kind of you name it. If we can help you solve your problem, or we want to partner with you and do that.

Why They Avoid Niching Down

Gary Pageau 1:30

So one of the things that I find interesting is unlike you know my own business where it's a niche in a very specific industry, the photo imaging industry, you span a bunch of different industries. Oh, yeah. Why is that? Because that seems to go counter to what a lot of people do. Is it just because you've got a lot of skills that are transferable across a lot of things, or you think there's a commonality among the clients that you serve?

Joel Miller 1:59

I think the biggest commonality is that we are so focused on providing value and helping them achieve something new. And it's not just about a transactional outcome. So I think that's probably it. I mean, we've uh I of course read a lot of business books and know I'm supposed to niche down. And we end up working with all these people from, you know, the plumbers, we've worked for the Fortune 500 company, we've we work with a tutoring company. Uh, you can basically you name it over the last 17 years we've done it.

Gary Pageau 2:28

So the question is though, is it because you're able to apply your techniques across different businesses, or do you have to do some customization when that fortune 500 company calls? Clearly, they might have a different set of values than plum crack plumbing company, right?

Joel Miller 2:46

No, they do. And yeah, we are able to transfer some of those skills, but really I think it's because we're lifelong learners who are curious. So, and that's what makes it exciting to me. Like, I think I'd get bored to death if I just did the same kind of work over and over again for the same kinds of people. I love learning about a new business that I don't know anything about, asking questions, how does this work? How do the mechanics work? I want to know like I'm part of your team, and then we can get to where you want to go.

When Owners Misread Their Model

Gary Pageau 3:12

So, one of the things I think you probably learned from asking those questions is maybe some of these business owners may not even understand their own business. That's right.

Joel Miller 3:26

Oh, yeah, several times we've been brought in to kind of be the savior of the situation. We need digital marketing help. A lot of times this is like a legacy business that's done a different way. And they think digital is free almost, right? It's gonna be it's gonna be cheaper, almost free. And so they come to us, and as we talk with them and learn what's going on, we realize, oh, they didn't know their business model, they had no idea how they got successful. It was an act right. Yeah, and if you don't know how you become successful, then you don't know which levers you're and knobs you're pushing and pulling are changing things. You can't make you don't have a hypothesis that you tested. And so we often have to come in and do a little like business coaching. I call it a Joel Miller business school, actually, when that happens, because it'll a lot of times just come up on a call accidentally, and I'm like, Oh, you fundamentally changed how your business makes money, didn't realize it, and now you're struggling. So now that we can realize this together, how do we we can move forward?

Gary Pageau 4:26

Because we actually have to can you go back to making money perhaps?

Joel Miller 4:29

Sometimes right try to that thing that you gave up that you didn't realize was the key. Yeah, maybe it's not dead yet. I mean, or maybe you use it for a little lot longer so that we can transition to something else.

Gary Pageau 4:40

But you have to know because one of the things I find with businesses that I encounter is they're usually really got one thing that is like their identifying characteristics, where there's core competency or whatever, and it may not even be related to the thing that they're best known for, right? So, like for example, the example I always use is Walmart. Walmart's product or service, or the reason why people go there is low prices, but really what they're really good at is efficiency. And if they weren't efficient, they couldn't offer the low prices. And a lot of businesses, I think, you know, if it's a restaurant, maybe it's really community, it's not necessarily how great their food is or something like that.

Joel Miller 5:27

Oh, yeah. With the the example that always comes to mind for me with the not knowing your business model, it kind of is related to that. This author that we worked with who had one of the best-selling parenting books, I think it's of all time, used to do a lot of TV appearances all the time. And then decided, well, it's it's be easier not to do that because I have to travel. And we can surely replace it with digital marketing because it's going to be right. And then, of course, that didn't exactly pan out in the TV appearances. But what they were known for is the personality, right? Like, yeah, you have the book, but people are relying on who you are and buying into that, and they're getting that from the TV appearance. They don't get that from an ad on Google. And so again, fundamentally misunderstanding why you're successful is not a good recipe.

Gary Pageau 6:16

So, one of the things that you really talk about is value, right? How to sell value, how to determine what your value is. In the photo imaging industry, I think you know, sometimes we struggle with that as an industry because what we really do in a lot of cases is provide the means for people to capture their valuable memories and preserve those and share those and pass those along to generations, but we want to provide it in the absolutely cheapest way at the cheapest price. Right. And I think that just that's one of those things that's a generational thing. What would be your advice to someone who are, let's say, for example, it were a local photo printer up there in northern Michigan, and you know, they've been around for a couple years or a few, you know, decades, and they've been and really, you know, they've sort of fallen into that price trap.

Joel Miller 7:09

I think the key thing to value is positioning. So you have to understand how are you positioning yourself to the clients you want. Right. And you're only going to get into that race to the bottom price-wise if you don't on if you really have no competitive advantage. And so that might look different. It's kind of hard to maybe with photo printing to imagine what my competitive advantage could be. But maybe I don't know, I could think of a few things off the top of my head. Like you come alongside the photographers that come in to get their photos printed, and you offer them resources that help them get better at their craft. People know that's what you stand for. And it's that reason because they we buy from people. We don't just buy on price, we buy when we think something is extra valuable. And so you can there's, I mean, we could brainstorm tons of ways, but that's you you have to find something that makes it so that there's a little bit more than when they just go for the cheapest person.

Gary Pageau 8:29

Because I mean, obviously, you know, price is obviously important. You can't go from charging 39 cents for a print to 259 and expect, you know, oh yeah, there's no resistance to that. But I think there is a lot more flexibility because you know, I don't think people really understand consumers don't really understand what things cost or what they'll do is they'll convince themselves it's okay to pay more, like with DoorDash. I'm gonna buy this five dollar Big Mac, but I'm gonna pay three bucks to have it delivered to my door, which is crazy. But people will do that.

Wedding Pricing Lessons That Transfer

Joel Miller 9:05

Yeah, it immediately makes me think that's gonna be another for a local print shop. If you can forge some relationships with some photographers in the area, offer them again something like package it all together. But what if you could give them a subscription and say, hey, look, you you get this amount of prints, plus you get access to the community. You're gonna be in with all these other photographers, we'll connect you also to some event, whatever, you know, add something in, do something unique, something different that maybe isn't done. All of a sudden that cost it gets hard, it gets more intangible because it's not just I'm buying a 49 cent print versus a 39 cent print. Right. I'm buying these things that that come with status with something else that I can't put my finger on. Yeah. If it's intangible, yeah.

Gary Pageau 9:51

Now, incidentally, just coincidentally, you have some experience in the wedding photography business. Was that something where you learned some of this stuff and were able to apply it? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Joel Miller 10:02

My wife and I ran Kate Miller Photography, that's her name, in Chicagoland for about six years, and we learned a couple of good lessons about pricing. I think one thing that comes to mind immediately is that from the first season to the second season, we doubled our prices or more than doubled them, and leads just dried up all of a sudden. And so we learned pretty fast like, oh, there's like a little bit of a ladder we probably have to climb.

Gary Pageau 10:28

Right. So like we can't just go where you can't go from first floor to 10th floor in one season.

Joel Miller 10:35

And so we didn't go back to where we were, but we priced it maybe half kind of in between those two things, and then it started coming in again. But then by the end of it, we were you know charging four times as much as that original increased price. And so that was all within the span of five or six years. So I think like how the lesson for us was we had to get in front of the right people, find the right audience, right, and and they had to talk to each other. Also, we had to hone our skills and be able to say here's why you want us at your event. Here's what you could, and we would tell people this you can find 50 other people in a big area like Chicago who can take excellent photos of you. But someone here's some of the differentiators about who we are. You may want to surround you all day. And then they have to love your style, but yeah.

Gary Pageau 11:26

Yeah, I mean that's because I think that's one of the challenges that people have establishing what the value is, right? You have to have a track record, you have to be able to demonstrate the value over time, and maybe you have to have reviews and you have to have feedback and the Google reviews and things like that, kind of build your case to say, yes, I am worth six times what the other photographers are, because these people say it is. I don't say it is necessarily all the time, but these people say it is. Right. Being able to social proof, right?

Joel Miller 11:59

That's what that is. It's I have a reputation, and I think that applies to any business, really. Like if you as you build your reputation, you you can the some of the value just comes from that existing. So and there's a little bit of a you might go through some slog years trying to figure out how to establish that and and step up that ladder so that you can charge more for the photo print, even because you've established yourself as valuable beyond just yeah, we print pictures cheap.

Gary Pageau 12:29

And even though you're not a big fan of niche marketing, there is a recognition of the fact that not everyone is your customer, right? And I think that's one of the things where we've kind of moved as a society from sort of this mass market mentality to very much a targeted mentality, right? So where, yeah, you're willing to say that the person who is only willing to spend $500 on a wedding, they're not my customer.

Joel Miller 12:57

Yeah, our favorite technique, sales technique, is trying to talk the client out of hiring us. And if you what's great is that then they end up selling themselves on you.

Gary Pageau 13:10

Right, okay.

The Problem With Failure Culture

Joel Miller 13:10

There's enough evidence there for them to be like, what? No, of course I need you. Yeah. Do you? Why? Why now? Why can't you do it cheaper? Why don't you use in our world sometimes it's like you could we can make you a custom website, but you can use Squarespace. Yeah, we don't just want a Squarespace template. Why? It might work for you because it takes them to figure out, right? Like figure out what what are they actually aiming for? Oh, and then I'm the one helping you realize what you need, and boom, a little bit more value. Yeah. You know, it's almost like reverse psychology on that. Yeah, it is. But at the end of the day, what you're doing is you're finding you're discovering the value that you can provide them because you're you're peeling away the layers and getting to the core thing, transformation that they're looking for. And that really applies differently across different industries and different products, but it can be applied at anything.

Gary Pageau 14:02

So the other thing that you like to talk about is failure, the sort of this the cult behavior around, especially in the tech community, around the idea that you gotta fail early, you gotta fail often, you gotta talk about it, you gotta, you know, write a book about it, you gotta have seminars, failure, failure, failure. That is the path of success. And you are not a believer in that. So can you explain why? I because I who says how to fail, yeah, right?

Joel Miller 14:32

Like failure to do, I think. Yeah, certainly. They do, they just end up that way. Like, are you willing to be a failure? Like, is that what you're planning on? I'm not. So I think it's just like a recipe for self-sabotage a little bit. And I don't think, like, conversely, that just the power of positive thinking is gonna save you, but I think how we frame our mindset matters. And so I don't know, some of the most obviously like successful people out there have like like I think of Walt Disney immediately. He was a school drop out, you know, his first business went bankrupt. But uh setbacks turn turn into success when we can learn from them. So I always like to say that I think instead of fail, this is not as pithy, but instead of fail early, fail often, we should think of it this way. We should seize our opportunities, learn from the setbacks, know when to move on, and try again. So perseverance is actually more important mindset-wise than than attempting to fail super early and often or fail forward or whatever you want to call it.

Gary Pageau 15:33

Well, some of the things though is this I think the I the concept is you should learn from failures and not be making repeated mistakes. Right, right. Right. I think that's what people are trying to say, but then it just turns into this cult of failure that you know, wow, I wasted $10 million of VC money on my failed pets dog dish startup. And here's what I learned. The first thing I learned was maybe, you know, don't do that.

Joel Miller 16:05

And I think we should obviously let's wear our lessons as a badge of honor, not the failures.

Humor That Builds Real Trust

Gary Pageau 16:10

What did you learn from it? Not the fact that you made a bad idea. Because if you think about it, I mean, again, I mean, like failure is I think sort of a maybe not the right word, right? Maybe it's lessons. Learn lessons early, learn lessons often. But it's kind of been positioned in this sort of this sort of and I don't know what happened, why that happened. I thought I I started noticing that as a trend in the business press. Like, you know, around I guess it was like when TED talks started, right? Where people got up there and they turned into giant confessionals, and it was just, oh my gosh. I just want to know what you learned from it. That's all.

Joel Miller 16:44

Hit us with it, hit us with that.

Gary Pageau 16:46

I think that's where we can all grow. We can all learn something new. So from talking to you, I can tell you you've got a sense of humor. How important is that to running a business as a tool in your business?

Joel Miller 17:01

Yeah. I mean, well, first off, I think if you're interested in forging partnerships with people you work with, instead of just having a transactional relationship, there's no better way to do that than having a sense of humor. Right. Sometimes you can even the the steeliest of exteriors can be cracked, I find. Right. Once you get to know someone. And also just having that rapport helps. But I also think that there's we've run across a ton of businesses who are in a serious space. Maybe that's like their lawyers or whatever, they do something with manufacturing and they just think this is serious. Sort of have this like I jokingly call it the mullet method. It's the mullet method. Yeah, mullet, yeah, like the haircut, right? Business in the front, party in the back. Maybe maybe your business needs a little bit of that. Like represent yourself professionally, be business as usual. But maybe you need a little more personality. Maybe you should inject some of that sense of humor into how you present yourself because it humanizes you.

Gary Pageau 18:01

It is interesting though, because there is almost again. Maybe I read too many business books and things, but there's almost too much party in the front in some cases. Well, that's what oh yeah.

Marketing Cannot Fix Broken Operations

Joel Miller 18:13

No, you're exactly right. That's that's uh and I think some that's why I like actually like the analogy, because there's uh some people need to they need a little haircut in the front. This is ridiculous, you know? Like what is going on? Like, I want I want to be able to like know we're in business together. So I think it has to be ordered, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, exactly. They need an exception of personality, other people maybe maybe not a joke.

Gary Pageau 18:42

I I totally get that because I think one of the challenges people run into when they run into a what they think is a marketing problem, it's actually a process or business problem. They're not doing what they're supposed to be doing well, but they think they can fix it with like Cracker Barrel was probably a good example of that, right? Where guess what, their menu wasn't wasn't very interesting anymore and their service sucked, but we're gonna fix it by changing the things people liked about Cracker Barrel and give it a new logo, and that's gonna do it, right? And so do you encounter a lot of that and in in with your people who reach out to you saying, hey, I've you know, I'm I'm I'm Bobby McButtcrack and I'm I'm I've got a plumbing business and I can't get any people. That's something and how do you approach that? Because you're a marketing agency, right?

Joel Miller 19:28

Bring it up. I mean, we'll bring it up. We'll say, look, we gotta get down to the fundamentals here and first principles with what you do. Like, because it is again the positioning, right? If we're gonna if I'm gonna work on marketing you, well, sales and marketing aren't two different things anymore, they all tie into each other, and so what we have to understand how you're how you're positioned in the marketplace doesn't matter if you can't follow through, right? You can't have that reputation, right? So you can't just make stuff up, right? Like a cracker barrel, right? Great, you redesigned the logo and you did a new interior, but did you go back and figure out how you can be the best cracker barrel restaurant you can be? What are we coming for? The food, hopefully. So yeah, we get into that all the time.

Gary Pageau 20:10

Because it is one of those things where I think people run into a certain point in the business. And I wish I could point figure out where it is, but there reaches a a lot of people reach a point in their business where they're I won't say they're embarrassed by what they do, but it's almost like they feel like they have to make a change, they gotta pivot. And you know, maybe they do, maybe they have to, but maybe it's just the fact you know they're getting bored, or they're just you don't realize that maybe their business has run into a certain stage in its life cycle, right? So that's when they pivot and they go, Oh my gosh, you know, we need a we need a new logo, we need a new slogan, we need to hire somebody to be on our TV ads to jazz them up or whatever. What do you think about that as a problem?

Joel Miller 20:55

Oh, it is one. I mean, we frequently tell our clients, let's not just change something for change's sake, right? Let's know again, why are we doing this? We gotta know, let's drill into this. We because some people are like, we need a new website because it's time. Okay. Is it fine for me? I'll charge you for it, but but yeah, is it gonna serve a new purpose for you, or what's the other one not doing for you? There's real answers to that question, but don't do it just because it's the next thing you're supposed to do.

Gary Pageau 21:25

Yeah. Or you've got someone on your staff who's just bored and they want to make a change, right? Which is usually what happens. I've run into several small businesses where the business is humming along, but then you get a staff member who wants to make a name for themselves or do something, and they say, Well, why aren't we doing this and why aren't we doing that? And it's well, because that's maybe not our business.

Joel Miller 21:49

Oh, yeah. I mean, a decision by committee can be kind of a painful thing sometimes. Yeah.

Gary Pageau 21:55

Not everyone has Which is kind of interesting because that is sort of a trend, this sort of management style where everyone has feedback, everyone has input. And that can be good, it can also be bad.

Joel Miller 22:08

Yes, it can lead to distractions. Maybe that's the tactful way to put it. Where again, something you start heading in directions that aren't actually serving who your business is and who you're trying to serve as a side project for someone. Yeah.

Customer Access And Smart AI Use

Gary Pageau 22:20

Because then sometimes I think bosses. Or leaders or general managers don't necessarily want to have to make decisions.

Joel Miller 22:29

That's true.

Gary Pageau 22:30

I mean, if the buck stops with you, and it's like, well, the group decided that we were gonna do this, you and then you get to that failure thing we were talking about. Right. Which is, you know, maybe maybe trust your instinct and not outsource your gut feeling. Someone has to be in charge at the end of the day.

Joel Miller 22:49

I'm pretty confident of that.

Gary Pageau 22:51

So we've talked about process, we've talked about marketing. Is there anything about customer relations that you're seeing that small businesses in general should be paying more attention to now? Because it seems like there's a lot more distractions, a lot more ways to reach customers. But like you said, that's where kind of the gold is building relationships with customers.

Joel Miller 23:17

Yeah, I think it's one being upfront about how you can actually be reached, right? Don't make it opaque. Anyone who these people who have no contact information available, you have no idea who to reach the people you're working with. Right. I mean, I think instantly like tying it back to I'm thinking of a print shop, you know, a local print shop, because we've talked about that. Like if you if no one can get in touch with someone at your store, that's gonna be probably bad for you. So make it easy and accessible. I would say that having responding quickly, I mean that's always been the case, but it's so huge. And then don't rely only on AI, maybe not at all. I don't know. Right. I might be the very obvious first step, but but it should be the easiest thing to off ramp from.

Gary Pageau 24:06

Right. I was talking to somebody in the industry who's very, very smart in what they do, and he we're talking about use the use of AI in business, you know, specifically the cloud co-work thing and what it could do. And he said, I think it's great for taking care of menial tasks so you can spend more time on relationships with people. That's he says, that's what I need my human spending time on, not answering emails and writing proposals and doing drafts of things. So I think that's a great idea. I mean, that's a great approach, probably the proper use of AI.

Joel Miller 24:43

Do the things that that people can do well, but it's repetitive or energy draining, or really a computer is great because it's good at remembering different things and it gets some of those details right, but it's never gonna have we wouldn't be having this conversation if we were both computers, or one of us was. It wouldn't be the same. And so I don't want to talk to a computer at the end of the day. I was on Adorama customer support the other day. I'm speaking of photo, some adjacent businesses, and I couldn't get out of the AI loop because it's interesting. Uh pretty sure that's where it was. Eventually I got on email, but like I that's just the worst.

Where To Learn More And Wrap

Gary Pageau 25:23

Oh, and so yeah, it's awful. I mean, talking to my bank is abysmal, right? Because I always had an issue with one of my bank accounts, and it was my business account, so that was a whole nother number and a whole nother phone tree. And I just couldn't ask a question. How do I deal with this issue? Can I play? And I literally said to the voice prompt thing on the phone, I need to talk to a human. That's literally what I said because I'm done with this because it kept repeating zero. It's like, I know that you don't need to tell me that. I need to talk to a human being.

Joel Miller 25:55

Oh, yeah. I mean, a knowledge-based answer is great, but when it doesn't answer your actual question, yeah, I need to talk to a person.

Gary Pageau 26:02

My time by providing me for information I can easily find elsewhere, right? Exactly. So I have humans do what humans do best.

Joel Miller 26:08

Yes, yep.

Gary Pageau 26:11

So listen, Joel, how can people find out more about what you and your leap day identical brother Alan do? Where can people go for more information?

Joel Miller 26:21

Yeah, they can visit us at theskyfloor.com. And there we have a little bit about us, who we are, who we serve. So it's a great place to sort of read some new marketing business thinking, you know, whatever we're kind of interested in.

Gary Pageau 26:34

Awesome. Well, thank you much. It's great to meet you. Best wishes, welcome to Michigan. Thank you and have a great day. Yeah, you do. Thanks, mean.

Erin Manning 26:45

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