Building an Exclusive Event Empire

Is the future of work letting people do their best? Carlo Cisco is the CEO and Founder of SELECT, a private membership community that provides access to exclusive events, pricing, and perks at over 1.6 million premier partner locations. In this episode, we talk about Carlo’s experience working in Groupon, how to manage employees working from home, and why entrepreneurship is a crazy rollercoaster.

🎙️Talking Points:

(4:45) What was Groupon’s market strategy?

(13:10) The advantages of having a remote team

(16:16) How to manage employees working from home

(23:00) Challenges in entrepreneurship

(28:47) Is influencer marketing good for your business?

🔗Connect with Carlo:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlocisco/ 
• Website: https://www.meetselect.com/ 

🔗Connect with Tom Finn:

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/therealtomfinn
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/therealtomfinn/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@therealtomfinn
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealtomfinn/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/therealtomfinn
• Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/therealtomfinn‍
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@therealtomfinn

Tom Finn:

Hey there, thanks for tuning in to the Talent Empowerment Podcast. We're here to help you love your job. We're going to unpack the tools and tactics of successful humans to guide you toward your own career empowerment. I am your purpose driven little host, the real Tom Finn. And on the show today, we have my good friend, Carlo Cisco. Carlo, I'm thrilled to have you on today. Welcome my friend.

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

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Tom Finn:

Well, Carlo, if you don't know him, is a successful entrepreneur, investor, and business expert with experience in startups, leadership, growth, marketing, fundraising, technology, and of course, innovation. He is the CEO and founder of SELECT, a new generation concierge and community platform that offers exclusive access to events, pricing, perks at over 1.3 million, yes, million locations. Go ahead and check that out at meetselect.com. So let's start right there, Carlo. What led you to start SELECT?

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, it was a bit of a combination of experiences really. So when I was in college, that's when I started my first business, which was an event planning and promotion company and really kind of fell into that. Essentially I cared about where I went if I was gonna go out. So what some promoters noticed is that people that were outside of my friend group were beginning to follow where I was going to go. And they were like, hey, you know you can get paid for that. promoter. So we did this one off event brought over 600 people and after that was able to kind of start a company because every venue in Miami was calling me. So that was sort of my first experience of kind of curating experiences for people and then also working with hospitality owners and hospitality is definitely a unique industry and you know probably the other big piece of it and I had like a finance background in between so that ties in you know a bit with what we're doing with Select Now. Another big catalyst was when I was working with Groupon. So I was with Groupon back in 2010, 2011, as Groupon was becoming the fastest growing company in history by revenue. I actually think that's still the case, by the way, so people understand how significant of an event that was. There hasn't been a company yet that's grown faster. So I basically joined them and helped build it out in Japan, which was this incredible startup on steroid experience. employees to enter the market within about three, four months, we had 700. Similarly, revenue in Japan alone had gone from like low six figures to over 20 million a month. We had become the number three out of 48 markets. Obviously, US was number one. So it's a pretty successful market for Groupon as well as fast growing. Kind of my big takeaway from that experience was, whoa, there's a huge demand for a new way for merchants and customers to connect. felt like even back then while that model was working really well that it wasn't a good fit for premier brands or premier customers. So on the brand side, obviously, you've got a big one-time discount and then you're kicking a bunch of revenue back to Groupon on average 45% at that time. I don't know what, I'm sure things look different today. So it's a pretty big hit to the business. And then on the customer side, there's all these stipulations. It's a one-off thing. There's not a lot of quality control for the venues because especially at that period, they're trying to get new deals up every single day, which is really crazy. So I just felt like there was an opportunity to create something that was more tailored to premier customers, premier venues, where the customers actually apply and pay a fee, but then the value they're getting in return is potentially uncapped. You're getting these significant benefits, but they're not 50%. but maybe they're more like 15-30% typically, although they do go as high as 60% in our case. And then they're not a one-off, they're always and ongoing. So you don't have to go at certain times, they don't expire, it's unlimited use. You can go every single time if your favorite restaurant is on the program. So definitely Groupon was a big inspiration for creating

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Tom Finn:

Yeah, so that was a lot of really great detail around Groupon and understanding that. So let's just unpack that business model for those that really don't understand it in its most simple form. So talk to us about sort of what the basic market strategy is for Groupon, what they did. And we'll start there.

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, it's a great question. It's funny, it's actually a good question now because I feel like there's probably people listening that aren't familiar. And if it was five, six years ago, even that wouldn't be the case. And certainly 10 years ago, that wouldn't be the case. So basically what Groupon did and why it worked is that it was a great way for a business to get customers through the door that they knew were coming from a marketing initiative. So Groupon would set up deals with various merchants, restaurants, hotels, retailers, everything really. And they would typically be pretty strong one-off deals. They would be like 50% off perhaps. And then customers would buy those deals and then use them at the merchant. And the thought is, well, then they get exposure to that merchant and the merchant is so great and every merchant wants to believe this, right? That merchant's so great that they'll go back and pay full price, right? that's not often the case. And then of that deal amount, let's say it was 50 bucks for 100 bucks, just for sake of simplicity, and sometimes they were packages or whatever. Let's say it's 50 bucks to 100 bucks. Groupon was typically taking $25 of that $50, so what was actually going back to the merchant was 25 bucks. So that was the core model, and it absolutely exploded, because obviously it's a great deal for customers, and it actually, in some businesses, is a great deal for businesses, because it was a way to get a customer through the door and have a net revenue right away, which is a little unique in business. Mostly people are slapping around ads, trying to figure out. So there is something to the model for sure, but that's the core of it. That's how it worked.

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Tom Finn:

Yeah, I'll give you my experience with Groupon. We joined a local tennis club a few years ago for the summer and they had a Groupon summer special for two months. They gave you a heavily discounted sort of short term membership so that you could feel and experience a tennis club, pool, restaurant, the whole deal. And then ultimately, what do they want to do at the end of that? They want to transform you into a full member so that you can become a member of the local tennis club. So. It is a great way to be a feeder for new clients. I don't think we would have done it without Groupon because it gave us such a pricing advantage that we were able to kind of play around. And even if we didn't like it, it really wasn't a huge loss for us as the consumer. So totally get that business model. And so as you think about your Groupon experience and you go towards building your own model, what were the things that you wanted to change? So we've got Groupon on one side, we've got select, which is your business on the other. What were the things in the middle that you needed to change?

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, number one was making sure that it was going to always be great experiences. So you highlighted a good example, like a tennis club, that probably was a great experience, especially if you decided to continue, but there wasn't that sort of filtration with Groupon. So if you were using it regularly, it could be kind of hit or miss. And then also like the incentives are a little misaligned. So a lot of venues would try to restrict the times, restrict what you could with stipulations and they would also expire. And they eventually got, effectively got rid of the expiration where you could trade it in and get another one, but still like that individual deal expires. So a lot of people would forget to use them. They would get actually no value for what they paid. Or I think you could technically like bring it back for what you paid, but that's very different, right? You wouldn't wanna go back to that tennis club with what you paid for the group on and then pay the rest. So I felt like there was a quality problem in terms of the businesses, experiences, and things that were available. I wanted something that would connect people with places they actually want to go to. For example, on Select, we have Michelin star restaurants in every US city they're awarded, right? So like we've got the best of the best, we've got some of the highest grossing restaurants in the country. These are great experiences and you know, what they're looking for is a great repeat customer branded channel, which is what we're able to do because of the application process, the annual fee, all of that. Like people can't just become a member of select. You actually have to apply, you have to pay a fee, but then you don't get, you know, a one-time offer. You're getting unlimited use offers. So like on average, our members are redeeming about 3x the annual fee, but some members are redeeming 20x because it just depends on how much you use it. We don't restrict that. And that is we paint, you know, sort of versus the credit card space as well, which is maybe like the other variation of this, this model, at least like the largest application of a paid membership model for sure. You know, like everything's restricted, everything's, it's all those same stipulations and issues, but without the great deals that Groupon had. So this was created kind of right in the middle to like create a good system and ecosystem for everybody. And, and over time, it's basically proven. Obviously, the membership's grown, the partner network, as you mentioned, 1.3 million locations, that's grown. One of the key elements of it, although it's more of a business model element, was like I mentioned when I was a Groupon, literally every day we had hundreds of sales reps all over the place setting up new deals for each day. That's extremely inefficient. That's a huge resourcing problem. Our relationships are ongoing. They don't expire. And of course, merchants can cancel if they want to, less than 5% do each year. But that makes everything a lot more efficient too. Plus you have recurring revenue from the membership fee, so you're not as worried about, well, maybe people aren't buying in this time period or maybe this isn't compelling or whatever. It's just as a business also like a stronger model.

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Tom Finn:

Yeah, so one of the things that you mentioned was the credit card alignment. And you've gotten some media that says that you are the new AMEX for the next generation around what you do. Is that, do you actually offer merchant card services? Are you a credit card as well as being this incredible 1.3 million locations of partnerships? Is it both?

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, so great question. And at the time of that quote and many others, I think media was kind of like seeing the forest through the trees, if you will. So today we still have, of course, the membership model, digital membership. You don't need to get a line of credit to have access to that. You do need to apply. You do need to pay an annual fee. But you have unlimited access to everything. This year, we announced that we're doing a credit card in partnership with MasterCard. and Deserve and a few others. There's a lot of partners that go into the partner stack for a credit card. So we actually will have a select credit card. I actually have it today. We're in like employee testing essentially. So wait list is open. There was a bunch of initial press because the model is so different from what a credit card would typically do, right? They typically do these little one-off offers and try to game the signups so they get you in and then you don't cancel. these fees all the time. You know, we really kind of focused on customer value and improving people's lifestyles, and that's resulted in a lot of unique benefits that have thankfully garnered a lot of attention. So yes, that's an interesting expansion of the program that we'll be rolling out in the next couple of months here and that we finally got to announce. We were working on it for a solid year and a half or so before we were able to announce it, so.

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Tom Finn:

Yeah, that's wonderful. Congratulations on the progress of the business. It sounds like an exciting time to be a part of the team. So let's, let's talk about that a little bit. You've got a team, team of employees. Are you all based in one location or you spread out across the country or the world, how does that look for your organization?

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, we're pretty spread out. So I would say before the pandemic, because of the member events, it advantages us a little bit to have people spread out to some extent. It's good to have a few people in LA, in South Florida, some of the biggest markets, but we were still actually headquartered in New York, so that was the hub. So we had about 60% of the team in New York, 40% everywhere else, essentially. And of course, the pandemic changed all of that. Everyone had to be remote for several months at a minimum. For most employers, it was one, two years. And then they started bringing people back into the office. Our view of it is basically like, let's get the best people and let them do their best work wherever that is. So for example, I'm down in South Florida now. This is actually now the largest concentration of our full-time team. But there's no office here. We're all working remotely. and then we have access to like WeWork and other co-working spaces because we still have a WeWork office in New York. And there's only one or two employees that really need to go into that office, but we find that a lot of our employees there, or at least a handful, like occasionally use it because obviously in New York, everyone's got these small little apartments. It can kind of be good to get out and go somewhere where other people are working, where there's like a good environment for productivity. So that's how we view it. That said, we're trying to kind of hire people in hubs where possible, because while we don't feel the in-person component is necessary, I think it can be beneficial, even if it's as simple as, I don't know, meeting up with a coworker once a month and you grab a drink and you're just talking socially and perhaps business comes up, it kind of inevitably does. But I do think there's a benefit to that. But I think the future of work is really letting people do their best. and just making sure that they have the tools and location access to do that.

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Tom Finn:

So here's what people really think about and talk about behind closed doors that maybe others don't want to address. But this idea that people are taking naps in the middle of the day or walking their dogs for too long or spending too much time at kid drop off and pick up or just quite frankly, not being productive in the home environment. And look, let's be honest, there's absolutely abusers of this through the pandemic, after the pandemic, there are those people out there. So We're not going to say there aren't, but there's also a whole crop of people that are incredibly productive in a home space environment, even more productive than they would be commuting into the city in New York sitting on the freeway in Boston or LA, whatever it might be. So my question to you is how do we actually manage people in working from home environments to make sure that the productive ones get the promotions and the support and they stay with the company and the ones that are unproductive are held accountable.

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, it's a great question and it can be a hard thing to manage, certainly an adjustment for a lot of people and a lot of companies. I think the number one thing really comes back to company culture and mission. So we have everyone pretty strongly rallied around the mission of making our customers' lives better. That's literally what we have as the mission of the company is to continually improve our members' lives by improving the way businesses and customers connect. even when we have summer interns, for example, and we asked for their takeaways or whatever from the experience, number one, just about every time is like, wow, the whole team is really focused on our customers and they really wanna make things better for them. And that's a perfect takeaway, right? And I think that helps give everyone a guiding light kind of direction that helps make them more productive, helps them think about things in the right way. fit with productivity. Now the other thing that you've got to do, and look it's tough, everyone who's in like a hybrid or remote or whatever kind of work environment, even in the office by the way, people can certainly slack off in an office. We've all seen that. But what you kind of have to do is just like, figure out like the relative productivity of people and like make sure that you don't have someone, for example, and this may be a tip for people or a business and there's some sort of mark Cuban quote around this actually but like if you have more than one person that slacks off like it's pretty polluted for the whole organization you've actually got to be really careful of that because it will eventually permeate the organization and it will encourage others to slack off to whatever extent. Because if you're going to tolerate it from one person or two people, then you're probably going to tolerate it from others. So you can't really do that. And look, it's hard. based on different roles, right? Like, you know, engineering, you have like a decent idea of like what's required to do something. So there's a little bit of a framework there. Sales, you know, like you have a pretty good, at least in our case, it's mostly commission oriented. So like someone's comp correlates with their performance that helps make sure someone's motivated to perform no matter what environment that they're in. You know, also like everything on the customer service, the air side for us, which is one of our larger teams, like it's all live chat, we see all the conversations. So we're able to know if someone's slacking off or not, but there's always going to be areas of the business where it can be harder to tell. And you just kind of got to go with gut instinct, I guess, to a certain extent and not be too lenient. This whole pandemic cycle, we didn't have to fire anyone for financial reasons. fired people for performance reasons. You know, so like you have to not be afraid to do that and like counter to people slacking off if people see that if other people slack off they get canned, they're a little less likely to slack off, right?

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Tom Finn:

Yeah, I'm proud of you. I feel like I should be giving you a round of applause. And, uh, and, and the world should be giving you a round of applause. Look, that is the epitome of holding people accountable. Um, people want the freedom and employees want the freedom to do their work the way that they want to do their work in the environment in which they want to do it. And that's totally cool. That is the best version of society where we can do that for our employees. The underbelly of that, which all CEOs struggle with is very simple. What do I do when people don't do their job and you have to hold them accountable? You have to. And if that means a reduction in force, if that means individually picking people off, um, that are not being productive and are taking advantage of the system. I agree with that wholeheartedly. Um, it's an easy one for me.

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, it's a it's an easy one to know it can be hard to do, but you just have to do it. There's really no other option. It's going to hurt your company, your customers. You know, a lot of our employees are stakeholders in select. So like one employee not doing their job is hurting the entire team is the way I view it. And, you know, I'm saying it all I don't do it perfectly. I probably give people more time than they should have a lot of the time.

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Tom Finn:

We all do. Yeah, we all do, of course.

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Carlo Cisco:

It's hard, right? Because you want to give them like every last, you know possibility but But but you can't do that, you know Like it can be hard to know a hundred percent if someone's going to be a perfect fit during the interview process because some people just Interview really well. They'll just turn it on and they'll crush all the interviews doesn't matter if you do two or twenty You know like they'll hit it and then they get in and they're you know, it doesn't work But but you know typically within a couple weeks. We more or less know if something's going to work However, we've also seen some of our most successful employees be a bit more of a build, but there was never like a negative view. It was just how positive is this going to be and then it becomes super positive. So there's a lot of fine lines to toe, but the biggest one is not to be afraid to take action because if you don't, it's hurting your whole company and it's going to make it much harder to build like a hardworking culture. And we're probably starting to gear a little bit too hardworking on the hardworking side, much prefer that to the opposite for sure.

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Tom Finn:

Yeah, I've got a favorite phrase of mine that goes something like this, Carlo. I'd rather rain in a stallion than kick a donkey in the ass.

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Carlo Cisco:

That's a great way of looking at it, yeah.

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Tom Finn:

And look, it's just easier to manage, right? When you have hardworking, driven people that are mission driven, they're behind your purpose, they believe what you believe, and as a group you're rowing in the same direction, that's a wonderful place to be, and it's much easier to manage. Hey, guys, need you to take a day off, need you to take a vacation, need you to dial it back, we don't need emails at midnight and around, or sending Slack messages or whatever it is, right? That's a lot easier than, hey, haven't heard from you in a couple of days. You know, you're behind on all your targets, everything, which, which is much harder to manage over, over time. 

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Carlo Cisco:

Oh, for sure.

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Tom Finn:

So, you've been doing this, um, since 2014 outside of the pandemic, what's been the biggest struggle for your business?

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, that's a great question. And honestly, like, and this is something to realize about entrepreneurship, I guess, for listeners is like, you're going to get hit with a million challenges all the time. You know, like you can have, it's a crazy roller coaster. You can have like your best day and your worst day inside of the same day. You know, there's just a lot. And then especially if you're doing, you know, a lot of people think like a startup is fun. startup that has institutional investors, that's a lot of responsibility and high expectations, right? Like if you're growing 10% a year, people don't like that. They need to like really trust you if you're doing that frankly at all, in order to believe that the business is going to ultimately do well. So there's gonna be a huge number of challenges. I would say, challenges for us and the pandemic was definitely one, but we were able to handle that pretty well. Our renewal rate actually went up during the pandemic, which was pretty cool. But another one was actually in our early days of rolling out the membership, you could link the membership card with a credit or debit card and use the membership card to pay. So you now have this like black metal membership card. That was cool and that was like easy from a marketing perspective essentially. But then I forget exactly when it was, maybe around 2017 or whatever, like the chip and pin became a lot more adopted. And if you don't want to be in a legal gray area, you're not going to be able that anymore, right? So you had a bunch of companies that had lots of funding and great revenue, you know, that basically disappeared. We stayed, you know, we just sort of doubled down on the benefits. We had to make the marketing language a little bit more boring, right? We weren't like, you know, connect any card with this black card and unlock all this stuff. It was more of this is a membership that unlocks all this stuff, right? Kind of like we intro'd it today. You know, still a great value prop, maybe slightly less exciting. And then do our own credit card and now we're able to provide both options as a sort of expansion of the business. I would say that was probably the other big one because you don't necessarily think about it if you haven't run a business before, but if anything makes your message less exciting and that's ultimately going to make it more expensive to market. So your whole business unit economics change. So like essentially after that happened we had a period where we were basically growing 10% a year instead of what we were doing before then which was about a hundred and fifty percent Per year even excluding the first year because that's everyone's first year is nothing you're kicking the tires So so that is a big, you know adjustment but it did make us I guess actually probably get even better at delivering for our customers because the message was a little more boring We needed to make sure that we kept more of those people and we needed to make sure that they told other people because of how great their experiences were, not just because they felt cool, you know, having this upgraded version of their card.

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Tom Finn:

What percentage of your business is word to mouth and what percentage do you think is really core marketing?

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, I mean, transparently, it's mostly marketing. I think member referrals are probably doing about 15% or so, which is a healthy number. But if you're going to grow, you've got to market. And we just try to do it in a native of a way possible. So I would say probably 15% is referrals. Probably another 10% or so is going to be partnerships, so partnering with different organizations, newsletters, as an engaged group of people that might benefit from membership. And then most of the rest of it is marketing. And we essentially just try to make that feel as native as possible. For example, one of our big strategies has been, and you still see us do this because it works, advertising articles about Select. So that feels a bit more native because even though it's an ad, it's a piece about us that we didn't write. So people feel like they're learning about a company, with an ad and of course like the more modern version of that that's absolutely exploded in the last call it one two years is user generated content so if you're on tik-tok or Instagram or whatever a lot of ads you're going to see now aren't gonna look like a traditional ad they're going to be someone talking about a product also pretty effective because it's more native and the best ones are authentic too. Like people can sense if something scripted in the same way now that like a traditional ad that might have worked five years ago where it's like here's this cool sexy thing or whatever now people scroll through it. So you know you've always got to keep on top of things and make you know the normal advertising feel native and then just build the sort of system where people do then obviously that really helps the ecosystem grow.

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Tom Finn:

I love the way you said that. I kind of want to double click on this idea of being native and, uh, ask you some, some detailed questions here. So are you, are you looking at the social media platforms and are you looking at influencers to do that work for you or are you, are you looking for regular members, um, that are excited about your product to do that, that work for you, how do you view that space specifically?

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, it's a bit of both, I guess. So like the strategy where we have a little more experience is more like the media companies doing it basically. So if there's a great write-up about Select, we're gonna throw ad budget behind that. How much will depend on how many people it signs up because they're able to track all of that. And you can do that with organic posts, but also for business owners or marketers who are listening, you can do it with sponsored posts too. It still works. It might not work as well, on what the site looks like, but that can work. That can work a bit too. But then as we've gotten now more, and this is more recent for us, call it last few months, into the true sort of UGC kind of content, mostly with creators. Where we've seen members play a critical role is like, especially if you're advertising on social platforms, people can interact, right? So people will share their experience as a member, typically positive. So the fact that you've got real people who are real paying members saying positive things can actually really amplify your ads, and that's true of any ad format actually. Because it kind of reinforces for people that this is something to trust, this is something that other people are using, this is something that people are having a good experience with. So I think that's where members come in. And then on the creator side, we're basically getting a bit more bust in this area, but historically it's basically been if someone's inbound to us, which is great because it's more authentic, right? Like that means they're more likely to, you know, actually use the product, want the product, etc. And we've seen that, you know, working with influencers over the years because we certainly did that in the early days as well as you have some people where, you know, they're not just posting about it once, they post about it every time they use it and maybe that's every week, you know? So that's not the normal case, but it can certainly happen. we have like we just recently automated the application processes, you know, for both ambassadors and what we call affiliates, which would be like a newsletter, a community or some sort of other group. And that helps attract authentic interest. And then you just sort of measure and gauge if that interest is a fit. And then when it comes all the way down to the content, you know, You know, it's good to have several pieces of content, several different people. And then all of the platforms are pretty good at this at this point. They're going to figure out what's converting people, what's engaging to people, and they're going to play that content more. And then what I would say is that, you know, in this new UGC world, probably the content demands are up. So you're certainly going to have to go out there and recruit creators and things of that nature. But it's good to focus. in the case where you want video content, don't find the most expensive person with the largest reach. You're gonna advertise it anyway. You're gonna have the reach. Find someone who's really good at creating content or who really authentically loves your brand and your product or your service, or ideally both. That's certainly the ideal.

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Tom Finn:

Yeah. For those of you listening into this, um, Carlos doing a great job of describing, uh, one side of the marketing game that he has to play. Uh, but the other side of the marketing game is equally important or perhaps even more important and we haven't even touched on it yet, and that is being able to actually get the deals that you need with the vendor partners and being able to put together contracts with, uh, brands. that are premium brands that typically don't want to give away discounts because it dilutes their brand image. So how do you build the network side of all of these partners without diluting a premium brand's image?

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, that's a great question. It all comes back to the ecosystem. Like we turn away members, people will ask or joke about that, probably everyone gets approved. That's not true. Thousands, probably over 10,000 people have been not approved for Select. And we need to do that not because we want to be exclusionary, but because we need the ecosystem to function in a certain way. So what's proven out over time, at least with the hospitality to track it a little more closely is even with the incentive included, like our average check is typically higher than the average of the business normally. Why? Because most access to that business is not gated in any way, shape or form, whereas access to select is gated. You have to apply, you have to pay a fee, you have to do these kinds of things enough that fee is worth it and will be valuable to you from an ROI perspective. you know, businesses to be partners, we were really kind of selling that as a vision. We didn't have data to back that up, right? We're like, this is what we think will happen because the model is structured in this way. And thankfully, there were enough businesses, you know, including some who had never done any sort of external offer before because they don't need to. And in many cases, to your point, it would actually be bad for them to, especially in the case of a... restaurant if you're a hot restaurant. You know, but we were able to get them to kind of buy into that vision and then it sort of proved itself out over time and then eventually there's kind of like There's a little bit of a herd mentality in every industry. So when people see brands that they view as their competitive set or their tier of brand, that makes them a lot more inclined to give something a shot. And then when you're able to back that up with data, that makes that even stronger. And then we're also typically not charging these merchants. Well, actually, we're never charging them. In some cases, we get affiliate back, but that's never a priority. the best possible benefit for the member. And there is certainly an education process to it. For example, a lot of restaurants hate the idea of a discount, they'll do a round of drinks. Okay, that's great, but that's not as likely to increase the spend, right? Like we had one restaurant actually that was giving you, I think, like a free app, a free round of drinks, and something free, a dessert. And they're like, why aren't people spending more? I was like, what are they gonna buy? What are they supposed to buy? You're giving them everything, aside from the entrees. essentially for free. What do you expect them to do versus a discount where brands might not like it, but that aligns all incentives because the more they spend, the more they get out of their membership. So it's always going to be more likely to encourage spend to actually, especially if it's an elevated discount, which with some brands don't believe, but it's always the case when it comes down to the numbers. So there's definitely an education component to it, but it's mostly running the, ecosystem while maintaining a certain level of brand, right? Like we mentioned the member side. We also turn away, I would say at least half of the inbound partnership increase that we see, right? You know, for the exact same reason, like we need all of these experiences to be quality. We do like to have a mixture, you know, a lot of people think maybe everything's high-end. We don't want that. We actually want, we have a place down the road from me that's a very casual place, but it's exceptional, right? reflect that. So I was actually really happy to see that our team unearthed that place because it wouldn't maybe be the typical place someone think of as a select restaurant but it's really good and because of that you know it sees a good number of people from the program. So it's definitely you know it's a tightrope to walk but we've got a pretty good command of it now and we know what... makes everything work and we've been able to back it up with data which helps make it a little easier to get some of these bigger brands too.

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Tom Finn:

Yeah. Thank you for that explanation. That's super helpful. I, it begs the question, are all of Carlo's favorite restaurants on the network? So I feel like you're going to show up go, this is a great restaurant. I gotta have it, right?

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Carlo Cisco:

I would say a good number of them are. It's probably more a product of lack of time, to be honest. Like I know that our network is curated. So even if someone, I'm not in New York anymore, but if someone's like, what's a good place to go in this area, I actually will often jump to Select just because I know that it's curated. Is Select gonna have everything? No, there's no way, right? Because we've got to set up these individual partnerships. to have everything, but generally if I do really like a place, I'll absolutely mention to our team that we should probably have it in the event that it's not a select place, right? And the same is true as if members mention it too. Those are higher priority for us to bring on to the program, but I would say 90% plus of my favorite places probably are on select.

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Tom Finn:

Yeah, I would, I would hope so. If you believe in the brand and you believe in the curation process, I imagine you've got your favorite stuff on there. Well, Carlo, this has been a fantastic conversation for those of you listening in, we'll put all of the details here in the show notes, certainly head over to meetselect.com, check out the application process, check out if it might be a good option for you. And Carlo, if people wanted to get in touch with you, how would they do that?

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, I'm just my name on every social platform. So, Carlo Cisco, keep it easy.

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Tom Finn:

Yeah, beautiful. We'll put that in the show notes as well. Um, thank you for the discussion today. I learned a ton. I know everybody else did too. Appreciate you being on.

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Carlo Cisco:

Yeah, thank you again so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.

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Tom Finn:

And thank you for tuning into the Talent Empowerment podcast. We hope you've unpacked a few tips and tricks to love your job and get ahead. We'll dive back into all things, career and happiness on the next episode. We'll see you then.