This weekend I found myself in a bar here in Saskatoon with an old friend of mine – I’ll call her “J” – who told me she still hadn’t signed up for MyFrontSteps.
“I don’t understand what it’s for,” she complained.
“That’s my fault,” I said. “I’ve been at this job for almost a year and I still haven’t figured out how to explain it to people.”
“So explain it again,” she said.
“Alright,” I said.* “Let’s say you’re someone who provides a service, like, say…um…”
“I install insulation,” she offered.
“Sure, you’re an insulation installer. Now, as it happens, I’m looking for someone to insulate my attic. So what do I do?”
“You call me up and you say, ‘Hey, come insulate my attic.’”
“Okay, but in this alternate reality where you’re a professional insulation installer, we don’t know each other.”
“Huh. This alternate reality is sounding better all the time.”
“So what do I do? First I probably look in the yellow pages. But I can’t tell from the ads who’s reliable and who isn’t. So then I call up a couple friends and ask if they know anyone. But no-one does. So now what do I do?”
“You give up?”
“Well, in the old days, I would have. But now, I go to MyFrontSteps. I look under home renovations in Saskatoon and right there at the top of the list it says” – I pointed across the table at our friend K, who was absorbed in a separate conversation with her husband – “it says K trusts you.”
“She trusts me?”
“Why shouldn’t she? Aren’t you a good insulation installer?”
“I’m the best insulation installer.”
“So based on K’s recommendation, I call you up and we make a deal and you come over and you insulate my attic.”
“Good for me!”
“And good for me, because you’ve set your advertising fee at 5% of the total price.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m getting to it. So after I pay you I go to MyFrontSteps again to claim my rebate. You pay back 5% of what I paid you. Let’s say that works out to twenty bucks. That twenty bucks gets split right down the middle. I get half – and K gets half for recommending you.”
“Good for you, and good for K, but what do I get out of it?”
“Well, you got a new customer – me – and you’ve given K an incentive to keep on recommending you to her friends. And instead of throwing your advertising dollars down a deep dark well where you can never be sure you’re getting any benefit, you only pay the advertising fee after you’ve made the sale.”
“So it’s good for all three of us. But what does MyFrontSteps get out of it? How do you stay in business?”
“We take a 10% cut of the advertising fee. So it’s actually a 45-45-10 split – in this case I get nine bucks, K gets nine bucks, and MyFrontSteps gets two.”
“Huh.” J leaned back and took a sip of her beer. “I think I get it now.”
“Sure…and all I had to do was sit here in a bar and explain it to you in person. If I could just do that for everybody in North America, we’d be in business!”
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* Note: Conversation has been altered slightly for dramatic and/or promotional purposes.
