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In this episode, we’ll introduce you to Kyle Dennis, EAG’s Director of Research & Development and the newest member of the EAG team. Kyle comes to EAG with its recent acquisition of Useagility, a design research and strategy firm focused on human-centered interfaces and experiences.
Kyle talks with EAG chief marketing officer Jeff Randolph about his approach to helping client companies understand their customers through innovative, on-the-ground research. “People are complicated,” Kyle says, and shares some of his methods to tap into their attitudes and behavior. Also, find out what Kyle drives to the office, what arcade game he slays, and what movies he’ll never watch.
Transcript
Jeff Randolph:
Welcome to the Small Business Miracles Podcast. I’m Jeff Randolph. This small business podcast is brought to you by EAG Advertising & Marketing. We talk about marketing on this podcast, especially for entrepreneurs and business owners, but today is a little special.
Jeff Randolph:
We’re jumping right into the featured interview because today, we’re announcing something big. We’ve acquired Useagility, and that gives us the ability to expand our services and research, and deliver enhanced consumer insights, and even better user experiences. You want to know what that means for your business? Well, we’re talking to EAG’s new director of research and development, Kyle Dennis. Let’s get right to it.
Jeff Randolph:
On this segment of the show, I am going to welcome Kyle Dennis. Kyle, welcome to the podcast.
Kyle Dennis:
Thank you. It’s good to be here.
Jeff Randolph:
Excellent. You are the director of research and development here at EAG, and so that is a brand-new thing for us after Useagility was acquired by us.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
So, hey, welcome. We’ve brought you in. We’ve brought you into the fold now.
Kyle Dennis:
I’m really glad to be here. You all immediately struck me, the first time we met, as like people that I thought kindly of-
Jeff Randolph:
Hey, that’s-
Kyle Dennis:
… right away, right away.
Jeff Randolph:
… all we could ever hope for.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s like best-case scenario for it. Just to give a little bit of background and let you talk about some of the services, and what this means for clients, and the kinds of work you do really so that we can get a better handle on it, you have helped some amazing brands so far like AMC Theatres, American Century, and Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, and Hallmark, and so many big names in Kansas City and beyond.
Jeff Randolph:
It’s about user experience. It’s competitor analysis. It’s focus groups and guerrilla research. I thought, let’s talk about what it means and the kind of pieces that you do. What is it you’d say you do here? That’s the question.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
Talk to me about usability evaluation. What are the kinds of things that we’re doing to help companies in usability evaluation?
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah. Well, usability evaluations is a good place to start. In many ways, that’s just naturally watching, observing, in a variety of ways, people using products, services, et cetera, in sort of like an uninterrupted … to the best of our ability.
Jeff Randolph:
Right.
Kyle Dennis:
But also testing out specific pressure points and trying to see if we can prove someone’s hypothesis true. I think that that’s where all usability tests start is with a hypothesis. Some business person somewhere has an idea that a product is broken or something isn’t working, that it is not usable. Those ideas that something is not usable have to be proven, you know?
Jeff Randolph:
Mm-hmm.
Kyle Dennis:
So the hypothesis starts with, “Hey, we think there’s some friction,” and then the usability test either attempts to prove or disprove that true.
Jeff Randolph:
Just to drive that home and say, okay, if a company is doing this, the thing they’re trying to do is make their product more attractive to the customer, the person who is buying that kind of thing, right? So if we come up with a hypothesis that we want to test and we say, “This is what we’re trying to figure out,” and we make that assumption, we prove that assumption right, or wrong, or whatever, the ultimate goals of that is I want a product that people truly care about, that they truly want.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, yeah. The thing that I tell people is that my job, when I go to do research anywhere, is that my job is to help build a product that makes people’s lives better and their jobs easier.
Jeff Randolph:
Well, summed that up real nicely.
Kyle Dennis:
It’s that simple.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s a good way to go.
Kyle Dennis:
Excuse me. Yeah, when I do an interview with somebody, that’s one of the first things that I say is that I just say, “Hey, my name is Kyle. I work at a company called EAG Advertising & Marketing. I’m here to listen to what you have to say, and then help the team at X client build something that makes your life better and your job easier.”
Jeff Randolph:
Man, that’s as much as … It’s everything you could ever hope for. I think we get that. Let’s see. When you talk about your career, and what you do, and all of that kind of thing to somebody at a party or you’re out doing that, you’re talking about what you do, meeting somebody for the first time, is there a project you use as an example of like, “Yeah, here’s the kind of cool stuff I get to do”?
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah. My favorite project, I would say, in my entire career has been a project I worked on for H&R Block that was related to … During COVID, when they had the transition to everyone having to do their taxes remotely, naturally they were thrown like everybody else, so they invented and created a lot of innovation and drove a lot of traffic to switch the way that taxes were getting done.
Kyle Dennis:
My favorite project that I’ve ever worked on was actually just like literally sitting and watching people in retail tax offices. I know it sounds exceptionally boring-
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, yeah. But …
Kyle Dennis:
But just watching them complete their taxes, watching them complete other people’s taxes. Going, like setting up scenarios with them where I would sit down and take the point of view of the person getting their taxes done with fake information, and sit there recording a screen. Setting up a couple of Go Pros so I could do a full ergonomic analysis of the space, and how long people were lingering, and where their hands were placed, and all of these things. Details, just details.
Kyle Dennis:
My favorite projects are ones in which no one ever says like, “Oh, that detail’s too small.” My favorite project is the ones where someone says, “Go get every detail you can.”
Jeff Randolph:
Wow, yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
Truth’s in the details.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
And watching people, listening to them, experiencing their kind of like audiological reality. Have you ever gotten your taxes done in an H&R Block office?
Jeff Randolph:
Yes.
Kyle Dennis:
With 10 people sitting around you? You can hear the person next to you. You can hear the person … You can hear everything. You can hear a person screaming because it costs too much money. The door, “Ding, ding, ding.” Like all of those things, you don’t even think about them, but when you start documenting them-
Jeff Randolph:
It’s part of the experience, yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
It is.
Jeff Randolph:
It’s part of … And which reflects on the brand and reflects on whether or not they come back next year.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
Honestly, yeah, I don’t know if I’m even allowed to say this or whatever, but I saw some news article recent about how H&R Block recently put in a sensory room for its employees, a quiet room where people could go and decompress. That’s just, it’s an accessibility accommodation, but what’s good for someone who needs an accommodation is good for everyone. That’s universal design. I’m sure you guys have talked about that.
Jeff Randolph:
Right, right.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, so I mean that’s something that happened recently. Weirdly, that was one of the things I recommended to them in terms of going through and watching people do their taxes-
Jeff Randolph:
Wow.
Kyle Dennis:
… is that there should be like a way to do it silently or like a way to say, “Hey, look. All these audiological things bother me, so I need a different kind of quiet customer experience,” et cetera. I don’t know.
Kyle Dennis:
Again, one of the things about my research that I think is … I don’t want to ramble too much, but one of the things about my research that I think is interesting is that I often don’t know the outcome. I will often … A lot of the stuff we’ve talked about, like participatory design and heuristic evaluations, they’re so early on, like the manifestos, and the planning, and those types of things.
Kyle Dennis:
It’s like I set people off to go on their journey, and ideally, I’ve set a good course for them or I’ve helped them chart a good course. Then after that, they make decisions and the reality of user experience design starts to seep through organizations.
Kyle Dennis:
Then people start to say, “Okay. Let’s listen authentically to our customer.” The more you do that, just it’s a natural kind of bend towards … You’re going to arc towards a better relationship with your customer, a more profitable relationship with your customer.
Jeff Randolph:
Gotcha.
Kyle Dennis:
You’re going to design products and services that are exactly as they want, the closer you can listen, and observe, and … H&R Block, the thing that was interesting was that it was employees too. Because think about that. It’s a person’s experience, but what’s really being designed is a piece of software that an employee’s using.
Jeff Randolph:
Yes.
Kyle Dennis:
Right?
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah. Because services marketing, you can’t separate the creation and delivery of that product. It is together in one thing, and so you have to account for the interaction and the delivery of that. If it’s being run from an online software piece, you can’t separate them. They have to be there together.
Kyle Dennis:
It’s so physical because you have the actual physical reality of a retail environment.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
I know.
Jeff Randolph:
The nature of services marketing.
Kyle Dennis:
I think that stuff is awesome because it’s like I can look at somebody at H&R Block that’s an executive that’s making a ton of money. They’re doing good for themselves, but it’s like you can sit in meetings all day long thinking about how you think it’s going to go. But when your customer’s mad, and they’re not getting enough money back, and the person that has to deal with them is definitionally your lowest paid worker at the front desk of a retail environment, hearing what those people experience in their lives, and really authentically trying to design something that, like I said, makes their job easier.
Kyle Dennis:
If I can look at that person and I can say, “Look, I’m here to listen to what you have to say, and then I promise you from the bottom of my heart, I’m about to go back into this room and I’m going to advocate for you until the end.” Not for … I mean, the money will come, right?
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
But advocacy for the user is the most important thing to me.
Jeff Randolph:
I love that example. That is a very good example. Continue to use that as many times as you need to.
Kyle Dennis:
Great, yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
Let’s talk about customer discovery where we’re talking to people and getting their … What kinds of things? Because it’s focus groups, it’s user interviews, it’s getting the customer point of view. Tell me more about what’s involved in that.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah. That starts with just if you want to listen to people. You got to listen to what people say and then sometimes, you do something different. You don’t do what they say, so these are not so simple as get a bunch of customers in a room, have us tell them what they want. That is an unnatural sort of exercise. You don’t want to necessarily … You don’t want your customer telling you what to do all the time.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah. The more artificial of an environment you make it, the more that impacts the results. Is that what we’re saying?
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah. There’s like an oft quoted thing, and honestly, I feel bad that I don’t know who it is that initially said this, but it’s that if Henry Ford would have asked customers what they wanted, the customers would have told him, “Build faster horses.”
Jeff Randolph:
Right. Exactly, exactly.
Kyle Dennis:
The idea is, yeah, you want to listen to your customer, but you also want to observe them. You want to be able to make decisions about what’s best for them by empathizing deeply with them and then trying to design products and services that will meet them where they’re at.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
Right? That’s the core of marketing, and advertising, and all those, that you’re trying to meet a person right where they’re at and influence them to become a customer, or adopt a brand, or something like that.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, that’s the whole thing. The whole thing about why we do customer discovery is that we just start with the question with any client is, “What do you know about your customers?” Sometimes, what we think we know is not true. Sometimes, what we definitely know that we know isn’t helpful.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah, yeah, no. I believe that strongly.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
There a are a lot of times where we run into business owners, and we’re talking to business owners about their marketing, and their strategic direction, and where they want to go, and they say, “Well, my customers do blank,” and you go, “Should we challenge you on that?” Like, “Is there more we can know about that? How do we know that? Is it valid as something that we’re basing a lot of investment on?”
Jeff Randolph:
I mean, you’re putting all of that marketing power into whether or not someone has accurately defined what it is that they want.
Kyle Dennis:
Right. And they may well be right.
Jeff Randolph:
Right, sure.
Kyle Dennis:
But if you think about yourself as a human being, you don’t want one thing. People are multifaceted. They want different things, and nobody wants the exact same experience all the time.
Jeff Randolph:
Sure.
Kyle Dennis:
And people are complicated, and the reasons that we think people make decisions are often not the reasons that they make decisions.
Jeff Randolph:
Yes, yes.
Kyle Dennis:
And that’s the heart of what I do is try to figure out, get to the core, the real honesty of where a person can’t hide anymore. You asked me before what my job is, and the joke that I always tell is that my daughter says my job is listening to people and then selling their secrets to other people. That’s what my daughter says my-
Jeff Randolph:
She’s really insightful. That is, you’ve developed a really insightful child.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but she thinks that my job is basically talking to people, and she understands that 100% of my job is meeting people exactly where they’re at and understanding that while I might be an expert in a process, I’m not an expert in any industry. I am not an expert in any client’s business. I’m only an expert in a process that, hopefully, reveals a certain truth to them that ends up being profitable.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah, and if that truth is actionable, if we can take data from what we’ve uncovered and make that work for us by changing something, that’s what we’re after.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jeff Randolph:
The Henry Ford quote that I remember is the, “You can have the Model T in any color you want, as long as it’s black.”
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
There was no choice. There’s no choice in that.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
Well, let’s get into the solution manifesto thing, because this is a process that you undergo to get there. Tell us what that is.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, so I believe that you should think and plan before you do. Oftentimes, I’ve seen all these different projects across the work that I’ve done with different clients, and everybody’s ready to go. A lot of times, by the time they’ve hired a third party or somebody else, it’s on fire already. I’ve just seen a lot of people make a lot of decisions that weren’t advisable for the sake of expediency and for the sake of just kicking a can down the road.
Kyle Dennis:
The idea of a solution manifesto arises from the idea of, basically, an agile work plan. The idea that before you construct a piece a software, you best have yourself some very good Word documents that indicate exactly what that software is going to do, exactly what it’s going to look like, exactly what has to be built, exactly what the technical requirements are so that you basically get all the possible explosions or all these things that could go wrong, landmines along the way.
Kyle Dennis:
The idea is to plan those out in advance because I think that you can do a lot more planning in four to six weeks on a project than you can do replanning a project while it’s happening.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, true, true. For sure.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
It’s the more work you put into it in preparation, the more that you’re sure that when you get done with it, it met the need, that it meets the expectation.
Kyle Dennis:
We don’t … My wife is a full-stack software engineer, so I spend a lot of time in my house thinking about like, “What does my wife need to do her job?”
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
Right? And that’s where a lot of this arrives from too, is that I think about and value the time of a person who’s technically creating software, a software developer. They don’t have time to bounce back to creative and go, “Oh, well, I’m going to double my time on everything and then pass that along to the client.” Right?
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
So I just deeply, deeply believe in this idea of planning everything upfront, and then the execution is … It’s not simple, but at least it’s the kind of thing where you don’t do redundant work.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s a good … And have a need later to change direction and add budget.
Kyle Dennis:
Right. Yeah, and ask the questions upfront. Ask people, “Are you sure? Can we validate this? Do we need to go …” When you start to do that, you start to find that sometimes, you don’t have alignment within organizations. Then if an organization is not internally aligned on the thing they’re about to build, it’s going to cause problems later.
Jeff Randolph:
I don’t know, Kyle. All this seems very reasonable to me.
Kyle Dennis:
I know, I know. Just to ask questions first.
Jeff Randolph:
Ask questions first. Have it all planned out so that you don’t start down a production route or something and need more information, or it doesn’t match what your problem was, or …
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah. All of that. It really makes a whole lot of sense. All right. One of the last kind of structure areas we’ll talk about is participatory design.
Kyle Dennis:
Great.
Jeff Randolph:
Human-centered design services for when you’re ready to build something new. Tell me about that.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah. There is a lot of thinking that goes into designing any digital product, service, software, website, whatever it might be. The thing that I always try to tell people is that shockingly, to start with, if you think about most people who are user experience designers, they’re good. They have an eye. They know what they’re doing, but you don’t want them to be just telling you what to do, right?
Jeff Randolph:
Right.
Kyle Dennis:
I believe that they’re … Like in every organization, the knowledge to do whatever that organization needs to do is locked within the people that work there, but they’ve worked there too long. They’re burned out.
Jeff Randolph:
Close to it, yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
They’ve already been told the project wasn’t going to work. They’ve already gotten shut down enough times. They’ve already seen enough turnover on their team, right?
Jeff Randolph:
Mm-hmm.
Kyle Dennis:
A variety of reasons. Or maybe they’re on the side of they were the one that their idea was what the business advanced and maybe it failed, and maybe they’re just hesitant to do it again. They’re reticent.
Kyle Dennis:
One of the things I care about participatory design is that I want to give people … get their hands dirty. I want them to start designing. I want them to literally draw what their website will look like, even if it’s bad. I want them to be involved in up-down votes. I want them to be engaged with their peers to uncover misalignments very early as opposed to later.
Kyle Dennis:
You can’t solve a misalignment later if there’s two parts of a business that aren’t aligned on what the product’s going to do, but you can solve the problem early,
Jeff Randolph:
You can solve the problem early and at a much lower cost than if you tried to do all of that later on.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
Sure.
Kyle Dennis:
It’s shocking that if you just … I mean, this is just a very simple example, but it’s like if you take three or four people on a marketing team somewhere and they’re trying to get us to design a website for them, and you say, “Okay. Well, here’s some Sharpies,” or, “Here’s a digital tool. Let’s start piecing it together and just see what you think.”
Kyle Dennis:
People, at first, are always like, “Oh, I can’t draw,” and it’s like, yeah, but you can draw stick figures. You can draw a storyboard. You can fill in five or six pieces of a storyboard and talk about a customer journey. You can tell me things that I would never know and never be able to understand by posting a couple of sticky notes, doing it in a low-risk, don’t be afraid to be wrong kind of situation.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, sure, sure, sure.
Kyle Dennis:
In the participatory design, I’m the person always upfront that’s like, “I don’t know anything, so I’m just going to be wrong first,” so I try to be the first person to … I’m rushing towards something that our audience can react to, so the quickest I can make a prototype, the better. The better I can give them something to look at, to use-
Jeff Randolph:
To react to, yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
Even if it’s fake. Even if it’s in no way real, the faster I can do that, the more authentic kind of outcomes I think I get.
Jeff Randolph:
I like the very concept of that where we invest in our employees. We hire the right people, and we get in there, but the day-to-day grind of any business is it takes a toll. You went down a path at one point, and it failed for whatever reason, and you …
Jeff Randolph:
Products fail and services fail for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not it was a good product or good concept. So understanding how do we unlock all of that potential, all of that knowledge, all of the resources within an organization so that we get out of our own way and can keep moving forward.
Kyle Dennis:
At minimum, to document. One thing I mention to people all the time is that at least we’re documenting it. Even if no decision gets made. Even if it doesn’t create an inflection or a pivot, it’s something that a year later or six months later, somebody can go back and they can go, “Look, I understand why these design decisions were made.” Do you know what I mean?
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
I’ve seen so many times, a new designer shows up to a team and they say, “Oh, we’re going to change this, and this, and this, and this,” and they have little history about all of the thought that went into what exact the problem was we’re trying to solve with this other workflow or this other specific design. You know?
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
I think very deeply about documenting things. It’s one of the brain drain kind of aspects that comes from just owning a business. You have turnover and you lose institutional memory.
Jeff Randolph:
Mm-hmm. We have so much of that knowledge that we could tap into if we can only harness the power for good. At the end of the day, the thing we want to help clients understand is what their customers want. If we do that, they make more sales. They have better conversion rates, people like them. The world’s a better place. The sun shines and products fly off the shelf.
Jeff Randolph:
We’re happy to have you here. We’re happy to have the kind of extra horsepower and really expand the capabilities of what EAG can do, so welcome, welcome.
Kyle Dennis:
Thank you, thank you.
Jeff Randolph:
We don’t usually always do this with employees.
Kyle Dennis:
Oh no.
Jeff Randolph:
This is different, so we might as well go into the lightening round.
Kyle Dennis:
Uh-oh.
Jeff Randolph:
Let’s do the lightening round.
Kyle Dennis:
Okay.
Jeff Randolph:
Rules of the lightening round, there are no rules. Shorter answers, sound-bite answers. We can dive into them if we need to, but we’ll just rapid-fire and see. You don’t know what any of these are, so we-
Kyle Dennis:
I don’t.
Jeff Randolph:
You will just react the way you do, and if you swear a lot, we will earn an explicit rating, so-
Kyle Dennis:
I won’t. I won’t. I promise.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s very kind. What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten?
Kyle Dennis:
Rapid-fire.
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
People that lack self-discipline punish other people.
Jeff Randolph:
Ooh, interesting. Yeah, that’s … Ooh, okay.
Kyle Dennis:
People that lack the ability to discipline themselves end up engaging, behaving punitively towards other people.
Jeff Randolph:
That’s a fascinating insight as well. We did a new business, or new employee welcome lunch kind of thing, and everybody asks all kinds of questions. We’ve learned a lot about you so far. These are some deep insights that we can go in.
Kyle Dennis:
Okay.
Jeff Randolph:
I noticed that you wear a helmet and wear a high-vis jacket to work. To be fair, I think it’s because you’re riding some kind of device.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah. I ride a scooter to work.
Jeff Randolph:
You ride a scooter to work. Tell me why. Why did that start? What’s the thing?
Kyle Dennis:
Well, we don’t have enough parking spots here, and I don’t like things being unpredictable, so I’ve always had on my … I don’t believe that most people keep a bucket list, but they say, like, “Oh, a-”
Jeff Randolph:
“Oh, that’s on my bucket list”? Yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
“Here’s my bucket list. “Okay. Show me your bucket list.” Well, you don’t really have it because most people don’t really live their life around a list. It’s like a list of things they want to do. Perhaps we should, and I’m considering starting this, by the way.
Jeff Randolph:
Okay, all right.
Kyle Dennis:
Is that I have one to-do list in my life and it’s the bucket list, and if work projects aren’t on that list, then we need to talk about if they’re actually that valuable.
Jeff Randolph:
Gotcha.
Kyle Dennis:
But I mean, anyway, long and short is on my bucket list it’s been I’ve always just wanted to be able to commute without a car.
Jeff Randolph:
Nice. Okay, okay.
Kyle Dennis:
I’ve never had a job before where it made sense for me to commute. For the last couple of years, I’ve been working remote or working from home, so it’s just something I’m excited about.
Jeff Randolph:
Excited, and scooter over bike, or-
Kyle Dennis:
Scooter over bike just because a lot of leg movement. I’m not trying to be sweaty when I show up. I tested it out a couple times the first week before I started, and I was too sweaty on the bike. I just didn’t … Summer and everything. It’s relaxing just to be on the scooter and just going 20 miles an hour, chilling.
Jeff Randolph:
Just zip along.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
Nice. All right, okay. The reason why is an interesting one. I like that.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah. I always wanted … I think it’s important to me. I don’t care-
Jeff Randolph:
Predictability.
Kyle Dennis:
… about having a car. I don’t care. I don’t. I don’t. If I could live someplace where I didn’t have to have a car, I would.
Jeff Randolph:
I think that’s the … A lot of the youths these days, as they get their license later and later after age 16, I think they feel the same way, that like, “If I didn’t ever have to own a car, I’d be just fine. Uber everywhere, rent a car, have a self-driving care come pick me up.”
Kyle Dennis:
Right.
Jeff Randolph:
All of those things.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jeff Randolph:
You are superhuman at Pop-A-Shot.
Kyle Dennis:
Oh, yeah. That’s true.
Jeff Randolph:
What’s the high score? Do you know what the ultimate high score that you’ve ever gotten is on Pop-A-Shot?
Kyle Dennis:
No, because it depends on the machine, obviously. Some machines are different. There’s a machine at Main Event up North where it’s not unheard of to have 260 or 300 points on a machine, but in a classic Pop-A-Shot, one point per shot-
Jeff Randolph:
Per basket.
Kyle Dennis:
Two points for the last 10 to 15 seconds, or whatever it is.
Jeff Randolph:
Mm-hmm.
Kyle Dennis:
I mean, I’m usually over 100 every time I touch that basket.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, man.
Kyle Dennis:
It’s like I don’t even …
Jeff Randolph:
This guy. He’s-
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, it’s like a thing. My parents bought me a Pop-A-Shot when I was a kid. It was in the garage, and it was just like all I did for from age like eight to like 12.
Jeff Randolph:
Ow, yes.
Kyle Dennis:
The muscle memory never goes away, and then it’s like it just checks a lot of boxes for me for an activity because I can take my kid to the arcade and I can play Pop-A-Shot while she plays all the other games.
Jeff Randolph:
Man, that’s a good … If anybody listening who wants to come in and throw down a challenge, we are open to that. Let’s just say we’re open to that.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, and I have a Pop-A-Shot at my house that’s also for sale if anybody would like to … Just doesn’t fit. It’s too big.
Jeff Randolph:
Good shout-out. Good shout-out. On … next question.
Kyle Dennis:
Okay. Sorry. We’re in quick-fire, right?
Jeff Randolph:
That’s good.
Kyle Dennis:
I apologize.
Jeff Randolph:
No, no. That’s spectacular. On your official EAG bio, you say, and almost proudly here, so I’m quoting, “I’ve never seen Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, or Indiana Jones. Probably never will.” That’s the quote. Now what is it about American culture that you hate? Sorry, sorry. That’s probably not the right way to phrase that. Why don’t you like having fun? No, hold on.
Kyle Dennis:
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
It seems like a person who deserves human behavior would like to understand what humans find enjoyable. Why don’t you find that enjoyable?
Kyle Dennis:
I don’t-
Jeff Randolph:
However you’d like to define this question that I’m throwing at you, what gives with that? Why no-
Kyle Dennis:
I have a really short attention span, so anything that’s like … If you’re talking to me like over an hour, I’m looking at my watch in a movie. I don’t care how good the movie is.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, wow.
Kyle Dennis:
So then when it comes to sagas, I mean-
Jeff Randolph:
It’s an investment of time that you look at.
Kyle Dennis:
It’s a serious investment.
Jeff Randolph:
I see.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Randolph:
Okay, okay.
Kyle Dennis:
And it’s like, at this point, I just think it’s almost funny because people get mad. People are like, “You have to see Star Wars,” and I’m like, “Bro, I don’t care. I’ll figure it out.” I read the Wikipedia. I generally get it. The movies seem like they’re hard to watch at this point because the graphics seem to be kind of bad anyway. I don’t know. Am I hurting your soul?
Jeff Randolph:
You’re … My heart, it’s crushing me.
Kyle Dennis:
You look like Milhouse in the Simpsons. Like I could watch your heart just … When Lisa’s like, “I don’t love you.” It’s like it was like that.
Jeff Randolph:
It’s close to that. It’s close to that.
Kyle Dennis:
No, I just … I know. I get it that it’s cool, and maybe one day, but …
Jeff Randolph:
Maybe one day. Eventually, at some point you’ll … Yeah, maybe, but I understand why you say that because-
Kyle Dennis:
Have you watched the first episode of Game of Thrones?
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
There’s some horrific stuff in there that I was like, “Is this all it is? Is it more like this stuff?” Because I didn’t …
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah. Oh, for sure. For sure. There was the joke that happened at the time of Game of Thrones that was, “Why doesn’t George R.R. Martin use Twitter at all?” And it’s because, well, he’s already killed 144 characters, and it’s like episode one. That’s the whole joke there.
Kyle Dennis:
No, but I do like TV shows and stuff. I like The Wire. I like The West Wing. I like traditional, great stuff, classics of TV, but I don’t mess with those big movies.
Jeff Randolph:
I can understand that if one were not into the Star Wars saga, or Marvel Universe, or whatever, that you would look at all of the volume of work that is there in the catalog and go, “I don’t know. Am I ready for this? That’s a lot. That is a lot to take on.”
Kyle Dennis:
I don’t want to self-disclose too much, but this is a thing with me is that self-disclosure is not an issue. When I was a kid, I just never … My parents were never like, “Hey, watch Star Wars.” My dad was never like, “Oh, let’s watch these sci-fi movies.” My dad was like, “You’re seven years old. Would you like to watch Predator? Fine.”
Kyle Dennis:
Basically, at my house we just watched whatever we could rent from Blockbuster that night, and if something was on there that I wasn’t supposed to see, my parents would be like, “Turn your head. Don’t look at this.” That was literally my childhood was … I mean, so it’s like in some ways, I look back and I’m like, I would never parent my kid that way, but that was the reality, and it was like I wasn’t some kid that was obsessed with Star Wars because I just watched the most violent movie you could think of immediately. There was no … We didn’t need a bridge to like a-
Jeff Randolph:
Okay.
Kyle Dennis:
You know what I mean?
Jeff Randolph:
Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
I took cinema and movies very seriously as a kid, so this is not to say that I don’t take these things seriously.
Jeff Randolph:
Right. Or that you don’t watch any movies.
Kyle Dennis:
Or I don’t like watching anything or like anything. Yeah, just those were never on the … I think a lot of those, like Star Wars in particular comes from being a kid. A lot of people have childhood memories.
Jeff Randolph:
Oh, yeah. For sure.
Kyle Dennis:
My childhood memory was like literally, “Are we about to watch Rambo?” or something. You know?
Jeff Randolph:
Wow. Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
So this is like-
Jeff Randolph:
Okay. It’s fascinating what happens in human development-
Kyle Dennis:
I know. Right?
Jeff Randolph:
… and how that affects us later on. Next lightening round question, and we can make this the last one. Tell me, like you’ve just accomplished some major goal, you’ve done something, you’ve won. Whatever that is, you’re celebrating. How do you celebrate that big win?
Kyle Dennis:
Buy a meal for people that I love. That’s … You know?
Jeff Randolph:
And celebrate with them- [inaudible 00:31:05]
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, celebrate with them and hang out. That’s like my favorite thing in the world to do is go out to eat with people, and just sit and enjoy people’s company, and break bread with them, and talk to them, and not worry about … Like my favorite thing would be if I got to sit down at a restaurant with you. Your favorite restaurant, and you ordered everything, and you told me what we were going to eat, and we sat there and talked, and you paid, of course.
Jeff Randolph:
Well, obviously. Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Dennis:
Yeah, but I like taking the route of paying, ordering, letting people just sit and enjoy other people’s company. That’s my favorite thing to do. It’s what I would do if I was celebrating. It’s what I would do if I was hanging out. It’s what I would do if I didn’t have to have a job.
Jeff Randolph:
Well, we are going to … I’ll use that as a just way to easy transition into saying we are happy to have you here, and celebrating with you, and breaking bread with you now. Kyle Dennis, director of research and development of EAG now. Formerly Usagility, now that we’ve acquired Usagility. Thanks so much for being with us on the podcast today.
Kyle Dennis:
Glad to be here. Thank you.
Jeff Randolph:
That is our show. Thanks for listening to the Small Business Miracles Podcast. Remember to subscribe. Leave us a five-star rating and review. Drop us a line on the website at eagadv.com if you have any thoughts. Until then, we’ll be out here helping entrepreneurs with another small business miracle.