How Gift Cards can Drive Business Success with Larry Rubin

In order to grow our business, whether small or large, there are many initiatives to consider. It could be advertising. But one thing that can help you gain leverage, get exposure, and develop new clients is gift cards. How do we do it? In this episode, I talk with Larry Rubin, Founder of Swipe It. He shares his journey, including how he overcame significant debt and the importance of supporting small local businesses. We talked about how small business owners can utilize gift cards to generate revenue and build a customer base. Larry emphasizes the versatility of gift cards, which can be used as promotions, employee rewards, and for online sales. Grow your business with gift cards. Tune in now! --- Listen to the podcast here: How Gift Cards can Drive Business Success with Larry Rubin Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about gift cards and a little bit about the restaurant industry, specifically the manner in which restaurant industry uses these gift cards and what it says about what we might need to do in general to help level the playing field between smaller and larger businesses or give smaller businesses, give the person that’s just starting up their own business, whether it be a restaurant or any other kind of business, a chance to survive, a chance to really make it in this particular current state of affairs in the United States, or in any other country, for that matter, given that a lot of you out there listening are trying to build something, build something that you’re passionate about and really putting your all into it, but, sometimes, when you see these bigger corporations out there, it does feel like that the cards could be stacked against you. My guest today, Larry Rubin, is the gift card guru, the founder of SwipeIt, and he’s here to tell us a little bit about his initiative to help some of these smaller, locally owned restaurants take advantage of this tool that is much more readily and easily available to a lot of the bigger restaurant chains. --- Larry, welcome the program. Thank you for having me and excited to talk to you about hopefully leveling the playing field for these smaller guys. Yeah, so 100 percent because I remember when we first connected, it didn’t feel to me necessarily obvious that gift cards was one of the ways that the bigger, larger chains kind of stomp on their smaller competitors, but you’ve observed something very different when it comes to leveraging this tool. First thing I’m kind of curious about is what makes gift cards such a powerful tool for any restaurant to use in kind of generating sales and customer base? That’s part of our battle is going in and really educating the small business owner who, right now, they think of a gift card as a product that someone walks into my business, they purchase it, and they walk out. And that’s great for people who maybe are living or working within 15 or 20 minutes of your business. Gift cards can be utilized in many, many ways. It’s a huge revenue stream for restaurants and other merchants. It’s a great gift to give someone. I don’t know what clothes they wear, I don’t know what their activities are but I certainly know that this guy loves his chicken parm from this restaurant so I’m going to buy this gift card to his favorite restaurant. I know that you can always use it. And what we’re doing is helping the restaurants look at kind of outside the box. Great, we know that someone can walk in and purchase a gift card but do you have a website? Are you offering them online? Are you capturing last-minute gift giving by offering e-cards? All different ways to bring in revenue. And then we look at it in a different light as well and say, hey, it’s great for people to come in and pay you for gift cards but can we use these gift cards to bring in customers, run promotions, get exposure for donations and options, reward our employees? There’s so many ways that we can utilize these gift card programs or custom card programs outside of just waiting for someone to walk into our business and buy a gift card.Share on X So it sounds like you’re saying that most of these smaller, say, one-location restaurants, local restaurants, only use gift cards in the sense of someone walks in and they want to purchase a $50 gift card for someone and that’s limiting the amount of, first of all, gift cards that they can actually sell but also the way they can leverage these gift cards to get exposure and to develop new clients. Yeah, when you look on your ROI, return on investment, and so if you’re only using the gift cards for one portion, obviously, you’re not going to get that return. If you’re using it for a whole array of things, promotions and marketing and employee rewards and comps or whatever, well, certainly, you’re getting a lot more out of that program and it’s our job to kind of let these small business owners know that, hey, there are a lot of different things that you can do with these cards. So what area is the smaller, one-location or two-, three-, four-location restaurant at the biggest disadvantage? Because anyone can walk into a restaurant and purchase a gift card and it seems like most people can put one onto their website. Is there a particular area where this disadvantages really shows up? We’re based out of Massachusetts so we try to do a lot of things locally, so we partnered with the Massachusetts Restaurant Asian Association. So, basically, it’s a restaurant association geared just for the Asian restaurants in Massachusetts. And if you look at a lot of Asian restaurants and look at their websites, you will see that they’re not using the newest technology, they’re not offering e-cards, they’re not offering physical gift cards, and so the question is why is that happening? Why are they not doing it? So then you look back and you say, well, there could be a language barrier. They might not understand the gift card concept that we’re so used to. So my objective of reaching out to that organization was, again, let’s level the playing field. It’s not fear that they aren’t doing what every other restaurant is doing in Massachusetts, which means their revenue is going to be low. They’re not bringing in, they’re not getting that return on their gift card program, and so the first thing with that partnership was to educate them, here’s what you can do, and once they’re educated, then, okay, now you know what to do, if you need our help now to get it started, we’re here, but the biggest thing is the education, to say you can do this just like everyone else in the state, and you can do this just like the bigger guys. Again, these are things that all restaurants and all merchants really should be taking advantage of. And is there another barrier around the infrastructure that needs to be put into place to move anything beyond in-store gift cards? Because an in-store gift card, all you have to do is have the cards there and have them loaded up and have people pick it up. But, of course, if you’re selling them online, a physical card has got to be mailed to the house, an e-card or a digital card would need to be sent to emails with some other type of technology that probably involves someone that has some sort of web programming capability to manage. Yeah, and that’s where we try to make it very simple for the merchant. So we’ve gone and we’ve taken care of all of the backend technology so they can just put a button on their website that says Gift Card and when they click on that button, all the backend technology that we put together allows the customer to check a balance, buy a physical card, or buy an e-card. If they buy a physical card, my office is actually grabbing that physical card and mailing it out for them. So the small business owner doesn’t need to deal with mailing out cards, they don’t need to deal with customer support if a card got lost in the mail. The small business owner is already so busy running their business that if we can take one thing off their plate, gift cards, then it’s going to allow them to run their business a little bit more better. And so that’s what we’re trying to do. Now, again, you will have small business owners who literally don’t even know who runs their website so even when we make it real simple and say the only thing you need to do is add this link to your website, just like when you added your Facebook link, just like when you added your LinkedIn, it’s just a link, but we hear it all the time, the email we get back is, “Can you help with that?” and then we have to write back, “Whoever is managing your website has to do it.” Sometimes, that can be a battle just trying to figure out who has access to the website. Anyone that owns a business of any kind, they had to pay for the domain and they had to develop that site and that site is a big part of how that business gets exposure to the world so you would figure that there’d be a little bit more at least knowing who the first person to reach out to would be in case anyone ever says, “Your website’s down,” because whatever business you have, if someone tries to go to your website and something just doesn’t work, I mean, that’s money being lost, that’s clients being lost. Small business for you, what happens is sometimes they might have bought the business from someone else so the person who set it up was the old owner, and they, again, they just didn’t think to find that out. Or, we see this a lot, is an employee set it up. Unfortunately, that employee is no longer with the company and then we see this a lot, and then there’s like passwords to get into it are attached to this person’s cell phone, everything has a code that gets sent to gain access to and so it can really be a mess trying to get access to websites or banking accounts or wha