hogs and microwaves

I come from a long line of poor people who cook hogs over fire.

Thing is, a microwave will also cook a quick piece of pork.

Thanks for reading!

Eric

Eric Boggs
CEO @ RevBoss

PS - as a friendly reminder, you’re receiving this email because you filled out a form on revboss.com or because we interacted on LinkedIn at some point.

Any self-respecting North Carolinian either 1) has personally smoked a hog, 2) has an uncle or a grandpa who smokes pork, or 3) has stood around a giant pit with an entire disemboweled hog laying over a bed of coals…and had some mixed emotions about how primal the whole thing feels versus how delicious it tastes.

It’s a big undertaking for me — I plan all week to get my process, ingredients, and timeline right. And I make sure we have the right fixin’s (pronounced “feeexins”, iykyk) in order, Sun Drop and Cheerwine at the ready, and plenty of friends coming over.

I even plan the wood. Maple and oak, typically. Cherry or apple if I can scavenge it, as noted in a previous email about my firewood obsession.

I cook on a home-constructed reverse flow smoker built with cinder blocks and sheet metal that I drove home from Lowe's in the back of my pickup truck. (See below.)

No disrespect to the people who use these auto-feed pellet smokers, but…actually….yeah...never mind.

I get the fire right, I get the temperature right, and then the main job for the next 8 to 12 hours is to leave it alone, keep the fire steady, and keep the beer pace reasonable.

And at the end of it you have both created something meaningful that you can share with your family and friends AND you have honored your ancestors — nay, all of humanity! — by slowly cooking meat over a low fire.

We live in a microwave culture.

We were already on our way there and our AI overlords have only made it happen faster. Products, interactions, relationships, content, marketing — it all feels fast, uneven, undercooked, and lazy. Basically nuked.

And it’s encroaching on scam territory — $70 t-shirt at a $400 ticket show, presidential meme coins, a $948 wooden box with nothing in it, Suno slop music by the worst talking head in the history of ESPN.

And I'll say this with as much humility as possible…I (via RevBoss) helped usher in the microwave marketing era. We've sent a LOT of email, generated a LOT of leads, and got a LOT of people hooked on the idea that marketing was easy.

And now that the tooling and the process are so stupid easy, everybody's doing it.

It takes a lot more work to get a Hot Pocket than it used to.

I use microwaves all the time. Claude helped me shape this draft. Agents do a huge chunk of my work. I feel like I'm 4x more productive than I was. I love microwaves…as a part of a process, not the entire process.

When everything is microwave easy, what stands out is true quality and true craftsmanship. That takes care and actual talent. And it’s not easy at all.

Anybody who has smoked a pork shoulder knows the stall – hours in, the meat temp just stops climbing and sits there. There is no shortcut — you have to wait and let it happen.

It feels counterintuitive — the “slow down to go fast” start-up adage comes to mind — but it’s true. Low and slow doesn't mean slow in the linear sense. You can build a business or grow an idea quickly that's built on relationships, takes its time, and doesn't skip steps.

The difference is what you're skipping.

For example, our typical sales process at RevBoss has three calls. I used to celebrate a one-call close. Now I'm incredibly skeptical of one, and we'll purposefully lengthen the process just to make sure it's the right setup for us and for the client. You should do the same thing.

Humans have 300k years of hard wiring that demands relationships. We want to know who we're dealing with. We want to trust them. That wiring doesn't update quickly and trying to nuke a relationship (or a new customer) will actually nuke it but in the not good way.

As fast as AI and computers can move, humans just aren't gonna move that fast.

In a world where everything gets microwaved, low and slow feels right and maybe a little revolutionary.

Our best performing clients think about their work the same way I think about the pork butt I’m going to smoke at four o'clock in the morning.

They're up early thinking about it. They're planning all the details — the wood, the timeline, etc. Their work is an act of service, and it's a deep passion, and for a lot of them it's their life's mission — not a paycheck or a “job”.

And because they care that much, two things are true. They have something to say that's worth hearing. And they've built up real trust with real people over a lot of years, mostly without trying to.

No amount of automation gets you either one of those.

On the contrary…we've worked with clients where the work was transactional. Business was transactional. Sales was transactional. A lot of them aren't clients anymore.

And I can tell you: that doesn't work. Unless you just want to live in a world of Hot Pockets.

If your business is more smoker than microwave – hit reply and tell me what you're cooking. :)