A Garage Launched Biz with Zero Funding Scales to $80 Million with Luke Peters

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like This Old Marketing. Today, we'll be breaking down how a garage-launched business with zero funding scaled to$80 million. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Luke Peters in the EO Fire Studios. Luke is an accomplished entrepreneur and the former CEO of New Air. He sold New Air in the mid-eight figures, and today he serves as a strategic CEO coach, leveraging his extensive experience to help other entrepreneurs navigate their paths to success.

0:37In today's foundation, we will talk about Luke's path to success. We'll talk about balancing family life with the demands of a growing business. We'll talk about some critical financial decisions that have to be made in every business. And of course, key lessons that were learned along the way. And oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Luke and our sponsors. Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship.

1:14A recent episode discussing the billion-dollar health secret with the founder and CEO of Whoop is a must-listen. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Is this your year to grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest-rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and now featuring Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EO Fire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EO Fire. Luke, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:57What's up, JLD? What's up, Fire Nation? I'm so excited to be here. A long, long, long time listener. Okay, what most people will disagree with is the fact that, listen, focus is great. I'm a big focus guy, but I believe that you should be working on more than one big idea at a time. Life is difficult. There's so many chances and opportunities that can happen, and I think you limit yourself if you're just working on one big idea. Have a couple that are going. Have a couple that are brewing, you never know which one's going to take off. Fire Nation, we're talking about a garaged, launched business with zero funding, scaling to$80 million.

2:38Now, Luke, I love inspiration. I love motivation. It's critical. But I love that quote as well, that motivation, inspiration, they're kind of like a shower. If you don't take one, you still stink. So you need more than that. So we're going to talk about inspiration. We're also going to talk about actual tactics, strategies, implementations. But first off, what was the inspiration to your business? How the heck did you launch it with no funding? Tell us that story. Sure thing, JLD. So I'll back up into my family. I come from a big family of 12, okay? And we always worked. And I wasn't a great student.

3:15I barely graduated high school, you know, but, you know, I got excited about science and graduated college, got a degree in microbiology, and I went to work as a hazardous waste scientist. Okay, so I'm working sort of for the government. Okay, but this is after my whole life I'd worked in delivering newspapers and all that stuff. And it was a boring job and my little brother who never graduated, never went to college, was making tons of money selling stuff online, driving a cool sports car while I was driving a beat up truck into LA like an hour and a half every single day. So I got to thinking, I'm like, wait a minute, something's wrong with this.

3:52What's he doing? And I learned what he was doing. I learned about SEO. And I didn't know what business category to go into JLD. And one day I'm just studying some SEO, doing some research. And I look at the bottom of the Yahoo search results. This is back in about 2000 or 2001. And they show the most searched categories. And at that time, the third most was portable air conditioner. And I said, I got to find out how to sell these things. And that's, you know, it all took off from there. And Fire Nation, I think going back to your roots, really looking at what's your upbringing instilled into you and then implementing those things going forward can be such a critical piece to you actually starting off with some traction, with some momentum.

4:38And you scaled this garage startup to$80 million in revenue, which is just insanity. So let's talk about some of the key strategies that you implemented to succeed at this scale. Start back at that garage. I never had envisioned that we would get as big as we ended up getting, right? It was just every day was survival. And what really rang for me was a book that Google wrote, okay? It was called Zero Moment of Truth. And this kind of goes back to what Procter & Gamble had talked about in their marketing, and they called it the first moment of truth. And that is like when a customer, and this goes back to your product.

5:18So for business owners, think about your product. When a customer is in the grocery store, for example, and they're looking at three different detergents, why did they choose the one they choose? That was called the first moment of truth. Now with the internet, there was the zero moment of truth. That is research that customers are doing that you don't know what they're doing. You don't know every way that they're influenced because they're influenced in many different directions, social to search to all these different areas. And early on, I was a big advocate of that. And I made sure early on it was SEO and making sure we showed up in the right place, but also building a brand, JLD, right?

5:57People don't just want to read a blog and trust the brand. They want to listen to what other people say about the brand, not what the brand says about itself. So early on, we were getting other people to talk about us. And I think that was a huge differentiator. And that marketing strategy has continued to change. But building a brand has not. It's always the most important thing you can do for your product and for your company. Now, you did mention this at the beginning. You come from a huge family. You're actually a father of six. So how the heck did you balance family life with the demands of a growing business?

6:31What did that look like? What it looks like is ADHD, basically. You know, you're all over the place, right? And came from a big family of 12. And then we had six and my wife had six. So she was used to it. And it was always chaos, but we always made it work. I always coached the sports teams. So I probably coach now maybe 30 different seasons of kids sports. That was always my fun way to hang out with them. and we always did a bunch of road trips. And it was just something where at the beginning, she was working in the business with me and it was six in the morning till 11 p.m. It was a grind every single day.

7:08But you're excited as you see the business growing, you learn new things. Early on, you're working on the business, right? You're not having to deal with too many employees. So it was energizing actually as the orders came in and as we're cash flowing and I could quit my job. After six months, I was able to quit my job to move into the business. So it was challenging, but it also made things very exciting. And Fire Nation, that's what you're looking for is that challenge plus excitement. I mean, that's what's gonna get you up in the morning rearing to go literally on fire. Now, I do wanna move back to some of the key strategies that you implemented to succeed.

7:49I mean, getting from garage startup, again, with zero funding to$80 million in revenue, you were doing some things right. You implemented some strategies that just worked. Talk about one or two of those that were really impactful. Sure. Okay, so we actually had an influencer marketing program, JLD, and we're selling appliances. So my business is selling wine coolers and ice makers and beer coolers and fridges and some HVAC products as well. But we built a brand around that, and we were able to work with influencers. Now, I know that's common now, But when we did it, nobody was doing it. So we had people talking about our products on YouTube.

8:29I like the long form because it would give me a good SEO benefit. And the main thing that I would think about is how can I build more trust for the brand? Because at that zero moment of truth, we always were a little bit of a premium price. So we're asking the customer to pay a little bit more for a better product and better service that they're going to get on the back end if anything happens. And so it was all about building that experience through influencer marketing, long form videos. And that required a team to do that, basically reach out and organically find the right partners and continually launch these videos.

9:06Every time we launched a SKU, we might have goals. Okay, let's find 20 influencers to engage with. And they were all micro influencers. So we are never having to pay for this. We never had to hire an agency. We did it all in-house. it was a really fun strategy. So that was one strategy that worked and it still works now and it can work with everybody. You know, it's just, it's just, you have to kind of get your ground game on. And the other one is just being flexible. I had to change my business model a couple of times actually during those 20 years until we, I sold the business to private equity in 2001.

9:39So just being flexible to change your business model, which is, which can sound scary, but, But that goes back to that initial idea of always have something baking in the oven, something extra that you can jump into because competition can rise up, your business can get stale, and oftentimes people aren't ready for a big change. And that definitely helped us. We're going to talk about that specifically more later, Fire Nation, when we get back from thanking our sponsors. If you're a marketer, then you know what it's like to feel like you're moving in a hundred different directions at any given time, like you're spread too thin.

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10:57Stop spreading yourself thin and start making major moves with HubSpot. Visit hubspot.com slash marketers to learn more. Is this your year to grow a successful business? Are you looking to learn the proven processes and success systems that have been used to create thousands of millionaire success stories? See thousands of success stories and testimonials from real people just like you who Clay Clark has mentored and coached into prosperity at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Clay's proven business coaching program is month to month, and it costs less than hiring a minimum wage employee. Yes, it's month to month, and it costs less money than hiring a minimum wage employee.

11:34Schedule your free 13 point assessment with Clay Clark himself today at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EOFire. Because Clay only takes on 160 clients and only allows 300 attendees to each business conference, you will interact with Clay directly, see thousands of real success stories, and learn about attending the Thrivetimeshow two-day in-person workshop featuring the legendary Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump today at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EOFire. Become the next success story. Schedule a free consultation and request tickets to join Eric Trump and Robert Kiyosaki at Clay Clark's next business conference today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO Fire.

12:12I have a question for you, Fire Nation. Do you feel like your life is optimized or do you feel like you're leaving a lot on the table when it comes to health, wealth, and relationships? After interviewing over 4 ,500 successful entrepreneurs, I have found that every one of them have optimized their life to a high level. In over 12 years of running a multi-seven-figure a year business myself while staying healthy and raising a wonderful family, I figured out how to optimize my life to an amazing level. It didn't happen automatically. There was a lot of struggles, but through mentorship from others and a lot of intentional work, I got there.

12:47And if you think you could use some personal guidance in optimizing your life, let me help. I've created a program called Optimize, where I will personally work with you one-on-one to get to know you, your life, your goals and your dreams. Then over a three-month time frame, we will create a fully optimized life that will set you up for a lifetime of optimized health, wealth, and relationships based off your goals and your dreams. An optimized life does not happen automatically. It only happens through intentional work and guidance from someone who has reached that level that you are striving for.

13:20My goal is to turn you into a fully optimized human based off of your life goals. If you want to learn more about this program, visit eofire.com slash optimize. We'll jump on a call. We'll discuss the specifics of the program. And if we both feel to fit, we'll talk about next steps. eofire.com slash optimize. Luke, we're back and I want to talk about finances because listen, a family of six is not a cheap date. I mean, we had our first child one year ago and it just blows my mind the resources that this human who can't even walk yet is taking up. So I mean, having sex and, you know, with them growing up and just, I mean, food in the house, I mean, it's crazy.

14:00How the heck did you handle finances without any kind of external funding? Yeah. Congratulations on the, on the youngster JLD. It's, it's a blessing. Well, you know what? I never really thought of it that way. You know, I mean, my, my parents would always say God will provide, God will provide. So you always just, you put your head down and you just work. And it did always work out for us that way. Um, but what I would say is from a business perspective, you know, my, my formula is product people and margins. Okay. Product people, margins. That's how I break it down. And you have to have great margins.

14:35Okay. When you look at your business, too many entrepreneurs are running companies and they're making great top end sales, but they're not building the right margin. And so for us, early on, we never had to take any investor capital. We never even really needed a serious bank relationship until down the road. And that was all due to the fact that margins were built into our sales. And we didn't sacrifice too much on the advertising. You know, I had kind of strict parameters that I would work through. And anytime a new product was launched, it had minimum required margins. And, you know, oftentimes we were coming in above industry pricing, But that helped us create a great brand and also gave us the resources to invest in influencer marketing, better products, better imagery and collateral, and all these things that maybe other brands weren't able to do.

15:27So that's how we funded it. You talked about getting stale, about competition coming up. I mean, that can happen to anybody in any industry at any time. You need to keep getting up every day, Fire Nation, innovating, working hard, looking for your weaknesses, improving upon your strengths. Luke, what was your scariest moment? Like if you're looking back, is there just a moment in some people can just say, oh my God, there is absolutely one moment. For some people, it was spread over 10 moments in 10 years, who knows? But what would you say was your scariest moment when you said, OMG, the house is falling down?

16:01Our biggest pivot happened around 2011 and 12 GLD. And what I saw is back then we were 100 % direct to consumer. We were buying Google ads back in the day for five cents each. and SEO was easy, we were top page, top three results on SEO. All of a sudden, I start seeing Walmart showing up, and Home Depot showing up, and Best Buy showing up. So all of these big players started showing up in the results, and eventually were buried to page two, because, yeah, because the times had changed. And I wasn't gonna go win that battle. Our marketing team was not going to beat Home Depot for a general term like wine cooler.

16:41we weren't going to win that we could win maybe the longer longer tail terms but not that one and so we made a big business change first I started a new company as a side shoot okay to test the waters and say hey can we just sell to Home Depot instead of trying to outrank them and that took about a year because I had started a new company took two really good employees that was their project and at the time I think I can't remember maybe we're doing 12 million dollars or so at the time. And we went and changed the whole business model for a subset of products that we developed and sold it to Home Depot, Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Lowe's, all of those companies.

17:20And I was surprised actually how easy it was. I was like, wait a minute, I can just service these incredible retailers instead of having to pay for and find hundreds of new customers every day because we don't have a good reoccurring business model, right? We sell the appliance and that's it. Maybe they come back six months or a year later, maybe they don't. So we have to be profitable from sale one. Well, anyways, we started this new business that we would call B2B and now you just call multi-channel where we're selling to those large retailers and that really transformed the business. Fast forward to today, 95 % of the sales are going to be selling to Amazon and all of the big retailers versus direct to consumers.

18:03So that was a big pivot that we made that worked out really well for us. Now, are you selling to Amazon or on Amazon? We are selling mostly to Amazon, meaning a vendor relationship. And some of it is a seller relationship or some of it's in the marketplace as a seller, but mostly as a vendor. There you have a buyer, you have a relationship, You have someone to talk to. And at our scale, that's been a big advantage for us. Did your leadership approach change as your company grew? Absolutely. Early on, I had to learn a lot of things like anybody else. I read a lot of books from John Maxwell, read books about Lincoln's leadership.

18:45And early on, I was probably too distracted as a leader, too many shiny objects that I was chasing. And then how it changed later on was, you know, I really focused more on business systems. We've tried them all, you know, from OKRs to X matrix to, you know, EOS system. But in a way where what you do is you you obviously delegate to top leaders. You don't abdicate responsibility as as a CEO. You are responsible for everything. Um, so it's, it's, you know, it's your fault if something's not working, not your leader's fault, but you have to trust and hire the best leaders and hold them accountable.

19:25That's your job as a CEO. So that, that's how it changed from, uh, from sort of micromanaging in their business to creating structures and systems and goals and then holding them accountable. And of course, good leaders know how to hold their teams accountable. And that leads to a lot more freedom in your life, JLD. It's a lot better way to do things once you get there. Now, Luke, you've been a listener of Entrepreneurs on Fire for over a decade. So you understand that our listeners, Fire Nation, they're entrepreneurs, they're small business owners. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs, specifically our audience, if they are in the situation where they're starting from scratch?

20:07Sure. If you're starting from scratch, then the most important thing is to focus on the product. Too many times people focus on things that really aren't that important. So that means get to the MVP stage, minimum viable product. Get it out to market. Friends and family, don't worry about the reach that you have initially. Don't even worry if it's scalable, which too many people think about. Well, I can't do it because it's not scalable. That actually doesn't mean anything. First, just focus on product. find your 10 raving fans and your 100 raving fans and then go from there um and i think the you know a big mistake is that people don't they don't want to think about mvp they want to think about perfection um and it most people just have a real hard time launching you know they're doing things jld that really might be great down the road but at the beginning you got to get your product in front of people um and that is hard to do for a lot of people uh maybe just psychologically there's There's just blockers that people put on and they don't get to that stage.

21:08The other thing is, you know, get people that you can trust in your life. You always talk about, you know, you're the average of the five people around you. I wholeheartedly agree with that, you know, and if you don't have advisors in your life, you can find advisors. People will help you. They'll give you trust. They will advise you, you know, for free and just help you because they want to see other people succeed and save you a lot of time. So Luke, you've dropped countless value bombs today. I mean, we talked about the demands of a family life balance, your scariest moments, your leadership approach, a lot of cool and very important things.

21:44What would be the one key takeaway that you would really want Fire Nation to get from our conversation today? Yeah, thanks for that, JLD. I would say that the biggest thing for business owners, and even if you're not a business owner, is make sure you're solving for the right problem. Too often, you know, when I'm working with clients, I see that they're in their business and sometimes they have wonderful businesses that are stale. Maybe that's why they reach out to me, right? And they want to, you know, double down on the stale side of the business when often they need to take a step back and solve for the right problem, not the wrong problem.

22:19And sometimes that's not on their radar. And sometimes, you know, you're going to need someone else's advice or you're just going of need to maybe, you know, get out in the forest or something, get, get, you need to get a new perspective on your business. Um, and the reason I say that is because most entrepreneurs or most professionals have amazing skillsets and they've gotten comfortable with the business. It's what they know, but within them, they truly do have the flexibility to stretch and make a pivot and say, Hey, this is something I hadn't thought about. And oftentimes your biggest gains are going to happen when you make that pivot.

22:52Sometimes it's a complete change of business from your initial premise. Sometimes it's a slight change, but often it's not in your radar, JLD. And that, I think, is the biggest thing that can give you the biggest gains as an entrepreneur. Well, Luke, if Fire Nation is fired up by this content, how can they connect with you? What is your call to action for our listeners today? Well, I'm offering a free strategy call, JLD. So they can head over to my website at apexceo.co and you get a free strategy call. No strings attached. Let me know anything I can help you on your business. Show me your year-end planning, whatever it might be.

23:31And I'll give you my honest opinion and try to help you as much as I can on that short call. You can also find me on LinkedIn and DM me there. Fire Nation, when you have the opportunity to speak with somebody who has scaled from$0 in zero funding to over$80 million, you take advantage of that. This free phone call with an individual that is really looking for nothing more than just to provide value to you in that moment, in that call. So make that happen. And Luke, one more time, what's the call to action for that URL? Sure. ApexCEO.co. Go there. You can see and schedule a free 15-minute call.

24:08And also find me on LinkedIn at Luke Peters. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with LP and JLD today, so keep up the heat. For links to everything we talked about, type eofire.com into the URL, and you can type Luke in the search bar on that website, and the show notes page will pop right up. And Luke, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute your brother, and we'll catch you on the flippity flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Luke for sponsoring today's episode.

24:44And Fire Nation, what can 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, is a revolutionary 17-step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle you've been dreaming about. You can get it all in one place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there or on the flippity-flip side. Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business startups, and entrepreneurship.

25:26A recent episode discussing the billion-dollar health secret with the founder and CEO of Whoop is a must-listen. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Is this your year to grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and now featuring Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire.