Growing a Business with Community with Michael Chernow

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. are brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today, we'll be breaking down growing a business with community. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Michael Chernow and the EO Fire Studios. Michael is a founder and CEO of Creatures of Habit and is a serial entrepreneur and wellness expert. Chernow launched his first business in 2010, has been building businesses for the past 15 years. And today, for our nation, we'll talk about how people underestimate the power of community and why you shouldn't, the three C's in life and business, and oh so much more.

0:38And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Michael and our sponsors. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10 % of all e-commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. If you want to see less cars being abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash on fire.

1:06Michael, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What up, Fire Nation? I am super excited to be here. Something that I believe about being successful that most people disagree with. I have to say it's that most people don't believe that there is such thing as work-life balance, especially if you are a successful entrepreneur. I wholeheartedly, experientially disagree with that statement. I've heard it over and over and over again for many, many years, you know, that there is no real balance. You know, it's very, very difficult to create a balance.

1:51And after 15 years of almost 16 years of being an entrepreneur, the first probably eight years, I would have said, yes, I agree with that. and maybe the trajectory is for the first 10 years of being an entrepreneur, it's very, very difficult to establish and like mature into the ability to have a work-life balance. But I can say for the last five, six years that I have created boundaries in my life that are balanced and also realistic for anybody who wants to live a life that is both successful in business and in personal life. I asked myself a question about five, six years ago and said, you know, I work a lot, a lot, a lot, and I have a family.

2:52And what brings me more joy? Working a lot, a lot, or the time I spend with my family? And the answer obviously surfaced, spending time with my family is where I get the most joy in my life with my wife and my kids. And so I said, I need to recalibrate this process. And so I had a start time and an end time. in my day. And I committed to not working on the weekends unless it was absolutely, absolutely, absolutely necessary. I began putting true faith and trust in the team of people around me and giving them almost complete autonomy outside of large scale decision making, where I set a threshold for.

3:34And I watched my life change into a way more balanced life where I work, I still work my butt off. I'm more efficient in the hours that I work, but I'm able to reap the benefits of the hard work I put in by spending more time with my wife and my kids. And I have breakfast with my kids every morning. I have dinner with my family every night when I'm in town. And I'm just a far more happier entrepreneur accomplishing similar, if not greater outcomes. I love that evolution for you. And it's just so great to see that you're able to bring that into your life. And Fire Nation, we're talking about growing a business with community today because Michael, a lot of people underestimate the community when they're setting out to grow their business.

4:22Why do you think community is so important when looking to scale? Community carries businesses through the tough times. If community, and when I say community, I mean like the people, your customers. When I was in the restaurant business. I spent many years in the restaurant business. And then I opened, you know, 13 restaurants in the course of 11 years over the course of 11 years. And I learned very quickly that our regulars are our diamonds. There are diamonds. And we need to treat them like diamonds because when the Oscars were on or when the Yankees were in the playoffs or when the biggest TV show was having a final episode or it was raining or snowing or super cold, the regulars always showed up.

5:11And I learned that the community is the regulars, the people that believe in what you're doing, the people that love the experience, the people that feel like they know the business and the people behind the business. And so I learned through that process, that journey, that you can create a similar thing in the world of direct-to-consumer CPG, which is the business that I'm in currently right now. And so I put an enormous amount of time into the community, so much so that Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I carve out three hours of my day where I sit down, I open up my Shopify store, and I go to the orders, and I start at the top of the list, and I call customers for three hours straight.

5:54I call them personally. Now I do it through a Google voice number, so I'm not just like passing my number out to everybody, but I do it through a Google voice number and I call customers and I have developed some of the most incredible relationships. I've gotten some of the most incredible stories. I've also been able to get real time, real life data from these from these wonderful people. And they believe they know me and I believe I know them. And, you know, I've spoken to thousands of people over the course of the last three and a half years that we've been in business. and I have yet to find someone who is willing to put that kind of time in.

6:29As the CEO of a company, I believe that could arguably be my number one most, you know, the component of my role that will garner the greatest results is building this community of people that actually know who I am. And, you know, it's been a wonderful journey that way. So I believe community is going to carry us through the tough times. If it gets really hard, I also write a weekly email to the 45 ,000 people on our email list, and I write them real things that are happening in my life in real time and also happening, obviously, with creatures of habit. And I get hundreds of responses every week.

7:11And guess what? Similarly to how I call customers three days a week, I also respond to all of these emails. So my role is really, I'm the CEO of the company, but I would really say, if I was being honest, I'm the chief culture community officer at Creatures of Habit. That's what I love to do. So you mentioned you call customers. That's amazing. You send emails, you reply to emails. What's maybe just one other thing that you do to keep engaged with your community and to keep your community engaged with you? Well, we developed a Facebook community page. And so every week that I send out the email, the email is called the brain dump.

7:53Every week I send out that email, I record a video to sort of enhance a little bit more on what I just wrote in the brain dump. And that video is exclusively posted to the Facebook community group. and, you know, creating exclusive content for the people that really want to engage is something that I think is powerful. And it's not that we don't want to be able to share this content with everybody, but the people that are engaged, the people that are really trying to be, you know, make better decisions for a better life. That's kind of our motto, better habits, better life. The people that are really doing that, they're engaged, join this community.

8:29And there's all sorts of awesome things in there that we create for them. Perks, early insight to new flavors, any sort of introduction of a new product. They get first dibs on. So I think, you know, rewarding community is another way to do it. And some people will tell me, you know, that doesn't scale. But interestingly, Gary V, Gary Vaynerchuk, who actually introduced me to you, when I told him that I was going to start calling customers a while ago, he started hysterically laughing and he was like, dude, that is it. He was like, nobody wants to do that. And everybody will tell you that that's not scalable.

9:10And the way to win is to scale the unscalable. And that's what he's done. That's what I do. And, you know, I think you can scale the unscalable by putting the time into your community. Fire Nation, one of my favorite phrases is do things that don't scale. Because guess what? Other people are not willing to do that. Period. End of story. And whenever people come to me and say, John, but this is hard. This is difficult. This is challenging. I say good because that means nobody else is doing it because people don't like to do hard stuff. So if you're doing something hard and difficult, your competitors aren't.

9:44So suck it up and get going. And we have a lot more to talk about around this topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors. I know firsthand it's easy to get hung up on all the things that need to happen in order to bring an idea to markets like a great website without knowing how to code. How are you supposed to build a beautiful platform that attracts people to your brand? Well, at Wix.com, you can build a business-ready site in minutes with the help of an AI site builder. All you have to do is answer a few questions and Wix does the rest. Whether you want to start with a template and build from there or would prefer to start from scratch, their AI tools make it easy and fun.

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11:34Your customers already love it. If you want to see less carts being abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash onfire. go to shopify.com slash on fire, shopify.com slash on fire. Michael, we're back and you have something called the three C's of life and business. Take it away. The three C's of life and business. Most people probably don't know who I am listening to this podcast. So I'll just give a tiny bit of background. I am an entrepreneur. I've been an entrepreneur for a long time, but I'm also in recovery, meaning I am sober.

12:17I've been sober for almost 21 years. And the one one of the greatest gifts I got from being in recovery was this idea that I can commit. I can commit. Once you understand and and and have seen the power of commitment, you can apply it to anything in your life. Anything. I'm the guy that knows that I will die on the hill. I will die on the hill. That's just it. And I know that about myself. And so I kind of developed this thing called the three C's. The first C is commitment. Without commitment, good luck pulling anything through to fruition. It's just, life is hard. Business is hard. Entrepreneurship is very hard.

13:07And most people quit. Period. Done. That's the truth. It's not like a, I'm not saying that as like a myth. It's the truth. Most people quit because it gets really, really hard and they don't want to have to go door to door. I have learned that I'm just a committed guy. I'm going to commit. So commitment over time breeds confidence. And the more confidence you have, confidence is the second C in the three Cs, the more confidence you have in anything. You know, like if you stand at the free throw line and you commit to throwing 500 free throws a day, by the end of every single day, you are guaranteed to be better, but also more confident so that the next day when you step up to that free throw line, you just feel like you're gonna throw those nothing but nets more.

13:56And so I kind of look at my business and my life that way. I commit every single day, I show up to the free throw line and I'm just more confident. And with confidence, enough confidence over time, you're able to start, you believe in yourself more and you're able to start taking risks, also known as courage. Now, people write textbooks about other courageous people. Courage is necessary as an entrepreneur. It's just necessary. You have to be willing to take a risk and put it all on the line. That is what separates entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs. Now, there's nothing wrong with not being an entrepreneur, But I do believe that the dividing line between someone who's supposed to be a nine to fiver or an executor within an organization, maybe an intrapreneur and an entrepreneur is how much courage and risk are you willing to withstand.

14:52And so commit courage. I mean, commit confidence, courage. Those are the three C's that I really do believe if you if you can if you can if you stick to those things, you will just see an enormous amount of opportunity. Now we've talked about community multiple times. I mean, I've seen the power of community Fire Nation within you. I mean, I launched this podcast in 2012. I've been busting my butt doing a daily podcast ever since 4 ,684 episodes as of today. I keep showing up for you and I know my community appreciates that. And I've done multiple crowdfunding campaigns. We ran the sixth most funded publishing campaign of all time back in 2016 with the Freedom Journal.

15:33We did$453 ,000 in 33 days for a$39 journal. It was amazing to see that kind of support. And Michael, you're doing something with a crowdfunding campaign with Creatures of Habit. So tell us about that. What is this crowdfunding campaign? Why are you doing it? And how can we get involved? Yeah, awesome question. Thank you so much. You know, traditional fundraising has gotten to be harder and harder and harder. And the way venture capital and private equity sort of view businesses these days has also gotten it's it's very sometimes, you know, in some seasons, they want to see these these big top line revenue numbers, and they're not as concerned about how much money you're burning.

16:21and then very quickly they could say, you know what, we'd wrap, we want to see top line and bottom line. Sometimes they'll say, Hey, you know, if your top line's not crazy, if your top line's not at a crazy trajectory, but you're profitable, that's more interesting to us right now. So there's a whole bunch of different things that you got to be able to read minds that way. When I was thinking about raising money for creatures of habit for our next round of funding, someone had mentioned to me hey have you ever done a crowdfund and i i hadn't thought about a crowdfund before and it's interesting that i hadn't thought about a crowdfund because we have such an awesome community and i built an awesome community as well personally and so i started looking into crowdfund and i just i was floored by the amount of incredible brands that have launched crowdfunds and been very very successful so i just said you know what that's it we're going to, we're going to, if there's, if there's a way to build a brand in a like powerful way to build a brand, do it with like, make the people that are raving fans, owners, make them owners, give them an opportunity to actually grow the business with you, give them real equity in the company.

17:34I was like, Oh my gosh, how have I not like thought of this before? So I began the process and we're going to be launching our crowdfund very soon in two to three weeks. I don't know when this episode is going to launch, but we're launching the crowdfund on July 15th to the public, and I couldn't be more excited about it. There's amazing perks, especially for the early in investors, serious perks where there's extra equity bonuses based on tiers of investment checks. So, you know, the goal for me is to just grow this business to the finish line with the community. And the way to do that is through crowdfunding.

18:22And I could not be more excited to bring the community in on ownership and creatures of habit. Well, Fire Nation, I've been an investor in creatures of habit, full disclosure, since what year was it, Michael? Was it 2021? 2021. 2021. So over four years now, I actually did an additional add-on investment as well because I believe so much in Michael's mission and what he's doing with Creatures of Habit. So I definitely will say it's worth checking out. What is the location? What's the URL? Where does Fire Nation go to learn more? Super easy. Creatures of Habit. That's Creatures with a K. Creaturesofhabit.com forward slash crowd.

19:00Fire Nation. Super simple. direct creaturesofhabit.com slash crowd. You go there, you can RSVP. If the RSVP section has passed, you're going to be right there learning more about how you can take that next step. Definitely a lot of interesting and cool things are going on with this company. Again, I've been involved for over four years and I'm really excited to see where this continues to grow. A lot of good things happening. Michael, leave us with one big takeaway for Fire Nation of everything we've talked about to really bring it home. The number one piece of the puzzle here is think outside of the box.

19:37You know, when you launch a business, typically you're thinking about your product or your service. You're thinking about the operations and the P &L and the finance. The marketing is traditionally thought about through paid media, email marketing. just remember in any business the best form of marketing is the hardest to attain which is word of mouth you want people walking away from your business closing their computer experience getting their product and enjoying it and telling every single person they know about it that is absolutely without a question of a doubt the number one form of marketing to make waves so think about how can you get people to talk about your company and the way I've done it before people get their experience with our product or while they're experiencing our product I call them and I connect with them personally and that has been that has just paid itself in in spades in giving people in in extraordinary experience with a brand no one ever expects the founder of a company from a digital brand to call them and ask them, you know, introduce themselves.

20:51So I really do say think outside the box, give yourself the freedom to really, to really swing and do something unique and do something extraordinary. Because scaling the unscalable is something that's possible. I know a lot of people that have been, have proven to be successful with doing it where most people sort of follow this, you know, similar path or follow a path of step one, step two, step three exit. And it just it just tends to not work out that way. So my biggest takeaway here is community is king. Think outside of the box. Scale the unscalable. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

21:33You've been hanging out with MC and JLD today. So keep up that heat for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Michael in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And again, your direct link, Creatures of Habit. That's Creatures with a K, creaturesofhabit.com slash crowd. That's the word crowd because it's all about the crowdfunding campaign right now. Michael, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Appreciate you. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Michael for sponsoring today's episode.

22:09And Fire Nation, are you an entrepreneur on fire who's looking to share your amazing message with the world? If yes, we are now accepting applications for entrepreneurs on fire. To learn more about becoming a guest, visit eofire.com slash guest. And I'll catch you there or on the flip side. You know that iconic purple shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. If you want to see less carts being abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash on fire.