How to Fight Back Against Shady Industries with Coulter Lewis

0:01Light that spark 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 Side Hustle Pro. Today, we'll be breaking down how to fight back against shady industries. To drop these value bombs, I brought Coulter Lewis into EO Fire Studios. Coulter is the CEO and founder of Sunday, who, after being disappointed with the lack of natural solutions on the market, set out to create yard care products that were easy to use and safe for family, pets, and the planet. And today, Fire Nation will talk about fighting the big boys.

0:39We'll talk about big box retailers versus direct to consumer. We'll also talk about planet implications and businesses that you can create to help our planet and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Coulter and our sponsors. The Gold Digger Podcast hosted by Jenna Kuchar is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Gold Digger podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips, social strategies, business hacks, inspirational stories, and so much more. One of my favorite recent episodes is titled, How I've Built an Unmatched Team Culture, an insanely important topic for all business owners to dive into.

1:18Listen to Gold Digger wherever you get your podcasts. Is this your year? Visit thrivetimeshow.com to see testimonials of how Clay Clark's business coaching has helped over 2 ,000 entrepreneurs to dramatically increase profitability. It's month to month and less money than an average minimum wage employee. Schedule your free consultation today at thrivetimeshow.com. Coulter, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hey, everybody. It's great to be here. Excited to chat with you all. I think maybe for me, it's a definition of what that success is a little bit.

2:01I think very often in the entrepreneur world, we hail and celebrate and get so much energy behind that three-year story. I had an idea, straight up rocket ship, and then had this amazing conclusion exit to it and all this money. And that's impressive. I mean, I think that is not an easy thing to pull off. It is something to celebrate and be amazed by. But for me, what really impresses me is the longer journey and one that has much more direction, ups and downs than that, which is more typical of what we all actually experience. And I think it's important that everybody knows that. It doesn't always look like that, even though that's what we talk about a lot.

2:43And to me, the stories where there was some incredible turns and twists and it wasn't clear at moments exactly what was going to come next or exactly how to get to this next milestone. But the person just faced that challenge, walked straight into it, found it, found the way and kept going and then got to that spot and brought the business where he needed to go to have a great conclusion for his employees and his or her employees and investors and everybody else. So I love the journey, man. I think that's success. Fire Nation, the journey. I love that. And we're talking today about how to fight back against shady industries because there's some shady industries out there, Fire Nation.

3:26They try to be bullies. They try to steamroll. There's a lot of things that are going on. And guess what? We, the entrepreneurs, can do our part to fight back against them. And this is going to be a story about that today because I want to set the stage. I want to talk about the innovation in the lawn industry and how your company, Sunday, is doing it both better and safer than some of these shady big boys. Sunday is about the lawn, but also everything outside your home, everything growing. That space is actually our third largest crop in the U.S. It's a huge portion of the landscape. And so we could talk more about this, but the way we care for it now is not a little bit off track or not quite right.

4:11It is completely misaligned with where our values are. And it is in the Stone Ages, essentially. So a typical yard in the U.S. gets about five times more pesticides per acre than an industrial farm. So just insane amounts of pesticides and synthetic chemicals that we're applying to the space that's actually, you know, it's our little piece of the earth. It's something really special. It should be like our own little national park. We should see it in a totally different light. So what Sunday set out to do was to be able to make that a reality, how people care for this incredible thing that they own and they're responsible for in a way that meets their values, is good for the planet, better for their family, all those things.

4:51and we did that through really a heavy application of science and pulling apart the plant science and the agronomy in the space to understand fundamentally what will be a different approach just to meet everybody's needs in this space and that ended up making us change almost everything about the way that we care for the space. Fire Nation, it's really important to think about what culture is just sharing because there's so many opportunities for you out there. I know that a lot of listeners want to improve the world that we live in. And you, Coulter, you want to improve the world that we live in.

5:27And you're actually doing that one lawn at a time. So give some advice and some thoughts and some experience to our listeners who are out there who want to make the world a better place, who want to help our planet, who want to improve something one X or Y or Z at a time. Talk to us about that. The challenging part of it is finding the problem to solve. Actually, they're all over the place, right? That's not as difficult. I think it's really around the how. How am I going to make this thing better? And I think my assumption is people are where I was when I first started to think about the American Yard.

6:05And it felt really big and really complex and way out of my comfort zone and where my knowledge was. And so at that moment, it's intimidating, right? It'd be easy to say like, oh, yeah, that'd be a good thing to go after, but I just don't have it. And what we did at Sunday is just start small, start piecing it apart, start learning about one piece of it, the next piece of it. And then what started to happen is as we are unpacking that and getting more and more excited about what could be done here, is we started to attract the people who could actually then accelerate that and really have the deep knowledge.

6:42So a guy named Frank Ross, he's a turf PhD at Cornell. He joined in early on, just as I was starting to reach the limit of how much I could possibly understand all of the plant science here. And he brought in an expertise and then brought us to the next level again. So I guess in that moment, knowing you're not going to have the answer right away, but just being willing to explore it and unpack it and give it some time for you to get that clarity. The next thing I want to talk about is your success at big box retailers versus direct to consumer. Because I think there's a lot of people that are in the audience that are listening right now that are really curious about, hey, what's the best route to go?

7:22What are the pros and cons of going big box versus direct to consumer or both? So what recommendations do you have for our listeners based on your experience? Lots. You know, they are two entirely different businesses. And so I think, you know, on the direct-to-consumer side, that's how we launched Sunday. And it was a great way to initialize the brand and get the name out there. And that's really because of fundamentally what we were trying to offer was this customized to you. So what Sunday really is at its core is we're tailoring the care for your property to specific needs of your yard. I mean, down to soil tests.

8:01We have the largest soil database ever created now through our customers and daily weather. All of that's going into Logic that's helping make sure you do the right thing at the right time so we can avoid using all those pesticides and chemicals. And then for our users, so it's really easy. This thing is really intimidating and really complex. It's as simple as just follow the guide. You've got an expert by your side to help you do this. So that really was a unique offering in a space that solved a couple problems at the same time. and direct-to-consumer was a natural fit because there was that one-to-one customization.

8:32And I think in direct-to-consumer where it can be more challenging is if your core value prop for being direct-to-consumer is, you know, it's easier than a trip to the store. I think that value prop isn't holding up as well as it used to, given that, you know, there's so many other platforms for that now. So we had, you know, a specific fit to direct-to-consumer that enabled us to scale that and continue to scale that fairly rapidly. and then retail was just you know an exciting addition to that where the reality of our space this is true for most spaces but especially in outdoor home care that the vast majority of purchases are made in store and so you know the goal here was to make a product and a solution that was available to the average American household just ready to go anybody who wants this should be able to afford it and use it and have access to it and retail enables that and so So that's been a really exciting new development for us.

9:28And it's actually doubled our customer count, just even though retail is much newer for us. And so we're national at Walmart and Lowe's and Target. And those stores have just an amazing audience for us to be able to share Sunday with. Fire Nation, so many important things to talk about when we get back from thanking our sponsors. If you're anything like me, then you're looking forward to a lot of outdoor time this summer. I'm talking about hitting the pool, going on epic hikes, and maybe even getting in a few pickleball matches. But in order to do all that, you and your team need to work smarter, not harder.

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11:17Then Clay's team of talented designers, videographers, web developers, workflow mappers, and accounting coaches will help you implement that proven plan. See over 2 ,000 Verify Success Stories and schedule your free 101 13-point assessment with Mr. Clay Clark himself today at Thrivetimeshow.com. Knowledge will not attract money unless it is organized and directed through practical plans of action. become the next success story. Schedule your free 13-point assessment today at thrivetimeshow.com. Coulter, we're back. And a lot of people that are listening right now may be saying to themselves, you know, I think Sunday sounds pretty cool.

11:55I mean, I see what he's trying to fix in the marketplace, or I really understand the niche he's trying to carve out here. But, you know, I take care of my own lawn. And, you know, this is a pretty passionate topic for you. So let's talk about how actually taking care of your own lawn can have a big impact on our wallet as well as on this planet. It's a pretty fascinating space. The DIY lawn and garden space, just in the US alone, is about$45 billion. That means average household spends about$550 a year. So this is purely in DIY, not including any professional services and that additional cost.

12:33So that makes this market similar in scale to like cosmetics or you know any of the other highly developed consumer facing markets um but unlike that you know really the selection and options you've had have not changed in half a century um it's it's it's remarkable how insulated and how undeveloped or how little innovation has been in the space um and so you know from a consumer standpoint there's a lot of deep ruts there's a lot of habits that have formed over the reality there's only been one or two options for their entire lifetime. Whereas you think about something like cosmetics, there are kind of categories that have been faster moving.

13:10People are used to change. They want to try new things. They're kind of open-minded to that. So that certainly exists here. But on the flip side of that, it's also really thrilling to be the new thing in the space. We're not one of 10 new brands. We are really helping to redefine what this market could look like and how it should look and feel so um you know that's that's thrilling and and um yeah you know at the end of the day you know our our kind of we have customers that range from you know every every possible age group um male and female you know we unlike kind of traditional players in the space we have a much broader set of customer base and um you know where we kind of where we center the most though, we have the greatest, I guess, density would be really on, you know, younger, newer families, first home, and this kind of first moment of like, holy cow, I've got this space to care for.

14:05And, you know, in my house, I'm drinking oat milk, and I'm probably being thoughtful about the hand soap I buy. Like, I should be thoughtful about how I care for this whole outdoor space, my habit for my pets and my kids, I don't want it to be poisonous. And so, you know, that audience really, really resonates with Sunday. Fire Nation, I hope you're thinking during this time of like, man, I really can see where Coulter's passion comes through, where he identified a need in the marketplace, a problem, an underserved niche, and he decided to create an amazing solution. And what's really crazy to me, Coulter, is how one thing can just lead to something completely unrelated, or at least appearing unrelated initially.

14:44and this kind of tells a story of how you founding a natural snacks company with your wife actually led you to starting Sunday. So tell that story. Yeah, you can't make this stuff up. It definitely is not a logical path and I always want to give some background on it because on the surface you just can't make sense of it. So my wife and I started a company called Quinn Snacks. We started that when my first son Quinn was born. And really, that is a company that is all about ingredients, who's growing them, how they're growing them, what the impact is on the land, on those people, and our customers.

15:22And I grew up in a place where I didn't have access to agriculture, just wasn't a part of my surroundings. And suddenly at Quinn, we're in field with our growers and farmers, working directly with them, helping them manage their management practices, use fewer pesticides, things like that. And I kind of witnessed firsthand what that relationship looks like, what it looks like to work with land and to really understand the needs and have this symbiotic connection with it. And it's honestly, it's beautiful. And it's an amazing thing to see firsthand. It's inspiring. And so it was with that, you know, in the back of my head and this intuition I built around that, that when I'm standing in a few months later, standing in a home improvement store, looking at that shelf and smelling that shelf from 30 feet away and seeing that there's a$10 billion settlement for Roundup.

16:08All these sort of things were happening. And I just thought, this feels wrong. I just saw what Wright looks like, and this feels a million miles from that. And I know it could be done better. And I've seen what it looks like when this is really in balance. And that was that first moment. That was that ignition that then set forth two months of just digging through every detail in the space and pulling back and really just trying to understand the customer and the history here and what's happened and then starting to work toward what could we do differently. So Fire Nation, there's so many cool things to take away from everything we talked about here today.

16:43But if you were to step back, Coulter, what would be the one thing that you would want our listeners to take away from our conversation? Just keep moving. I think when someone recounts a story like I'm recounting now, it feels like things just fell into place. And it's easy to tell a story in that fashion that feels like there's a continuous momentum. But the reality of it is that it's pretty chunky and you've got to push through lots of boundaries every single step of the way. And so that willingness to just slog forward when things are rough is what it takes, especially in those early stages when it's really challenging.

17:24So that would be my recommendation. Now, if Fire Nation wanted to connect with you, your business, what is your call to action for our listeners today? So I would go to GetSunday.com and check out our products, check out our offerings. YouTube, we've got tons of videos and I'm in lots of those videos too, talking about this. But I think to check out the tech too that we developed, so you can put in your home address and we'll get you an instant analysis of your yard, all the soil type, and you can kind of get a view of all the data we have. So I would love if people would just explore the brand and how we try to put together a really unique solution.

18:01Fire Nation, you are the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with CL and JLD today. So keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Coulter in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And Coulter, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you, brother, and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you, John. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Coulter for sponsoring today's episode. Fire Nation, successful entrepreneurs are great at three things, productivity, discipline, and focus.

18:39That is why I created the Mastery Journal so that you can master these three things in 100 days, and we're talking step by step. Visit themasteryjournal.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. The Gold Digger podcast hosted by Jenna Kuchar is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Gold Digger podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips, social strategies, business hacks, inspirational stories, and so much more. One of my favorite recent episodes is titled How I've Built an Unmatched Team Culture, an insanely important topic for all business owners to dive into.

19:14Listen to Gold Digger wherever you get your podcasts. Is this your year? Visit Thrivetimeshow.com to see testimonials of how Clay Clark's business coaching has helped over 2 ,000 entrepreneurs to dramatically increase profitability. It's month to month and less money than an average minimum wage employee. Schedule your free consultation today at Thrivetimeshow.com.