How Trifecta is Hacking the American Diet and Building a $1B+ Empire in the Process with Greg Connolly: An EOFire Classic from 2021

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 Success Story Podcast. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we will be breaking down how Trifecta is hacking the American diet and building a$1 billion empire in the process. To draw these value bonds, I brought Greg Connolly into EO Fire Studios. Greg is a co-founder and CEO of Trifecta, the nation's large organic meal delivery service with over$120 million in ARR and free shipping to all 50 states.

0:38And today, Fire Nation will talk about how there is a certain amount of crazy in believing that you have to be a massive entrepreneur, and that's okay. As an entrepreneur, start to structure your organization so that it helps people also making a profit. Keywords and Fire Nation owe so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Greg and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lanz, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier.

1:13AI technology is transforming the way we do business, and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Greg, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hey, John, thanks for having me. And that's really a tough one. I tend to focus on pushing entrepreneurs to really have a growth mindset and continuously learn. And I think that's pretty well agreed with across the board.

1:58In terms of something that I think a lot of people will disagree with, I think there's a certain amount of kind of crazy and believing your own legend that you have to have to be a massively successful entrepreneur like the Elon Musk caliber entrepreneur. So I think I probably differ from a lot of people in that area, although I think, you know, continuing to remain humble as you grow your company, you know, at this point, you know, for Trifecta, we're well north of$100 million in revenue. Wow. Making sure you stay humble while kind of believing your own legend at the same time, I think, is pretty important and a little bit, you know, counterintuitive for most entrepreneurs.

2:46I mean, Fire Nation, you have two options in life. Believe your own legends or not. And so of those two, why would you not? Like believe in yourself, have confidence, have pride. You are legendary. And Greg, high level entrepreneurship, we're specifically talking high level. It's focused on solving major, we're talking major world problems. How are you specifically doing this? Absolutely. So I joke that some of the entrepreneurs that really inspire me are people like Elon Musk that I just mentioned that look at like species level problems. If we look at humankind as a single species globally, what are some of the biggest problems we face?

3:32And, you know, easy ones come to mind in that, you know, we're a one planet species. We get hit by an asteroid, you know, pardon my French, we're we're left. So, you know, Elon Musk is trying to set up a, you know, a city on Mars. Obviously, there's, you know, pretty wide consensus around climate change. So, you know, getting electric cars and electric houses and buildings up and running. He's he's tackled those as well. For me, I happen to be married to an emergency room physician, and she's a chief in the ER here in Sacramento. And ultimately, hearing her kind of day in and day out stories throughout our relationship, we've been together for 12 years now.

4:21Chronic disease seems to be like the big problem that we face here in the United States. We spend over a trillion dollars, trillion with a T, in health care costs every year. And if you look at total productivity, health care, et cetera, costs, a lot of the estimates are as much as$1.7 trillion a year that we're spending on chronic disease that's caused by poor nutrition. So I come from the software entrepreneurship world, largely kind of B2B software. And while it feels great to save other businesses, you know, 2 % on their EBITDA, their bottom line, etc., tackling a major world problem like, you know, suboptimal nutrition, the obesity epidemic, whatever turn of phrase you want to call it, was what really inspired us to start Trifecta.

5:17And I do want to jump in on that, Greg, because let's be honest, the vast majority of Americans, they're overweight, they're obese. We're talking not just like over 50%, we're talking the vast majority. So what specifically is wrong and how are you setting about to fix it? It's a great question. And getting into the business, being savvy entrepreneurs, I always encourage people to really look deeply at the problem. You know, thinking through the obesity epidemic, most people are like, oh, it's personal choice. People just need to pick a salad instead of McDonald's Big Mac. And if you look back over history, going back to the 80s, 70s, and even 60s, we didn't have this problem in the United States.

6:08It's a relatively new problem for us. And the transition that happened in society, which was a fantastic transition that all of us are in full support of, was that women entered the workforce. So there was no longer one major member of the household at home cooking three meals a day, like leave it to beaver style. You now have women working right alongside men 50, 60 plus hours a week, like my wife. that created a environment in the economy where getting food quickly became the key thing that Americans focused on. And that in the, you know, the late 70s and especially in the 80s and 90s led to the rise of fast food.

6:57Ultimately, time became the big factor for people to eat. And as that happened, you know, we started focusing less and less on, you know, on the health aspects and cooking from home and, you know, all of those type of things when it comes to eating and more and more on the convenience of food. So that was our fix with Trifecta. As we said, how can we be more convenient than fast food? and you know unless you're in Puerto Rico sorry John uh you know we we ship the food fully cooked directly to your door so you don't even have to go through the drive-through uh that was our kind of market solution to out compete fast food in the marketplace uh so that that really was our you know whatever you want to call it our better mousetrap our solution uh etc is we shorten the supply chain by cutting the retailer and the distributor out of the equation.

7:57So you don't go to the grocery store to pick up Trifecta. You order it on the internet and we ship it directly to your house. So there's so much I love about this because Fire Nation, when I came across this quote, it just made so much sense to me that the healthy person wants a million things. The unhealthy person wants one thing. What does the unhealthy person wants? They want their health. That's all that matters when you don't have your health. When you have your health, yeah, life is great. You want a lot of things. You want to go out fun, travel, do this, do that. When you don't have your health, all you want is your health.

8:33So it's so important. It's been the focus of my life now for years. I mean, my business has taken a backseat to my health and wellness and my optimal living. And, you know, I don't want to pat myself on the back too much, but I do try to set and lead my audience. I want to set that example and lead them to the ways that I am actually finding to be the ways that I'm obtaining maximum and optimal health. I just got back from a 17-day wellness retreat. It was actually up in your neck of the woods, Santa Rosa, California. It was a 10-day water-only fast, which you may not be a big fan of, Greg, because I wasn't eating any of your amazing food.

9:12But then it also included a seven-day refeeding the right way. And it just made me realize that what we put in our body is so important. It is so critical. And that's why what Greg's doing with organic meal delivery is so key and so critical. Because if we can get more people healthy, then besides the drag it is on our overall, you know, just gross domestic product, our GDP and everything that's happening, that's just why we're printing trillions of dollars right now to pay for all these things. People are no longer going to be that kind of a draw on that financially, but also they're going to be out doing great things.

9:49They're not going to be sitting in front of a TV all day, binging on sodas and chips, getting fatter and less healthy every single day. They're going to be out and about doing productive things in society. So, Greg, how can our listeners become and remain a premium brand without having to sacrifice the cost or the quality of the deliverables they give to their customers? It's a great question from an entrepreneurial standpoint. I think it starts with the brand itself. So for us, since we're a consumer packaged goods brand, I'd love to take credit for coming up with the trifecta name, but we went to a branding firm that I had worked with in the past, a company called McLean Design, who's based out of the San Francisco Bay Area.

10:42They've come up with a number of brands you would recognize. Probably their most famous one is they took an energy drink called Hansen's Energy. I'm sure you remember like Hansen's Cream Soda and Root Beer and that type of stuff. And they turned it into Monster Energy. You know, Monster Energy has gone on to become the largest energy drink company in the world. So really having a solid brand to start with, I think is a huge piece. And that starts with the name. I would recommend entrepreneurs read Igor's Naming Guide. Igor, like Dr. Frankenstein's servant. I think it's I-G-O-R. A fantastic naming guide, the full version you can download for free off the internet.

11:31I think it's 80 pages, but it really explains the difference between an evocative brand name, a descriptive brand name, and I forget the third, which was the worst type of brand name. But the different types of brand names, and then really building kind of evocative meaning into your brand name. So some of the most famous evocative brands are like Apple or maybe the best brand of all time, which is Virgin. Any market that Richard Branson moves into with the Virgin brand name, it makes it seem like they're the new cool kids in that market. It's like pure, fresh, new. And it's a little bit like, ooh, that word Virgin means a little edgy to us.

12:17So I like it for all those reasons. Exactly. And you remember it, of course. you're never going to forget the Virgin brand name. So with Trifecta, we wanted to start with a really solid brand. And then from there, it was a lot of work around the design. So making sure you've got, I'm big into design, but making sure you've got somebody in the organization who's going to have an incredible design eye when it comes to the website. And then really another Another book I would recommend reading, you know, not to go back to Elon Musk, but is Elon Musk's kind of unedited biography where they talk about the pyramid branding strategy.

12:59And that is you imagine a brand like Toyota. They started with the inexpensive kind of bottom of the pyramid cars in the 70s and 80s. And it was impossible for them to sell luxury. Americans didn't want to buy an expensive Toyota. So they had to, obviously, we all know what happened after that. They invented Lexus, which is literally an acronym for luxury export US, L-E-X-U-S. And they were able to sell Lexus for more expensive. Now, Tesla did the opposite. They started with the super premium option, very few roadsters. Then they went to the Model S and eventually to the Model 3, which is their mass market car.

13:49So it's much better as a brand and an early stage entrepreneur, in my opinion, to start as a premium brand with a premium product because you're only going to sell a few in the beginning. So you might as well get high margins and then over time work down market instead of trying to compete on price in the beginning and work up market. That's what establishes your brand in the mind of consumers as a premium brand. So Fire Nation, I really hope you're kind of taking through what it looks like in the process. And I think that's a really unique way to look at it, where starting with a high ticket thing, or starting with a really premium, potentially even a little exclusive, that allows you to build and scale the right way, where you can build out as you kind of catch on more mass adoption, have proof of concept, and have testimonials, and maybe a small raving super fan audience.

14:39And we're going to hear about Greg's top strategies for inbound marketing funnels, as well as digital media buying, which I'm pretty interested in hearing being in digital media myself. Also, you know, staying true to your products while you're scaling. And then, of course, the importance of trifecta, people profit planet when we get back from thanking our sponsors. We all know that starting a business is hard, but there are tools out there that help make it easier. HubSpot is one of those tools. And just one way HubSpot makes starting a business easier with their all new entrepreneurship kits.

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17:53So Greg, we're back and I want those top strategies for inbound marketing funnels because that's where fire nation really does struggle in general. It's like how can we increase those leads inbound to our funnels? And let's talk about digital media buying. Break those down for us. Absolutely. So when it comes to inbound marketing, I think it's maybe the most useful skill set an entrepreneur can have today. What I mean by inbound marketing is getting people from wherever they are on the internet to come to your website and buy your stuff. Now, a lot of people know how to set up a website, and I must have mentored dozens of entrepreneurs over my 20 or so years doing this.

18:37And one of the most common things I hear is people will set up a website, and they'll go, well, I don't know how to drive traffic to my website. So really understanding the process of driving traffic, then when traffic comes to your website, capturing the lead, which is somebody's email. And then from there, building out email automations, a drip sequence, whatever marketing term you want to use for it, but automated emails that eventually convert people into customers. And then, of course, once their customers, turning them into evangelists, going through that whole process is just blocking and tackling.

19:17You're just doing it step by step and then zooming out as the entrepreneur and going, OK, what what part of the process am I falling down on? So for most entrepreneurs in the beginning, it's getting traffic. But that is where I tend to see a lot of people fall down. Like we work with a lot of celebrities and celebrity athletes and they'll have millions of followers on social media. And then I talked to them and I'm like, well, how big is your email list? And they're like, oh, well, you know, a thousand people. And I'm like, how the F do you have 5 million followers on Instagram and a thousand people on your email list?

19:54And then I look at their website and they don't have any lead magnets. You know, all they have is sign up for my newsletter at the bottom of the page. So I'm not going to be able to explain all of the details on this call, but what I would recommend to your listeners is go to Google and Google Digital Marketer and the CVO article, CVO standing for Customer Value Optimization. optimization. That's the best holistic article I've ever found on the internet, showing people the step-by-step process of how to go from setting up a website to driving inbound traffic, capturing leads, and converting them into customers.

20:37That's literally what Trifecta did. And within five months, we were doing over$100 ,000 a month in revenue. And now we're obviously well into the multi-millions. We're now getting into the tens of millions a month. So ultimately, it's just building out that infrastructure, which you can do for practically free with stuff like WordPress and MailChimp and other platforms to start. And then taking the time as the entrepreneur to look at what stage of the funnel are you breaking down? So are you not getting enough traffic? Are you not converting the traffic to leads? Are your leads not converting from your email list into buying customers, you know, et cetera.

21:28And at that point, you're almost like a mechanic working on the part of the car that you want to improve as best as possible. Your second part of your question was media buying. So that's the easiest way to get traffic. Uh, unfortunately it also costs money. Um, so, you know, a lot of early stage entrepreneurs have a limited budget, but the good news is it's easier to media buy when you're small. You're never going to spend a million dollars a month as effectively as you're going to spend a hundred dollars a month or a thousand dollars a month. So when you're early stage, you actually have a competitive advantage that you're able to spend money on Facebook, Google, etc.

22:14That's what we mean by media buying or podcasts in your case, John, you know, where you're ultimately driving attention from somewhere on the internet like Facebook, Google, you know, podcasts, etc. to your website. And, you know, that that's relatively simple to start. You set up a Facebook page, You set up an Instagram, you know, you set up Google Analytics on your website and you start driving traffic to your website. I recommend people start with Facebook because initially it's just going to be cheaper than than Google. As you get bigger, though, you're going to want to buy across all platforms because that creates something called the halo effect, which is essentially customers are seeing you everywhere.

23:04They're seeing you on Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest. We're now on connected TV, podcasts, you know, all over the place. So we're all over in the digital marketplace. And that allows us to drive over a million monthly unique visitors to our website, which, you know, we obviously convert a lot of them into into paying customers. Fantastic stuff. I love how we broke this down. And Fire Nation, I mean, make sure you do go into Google and type digital marketer CVO article. that's Charlie Victor Oscar article and go through that, bookmark it, go back to it again, have your team read that.

23:41I mean, we're talking step-by-step stuff and listen, Ryan Dice and his team, they only put out the highest quality stuff there. And I love how you talked about that halo effect. I mean, that's one thing that I love talking to my sponsors of Entrepreneurs on Fire about is like, listen, we're gonna get you on the show. We're gonna get you in the ear balls of amazing people. But guess what? The halo effect is real. Like when they listen to and hear a sponsorship on a podcast and then they go to Google and search something on a topic around what you do and what you sell and they see a sponsored ad there and then they go to LinkedIn and see something there and then they drive on the highway and there's a billboard there.

24:17They're like, this company's legit. Like they're around. Like I need to look more into this and like they're doing some serious stuff here and it really takes that halo effect if you're able and willing to go all in on that. And what I want to talk about next is the importance of staying true to our own products that we're producing while we're actually trying to scale for the masses. Because you do see that a lot in the world where, you know, there'll be this amazing product you find. It's like undercover. It's hidden. Not many people know about it. And it's so amazing. And you just love it. And then you tell people about it and everybody starts buying it.

24:49And then you just see this degrading of quality over time as they just can't scale. In fact, my buddy Tim Ferriss talks about the hug of death sometimes, where he's given so much exposure to a company that he loves by talking about them and promoting them that they literally go under because they just can't handle the mass inbounds. They're just not ready for it. So the hug of death is a scary thing. So talk to us about that, Greg. The bigger visibility a company gets, the more you have to be prepared to scale operationally. And, you know, to give you a plug on the podcast front, I mean, one of the advantages of, let's say, a sponsor sponsoring your podcast is you're very channel aligned with CEOs.

25:32So if I'm a business like MailChimp or HubSpot or Salesforce or any of these B2B businesses that want to communicate with a lot of CEOs, sponsoring a podcast that's very channel aligned and communicating with CEOs is an ideal direction to go ultimately as a brand. So I think the other piece of the equation is making sure, you know, who you're targeting is really channel aligned with who you're trying to sell to. So other part of your question, you know, scaling operations. That has been definitely a huge challenge for us that we've continuously worked on. You know, at this point, we're shipping close to 200 ,000 meals a week.

26:21Wow. So you can imagine the amount of production that we have going on at our production facility. We'll ship close to 20 million meals this year. And that has led to us at this point, we've got three shifts going in 120 ,000 square foot facility, about 600 employees in that facility producing, you know, essentially 24 hours a day. We've got a, you know, between 3 and 4 a.m., we've got a full kind of clean of all the equipment that comes in and happens. But above and beyond that, really having the right operational people around you if you aren't familiar with operations. They're going to save you so many costly mistakes.

27:07And when I say operational people, I mean somebody that's been on a warehouse floor for 20 plus years. You know, on our side of the fence, we've got a gentleman named Todd Burke. He's our VP of supply chain. And he ran PF Chang supply chain, you know, 430 restaurants, 23 distribution centers, Pacific Seafood, you know, multi-billion dollar seafood company, you know, Sigma, which is a$7 billion division of Cisco. I mean, he's got I've got a lot of operational experience, but he's got 30 years of running massive teams and massive production facilities and warehouses. So really bringing in a been there, done that person who's who's ultimately going to understand supply chain and, you know, maybe spending a little bit of time studying Six Sigma and other things yourself.

28:01You know, I the book I recommend to entrepreneurs on this is it's actually an older book. It's called The Goal by Eli Goldratt and was one of the best operations books I read in my early operations days to understand the theory of constraints. So and it's a fun book. It's like, you know, showcasing a guy coming into a production facility that has all these bottlenecks in their production. And he essentially over a couple of years, like fixes the facilities. So, you know, understanding really how to scale up operations. So, yeah, the book I would recommend on that front is The Goal, to prevent yourself from getting the Tim Ferriss hug of death, as you said.

28:51The Tim Ferriss hug of death is real, Fire Nation. And I love how you kind of talked about alignments. And you actually mentioned HubSpot in there, which is pretty unique because just two months ago, we signed a seven-figure, two-year deal to go into a major partnership with HubSpot where we're becoming part of the HubSpot network. They're taking a huge chunk of our sponsorship inventory over the next two years because they know how big the audio space is and is going to become as we just go forward here. and they're just going all in on that because they see the alignment. So this is a huge opportunity, Fire Nation, to make sure that you know who aligns with your brands and go after them.