The Truth Behind Launching Companies with Vinnie Tortorich: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Billion Dollar Moves. Today, we're pulling a timeless EO Fire episode from the archives so the giveaway may not be active, and we'll be breaking down the truth behind launching companies. To draw these value bombs, I are brought Vinny Tortorich into EO Fire Studios. Vinny is a bestselling author of Fitness Confidential, and his Fitness this confidential podcast gets a million downloads per month.

0:36And Fire Nation today, we will be talking about if you want to build a business, go to a bank instead of asking outside investors to help. Investors will want to have a share in your company. Never thinking about your IQ, think about your FQ and keep failing until you don't fail anymore. And so much more Fire Nation. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Vinny 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.

1:14One 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. Listen to Gold Digger wherever you get your podcasts. We all want to live better, longer, and with LifeForce, we can. LifeForce is making proactive and personalized healthcare easier than ever. Start your membership today and receive$200 off. Visit mylifeforce.com to get started now. That's my, L-I-F-E-F-O-R-C-E.com. Vinny, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know. Hello, Fire Nation.

1:56uh glad to be back john thanks for having me on yeah wow something most people don't know well uh yeah here's the deal i'm a health and fitness expert and most people know i've been into ultra cycling and ultra events and the whole thing so oddly enough i love to exercise and of course i eat right and take care of my health so people would think oh well fitness is the most important thing to this guy. And fitness may be, well, it's number one, but it may have a rival. Financial health has always been as important to me. You know, just watching my money, watching where it goes, protecting it, you know, investing it myself, not leaving it in the hands of other people.

2:42So I look at financial fitness as much or more than I even do my own physical fitness. I love hearing that for sure. And I mean, we actually had a really fun chat before I hit the record button here, where both myself and Vinny Fire Nation, we escaped California. We're not talking about the fires. We're talking about the insane taxes, which by the way, Vinny, I don't know if you're so tracking this, but they're raising state taxes to 16.5 % there. That's just state taxes, which is absolutely mind blowing. The only problem I have with Vinny, to be honest with you, Fire Nation, is that he stopped about 1 ,200 miles too short.

3:20He needs to get into a boat, even a canoe, paddle out into the Atlantic, come a little south from Virginia, Vinny, angle yourself down towards the equator. Don't stop till you hit Puerto Rico and come join the world of 4%, my man. Come on. You know what? We actually talk about it because my wife is European. So I could be anywhere in the world that has a computer. If I can run a computer, I could be anywhere in the world. And it felt so good leaving California and going to a quote-unquote normal state. But, John, we've talked about it. I keep going, you know my buddy, John? Yeah. That guy is killing it down there.

4:00Okay, let me just say this, Vinny. This is what I want to happen. I want you and your wife to come down, visit me for a weekend, and I will blow your minds with the beauty and amazingness of the islands. And by the way, from San Juan, our international airport, we have direct flights to Germany, to Portugal. I mean, we're talking five hours in the air. You're in Europe. It's absolutely unbelievable. So that's for another time. But the invitation is always there, Vinny. I would love to host you here. Love to. I want to talk right now about you and starting companies. because a lot of people, and a lot of people in Fire Nation included, they think that they need to go directly to outside investors, to go to venture capital, to raise all of this money before they even think about starting a company.

4:47But you started a very successful vitamin company with zero outside investors. Talk to us about that. How did you pull that off? Yeah. I think you have my partner, Andy Schreiber, in the vitamin business on the show at some point. And what had happened was, look, the whole time I was in California, the reason I went there was to start up businesses. And every time I had a great idea, it turned out that I would have made like two or three pennies on a dollar. Because when you're borrowing someone else's money or you have these investors, they're taking the big financial hit. They're taking the big chance.

5:23And even though you've invented something, they want the lion's share of it. And when you go to a bank and beg a bank for money, first off, you have to have a whole business plan written out and the whole thing. And every time I went to a bank and said I wanted to start a vitamin company, they were like, who are you and why should we trust you? Even with my plan in place, they were like, yeah, we don't think so. And so that's how that whole thing started. I got lucky. that was a lucky move in my life. I wrote a book and I, the book is called Fitness Confidential and the book, you know how they say you should dance like no one is looking.

6:08Yeah. I wrote a book as if no one was going to ever read it. So anything and everything that I wanted to put in that book went into that book. And it turned out that it was this weird colossal success. So for once in my life, I did something right. And for once in my life, I had money in my pocket. I wasn't living so hand to mouth. I was a fitness trainer for all those years. And to live in L.A., I was probably making$120 ,000 a year. And it cost almost all of that after taxes. Totally. Just to live a normal life in L.A. So when the book came around, I had a chunk of change. and I'm going to be honest with you, John, I thought about it, I went, hmm, I could probably buy a Corvette or a Mercedes or I could really go look like I'm doing well here because I had a lot of money for me.

7:05And then I went, you know what? I've always talked about putting my money where my mouth is. If I said, if I ever hit the lottery, which couldn't happen because I never played the lottery. I would do my vitamin company because I had this great idea for these completely pure vitamins. And so I had this money and I said, okay, will it be a Mercedes or will it be vitamins? And I sunk all of my money into this vitamin company. And everyone, my parents, my friends, all of the business people I knew, everyone told me I was out of my mind. I said, you're insane. You're insane. What are you doing? And I said, I'm doing what I want to do.

7:51And here we are. It's a multi-million dollar company. We get approached, people want to buy this company all the time now, purevitaminclub.com. It's done really well. I can so clearly remember having you back on the show when that was just an idea, Vinny. And you've build this into this amazing and exciting company that, like you said, is getting now approached by outside investors, by just outside companies that want to buy you, gobble you up and obviously replicate the success that you've had. And to me, you always have been that fitness guy. So to me, Vitamin seemed really on brand for you and other things you've done as well.

8:28But you started a coffee company, which seems, you know, at first glimpse, just a little off brand. So what was your motivation for launching that company? I started drinking coffee when I was four. And every time a doctor would say, well, cut back on coffee, I would say, why? And they would say, because it's not healthy for you. And I would say, why? And they would say, because too much caffeine. And I would say, what's wrong with caffeine? The fact of the matter is, they didn't have an answer for me. And it wasn't until Google came into our lives where, you know, you can Google yourself right about anything.

8:59I started looking into coffee and it turns out that it's the number one antioxidant in the world. Wow. Next to water is the healthiest thing you can drink, even more so than tea. And tea is really good for you. And then the American Heart Association started saying, if you have one cup of coffee a day, it can lessen the effects of a heart attack. If you have two or more, it's even better. There is no upper limit to how much coffee you can have. Oh, I love it. Now, some people might get the jitters from coffee and you may want to watch it. But for most people, coffee is very healthy and I'm very health conscious.

9:37So I started on my front porch the same way I started at my kitchen table, you know, mixing different vitamin levels together. I just bought a roaster and just started roasting on my front porch in L.A. And the neighbors all thought I was nuts because coffee makes a lot of smoke and everything else when you're roasting. and I came up with these roasts and once again I put my money where my mouth was and I started and I know I'm making this sound simple but when you're playing with your own money you don't have anyone to answer to right so I just went down to Costa Rica and talked to some farmers and said can I get your green beans I like your beans and you know we made deals and and you know all of the you know not all of but a lot of the different countries in Africa and said hey I want to get your beans.

10:24I like your particular beans. I want to do the specialty coffee. And next thing you know, you know, I'm spending money on green beans and contracting with a company to do exactly my roast. It's not that difficult when you have your own money and you can start playing with it. And Fire Nation, that's the thing. Like once you've already done what you need to do to get a little financial cushion to build up that little war chest, now you can start taking some risks. Now you can start maybe pursuing some passion projects and doing some really cool things that who knows, may just click and go to that next level.

10:57And you have a movie that I know a lot of people in our audience have already watched. It's called Fats, a documentary, which went to number one on iTunes and Amazon. What made you think you could even make a documentary in the first place? The fact of the matter is, I didn't think I could. I was against it the entire time. And as a matter of fact, when Peter Pardini, the guy who already had a hit documentary under his belt with the band Chicago, a film called Chicago Now More Than Ever. He approached me and said, hey, we need to do this. And I said, I'm not going to put my own money into this because I don't believe in me when it comes to this.

11:39I really didn't believe in me. And he says, no, I don't think you realize the voice you have. And I didn't. I'm going to be honest with you. I doubt it me. So Peter said, look, if we could get$100 ,000, we can start this movie. And I said, well, I'm not putting the money up. And he said, well, how about we crowdfund it? And I thought that was an excellent idea because I was 1000 % sure that nobody would give me a penny. Then I could just shut Peter up. You know, it's like, look, Peter, no one gave us money. So okay, I'm not going to put money into it, so we're done. Well, we were asking for, I think, $150 ,000, but we had both decided if we had gotten to$100 ,000, we would do it.

12:27I hand shook on that. Well, we ended up getting a quarter of a million dollars. Wow. And actually, we got more than that because some people privately called me and said, I'm going to stroke you a check for$10 ,000,$15 ,000, but I don't want to do it through the crowdfunding thing because why give them a percentage of it so we got private donations too and uh we went off and did this movie and my biggest fear was i hustled on this harder than i hustled on my own uh products because this wasn't my money and i certainly didn't want to let anyone else down i was scared to let people down we went 100 into this 200 actually we just signed a deal with Gravitas Ventures, who got the first movie to number one for us.

13:14We have coming out on January 1st, 2021, in a few months, Fat, a documentary two. So I've been busy behind the scenes and I did another documentary. Good for you, brother. Yeah. Look for that, folks. And I think, Fire Nation, this is another just great takeaway that, hey, even when you do kind of have that little financial cushion, you don't always need to just be saying, that's the only stash that I can take from. Like if you've gotten to that successful place, there's people around you who can support you in this. And, you know, I've taken a similar route to Vinny as well. Like back when I wanted to launch my journals, the Freedom Journal, the Mastery Journal, the Podcast Journal, I had the money if I wanted to, to say, OK, I'm going to invest, you know, tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars to get these journals created in the inventory and shipped over here and all this stuff.

13:57But I was like, you know what? Let's make Fire Nation a part of this journey to see if they really want it. And then they can feel like they're a part of it, too. and we did$453 ,000 in 33 days on Kickstarter for the Freedom Journal. Just a year later, we did$300 ,000 for the Mastery Journal on Kickstarter. And so that is another option, another way to look at things. And so for Vinny's movie, Fat, a documentary, he went the crowdsourcing route and went to number one on both iTunes and Amazon, super cool stuff. And we have something that we're going to be talking about when we get back from thanking our sponsors that Vinny hasn't had the opportunity to talk too much about yet because it's pretty new, but you're gonna have to stick around for that, Fire Nation.

14:42We'll be right back. I'm all about lifestyle freedom. I wanna be able to do what I want, when I want, and there's no better time to kick your feet up poolside than the summertime. But to achieve this lifestyle freedom I speak of, you and your team need to work smarter, not harder. That's why we're so excited about HubSpot's integrated AI tech. It's helping teams of all types and sizes automate the more tedious parts of running a business. With AI-powered tools built into HubSpot CRM, you can pull reports, sift through loads of data to see what's working and what's not, and even craft content all in a flash.

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16:29Better energy, more focus, and deeper sleep are all within reach. Start your membership today and receive$200 off. Visit mylifeforce.com to get started. That's my, L-I-F-E-F-O-R-C-E.com. So Vinny, we're back and you have just recently launched nsngfoods.com. So talk to us about that. What does NSNG stand for? What are your first products? And how the heck is it going, brother? Yeah, NSNG food. When I wrote my book, Fitness Confidential, it was before anyone had mentioned the word keto. The word keto didn't exist. Ketogenic diets existed. They've been existing forever. But the word keto, the term keto didn't exist.

17:15And I was loathe to put that term in my book. I didn't want to say ketogenic because 12 years ago, people would have mistaken it for ketoacidosis, which is a deadly situation. So I was I was scared to use it. So I said, OK, what's close to that? And what was close to that is just don't eat sugars and don't eat grains. No sugars, no grains, also known as NSNG. uh so and as a matter of fact uh my wife serena said you need to get your attorney to go and trademark that i went nah and she's like no get a trademark now i was like i'm not gonna spend a thousand bucks on that you gotta be crazy thank thank god i did because i own nsng in all of its because it's become its own thing.

18:06Yeah. And I cranked up NSNG Foods a few months ago, and it all came about because of one of my sponsors who was making a similar product. And I saw ways to change the product. And I'm going to be honest with you. I found out behind the scenes that even though I was the number two way that people were learning about their product on the internet, they didn't want they were going to get rid of me because they didn't like my image. They thought I was too old, even though my my crowd is the 30 to 35 or whatever. You know, they were like, oh, he's kind of old. You know, everyone calls him Gran Torino online and all this stuff.

18:49So they were going to get rid of me. And I was like, Serena goes, well, should we start looking for your next sponsor for the show? and I said no and she goes but that's a lot of money you're going to be giving up for that sponsorship I said I've I've had an idea for a long time by the way the number one way people were finding out about this product besides me was Joe Rogan oh yeah um so I yeah and they wanted to get rid of me the number two way behind Joe Rogan but I said no I don't want to go and make and get another sponsor. I want to sponsor it. I'm going to make a better mousetrap. And we came up with NSNG Foods.

19:35The product is called UltraFat. I borrowed from my vitamin company, my UltraSalt, which is the leading electrolytes for ultra runners and ultra cyclists around the world. We can't keep the stuff in stock. I took from that. I took from my coffee company one of my coffees and ground it down to a Turkish blend. I mixed it with the finest raw almond butter I could get and added the best coconut oil in the world and just mixed it all together and came up with a product that any athlete can eat out on the trail and, you know, in the kayak, in the rowboat, on the mountain, you know, running, biking. It sounds like an old tampon commercial from the 80s.

20:25You're used to doing anything. And as it turns out, parents are giving it to kids, type 1 diabetic kids, and they're giving it to them to go to school as a healthy snack. We had no idea when we cranked up, John. We made three times what we thought we could sell in the first couple of months. and within two weeks we had to start writing to anyone who was buying the stuff and saying there's a two-week back order wow sorry about that we couldn't keep up with production um we're now producing it around the clock we we run a 24-hour shift uh and we're still we're still not caught up uh it's been this this crazy phenomenon on ultra fat over at nsng foods i mean For me, Vinny, I look over the last few decades of your life.

21:18You've just done so much with vitamin companies, coffee companies, documentaries, books. Your podcast is obviously awesome. What the heck is next for you? I'm going to take a nap. I'm still excited about all the companies. I'm always finding new coffees around the world for Pure Coffee Club. I have a new product I've been working on for a long time for Pure Vitamin Club. But I think that the place that has the most growth for me is, number one, NSNG Foods, because there are so many food products that can be had in a good way. You know, that people, you know, if these big companies, for years, I would go, if Unilever and Kraft would just do the right thing.

22:06And now I'm going, wait a minute, I can just do the right thing. Yeah, because they're never going to do the right thing. You see, they have a little something called bean counters and they go, well, we can save a half a penny here and there. I don't look at pennies. I'll look at how can I make the product the best? And yeah, I get it. I'm a small company. I'm not selling the stuff around the world. So a half a penny here and there for them becomes billions of dollars and they have stockholders and everything else. You know, but for me, I don't have any stockholders. I own the companies. So I have no one to answer to.

22:39so yeah we're going to be building up a lot of foods at nsng foods and um there's even though i'm on my second movie um right now we're looking at that as a uh another thing you know we're looking at movie number three because gravitas is you know the distribution company is going do you have any other tricks up your sleeve like yeah i think i got another one emmy and i told him what i was thinking and they were like please come to us first we've done good by you twice and i was like i guaranteed him that so um in january i'm gonna i've already started writing the third movie and um man so i'm going along that line vinnie can you do one thing for me sure can you take a nap

23:29oh brother it is always great catching up with you i love it truly i'm looking forward to joining you on your show in the upcoming near-term future and for fire nation give us a key takeaway we've talked about a lot of awesome stuff today give us one takeaway you want to make sure our listeners really walk away with from this episode any call to action you want to give to fire nation and then we'll say goodbye. Yeah, I've said this on your show before. I will say it again, because it's that important to me. Never, ever, ever think about your IQ. IQ does not make you successful. If I went off of my IQ, I would still be broke.

24:08I always look at FQ. I even wrote about it in my book Fitness Confidential. FQ stands for failure quotient. It's the number of times you can fail and come back. No one, and I mean no one, has failed as much as I have in my life. We sat here and talked about a few of my successes. If we lined up all the failures versus my success, you would go, well, this guy's a colossal failure. And if you look at anyone who's been anywhere near successful, look at Colonel Sanders or any of these people who started these massive companies. When you look at all the failures, I actually knew the guy, Al Copeland, who started Popeye's fried chicken.

24:50Popeye's, he failed over and over and over. Popeye's was actually called Chicken on the Run. And it failed because it had a bad name. He reopened the same recipes, same everything, and named it Popeye's. And boom, same everything. He became one of the world's great successes. So failure quotient. Keep failing until you don't fail anymore. I love it. and Fire Nation, hopefully you're going to be checking out nsngfoods.com. Check out Fat, a documentary, and everything else that Vinny has going on because it is simply straight fire. So get up in there because you know that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

25:30You've been hanging out with VT and JLD today. So keep up that heat and head over to eofire.com. Type Vinny in the search bar. You're going to get the show notes for this episode, obviously, but we've done a bunch of these episodes together and Vinny always drops value. So go back, listen to those other ones. They are incredible as well. Vinny, thank you, my man, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we will catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, today's value bomb content was brought to you by Vinny. And one thing that I've identified over the years and years and years, successful entrepreneurs, they're productive, they're disciplined, they are focused, they follow one course until success.

26:13That's why I created the Mastery Journal. It's a gorgeous faux leather journal that's going to ensure that you master productivity, discipline, and focus in 100 days in Fire Nation. It's my best work ever. Visit themasteryjournal.com, use promo code podcast for$15 off the journal. And thank you for listening to my podcast. I'll catch you there, or I'll catch you on the flippity flip side.

27:05the better, longer. And with LifeForce, we can. LifeForce is making proactive and personalized healthcare easier than ever. Start your membership today and receive$200 off. Visit mylifeforce.com to get started now. That's my, L-I-F-E-F-O-R-C-E.com.