Dom Iacovone - He Runs 7 Companies in 2026 — You Can Barely Manage One

20:38Core KPI moving forward. Yeah, core KPI. And then from there, I'll usually do sauna. I'll cold plunge. I don't cold punch for any other reason besides the fact that I have to stop sweating before I go to work. So I'll jump in there to cool off and then I'll go take a shower and then I'm off to the races. So depending on what day it is will depend on what office I go to. Mondays, I usually go to my family office in the morning and I spend my morning at the family office and then I'll go to my gym and I'll actually work out of my coffee shop at the gym for the rest of the day. It's kind of been a trend that like my team does the same now.

21:06So like some of my team and my family office will follow me to the gym and we'll have coffee and it's a nice thing, right? And then Tuesday through Thursday, I'm locked in on Raw and Bomb. Those are the, those are the, that's the time of the week that I go to my, the corporate headquarters for Raw and Bomb. And you know, that's where I do 99 % of my work for that company. Fridays are usually a work from home day. That's where I catch up on all the companies. So I'll catch up with, you know, there's a ton, you know, we've talked about them, but all the heads of all those companies, I'll check in.

21:33Hey, how's everything going? Are there any problems? And granted, right? Like I'm a firm believer that the job of a CEO is to really keep your schedule as light as possible because you just need to put out fires and there's fires every week from a different place. So I have to have the ability to grab and go and get into those calls and fix those problems as they come about. But I will be honest, you know, I have, I would put my team against any team in the industry. I think I have the greatest team in the world. And I think that there's no world that I am me without them. So I mean that entirely.

22:01And everyone that the number one question I always get asked is, Hey, I have trouble running one company. How do you run this many companies? And it's, it's my team. And it took a long time to get it to where it is. I want to get deeper into hiring and how you get these people. We're going to get into that further and later in the conversation. What about like switching costs? Because like for me, I'm basically running a company and then running another company and then hosting, I think is like another job that I've said my personal life as well. I mean, you have so much going on. Are you doing like, obviously you said you're doing batching on Tuesday and Thursday.

22:28day. Are you just trying to isolate blocks on a per company perspective? No, I mean, I think really what it comes down to is just being available as much as possible for all of them. So again, like I don't take meetings, I don't need to be at like, for example, there's an SNS sales and operations meeting, I don't need to be in that meeting. If something's up that I need to jump in and you know, course correct something, I'll jump in on it. But I really let my team lead and and it's been the reason why my team is so good. I think one of the issues with founders in general is they cripple their own team by trying to stay involved in everything.

22:55And then everyone gets scared and everyone gets worried. Most people are a little bit less creative or a little bit less opinionated when the founder's in the room. And I think when the founder's in the room is when people are yes men. And I want people to have those opinions and fight and have a little bit of arguments because that's where stuff gets done. I fully believe that a healthy argument between a C-suite is a very valuable thing. If everyone's just not talking or following blindly, it's no good for anybody. I completely agree. For people out there listening that are on, you know, seven figures, they're smaller.

23:21If you had to pinpoint kind of one system as a CEO to lever down to all the other things? What would it just be? Just one weekly meeting to find the vision and then just get out the way? Is that what you would recommend? Yeah, I mean, I think the goal of any CEO is really to just define the mission of what the brand's there for, right? And I know that sounds crazy, but at the end of the day, it's giving them the tools they need to do, all the jobs they need to do. But yes, I believe that the CEO being involved in anything is very valuable until the point that it cripples everyone else's ability to do tasks.

23:51And I think that you see in a lot of companies that the CEO tries to hold on to everything and they want to do everything all the time. And then everyone else just decides that they're not going to be leaders at all. They don't need to be because there's no point. There's no point in being creative. There's no point in being proactive because at the end of the day, they're not able to do anything they want to do anyways. So let them do it. Let them make mistakes if they make mistakes. Obviously, like help them. And if you see something coming, that's not really great for the company, you can jump in and try to guide them the right way.

24:20But I think the most valuable thing for your C team or a leadership team in general is to make some small mistakes because you learn, I mean, I'm sure you would agree. You learn way more from fucking up than you do from not being able to do it at all. Elevate, delegate, get out the way and just be there if they need you. Let them make small, small, not fatal mistakes once and you just keep moving along. It's the 80-20 rule. I'm a firm believer in it. If they're doing the right things 80 % of the time, I'm happy with it. 20 % mistake, as long as they don't make the same mistake twice. You need like a 90-10 there, 80-20.

24:47I'm okay with it. You're okay with 80-20. I'm okay with it. You're doing something that I'm not doing, bro. So maybe I need to go down to fucking 80-20. I don't know, man. Back to this quality group deal for people out there, founders that are listening and they want to, you know, pre-plan and think five years out. They want to sell their company in five years. What should they be doing now to set themselves up for something like what you did? Yeah, I think there's a few things. Number one is I think, you know, when you start a business, I think you have to have a real conversation with yourself to understand, you know, is this business being set up to sell or is this business being set up to be like a cash flow came from me.

25:22And most people don't understand the difference of those two things. So being able to set up a company where you're not taking all the profitability away from the company, you're not running personal expenses through the company, it's very valuable and very important because if you're going to sell, if you're going to sell, right? Because at the end of the day, like I said, you know, EBITDA is a big deal. CM1 is a big deal. And really just having messy financials is no good for anybody when it comes time to sell your company. So doing, I would recommend if you plan on selling within two to three years, having at least two years of audited financials, doing a quality of earnings, and then really setting yourself up to understand that it's a process.

25:58And the more you do before the process starts, the easier the process is. And I'm using the word process specifically because when you start to sell a company, it's called you're going to run a process. And when you run a process is usually you hire an investment bank. the investment bank will kind of do a mini process with you before you run your real process to say, okay, do we have all of our ducks in a row? Are the financials good? And that's where most people, they get worried because that's where the work starts. But if you do all these things first, when you start to run your process, you don't have to go back and do all that stuff.

26:26It's already done. I don't think like almost any first time founder does that. And then you get, I mean, I've been in and around this situation. And then you're talking about like cash, P &L, Acropion and it's pro forma. If you're living through the company, you're not going to get the full credit for all of the ad backs. You can't. So if you live through the company, guys, it's a tough sell and you're not going to get dollar for dollar what you're actually doing. And then the other piece that's even more important, and this is something I learned the hard way, is when you're going to sell, you need to have a team in place so the company doesn't rely on you.

27:00Because that's a massive, massive red flag for someone coming to buy you. If you are the company, or if the company doesn't work without you, it's a way, way more material issue for them to buy you because they feel like if you step away from the company, then the company's going to turn to shit. So with that being said, on the former, if you're trying to set yourself up for an exit, don't live through the company. And then what about salary? What do you recommend for people out there? If you're a founder, just, yeah, I mean, look, the salary thing's funny. I actually just did a YouTube video on this.

27:27You know, when I first started my company, I did, we didn't take salaries. We took distributions, right? So when the company had enough cashflow in the business to support itself and sustain for a few months at a time. That's exactly what I did. We would take a little distribution. Yeah. You know, and, and then those get bigger and they get bigger and you get excited. And then it's like, okay, what do I start doing with this money to, to, you know, not be an idiot and start making other money? Or can I reinvest it back into the business to get the business a little bit bigger? But ultimately, you know, salaries and all that shit really shouldn't come to fruition until, I mean, we really didn't start taking salaries until we sold.

27:57We did the distribution model the whole way through our acquisition. And then when we sold, we basically said, okay, we're going to get salaries because once we sold, we're not getting distributions anymore, right? It's a whole different game now. So we put in the salary of what, you know, a typical CEO would make. And now that's what I, that's what I make. And that's okay. I'm fine with that. You have to be very, very intentional early. Yeah. Yeah. First conversation to exit. How long did it take you? I get some, damn, full year, full year. And that's because we had to, we had to do a lot of cleanup.

28:26So, you know, I learned a lot of things that I'm talking to you guys about from that process, you know and I would say that I'm in a 100 or 200 percent better after that because of that process and it was the most difficult it was the most stressful time of my life to date no doubt yeah the worst is when you come up with a number and then there's that like due diligence and exposure from the outside world where it's signed but it's not signed and you're in that little holding pattern yeah I just had a conversation with Rahal from David protein and he was telling me about that and I was like that sounds absolutely dude it's it's brutal because what they do is you know you run this process, you sit down with 15 or 20 different people, you do the same spiel to every one of them.

29:03And then you get to the phase of, you know, this is where they have to send their LOIs, right? And you're, you're waiting for the LOIs, the LOIs are coming in. And you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you, because unless you're selling the whole company, this is going to be a marriage, right? You're partnering with these people for quite some time. And that's exactly what we did. So it wasn't always about who was going to give us the most money. It was about who is the right partner for the business. So you can get a lot on the second bite. The second bite of the apple is the most important bite of the apple, right?

29:26Right. So that's kind of the way we did it. And, you know, you go through this whole entire period, you're going through the financials and then, you know, you say, okay, I pick you. And that's where you get this exclusivity, right? So during exclusivity, they're diving in, digging in, pulling the data room, trying to find any holes in anything. And that's where you're, you know, your evaluation was up here. And then it's like slowly going like this and then you're like, fuck, you know, and it is what it is, but they, it's true, you know, and look at these guys that are buying these companies, they're, they're dogs.

29:53That's their job. They come in, they try to find holes. They try to find ways to get it for less and build it up later for more. And it's a business and I accepted it, but it was stressful. You can't hide anything either. That's like the huge thing I've learned. Everything comes out. To put a pin on that, you guys, again, you guys didn't sell in full. Correct. You rolled over equity. So I'd love for you to just give advice for everybody out there listening, because I actually think that that's a great play for someone to get, take off some of the chips, get some liquidity, but then also have some asymmetric upside in the future.

30:23So what are the key things you've learned? And without telling us numbers, just dive into what that looked like. Yeah, look, I think there's very strategic ways that you can do a lot, right? And in this process, the goal is to always sell your company when it's going like this, right? Everyone always says, you know, I'm going to keep going, it's going to keep going, it's going to keep going. And you know, great, you may think that, but there's a very good chance it doesn't. So the goal is, before any type of plateau hits, you want to have some type of an acquisition. And then at that point, it's up to you to say, Hey, do I want to stay along to ride this thing as high as we can and to grow it?

30:55Or am I selling it all the way? So in my position, I knew that we had a lot more white space. And our team and my partners also knew that. So our goal was how can we have a strategic exit where we can have, you know, our generational wealth for our families, but also position ourselves to be ultra wildly successful in the future to get this big second bite. And that part right there is where you think of strategy, right? That's all I cared about. That's why they're selling you just as much as you're selling them. A hundred percent. Yeah. Because most of the time the strategic partner is not going to pay the most because they know their value too, right?

31:28So you can have a PE group come in and just throw a ton of money at you and say, yeah, we'll do it. But they're not going to come with any type of strategy, any type of ability to help you keep going like this. And that for me was the biggest goal. I needed to find somebody who, you know, I, like I said, I didn't know what I didn't know. So I only knew how to get a company so big, but they knew how to get a company to that next level. So the Germans weren't the highest bid? No. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. No. Love it, baby. No risk, no reward. Let's go. Yeah. I mean, you have true operators. Like the reality is, is I've been talking to a lot more people.

31:56I just had like a five hour dinner with people. And like, I forgot who said it. It might've been Ross on the cadence episode, but it's just like the best investors are the operators and these guys are operating companies and they've, I mean, they brought companies over a billion dollars. Correct. Those are the people that you want to go with. Yeah. So what are the key learnings in there? What are the things that you take away? It's just for you, you think that get enough, probably the minimum amount that you need on the front for generational wealth, whatever that number is, and then probably the best swing on the other side.

32:28Yeah, so the way we structured it was unique is we structured earnouts too. So like you have the ability to say, okay, we're gonna sell X percent of the company. We know we have these massive growth years coming still. So we need to figure out some way to have an earnout structure for those years. because again, in our industry, the work you do for the year before shows the year of shows the year after. So like the work we're doing in 2026 right now, all these retail meetings, everything we're doing, those don't load in until next year. So it's like, I know what's coming, but like, I'm not getting paid for it.

32:56Right. Does that make sense? Yeah. So retail and product. Yeah. So for me, it was like, look, like I, I understand that, you know, this is the right time, but we have a lot of stuff happening in the, in the future. So they're like, okay, well put together what we would call like your SGM or your forecast for the next two years. And then we'll put a, we'll put an earn out on that. And then if you hit it, you get the earn out and then you don't, you don't delineate any of your equity in those earn outs. Those earn outs are based on what you told me you were going to hit. We're obviously not going to pay you up front for it, but if you hit them, we're going to pay you.

33:25And then you still have that second bite after that. So we have a very sweet deal where it's, it's amazing. I mean, so the initial bite of the apple you got, that percentage was probably based on trailing 12. Correct. An additional earn out based on you hitting the goals in the next two years, 12 to 20, 24 months. And then you have two individual earn outs. And then you have points in the hold co your two companies, their two companies. Correct. And then you're on some sort of salary with them. Correct. And then if you win big, you win big on the four and maybe even more, you guys can go acquire companies.

33:55You can do whatever you want. Exactly. He's smiling guys. He's smiling. Yeah. Some shit's coming. Exactly. Some shit's coming there. Amazing. Yeah. I watched one of the videos with that guy. I don't know how to pronounce his name. He seems like a gangster. He's the best man. I tell everyone all the time that I don't even know if I would have stayed if it wasn't for Heike or picked this company if it wasn't for Heike. Heike is without a doubt one of the most influential people in my life. And I've only known him for a year. No bullshit guy. All about his processes. I've watched YouTube videos of him from when he was at Amerisports.

34:28And I've watched some of his quarterly meetings because it's a publicly traded company. So all that stuff is public. And it's like, if he's anything, he's as consistent as they come. You know, the same building blocks. And which shows it's a system. And if you build the system right, it can work anywhere. You just got to stick to the fucking system. You would like Brian Garofalo, CEO of Skullcandy. We did an episode with him. He's an absolute gangster, disciplined, consistent systems for 20, 30 years. Seems like he's very, very similar. Guys, this episode is sponsored by Ketone IQ. I often sit down in this chair for over three hours and stay super dialed with ketones.

35:03It's a completely different category of fuel for your brain, clean, sustained, and no crash. I take a shot before recording, before deep work, and any session that I need to be sharp. Head to ketone.com slash open residency for 30 % off your first subscription and a free gift with your second shipment. That's K-E-T-O-N-E dot com slash open residency. Guys, this is something that I use every single day, non-negotiable. Give it a try. I want to dive into the companies now. Everyone knows all your companies. I guess let's just start with, let's start with like the marketing mix. Pick a company. It could be Raw, it could be C-Bomb.

35:42Just tell us like how you look at marketing holistically, whether it be paid, organic, influencer. What does that look like from the top. Yeah, so, you know, we can start at, you know, the first one which would be Raw and then we can go all the way to Onside because I think they're two different ways and I can kind of work through both. I'm so curious on Onside. Dude, Onside's sick. Guys, long story short, they just went zero to all doors target with a bunch of celebrities. We're going to get into that deep. Yeah. If that plays out how I think it is. It's already playing out the way it's supposed to.

36:09It's already playing out. That's one of, I don't, that's never, this has never happened before. No. Stay tuned for that. Let's rewind. Let's go through the marketing. So with Raw and Bomb, you know, the way we started the company really is, is the same way you used to see companies start, you know, four or five years ago, where it was just influencer backed, right? We, we didn't have any cash. We, we didn't know what we were doing and we just figured it out along the way. So being fully transparent at that time, Matt and myself owned a vitamin company called Revive and we still own it, but we were trying to, people were asking us to start a sports nutrition brand.

36:42And we were like, we're not going to get into this world unless we have someone who can really like, just, we can own it immediately. Let's be honest. The sports nutrition world is very saturated. There's a thousand brands selling the same shit. So how can we get in front of all of it? And we knew the face of the brand needed to be Chris. We're going to pop up this beautiful human right here. Yeah. So it was Chris, right? And we flew Chris to Florida. We had a great conversation with Chris and we were like, hey, look, this is what we want to do. And I think at the time we were the first company to do equity deals with an influencer.

37:09Smart man. Right? Like no one was doing that. Everyone was doing the same bullshit. 10 ,000 a month, 15 ,000 a month. You know, here's your commission. What year is this for context? 2021. Damn. So. You know what's crazy with that too? That's a monster deal. How much leverage did you have in the marketplace then? You weren't that big then, were you? No, no, not at all. Yeah, we were nobody. You know, we were nobody back then. People do business with people, man. That's amazing. And you gave them a great deal. Of course. Yeah. And I think we actually started something cool because you see it a lot now, right?

37:36You see like a lot of the partnership stuff happening. You have Seth Ferozzi with Axe & Sledge. You know, there's another, a lot of other brands doing it now in sports nutrition. but it worked out really well for us. So we had the conversation. He agreed to it. We announced him like right before the Olympia, which was a great time to announce. That's when his videos on YouTube were getting a million views at a time, more than a million views at a time. And the brand exploded. It was like a massive, massive revenue number from like October to December of that year. That's what kind of spiked the vitamin shop's interest for us.

38:07And our goal with that was like, we're not going to go chase retailers. We're just going to build this DTC machine until people come to us and ask for it because we don't want to play the price game. we don't want to have to give them crazy margins on shelf we want to win on velocity so they may not make 50 points on our products but they're going to sell five times more of our product than the next so we're going to be able to make some real money here so so in the beginning just by context the youtube evergreen machine is just absolutely insane so you just turned him on i imagine just across all social just organically integrated in and then he was proud to say that he was an owner of the company so it started in the beginning no no ads no nothing just organic arbitrage.

38:40Correct. How big could it be with that? Was it over? Was it seven figures? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was seven figures with that. And the cool thing about that, and this is where people really, really have a hard time understanding how important having like that face is for your brand, is if you have a good face for the brand, other influencers want to be a part of it for way less money. So when we were trying to go get influencers before Chris, they were asking for all kinds of crazy numbers. I want 6 ,000 a month. I want 7 ,000 a month. I want 10 ,000 a month. But then once Chris came on, he's Michael Jordan, he's Michael Jordan, and everyone wants to play with Michael Jordan.

39:13So those same influencers are coming back saying, I'll take three, I'll take 2500. I you know, I know this brand is going to be massive now. So I just want to be a part of it. And that's where you win you building out, you know, we always had this idea. And Chris from day one always said, you know, I want to be the face of the brand for a little bit to get this thing going. But there's going to be a point in time where I want to step away from this. And I want this brand to be bigger than me when it comes to, you know, everything. 100%. And again, key man risk, right? We wanted that too, because we knew going to sell - Do you have a business background?

39:39I mean, I'm sure at this point he's way more - He's very intelligent and he's very like analytical in like anything he does. Chris is a, you know, a mind, you know, he's always questioning everything. He's very curious. He wants to know what, where, how, when, why. And I think he relied on me a lot in the beginning to help guide him, but then he kind of took it on his own and really started to be very, very successful in business himself. But that was the plan. And the plan was executed flawlessly. You know, if you look back now, Chris isn't even our number one athlete when it comes to sales. He kind of just...

40:10That's the dream. That's the dream. It's the dream. Yeah. So CAC arbitrage organically, I would imagine on the back of that per what you said, get other influencers. Correct. And you're not even driving Meta. And then I imagine at some point Meta, what about now? What does now look like? Now is a totally different animal, man. What does it look like right now? Yeah. So now is TikTok, man. TikTok is the new fucking paid media source. It's all influential seeding to product to TikTok. TikTok kind of has a spill over to Amazon. D2C is still in play, but like I would argue that TikTok is absolutely the new D2C.

40:40D2C to Amazon to retail. I think if anyone's starting a brand today, that's the model you pick and that's the model you run with. So if we got D2C, TikTok with a drip to Amazon and then retail, are you spending more on like, give me like a little bit. Like if you have a pie chart, I spend 80 % of our money on TikTok for ads. For ads or for giving free product to influencers and then win on affiliate? Or is it both? It's both. It's both. Yeah. It's literally 80 % of our ad spend right now is going to TikTok. Wow. Yeah. Guys, this is so and so crazy. I mean, you could watch all of our episodes and everybody kind of has their own secret sauce.

41:16I mean, most people, it's like 80 % meta. Michael Brand from Ketone, they do 50 plus percent partnerships, podcasts, whitelisting they do? So we launched TikTok not even two months ago. I would say a month ago. Our TikTok revenue is almost double of our entire athlete roster revenue right now. Wow. Yeah. And how has TikTok affected Amazon and DTC? It only helps it. Because the problem is you have a TikTok audience of younger kids, right? They're loyal to TikTok. They'll buy whatever they want on TikTok. But then you also have people like me. I don't trust that shit. I'm going to look at it. I'm going to find it.

41:50I'm not on that shit, bro. I mean, I have like clippers that clip for me on TikTok, but I don't even go on the app, right? I actually had a video my wife posted went viral and I'm hilarious. Actually, it's like a going on a vacation with a CEO. I was like four or five million views now, but I never run it. My best piece of content with my wife. Yeah. It's fucking wild. Yeah. It is wild. But yeah, no, I mean, it's, we see it because we have a tool that tracks it. It's about a 40 % spillover out of TikTok to Amazon. Yeah. We did a great episode with that. Kent from Nero. They were the fastest going brand on TikTok in 2024.

42:19and he actually turned down the spend on Amazon due to the spillover from TikTok. And it was like, you know, if he turned it all off, he saw like a 10 % decrease from the top because it's just direct spillover. Yeah. I have this funny, weird feeling that Amazon watches that. And if you like pull it, they like punish you for it. So like, I still rock with Amazon pretty heavily with ads just because I don't want it. Like, it's a great, great, great business for us. And like, I don't want to fuck, like, you know, it's like the saying, if it's not broke, don't fix it. Yeah. Like, I'm not going to fucking touch it.

42:48It's cranking. And we do very well on Amazon. Number one pre-workout on Amazon. So like that badge alone is massive for us. Yeah, I feel like Amazon, like you always see like the rankings and who's doing what on what. I feel like TikTok is still like, it's still kind of like a little bit under the weight. It's the Wild West, bro. It's the Wild West. I'm like, it's like, no one is like really, really talking about it. I don't see people flexing about TikTok. I know like a couple of brands. It's also a tough business to sell. You know, I would argue that if you're going to sell a company and it's like, oh, how do you do?

43:14Oh, I sell a 200 million a year on TikTok. Like P groups are still questioning that. Like, okay, like what if it goes away? You know, what happens if this? So I think the goal in any, in my opinion, and I could be 100 % wrong, but the goal for me, if I had a really strong TikTok brand would be to get it off of TikTok and get it into retail or Amazon as fast as possible. Yeah. I mean, I just saw a stat. I think the name of the company was Avi. Don't quote me. But if, especially if you have good margins, let's just say you have 80 point margins, you just blood free products. Yeah. And then they're giving 30 % commission.

43:45Yeah. That's a lot. A lot of companies do that. And the blended margin they're getting is like 40 points. And then they win there. And then you're winning on the back end, Amazon, retail, D2C. They don't even give a shit where it goes. Yeah. Like, you know, I think like the secret sauce right now is you run TikTok at a break even and you let it all flood over everywhere else and let it do its thing. To put a bow on Seabomb, what's your advice for people out there? I mean, obviously he's like a one of one. He's the top guy. But what are kind of the red flags or the green flags when people are signing?

44:14I would imagine, did you do some sort of vesting deal where he got X down investing? thing around. Wow. You went raw dog all in? Damn. That's a charismatic man with a lot of juice there. Seabomb. You went all in. Yeah. Yeah. But here's the deal. I get asked every single day by all my friends in the industry, who's the next Seabomb? Who can do the same thing Chris can do? And if I'm being honest, there isn't one. There's nobody that can do what he did in the industry. So for me, it's like my key green flags to look at when you're looking at someone like him is you have to be as authentic as all hell.

44:48I don't think there's anyone more authentic than Chris on social media, true to what he believes in. I've seen Chris turn down three, four,$5 million deals from companies because he doesn't believe in what it is, you know, and that's a, that's a hard pill to swallow, you know, 300K cash a month, just, no, I'm good. I don't want to do it. It doesn't align with my branding or my audience. That's going to compound big with where this world's going. Trust and distribution is everything. Yeah. But that's what builds trust, you know, and validity. These kids who jump from brand to brand to this, to that, I would argue there's probably no one on influential on social media that hasn't gone through 12 companies anymore.

45:20It's hard. You know, it's, it's too easy for these kids to make money. And then it's very, very difficult for brands to keep them once they realize they're not bringing the revenue they want and they quickly flip and they go to the next and the next and the next, and then you lose all validity and all trust in your audience. And then you're not worth anything to a brand. So, you know, if I could tell, you know, the influential kids on social, one thing is like, you got to ride it out. You know, you got to stick to something and be there for quite some time. Because if you don't do that, you're not going to build the loyalty and the trust of your audience.

45:47I don't think it's, you might think it's crazy. I don't think it's crazy for an influencer to ask for equity if they've put in their time for years and years. Yeah. You're like a pragmatic, pragmatic, if they're driving the value over time and they are trustworthy, have good distribution, it's grown. And you're happy to pay it or give it. Yeah. Right. Like I'm, I'm not sad at the equity I'm giving for the business I never would have had without that person. It's there's, it's a value-based trade. Yeah. I mean, Bum Energy went from 400 to 45 mil in under three years. Obviously, it's done some of the stuff that we've done here.

46:16What about the, it's almost like a sub-brand. Like it started as Raw and then it was Bum Energy. What was the strategy behind that, the reasoning behind that? Super easy. So the goal with that was we didn't want to pigeonhole ourselves into like the fitness community. And we've done a very good job of pulling Bum out and making it a lifestyle beverage. So this is for people who want to party. Like we do massive college campus tours with this. We do massive lifestyle events with it. We don't want you to think that you need to, the only person who drinks this is people who go to the gym. And it's ham.

46:42Yeah. And if you look at brands that have done it in the past, there's two reasons. That's reason number one. Reason number two is if you look at any brand in the past that has started an energy drink that also owned a sports nutrition brand, quite literally within the first year, they just totally forget about their powder business and they go all in on the energy drink business. And this business is what's paying the bills. Don't forget it. You start a new business. This business isn't going to start making money for a little bit, right? But if you put all the effort here and you don't pay attention here, this goes away.

47:11And I'll give you an example. Two companies that we took a lot of brand space from at the time were C4. When Nutribolt came out with C4 Energy, they kind of let go of their business with C4. C4 is the number one pre-workout on Amazon for fucking ever. And we stole that from them just because they weren't paying attention to it. It couldn't have been easier, right? We just laid down on what we knew we knew best and we just took it because they weren't paying attention to it. And that was just you just being strategic and building two different systems, two different. 100%. You don't forget about it.

47:41You know, this is a big business. This business made a lot of money. Why would you let it go? Because this is the new shiny object on the street. Like you can't do that. It's not how you build brand. So I would rather have both, you know, have a team dedicated to this and the team get it dedicated to this. Is that the secret sauce is isolated, separated teams. That's really what it is. Cause I feel like that there's not as much. I think it's a bandwidth thing. You know, I think that there's some people who can do a great job. Look at Greg. Greg's done a fucking amazing job of building bloom. And it's very much quite literally could be the same team under one roof.

48:09But it's also about the founder, you know, giving clear direction, you know, look, guys, you know, yeah, one of our key building blocks is energy, but we still have these other three key building blocks over here. And if these aren't hitting, we're not winning. And that's how it's all about the leadership structure and all about because as a CEO, if I see this start taking off, and then I'm like, Oh, my God, look at the multipliers on energy are so much better. This is so much better. It's so much easier. It's one skew with different flavors. I don't have to manage fucking anything. It's just, it's an easier business.

48:36And it's so easy for me to take that road and just go to the right. So easy, but you can't. And you have to be very, very, very disciplined and understanding that that's not the right way to do it. And yes, you need to give this all the attention it needs. You need to hire for this. Don't build your team too thin to where they can't focus on it. Build the right team for both and win. Love that. Guys, next episode is Greg from Bloom. That's going to bang. We're doing that in a couple of days. Make sure you guys subscribe. Don't miss that one. So you just started another company, separate team. Obviously you gave him sauce in both of them.

49:05And now this probably gives you probably more leverage and optionality where you're talking to anyone, maybe influencer and they could do both deals. Maybe a retailer, you're talking to the same person, you can sell in both. Yeah, look, the strategy is always the best about CPG is once you get to the Walmarts, the Targets, the Costcos, the Sam's Clubs, it's very easy to shift vertically and say, hey, we have this, hey, we have this. And granted, you're only as good as the last thing you launch. But once you get into those doors and you do well, they want more product. Like they're dying for innovation.

49:34They're dying for awesome brands. So if you can deliver on that over and over and over again, the CPG game is a fun game. It's a really fun game to be in. It's so crazy, man. Because obviously we're looking at like AI in the future and we've like dissected like our business iconic and we're like looking back on like what truly is our moat and stuff keeps like evolving over time. Like, you know, our designs, our licenses, our brand, our following. But it's really coming back to now our production supply chain because we've done so much volume over 10 years that we have pricing power. Sure. And then it's the distribution.

50:05And like someone like you, like the fact that you could just go to Walmart and go to Target and you have all this credibility across these brands and you can start anything new and just pitch it in. It's dope. That's the sauce, bro. So I tell people this all the time. Since we started messing around with AI and I really do believe this, I think the most powerful thing that you can have in the next 10 years is relationships. I agree. Because AI is going to fucking do everything. Offline relationships. Yeah. Because AI is going to do it all. You're not going to be able to outwork people. You're not going to be able to outsmart people.

50:35Isn't it wild to think that the outwork thing is going to no longer be a thing? It's gone. You're going to have a bot working 24-7, doing everything you want to do. I'm going to put you on some sauce after this. I want it. We're in deep. I feel the smiles. I want it. We just did an episode. We're about to do a lot more. Yeah, the agent is what increased, what cut my prepared time in half. Bro, we have the same shit going right now. I named them all. I can text them. They have email addresses. We got Marty. because we're this our whole our whole vibe is inspired by marty supreme like how would you like the movie covers yeah so marty is our first agent that's dope we're deciding the subject i literally i sent out a group text yesterday we're building them for all my my team like my team like each one's gonna have one and i'm like you know with my chief technology officer like you i need you to meet with them this week i need you to basically you know tell it tell him everything you want it to do or you know what you want it to operate like and then put you obviously you know build the brain and then once you build the brain like executing on it naming it giving get a phone number and email address and all of them are going to have their own virtual you know what it looks like our guy we had a put him down to more like gen so you got to ask him what he looks like he's going to send you an image of what he looks like yeah we're restyling him right now he looks like very like a brooks brothers i'm gonna ask him type guy you ask him let him ride with it don't tell him the vibe let him figure it out but then you can you have to be polite though when you ask him to adjust yeah it's fucking crazy man yeah i think for people out there like obviously be slow and calculated but doing a deal with someone like a c-bomb I think that wins over time because it's trust and distribution.

52:01Maybe you got lucky there. Maybe do a vesting over time, but everything else sounds amazing. Yeah. If I went back, I probably should have done that. I think that was a little bit before my business acumen was as high as it is now, but I also trusted Chris and I still trust Chris. So I'm glad I did it. Good man. Let's go a little bit deeper into influencers. I saw on one of your videos, you have this full-time athlete education specialist named Isabel. Tell us about that. I know nothing except that exists. And I think it's brilliant at the surface level. I want to know more. Tell me more. Yeah.

52:31So again, our German counterparts do massive revenue on DTC. Massive, massive revenue. I can't say the numbers, but it's, you wouldn't believe them if I told you. So our goal was like - Great complimentary business. Again. And that was one of the reasons why they liked us because they saw so much white space in that category for us. So it was like, okay, well, we're going to bring Isabel over and Isabel is going to do this whole entire education series on our athletes. And I'll be honest with you. another person who does a fantastic job of this is CG, Christian Guzman. So, you know, bringing Christian on board was really a great way to show these new up and coming athletes and influencers how to do it right.

53:06You know, how not to sell your soul to the devil, how to, you know, don't post these corny, you see it, you see it all the time. You have the influencers that take a photo of the product and then put a code underneath. And it's like, that's not going to sell a fucking thing. You know, you need to work through this. Why do you take it? When do you take it? What's the benefit of it? Why is it better than everything else? Right. Answering those questions live, even like the time to post how to do three stories in a row to make it more exciting for the person watching. But that's what Isabel does.

53:30So she'll sit one on one with each of these athletes, relationship manager, optimizing relationship manager, but also helping them build their personal brands. Because let's be honest, like if they're not building their personal brand, they're not growing their following on social, it doesn't do us any good after three months, after three months, that person, we've seen their whole entire audience. And after we see their whole entire audience for those three months, unless they're growing 10, 20 % month over month. Need net new to capture. We're not doing anything good for ourselves there. So we help build their brand.

53:57Yeah. You hear so many times of people just like partnering, extracting from the audience and moving on. But if you're, if you're growing fast, then that's why you see a lot of brands nowadays, they don't do long partnerships anymore. They do a three month deal where they'll pay more for three months. So let's say someone wanted 10k a month for a year contract. They'll pay them 20 for three. See you later. Because in those first three months, you're getting 90 % of what you're going to ever get out of that person anyways. and then you can flip different, you know, demographics much faster and you have a bigger audience, your TAM's bigger.

54:25What is one of the biggest things you've seen out of that from Isabel? Is there like one big takeaway you could share with the audience on that outside of just be authentic? Well, no, I think what it comes down to is a lot of these people don't really know how to do it right. And they think that, you know, a lot of people when they're on social, they don't want to look corny, right? And that's the big thing with these athletes or these influencers. They're like, I don't want to post this all the time because it's corny and it's not going to make me any money. But when you really educate them on how to do it right, and you see that one, it doesn't come off corny at all.

54:50It comes off very real and authentic. But two, the level of difference it makes in their compensation, they get excited about it. And then they kind of double down on it and want to do it more. So I think it's that. It's showing them that you can do this well, you can make a lot of money and you can do it in a way where you're not corny. It's a balance. We talked with Ross, like premium at scale. It's like, how do you make a lot of money and not be corny? It's hard. They just rolled out yesterday. I don't know when this is going to air. Instagram is doing baked in affiliate where you can bake in.

55:18Yeah, that happened yesterday. Really? Yeah, baked in affiliate on Instagram. So they can be even less corny. You could just do some straight up lifestyle stuff. That's cool. And embed it in. Very cool. That's going to slap. What about Gymshark times bum energy? You've done some great strategic partnerships. Yeah. Gymshark is like the fucking OG of all OGs. How did that come about? And what's kind of the big takeaway from that? Oh, it's funny. So we did a deal. I helped Chris do Chris's deal with Gymshark when he went back to Gymshark. And one of the things we threw in the deal was we had to be that exclusive, you know, supplement slash energy drink, like collaboration with Gymshark at all their events.

55:52And I've just become really tight with Noel over the years. Noel is, you know, an incredible human being, Ben also an incredible human being. And we are, our visions, I think as to what we want out of, you know, brand and people are very aligned. So it made sense for us to really lean into Gymshark. And I think it made sense for them to lean into us. And we just have a great relationship with them. We did a deal with them where we did an exclusive energy drink. You got, you've probably seen it. It's like the most sought after i think they sell for like over a hundred dollars a piece on ebay it was just as much as much just as much a brand play as it was like yeah and we we only have it at exclusive gymshark events so if you want one you got to come to the event you got to get it and that's kind of how we do it and is it almost like an evergreen deal you guys are going to be launching new products over time um i think we'll probably mess around with some powders and things of that nature but you also have to remember a lot of gymshark athletes aren't raw athletes and they have other sponsorships so we have to be very careful with how we do it because we don't want anyone to get in trouble either right we don't want someone to grab our products and get in trouble and get thrown off of a sponsorship.

56:45It's supposed to be fun and we want to keep it that way. So less like hard marketing deliverables and more like homey, elevate brand, limited product, limited distribution. Exclusiveness, right? You want what you can't have. Can't have enough of those. Yeah. We did a really cool one. I don't know if you remember, we were the first one to do it in sports nutrition. We did a Ghost and Thavage collab. Ghost and who? And our pre-workout. So our pre-workout is Thavage, which is Chris's lisp on Savage. Yeah. And we were the first company ever. This is Lisp on. Yeah. That's why it's called Savage. That's interesting.

57:16Yeah. That's a nice authentic play. Yeah. And our protein is called Isolate with a T-H instead of an S. I did not know that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's funny, but yeah. So we were the first brand to do that. And to this day, we still get asked to do that again. Like, Hey, when are you ever going to do a ghost, you know, Savage collab again? And it like broke the internet at the time. Brian and Dan are the homies. I love those guys. Dan told me about the concept while walking a trade show on his non-compete 10 years ago. My artist I was managing did his logo. He told me the most crisp vision.

57:46I thought he was a fucking psycho. That was like 12 years ago. Dan helped us with Bum Energy. He was like one of the people who I have a very close relationship with Dan. And, you know, when we were wanting to launch the energy drink, he gave us a really good idea of not chasing what everyone else was doing and doing it a little bit differently. And it was the best advice we could have taken. It's very, very rare to see. I feel like when I'm thinking of like apparel, thinking of all the brands i'm not gonna name the brands here guys just so fucking cutthroat no one wants to help anybody and i it's wild for me to hear i mean even on like the momentous episode just calling out all these he's just calling out bpn like you're just openly talking about bloom talking about ghost is it just because just the tam is is so massive and just it's just no i mean look i believe that there's a lot of yeah i guess you could say that i think there's enough people in the world that you don't have to compete, you know, like that.

58:35And I like good people. You know, I truly believe that there's a lot of people in the industry that I don't talk to, because I don't think that they're the right people. And I don't think that they do good for the industry. But you know, Andy and Sal for still at first form, Sal was quite literally besides Matt was one of the only people that I looked at for father advice when I had my son, I had a call with Sal every Friday, and we would talk about everything I was going through as a new dad. And he was literally one of the most incredible human beings on earth at the time. He didn't owe me anything.

59:04Fun fact, I used to be an influencer for First Form like 15 years ago. I never met him at the time. You're not from the Midwest. I know. I know. I know. But you know, we have a great relationship. Me and Greg have a great relationship. You know, we talk almost every day. Me and Ross obviously have a great relationship. Fuck. I mean, there's so many brands that I talked to Dan and Ryan, like great guys. And then there's some that I don't, but I'm, I don't think that there's any world where you shouldn't be collaborative at some point or another with the people in your industry and try to keep it good.

59:34I think the more you do to keep the industry on the right path and do the right thing, that makes it better for everyone in the industry. Everything rises. Correct. All ships rise. Yeah. And let's be honest with this whole GLP one craze that's coming out. There's more eyes on sports nutrition now than ever before. PE didn't even really play in sports nutrition until recently. And now look at all the numbers you're getting out of these crazy deals coming out of protein because protein is the new hot shit. It's so wild. It's going to be harder to eat than not eat. It's just the whole entire thing is about to be back.

1:00:07It's going to be cheaper to eat filet mignon soon than get protein powder because protein powder prices are absolutely insane. They just came out a report too that people's bones are getting weakened too. Oh, some GLP ones? Yes, I don't know what the fast follower is going to be on that to strengthen your bones. I don't know what that micronutrient is. But that's going to be a big, big sucker. I mean really, it's a lack of protein. They're not getting, because the problem with GLP ones is you're not craving protein. You're craving fat. You're craving sugar, right? So what you're seeing now is this whole new snackable category where they're just putting protein in anything, Pop-Tarts, fucking potato chips, because that's what you crave when you're on them.

1:00:39And you're going to see those categories are going to blow up. Every category. The weirdest, most niche category you see. I remember when like protein chips came out. I was like, yo, this is absolutely crazy right now. And that's like, now that's like a given. Now it's like if you come out with a chip. Yeah, you come with innovation at a meeting and you have a chip. They're like, we've seen this shit a million times. Give me something good. Insane. Biggest waste of marketing dollars. You've been in the game for a while. you've seen a lot of different companies? What do you think is the biggest waste?

1:01:00I think the biggest waste of marketing dollars is not knowing how to use the money the right way. So for example, if you use a ton of money in Facebook, like make sure you know how to do Facebook ads before you spend it, right? If you want to do a celebrity partnership, make sure you know what you're going to do with the celebrity before you buy the celebrity, right? So for example, if you're going to spend$2 million on somebody, you better have a really fucking strong plan on how you're going to effectively use their name, image and likeness for the next 12 months. Are you doing billboards? Are you doing banners?

1:01:24Are you doing cutouts? Are you doing everything you can to capitalize on it? Because I don't think there's a bad way to spend money in marketing as long as there's no plan attached to it. And that's what you see happen, right? When we started Facebook in the beginning, we didn't know what the fuck we were doing. We were lighting money on fire, right? When you start Google ads and you don't know how to manage them properly, lighting money on fire. If you pay$2 million for a celebrity and you don't have a plan of action on every granular detail of how are you going to use them for 12 months, I consider that lighting money on fire.

1:01:51if someone is starting a brand now and they had to spend their marketing dollars in their first place tiktok i think that there's no other place you can get the return on your investment than tiktok right now and you're only two or three months in yeah i mean granted we have massive brand legacy but i've spoke to some of the most intelligent people in the world that have you know built tiktok one of them being you know jay from mary roos you know alan carr from based that's that's the hot shit right now that's where you put your money you guys heard it here um if You had to pick one product first or brand first.

1:02:23Oof, I'm going to go brand. Why? Because I think once you have a brand, you can sell anything and you can be more than one product. I think when you have a product, it's tough to integrate more into it. And granted, there are some places or people who have built a product first, built a brand after, but I think it's a lot harder. I think branding is ultimately the most important thing in the world. I think it's what gets people excited. I would argue that people buy into our brand for our brand more than our products. I mean, let's be honest, pre-workout is pre-workout. Why are you buying Raw over any other company?

1:02:52Into the emotion, into the association. And what we believe in, right? We're good people. We're family men. Like we believe in, you know, good values. And I think people want to support that. How big has you been doing personal content helped shape this branding narrative? Because you, I mean, you came, I feel like you came out of nowhere. Like we were looking last night and like, dude, we're like every two weeks, we're about to really up to frequency. But bro, you are firing, bro. You're putting out so much content. How's the content changed and shaped the brand and help the brands. Yeah, you know, what happened with me was when I was going through the process, one of my good friends, it was actually Ross came to me and he was like, bro, you have to get your fucking face like the shit you're doing that no one knows about is more than anyone's doing that's famous.

1:03:30Like you just need to get out in front of it. And my goal is, I'll always do it now, because I do believe that I'm helping entrepreneurs and I'm helping the next generation come up. But I'm a CEO and an operator first. So the second that this interferes with what my day to day job is or my family, I'm done. Like I'll miss an episode. I'll miss it. My, my content, my head of content, he's here. He's fucking amazing. And you know, what you see is real. And that's why I'm able to do it. I'm not sugarcoating anything I'm putting out. If it's a bad day, you're going to get a bad me. If it's a good day, you're going to get a good me.

1:03:58But ultimately, as long as I stay true to, you know, being authentic, I think that's what's made it kind of pop off so much, because it's not like a highlight reel, you see all the bad shit too. And I'll be honest about it as much as I can be, right? There are some things I can't talk about, but obviously it's been a really cool last, you know, I would say year. Yeah, I did in like 17 or 18. I was called Behind the Hustle. I had someone follow me around for 18 months. Documentation is way easier than like preparing and filming because you just like live your life. Yeah. And to this day, 10 years later, a lot of people that like come up to me and know me, know me from that.

1:04:30And it's fucking evergreen. Dude, you know what the crazy - And little Enzo the gangster. He's going to see this shit too. That's it, man. And, you know, I think the cool part about it is it's so easy when it's authentic. Like I have people that message me all the time and they're like, oh, you need to change your thumbnail to this and you use this fucking title. And I'm like, I don't fucking care. You know, like this is what I'm going to post. It's real. If people find me, great. If people don't, that's okay. Eventually one of these things is going to pop off and it'll do its thing. I think you're doing it well.

1:04:58Thanks, man. I don't agree with that guy. Biggest branding mistake you think new CPG founders are making in 2026? I think if you had to blow it down. Yeah, for sure. If I think of CPG, I think of a lot of times, and we made this mistake when we were going into Walmart the first time, our buyer came to us and said, this is what we want from Raw, right? Nah, this is not how this works, bro. So that's what he did. And, you know, we're young. We're like so excited to get into Walmart. So we're like, whatever this guy says, we got to do. Like, right? We got to formulate these products. We got to come out with this shit.

1:05:27Biggest mistake of my life by far. You know, we basically came out with SKUs that weren't aligned with our vision because they wanted to hit specific price points on shelf. and they did terrible. This is reactive versus proactive. This is them dictating. It was the worst thing. And I learned the most valuable lesson of my life that buyers don't know what they don't know. And, you know, we were super lucky that that buyer ended up actually getting fired from Walmart. Guys, this is very rare. You get a second crack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that buyer ended up getting fired. The new buyer came in and we sat down with them and, you know, we have this data in front of us and it's terrible data, right?

1:06:04terrible data. And we're like, all right, we're just going to be honest. Like this guy told us to make these SKUs. We made these SKUs. It's not aligned to our brand. Like give us one more shot, please. Like, please give us one more shot. Actual one more shot. Yeah. Let us put what we think is meant to be in here. And now we hold the number one selling SKU in Walmart. We're going to get deeper into how you accelerate the sales and make sure that it works. We're talking a lot about branding. I want to dive into, into 3D energy and Guzman. Guzman is like a YouTube OG legend. You partnered there and it exploded.

1:06:39What happened? And went what? Zero to 10 million in six months? Yes. About six or seven months. Yeah. So it was a cool story. So Christian, obviously, you know, had his relationship with Congo and Congo, obviously, you know, owns a lot. They owned Alani, they own prime and 3D was the first energy drink they came out with. And that was the relationship between Christian and them. So he was a 50 % partner and Congo was the other 50 % partner. And about two years ago, Christian came to me and he just wanted advice. He was like, Hey man, like I've seen what you've done. I would love some advice and kind of how to operate through this.

1:07:09He's like, I think I'm going to shut it down. And I said, Hey, look, I said, I think what you need to do is kind of figure out what you want to do. And if you want to make this thing go, you know, I think I can help you get it back and kind of tweak it. And he's like, would you come in as my partner? And I said, look, there's a lot of stuff that has to get done before that happens. There's a lot of cleanup. You know, you have to have a conversation with Max, which is the owner of Congo, and he's a good friend of mine too. And, you know, you need to figure it out. So as soon as that happened, I reached out to Max.

1:07:35I said, Max, look, you know, Christian reached out to me. This is what he's trying to do. You know, I think there were some underlying issues between them that they had to get solved, but I think it's a good move. You don't give a shit about the brand. You haven't given a shit about the brand in a long time. Give it to Christian and full transparency asked me to help him. So if you're cool with it, I may help him. And the whole time after that, my thought process was, how am I going to be able to run two separate energy drink companies without competing with each other? Because bomb was just now taking off too.

1:08:03And I'm, I have partners, right? Like I'm loyal to my partners before anything else. So I'm not going to take my focus, put it somewhere else and then cannibalize it because I have a better opportunity somewhere else. This is not how I am. I would never do that. So I had to figure out how can I do this without cannibalizing each other. And what we came up with and what I had to pitch to Christian was if you do all of this, and if you get all this back, I would be willing to do it. But we would have to restructure the way that we sell this drink. And what I would recommend doing is first of pulling all the shit out of it, the artificial colors, all the bullshit that doesn't need to be in it.

1:08:33Let's make a really cost-effective, affordable energy drink and target the market that no one's targeting, which is the Venoms, the Nosses, that market. Noss, that's still a thing? Bro, they do 150 million a year. Wow. No marketing, right? But it's because of the price point. So if I can come out with a beverage that's sub$2, that can compete in that category, that hasn't been penetrated or disrupted in 10 or 20 years, I think it's a win because you'll have a$1.50 per se energy drink over here. And you'll have your$3.50 energy drink over here. One is a fully built out functional beverage. One is just a blue collar worker energy drink that you're going to grab at a 7-Eleven.

1:09:10And I pitched the idea to him. I said, the margins are there. We can make it make sense. It's a great opportunity for us. And he said, fuck it, let's do it. So I said, okay. I said for him. Yeah. And that's what we did, man. We launched it. You know, I used, I leveraged some of the relationships I had at vitamin shop. And to be honest, it's been really difficult to salvage some of the bad relationships that, you know, they left, they were left with because 3d kind of really fuck some people over big retailers. So coming in and having to massage that and say, look, it's new organization, new ownership, the bum energy guys.

1:09:41And again, bum energy wasn't that big at the point. So they were still trying to figure out if we were going to get special over here. So like, ah, we're not going to make that many big bets here until we see this take off. and now obviously those conversations have changed but you know in dollar i think it's dollar general or dollar tree we're the number two energy drink in the store heb in texas number two energy drink in heb so we're doing it right we're nationwide and quick trip so kind of you know a year behind bum is where we're at and we're leveraging those same relationships and now we're using the same distribution team to build 3d you're saying a lot of stuff there i think for a lot of people out there listening especially young entrepreneurs it was like an old quote i used to here it was you can't cash cool and so much money is in the bottom like you're talking about like dollar tree and dollar general and it's so funny because like i could tell again i haven't known you that long but just like you now versus five years ago i can imagine christian now versus fucking three years ago it's a completely different person just being non-emotional and just like seeing very clearly that like yeah it might be in the bottom at dollar tree dollar general but that's like massive businesses and that's where the white space is because most of the people that are cool don't want to go there.

1:10:45Yeah. And like, there's, there's a, there's a reason, right? Like if you look at energy right now, like let's compete where there's not a lot of competition. You have everyone chasing the same kind of energy drink, this functional$3.50, you know, okay. If everyone's focused over here, no one's focused over here. Where's the best place to win? It's here. And as long as you don't have to spend a lot on marketing over here, because let's be honest, what's the number one thing that sells? Price. Yeah. Right. As long as it tastes good and it's priced well. The name is good. It's clean. It's enough.

1:11:16It's enough. It's exactly what it needs to be. And the flavor profiles are fucking incredible. I would argue that some of the best tasting energy we make is in 3D, but there's not a lot of marketing needed when it's $1.50 a can. You know, that sells it. And that's true everywhere. If you look at any place, if you get low enough, you're going to sell. But the problem is, is are you profitable when you're that low. And that's the game we played to get there. And we got there. Love that. What about Guzman? Guzman as an individual, I don't know him that well. What's his superpower? Christian, I would argue that Christian - Outside the bench press, for sure.

1:11:48I think that CG is, anyone in the influencer space for the last 15 years that's still relevant has some type of a superpower. Because name another person who's been as relevant as, I mean, I would argue that every fitness influencer over the last 10 years was motivated by CG to start doing what they're doing. And he stayed true to himself. He's an honest person. He's quirky, but he owns everything he does. And he's a he's a master of learning. You know, I think that the one thing about CG is, if he doesn't know something, he doesn't bullshit himself to say that he does. He wants to be in rooms of people that know more.

1:12:22And I think he's one of the most successful entrepreneurs that I've ever met, you know, and I think his wife is the same way. Yeah, 15 years staying like relevant in the cultures, I guess, is fucking rare. And being real, you know, he was never anyone he isn't. He was as honest as they came. You know, when he did something stupid, he talked about it more so than most people. So it's rare. You know, most people, they, the true colors come out over time and they kind of lose that audience. And he's done a really good job of keeping his audience and building his content as he got older, as he got mature, that same audience followed him through.

1:12:55Love that. What is everybody getting wrong about price? You talked about it, like when they're pricing their product. Yeah. We talked a little bit off camera, just about understanding and knowing kind of like the distribution points. Why don't we actually just like zoom out? You're, I don't even know, you're probably talking to more retail buyers and more retail than like anyone. So like, what's your like thesis on just retail in general and pricing and such? I'd love to talk about that. Yeah. You know, so price back architecture is, is definitely, I would say it's a, it's a literal position in my company.

1:13:23We have someone who sits in that seat, his name's Ant and he, all he does is handle anti-cannibalization from retail and price-back architecture and serving sizes across all of our channels. That's a little, that's an awesome ninja job. And he's an ex-PNG guy. He manages all of our glide path from gross to net. So our gross to net waterfall, which is where all of that trade spend comes out of. So that's all he does, right? So it's CM1, CM2, all of it. No, it's before that. So you gotta remember. So this is what I was saying earlier is your gross to net doesn't show up on your P &L because your P &L starts at the money that hits the bank account.

1:13:56Yeah. So all of those deductions from retailers, all of those rebates, all of that comes in before you see it on the P &L. So the money you see, all that shit's been taken out already. So most people don't pay attention to it because it's like, it's in la la land. So he's laddering up after the fact when everything comes in. Correct. So he's going in there and he's saying, where can we claw back some of this? Or are we using it the best way we could? Because let's be honest, trade spend is a lot of money. I would argue if you blend our trade spend across all of our categories, you're looking at above a 10 % number.

1:14:25So think of 10 % on hundreds of millions of dollars. And trade spend is end caps. It's all the above. Discounts, end caps, late delivery, like all that shit sits above. It's everything that they can deduct from your invoice before they pay you, ultimately, every retailer. So he can go in there. You're saying 10 % of, like, let's just say the MSRP is four and you sell to them for two. You're saying 20 cents of that too? Yes. I mean, just think about it easy math. Say your gross revenue for the year is, I'm using numbers that aren't mine. Say it's$100 million. If you take 10 % off of that, it's$10 million.

1:14:58Damn. And think about that on a multiple. If you get a 10X or a 20X multiple on your company, what is that? That's straight, it's hundreds of millions of dollars. So how do you get to that point in figuring that out? And you got an important job here, bro. He does. He's got a lot. He's amazing. But the goal is, is if we're going to use the trade spend, right? Are we using it in the best way? And what we call it is like, it's a new customer acquisition tool, right? That's what really trade spend is. New year, new me, Black Friday, those types of things where you're doing these massive discounts.

1:15:25Are they driving a new customer? Can you track it? Does it make sense? How often are you doing them? Because if you're doing them all the time, what do you have now? You have a discount brand. You don't have anything besides a discount brand. But if you're doing them in strategic points of the year, so let's just say you're doing it at a new year, new me. Let's say you're doing it at Black Friday and you're pushing a lot of trade spend into those months to get new customers, then you're doing it right. So you're doing like a BOGO. you'll lose margin there under the assumption that in between these troughs, you're going to win on higher margin.

1:15:55100%. And you don't have to have the beautiful part about it is that tradesman, that percentage doesn't need to be the same every month. It shouldn't be that's bad. What you want is you want these big peaks and valleys because you want to gain the new customer. And then you want to cool off and let them just consistently buy then you want another big one to gain a new customer and then cool off. And you do it with different deals publics, the way publics does it the grocery store here is they love their BOGO, right? They have to have a BOGO. So that's what you do at Publix. What you do at Sam's Club is they have an ISB, what they call at the beginning of the year, where they give you the opportunity to go to the front of the club, get a pallet drop, do a discount for new year, new me.

1:16:31That's where you do it. But the new customers you're getting, as long as you can quantify it, makes sense to do those as strategically throughout the year. And how are you understanding that attribution? Because it's a black, I mean, it's Amazon, it's black box, it's retail. Well, you can see it because you can see the uplift in sales. Yeah, so you're saying on a per, you can't really do like the drip over, but on like a per retailer perspective, if you do the BOGO. Yeah. So we build out a P &L by retailer and by channel. So we see like, if we see these big lumps, it's like, okay, we wouldn't have this traffic if it wasn't for this deal.

1:17:00So let's say our average order, our average basket value is, you know,$30 at Publix, then we know that we got that many new customers in that big, in that big spike, right? And then what we do is we track it after. So if we were doing, let's say 100 grand a month in Publix, before we have this big sale. And then after that sale, it goes to 120 ,000 a month. We won, we did it. That's what we wanted. Right. And then, and on a per retailer perspective, probably has like a blended number at the end of the year on like the P &L that he wants to make that percent to hit that. Of course. Yeah. And you can look at like an empirical, like you can look at past years and you understand and know seasonality months, a little, little econ game here.

1:17:40It's very similar. I mean, that, that, that's how they stay in the game. That's how retailers stay in the game. Why are people going to them versus buying it online? They have to get the same types of deals to get them to go in store. Is your game, is it like, do people give a shit about like Black Friday and stuff like that? Yeah. I mean, we still do a pretty big number on Black Friday. Interesting. I think Amazon, what is it called? The Amazon days or whatever are bigger than Black Friday. What about, I think what we almost always hear, and we're going to get into it very, very soon, this onside deal.

1:18:09Like you always hear, like you want to start kind of deep and narrow, maybe go boutique and then kind of lever up to mass. Yeah. What's your like overarching thesis on how you approach different retailers and what you should do outside of it's about the sell through, not the sell in. If you guys don't know that yet, you need to watch more episodes. It's about the sell through, not the sell in, but more about like specific retailers. Like how does the sequencing go in your mind? Like how do you think about that? Yeah. So the way that we, and I think most do it well is you cannot club is where you make a lot of money, but you can't jump to club because club isn't going to build a brand, right?

1:18:41And club is Sam's club in Costco. So when you think about it, you have to build up to those numbers. So my perfect scenario for anything, and you know, I would say I'll give you the roadmap we did for raw and bomb is, is e-com. And then from e-com and let's just say you use DTC as a bucket. DTC is going to be a TikTok and DTC, right? Both. So yeah. Amazon DTC. TikTok, Amazon and DTC. Yeah. So starting there. And then for me, it was specialty. So specialty is vitamin shop and GNC. So we went into vitamin shop and GNC. Elevated brand, keep it premium, higher price point. Exactly. Bigger serving sizes, all the above, right?

1:19:16And in there, your margins are great. Your serving sizes are great. Your pricing is great. But what you're doing there is you're first, you're learning how to deal with a retailer, right? It's a very small in the big scheme of things retailer, but you're learning how to manage a retailer. You're learning how to manage relationships with retail. You're managing trade spend. You're managing how to forecast. And it's a great stepping stone before you go into FDM. Because if you don't get it there, you are going to get swallowed in FDM. You will get destroyed. And unless you're mafioso like you, you don't get a second chance.

1:19:48No second chances. Yeah, no second chances. You don't get a second chance. Correct. What's FDM? Food drug mass. Food drug mass. What's like a CVS? No, food drug mass is Publix. It's HEB. It's Hy-Vee. It's the biggest FDM is Walmart. But I would consider that like the next one, right? So FDM is that. It's all sequencing based on probably lower and lower MSRP, correct? Yes. Yeah, basically. And at the bottom, it's because they win on a membership. So that's why they can do lower MSRP and lower margins, right? Well, yeah. So Sam's Club and Costco, they live on way, way less margin. I would say around 15%, which is a third of what other places want.

1:20:27So it's very, very accretive for us to do that because we can still kind of make the same profitability because they want less margin. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. What about the sell through? Is it just all trade basically? Sell through is not all trade. And the way I look at sell through is I look at it as like this perfect situation. So you have to have a good product. Like I don't care who you are. I don't care how popular you are. I don't care what celebrity you are. If you don't have a good product, you're not gonna sell. It has to be a good product. So the product has to be good.

1:20:56The product has to look good, right? When you do D2C, the one thing that people always forget about is people are buying because of the person or the brand. Once you go on shelf, the goal for me, not for the store, the store's goal is for me to drive incremental value, right? Which means me bringing my consumer into their store that wouldn't traditionally shop there. My goal is to steal the guy next to me's idea, right? I want them to switch from that product to my product. And the only way you can do that without having a brand, and granted, that's the third thing, but it's product. It's what the product looks like on shelf to get, oh, well, that's cool.

1:21:26Like, what is that? You know? And then the last thing is your brand. So I don't know if it's that order. I wouldn't agree in that order at all. I think brand is obviously very, very important but if you have all three of those things that's how you win and that's how you get the velocity and the sellout makes sense we did an episode with peter hall from david protein this guy from a packaging and branding perspective i don't know if you know the story with rx bar but they were bro they were like six or seven million dollars and we could pop up the old wrapper it was absolute crap and then he changed it because there's only four ingredients and it was like four egg whites almonds cashews whatever it is kind of like the rx how the oh yeah oh yeah yeah Yeah, like you don't even know what it is.

1:22:00You just know that, bro. This guy goes tactically into it. It's fucking brilliant. It's like, think about egg whites. Yeah. Like they don't have a lot of protein. Yeah. But what do you think about with egg whites? Think about protein. What about when you go to the diner? What do you think about that? You pay more for the egg whites. So it seems more premium. Yeah. Bro, the shit went on a rocket ship because of - I believe it. Because of that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's Ross, that episode as well too. He made tweaks on the cadence. Oh, dude. Oh my God. Tweaks is an understatement. I think we looked at 400 fucking renders in like three days time.

1:22:27Give us context on that. Like how much was, was the uplift based on that? It was massive. And it was, that was the exact example that I'm talking about. We were going from a D to C brand to going into retail and we needed to be able to call things out differently. Right. Because no one knew what race meant. No one knew what flavor anything was because it was, it was just, it was a lot, but like for the true and tried cadence shopper or, you know, follower, everyone knew what everything was, but going into a retail environment, like the way we did the color across the top of the can to call out the flavor, the way we moved the flavor name to the top of the can, because when the can sits on shelf, when you have the holder here, you lose everything below my hand.

1:23:04So if you're on shelf and you're, you know, they're angled shelves, they have the blocker in the front, everything from here down, you can't see. So if you look at this can now, what do you see? You see everything you need to see. You see the name of my company, you see the flavor, you see all the call outs of what's important on the can, because this is what shows. That's a gangster call right there. No one has done that is the blockage of how it's actually sitting. Everything under here is useless. And that's why it's empty on this can because this is not seen. So you got to use this real estate the whole time.

1:23:29Love that. I mean, for me, it's really just about like, I feel like when you move into retail, it has to be like direct response. It has to more be like, and don't get it twisted, bro. Like we didn't know this shit going into it. Like that is tried and true. This can change too. That's why people are listening. That's why people follow you. Yeah. Put them, put them on the game right now. Anything else big before we move on from, from retail, from an advice perspective? No, I think again, it's retail is about managing relationships and managing expectations and being a good partner. I think so many times what you forget about is, you know, you're going into these places and they're telling you, you know, you're telling them what you want.

1:24:01You're telling them how you want it. You're telling them where you want to be in the store. You're telling them what you deserve. But, you know, I've never seen someone besides myself at the end of a meeting say, what can we do for you? You know, what can I do better on my side of the table? And, you know, we have that conversation. I was at Walmart yesterday. I was at Walmart with Ross yesterday. I had all my brand meetings yesterday. and, you know, at every one of these meetings, it's like, you know, what can we do better for you? You know, how can we show up for you in a better way? And granted, it's hard when you're doing a really good job, right?

1:24:25We're the fastest growing new energy drink in Walmart. We're doing everything right. We're doing everything we're supposed to be doing. But it's more of a relationship tool of saying, I understand that you're in your seat and you're getting beat up by brand after brand after brand, every single meeting, every single day, every single email. They love when Uncle Don walks in. What can I do to help you? How can I make your life easier? You know, what, what can we do to be more efficient? What can we do to sell more? How can we make these things happen? And that's exactly what we've done. And we've become really good partners.

1:24:54We're not taking on more than we can chew. If I feel like two companies are coming at me at the same time that want us and we can't service both of them equally and well, I'm going to hold off on launching in one because I want to make sure that that relationship stays great. Yeah. It's as simple as like in any partnership, just like, what does success look like? You start with that. And then just continuously saying that. It's so crazy, man. Like, again, it's like, I don't even know. simple, but not obvious. I don't just don't understand why more people don't do this. It's maybe you were, you were raised, right, bro.

1:25:21Yes, I was for sure. But I think the other thing is some people don't want to know it's that easy because it's hard. You know, like there's so many times where you talk to someone, you're like, how'd you do this? Well, I didn't quit. I stepped through it. I went through the hard shit and they're like, that's it. Yeah, that's it. But it's not as easy as you think. You know, there's times where I quite literally, you know, wanted to quit. And I was sitting in my room by myself, crying my eyes out. There were times where I went to Matt bawling my eyes out saying like, fuck, we're fucked. I don't know what to do, but we just figured it out.

1:25:48But like, those are the times that separate the people who get there and who don't. It is that simple. I agree. Most creators are just duct taping together a bunch of different tools to run their podcast and their newsletter. Your audience, the analytics, the attention, it's all split. Everything is fragmented. This is where Beehive changed everything for us. It's where Open Residency runs our newsletter and they just dropped a new native podcast tool. Upload your audio and immediately get distributed to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you're hosting somewhere else, just paste your RSS feed and your entire back catalog, the metadata and the episodes all carry over.

1:26:21One platform, one login, everything talks to each other. Head to beehive.com slash openresidency for 30 % off your first three months. Just enter code mark30 at checkout. That's B-E-E-H-I-I-V dot com slash openresidency and code mark30 at checkout. Stop renting your audience, start owning it. Let's talk about the Bum Energy going from direct to Walmart to a DSD network. Sure. Just giving like the nitty gritty, like granular advice and stuff like this. There's somebody out there listening that you're going to change their life. So just explain to us what that is and why. I hope Walmart doesn't hate me for this, but okay.

1:26:55So we launched in, we launched directly into Walmart with Bum first, because let's be, let's be honest. It's really hard to build a DSD network. It's direct store distribution, unless you have a partnership with them. Break it down. Fifth grade level here. Yeah. So basically, if you look at companies like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Keurig, Dr. Pepper, Anheuser-Busch, those guys own the trucks that deliver the goods. Okay. And those are all independent distributors, but they fall into houses. They call AB house, Molson Coors house, Pepsi house, Coca-Cola house. So as opposed to wholesaling it in the DC of Walmart.

1:27:28Exactly. As opposed to selling directly to Walmart, then Walmart distributes directly to their stores, the Walmart employee fills the shelf. Okay. So those are the two ways. You go direct, which is the way I just said, or you go DST, which is the route where we fill their shelves, right? Through distribution partners. So speed versus probably latency. Yeah, speed. It's a lot. It's a lot more than that. So the problem is a Walmart employee is not incentivized the same way a DST is incentivized to fill those shelves. So if you have a Walmart shopper or a Walmart employee, they're going to go to the back of the store.

1:27:59They're going to grab Bum Energy. They're going to put it on the shelf in the morning, and they're going to leave. and then Instacart's going to come in at 7 a.m. and they're going to rip the shelf of all the bum energy on the shelf. And then the shelf's going to sit empty for the rest of the day. And then no one's going to be able to get it because it's going to be out of stock. And it's going to look poop. Someone's not going to take care of that. They're not going to rearrange the label. There's no incentive for a Walmart employee to go fill that shelf four times a day. Disclaimer here, guys, we love Walmart.

1:28:21I love Walmart. We love Walmart. Yeah. Love Walmart. It's the truth, though. Look into the eyes. Tell them you love them. I love them. Love them. But they know it. They're fully aware of it.

1:28:33is when you're working with Walmart, you get one spot to put your beverage on shelf. You have your pogged area on the shelf. What's pogged mean? I don't even know what it means. It's just the spot where you're allowed to put your stuff, right? It's your three spots, right? And your 12th back underneath. So we have this little spot where we have three products. Now, when you go distributor, they can make those crazy displays you see when you walk in. So I don't know if you've ever seen them in the past, but you walk in, you'll see a bum energy display. That's literally the size of this whole entire thing.

1:28:59There's a cold refrigerator in the middle of it. There's a banner hanging from the ceiling. Crazy shit, yeah. And that's what the distributors do. So instead of putting it in one spot, they're going around the whole store, finding empty end caps, putting placement everywhere in the cold coolers up front before you're checking out. So the ability to be able to do all of that is not, you cannot do that going direct. You have nobody doing that. So your velocities are going through the roof because you have five or six more spots in each individual store that your product is in. So contextually, like total units, you're talking about more spots and probably more velocity.

1:29:31You're talking about like, probably like two, three, four, 500 X. Yes. Yeah. It's a, it's a massive difference. And you need like leverage and sauce. Like obviously in the beginning, you can't do this. You have to build up credibility. Yeah. So it's the chicken before the egg game, man. It's the hardest thing in the world because you want to go DSD first, but you have to build a brand for them to say, yeah, we'll take you because they're going to have to fill their trucks with this product. And if this product doesn't move, they buy it. So they're buying the product and then they're selling it into Walmart.

1:29:54So what we, our relationship is with the DSD, the DSD buys from us and the DSD goes and sells to Walmart. DSD gets paid by Walmart. lower margin profile on the DSD. For sure. But velocities are through the roof. So you went on volume, you went on volume all day, every day. Yes. So the point of the matter is, is the DSD model is, in my opinion, is a great model to use. And we love using it. Now, they're also incentivized to sell our products. So what we're dealing with now is, you know, we switched to DSD just at our nationwide target and Walmart rollout. And we're having these gaps of out of stocks.

1:30:27So our velocities right now are absolutely amazing. But they're still not where they need to be, because what happens is the DSD truck shows up and then it sells out and then it sits for a minute until it comes back again and then it comes back up and then it sells out again. So, and we can see it. It's a chart. It just looks like this. It looks like a heartbeat. And the problem is, is most brands that start DSD don't sell out as quickly as we do. So now we're having to - What's the next level, baby? What's the next level? You buying trucks? No, no, no, no. The next level is just, you know, educating the DSD on look, like, you know, you got to pay attention to us.

1:30:57So now it's building out our field team. So we have, by the end of this year, will have 100 people on the ground across the country. And their job is to sit with these DSDs and educate them on how valuable the brand is going to these stores, taking the photos of the shelves being empty, and just holding them accountable. Because look, they have a lot of brands to service to. Ideally, you want to go to the ones that have the least amount of non-alcoholic beverage because you want them to be loyal to your brand. But they probably have five or six different ones on their truck. And, you know, why would they focus on us?

1:31:24And that's the relationship building, right? That's showing up, you know, taking them to dinner, showing them we want to help support them, you know, fill these shelves, giving them incentives, doing crazy, you know, contests for the DST of who sells the most gets a crazy trip or, you know. You can do any and all those things. I mean, that's completely free game. Any type of incentive plan. You can in non-alcoholic. In alcoholic, you cannot do any of this. So as long as it's an NA beverage, yes. Wow. Yeah. Awesome. There's probably a lot of creativity. Yeah. You can do it. Oh, for sure. You can do whatever you want.

1:31:52Tying up on retail, what is, you know, you mentioned that people don't like ask, like, what does success look like or how can we help you? What are some other things, key things to say in there, maybe even to ask the retailer so you set yourself up for success? I want there's someone that's walking into their first meeting in a big retailer. Any other things that you can point out to them that they need to do? You know, I would say don't rush it. I think rushing into retail is a mistake. I think you have to have a really big brand, a lot of brand validity before you jump that ship and get in there.

1:32:21Because again, the sellout is harder than the sell in. You can get in almost anywhere on a great spiel and some good data. but unless it starts flying off the shelf, you're going to be in a world full of hurt. And that's where the trade spend comes in, right? Because if it's not moving, what do they make you do? They make you make it cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper until it starts to move where it needs to. And that's literally on the, like the retailer's gun to head. Yeah, and they don't care. Like they're not going to take it out of their margin. So it's just going to come back in deductions and deductions and deductions and deductions.

1:32:49And then you look at the business and maybe it's not the most profitable business to get to the point where it needs to move because they have what they call hurdle rates. right? A hurdle rate is how many of these things need to move on a daily, weekly, monthly basis for it to make sense for them to keep them on shelf. And if they don't hit that, that's when, you know, oh, we need to do a rollback or we need to do this or we need to do that. And that's where you become quickly having a very healthy CM1 to being not profitable at all. That's everything for them on their side, the hurdle rate. It's sell through.

1:33:16That's how they make their money. I don't blame them. What's the playbook for you to your team when you don't hit the CM1? What do you do? Is it just, is it just trade? I mean, they're telling you what to do. If we don't hit our target CM1, we can't keep the product. It's not a profitable product. We have to get rid of the product. It's that simple. But we do a lot more in those stage gate meetings that we talked about now to where that usually doesn't happen anymore. We put enough profit in the product. We make sure the product makes sense. So that way, when we get to that point, and if we do have to do a discount of some sort to get it cranking, you still win.

1:33:43We have the ability to do it. What does it look like on the bottom? Like what's that like actual kind of EBITDA or gross after all things? Like what's a good target for a brand? CPG, a great target is anything north of 18%, I would say. Damn, that low? That's not including the internal OPEX. That's including... That's everything. That's straight profit to the bottom, cash to the bottom. As a company. Yeah. As a company. Yeah. That's good, bro. Yeah. That's what PE wants to see. That's healthy. Yeah. And that's how the multiplier gets announced, right? So if you have under a certain amount, your multiplier is going to be about a little less than if you have over that.

1:34:16Diving deeper into the numbers on kind of like financial management, what are those other things? You've so many like little booby traps and like little mistakes because he's given you guys so many gems. What are some of those other things that your CFO has found? Because now you're a part of this like massive conglomerate. What are those other kind of like sneaky things? We talk a lot. We talked about it on the Sean from Ridge episode is like people don't understand like 3PL costs. They don't understand actual shipping versus what you charge. It actually could be a profit center shipping. Oh, for sure.

1:34:42What are some of those other kind of leaky buckets that you've seen that I'm sure that you've solved a ton of them? So I would say the biggest leaky bucket that any company has is that gross to net waterfall of trade spend. Number one, always. Number two, I would say is logistics. You know, when, as you start to grow, you know, if you look at the way that we're structured right now, like you don't think anything of it when you're growing like this, but our facilities in South Florida, it's the worst place to have a warehouse in the fucking country, right? Like, because everything has to come into South Florida to deliver.

1:35:13And then it has to leave South Florida to go everywhere else back in the country. Oh, you're saying, cause you're in the bottom corner. I'm in the bottom corner. So I have every semi-truck from New York to California, driving to me in Florida, unloading, and then quite literally reloading and going back to the other sides of the country. So like - You talking to Wifey about the Midwest? Come on, I'm not moving. But looking at it now, what we needed to do and what we did is we did a heat map of how our trucks are coming in and where most of our stuff is going out. And a centrally located spot is very, very valuable for us.

1:35:46So our Baum Energy Warehouse is now moving right next door to our manufacturer, which is great because it eliminates all inbound freight. We have no more inbound freight. Wow. That's a massive number. Seven figure win annually. Right. And then if we move our warehouse out of Florida and centralize our warehouse again, boom, another seven figure win. So those things add up quickly. But again, percentage wise, it may not look like a lot on the P &L until you get to a big size. Right. But that's how you start dragging a lot of percentages points to the bottom line. And let's be honest on, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, bringing 5 % to the bottom, straight cash, is a massive multiplier on the back end, right?

1:36:23So those are the things that we check all the time. SG &A is another one. On the logistics side, what are you bringing in? Are you bringing in like a logistics expert? Like some ninjas coming in? No, so you can hire outside companies to come in and do like a heat map survey of the country and kind of figure out where you need to be and where most of your people are. And it's a pretty simple exercise. And then once you figure that out, you just go tackle the warehouse space. The other thing is warehouse space in the Midwest Weston in Texas is a third of the price of warehouse space in South Florida.

1:36:48Right. So like there's wins everywhere there. Again, it wasn't on the top of my mind because that was the least of my worries. I was worried about building a brand. I wasn't worried about a truck getting delivered or leaving. But now that I have someone who's paying attention to all those little details, there you go. They just drove that much more money to the bottom line of the company, which I'm super grateful for. Bringing an outside specialist. I mean, I even have like a gangster media bar. I just brought in this guy, Barry Hot. You know, you pay him a thousand dollars. He comes in, he wrecks havoc.

1:37:12And if you're spending way, way more than that a day, it makes up for itself 10X. We hired an expert to come in and analyze our gross to net, which was our trade spend. We had to do it because we don't, I mean, we didn't know it. We didn't know how to bucket it from new customer acquisition, channel by strategy. He came in and he did a full audit in about two months, came back, delivered it, put our team to work to get it done. You know, sometimes why waste time not knowing what you don't know? Hire the guy to come in and crank it out. You know, SG &A is another huge bucket. People overhire all the time, especially in the beverage.

1:37:43What's your percentage of revenue? Can you drop it on here? 4%. Holy. Yeah. 4 %? Yeah. I'm putting you on Mount Rushmore up here. 4%. Yeah. That keeps getting lower and lower, especially with AI. Yeah. So to be fair, we had a buildup period where it was like 6 to 8 because we were building the team. Oh, 6 to 8. That's still good. Yeah. But now it's right at 4. So when you look at it, you have, like I look at COGS, OPEX, and marketing. When you look at your business from like a financial perspective. It's our CM3 pretty much. That's what it is? Yeah. It's those. Wow. So it's really, and then you bake in, are you baking in on the COGS, all of that, that 10%, the trades, or is that on the marketing?

1:38:23The 10%. All that bake in like the buybacks and that. No, no, that doesn't, again, that doesn't fall on our P &L. That's because it's gross to net. So our P &L starts at net revenue. Oh, I get it. Yeah. Yeah, so our P &L starts at net revenue. So our P &L, if you look at it from top to bottom, would be net revenue is number one. Underneath net revenue would be cost of goods and inbound freight, which would equate to CM1. And then underneath CM1 would be outbound freight. And then underneath that is SG &A, marketing, and all the other bullshit. Guys, we're going to put a lead magnet down below that's going to have all this free game in it.

1:38:55You guys are going to love it. Last question on finance. Would you rather 100 mil in rev and 20 points at EBITDA or 50 million REV with 40 points in EBITDA? It's a tough question. It's a random one. It depends if what you're using, the money that you're not spending. It's a loaded question, right? So I always like, for my rule of thumb in everything that I do, I say if you're making over 20 % EBITDA, you should be taking whatever's over that and reinvesting into the company to grow. That was going to be my next question, a better question. How much money, how much EBITDA is too much EBITDA to reinvest and get economies?

1:39:30I like 20 % EBITDA at the bottom line. And I think that if your company has 40, 50 % EBITDA and it's not growing, then you need to just keep reinvesting that back in to make it grow. And then obviously there will be a point where it plateaus where you can't get any more out of it and then just take the cash back. Love that. Let's talk about the new bets. Onside and Eterna. Sure. I'm so interested in this Onside. Yeah. So it might be a little counterintuitive that we talked about before on the retail because this man just said, fuck it. Yeah. We're just going all doors with Target. I don't even know where to start right now.

1:40:02I guess just for people out there that haven't heard of it, let's just start with just like, what is Onside? Why is it in Target? And I just want to pin down a million questions because this is like, was it like the biggest opening PO? I mean, it had to be one of the biggest opening POs like ever. It was a big PO. Yeah, it was. Tell us everything. Yeah, so Onside is a men's care brand. So it's the way it's described is it's basically body, face, and hair. So that's kind of like how we target it. So we have 22 SKUs with the different fragrances. And then we have a fragrance free. And it goes everything from under eye roll on cream to face wash, to face lotion, to shampoo, to a hybrid body spray, to everything in between for guys.

1:40:45And the way we wanted to do this was our brand partner is Jason Tatum, who I'm sure a lot of you guys know who that is. He plays for the Celtics. He's one of the best NBA players of all time right now. and in the past you know what you've seen is you've seen these celebrities endorse Louis Vuitton or Tom Ford or you know whatever it is that's expensive that costs a lot of money for fragrance and the problem that I saw was most of the following of these people can't quite afford that fragrance you know the average person who's following them is buying at Walmart Target and all these other places so our goal was to come out with a product that literally was the same quality as a Tom Ford cologne or an Estee Lauder face cream or one of those things.

1:41:29But at a price point, that was sub$13, right? I can't speak to the quality. I haven't tried it yet, but the aesthetic is beautiful. The aesthetic's nice. And the next piece was to make it look really fucking cool, right? So how do you do that in a sea of a ton of different things? Well, you do custom packaging, custom molds, embossed print in the packaging, no labels, everything's direct print. So we did a lot of unique things for this packaging to make it look very, very premium. at a very affordable price. So again, I talk about it all the time, but you have to win on product, you have to win on packaging.

1:42:01And then the third is obviously influence, who's influencing the product. And I'm a firm believer, and I've heard it a million times over from all the retail buyers, is so many celebrities have launched brands now that have failed, that they don't really even get that excited about a celebrity brand anymore. It's more like, okay, what else are you doing? Like, what's the TikTok model? What's your D to C revenue? What's all these things? So when we went to Target with this, it was more of a, what else are you doing besides this? And then we need the products. We need to smell it. We need to see it.

1:42:31We need to hear it. And it worked out really well where Target said, look, we think this is a phenomenal brand and we would love to have an exclusivity on this product for a year. And for that exclusivity, we would be willing to give you probably the most insane launch ever, which is full end caps for almost the whole entire year. All doors? Yeah. We have full end caps everywhere. Yeah. So, you know, it was a massive lean in from Target, but, you know, it definitely paid off for them. And we just launched the brand about three and a half weeks ago. So the brand has been launched. We did a really cool collab with Jason Tatum to launch the brand.

1:43:06We're utilizing TikTok to drive traffic without TikTok shop, which is working pretty well for us. So not transacting there. It's not transacting there. It's driving to online and in-store. So their online business is pretty strong too. So it's target.com, in-store Target. is it also on like an Onside website or not? No, no due to sale. Wow, this is interesting. Yeah, so everything directs back. So like if you go on Onside and you click it, it takes you to target.com. And the uniqueness is the first three weeks, we didn't market at all. And I wanted to do that on purpose because I wanted to see the organicness of what it would do on its own.

1:43:36And it almost hit direct hurdle rates without doing one thing. And that is strictly because of the packaging and the product. And I firmly believe that. Granted, I posted and stuff like that, but I don't think I'm driving the sales that it was getting, right? I'm driving all door sales in Target. it. I would love to take credit for that, but it's definitely not what happened. I don't think Tatum's selling in New York City for the next. I don't know about that. He definitely did a lot of damage in Boston though. So that helps. So we did like a walkthrough the launch day. Tatum was in the store.

1:44:02He signed packages, left them in the, in the stand. So like people could go and get them afterwards. It was pretty cool. He's very actively engaged. He's a great guy, man. He's his mom involved. His mom's involved. Brandy's the best. Yeah. She's, she loved the product. I think she likes it more than him, if I'm being honest, but he's actually, we were just in Boston a few weeks ago and he's coming out with the signature scent towards the end of the year. And it's like a coconut noir. It's like a, it's a really awesome, like Bergamot coconuts. It's amazing. But that comes out towards the end of the year.

1:44:32But anyways, you know, we just started turning the marketing on for TikTok this past week and we saw a 20 % increase in, in the sales and store, which was what I wanted to do because I really wanted to see the impact of turning it on in the trade spend and then seeing what I needed to plug in monetarily to that to see it go to the next level. So we're really doing a strategic approach to see where we spend our money and what money is best spent where for this specific brand. Because this is my first time in body ever. I've never had a brand in this space. Granted, I've been in CPG for quite some time, but this is a whole new world for me.

1:45:05We've gotten very, very lucky because my partnership with CVC actually allowed me to meet a woman named Georgia, who used to be very, very high up at Estee Lauder. And she sits on our board now for Onside. And she gave us a lot of strategic guidelines on how we should launch, what we should lean into, how the Germans let you tap into that. Yeah, CVC. Yeah. So CVC owns a big chain of stores in Europe, and she advises them on that chain. So, you know, I'm very close with the CVC guys now. And they basically are like, hey, I want to introduce you to somebody. She could help you a lot. And I talked to her, they didn't make her do it.

1:45:40They introduced her. And she loved it. You know, she was like, very, very interested in the brand. She loved how we were going to market with it. And we have a weekly call with her where we kind of give her updates on how everything's going. She steers us in the right direction. She kind of tells us what our margins need to be on certain SKUs. And she's setting us up to really win, you know, especially on the exit. And like hurdle rate perspective, I would just imagine there's not like the frequency like you can have two bums a day. The hurdle rate is not it. It's, they based it on weekly sales.

1:46:07So their hurdle rate is 200 to 300 ,000 a week. Coming back to the real world, Dom. Coming back to the real world. People buy stuff like once a month. Yeah. No, these guys, so like certain things, fragrance is like once every six months. Yeah. You know, and then obviously deodorant and things like that are less. Body lotion is usually once a month. Yeah, definitely. These numbers are better numbers for sure. I can make a really good joke about my art company. Yeah. But it would just be, it would hurt me internally. Yeah. I mean, how often do you buy art? It's just on your fucking wall. That's true.

1:46:34I know, I feel it in you right now. It's true. We don't want to talk about it. Yeah. This sounds like a great, I'm not going to say simple business by any means. Yeah, to be honest, it's much simpler than the world I live in. So it's unique. I'll tell you right now, the multipliers in this space are absolutely insane. Like unreal. Like a natural buyer. Again, we're not saying anything here, but like a natural buyer could be like a Target. I don't know if that would be it. I think like an Estee Lauder, a Unilever, a PNG, someone like that would come in and buy it. Because you have so much meat on the bone where you're winning in one retailer, and they could just deploy.

1:47:06Yeah, dominate everywhere. Yeah, you know, the goal is to give exclusivity to target and let them really win year one. And then, you know, as you know, I have a lot of other channels I can put this in. So year two is going to be the breakout year. This is for me to really, from being honest, like I'm learning, you know, I'm doing this, right? I'm like I said, I'm leveraging into one relationship, I'm making sure they're really happy. I'm making sure I'm delivering on my end of the bargain. and I'm learning. I'm not going to lie to you. I don't know this industry, but I'm going to figure it the fuck out before next year.

1:47:32And then next year, when January 1st comes, I'm going to have this shit in every fucking door in America. Hey. How'd that first meeting go with Tatum? It was super cool. Yeah, he's a pretty reserved guy, but he loves the product. So, you know, the first time I met him, our team was kind of going back and forth with him for like on Zooms and things like that. He actually jumped on the Target call, which was pretty cool. But we were in Boston. Guys, that's a Chico, by the way, too, to get the POs. Yeah, it helped. I know it was pre-deal, but it's a good one. Yeah. But no, it was cool. And then he's very reserved, very quiet.

1:48:01He doesn't get super excited about much, but you can tell he was raised very well. Yeah. Super polite. He's an overall great human. You know, I've met celebrities in the past that we were going to work with and it's a very different relationship. So he's a great guy. Yeah, I think you pointed it out and I just want to really, really put an accent on it is all these guys. I'm just thinking of like Shea Giltress. It's like everyone is doing these top end brands. And if you really want to appease, you know your fans give them the ability to transact yeah it's like we're i don't know how much nba jerseys right now they're probably like 100 bucks it's like even like a t-shirt it's probably like 35 bucks yeah so allowing them to transact i think it's more than 100 for a jersey now to be honest with you it's crazy it's a smart move high low i like that yeah the fact that you guys have this much velocity early i mean you could keep bringing on people and later and later stages and later and later strike prices and you could just keep yeah so i think like every Maybe two times a year we find the right face and bring it in.

1:48:53And let's be honest, the TikTok business, once we can open that up and do TikTok shop and that e-com side of it, I think will be a massive win too. Because a lot of people do rely on Amazon and TikTok to buy these things now. Look at base. I mean, those guys, Alan Carr, I think he's doing 200 million a year between TikTok and Amazon. Damn. Crushes. Some guy was just kind of, it's two young guys, right? Alan Carr, I mean, I met the kid two weeks ago and I'm overly impressed with him. I just got connected to him. He looks like he's like a young Persian-looking dude, right? He's here. He just got here for this weekend.

1:49:25Dope. Yeah. Good to know. Yeah. What should everybody look out for in the future? Is there anything else that we didn't talk about? You're going to bring on more athletes? You're going to go into other stores? Anything else big that people should know? No, I think with that, Brian, it's really about just lining up the fragrance, right? I think it's smell cells. And I think, you know, one thing that Georgia told me is, you know, scents really, like the reason why scents work so well is they drive people back to a place or an experience in the past. So like something reminds them of something. And I'm sure you have like a relative that passed away that you know their smell, right?

1:49:53Or something along those lines. So really playing into like the emotion of scent is something that most people don't do when they're building out a brand. It's really, they're thinking about packaging. They're thinking about the way it looks or who's holding it. But there's a very big emotional connection to the actual way it smells and really being very, very meticulous on not only the scent, but the way you announce the scent in the wording on the package. You know, so if you look at our package, everything is Santol leather, eucalyptus mint, you know, coconut noir. They're not stupid names.

1:50:22They're not basic names because we're trying to drive people to like an experience. Love that. Definitely got some good consulting from that woman on that. That's like, I don't know that shit. I don't know how someone would know. Well, you have to think, right? Like in her world, when you're selling a fragrance, most true fragrance, like a bottle of cologne, you're buying once every year, maybe a little bit after. So like you got to really win on packaging design and emotion to get someone to buy something like that. That's why when you look at every cologne commercial you've ever seen, what is it?

1:50:51Sexy time. It's an emotion, right? It's someone jumping in the ocean in Italy. It's someone like sitting on a yacht. Like you're not, it's, that's what it is. And that's because it's trying to drive you to a place. It's not trying to sell you a smell. Yeah. I mean, what's really good though, is I feel like, again, it's, it's not as the frequency isn't there but i feel like if you find a cologne like you're you're staying on that cologne for a while oh dude yeah i'm on perfumes marley you know that one no i don't it's a good one i just actually just got the new otega like oud scent they have and it's fucking unbelievable i love it and no one has it yet so i'm like don't don't buy it please whoever's listening but yeah people are definitely listening you're definitely gonna buy it bro it's it's a good we can cut it out if you need me i will no no you don't have to cut it out but if you're gonna buy it i'm gonna give you a tip like you need like a half a spray if you go over a full spray on that like you don't want to You don't want to be anywhere near you.

1:51:40Yeah, you don't want to be one of those guys. Eterna, let's talk about this one as well. Yeah. It's really about this kind of frontier layer. For people out there watching, what is it? Because I had no idea, even when I was reading about it, I still had no idea what the hell I was reading. So Dr. Adil Khan is the founder of Eterna and Eterna is his medical facility. He has a location in Cabo and he has a location in Dubai. Both of those facilities are the places that have and have basically trademarked and use a form of stem cell called a muse stem cell. and muse stem cells are the best of the best when it comes to regenerative medicine.

1:52:14There's a ton of different stem cells out there, but the muse cell is very receptive to the human body. So what that means is it doesn't die when it goes in you. Most cells can die instantly when they go in you. It can pass the blood brain barrier, which is very unique. And it also is a cell that doesn't cause cancer. So there's a lot of positives to it. Proprietary? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so it's a trademarked IP. and then there's another cell called a PAC cell, which is a form of a mu cell that actually was formulated with the collaboration of UCLA, which we just took over the patent on. So now we have the patent on the PAC cell and we have a mu cell.

1:52:53And the goal is to basically have and offer patients in America these cells. And if you don't know, Florida just passed a law that allows these types of cells to be used only in Florida. That's the only state in the country that is allowing the use of these cells. So when that - And these cells are like anti-aging. Oh yeah. I mean, so there's a cool test that you can do when you're going through the process where we can actually take your blood before the procedure. We can actually rate your organ health by age. So we can tell you your liver's aging faster than your spleen, is faster than your kidney, your heart.

1:53:23And then six to eight months after you actually do the cells, we can actually retest that and show you the work that the cells have done internally. But anyways, back to Dr. Khan, when he decided that he wanted to obviously open an office in Palm Beach, he knew about my business, which is Relive Health, which is the franchise that I own of the medical offices. So Chris actually introduced him to me and he said, hey, look, you know, this is coming. I would love to partner with you in the US. I know you know what you're doing there. And this is Sebum from Bum Energy. He probably was doing this. He was doing it.

1:53:52Correct. Yeah. So he's been doing this with Dr. Khan for probably the last three or four years out of the country. So that interaction happened. He introduced me to our other partner in this. Our name is Marina. And we started this process about a year ago. We finalized our lease. Our lease is going to be in the Nora district in downtown West Palm beach. It's one of the most beautiful up and coming areas in downtown Palm beach. And this facility will be the most state of the art facility that you will ever see. We're going to have our stem cell lab in the facility. So we're actually going to culture the cells live and deliver them to the patient live.

1:54:24So like literally wheeling the cell from the, from the actual lab directly to the patient. So most, most stem cells, just so you know, are flash frozen or lyphalized and then they're reconstituted and then given to the patient. This is a live cell culture, which is the best of the best. Like none are dead. They're going right into the patient, but we're going to offer a lot of other really cool regenerative therapies as well. Plasmapheresis, for example, which is the blood cleaning. Oh, I saw. Did Rogan just post about that? Yeah, everyone's been doing it now, but it's a really cool procedure where it basically takes the plasma out of your body.

1:54:53It takes all the inflammation. It takes all of, you know, you know, you can have, I had, I just did it yesterday or two days ago and I had a parasite in mine. Everyone has parasites, bro. Yeah. So, you know, and then that goes to the point of, okay, there's a parasite. How do you take care of the parasite? You know, there's a million ways you can do it. You can do, you know, you can do chelation, you can do, you know, what is it? Methylene blue. You can do NAD, not really necessarily for parasites, but you can also do ivermectin with activated charcoal. You can go down a whole rabbit hole, but we're going to have all of the best services you can possibly have.

1:55:23So the goal would be you come down for basically a week. And then before you come down, you're going to be on a peptide protocol to get your body ready for these stem cells. And you're really going to just build out if you're there for, you know, specific reasons for a joint, a back spine, we're going to have a C-arm for direct injections into the spine. The physician who's going to be running the office, his name is Dr. Raza, Dr. Dyer Raza. He's a neurologist. He's one of the most intelligent people I've ever met in my entire life. So he's going to be the one doing these procedures. He's been working with Dr.

1:55:49Khan for the last six months in Japan, in Cabo, everywhere, learning about these cells, how to use them, how to treat them. So this facility is going to be very special. This is a, is this a premium jacked up version of what I see? Like I see like UFC fighters. 100%. Yeah. Like they like go to like Mexico or some shit like that. Much, much more elevated version of that. I mean, Dr. Khan, if you look at his social media, you know, he, he got, he really exploded over the last couple of months or a couple of years, not couple of years, couple of months because he just treated Kim Kardashian and Khloe Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Tony Robbins, Zac Efron, you know, all of, and those are the names that I can name just because he posted them.

1:56:24but there's quite more that, you know, are wanting to not be known. You mentioned Relive, which is these clinics that you franchise out. Are you going to do the same thing with the Turner, like start in Palm Beach? And obviously it seems as though you have like the U.S. rights or something like that. Yeah. I don't know because I think this is a much, much more like destination boutique. Like I think the more there are, the less personal and the less premium it will be. I think this is more about the people doing it, where it is, the services we offer. This is massive ticket. These are six figure treatments.

1:56:53Damn. Yeah. And a huge commitment as far as time too. You're saying it's a week. Absolutely. And you got to pre-prep. Yeah. Dope. Yeah. I mean - The world's changing in a weird way here. Yeah. From start to finish, like prepping for it and ending it, I would say it's probably a four-month process to do it right. You know, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, pre-po, like there's a lot of things that go into it to do it, to make it the most effective it can be. So under the notion that you're dropping bags on your body here. Yeah. What have you done with your body? What's that one biggest thing that you've done, that one biggest breakthrough?

1:57:23Let's give us a price point one and let's give us a premium option here. What has been the biggest breakthrough? You can't say like, go to the gym. That's a freebie. No, no, no. I think, you know, taking my whole entire health and my journey of health and dialing it down to, you know, my VO2 max and really like my grip strength and understanding that those are the two markers for longevity. You know, I think a lot of my life I relied on looks, right? I want to look the best. And granted, like I've also found that when you do both or when you really focus on those things, you end up tending to look the best anyways.

1:57:52Yeah. But I would say that. And then I really do a lot of stem cell. You know, I've probably done, starting since last year, if I was paying full retail price, probably close to a half a million dollars in stem cell therapy. Damn. Yeah. On the former, we were talking off camera about the Norwegian 4x4 for VO2 and just obviously mix of high intensity and low intensity. Bro, I was mind blown. I saw like on Twitter, you know, the average person, I only, I barely cleared it. Like grip strength, like hanging, like you're supposed to be able to hang for like a minute 30 or two minutes. Yeah, two minutes.

1:58:22Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. How long can you hang for? I can hang for two minutes, barely, like just barely. Now my workouts, I mean, Matt, me and Matt train almost all the time. And if we're not training together, we're doing the same workouts. We follow the GBRS guys. Vernon Griffin is their trainer and he's very big on all of this stuff. So like hypermobility, grip strength, functional movement. So it's a lot more of like stretching and body weight in between functional movement and compound movement. But almost all of the workouts are ending in some type of a grip strength training. So taking like the bumper plates, the 45s and grabbing them like this and doing farmer's carries.

1:58:58And my body has never looked as good as it has since I started training this way. So I'm super grateful for them. But also I've never been internally as healthy as I've been, you know, and granted, I understand that I'm spending a lot of money on that. But after you have a kid, I think, you know, your whole entire life changes. For me, I don't care about anything besides spending an extra day with my son. And this just fuels the energy. 100%. To do that. Yeah. Granted, I think it helps with work too, because I don't think I can operate the way I do without feeling really good. Like if I have a cold coming, I will do anything to not get sick.

1:59:27I'll start slamming ivermectin. I'll do whatever it takes to not get sick because I just can't afford to be sick. I had a cold recently, like sniffles for a couple of days. Terrible. I don't do that. That was like the first time in like three years. I was like, what the fuck is this? Terrible. It's absolutely terrible. My wife will tell you if I get sick, I am a child. I turn into a baby. I don't want to leave the bed. Like I feel like I'm dying. and then she just makes fun of me. Last little portion before we get into the quick strike and we're just going to fire off a ton of questions. I just want to touch on this Relive just because, quote unquote, you said that it could be even bigger than raw.

1:59:59Oh yeah, for sure. I want you to give context, I guess, first what it is. And then I have just some pointed questions at that to help the audience there. Yeah, so Relive is basically it's a concierge hormone optimization stem cell, not the mu cell, just normal stem cell. IV therapy, we do a Eboo, which is a similar to a plasmapheresis in those offices, just anything to do with longevity, you know, at a affordable level. Right. So basically I started my first office in 2017. Early. 2017. That was my first business. Yeah. My first business was that. So I started in 2017. I opened in a 600 square foot little shoe box of an office and I bet everything on it.

2:00:40I bet my whole life on that working. So I made it work. I was in early. This was kind of like when Facebook marketing kind of just took off and no one was doing it for medicine. Everyone was kind of dabbling in the CPG and all that, but no one was doing it for medicine. So I kind of got a little bit of an early start there, kind of blew up the name. And this was in Stewart. My first one was in Stewart, Florida, where I live. And I thought to myself, I said, if I can make this work here, I can make this work anywhere because this town is super small. It's not like on paper, it would be the worst place to open or relive.

2:01:06Right. So I made it work. I got wildly successful. I opened a second location in Palm Beach. That one became pretty successful. And then I decided that I was going to reach out to a couple of buddies I went to school with and I was going to license it to them out of state because if they can make it work out of state, then I feel like I got something going. Right. So I licensed it to both of them. I was, I charged them 1500 bucks a month just to use the name. And then, so no royalty, no nothing,$1 ,500. Cause I didn't have, it wasn't a franchise at that point. It was just me. So I didn't want to get into the legalities of having a franchise without having a full franchise set up.

2:01:39Cause there's a lot of legality in that. So he's been calling you 1500 bucks. Basically. Yeah. You know, and I think Honestly, I think he actually was zelling me the money. I'm not even kidding. So that went through and then those two took off. And then I said, okay, there's something here. I got some legs on this. So what I decided to do from there is I went and I hired a franchise attorney. I got it to be a legitimate franchise and I worked it up to 12 locations by myself. So I got it to 12 locations. I don't even remember what those locations were at this point, but there were 12 of them. I own three.

2:02:09So I own three myself and then nine of them were other people. so at that point is just sheer luck the founder of orange theory went into my location in palm beach and he kind of liked the concept and a girl a mutual friend of ours dragged him into my steward office because that's where my office was was in steward and he asked me to look at the financials and i showed him the financials and he was like there's no fucking way this place makes this much money so imagine i'm in a thousand square foot space i had moved now i went from the 600 square foot space to a thousand square foot space. Yeah.

2:02:40Big jump. And you know, these places were doing at the time, I thought it was a ton of money. They do more now what it was doing about 200 K a month and it was doing about 25 % EBITDA. So great investment on really no build out, right? To, to stay in one of these things up was sub a hundred grand at the time. So it was like, this is a great model, you know, an orange theory for, for context is millions over a million dollars to start. And you know, they're making net at the end of the year, maybe 200 K. so long he was like holy shit so then he didn't necessarily believe me so he flew in his finance team and his finance team started ripping apart all my stuff and then they came back and they said yeah this is the real deal so after that he came to me and he said i want to partner with you i want 30 and he gave like a small investment in cash it wasn't a ton of cash but he guaranteed me that he would sell me 100 licenses within a year and we've sold i think about 250 licenses since that.

2:03:37And we have about 40 locations open and we have about, you know, I think we have six locations opening in the next four weeks. So it's on a ripper. And now, you know, our average velocity in each unit is much higher than that. And we're, we're, we're doing a lot more. And that's, if you understand franchising, like these numbers are insane, you know, they're, they're insane numbers. And the multiplier on franchise is massive as well. What is it? It's a 30X. Jesus. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. For people out there listening, we just did an episode a couple of days ago in Miami with Georgios of Oakberry. Yeah.

2:04:10We went in probably an hour on franchising. So if you guys are interested, you guys should definitely check out that. Who's running this? My mom. Yeah. Tell us about that. What is it like working with your mom? I'm going to get emotional on me, man. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people have like someone they look up to in their life. And for me, it was cool because I got, I was privileged enough for that to be my mom. So my mom started working as a cashier at BJ's Wholesale Club and she worked at McDonald's. And she worked her way up from being the cashier at BJ's to being the SVP of operations at BJ's over her career.

2:04:41And, you know, as you can imagine, when you're a cashier at BJ's, the quality of life you have isn't that great. So my life consistently changed based off of me visually seeing how hard my mom worked on a daily basis. So when I was five to 10, from 10 to 15, from 15 to 17, I saw my life get better from the amount of hard work my mom put in. And, you know, I don't think that you can teach that by saying, I think like what I learned is by her doing and me watching. You know, I grew up in BJ's when we had, when she used to have to do inventory audits, we couldn't afford babysitters or maybe I just wanted to be there.

2:05:17I don't know. I was really young, but I remember growing up riding bikes around BJ's at two in the morning when my mom was doing inventory. So I saw what it took for her to get from where she was to where she is. And I don't think that I would be an eighth of the person I am if it wasn't for her. And to this day, I look at her for all my advice. I look at her for all of guidance and everything I do, because I believe that, you know, being a good operator is the most important thing in a business. I think you can be a visionary. I think you can be, you know, a great influencer. But I think if you don't know how to operate and you know how to have operational excellence, you lose every time.

2:05:51And my mom is an incredible operator. and watching and seeing the way that her employees, you know, stuck by her side the whole time she was at BJ's and moved with her. And quite literally, I have people that work for me at Relive that work for her at BJ's now. They came over and worked at Relive because of the leader that she is. So, you know, I don't have a great relationship with my dad, but I will say that my mom did everything in her power to make sure that I never went without anything. You know, I remember growing up and there were times where, you know, we didn't have a lot, but I never knew it, you know, and she went without God knows how much to make sure that I lived a great childhood.

2:06:31So my whole life's goal from the day I started making money was always to take care of my mom, to retire my mom, to get her out of it, to make her have the best life possible. And I'm super proud to say that I've been able to do that. He's running the show. That's amazing. Yeah. What's the hardest part with working with your family, though? I don't have a hard part. You know, maybe sometimes I feel like I'm not hard enough on my mom because there are certain things that I would want to move quicker. And she's my mom. But I also respect my mom. And I know that she's doing the right thing for the business.

2:07:00And I don't think it doesn't matter how big or how, you know, successful I get. I think she's always smarter than me. So I think whatever she's doing, she's doing it for the right reasons. And that P &L is looking fat. Yeah. So she's doing something. She runs a tight ship, man. And she, one thing that she taught me from a very early age, and this is a unique situation is when we started raw, we didn't start it with, with a loan. Like we started that shit. We bootstrapped it, you know, all the way up to over a hundred, almost$200 million a year. We had no, no debt. So she taught me from a very early age.

2:07:29I remember me and Matt sitting in the break room of our office at the time. And she, she still does it to this day. She handwrites out weekly sales and she has this crazy handwriting that you can't fucking read to save your life. but you know she taught me how to run a lean business how to run a super lean business to make real money and that to me is the most important thing that I would say on this podcast is you got a lot of people watching me and Georgios and the lifestyles we live and they think that we live these lifestyles because of these startup brands and you know in the beginning it's nothing like this it's it's a grind it's if you saw the way we lived or the way that we operated back then you know don't compare yourself then to what we are now because you should be trying to save every fucking penny you can to be as successful as you can be.

2:08:12Love that. That's great advice. Yeah. People definitely see a lot of crazy shit. They follow your page. And half of it's not true on some of these social medias. You know, mine is. I would say 95 % out there isn't true. Be very careful who you guys take advice from and listen to. A lot of people would not swap places and even one element of their life. 100%. Even a single topic. A thousand. Let alone their whole entire existence. I want to get quick one questions each on you have so many fucking companies, bro. It's absolutely incredible. But I want to get big kind of learning lessons out of each.

2:08:44For everybody out here listening, it seems as though everything is a W. But it seems as though you had like a semi L at one point, this Revive MD. You've been quoted saying it's the one you almost lost. What happened and what'd you learn? So Revive MD was, it's a tough one because it's always been like the redheaded stepchild. Like it's the one that didn't take off. And I don't want to say it's a loss at all. We actually are very successful. So last year, you know, this year we're going to do 30 million in revenue. So it's not a loss by any means. We're launching nationwide in Walmart this year.

2:09:10But what I will say, and what I mean by that is like, look, when you have all these brands taking off at the same time, you know, it's very natural to, to, to put your focus on the one that is, is more important. Right. And unfortunately as raw exploded and relive exploded and all these things happen, revive just ended up going on a back burner, you know, but I think revive has a ton of potential. I think people, let's be honest, how many people take vitamins and how many people take supplements. Yeah. Way more people take vitamins than people take supplements. And now what I'm very proud of this year is I put a fucking dream team together, in my opinion, for Revive, because when we were acquired by the quality group, I had to peel off Revive and move it because I had the same team running everything, which is why it got neglected.

2:09:50But now that we've been able to peel it off and put it over here and build this team, now we're seeing the monumental growth. You know, we're up 30 % in the first quarter of this year. And that's without our Walmart launch coming right now. We launch in Walmart, I think this week or next week. so we have a lot of momentum coming. And then now I'm using all of the stuff that I've learned from the quality group and implementing it into this business. So it's a beautiful scenario to be in. And I think that it's going to be a massive win for us long-term. I think it could also be very, very large.

2:10:18This is crazy, just the flywheels that you have. Like hypothetically, you can drive this on the Eterna and the Relive, hypothetically. I'm not going to sell a Revive to anybody except the person who buys Relive because they go so hand in hand. We sell these vitamins in all of our locations. And there's a really cool understanding of this that you may not connect is what we're doing with Revive is we're building brand validity and trust. So that way, when people do turn 35 and they need HRT and they need all these other things that we offer, where are they going to go? They're going to go to relive because they see them together.

2:10:53They understand that we own both, that we collaborate with both, that we're building up a trust and validity with a consumer from the age of 18 to 35. that way when they hit 35, they don't even question where they're going to get these services. They already know they're going to come to us because we've been such loyal people to them and delivered such quality vitamins that they know we're only going to deliver the same thing on the brick and mortar. This is a sicko fly. Are these all separate co's outside of every single one? Every single one is a separate co. This is crazy. Let's get into the rapid fire.

2:11:22I got tons and tons of questions. A couple of people from IG as well too. You have a loyal base. I do. We were going to shoot a bit back and I put that on the story and people fired off. And then people came back after the fact and they're like, yo, where's the episode with Dom? I believe it. It happened. Yeah, I believe it. Something we don't know about Chris Bumstead. He's a teddy bear. He's a huge teddy bear. He's a family man through and through. He's got a heart of gold. And I would say that his conviction for his family is the strongest conviction I've ever seen in my life. One metric you check first thing every morning?

2:11:56For me, you're going to not believe it, but it's family first every morning. So for me, it's family. And then when I get into work, I jump on email and I check financials for sure. But it's, you know, I wait every day, eight o 'clock in the morning. I do my workout first. I see my son, I see my wife, and then I go to work and I start work. Like my family's number one. I believe it because this morning you told me that you are seeing your son. I wouldn't leave my house before eight o 'clock. Facts, guys, this happened here. Most underrated customer service move a CPG brand can make? Just owning everything as the customer is always right.

2:12:29You know, I've seen even my own customer service complain and say, this is wrong. They should have done this. Yep. Sorry. Here's your new order. I apologize. We went deep on the Rahal episode on that one. Yeah. I just think, yeah. Give away a freebie. You win every time, baby. It's absolutely insane that people wouldn't do that, in my opinion. From a time perspective, either. Just give it. 100%. Best supply chain advice? Oh, I think that supply chain is, you know, you need to have the strongest demand planner you can pay. I think demand planning is one of the most important things in the world.

2:12:58And without it, listen, the worst thing that can happen to you is you have a successful product and you can't sell it because you don't have inventory. So a managing supply chain and managing that is the most critical part of a business. What is the DNA of that human? It's someone who's really good with fucking numbers and Excel sheets. Love that. The moment you knew Raw was going to be big, was it a number, a meeting, a gut feeling? you know flex on them bro flex on them i can't i'm not going to use numbers it was when we hit a numerical number in an annual point and so the way i look at things is i look at things as again it's velocities and doors right so a lot of companies have a lot of doors but they have low velocity so the number is is small and a big door count i realized that we were going to be something very special when we were in a very small amount of doors doing the same revenue that brains were doing and a lot more doors than us.

2:13:49And then, you know, what clicked in my head was doors, doors, doors, doors, doors. And that's the same thing that's clicking in my head right now with this. I just need fucking doors. Love that. First question you ask in an interview. Where do you want to be in five years? Practical. The only reason I ask that is because I don't want to train somebody for them to leave because it's a job that they're holding a place to go somewhere else. It's the biggest waste of time in the world. Setting expectations. Love that. Best$10 ,000 you ever spent on your business? Probably an AI bot. Tons of AI episodes coming, guys.

2:14:21We're going nuts on that. Matt Jansen in one word. It's not one word, but I think overall he's the most, the greatest human I've ever met as a professional and as a person. Bold. Most overrated leadership advice of the last five years? The most overrated leadership advice in the last five years? I would say something along the lines of you need to know everything that's going on in your company at all times because I think it's absolute bullshit. Wow, that is a very counterintuitive bar. You don't hear that. Yeah, I don't think I think again, like I want my team to lead and I want my team to run how they run.

2:14:58Granted, we have a common goal. We have building blocks, but I don't want to know what's happening in marketing. I want to know what it's delivering. And I want it to be done. I mean, the fact that we've talked about 28 companies today and they're doing well. I think the proof is in the pudding there. You're definitely... You have to enable your team to make their own decisions. Again, because if you don't, they're just going to turn into workers. They're going to turn into people waiting for guidance. And I think that that cripples every company. I think that when you put so much effort into every little detail and you want to manage and manipulate everything as a CEO and a founder, you totally starve everyone's creativity and ability to lead and task manage.

2:15:36And then everything just relies on you. And then you have... You don't have anything. You have a full-time job. Ours. You got to go for one. Hire for skill or hire for hunger? Got to pick one. Okay. Hire for, could it be at different points in the company or is it just a blanket? So in the beginning I would hire for hunger. Now I would hire for skill. What's that number? What? Zero to 20 hunger, 20 and up? I would say hunger is good under a hundred mil. That's a lot of you guys out there. Love it. If someone dropped a 10th company or let's just say 20th company on your lap tomorrow, what's the first question you'd ask before saying yes?

2:16:06I'd say no. Ross Mackey in one word. he is the the most innovative marketer creative person i've ever met i don't have one word but as far as creativity goes the kid is he just gets it he is a marketer and a creator yeah getting to know him i uh actually said this to him the last time i was with him it's just like he's a good ideas guy his vision and like the way he can put things together is second to none shout out uncle ross um one thing you did at 10 million dollars that you missed now at 150 200 300 500 million We flew under the radar at$10 million. Now he's on open residency, just spitting game here.

2:16:45Let's go. Best advice to a brand owner on discounting? Don't do it. I would only do it for new customer acquisition. The only time you do it. I think people with a new brand and discounting, in the early stages, you see when you put a discount in place, you see how much revenue it brings in. So it's very easy to want to do it over and over and over to get that chunky revenue to come in and hit those numbers. but you turn yourself into a discount brand. So I think like what I like to do is if we're going to do a discount, I like to do it in product instead of monetary. So like a BOGO of some sort.

2:17:16And then I also only like to do it for new customers. So to get a new customer involved in the brand that they haven't tried or to get a customer to try a new product that we haven't come out with. So on all innovation, we try to do a deal to get you to buy it. And usually it's a BOGO. So for example, with Revive, what we'll do is if we have a new vitamin that comes out, we believe that it takes about 60 days for you to feel the effects of a vitamin. and we believe that you're going to come back after you buy it. So we're going to give you a bottle for free. And then that's how you get hooked on a new product, right?

2:17:44We want you to fall in love with the brand. And I believe that the best way that you can sell something is when they stop taking it and they realize how well it worked for them and then they come back and buy it. Keeping it off-site. So collecting emails and probably funneling it off-site. You want to keep big banner 30, 40 % off. Yeah, you can do it through advertising, right? Landing pages for new customers only. Like, you know, they don't even have to get to your website. Love that. the best deal you ever made the best deal i ever made was marrying my wife look at that guys the worst week of your life as an operator the the week of the process of selling the company that's first world problems but i've heard that many many a time yeah the one category trend every cpg founder should be paying attention to right now the number one category trend.

2:18:33I don't like, I don't like building on trends. I'm not a trend guy. I think that you got to build legacy and like product that's going to be around for longer than six to eight months. So I don't know if I'm the right person to ask that question too. Next. Number one thing that a personal brand has done for you and your businesses. I think it's added a lot of validity to the brands for sure. I think it's put a lot more, you know, in my, in my sense, a lot more of like the C, the PE, you know, strategic eyes on me now, you know whether it is to not not put me in you know where they are or however it is but i think it's helped the brands have a lot more validity i completely agree it only takes one person to go down the rabbit hole and watch this interview yeah to see and know that you know what the fuck you're talking about you know what i'm saying dude are you ever going to be an investor or you more just like a builder at your core no so i i would love to be an investor i have a really strict non-compete in my agreement with, you know, the quality group.

2:19:27So there will be a time and place for that. And there, I am investing in companies outside of that already. So yes, I have a family office called Lunetti Capital and I do do outside investments from there. Love it. Last couple of questions that I ask everybody. It's been fucking amazing, bro. Favorite book or podcast and why? My favorite book is The Motive. Never heard of it. It's a very simple book. It's a book for operators and it's really about how to lead people and do it effectively without like sugarcoating anything and making it very simple. It's a book that's basically bringing you through a real life situation of two different people who lead very differently and then showing the simplicity of being successful in leadership.

2:20:07It's literally a one day read. You can read it in a day. We're going to pop that book up and put it down in the description. How else are you getting smarter? Obviously in the doing and talking to people, are you a big consumer of information and content? No, I'm not being honest. Like I talked about this the other day, I probably buy like 150 books a year. And I would say I read like an eighth or a third of them just between a third and eighth. I don't know the number exactly. But it's because like, if it doesn't attract me, and I don't get like validation out of it pretty quickly, I'm on to the next thing.

2:20:36So for me, I seek out people who are doing it. And I just want to learn from them on how they did it. So like one of the things for me when we did this PE deal with CBC was like, throw me in like, whatever it is I can learn. Like if I can come shadow, like I want to fucking learn everything I can, you know, cause I see myself doing that type of stuff in the future. Like I love it. You know, it's the art of the deal. Like that's my shit. I feel like so many operators. And again, for me, one of my good friends is in that world. And then I've been having a lot of conversations with PE lately. I was so intrigued.

2:21:03That's when it was a five hour dinner in Vegas. And just like, I was just so intrigued by everything they were doing. It made so much sense. I feel like it's so foreign. That's actually a good person to have on as like a gangster PE person. Yeah. Because I feel like, you know, especially founders, hustlers, kind of the one of you have no idea what's going on there. No. And these dudes are just like buying distressed assets and like flipping it. That's the problem. If everyone knew what they were doing, they would have a hard time getting deals, right? So. Yeah. It's an art. It's an art and it's, they're animals.

2:21:34You know, those guys are absolute animals at what they do, but it's a hell of a business to be in. Those dudes were animals. Entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why? an entrepreneur brand that I would love to give flowers to and this is not blowing smoke I really really respect what Greg's done Greg lav's done with bloom I think it takes a very unique person to do what he did in a very short period of time I think franchising is a really tough world so Georgios also like I think the ability to scale the way he scaled in different countries because like unless you understand franchising I don't think anyone understands how hard it is and difficult it is because with franchising you have people who pay you to open a concept and then they think that they can do it better than you all the time.

2:22:14Every one of them thinks that they're better at it. So being able to reel that in and operate that on a multi-continent. Yeah, I mean, it's 45. Yeah. That's insane. Yeah. That's absolutely insane. So kudos to him for doing that. I was overly impressed with that. And then George, you know, is doing a great job. Like all my boys, I'm super proud of all of them, you know, in their respective fields, they just crank. Guys, George episode out. George has loom next. All good names. Got good taste there. last question man how big can the quality group be it'll be the biggest the biggest in the space i know that for a fact so you know like you know you the question i always get is like who do you compare yourselves to and we always compare yourselves to number one i don't compare myself to anyone else besides number one and we're gonna we're gonna be number one i don't want to say their name but who is number one like unilever or something no that's more of like a food conglomerate yeah honestly number one right now i'm not even really sure because it's going back and forth because they're public.

2:23:08So like it literally changes every day. But let's have a market cap is number one. Probably right around 10 billion. Nice. I love it, man. An amazing time. Guys, we're going to put so many links down below. Where's the best place for them to follow you on the internet? YouTube and Instagram are probably the two best. Completely agree. Bro, amazing time. Appreciate you. Thanks, bro. Appreciate you. What's up, guys? If you guys got this far in the episode, I would assume that you enjoyed it. If you got any value, it would mean the world If you hit the subscribe button, give it a like, post a comment, tell a friend.

2:23:40We could keep going bigger, bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode.