From $10K Losses a Day to an L Catterton Deal: Zach Stuck’s Full Story

20:22So to me, Holo was that from the very beginning. I had these socks that were made out of alpaca that were better than anything else. But I was like, how can I go sell this to a bunch of different people? And that's how the business started to build. And as we grew, we just found new cohorts, new angles that we could just keep doing. I think that helped us a ton. And I think that that's what a lot of the brands that grow super fast, that are scaling really quickly on Meta, is that they have the ability to sell it to a bunch of different people, have a huge TAM, but sell it to a bunch of different people.

20:52But it'd be very simple from a supply chain and product mix standpoint. So that was Holo at the end of the day. I mean, we had eight SKUs the first year. I think we had 20 the next year. I mean, it was very simple from an apparel brand perspective.

21:04Matt Bertulli:Does margin matter? Yeah, margin matters. Margin matters. I would say that's an important piece. But my margin for Holo is not incredible. There's many brands that have better margin than us. I think it's the fact that we can position things in a bunch of different ways, right? Like throughout the year, we're going to sell products to like 20 different cohorts of people, different types of people that completely are from tradesmen to ultra marathon runners to people that have that are moms that whatever, just stay home all day to nurses to like, these are all completely different types of people that are buying products that are like a very simple product mix.

21:47So I think that's a huge piece of why we've been successful is that I didn't have to go make, our product is more function over fashion. That's what I always say internally. And when you're function over fashion, you can usually be problem solution based. So again, I think that that's what's allowed that business to grow so much is that we have a very simple product mix, but we can sell to tons of different people and talk to them a bunch of different ways to try and convince them to buy the product yeah and i think this angle piece is what groons got so right like it's exactly what groons did right it's exactly they're talking

22:21Sean Frank:immunity they're talking fiber they're talking you know kids they're talking everything right

22:26Matt Bertulli:um glp ones like they hit every freaking you go through their ad library same thing it's like there's six seven major angles in there at all times yeah and i would say that this is why Marsman is growing as fast as it is also because testosterone as a male hormone is tied to everything that you feel. So everything that a man feels or could feel is tied to your hormones, which is tied to your testosterone. So it allows us to talk about the full gambit as well. So yeah, I think that that's it. I think that when you sell, I mean, like, again, I'm not trying to diminish like the brands that four by 400 had, but I think it was baby clothes.

23:02They had like the, the leather wallets that were being out of baseball mitts and then it was the pen thing and then um bamboo earth i think was the last one and bamboo wither is the one that survived and i think that brand has the ability to sell to more people in different ways so i would say and it has mrr so like you combine those two it's like yeah so the three things are like product

23:24Matt Bertulli:your thing is like your product choice was different better whatever you had higher risk tolerance and then you because you had higher risk tolerance you also had the structure to back that up and like nobody there was no like competing interests that would hold I guess that would challenge that risk tolerance as I understand it yeah yeah that's basically it I mean I had no investors in either the agency or the brands you know so it was kind of just up to me Sean how does that contrast like the the angles thing with with Ridge like did the original wallet was that more function over like what basically like how close to what Zach is saying was the original original Ridge wallet I don't know why that's so freaking hard for me to say the original Ridge

24:07Sean Frank:wallet uh yeah you you want to avoid being fashion for as long as possible the our wallet business is now a fashion business but when the Ridge wallet came out we invented it it was the like the first wallet that could expand to fit as many cards as you wanted uh we've now transitioned to being a fashion company and it's harder because you have to have launches and color stories and brand campaigns and some launches do better, some launches do worse. It's hard to predict that. But like our luggage business is essentially a fashion business. It's like all luggage is basically the same. That's a hard business to be in where our rings business is a function business.

24:38Sean Frank:It's like, Hey, it's a, it's a ring. We have some special stuff about it. And like, we're not, I'm not going to try to win you on color or design or story. Right. That's very hard to do. A ring's very traditional. I want to talk about the risk because I think Zach, you have a legendary risk tolerance. I don't think people know that or appreciate that about you. You're willing to put it all on the line and then walk away if it loses. So many people get stuck with businesses that suck, but there's sunk cost fallacy or whatever. I've watched you shut down at least two brands and you've taken brands to the point of bankruptcy and saved them back.

25:12Sean Frank:It's really a very legendary level of risk tolerance. And that's actually, I think, the most undersold part of the story. So let's talk about where that comes from. Are you a gambler or? Let's go back to being a DJ. I mean, if you really want to go deep on this, it's like my understanding of money is I think a very unique understanding of money where I grew up with like none. And so I think everyone that talks about like, you could always go back to zero. I think, Sean, you've even said this. Like I always say the reality of like, I could go back to zero and I would be just fine because I love the game so it's like I think I you know outside of now obviously I have like nice things I have nice car boat whatever uh and I'm grateful for those things but like I was always willing to kind of go back to zero on and if I needed to to like get to the final winner so that's really it um you know grew up in a you know 1100 square foot house in Wisconsin you know didn't didn't have a lot of things so the things weren't really the exciting thing.

26:15I think of like winning was the important thing. And I just knew that eventually I would win. So, you know, I think the perseverance part of that comes from seeing my parents run small businesses for my whole life and then just continue to push through and push through and push through. So it's that. And then my idea of money is just kind of, you know, a unique one. Yeah.

26:33Sean Frank:Nothing scares rich people more than being poor. But like, if you were already poor, you're like, no, it's not that bad. It's like Taco Bell is still there. Like, you know, You still got the internet? It's all still pretty chill. Yeah. Give me a MacBook Pro and let's cook. That's usually it. MacBook Pro and Wi-Fi. Black t-shirts and I can figure some stuff out. That's really it at the end of the day. Nothing more special than that.

26:58Matt Bertulli:Did your, over time then, has the watermark for what is winning changed to you? Is it always moving up? You're always pushing it out further and further. Is the horizon always the horizon? Yeah. I mean, it for sure has changed. I think like, you know, my, my original goal, I wrote, you know, I've, I have notebooks from back when I was like 19, uh, just writing notes to myself and like what I wanted to accomplish and stuff. And my, my goal was to make a hundred grand by the time I was 30 a year. And so, you know, started, started, started Homestead and that was my first like, you know, business that I was generating, you know, good money.

27:37And so I smashed that at like 25, 26. And I was like, okay, what's next? And then when you see these businesses like HexCloud go from, you know, small, basically some guys that were selling pans to, you know, mid nine figure business in a short period of time, your reality changes. And I think that that was really helpful for me to see just to kind of open up like what's possible. Yeah. I mean, when I started Easy Street Brands, which is like my hold co of brands, the goal was by 2028 100 million in revenue and you know we hit that last year so like it was like okay change spread the horizon push it more like let's see what else we can go do so yeah i think i mean like i think it'll ever be changed you know forever be changing but i don't know i'm at the end of the day i'm a pretty simple person like i like nice things but i don't need nice things you know i grew up not having them so i don't really need them and i you know now i have kids.

28:32I kind of want to embody this idea of like, these things are sick and cool, but we don't need them to like be happy and have a good time. And I think that that's, what's really, really helpful about me being here in Wisconsin still is that when I go to a bar on the weekend, no one gives about how big my business is, what car I drive, what watch I wear. No one cares. They could care less. They're talking about things that are in the moment and having a blast. And that is such a good reset for me to have because they just, it just doesn't matter. So as much as like building the bigger business is like the game that I enjoy playing and the numbers getting bigger, a part of that, I think I'm grateful to have this like grounded ability to like stay in Wisconsin and stay around my family and the people that I care about that like don't really care.

29:19Right. So, um, yeah, I don't know. That's, that's my take at it.

29:23Matt Bertulli:Can I add on that? Like, I think that's such an important, it's an interesting take, Zach. I live in a 200 ,000 person city in the middle of the mountains in British Columbia. I used to live in Toronto, which is like 8 million people. It's like Canada is New York. Built my first company in a city where everything is so big and there's always another level in front of you. And now I'm in a place where half of my friends are just, we call them, they're dirtbags. All they want to do is just go sleep in the forest in a hammock. and some of them are insanely wealthy, but it's like their best day is like, dude, did you see the stars last night?

29:59Matt Bertulli:Like that's how they think. And I find it so refreshing to just not be always around the shiny of like more, more, more, more, more. And it just is very freeing for me. So I'm happy you said that.

30:12Sean Frank:Yeah, look, we can talk about LA all day, man. I mean, you guys have seen my tweets. Well, nobody said anything about LA. I think we're talking about Miami more than we're talking about LA, but. Yeah. I want to go back to, look, I was also 18 and I thought if I could make$100 ,000 a year, that'd be the most amount of money ever. I'm like, oh, I could buy everything, right? And I want to talk about how long that journey actually took you from 19 to 26, right? You had to start your own business to do that. And just an education for all the young kids coming up, because there's 22 year olds listening to this and they're like, I need to make a million dollars a month.

30:45Sean Frank:And it's like, no, no, no, you don't. It took Zach, who's an amazing operator, five, six years in that journey before he actually cracked 100K. And now another five years later, he's doing, you know, he has a nine figure brand. So it should just take you five or 10 years to actually build something worthwhile in this and get the skills. And it's just a warning for all the people who are 18 and they want to start being comfort tomorrow. It's like you have to suffer a little bit to actually get the skills and to be grounded in reality. That's my perspective. yeah yeah I think the other part of it too is like I was also not around the opportunity uh I you know I I flirted with the idea of moving out to to Santa Barbara um when I was 18 19 um and my girlfriend who's now my wife we we met our senior year in high school so we've been together this whole time which is also a rare kind of unique story um she was going to go to culinary school.

31:40So it was like, I was either going to stay with her or break up or go to school in Santa Barbara. And funny enough, like the team and not the team, the group of people that went to Santa Barbara and went to the university that year was a team for movement watches. And I was like, I would always think in my head when I was like 19, 20, 21, 22, I was watching them start to build that business. And I was like, like, I should have went to Santa Barbara. What was I doing? Stuck in Wisconsin, running radio ads, running TV ads, like just this, like for plumbers. What am I doing here? So I think it's interesting of if you know what you want to do, I wouldn't say you have to do, you don't have to win right away, but proximity is also so important for learning these things.

32:20And I didn't get the chance to have that opportunity until Twitter was around where then I was able to talk with all these e-commerce people while I was still in Wisconsin. So I had that opportunity. And then obviously I started making enough money to travel and all that good stuff. But I will say for the young people listening to this, proximity is important if you have big ambitions. And so if you're thinking about it and it's not going to risk a relationship that may turn into a future partner, take the shot, go move to a town, go live in LA, go bother Sean for a month or stuff like that. Because I think there's a lot that you can just learn by the proximity piece.

32:54Sean Frank:You would have met Daniel, the original founder of Ridge wallet. He also went to school in Santa Barbara. He knows the movement guys. So you would have been there. It was an e-commerce hotspot, bro. The world would have been different.

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34:04Matt Bertulli:Zach, you're... So, like, Holo and Marsman are clearly, like, these two home runs. Did you have any shots on goal with brands that just did not go that well? Like, how many shots, how many swings of the plate did it take? so we've shut down or bought and sold five other brands outside of these two so seven in total

34:27Sean Frank:and also look homestead's also an eight-figure brand so this guy this guy is three out of eight he's got three eight-figure outcomes out of out of eight brands that's fantastic yeah so we yeah uh the most recent one was a sleep accessory brand that was focused on melt tape that got commoditized so we just like shut that one down that was a miss um another one was a brand called fray this one i think actually probably had the most opportunity um so full quick very quick story on this business we had a client uh that was a manufacturer uh that manufactured the product fray was a laundry detergent company and they were their original manufacturer this brand fray uh frey laundry i think it's just frey.com um uh was raised a bunch of vc money torched it all went bankrupt and we were buying it out of bankruptcy and one of our clients brought us the idea and said hey we can buy it out i can manufacture the product and you guys can sell it you're so good at this i was like this is a magical opportunity we can have great cogs we can do you know on-time inventory all this good stuff and this was like a couple this is a year in hollow um and i'm like this sounds great and basically what ended up happening is i took it over started to build it and started to build a team and me and the the partner of the manufacturer just like it wasn't working the partnership like basically like hit a point where i won't go into details but like i hit a point where i was like i'm done like i can't deal with this anymore we were running into inventory issues all the all the benefits i thought i was going to get by having a partner that was a manufacturer like didn't end up panning out um and so i've i've had a lot of conversations with other entrepreneurs that are like hey this manufacturer wants to start a brand with me and i'm like pause like do not necessarily do that because a you don't know how good of an operator they are you don't know how big their manufacturing business can be you don't know any of these other details about how they run their company um so i i i make people that i've talked to like pause on that but anyways fray was a business that we started to turn into a great opportunity we basically took it from 100 100k a month like 700k a month and in about a year um and then we were just starting to crack through where we were profitable on acquisition with a 50 take rate on subscription so i was like this thing is going to go and like that's right when me and this other partner of mine just like it didn't work out so that one we killed or i killed because of the partnership uh basically sold my shares that i bought in with so that was like a zero outcome for me but from like my mental headspace standpoint i was like whatever i'm I'm better off without it.

36:53So that one, I think, could have been a monster if I would have kept working on that one. Outside of that, there was a licensed, whatever, home decor brand that bought, sold. That one didn't work out, didn't scale. And then a notebook company. Am I missing anything else? I think that's it. So yeah, I mean, we took a decent amount of shots at that goal. But if you really look back at what were the products that had those same three elements, it's like okay it's hollow and marshland so yeah so the other ones were missing something right so it sounds like fray had a structure problem that you know back to your thing uh so the product

37:30Matt Bertulli:may have been right your risk tolerance was there but structure sounds like it was an issue um just cap table whatever else and then the other ones just not like i'm thinking out loud but like they may not have actually had the like the angles to sell they didn't or they were commoditized to the point that it just didn't make any sense that the margin and like the opportunity got depleted

37:50Sean Frank:I was going to say, do you think it's important that hollow was so successful to start? Or do you think you just put more blood, sweat and tears into it to make it successful? Because it was the first one. And that kind of set like it sets you up to do more of them later on. But it's your first one and your last one are the big successes. So do you think that's just a coincidence? it was i think i i would give that product like i think that the product itself like our reviews are insane like they're socks but people write like novels it's crazy so like i think that that helped us um but it also checked that other box i don't know i i think that i think it was just good products good time no one knew what alpaca socks were no one knew that you could make stuff out of alpaca fiber um they didn't know the difference between alpaca and merino most people still don't but like it was a it was a unique opportunity and it solved it solved the problem and it checked all the right boxes it was light you know margin was pretty good um returning you know customer existed it's not like we did not have a returning customer like our LTV is not crazy but it had it so that that was working and helping um yeah I don't know I don't know I mean I also would say like back to the risk tolerance point that was the business I pushed hardest compared to any other business, even compared to Marsman.

39:01We hit a point where we were, so let me think about this. We were 1 million, then 8 million, and then 21 million. And between the 8 and 21 million year, we were in the spring. And I was like, okay, we need to start selling this product in Q1, Q2, Q3, so it's not just a Q4 product. And I was making POs in preparation for Q4. So I got to the point where I had debt from Wayflyer outstanding. I had payments on that debt like hitting, tranching every single week or every single, like every other week. And so we needed to generate enough cash to pay for the way for flyer payments to, to buy the raw materials, then buy the, and make the product for Q4.

39:39And we got to a point where we were torching like 10k a day inside, wake up, open up triple whale. And it was like negative 16k yesterday, do it again the next day, negative 14k. And it was like every day. And I like hit a point where, I mean, that was the most stress that I've ever had in any business where I was like, I thought it was all going down because I was like, okay, I have so much debt on this business now that I could actually lose Homestead because Homestead was like successful, but it wasn't millions of dollars sitting in the bank successful. And so, yeah, that was, that was terrifying.

40:11But I mean, that also taught me how to run a business properly. I had to have some really hard conversations with manufacturers. I had to lay off some employees. I had to do all the hard things to turn it around. And I had to build a proper financial plan. I really needed to get in the weeds in our cashflow modeling, on our P &L, on everything, on all of the debt, how we were structuring debt and what partners we had. I really had to learn that, which I think was obviously helpful then when we started a business like Mars where it started to click and we were like, okay, I know exactly what to do and not how to, I know not how to ruin this at this point.

40:45So, um, yeah. Yeah.

40:48Matt Bertulli:I guess I got one question I have for you, Zach is like, do you have a strong view then on the holdco model? Like you're multi brand, like the easy street brands concept. Uh, you clearly were like, I can do this many times over. Why do you think that that's the case for you? But like, we've also seen other holdcos completely like flame out and we, and we, we all have friends who have multiple, like actually have made this work. So I'm just curious, like your stance on this model, because I think I get this approach on this often. You need a GM. You need someone that's not you running the company.

41:21So like, if you want to do this, you need individuals to run the business. That's not you that can worry about the day to day. That's not you. That that's the take, because there's always going to be a problem in one of the companies every single day. Like, I think if you talk to most of the whole people that tried it or try to do it, like one of the brands was struggling every single day. So you as the CEO of all of them, that is your problem now. So you are going, you're just constantly shifting from inventory issues, from importing alpaca to, hey, our manufacturer is not, we don't have enough, whatever, whatever.

41:54We don't have enough inventory for this like laundry detergent business to, you know, CAC went through the roof on the sock business to like every single day there was a different problem. And I think it's really hard to do that unless you have someone like running it and owning it. And I think that that's where like Roman did a really good job. So he's got like operators running the companies. I haven't seen anyone else really do it quite as well as him. But I think that that's the distinct piece is that he's not CEOing a bunch of different businesses. So, I mean, my honest take is like it helped me find winners.

42:28Right. I don't think it's the best model. I think like I had risk tolerance and it helped me find these winning businesses. But even like today, so like we are, you know, I have a GM of hollow now, Josh, um, and I am so happy because there's no way I can give Mars the energy that it needs if I'm still focused on hollow. So, yeah, I mean, I think that you have to have GM, CEO, whatever, someone running the business to, to build a proper holdco. Otherwise it's just like too much for one person to do. Okay.

42:58Matt Bertulli:So I very much, you know, I've, I've noticed a pattern now, the more of these episodes, the show that we do, it's very easy for us to like go from had an idea to like now it's big. Would you be willing to share like how you think about literally cold starting a brand? So like you've done this multiple times where like you didn't buy an existing thing. You like, I got this is a product. Here's an idea. I'm going to cold start a brand in like 2025, 25, basically today. And I would love if you could, just for people listening, like how the hell you think about this? Like right now, if you were to start another one, how would you do it?

43:37Matt Bertulli:What's the playbook that runs through your head over and over and over again? Everyone's talking about health and wellness, but like that is the space that I would plan if I were to do it again. Seeing what we were able to, category matters. I would create one product, no more than one, just one. And I would try to build that product and set it up in a way where I could talk about it 50 different ways to a bunch of customers. And I would love the ability to sell it to both men and women. So not necessarily like an IM8, but like in that range, I would try to do something about that. Maybe I would go a little bit more niche where I would maybe make a heart supplement, something that's for like heart health, where it could still be 40 to 70 year olds.

44:17It could be men and women, but it's a comprehensive product. And then it needs MRR. It needs returning revenue. Any brand that tries to say that they're an LTV brand, it's so hard. There's been some of these apparel brands, like there's Represent, there's some of these other ones that customers get super loyal and they come back and they buy again, but that's so rare to see. So I would much rather lean into a business that inherently is a returning customer revenue driven business because Facebook ads has just gotten more expensive. Like acquiring customers has just gotten more expensive. And especially if you want to hit scale, you need the ability to lose money on their first customer or on that first purchase to actually achieve proper scale.

44:59So yeah, I mean, if I were to like start from zero, just whatever. Riffing. Health and wellness brand focused on heart health, which is like holistic health for 40 to 70 year olds. That's a multi-ingredient product that has some clinicals so I can make some pretty bold claims. I can tie them to clinicals that has MRR. And, you know, I try to find a manufacturer in the States that can make a holistic product like I, that I wouldn't have to worry about sourcing packaging or bottling or

45:30Matt Bertulli:boxes or any of that. Just make it all for me in one so that my like operations of the business are super lean. Then literally one person, me could run that business because I could use AI for CX. I could use AI for, you know, BSing email and SMS. Like, I think you could kind of get away with it for a little bit. And then it's just Facebook ads at the end of the day to get it started. I think you can. Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I think like, that's just my, it's just my playbook. Like everyone says like, do the organic content piece. I'd say do that as well. But to do that properly, you need the ability to have the cash to seed the product in the first place.

46:05And you need to seed at volume to actually get enough content to actually get the banger. that's the route that I would take. I mean, I'd run static ads up to, you know, a six figure a month business and then I'd start incorporating video and then I'd maybe go into the organic thing. But yeah, I think, I think you could literally that concept right there. You could stand up with 30 grand. You could stand that up and get a hundred KMR business in 30 to 60 days.

46:31Matt Bertulli:Give me your take, man. I want to know how you, compared to what Zach is saying, like, from a cold start perspective.

46:38Sean Frank:Zach's right because Zach's a ruthless operator. Like, you know, I would do organic, but I, because you wouldn't be testing a product. You'd be like, this is the product I care about and I'm passionate about. I'm the face of it. I'm going to go post videos about it all day long. But that's not what Zach's describing. What Zach's describing is he's like, I'm amazing at ads. I've done this four or five times. Because if the heart health thing didn't work for whatever reason, if there's not a TAM there, he'd pivot to gut health or sleep health or something else, right? And like, what you don't want to do is put your social brand on the line, like making videos of yourself and like on your own organic social channels for a brand you're going to shut down and then relaunch with a new ingredient, right?

47:13Sean Frank:So it's still the right. If you're a ruthless operator, just follow exactly what Zach is saying. But Zach's just better at it than other people. So it's like you have to be good at ads and actually understand this process. You know, I want to talk about, and this is going to be a little bit of a pivot, but like the structural structural advantages that you typically produce when you're doing brands people don't know this or not you're a very generous person when it comes to equity and partners and stuff right like you know a lot of times i find fat like founders who won't give up one percent right but like on homestead you're like hey riley you're gonna run it now you're you're an equity partner you're gonna fucking run this thing you're the president and if we sell you get a bunch of money and with marsmen it's the same thing it's like you brought of partnering this business.

48:00Sean Frank:If you're always down to partner with people. And that is something I think people don't appreciate is you're in, like, you're very into aligned incentives, like the team that's working on it or the co-founder, you're going to make sure that like they are healthily taken care of. Do you think I'm overstating that or you think that's a big part of your story? The only thing that I'll correct is that Benjamin Smith brought Marsmen to me. That was not my idea. So Ben, my co-founder in Marsmen, who was previously the founder of Disco, which is a men's skincare brand, brought both the melt tape idea and Marsmen to me.

48:34And so we started those together. And we said, you know, his whole thing was, I'm great at product, brand, vision, organic, and I know how to build a brand, which Disco crushed. If everyone ever like you look back three, four years ago, people knew who Disco was and they were like a sub eight figure, they were seven figure business. It looked like a eight or maybe even nine figure brand. so Ben was so good at that that I saw him do that and fail and I'm like but I'm good at growth so like this could be really interesting um and I'm not really a product person at the end of the day like I feel like I have my opinions on product but I'm not I'm not the innovator on product so he brought that concept to me I think that Marsman is working and it has worked the level that it has because he invested in things and wanted to invest in things that I normally wouldn't have right so he wanted to invest in brands he wanted to invest in like making things sick making the packaging great, making it fully paper unique.

49:28No one else had done anything like our packaging. And he was all into that. I'm like, I think we're wasting money. We should just do a plastic bottle and let's just sell this thing. So that's my end versus his. And I think that a lot of those decisions that he made were really important to people buying into it. So yeah, I don't know. That's the only correction that I have is that Ben did bring Marsmen to me and present that to me, which when you run an agency and people see you grow a bunch of businesses, I've had a bunch of those opportunities. This one with Ben was just unique enough that I figured it was worth taking a shot on.

50:02Okay.

50:03Sean Frank:Well, and Frey was the same thing. Frey came to you with an opportunity. So you've seen it work once and you've seen it not work once. Do you think incubation by yourself is going to be the future or are you looking for more partners to launch stuff with? It's a hard question. I don't know. I don't know there there's there's um there's a lot of peace in running a business by yourself um partnership can be hard you know depending on like who who that person is and like their you know their goals um I will like give I don't know why my camera keeps going blurry but I will give Benjamin like a lot of credit on how hard he pushes I think people in the D to C X space think Marsman's success was because of me, it literally is 50-50.

50:50Ben has pushed so hard on that brand. We'll set a forecast to be, no, bigger, bigger, bigger. And then it's up to me to be like, okay, can we actually pull this off? And is that even reasonable? So I do have to give him a ton of credit. I think there's been moments in this business with Mars that he's definitely carrying more weight than I have, certainly. How?

51:11Matt Bertulli:Can you go deeper on that? What does that mean? Because people listening are going to know you as the paid guy. What's Ben doing? Sorry, Ben. I'm not discounting what Ben does. No. Yeah. He's super in the weeds. He is reviewing every single email that goes out. We have a channel where we still were reviewing, between Ben and I, every single ad that was going out. I approve every single lander that goes out. Website changes. Ben, me, plus our designer in Figma, making the design changes. He's very in the weeds. Every product changed. Like we were reviewing product packaging together making tweaks of the product packaging him and I He's done a lot and he also like what I will give him a ton of credit for too is he's been patient with me while I've been making this transition into like creating more time for Marsman because I had hollow I had homestead I had these other businesses and so he was like all in on Mars and so from a time perspective I mean like he was it was 80 20 for a while there from time committed me versus Ben so I mean I think a lot of that

52:12credit is due to Ben for that. It's just the commitment. And he is very, very good at identifying problems in the business. He will find pockets of problems that I wouldn't find. Operations issues. Hey, we don't have a system for this. I'm much more like fly by the seat of my pants. And he's much more like, we need an SOP for this. And we need this in Notion. And we need this automated and we need an AI person to come into the company and build out this full automation so I never have to do this again. I will just do it over and over again. So he has a lot of really unique skill sets that have made the partnership work.

52:50And then his idea to push is like, you know, Ben wants to build a billion dollar outcome business. Like that was his intention was like, I want to go big. He thought that was disco. He's like, this is going to be Marsman. So when you have a partner that is like, we are going for it, no matter what your intentions are of the business, it's like, okay, like I'll try to keep, you know, the train on the tracks while we keep pushing. But yeah, I mean, that is, that is a big attribute of his.

53:17Sean Frank:Yeah. And for people who don't know, I mean, disco, great product, great branding. They were trying to sell makeup to man, which is just a very, very tough market. So the fact that even got to seven figures, I mean, hats off to them. Like that is, that is a generational change if they could pull that off. Yeah. Yeah. A very, very tough market. You said, you said one more thing, you know, LTV is not guaranteed. And that's something people should take away is that like the reason why all the subscription brands are working right now and selling for hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars, it's because subscriptions are guaranteed.

53:51Sean Frank:Like, you know, the problem with being a fashion brand in LTV, it's like, yes, t-shirts, you know, do wear out, but go in any guy's closet. They have shirts from 10 years ago. It's like, unless they gained a bunch of weight, they're going to keep the shirts that they have for five years, 10 years. And the only way to get them back in is to do new and more exciting stuff. And that's why collab culture has gotten so big. It's like, Kif gets me because every week they're like, oh, here's a new, you know, 90s retro collab, or here's a new, you know, we're partnering with on running or new balance or whatever.

54:21Sean Frank:And it's like that hype machine is really, really hard to build. And it's really like, and if you have something that flops, you don't get the sales where MMR every single week, every single month sales are coming in regardless. So that's why there's been so much push to anything on subscription. And it's physical products are harder because of that. Yeah. The other thing that I will say about the subscription, like health and wellness brands that I don't think people are paying enough attention to, maybe they are, maybe this is like a thing that I've been thinking about lately, which is how do you drive?

54:50So to get a big outcome with a strategic, you need retail velocity, right? DTC is important. Amazon's cool. International's meh, doesn't really matter as much, but retail velocity is important. When you have MRR, you can spend into that MRR. So these brands are spending more money on paid social and just awareness than everybody else. So when you think about brands like Groon's that then went into Walmart, everyone already saw Groon's ads. They noticed it, of course, when they were walking past. They're like, oh, yeah, that's that green gummy thing that I saw Facebook ads over. So I think there's an unmatched value add when you have MRR for the fact that you can literally spend into that MRR and keep pushing, pushing, pushing the awareness that by the time that you do hit the stores, the retail placements, the velocity is just going to just crush everybody else that's in there.

55:43So that's another thing too that I think is people don't give enough value to because they're like, oh yeah, these brands are growing really fast. But some of these brands are spending $10 million a month on meta ads. Who else is spending$10 million a month? Like you go to like even like the huge, like 4 to 500 companies don't spend $10 million a month on meta ads. So the awareness is there, which is a huge piece.

56:04Sean Frank:It wouldn't be surprising if Grooms' marketing budget was way bigger than Liquid IV, right? It's because they're in the scaling phase right now. So yeah, I feel like what you're saying. The impression that they're pumping out in the world is just scary because what you end up seeing is they're really getting 10 billion impressions a month on paid social. like they could take over your whole category if they wanted i saw something super just basically carpet bombing america yeah totally i saw something super interesting on twitter uh yesterday a friend sent it to me and there was i forget who it was i think it was for sarah v and they're like hey sarah v has a youtube channel i've got 150 million uh views and i did the math and i'm like on a 30 cpn that's 4.5 million dollars like there's brands that cook through $4.5 million in a month.

56:54So it's like, yes, organic is interesting and 150 million views sound interesting, but when you're actually spending real dollars and your CPMs are decent, like you can blow past any organic reach that you're going to get from building like a big organic brand. That's my perspective. And so I think brands like Gruen's, like Sarah V got 150 million views on YouTube, who gives Gruen's guy 150 million views in the last seven days on meta ads. So I think that's what's, that's what's super interesting about these brands.

57:25Matt Bertulli:can i ask a thing on mars man where did i mean this might be more of a ben question but like it seems sort of counterintuitive to me to go into this category like trt is a like a i felt like that was a common thing like there's a lot of trt out in the world it's like what was the the insight to create this product and to go into this space yeah i'll try to tell Ben's story as best as I can because it's his story. So Ben was a little bit of a wild child, let's call it that, in his early 20s. And he depleted his hormones massively. He hit a point where he was like, you know, getting pretty out of shape, not feeling good, and started to try to go down the path of fixing that.

58:12So of course, he did the like, okay, quit drinking, start eating healthy, start doing the things, right? He started trying a bunch of different products. And so he ended up building basically a stack of products that cost him, I think he says$300 in total. And then that thesis of like, okay, here's the stack that I've been taking now for a couple of years is what turned into Marsman. He's like, someone needs to just buy a product that is my stack of natural tea boosting stack. And that's where the Shilajit, the Tangadeli, the Boron, all that stuff, the vitamin D, all of that comes into one. And that's how the idea was created.

58:46So it was actually like a true founder story that led to the product innovation being what it is.

58:51Matt Bertulli:And how come when you looked at it, right? So Ben brings you the idea. You must have seen more than just like angles and what we've talked about before. There's got to be an insight that you had where you're like, you're looking at it. You're like, oh, this could actually work. Ben will talk about this probably until the cows don't come home. But I thought the Meltate brand was going to be bigger than Marsman. so yeah that's what i thought i'm like ah this t booster thing like neugenics has been around forever no one really cares about this trt exists who cares that's what i thought until i realized that there are millions of men that hate needles that want to go natural first before they go to uh you know something that they have to inject every single month or every couple weeks for the rest of their life otherwise they're going to mess up their hormones so there's a huge market the TAM is massive.

59:42And then the other part of this too is it's not just the 50 year olds, it's everyone now that is literally 25 plus, because if you look at the chart, there's like a really important chart that shows testosterone levels over the course of time. Now, 2026, men in their twenties had the lowest testosterone they've ever had in the last like hundred years that they've been tracking this because of our diets, because of sedimentary lifestyle, because of all of the things that we do that lead to, you know, just sitting and scrolling on our phones all day. Like none of these things are helping us create the natural hormone that regulates our body.

1:00:17So our TAM got a lot bigger, right? Now we have 25 plus. We have guys in their 20s that don't, like Ben, didn't want to go to TRT, that wanted a natural supplement to do it. So yeah, I mean, I think that was kind of the eye opener for me when I realized that, you know, Ben had his story, but I was like, how many people are there like Ben? There's a lot of them. And then I think, you know, the other pieces, like testosterone has always had this weird stigma. And our goal with Mars is to like push that stigma away. Like testosterone doesn't mean like you're just like horny all the time or whatever.

1:00:49It has a huge impact on how you feel holistically. It is the energy. It is your focus. It is your sleep, which is a huge piece of this. So there's, we have customers that tell us that they take it specifically because of the sleep benefits, which is super interesting. So yeah, I mean, I think I was proven wrong. I thought it is going to be melt tape, but obviously, you know, this is a great product. And then the ability, you know, I've shared this publicly a few times, but we were at a point where the business was doing, I don't know, 200K a month in revenue. And we were kind of flatlining and we were kind of struggling to get NCPA in a spot where I felt really comfortable.

1:01:24You're running, you know, an offer for a subscription versus one time. And I had a conversation with Jordan Menard from Instant Hydration and he's like, dude, you've got high risk tolerance. What the hell are you doing? Send it. Go all in on subscription. Just go. Just do it. He's like, torch money for two months. Track the cohorts. It's going to back out. I promise. Jordan, if any of you don't know Jordan, Jordan had the opportunity and he was the main kind of guy behind this for brands like Everyday Dose. He was the guy behind Rise. He was the marketer behind those brands. So he saw it and he was starting to come up with this idea for instant hydration while we were talking.

1:02:01And so we sent it and we basically, we torched 250K over two months building our MRR because we went all in on subscription. So you took away one time purchase as an option? So we have to, you have to show it. FTC regulation, you have to allow it. So we allow it, but it's just like not the forefront offer on our site. And so we went to 99.99 % of orders were subscription only. and because the product's good and it does what it's supposed to do the cohorts held and MRR started a stack and we're like holy this is interesting so that is where then the company started growing by you know a few hundred thousand dollars a month to then a million dollars plus a month every single month we were growing by consistently so that that's really what allowed us to kind of kick things off so it was a good product it had the opportunity but it took the extra push from Jordan to be like, dude, torch some cash, like build, build the MRR, go all in, uh, for us to really hit the gas on it.

1:03:00And once that started, it, you know, it's kind of lights out from there.

1:03:03Matt Bertulli:How'd you fund the cash gap on? Cause I'm assuming you're not, you're not profitable day one. Uh, you've got a payback period. How did you guys, uh, bridge the gap? Founder investments from us. Yeah.

1:03:20Sean Frank:Okay. Let's actually, if you're done to unpack that, like you have businesses that are cash flowing. Did you guys go 50, 50 on the cash in or did you take the lion's share of putting the money in? Like how did it actually break out? Yeah, I took the lion's share. But Ben, again, going back to like the original point, Ben was working 80%. I was working 20 % of this business because I didn't have the capacity to work on it because I was still a CEO of, of hollow and I was still an owner of Homestead and still involved in that business. So yeah, it was, it was me basically saying, I'll take the bet kind of on you, on us, that this is going to work out.

1:03:53We were 50, 50 partners. We still are up, you know, up until the raise, we still own, you know, the fair share majority of the business, but our, our equity is split still today. But yeah, I was like, I'll take the bet on you. Like, I think there's an opportunity here. I trust Jordan Menard. Like, let's, let's give us a shot. So yeah, Ben put money in, but I definitely put, you know, the lion's share of it.

1:04:16Sean Frank:Okay. So let's talk about the last couple of months because you're a titan on this episode because you had the craziest 2026 of anybody else i know so i think you started off announcing the official sale of homestead and maybe maybe talk us through that process you hire a gm for hollow hollow is now ripping growing it's going to be an amazing nine-figure brand hopefully this year and then you sell and some some percentage and then there's some investment in from el catarin into mars man so So how did you survive the past four or five months?

1:04:50Matt Bertulli:Yeah, that's a lot of processes all at once. Yeah, I had technically four deals because I raised for Holo as well. That wasn't public, but we did a small PE round for Holo during that same period of time as well. So yeah, gnarly. And then we purchased a large 100 ,000 square foot warehouse facility, which is now our fulfillment center for all the brands. So yeah, it was nuts. Like I've, my accountants, my tax team, my attorneys were like, we've never had anyone do four deals in 60 days.

1:05:24But yeah, it was gnarly. I don't know. Like, I think I will, I will say and give credit to Riley. Riley led a lot of the Homestead deal because I wasn't the CEO. You know, I kind of put him in charge and not even put him in charge. He was in charge of that, of that deal and did a great job. Verndale was a great opportunity. It was a good fit. so I'll give him a lot of credit there for doing a lot of the heavy lifting Ben led a ton of the of the heavy lifting with Al Catterton Ben is his whole kind of pitch to me also is like if we need to raise I know how to raise I've done it before he raised I think almost 10 million dollars for for disco he has his rolodex is insane like he's one of those people that you like name someone in the health and wellness space for an investor like they know who Ben is he did a great job with that So, I mean, Ben led a lot of that.

1:06:13And then I led the raise for Holo because I was a CEO. So I did that. And then also this warehouse deal. So, I mean, yeah, it was a crazy 60 day period. I survived the other end of it now, which feels good. um but yeah i mean it was definitely a i don't know like i try to give advice to people now when they're doing a deal like one not four at once of just like try to just level set there's going to be really great days where you're like it's happening there's gonna be days where you're like it's falling apart and it's never gonna happen we're never signing this business so yeah i mean i think that the goal of the buyer usually is to not share their their temperature and that happened to me four times in 60 days.

1:06:56I thought I was maybe not going to get the warehouse. I thought Homestead deal was going to fall through. I wasn't quite sure about how the hollow raise is going to go. It's a great business. I didn't really know if El Caterton was going to be the one. So full context with Mars, El Caterton got first look. We didn't shop that deal around at all. Ben and I spoke to five PE funds very loosely, but El Caterton got first look. No one saw our financials no one else saw the business they were the one to look at it and we've obviously seen what they've been able to do for a handful of these companies i mean they're they're a blue chip fund so we we had the opportunity we're like we're gonna go all in on this one so yeah i mean i have to give credit to to my partners to be honest and the other two were a little bit smaller

1:07:37Sean Frank:but you're you're probably your lawyer's favorite customer you're probably gonna get a great gift basket this Q4.

1:07:45Matt Bertulli:Dude, they better buy you a second boat. Yeah, they did just fine in the last six months for you. Did the success of the brands have any impact in your decision to sell Homestead? Yes. Yeah. For sure. For sure. Candidly, we went to market a year prior, and we're going to go to to market a year prior with Homestead. And we started to have a little bit of a downturn. And that was a good reset for the business. It gave Riley and me an opportunity to really sit down and be like, okay, what do we have to do to sell this company for a number that we're both excited about? And a cash out amount that we're both excited about.

1:08:26So that helped us kind of reverse engineer our way into the exit. So when we went to market, it was quite easy to sell homestead because our churn got better. The retention got better. No one on the team was like, we didn't have any turnover. We had much more of a stability from a leadership standpoint. We were able to level up a few people and put them in a role for an entire year. And our service offering became so heavy on the retention side, which our retention clients, like the longevity, the LTV of our email and SMS clients is way higher than our paid clients, because obviously paid is much more volatile.

1:09:08Email and SMS is a little less volatile. So the business was kind of primed. So we did try to go a little bit earlier. But then, yeah, obviously as Marsman was ripping, Hollow had been ripping, it was a pretty easy decision to say, all right, now's a good time.

1:09:22Matt Bertulli:Would you be willing to hit on, I know we have a lot of people that actually own agencies that listen to the show. could you give like a quick, like, here are the things that are most valuable when it comes to selling an agency business? Yeah. I mean, I think number one is deciding, like, a lot of people are like, I'm going to sell it and I'm not, I'm, you know, I don't, I don't have to go with it. Unless you have a CEO or a GM, you are going with that business. So like, I think a lot of people think like I can check out very likely you will have an earn out. We have an earn out. Um, and And you're clocked in and you're pushing for one more year, even after all of the stress of getting the deal done, you still have a whole other year to kind of hit that.

1:10:03So be conscious of that. The other piece I'd say is like, I'd say invest more in your best people. If you have good people at your agency, continue to pay them more, continue to invest in them more as much as you can and keep them around. Because what usually happens in the agency space is an agency is arbitraging people. so they can only pay their employees so much. And it's not like brands where like brands are arbitraging their products, not their people. So a brand can usually pay more. So we would usually like have all these incredible people kind of come up through Homestead and then there'd be a brand that would come in and offer them a job for 50K more, 100K more salary.

1:10:39And so we just kept getting awesome people swooped. And I wish that if I like look back, I would have paid our best people more and try to incentivize them and potentially even give more of them a piece of an outcome to stick around longer. to try and push for an exit. Because I think the outcome gets much bigger once you have more people bought into it, especially when your business is the people, which is an agency. So those are kind of the main two that I would say outside of that, like if you can have a service offering that isn't tied to daily performance, green light, that's what you want.

1:11:12You don't want the service offering that's tied to daily performance. When your service offering is like, hey, when any e-com founder is having a bad performance day, they go, who do they go talk to? Media buyer. They go talk to like the head of paid. They go talk to their agency that's running their media. They're not looking at their email and us. They mean agency. They're not looking at their dev agency. They're not looking at their, you know, organic social agency. They're not looking at any of them. They're looking at them. So the paid team. So that was always hard for us. So as soon as we started to switch and be like kind of 50, 50 between paid and retention, it really helped us level set and like keep clients around longer, which then built stability.

1:11:49And yeah, that's, those are kind of like the main, the main three I'd focus on.

1:11:53Matt Bertulli:You know, Sean brought up the, like doing a bunch of deals all at once. And the last one, I think that sort of got announced was the LCAT deal for Marsmen. Why did you guys choose to go to them? Like almost exclusively, right? It's like one thing to talk to a few guys, but like, what, what was the thinking behind that? Oh, sorry.

1:12:14Sean Frank:No, great, great line of questioning. And I want to know, did you use a banker or not? Or this was all you guys self negotiating? Yeah, no banker. No banker. But we were in a spot where the business was growing literally a million dollars plus a month every month for like seven or eight months in a row. And so we were like, okay, how long can this stay this good was like my number one concern. How long can this actually stay this good? And what other factors are we not thinking about? And so Ben and I basically were like, okay, this helps us take some downside risk. It helps us take some chips off the table, which is great.

1:12:55It also builds our balance sheet up bigger in case it starts to slow down. It also builds up our balance sheet if we want to go to retail. And we knew that always the intention here is to build a great business that's growing MRR and DTC on Amazon. But we initially need to go to retail. And to do that, we need a balance sheet that allows us to go to retail and send it in retail to have the ability to do a nationwide roll up. So there was that. And then the other part of it, too, is like we wanted to have a partner in the business that we felt like could properly coach us and reverse engineer our way to a very big exit.

1:13:26And Ben and I have never had that. I've never done a deal, a nine figure deal before doing, you know, even just like the homestead deal was like stressful enough. And so I really wanted a partner that could help us think through this and be like, here's the timing. Here's how you think about it. Here's the business you really want to build. And, you know, we talk with we talk with the LCAT team a couple times a month now and even sometimes like a couple times a week. Just getting feedback, getting feedback on our model, getting feedback on, hey, we're going to maybe go sign some celebrity. Like, what do you think about this?

1:13:57Are we thinking about this correctly? They've been incredible to be able to bounce ideas off of because they've seen such big businesses and they've seen these transactions happen. So Ben and I figure that if we did the bet, especially with an Alcaterton, that our chance of outcome would go up. Because we're like, yeah, we might be able to build a$150 million business. But is the business going to be structured in a way? Are we going to think about it correctly? Are we going to lean too much into international and then a strategic doesn't care about it or PE doesn't care about that? We wanted someone that was going to help us kind of coach us and guide us to have a high likelihood of a nine or potentially even 10 figure outcome.

1:14:32Matt Bertulli:Can you comment on you made the you refer to LCAT as a blue chip, which I think we would all agree like that. That's a that's a like a very legit fund. Can you comment on the brand value that having an LCAT as a sort of on the cap table brings to not just to Marsmen, but like even the category, right? Like men's testosterone supplements, like these can be very hard categories from a like perception, like long-term brand equity. You know, maybe just go there a bit because I think you guys thought this through. They know this. So the closest comp that Ben and I would always think about when we thought about Marsman was Nutrafol.

1:15:14or like is a very simple product mix and they you know we're we're heavier in the men's product because it's mostly about hair loss it's very simple it's subscription based and they sold they sold to they went in with they did a round with um l-caterton and l-caterton helped sell them to unilever so we were like okay what other comp do we have because you know there's other there's other ones out there i mean obviously there's there's grooms um there's like brands like Primal Queen, which are crushing, single skew, whatever. There's some of these other ones that exist in the ecosystem, but we haven't seen many of them actually have the outcome.

1:15:49When we did this round, we obviously didn't know that Groon's was going to go sell. So we knew that they had the track record, and then we also knew that they've done and have a deal with Thorn. They're an owner of Thorn. And so we thought, if there's any fund that has access to data about holistic health, it's going to be Caterton, and they see it on a massive scale. So we thought if we were going to do a deal with a partner instead of partnering with another, maybe smaller private equity fund that maybe would have got us a bigger valuation, we figured that our likelihood and chance of having this blue chip, like I said, partner would increase the likelihood of an outcome.

1:16:29And so, yeah, I mean, to your other question, like we've gotten like the rollout treatment, right? Like the Google team was like, hey, we have a team that wants to support you. Meta's like, hey, we have a team that really wants to support you. Any agency, creative agencies have thrown themselves at us to do work for us because of this news. They're like, we'll work for free for a month and just try it out, run our ads for free. So we've gotten a lot of that, which has been great and really cool. And so I'd say that also has helped even in the last 30 days help with our trajectory and help us keep running.

1:17:05Matt Bertulli:And how did you navigate, if there was at all, the conversation with LCAT about you having multiple companies, you've still got Holo? Zach, where's your focus, dude? Are you going to help build this thing? Dude, I've been in these processes. It's going to come up, right? So how did you just talk this through? Luckily, while we were doing that, the Homestead deal was happening. So I was like, hey, I'm selling my agency. I know I'm a majority owner of that, but I'm selling it. It's literally like it's going down right now. Sold 30 days before the LCAT deal closed. Holo, I was like, I'm hiring a GM.

1:17:42Like, I promise you I'm hiring a GM. Was able to bring in Josh, like found Josh really quickly and hired him, brought him on like right away. So I was able to be like, hey, Zach's hands are not in, you know, a million different cookie jars. They're in the Marsman one. And I think they were also understanding like there was going to be a little bit of a transition and Ben's the CEO. Like I, Zach, I'm not the CEO. I'm the CMO of the company. And they have a lot of confidence in Ben, as do I. And I think that that was the underlying piece, is that Ben led the raise. Ben was and isn't the main face to Al Catterton.

1:18:20So I think that that also helped. It's not like I was the only guy. It's not like I was a sole founder that also had other stuff going on. Having my partner that was all in on it was definitely helpful too. But yeah, they know now, like Chris, who's the partner at El Catterton, who's been absolutely, Chris Roberts has been absolutely incredible. Like we've gone to him with a bunch of ideas and concepts and he's been the chillest, like best, like I couldn't, we couldn't ask for a better partner. He, you know, I like was able to let him know recently. I'm like, Hey, like, you know, I'm able to go fully in on Marsman now.

1:18:51And he, you know, he was supportive of that along the way. So I don't think some of the other funds would have been as willing to do that. I think that LCAT saw the business, saw the opportunity. They're like, Ben's a great, great operator as well. And these guys got it.

1:19:05Sean Frank:So Zach, is this the end of Easy Street Brands? You have Holo, you have Marsman. There's no, I can't bring you soap ideas. I can't bring you beer, dear. I can't bring you nothing. It's over. Well, I mean, I have a pretty strict non-compete now that LCAT's in the mix. Um, so depending on what it is, we'll see, but no, I think I'm going to focus on these two. Um, I think, I think hollow has an opportunity to have a nine figure outcome, um, to great business. It's growing, growing very fast. We're profitable. Um, Morrisman has an opportunity to have a, you know, potential, potential 10 figure outcome.

1:19:42So I'd be kind of silly to keep, keep taking even more and more shots like gold. So for now I will say no. Uh, and maybe this is the end of easy street brands and it's just going to be these two. Okay. We'll do that for now.

1:19:53Sean Frank:Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking forward to you sell both of them. You get a billion dollars and then it's, you know, then, then we're really on easy street. No, I was just going to say for what it's worth, like the name easy street was the most cocky remark of I did homestead, which was the street I grew up on. And now we're on easy street. Now we're, now we're on the easy part of it. You know, agency was tough. Brands are easy. So that's where it came from. That's the honest take of where it came from, which is like the most arrogant ever, but whatever. It is what it is.

1:20:19Matt Bertulli:Dude, if I could ever give you advice, don't, don't jinx your with stuff like that. Like just, you know, stay away from that. Um, I I'd love to just talk a little bit about, um, sort of like Mars men today. Let's just pick one like Mars men today. What does for the growth that you guys have experienced, what does the team look like? And has, how has it changed over the last like 12, 18 months? You know, like where did it start? Where are you guys today? And then how do you think about team and scaling brands like right now with how the market is and everything we're experiencing yeah well i'll say one thing that's blows everybody away we have one ops person um we have one ops person that was a junior ops person that is now our our director of operations um he was working with me on some of the previous projects and we were able to kind of like work him into to marsman we have one operations person which is crazy we're hiring a vp of ops now but like we got to you know nine nine figure run rate eight figures a month in revenue with with one ops person um we have a head of cx who oversees a team of about 15 reps um we have a head of retention uh who oversees our agency which we use homestead still um and so he oversees that and then oversees kind of the the day-to-day of of uh the back end of the subscription side of things and then i'm trying to think we have a you know a brand uh a brand director we have a creative director those are like newer uh newer role newer hires creative director is is one of the newer ones um and then pretty much i'm no i'm missing so we have a chief of staff that that's been she's been absolutely incredible so technically goes benjamin myself our chief of staff of vita and then like very flat line of a bunch of like head or vps and almost all of them everybody else is like growth so we have a head of growth We have a head of paid.

1:22:13We have a VP of performance creative. We have, um, I don't even know if three, three designers, we have four creative strategists. We have five video editors. I mean, like everybody else is the growth engine. Uh, we have five creative agencies right now. Um, yeah, it's like, it is a ad creative and landing page. Uh, we have, you know, a head of e-com. who handles our like CRO. It is, it literally is, we have, you know, ops CX, we have no head of product. We have no product people. It's basically just been and everyone else is just growth. So it is pretty wild to see. And I think that can only, like I think this is more of the future of like these, these types of businesses, especially if they're in like the health and wellness space.

1:23:02And even, even if it's not, even if like the skew count gets a little bit bigger, I think all the AI things that you can do to oversee ops now, I think, is getting way better. I think it's basically like, hire the people that are going to help create the growth engine. And that's exactly what we did here. And funny enough, Holo is very, very similar. We have one product person on Holo, two ops people, and everybody else, for the most part, is growth. So that's how we've structured things. And that's what, obviously, we've seen some success with.

1:23:35Matt Bertulli:We like to finish these things off with these 10 rapid fire questions. I do think because you have agency background and brand background, I'd love to, if you can, do the quick context switch. Give us one and then give us the answer from the perspective of the other. So I'll start it off. When we ask everybody the same questions, I'm amazed at how much variety I get in these answers. I'm like, we're all in consumer. Shouldn't they be the same? Um, so first question is you get to a desert Island, you get a dashboard to manage your business. You only get three numbers on that dashboard that tell you how the business is doing.

1:24:14Matt Bertulli:What are the three numbers that are most important to you? New customer CPA, cash in the bank, month six, uh, cohort retention. Okay. So like net revenue retention at six months. Yeah. Six months. I'd say that's relevant to both brands. that's that's my brand side agency side team retention client retention and and pipeline yep yep in pipeline yeah uh okay so then you also get to take a book or a resource but it cannot be about business and this this might be just like a one one answer like what is the thing that you're you're on this island what are you gonna read i'll go with something like super like childish because it's fun.

1:24:56I'll go with Harry Potter, Sorcerer's Stone, first book. Just kick it off with just a Harry Potter book. Yeah, I don't know. If I'm stuck on an island, I might as well just try and enjoy it a little bit and be playful because it's pretty brutal. I don't know.

1:25:07Matt Bertulli:You just may have made this the first time ever that my daughter might listen to this damn show because she loves Harry Potter. So thanks for that. You made me cool, man. What is your one contrarian belief about business that other people think you're crazy for? Profit doesn't matter as much as people make it seem like it's the most important thing. That is a very contrarian belief. I love that. That's great. Cash flow is great. I'll add the context. Cash flow is incredible. So I'll call that out. Free cash flow. Love it. What's the single most important word in leadership? Patience. Okay. Then what's the single most important word in business?

1:25:47Sean Frank:Grit. Best meal of the day and why?

1:25:50Matt Bertulli:Oh, dude, I want to know, has this changed pre and post baby? Best meal or words? Best meal of the day. And why? Breakfast, obviously. I don't know. You can rip savory. You can rip sweet. You can rip whatever you want. I mean, best meal of the day is definitely breakfast. Pancakes, breakfast burrito. I mean, how can you go wrong? Were you always a breakfast guy? Or is this like, oh, now that I got a young kid, I'm up? This is the fact that I married a chef and she went to culinary school and she makes everything dope, but specifically we can have incredible breakfast every single day. I think it's the most underrated meal of the day for sure.

1:26:30Matt Bertulli:What do you think the most overrated growth tactic is right now? Creative volume. I dig that. Okay, then what's the most underrated? Funnel congruency. If you want me to go into details on that, that's my big one. Okay, so like yes, just give us the TLDR on what the hell that means for people listening. You're talking about whatever. You're talking about weight loss in an ad. And then you push people to a 10 reasons why. Everyone's starting to do listicles now because listicles work. Maybe you mention weight loss once in those 10 reasons. And then you push them to a product page that maybe mentions weight loss in one review.

1:27:09Why would you not build an entire funnel that tells that story from A to Z, especially if they're watching a video ad that they only watched five seconds of before they go through? So the intention is that you're making an ad with the whole concept of weight loss. You've got all of your awareness ads that are about weight loss. You've got your product aware, solution aware, whatever. You've got all the awareness stages there. Your page should be able to tell that same story all the way through about weight loss. And then your product page should also tell the same story all the way through. So yeah, I mean, if you go study Marsman stuff lately, it's doing that.

1:27:44We don't launch ads unless we have a funnel that's congruent with the ad. And we've seen a big bump in performance based on that.

1:27:52Matt Bertulli:You could even go further for people listening. You could actually make that pretty dynamic. You could take it all the way down to cart. Take it down to cart. You can take it down to your email flows. You can take it down to your pop-ups. So now we're running pop-ups that talk about the same thing based on the landing page that you're on. We talk about email flows that fire based on the funnel that you're on. So you can take that same thing. Funnel congruency, I think, is the biggest piece. Why do you think that's underrated? Is it just because it's hard and it's like, that's just a lot of work?

1:28:17It's hard to do, but it's getting easier. So I'd say like it's getting easier, but it was always super hard. And people always thought, people thought that you could run broad ads, a bunch of stuff, push them to a lander that kind of talks about stuff and then push them to a very generic page because you want the ability to sell all these things to one. Really, you need to just tell the story all the way through because people are going to get confused along the way. Are you selling weight loss? Are you selling, you know, strength? Are you selling longevity? What are you selling? You know, so I think being able to tell the story A to Z, if you don't get them in each part, you can at least catch them in either the ad, the lander or the product page.

1:28:50Matt Bertulli:Freaking love it, man. That is awesome. All right, dude, we will let you go. This has been a ton of fun. It's just good to jam, bro.

1:28:58Sean Frank:Zach, you're a killer, man. I'm so happy to know you. You really deserve all your success. Very few people have grinded as hard for as long, come from as little to as much as you. Multiple brands, cross categories. You are one of one, brother. I appreciate everything you do. Thank you for being part of the community.

1:29:14Matt Bertulli:Thanks, guys. Yeah, Zach, this was a lot of fun. Come back anytime, man.