Kat Cole: From Hostess to AG1’s CEO With +$500M in Revenue

20:58Matt Bertulli:Now I'm damn near the top.

21:00Mike Beckham:It was greatly formative. I'd say there were several formative chapters. And to your point, I've been in each company, although the company has transformed over the time I was there. And I've often had many different roles in the window of time I've been in each company, but for a significant amount of time. And that's a lot of life and a lot of learning in one place. And so the first bucket of learning was childhood. You know, we left my dad, who was an alcoholic when I was nine. I have two younger sisters. I helped my mom raise them. She worked three jobs. That's why I started working so young in hourly roles in the mall, cleaning gym equipment, eventually a hostess at Hooters.

21:43Mike Beckham:So there was a lot of lesson, leadership lesson in that window and in my family life. And then the second big leadership lesson chapter was this 14 years at Hooters, which is summarized as started as a hostess at 17, became a waitress at 18, thought I was just going to pay my way through college as the first person in my family to get into college. And it was just a job that I loved to get me through. And then the company started growing. By the time I was 19, I was opening franchises around the world. By the time I was 20, I dropped out of college and took a corporate gig with Hooters, which is how I got to Atlanta.

22:19Mike Beckham:And by the time I was 26, I was one of the vice presidents of the company doing$800 million in revenue and then led through so many crazy periods. We launched an airline, a casino, a marketing company. We were fully vertically integrated, owned most of our supply chain, DSD, a direct distribution network. And then the CEO died and his son had to take over. So we had to navigate probate in an estate that was not really thoughtfully planned and was quite messy to live through as the largest asset in the estate. And then finally liquidating that asset in the estate to private equity. So there was that chapter and all kinds of interesting lessons in that chapter, being a young leader, traveling around the world, extending a brand in different countries, being in a franchise system where you are growing in partnership with someone else's capital, in addition to our own corporately owned restaurant.

23:10Mike Beckham:So being an operator, a marketer, a brander, and essentially a runner of multiple enterprises. And and then navigating being, you know, an executive in my 20s when my peers were in their 50s and which brought so much good. A little bit of fresh, a little bit of tough stuff, but a lot of good. And then the sale of the company into private equity. We had been privately held. So going from one ownership structure to the other was incredible, an incredible lesson. I went back to business school. I have a master's without a bachelor's. So I dropped out, but I did go to get an MBA, rare but possible.

23:45Mike Beckham:And then that next chapter was running multiple private equity owned portfolio companies at focus brands, starting as the president of Cinnabon, turning that business around out of the recession, building what was then an unprecedented multi-channel enterprise, taking a restaurant brand and extending it into grocery products, because it's the thing people do now immediately, but it was very unique then. And it became so successful that it became a model in and of itself. Then I became group president of that company, managing multiple presidents who had previously been my peers and navigating that company's growth.

24:22Mike Beckham:I was there for 10 years. So Hooters for 14 and all of that change, focus brands, now it's called GoToFoods for a decade and then moved into more very focused into health and nutrition with then Athletic Greens, now AG1. And I've been here for four and a half years. So it's funny. It looks, I'm loyal, certainly, but it's not that, right? It's that I have two questions that I ask when I have opportunity. And I was recruited to leave, you know, each of those points. And I get offers to go other places. Or sometimes I think about should I do something differently, of course, like any person as my life changes.

25:01Mike Beckham:But I ask two questions. One, is my work here done? Is it done? As I see what is to be done, is my work here done? Have I done what I came to do and want to do? And then two, if I'm being honest, could someone else do what needs to be done next? Not now, next. Could someone else do what needs to be done next better than me? Is that what's best for the company? And if the answer to both of those questions is yes, my work is done and someone else could do a better job of what's next, it is time for me to go. But when I would reflect on those questions, the answer was no to one or both, which results in me doubling down, changing something, staying, expanding my role.

25:46Mike Beckham:Like, oh yeah, my work is done, but no, no one else could do what I'm doing. So I need to change something here or my work isn't done, but someone else could do this part. I need someone else to do this part so I can go grow a different part of the company. Like my growth, my opportunity, my impact actually is here until it's not. And there's an opportunity to do something different and better that feels more aligned with my values, the opportunity in the market, and what fits with where my life is, my personal life is at that point.

26:15Kat Cole:I'm just curious, Kat, that at this point in your career, you've now been through this probably like your third really major leadership role. Is that a good description?

26:25Mike Beckham:I would call my executive tenure at Hooters as first, right from 26 to 31. then from when at 31 i became president of cinnabon this global frame so it was my first like ceo of the brand running the role a few years into that so that would be number two a few years into that four years into that um i became group president and started a whole innovation division so that would be number three becoming coo of the parent company of all divisions all things, president and COO would be number four, and then AG1 would be number five, so fifth. So fifth, yeah. But I've been the president or CEO of brands since 2010.

27:11Kat Cole:Man, so I guess one of the questions, because you alluded to it in your answer, was what are the things that keep you motivated at this point? You've been in it long enough that I'm guessing that the kind of profit motive piece has kind of dropped off in importance or in necessity. So now you're able to function in kind of a post-economic way of thinking about your career and the jobs you do. So what are some of those values that guide how you think about your career and the opportunities you take now?

27:43Mike Beckham:I've heard many people reference the concept of ikigai, right? These circles that overlap. And I don't remember what they all are, but it's like mission and impact and purpose.

27:54Matt Bertulli:What are you good at? And what does the world need? And yeah, all that stuff.

27:57Mike Beckham:Like the Venn diagram. Yeah. So it's a version of that, certainly. But more specifically for me, I have had such an unbelievable and incredible, and at moments tough, but mostly incredible life. And that has included meeting my husband, the love of my life, later than many do. And having kids later in life than at least they used to. It's becoming a little more common now. But I had my son Ocean at 39. So I had a miscarriage. My son Ocean at 39. Two miscarriages in between. My daughter Arrow at 41. um and and so that is such a force in how i think about things now there's beauty i think in being a more mature or seasoned parent and partner my husband and i literally we met um and proposed to each other within two weeks and then he then rode across the atlantic ocean in a rowboat he's an ultra endurance athlete on the side.

29:10Mike Beckham:We got closer through the row. It's not his job. It's his hobby. And we got closer through the row, not farther apart. When he landed, we tattooed our rings. We got married at Burning Man. And then we started this like miscarriage and baby's journey all while I was COO of this multi-billion dollar company. You know, we grew by M &A. So I'm traveling around meeting with brands to acquire. We grew our own businesses and just wild, right? That season of my life from my mid to late 30s to now, I'm 47 now. We've been together for 10 years, almost 11. And it is the answer to what colors my thinking now.

29:50Mike Beckham:And so the way that plays out in my decisions is, you know, my purpose and pride. What am I proud of? What feels real and important? What can I grow and impact and put out into the world that is deeply aligned with who I am and what I believe? if I want as little disconnection of that as possible. Not that you can't find purpose in any work and meaning in any work, but truly being able to grow a business and a brand that helped me. I was a customer for multiple years before I ever met the founder, before I ever was asked to advise him. And it helped me as a busy mom running companies so much. I had all these separate pills and powders.

30:30Mike Beckham:I was trying to be a super supplementer. I was going to Whole Foods, getting like vitamin C and ash work on that. and all of that stuff. And it wasn't working for me. I've had a lot of challenges around the birth of my second child. And so my husband, who's an ultra endurance athlete, was like, just try this. Like half the stuff you've bought is expired. You travel so much, you can't keep up with separate pills and bottles anyway. Try this. And AG1 made such a difference for me. My gut, my energy, my hair, skin and nails. I was getting sick less. It's not a medical claim to my experience. Um, so I was a super fan of the product and that is an example of the alignment where I'm, I'm a customer, I'm a user, I'm a believer.

31:13Mike Beckham:Um, I absolutely fell in love with the overall approach to nutrition. My mom had breast cancer while I was having kids late in life. And so I just got really serious about health and nutrition and I couldn't unlearn what I had learned. And I also saw the business opportunity there that the consumer was moving in that direction. So for me, making decisions in this like post-economic state is about that. It's about layers of impact, layers of integrity and authenticity to how I live my life and what makes me proud for my husband and my kids and the structure of that work. we're a fully remote company.

31:53Mike Beckham:And that's very difficult to do at this scale. But it works for me and it works for us. And that enables me to show up for my kids, even at a very busy time in my life.

32:07Matt Bertulli:On all that, I mean, I'd love to learn a little bit more about this hot shot rule you have, because you strike me as either you've done a lot of deliberate work on mindset and maintaining like this what is clearly a very positive outlook on how you run your companies. Can you just touch on this hotshot rule thing? Because I find this an interesting one. I've not actually seen a phrase this way before.

32:31Mike Beckham:Yeah.

32:34Mike Beckham:Likely because of my background. I'll share often when my mom came to me when I was nine and said, that's it, I'm done, we're leaving. What she meant was we were leaving my father. And I didn't get upset. I looked at her and said some version of what took you so long. I was ready to go. I knew it was bad. There is something in that. And then the many experiences I had as a young professional, as a waitress, you know, as a waitress, it would be interesting to see the corporate office show up and give all the praise to this manager because their sales were up. And meanwhile, you're like, this person's awful.

33:06Mike Beckham:The sales are up because there's construction down the road and all the construction workers come here. so you kind of learn the people who are closest to the action know what the right thing to do is long before the leader does the people who are close to the action have a detail that you don't have but they don't have the authority to make a decision they don't have the ability to name a scale problem or a scalable solution and i have become obsessed with knowing the true truth staying crazy close to the customer staying really close to people's perspectives and their experience so that I don't have blind spots or I have as few blind spots as possible and I can make the best decisions for my life, my family, my business.

33:45Mike Beckham:And many of my practices, which of course I didn't know were frameworks and practices then, they were just kind of things I would do to get through stuff and be helpful. And then upon reflection or when asked, I could call them a thing and put them into a succinct way to help other people use it. They're all a version of checking in, checking in with myself, checking in with others, checking in with customers, checking in with my husband. The hotshot rule is a version of checking in. It's just checking in with my understanding of what I'm going through and using the inspiration and perspective of someone I admire.

34:20Mike Beckham:So it's simply this. And I practice it weekly. I have for a very long time, talking like, you know, well over 15 years, 17, I don't know how long now. I practice it once a week. It used to be quarterly and it was so effective it became monthly and then so effective it became weekly and anything more than weekly is a little much. And candidly at this point, it just becomes part of how I think. I think about my role that I want to do better in, which could be my role as mother, my role as a wife, my role as a daughter. I'm so fortunate to have my mom still on this earth or my role as a CEO. And so I think of my role and just a few details around it, like what's going on right now, my Slack, my team, dynamics, the business.

35:01Mike Beckham:I just ground myself in what's up. Then I envision someone I admire. Could be anyone. Could be my mom. Could be someone I've talked to recently. Could be someone I've read about. So I envision someone I admire. Then I envision them in my seat tomorrow, in whatever that seat is. I think of them in my role as CEO. They're looking at my Slack. They're reading my interactions with the team. They're in my team meetings. If it's my role there, They're seeing how I show up for my husband or my family. And I just ask, when they see that, when they're in that seat, what's one thing and the first thing they would do differently to make it better?

35:36Mike Beckham:And for whatever reason, when I see my life through their eyes, something comes to mind immediately. And I think the reason is because, one, we often know the next thing we could and should do to be better, to have impact. We just, for whatever reason, aren't.

35:49Matt Bertulli:you said something there that I'd like to zoom in on if it's okay that you like to stay extremely close to your customer check in with your employees how are you doing that at I can see how you can do that at you're at like Cinnabon and that company walk in and talk to people yeah how are you doing that at AG1 where your customers are largely direct consumer right and your employees, as you mentioned, are all remote. Yeah.

36:20Mike Beckham:It requires more intention. It has less serendipity, but it still happens and it happens at the same frequency. So the way I do it and then our team as well. So it's a mandatory part of our leadership structure and schedule and certain teams that have even more impact on outward facing decisions have more frequency with customers. so we have our cip our customer interview program and it's as simple as our team because we do have emails because we do have the ability to communicate with customers which you don't have in a restaurant setting we reach out and say our ceo would love to chat with you this is what she does regularly would you be interested we'd love to hear more about your experience your advice that's it and we just you know we have a big member base so there's a lot of people to reach out to and plenty of people say yes.

37:10Matt Bertulli:So you're getting on the phone with customers?

37:11Mike Beckham:On Zoom or the phone, often Zoom.

37:15Matt Bertulli:That's awesome.

37:16Mike Beckham:It is constant, constant. It is my joy. It fills my cup. It sometimes makes me mad because when you talk to customers, everything is so simple and often so consistent. And in an effort to continue to evolve a business, to grow a business, to bring more sophisticated things to market, things you know are right and good. Sometimes you talk to a customer and they're like, I don't care about that. And you're just like, oh, you know, like, oh no. So it's grounding and it's empowering. So I do it, my team does it. The other is we recently expanded into retail, into Costco. And so we went direct to national into Costco.

37:57Mike Beckham:And so my team, a good portion of my team, we are in Costco with the samplers. and so you're just that's a little bit of a hybrid like my restaurant days right you're in there you're talking to people you talk to people who are considering but not trying you talk to people who are trying but not buying you talk to me it's and that is oh i miss that you know i do miss that in person ability to just talk and feel people's energy and really spend time uh but we do get it virtually through our Zooms and phone calls. And then we have traditional, like quant qual work, proper work with prospects, with existing customers, and more kind of sophisticated company, legitimate customer insights work.

38:41Kat Cole:It's a great point. I was a server throughout high school. That's kind of how I earned money in high school and early college. And it's amazing how much I learned about business and entrepreneurship through actually just waiting tables. And one of the things, like you were saying, Kat, is even in this world where we have so many digital tools and all these different ways to survey and gather information, I just don't know that we've recreated fully the ability to qualitatively gather a feel for the customer the way that you can in person. And it sounds like that's what you're saying with the club sampling.

39:15Kat Cole:And I've had the same experience that there's really no replacement for actually talking to customers. And maybe that's one of the biggest problems with D2C is that we're so busy clicking on our keyboards that we don't get out there and talk to people. And you're just able to pick up on things that are really difficult, I think, for a survey to pull through.

39:36Mike Beckham:The other place we do it is we, over the last few years, have really ramped up the investment in community and activations. Our run club, Sagey One is very morning oriented. And so being with people there too is, and that's got a special layer because it's not just interacting with people around the product and what's your experience and what are your questions and what's your advice. it's building community around that. And that adds a different and very deeply often missing layer to e-commerce and D2C, like a deeply fulfilling layer to what is typically an e-commerce or predominantly D2C business.

40:21Matt Bertulli:Here at Pila, AppLovin is the most incremental new channel we tested in 2025. It's self-serve ads manager Axon is now open and they're offering you$5 ,000 in credits when you spend$5 ,000. Every single one of us is looking for that next best place to put our ad dollars. It is just one of the laws of D2C. There are now brands spending six figures a day on ad-loving. That kind of blows my mind, but it is true. And there are brands that are running it as their number two and number three channel after Meta and Google. That is super impressive. You would be foolish to at least not try it out in 2026.

40:54Matt Bertulli:Go to nineoperators.com slash applovin to give it a shot. Oh, and you'll also get access to the live operators mastermind we ran with over 25 e-commerce heavyweights, plus our step-by-step playbook to channel expansion, nineoperators.com slash applovin. Let's get back to the show.

41:15Matt Bertulli:uh cat i i am so curious when you joined ag1 did you come in knowing that this is like the playbook you're gonna run like did you come in knowing like we need to take this from a dc brand we got to go into retail we got to rebrand it or was all of this uh like you know established after you joined. And then I would really like to learn a little bit more about this transition from AG1 being like very DTC, only DTC, single product. And now you're in Costco, as you mentioned, and how that worked. And was there a lot of resistance in the company to doing that? Can you just start at the top and walk us through how you got here?

42:00Mike Beckham:I knew that the business's future would include multiple products and multiple channels. But what I didn't know was when would be the right time. I didn't know in what sequence would be optimal at first. And certainly as a new member of the team, I didn't know what might be in the way of that desired. expansion. But generally, when a business is getting that big, so when I joined, this is public information out there, when I joined, we had just done, we were doing$160 million in annual revenue, bootstrapped, and growing crazy, right? Growing at multiples, not percent. And we completed our only big fundraise,$120 million at a$1.3 billion post valuation, and then continued the company's growth.

43:05Mike Beckham:And there were a few things that I learned early on that helped me get clarity on when will we be able to expand? How should we expand? The first was when I joined, we were only blending AG1. We were globally sourcing, but we were only blending AG1 in New Zealand. And we were air freighting that green powder to the U.S. Most of the business was in the U.S. 90 % of the business was in the U.S. I think we were like a top five exporter out of New Zealand or something like that. So this idea of being single sourced, not blending locally, was a real operational issue to improve before we did anything new.

43:54Mike Beckham:So blending exclusively in New Zealand and air freighting powder to the U.S. where 90 percent of the business of the 160 million annual revenue was located was a thing to deal with. And in my mind, I have no business creating new product. I have no business putting my product in retail where the inventory demands are very different until I address the operational structure. And so we put all of our focus on three things. One, making sure that our customer experience for what was still a crazy high growth business was excellent. And it wasn't. It was getting bumpy. We had shaker bottles that were leaking.

44:34Mike Beckham:We had gone through the supply chain crisis post-COVID where it was hard to have consistent suppliers of lids and bottles. And so I had all kinds of customer experience issues we needed to improve. Second, we needed to stand up U.S. blending facilities so that we had domestic production for a domestic business, which we did in the following year. And that was scary, right? Moving your recipe, your blending IP, all of your operations. And so we completed that. Then it was very clear that the consumer was moving to a much more science-oriented marketing message versus just like, hey, a person I trust, trust this.

45:14Mike Beckham:And so we did a few things. One, put a ton of investment in building out a team of PhDs, scientists, and human clinical trials that take years to conduct and complete, which is painful, right? You're taking tens of millions, plowing it into something you can't talk about, you don't have the outcomes for, and you can't tell the world about for a number of years. But it was so clearly the right thing to do to continue to level up that global sourcing, add in more third-party certification, so more quality work, bigger QA team, more third-party labs, NSF for Sport, Alchemist Labs, Informed Sport, Canada Liste, which is the German version, the EU version of NSF for Sport, because our customers are people whose bodies are their jobs, right?

46:00Mike Beckham:Athletes, Olympians, et cetera, in addition to everyday folks like us. And so we needed to do all that work before we launched a new product. That took two years. That was 22 and 23. But we had our product innovation on the roadmap. We knew what we were going to launch. We had AGZ and its formulation in the works. We had the AG1 Next Gen formula upgrade already happening. And so we did that work quietly behind the scenes, the product development, the diary studies, hundreds of people drinking the stuff for months as it was iterated and formulated. So we understood what does the science say about the ingredients?

46:42Mike Beckham:What does the customer say about their experience? And then what do the human trials say about the outcomes and pull that together to, in 2025, launch a very different company. AG1, NextGen, more human clinical trials than any other similar product. AGC, our first ever truly second product, going from D to C and not Amazon to Amazon, going from D to and Amazon to Costco, adding flavors to AG1. All that happened in a six-month period. And normally I wouldn't recommend that speed of that much commercialization, but it was overdue because of the things we needed to prioritize, keeping up with the man, shoring up operations, building the QA and science team and body of research rigor.

47:33Mike Beckham:And then once it was ready, We're like, we're only going to learn how it goes if we get it out into the world. And so month after month last year was just launch after launch. There was a lot of activity. Yeah.

47:46Matt Bertulli:It's sort of the, we all run consumer companies here. One of the things I actually struggle with in this business is that the rhythms and the sort of like the heartbeats of like product development, in your case, like the trials, that stuff is so slow compared to like this other machine over here, which is marketing. So slow. go to market. Like, it's like, you've got the heartbeat of a jackrabbit and then like of an elephant, you know, and you're trying to manage both team held back, right?

48:14Mike Beckham:You can feel, we want to talk about it. We have the branding, we have the messaging and it's not only so slow. We add layers of third party certification rigor that add months to anything we do, anything we do. If I change one ingredient, it has to go back through NSF for sport. That is nine to 11 weeks of review, testing, consideration, validation, and money. So it's extra slow for us in a way, which you can then understand why, like, if it's ready and we've now completed these things, let's get it out, even if it's being launched in close proximity to a more frequent launch.

48:56Matt Bertulli:Kat, I got to ask, like, that's so much change. I'm assuming you guys have a board, right? And you've clearly got shareholders. So how much debate was happening before you started making these investments? Like when you rebranded a company that was doing really well, you know, you're going like you took a form like this machine is working right to buy it for all intents. And then there's like a lot of change that was being implemented. Was this just all obvious and the board was like, this makes sense. Let's do it. Or was there a ton of debate back and forth? Because like this is a huge set of shifts.

49:36Mike Beckham:No, it was obvious. There was the board, which is a very simple board and not overly complicated and really supportive. And so the energy was more around we have wanted, we and the board, including me on the board, have wanted to do this for some time. So the energy was actually, when are we going to get it out? When are we going to start doing this? And the friction or frustration was, we all want it to happen fast, but it has to be done to a different level of thoughtfulness given our brand and our scale. We're not a tiny company anymore. We're not a startup. And so just putting stuff out carries risk.

50:25Mike Beckham:So extra months of diary studies and people's experiences, extra bodies of development and research on flavor and taste, because it's not just a supplement. It's not a pill. It's a drink. Like, right, it's got to taste good enough for people to make a ritual. And that takes a ton of iterations. So the board was more, there was much more energy around what, you know, when is this coming? When are we going to get it out? We all agreed it was needed, wanted, and in some ways overdue for very good reasons because of what we needed to prioritize. So there was just like anxiousness and energy to get things, to get things out.

51:05Matt Bertulli:What I'm also hearing is that there's clearly this evolution of the product that's very science-driven now, but then the brand itself is evolving at the same time, right? All of these things are changing the brand, but you and the team made a very clear decision to actually rebrand at some point. You went from Athletic Greens to AG1, and now AG1 is obviously evolving. How the hell did you get around the risk of a rebrand? Uh, and how do you think about that as a leader? Like you've been running some big brands for a long time. This terrifies me. And I think this terrifies most of our listeners.

51:44Matt Bertulli:Um, it was terrifying. It was terrifying.

51:48Mike Beckham:Um, but you know, you know, what was more terrifying is not doing it. And that's how, you know, as a leader. So our previous name, athletic greens served us beautifully for our first decade. We were the kind of category creators, certainly the biggest name in the space. But then what you started to see in a lot of our customers were, our early customers were athletic and the product was significantly green fruits and vegetables, but not exclusively. And so what started to happen, one, in the competitive space, you had everybody launching xyz greens bubba's greens jenny's greens purple greens whatever and if that happens in enough mass it can create and dilute like product it can create confusion and dilute product clarity so all of a sudden if people look at ag1 and they're like wait a minute there's you're called athletic greens and then this is bubba's greens and this is jenny's greens But Jenny's greens is half the price.

52:51Mike Beckham:And if I step back and squint, the label looks kind of similar. Looks like you're just an expensive greens. And it's like, oh, AG1 is so much more than greens. It's more a multivitamin. It's more the future of what the multivitamin was supposed to be. It's nutrients, multivitamin, multimineral, and gut health support, pro and prebiotic together. So in a way, our name that had created opportunity was becoming a limiting factor. It created a ceiling. The other was we had gotten so large and started to move beyond a very narrow niche core where it is not just athletes. It was a lot of busy professionals.

53:29Mike Beckham:And we're like, is that a problem? You know, athletic is still aspirational. But when you put it all together and we worked with a great branding firm to help us go deep into customer insights, our customers, how they talked about it, what was happening in the category. we had three jobs to do. One, to make more clear that we were so much more than greens. So not calling ourselves greens was a big part of that. Two, be more gender balanced. Our customer base was actually 50-50 male-female. And Athletic Greens at the time was skewing male in its perception and in history. And then three, making it two letters and a number, which seemed crazy to branding people.

54:15Mike Beckham:And now look at all the knockoffs that have done the same thing. Was a way to step into more precision, engineering, science. It also was a naming convention that could be used for other things. AGX, AGZ, right? We saw that coming. We knew sleep would become And so the shift served multiple jobs, but it was, as you said, very scary. We had a decade of equity built in it. Our website, our store was called that, athleticgreens.com. It is how we were referred to in the media, on the internet for quite some time. So you have this very practical and tactical concern about search efficiency and what's going to happen.

55:01Mike Beckham:But we managed it thoughtfully. there's a way to do this. When you have a wholesale name change, usually you need some bridge period, usually one to two years, but it depends on your marketing intensity, that you associate both names together. So we were AG1 by Athletic Greens for a while. And that's your bridge, right? That gives you a bridge where people are like, oh yeah, this is that thing. It's just something else. And then you have to make a call of when you drop it over time. And it's never perfect. Some people do it too late. Some people do it too soon. And eventually it was, we didn't need that anymore.

55:35Mike Beckham:Some people still call us athletic greens and that's okay. That'll always happen. And the team has to understand that. But we made the shift at the year we did 160 million in revenue, built a bridge strategy, packaging, branding, naming, and then made the move. But it was complicated, like entities and assets and packaging and social media, it was, it took a person to manage, um, just the checklists for a long period of time behind the scenes.

56:06Matt Bertulli:So you go into it knowing it's going to take years. Do you also go into it with this thought that it's like, it's going to be, it's going to force us to change like marketing mix and go to market and channels? Or do you, did you view those as like, those are separate. they're going to have to happen at the same time.

56:25Mike Beckham:Yeah, they're separate and they'll have to happen at the same time. I mean, our over the years, at least since I've been leading the company, our marketing mix has shifted in a way that I think is very typical of a company that scales and it's just become more mature, more typical, more diversified. It's referral and TV and out of home and direct mail and paid social and creators, right? It's, it's this really beautiful mix. I think in our post-purchase survey, it's like, depends on the month, but 25 to 30 % will say, I heard about you from a creator or social, um, 30 % a friend or family. So a lot of personal referral.

57:12Mike Beckham:And then the other 30 is all the more, you know, like traditional media mix of linear streaming ctv out of home activations community things like that how uh i'm assuming you're not

57:27Matt Bertulli:the one who's like deciding all of this on your team right like this is you've clearly got a great marketing leader yeah we have a great team how i'm very curious though from your role when you think about because this is clearly like a big line item in a business like like yours or ours right like marketing is obviously a huge bucket of cash. From your seat, how do you decide or how do you weigh in on where that money goes? Or are you just like, I trust my team and they tell me?

57:57Mike Beckham:We have such an incredible team, but we're also a very focused, simple business in some ways. So it's not a huge team, even though it's a large business. And so of course I'm involved in in those things. But we have a phenomenal team, the people who are channel managers, the data scientists, the analytics, and the leaders certainly of growth, marketing, performance, different forms of media and marketing. But we're just data driven, right? And the tools just get better and better to help us understand who are we reaching? What does that reach cost? What is the return on that reach? What type and quality of customer and relationship is that bringing us, which would historically have been CAC to LTV, but now it's so much more.

58:46Mike Beckham:We have interrelated channels. We have Amazon. We have Costco. We have D2C. We have more upper funnel brand work. We just launched our ambassador ship with Hugh Jackman, who's been drinking AG1 for five years.

58:59Matt Bertulli:I can't stop seeing Hugh's face all over my own Instagram feed right now. he has this if you haven't seen it he's dancing now for age one like impromptu tap dance that

59:08Mike Beckham:i'm trying to learn it was so good i'm treating it like choreography where he goes it's time to wake up it's time um he's he's definitely a morning person and so you have that right which is about the brand energy and the quality of the product and the quality of performer who trusts the product but it's not pointing people to a lander you know it's it's really saying who are we and who are people. Then we have extensions of that that certainly are paid media that do connect to a lander, that do take customers on a problem solution journey and bring them in to the funnel. And we have a team in analytics and processes that manage all of that on a, you know, minute by minute, hourly basis.

59:52Mike Beckham:And then regular leadership meetings of how are we performing? What are we seeing? What's resonating? What's not? Where should we shift investment? where should we take down in both? I mean, the team's phenomenal. They are an absolute machine, but it's getting more complicated as the place where that demand gets captured is physical retail or e-commerce channels. And even something like physical retail is demand harvesting, right? People are aware they want to try it there, but it also is demand creation because people see it on a shelf. And so using the proper MMM tools and attribution tools to understand the interconnect, like the connectivity of these channels.

1:00:30Mike Beckham:What do they create versus what do they receive? And then how that affects our investment approach while keeping the overall economic structure sound and healthy. We're a profitable company. We haven't raised since our one big round. We have no intention to. So, you know, all of that is a very powerful machine in the company that affects how the team makes those decisions. Yeah.

1:00:56Matt Bertulli:And so I want to double click on this a little bit. You mentioned that like it started out as CAC to LTV and now it's something much more. I guess what comes to mind for me is like, how do you manage that cultural shift internally? Right. Like I know that your company is very performance oriented in those early years. Right. Bootstrapped had no choice to be. And clearly now these are like it's something much bigger. Yeah. Is that a difficult cultural shift? Like, how do you think about that with the team? I mean, clearly the tools and the tactics change.

1:01:29Mike Beckham:It can be challenging in pockets, not wholesale in the org, but the way to navigate the challenge, one, is to bring in people who know the new way to do things. If you try to only move and mold the people who've done things the old way to a new way, it's not impossible. It's just a slower, heavier lift. When you inject expertise amongst the team, it accelerates that transition. next is you know what you measure matters and so making sure that what you're measuring is able to drive the shift in investment strategy and so if all you're doing is measuring cacto ltv but yet in that month you're investing in massive brand campaigns or a big retail launch that is that cacto ltv is going to look so out of whack you could make the mistake and pull back all the marketing, which is damaging in the short term in many cases.

1:02:23Mike Beckham:And so getting the right analytics and the right view that help everyone understand what job are each of these things doing and what really is, then you shift to like your marketing efficiency ratio and things that are a bit more like total marketing investment to total revenue while still keeping an eye on the heartland or the core of the business. I mean, D2C still needs CAC to LTV, but the business is now more than that. So you have to add a few more views in order to ask, is our investment approach serving the business and building the business that we want? And that's not just investment in marketing and channels.

1:03:04Mike Beckham:It's investment in product and innovation, in packaging, in research, right? All of that has to go into the bucket of where are we investing and what is the short, mid and long term return.

1:03:17Matt Bertulli:Would it be fair to say that as the company goes from like sort of single product, single channel, CAC to LTV driven to much more complex, right? Like more channels, more products. Would it be fair to say that like then your media mix from your seat, right? Clearly you're not like the one pushing the buttons. But from your seat, would the media mix shift to things like television, like unskippable formats like Apple and television, YouTube, like things where you're holding more attention as opposed to channels where it's very click based? Yeah.

1:03:56Mike Beckham:And it has over the years, over several years. I mean, it really does look far more diversified than it did five years ago, of course. And so whether it's more new channels or experimental channels... Or something much more traditional. It's rarely choosing one over the other. It's the mix. It's how is this mix showing up. And I remember this past Black Friday, Cyber Monday, which was incredible for us. We, for the first time, had one, we had multiple products to offer. We had never had that before. So like 101 playbook is bundles and offer structure. We've never had that. We got to over half a billion in annual revenue and never had the tools of the trade.

1:04:53Mike Beckham:And so this year we did. And so we were actually able to create bundles and offer structure of AGZ and AG1, flavor packages, a cool gym bag. Like we actually use the playbook of D2C fully. And we had an out of home campaign and we had direct mail and we had television and we tested Apple oven and, and, and, right. We had all of this and enough creative diversity that allowed it to not feel like one campaign being overused, chasing you, beating you over the head on Instagram, but rather a far more like thoughtful spreading of brand. So upper funnel, mid funnel, a little more product, lower funnel, click here, where to purchase, you know, highly attributable, coming together at one time.

1:05:43Mike Beckham:It was like a symphony. And you're like, oh, this is what this feels like. That's really nice.

1:05:49Matt Bertulli:This is how it's supposed to feel.

1:05:51Mike Beckham:It's cool. We're late to the party, but it's cool.

1:05:53Matt Bertulli:Yeah. Now I have to ask, like you're at the size and scale of, of AG one and you're used to, you're one of the few people in, I think in consumer has genuinely operated at, at these numbers. Do you still have, uh, moments or, or like when you're doing this many things, do you still have those like moments where you're like, oh, this is going to fail? Like where you actually have doubt or, or does that, maybe you would actually don't believe in failure. Maybe you're, you're not.

1:06:20Mike Beckham:No, it's just all part of the process, right? If I really think something is going to fail, given this category, we put it through enough testing, it's going to show up in the process. And I went by testing, I mean, consumer testing and people drinking it, people seeing it, testing an ad, testing a message, you're going to know and have it sharp enough to go out. You still don't know for sure. Sometimes things resonate way more than you think. And other times it's like, it was good, but didn't set the world on fire. But where in this past year what was so new for us is for 14 years ag1 our one product was only one flavor just the original that is highly unusual to get to the scale in a consumable product not just with a single skew with one flavor just this original flavor not even called a flavor and it there's something very powerful about how it brings together both clearly very natural sensory attributes.

1:07:19Mike Beckham:It's got fruits, veg, herbs, you can taste it, but it's tasty enough without juices and any added sugars to be tasty and surprise people relative to the category. It's funny. You can watch people drink it and they're like, oh, it's green. You know, I'm scared. And then they go, oh, not that bad. You know, I mean, I watch by the reaction. And then over time, it becomes your palate craves it first thing in the morning. And it's really interesting. And so So we've had that one flavor profile that has ebbed and flowed over 15 years because the natural ingredients ebb and flow. So it's like wine or chocolate.

1:07:53Mike Beckham:Like one month, the apple will be a little more forward. Another month, the pineapple is a little more forward because we don't have an artificial standard we're manufacturing to. It's got a very natural. But our customers are used to that. It's a little more green this month, a little more pineapple this month. but launching flavors was, it took a long time to get them ready because the human palate is so subjective. What you love will be what I might despise. And how do you deal with that? If you've got customers coming into your reviews who are like, I love this. I hate this. This is delicious.

1:08:27Mike Beckham:This is terrible. And it's the same thing. And when you're D to C, it's not a restaurant I can't sample. so launching flavors had real risk to it because what if that flavor relaunch that a customer chooses ends up having a lower rebuild or lower satisfaction than the original so then we put those flavors through the ringer and then launched with a three-pack flavor sampler that would go in every person's shipment so we were giving away three additional servings just in case what people got they didn't like. But the reality is there were always people who didn't prefer the original flavor, that now these flavors allow them something they enjoy.

1:09:12Mike Beckham:So it's scary to see the problems a new thing may create. But you also have to acknowledge the other problem it may be solving. And on balance, find a way to navigate your reality. So we're like, oh, people can't sample it. Let's give them the sample. Oh, people don't like this flavor for these reasons. We know this flavor solves those reasons. Let's send it to them for free. And now we'll be, you know, eventually we'll move the flavors into retail, which we haven't done yet, but that will happen. That was scary, right? Because you just don't, you know, 15 years of pretty predictable history of how do people feel about this?

1:09:46Mike Beckham:How many people love the taste? How many people don't? Who rebuilds? Who doesn't? Who can you help find their flavor with just recipe, water temperature, et cetera, and who's just never going to get used to it? So will this solve more problems than it creates? was the question about flavors. And in fact, it has. Like over 30 % of new customers are choosing a flavor. Most of them are equally as satisfied with those.

1:10:09Matt Bertulli:I totally believe that. I totally believe that. It makes sense to me. Yeah. How, man, I got to know, and this is so selfish, but how do you spend your time in a given week? Like you've got product, marketing. There's like, even on product, you have R &D, you have customer tech. Like there's so many elements to your business. There's go-to-market and channel. Then there's like people, leadership, there's supply chain operations. Where, if you had to take a swag at like the, how you divide up your attention in those buckets, like how do you view that? How do you manage where your attention is going?

1:10:45Mike Beckham:There's some baseline time and attention management, you know, with my team and with our customers. That's foundational. That's just structured in the day, in the week to support the team, to have visibility to what's going on, to navigate anything that may be unexpected and to push things with intensity that people will move at the pace they're pushed. And so that's what I'm doing when I'm spending time and then listening, listening, listening. Like what are themes? What are patterns? In a remote environment, you do need to listen more to get themes of where might people be, you know, going a little slow or get confused or where is this getting scattered and needs to be refocused.

1:11:27Mike Beckham:So that's baseline. Then there will be particular seasons in the company that might be, for example, as we were gearing up a lot of this first-time innovation. I'm in our labs doing tastings. I'm with our co-manufacturers doing sampling and tasting. I'm in the work because something has high risk and high reward for that season. So we calibrate as a leadership team around something new. Then I can pull back. But by definition of something being new, the company wasn't built for it. And so I view it as irresponsible to not be involved to calibrate. How do we think? How do we work? What, you know, what should, where should someone be informed versus involved versus have a veto vote?

1:12:14Mike Beckham:So we can build the new muscle and then I can go on to the next thing that's new. Something as big as going direct to national with Costco as our first retail move, highly involved, right? I'm meeting with the team. I'm involved with the retailer. But that's just a season. And then we go, oh, okay, we're doing more of this. More retailers are coming. Now we have a team. I don't need to be as involved in the day to day. So it's this in when needed, out as we build capability, muscle or talent. And then there's always something, always something else that is now new and next for me to be pushing or calibrating or building capabilities around.

1:12:53Mike Beckham:But most of it is angling my team.

1:12:55Matt Bertulli:This is like the zoom in, zoom out function that like every, I find every great sort of CEO, every great founder who turns into CEO has like a really good sort of like zoom in, zoom out. Would you still describe yourself as an in the weeds operator?

1:13:08Mike Beckham:Yeah, I think there are many aspects where I'm in the weeds. I would say as we've built our team, who is just incredible, there are many areas where I don't need to be, but I might be with them for a moment, either for visibility or for the showing the team that the CEO of the company knows and respects what they do and has some sense of what they go through. And so sometimes it's involvement for culture versus impact. But that's something I would agree on with that leader.

1:13:41Kat Cole:That's really valuable, by the way. I think leaders miss that all the time, that people care about the leader knowing what they do. It's one of the things that you don't think about when you're a CEO, but that people in your organization spend a lot of time asking this question to themselves. Does the CEO know what I do? Do they care? How do they perceive me? And we don't think that way because we're thinking about driving results and different things. But it matters tremendously to them that they're seeing. And obviously they're caring about their career progression. And I had a conversation actually in December where someone got kind of, I wouldn't say passed over for a promotion, but we went a different direction than they expected us to go.

1:14:23Kat Cole:And they had no idea how to interpret it. And their first way of interpreting that was, I don't know what's filtering up to the CEO about my performance, but it must not be good. And so being able to sit down with them and say, no, not at all. Actually, I have a great perspective and a great opinion of your contribution just for a variety of reasons. This is what makes sense. It was really helpful for that person and in that relationship. But as you said, we can get so focused on like knocking things out and accomplishing tasks that we can forget that the number one thing we're doing is managing people and that people have their own like desires and insecurities and concerns.

1:15:01Kat Cole:And that sometimes just being there, hearing them, acknowledging them is a huge part of leadership. Totally.

1:15:09Mike Beckham:And then there's the line you manage, right? You want to be involved and have people feel seen, but not be over-involved and disempower leaders or convey mistrust. And so it's something you have to be thoughtful about.

1:15:25Matt Bertulli:Kat, earlier on you were talking about when Mike asked you about why do you keep doing what you're doing? And you had sort of two questions that you asked yourself. What stood out to me is there's this, you strike a balance between drive and ambition and humility. or like courage and confidence and like really knowing what to do and when to charge and then like this curiosity humility thing how do you decide where you're leading from at any moment in time because it seems like you move between them pretty even listening to you talk like you are moving between them very seamlessly but most people don't so how are you using those as tools in how you lead the company right now?

1:16:09Mike Beckham:It's funny you use those words. I believe the most effective humans in the world have some command over and positive blending of four mindsets or characteristics. And it's humility, curiosity, courage, and confidence. And humility is the mindset. Curiosity is the action. Confidence is the mindset. Courage is the action. they're related but different so um those i don't know what you call them right ways you show up um those are the right words like most things that drive effectiveness fall into one of those four buckets yeah there are a few ways when i mentioned this idea of checking in um the hot shot rule reflecting on what would someone i admire do in my role checking in with my team one-on-ones feedback sessions, checking in with my husband.

1:17:06Mike Beckham:It's been written about in a ton of other books, but we've shared our monthly check-ins where we ask the same six questions to each other every month. And it's not a thinking exercise. It's an action exercise. Like, what is this experience for you? And I'm going to do something with it to be better. I stay close to my customers. I talk to them all the time my team does um i think that is a big way i am informed of which of those buckets to lean into is feedback just reading the room listening to people and okay if people are feeling a bit hectic and unclear then you need to be more clear have more conviction more decisive, you know, bring the courage and the conviction.

1:17:51Mike Beckham:If people are feeling clear and strong or there's some level of tension, then maybe more curiosity and humility is appropriate in that moment. And it's an instinct and it's an intuition, but it's formed from years and literal decades of leading people, making mistakes, doing it differently, doing it better, getting that feedback and then just staying fluidly connected to what is people's experience now what do they need now what do i not know there's always something i don't know do i need to know everything no but there might be something i need to know that i don't who should i so that that's the humility there's always this no one does it alone no one on my team not me do we have the knowledge we need do we have the skills that we need do we have the opportunity or do we create the opportunity and then just taking action that bias for actions it's humility and curiosity but if you're just humble and curious you're just a student and it's only courageous and confident you're a bull in a porcelain shop it's the two together it's that humble courage and courage to me is i uh not in confidence is not i know i know what we're doing.

1:19:08Mike Beckham:It's, I know we can figure it out. I know we will figure it out. I know we with this team, there's a we, we will figure it out. That is what I have confidence in. Not the exact what, but we have the right questions. Questions scale, answers don't. Answers get dated. Beliefs and playbooks get dated, especially in this industry, right? Things change. But if you have the right questions, what matters to the customer? What's really standing out? What are we seeing? If you have the right questions and you ask them at the right cadence and then have the courage to act on the new thing you learn, then that's how you make better decisions faster.

1:19:40Mike Beckham:Hiring people, firing people, pulling investment, taking up investment, experimenting with a new product or channel. It's the questions that lead to some degree of conviction that says making this change, taking this step, taking this risk is less risky than not doing it. And that's the, it looks like I'm so pro risk. And so like, oh, you do so many things or you did. I've heard people say you clearly love risk or you clearly aren't scared. It's like, no, it's the opposite. I feel very clear eyed that in the cases where it looks like my team or my company or I have taken a big leap, I have gotten very clear eyed that not taking that leap is a big risk.

1:20:24Mike Beckham:That's really what.

1:20:27Matt Bertulli:You know, what I get from this to listening to you is it's less about how you balance it. It's actually you're you're almost the balance for the team so it's like whatever the company is required like you when you sit in the seat of ceo you carry a lot of weight right no matter what and and you represent a lot of weight uh in everything in the business so if the company needs one thing or the other like you almost you know i'm envisioning like you almost go and sit on the other side of that scale to like help them balance out and level out so that we're always kind of moving smoothly through the company.

1:20:58I have -

1:21:00Mike Beckham:The team gives me great feedback. They're like, hey, in this meeting, in this situation, speak last. Yes. Or in this meeting, in this situation, can you help reinforce the tone? Start first.

1:21:11Matt Bertulli:That's a sign of a good team too, if they're willing to do that. That's like one of the best teams. They'll send me notes.

1:21:16Mike Beckham:Yeah, that's awesome. I'm like, okay.

1:21:18Matt Bertulli:We all need that. We definitely need that. Kat, just to wrap things up, I have, we have this thing that we do on the show. Um, it's called the Titan 10. These are like 10 questions that we like to ask everybody. We like you to try to, uh, sort of shoot from the hip, like gut response. Okay. Right. Each one. Some of them are personal. Some of them are more business. They're a little bit more tactical. Um, but what I'm going to just like rapid fire them. And I would love to hear how you think about these.

1:21:50Mike Beckham:Okay.

1:21:50Matt Bertulli:Okay. So first one's a classic one. you get to a desert island, you have to manage your business from the desert island. You only get three metrics to take with you to tell you how the company is doing. What are the numbers that you're looking at? You only get three.

1:22:05Mike Beckham:Revenue growth, cash, customer satisfaction.

1:22:12Matt Bertulli:All right. You also get to take a book or a resource, any resource, but it cannot be about business, what are you bringing?

1:22:23Mike Beckham:I would bring almost any book on organizational behavior by Adam Grant. And if I have to pick one, think again. I would bring think again.

1:22:39Matt Bertulli:Yep. Great book. What is one contrarian belief about business that you think other CEOs would say you're a little crazy for?

1:22:54Mike Beckham:I don't know if other CEOs would think I'm crazy for it. But most of the answers the company needs for the future, not all, most, lie within the existing customer and team base.

1:23:10Matt Bertulli:Yeah, okay, that's actually pretty contrarian. Most CEOs would probably say, like, you need to be upgrading those things all the time. I like that. Okay. What is the single most important word in leadership to you?

1:23:24Mike Beckham:Action.

1:23:26Matt Bertulli:Then what is the single most important word in business?

1:23:30Mike Beckham:Customer.

1:23:32Matt Bertulli:I had a feeling you were going to say that. You seem very customer oriented. It is extreme. Yeah.

1:23:42Mike Beckham:I don't hang out on social media. I hang out in our Slack reviews channel. I love it.

1:23:47Matt Bertulli:our customers say it still drives my team nuts but i read every single review and every single response that we get as a business right and it's like at scale it's a lot um but i think so how do

1:23:58Kat Cole:you not become captive to that is my question like because it's because i do the same thing and it'll drive my team nuts sometimes so it'll be like hey i saw this person say this thing you know and so it's like how do you kind of strike the balance between listening to the anecdotal and then looking at the large data sets, the surveys and all that stuff?

1:24:22Mike Beckham:You know, I look for patterns. If something is just exceptional for some reason, and I don't mean that necessarily good. I mean, it's just it stands out as an exception. I might make a comment and often I say to my team, I want to talk to this person. And so I don't whiplash the team around it. It's about me. It's about my curiosity. It's about what I want to know more. So that's one way, manage myself, not stir up the team. The other is look for patterns. And sometimes I'll see things that start to look like a pattern and it's just the nature of primacy and recency. Like I'm just seeing a lot coincidentally in a short period of time, but it's actually a nothing burger.

1:25:03Mike Beckham:It's not as good as it looks. It's not as bad as it looks. And in those cases, if it looks like a pattern, I think that shifting or we should pay attention to, I ping the customer insights team. Can you get me the data on this? Is this a pattern? Sure looks like I'm seeing a lot of. And sometimes they're like, nope, just the ones you're reading. Thank you for not overreacting. And other times it's like, actually, yeah, this is a shift. There's a there's a there there. So that's how I try to do it.

1:25:27Kat Cole:Yeah. I mean, I love how you said you start with a question. You know, it's like you're not coming in hot like people are pissed off. Like we've got a real problem. Everybody needs to drop what they're doing. You know, like, but it's easy as a CEO to get that way, I think. And so I found that, anyway, pressing down that urge and asking the question is a good approach. Most of the speech that a CEO does

1:25:47Matt Bertulli:should probably just be asking questions.

1:25:50Mike Beckham:That's right. We shouldn't be making that many decisions. The team makes those. The few that we do are, there's a reason they're on our plate.

1:26:01Matt Bertulli:What is your favorite meal of the day and why?

1:26:04Mike Beckham:oh my favorite meal of the day is my ag1 and coffee time with my husband it is our little window our little ritual and it's not food but um that is my grounding if i miss that in the day i am do not have as much energy i am not as sharp my bucket is not as full that little window with my kids who are now six and eight and my husband is gold it is fuel for the day i've owned my morning. Everything else can be tough. If I've started that, my bucket is full, my cup is big, I can hold a lot. Love it.

1:26:43Matt Bertulli:Right now, as you see things, what do you think the most overrated sort of tactic or line of thought growing a brand is?

1:26:54Mike Beckham:What a good question. What is overrated

1:26:57Matt Bertulli:building a brand. I know. Because it's always changing.

1:27:03Mike Beckham:Yeah. Yeah. It's always, I would say that there, that there is any singularly effective playbook for a brand that like this is what you need to do. It's this, right? If you do this, it's 90%. Usually that's not true. The most underrated, I don't know if that's one of your questions, but I'm going to share it.

1:27:25Matt Bertulli:It's going to be the next one. So you should just go there.

1:27:28Mike Beckham:Underrated is product quality, right? Like we get so much credit for marketing when as many customers in our post-purchase survey hear about us from a friend or family as they do from our more traditional marketing. It is about the product. Marketing only gets people to try a thing. It only makes them aware of a thing. What makes my customers keep drinking AG1 for five, six, seven. I talked to an 11 year AG1 drinker the other day is not marketing, right? It is the continuous improvement. It is the quality. It is the experience. Yes, it's the customer service, but it is the product. No one keeps buying a thing that they put in their body if they don't believe in it and have a good experience.

1:28:12Mike Beckham:And that doesn't mean it's going to be for everybody, but that is the work. Like that, that is the work. And our Our business has grown the way that it has because of the compounding revenue growth from prior years of people who stay. And now that we have a few products, find other things that they like and the new customers that we bring in to the journey. That's what makes a business that's so simple get so big.

1:28:40Matt Bertulli:Yeah. It's funny that those were your two answers because on this podcast, I think we sometimes get criticized for only. It's like the default answer to everything is make your product better stupid. And then the other thing that we do is like for a, for some, for literally like we do a show. So people listen to us and we often just say, you shouldn't listen to us because there is no one way to do anything. So it's great that that's, that's somehow that's where you went. Mike, any closing, any closing questions while we have Kat? Kat, this has been awesome. I just love, I could talk to you for hours, just listening to you, how you think about running a brand leadership.

1:29:16Kat Cole:I love how we're ending, which is that context really matters and that there's like principles to good leadership and principles to running a good D2C company, e-commerce company. And we always try and pull those out. But also like we want to encourage people to find your own leadership style and that your business is going to take its own unique synthesis of those things. And even, you know, Kat, one of the things I take away from your story is that with AG1, really Athletic Greens has become a new company, which is AG1. The distribution models change. The name has changed. The products that you're selling have changed.

1:29:56Kat Cole:There's certainly some things that carry through, some threads that pull through, but it's a reinvention of a company. And so that's the nature of business, I think, is that not only is it, hey, there's not one playbook that you can always run. It's that even in your company's life cycle, the same playbook doesn't work, right? Because your company grows and the economy changes and people's preferences change. And like, I think that your company is a really interesting and an expiring example of a company that's reinventing itself into an even more effective, more scaled version. And it's really fun to watch from the sidelines as somebody who's interested in health.

1:30:36Kat Cole:Like, I just think it's interesting. I see your company as a pioneer in the health industry. And I think that industry is going to continue to explode as we start to understand more about the human body and that we really can impact our quality of life and our health span. And so anyway, it's great. I learned a lot. But that's probably my number one takeaway is that your willingness to reinvent the company has really helped take it to another level. And I think it's interesting, your diverse experiences. This is always interesting to me because I have a very diverse background. You have this diverse set of experiences that you would never necessarily guess.

1:31:16Kat Cole:Like, okay, if you're looking for the CEO of a health supplement company, you know, what's the first thing you want them to do? Well, obviously work at Hooters. You know, that's number one. And, you know, but it is interesting how you've used all of those different experiences to help you to be the effective CEO you are today. And I always love hearing stories of that, how people have used their interesting, you know, backstories to help them have a unique perspective and be more effective as a leader. Totally.

1:31:47Matt Bertulli:Kat, thank you so much. This was awesome. Thanks for having me.