How Liquid Death founder, Mike Cessario, created a billion dollar water brand

29:14Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where that was kind of their sweet spot, which was find a brand that is trying to disrupt a large category through direct-to-consumer. That was kind of their thing. They saw what Dollar Shave did in the shaving razor business, which was this boring giant category. They were the one cool brand. They did a direct-to-consumer play. They were super successful. Liquid Death, same kind of initial strategy. Hey, really interesting brand, launch direct-to-consumer first. But we kind of knew from day one with liquid death for this thing to be successful we have to eventually go into retail stores figure out distribution i was going to say because uh water's heavy uh packaging costs are expensive distribution costs expensive and retail price is relatively low even though you're a premium still relatively low that's not a very profitable business model is it like you know shipping it direct to people's homes right exactly and we knew that from the start we knew what it was going to cost to ship and you know that's why the original the first cases of liquid death we were selling on selling on the internet they were 12 packs of 500 milliliter cans and we had to sell them for 20 the case and then we launched when we finally launched it on amazon and our website it was late january 2019 in the first month we sold a hundred thousand dollars worth of product in one month in one month and we spent twenty five hundred dollars on marketing no way yeah so insane we thought you know we were looking at these pallets of water that we just had shipped over from europe and we're literally like how are we going to sell all this and by the end of february we were sold out a product that's insane and then we basically was this coming just just so just just to understand is this coming from your facebook profile that demand or or do you do anything else at the time to build awareness or yeah how did that where that demand we took it like a legitimate d2c business we had a, you know, paid social strategy, which at that time before all the IO, you know, Apple iOS privacy stuff, you could target people really efficiently.

31:19And we were able to get really good return on ad spend when someone's just seeing this can of liquid death in their feed. It's like, whoa, what is that? So yeah, we, we had a, um, you know, we had a paid media strategy, you know, we had a pretty big list of people from the Facebook page. So when we announced on the Facebook page, hey, you can actually buy this right now on Amazon. There was a baked in audience. People were sharing that post. So there was a lot of organic virality that was sort of happening. Yeah. Now, where did you go next? So you're direct to consumer at this point, unprofitable because it's very expensive to do that.

31:54When did you break into retail and distribution? Our original plan for brick and mortar, because we knew, I mean, just a little bit of connectivity we maybe had with retailers or brokers was no retailer will ever put liquid death on the shelf in the U.S. I mean, most of the headquarters of these major retailers, I mean, they're in the middle part of the country. You know, it's a different kind of mindset, very conservative. So we knew it was going to be a while before the retailers would see enough dollar signs to take what they would think is a risk on it. So our original strategy was, okay, we can definitely get this in bars, like places where people are drinking, having a good time.

32:43We can sell in one by one. We look like beer. It's fun. There's a way that these bartenders, they typically just give free water. They want to make money. So if there's a water that people actually see value in buying, because when people go to bars, they're trying to be social. They want to meet people. They want to, and walking around with a can of liquid death, people literally will talk to you. Even if you don't talk to them, you're walking around, someone will be like, liquid death? What's that? Is that some IPA? No, it's water. What do you mean it's water? Water, let me see that. Like it literally creates a social interaction.

33:17That's, what's that worth to somebody? So now all of a sudden, we started selling into these bars and these bars who were like, guys, we've tried to sell bottled water in our bar, it doesn't work. Now all of a sudden they're like, we're moving through, 10 cases a week of this stuff like so we started having this on-premise as we call it uh strategy of like let's just get into all the cool bars in la and then one of our first sales guys was based in philadelphia who was very connected in the bar industry in philadelphia he started getting us into like these bars in philadelphia and that was our strategy then that started shaping our distribution strategy it's like okay now we need distributors because we can't just go hand deliver cases to all these bars.

34:00So it's like, okay, we have to go try to get on the beer trucks. Those are the guys that are going there. And then it turns out, you know, the beer industry in the U.S., the big beer corporations like Anheuser-Busch, Molson Coors, because of the American liquor laws, they're only allowed to own 20 % of their distribution network. So 80 % of the Molson cores network or 80 % of the Anheuser-Busch network are independent family owned distributors. And they're allowed to carry any brands they want to carry. You don't have to be owned by Anheuser-Busch. Whereas Coke and Pepsi, they own their whole networks.

34:40You have to be owned by Coke or Pepsi to be in that network. So it enables us again to sell in one by one to these family owned distributors and convince them that there's an opportunity for them to make money selling water to different bars and things like that so that's how we started building our our first distribution strategy through the beer network and to this day we still we our route to market is we use you know a ton of you know independent anheuser-busch distributors and big beer guys to to to distribute the product that explains a big question actually because having worked in the pepsi system and And particularly in the US, like direct-to-store means that so much of the store is literally owned, isn't it, by either Coke or Pepsi.

35:25And you don't realise this as a consumer, do you, walking into the store and you see what you think is this big choice. And then you find out that there's one or two companies literally own it. And it's a bit similar in the UK as well. So much money goes into owning that kind of fixture. It's really hard to break through. So it's very clever kind of going into an on-premise, isn't it, distributor. I love that. It's very, very creative. um sticking to the theme of kind of some of the constraints and challenges um you've been incredibly creative in your communication and building awareness to brand to what extent do you think the fact that you didn't have lots of money and you i mean obviously your advertising background really helps but to what extent do you think the constraints you had as a founder with limited resources has forced you to be quite kind of creative in in the kind of communication you put out there yeah i think it's absolutely critical and that's probably where a lot of startup brands get it wrong.

36:17They have no resources, but they're trying to do the same things that Coke and Pepsi do. And it's like, if you try playing their game, you will lose. You have to invent a new game that either they can't play because the way they operate is very conservative and safe. They're not able to do these kinds of things. But also, marketing and brand, you can basically boil it down to it is an attention game. At the end of the day, that's what it is. You're a brand. You want to get attention to your brand. And there's a lot of ways to get attention. You can pay a lot of money for attention where you're paying, you know, it could be $60,$70 per every thousand people that just get exposed to something.

37:05That gets really expensive, right? That's why a Super Bowl spot in America is$6 million because you're reaching 100 million people with your ad. But most startup brands don't have$6 million to spend on running a 30-second ad one time. The only chance of survival that you have as a small brand with small budgets is you have to find ways to get attention for free. How do you get someone to want to share a photo of your product to their 300 social media followers for free? How do you get press to write articles to a couple hundred thousand people for free? How do you get people who have podcasts to invite you on for free to talk about your brand because it's that interesting?

37:49That is the way that a small brand has to survive because the number one reason, especially in beverage that startups fail is they run out of money they weren't smart with how they allocated their limited resources and they just burn through it before they ever get to that level of scale where it's sustainable because to your point beverage is a really tough industry because the big guys own everything in a way that's unique from other industries like to your point The big guys own all the shelf space. They own exclusive deals with every stadium, every venue, every national restaurant chain, every ski resort, anywhere you go.

38:32Casinos, there is exclusive Coke or Pepsi locked up deals where they are only allowed to carry those brands. they own the distribution network they have people that are going into every retailer that you're in there is enough coke or pepsi people to go in every single day and make sure that the product's on the shelf that it's stocked and everything so the reality is most beverage brands if you try to take the approach of i'm going to be profitable on day one well unless you're selling something that's eight dollars a unit you have to price where coke and pepsi price because hey we're liquid death we're water in order to be profitable on day one we need to sell a nine dollar can of water well you're not going to move too many nine dollar can of waters next to dollar fifty smart water or dollar fifty so coke and pepsi who own all the manufacturing all the distribution all the scale they set the pricing at their scale you have to come in at similar pricing and be able to grow enough and get enough customers that you eventually get to that level of scale where you're getting cans cheap enough.

39:48You're getting the right distribution. You're getting these things where now you actually start having the level of scale to start making a profit. And yeah, and I think that's the way that, again, a lot of brands fail is you're kind of, like I said, the best analogy for a startup, you're jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down. And that's how most things, that's the way to do it. Because yeah, you can go a really slow path. Hey, we're going to sell just a little bit and just eventually get there. But I think you mentioned something when we were talking earlier that the average time for success of a brand is like seven years.

40:28Yeah, yeah. I actually looked into this when I used to work in beverages myself. And I was running innovation for the Pepsi bottle in the UK. And I looked at the best innovations over 10 years. I took a 10-year time period. I limited myself to only the top 20. So imagine all the ones that were like that. There's a ton of stuff. I think there's a new brand launches every week or even every day in the UK. Something crazy like that. So I only took the top 20. And there were some crazy stats. like 50 % of them were smaller in year two than year one. They declined after the first year. 80 % of them weren't there five years later, right?

41:09So even taking the top 20, the chance of success was pretty small. And then when I looked at the sort of, I looked at time series over time, well, actually what was quite interesting is year one was no prediction for success. So what happened was, it's really interesting this, because the Coke and Pepsi system was so strong but they could launch something very average, but it would appear to be successful year one. The following year, they'd come up with something else, right? And then that would be out and there'd be new things. So you had this sort of like big launch, big decline, big launch, big decline.

41:40The actual innovators, I mean, Fevertree would be a great example of it. They tended to seed the brand somewhere and like over-invest in a small part of the market and then build it out. Or Relentless was another one, Energy Drink in the UK, that did the same thing. But for those guys, it took seven years. Seven years was the average time before, not even like mega success, but before you were sustainable. Like kind of what you were saying in terms of before you had mainstream distribution, before you could get economies of scale, before you'd even started having your own production facilities.

42:12Seven years. Like it's bonkers, you know? And that is a, and if you have something really innovative, that strategy also comes with a lot of risk because if you are, there's a, there's a term, it's more in like the tech startup world, but they call it escape velocity. how do you invest so you get far enough where if someone's going to try to copy you or leapfrog you they're going to have to make a really big investment to do it but if you try to stay small too long and someone catches wind hey look this is working and oh we're just going to make something similar and for just almost no investment we can put it everywhere and you're nowhere and then you go bye bye that's it there's this there there was this um i can't remember what the phrase is now in the uk but it's like a there's a minimum rate of sales there's a minimum turnover per store so if you're going to be in the fridge in the front of a grocery store they've got maybe 80 like slots let's call them right um there will be like you have to sell 10 a day just to stay there so if you're a new brand and you go straight into tesco the biggest retailer unless you're doing 10 a day you're out three months later you're gone right so this is the conundrum right because how do you build a brand that that is then sustainable once you get into distribution so what you have what happened is the ones that went early went quick and went broad straight away they ended up falling foul of these minimum kind of turnover rates because they were suddenly up against coke and they couldn't compete the ones that succeeded had to usually double down on a particular channel they'd take i don't know garages or you know they'd take food service or something right and they absolutely owned it and they really invested in it to get to the scale, to build awareness, to build, you know, build some laws with customers.

43:58And then when they went into the, into the stores, they then had this kind of rate of sale that was sustainable. You know, that, that seemed to be the trick. So when I looked at the ones that after 10 year, after five and 10 years been successful, that's that, that tech typically was the tactic they used. Yeah. And that's why I think D2C was so, it's such a great strategy for new brands because with the internet and digital, it's much easier to find your audience. Whereas a grocery store, it's kind of, you're just hoping that the right person wanders by this and buys it and you start finding your customers.

44:37Whereas if you can build a big customer base digitally through a lot more targeted marketing, through viral campaigns, through these things, you start finding your audience and it's almost always going to be more expensive to sell, especially beverages, to sell something digitally because, you know, you can't go too far underwater. You're going to have to charge more. So then what worked for us was, you know, we were selling$20 cases of liquid death successfully digitally. And then when we had our first retail partner, which in the U.S. was actually Whole Foods, they were the one national chain that said, hey, we love your death to plastic mission.

45:19We're all about health, obviously. And there's nothing else remotely like this in our stores. We're willing to take a risk and we want to put you full national right out of the gate. But at that point, we had over a year of D2C audience buying from Amazon and our website at 20 bucks a case. So then when we got to announce, now you can get it at whole foods and it's 14.99 it was a great way to now drive people to a store versus having to order it and wait and pay more money so then to your point when it came to rate a sale we were doing really well out of the gate because we kind of already had a built-in audience that we were yeah no that's essential you have to build it up you know if you're not coke and pepsi you have to build up the audience and the distribution in tandem otherwise if one is bigger than the other you just can you know it's gonna uh it's gonna be a struggle i'd love to just touch on the super bowl as you mentioned the super bowl you had a really cool uh approach to super bowl last week so tell me a bit about your uh your super bowl ad shall we say inverted commas obviously super bowl commercials are very expensive six million dollars is a lot for for a lot of startups um for a full national there's other ways you can buy them that are more fractionalized and pay less But, you know, we considered, you know, maybe do it, maybe we run one this year.

46:37But then ultimately we said, you know, we don't really need one. And we could probably think of something that's really interesting that still gets a ton of buzz and almost, you know, hijacks the Super Bowl in a way. And that kind of feels very liquid death-esque. So, yeah, we came up with an idea, but we were like, we don't want to spend a lot of money. Like, we want this to be what we call a small bet. How do you spend a little bit of money on something that maybe it really takes off and is great, but if it does nothing, it's like, it's so small, it's not, no one cares, right? So we came up with this idea that only cost us$10 ,000 to execute, where we're like, hey, everybody's talking, when it comes Super Bowl time, everyone's talking about every year how expensive they are.

47:25$6 million for a Super Bowl spot this year. Like, what are people going to do? it's like the most valued media placement in marketing and then we had heard a stat that and and you know i don't know don't you know correct me if i'm wrong but what i remember the stat was something along the lines of just in walmart in the u.s nationally every week a hundred million people walk through the stores of walmart every week wow a hundred million people watch the Super Bowl. And we remember thinking, that's crazy. Like the Super Bowl is every week in Walmart. That's pretty crazy. And that's just Walmart.

48:04Then what happens when you add in Target? What happens when you add in Kroger? What happens when you add in Albertsons? Retailers that we have full national placement in. So we did, you know, some research and some quick math and conservatively through our top retailers, every week about 200 million Americans walk through those doors. So we're like, that's kind of funny that when our stuff is on the shelf or on a display in the store, in theory, it could be exposed to twice as many people as the Super Bowl every week. So we said, now all of a sudden, the real estate on our packaging is very valuable.

48:41So we said, let's do a thing where we announce instead of running a Super Bowl commercial, we're going to sell an ad just as big on the side of our case. and we did a funny video kind of selling this, this, this potential media opportunity to brands. Hey, you can reach basically more people than the Superbowl on the side of our case. And then we basically said, well, let's just auction it off to whoever the highest bidder is. And yeah, so we, we set up an eBay page. Um, and yeah, we, we had different brands and, you know, a lot of brands were reaching out to us directly because this is a real media buy.

49:17and but they were serious like big brands were reaching out hey we are very interested in this we want to learn more detail how does it work what is it is you know before we start trying to figure out how to bid on it and yeah it was uh really successful i think on tuesday we're going to announce like who the final winner is okay so it's still under wraps yeah it's still under for now but yeah oh any any clues as to how much it went for anything you can say yeah i i can tell you how much it went for yeah uh it's just over five hundred thousand dollars wow that's impressive which presumably more than pays back all the production costs and effort you went to all the production costs was ten thousand dollars yeah yeah that's amazing yeah well actually sticking to this theme of getting customers to pay for your advertising one of the things that i love that you do is the merchandise is just insane i mean like it's literally like going to the metallica store or something just going i can get anything here um and the thing that struck me about your merch is that like you're you've got your well let's call them fans shall we rather than consumers because i think that's a key differentiator with your brand but you've got fans of yours advertising and they're paying for the privilege like is that so where did the whole merch thing come from and is that part of your strategy to kind of uh be worn by your customers Yeah.

50:35With Liquid Death, we are in the unique position that we actually have fans, which is different than just having a user. Most beverage companies and CPG companies, they don't really have fans. They have people that use the product. but they don't really care so much about that brand versus another brand. Maybe it's price, maybe it's slightly taste, but there's not really a lot of very discernible differences. For us, because we're actually trying to build a legitimate brand through entertainment and making people have a reason to follow us or care about us beyond just the liquid itself, which means when they love our brand they want to wear our t-shirt just like bands and music artists merchant apparel is a meaningful part of their business because people actually love entertainment and you know whether that's metallica you know if you're a metallica fan yeah you want to wear a metallica shirt and let other people in the world know that you're a metallica fan we have a similar kind of audience where people who love liquid death like they want to broadcast to other people that I like this brand.

51:44And I think what was interesting, um, it actually came from my, my younger brother, AJ. Um, he's like two years younger and, you know, very different than me. He is not a punk rock or heavy metal guy at all. And, um, when I asked him about wearing, cause he wears liquid death merch like every day. And it's funny. He's like, when I wear liquid death merch, he's like, I'm not trying to communicate to people that I like heavy metal. He's like, I'm trying to communicate to people that I hate marketing because that's what liquid death stands for. It's like, yeah, we are making fun of the thing that 98 % of people in the world hate, which is marketing.

52:25Marketing is terrible. At the end of the day, that's what we're doing. We're making fun of all the terrible marketing and branding that's out there. You don't have to like skulls to like liquid death. You just have to like that our sarcastic approach is taking the piss out of marketing and everybody i don't care who you are can get on board with that and i and i think that's um that's a big part that is a really good part because i've seen all your videos the parody element is just brilliant isn't it it's just taking the kind of tropes of advertising and just turning on his head right like like your your innovation that you just launched as well the electrolytes yeah and there's blood pouring out of everyone and there's something but yeah so how how um how important is innovation to the brand as well so you're going to stick on water you've just launched obviously electrolytes tablets to go in in you know in the products as well what's your plan for innovation yeah with liquid death what we are building here is a healthy beverage platform we're one of the only brands i i can't think of one other brand in history that is winning across multiple very different categories like premium source water, like mountain still water and sparkling, flavored sparkling water that's like healthy soda.

53:37We just launched iced tea last year that's very successful. And now we're launching, you know, hydration electrolyte powder packets all under the same brand name. Typically, they create new brands for every category. There's not a single brand name that goes across categories. So that's, I think, what we're really excited about, that we have this unique power and we're going to invest in it. And as long as something is healthy, it's premium, and it's funny, it can probably make sense for Liquid Death to do and have it be pretty successful. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I wanted to ask you about your plan for scaling and maybe an exit one day as well, because obviously, you're not making money yet.

54:26So what's your plan to kind of, I suppose, scale the business further and also turn in a profit? I mean, we're really just focused on building a big business with sound fundamentals. I think, you know, we were a venture-backed company for the early days, you know, super high growth. I mean, we were growing triple digits every single year. To be a successful company, you don't have to consistently grow triple digits every year. I mean, companies growing at 40 % every year are insane, you know, especially as you, as you get to scale. So I think what we're really focused on now is, you know, shifting from sort of the typical beverage, like most beverage brands, startups, they operate in a sort of growth at all costs blueprint.

55:15It's like, Hey, you got to price where Coke and Pepsi is. There's no way to make money pricing where Coke and Pepsi is. You're going to grow the brand, acquire tons of customers, build this brand. And then most brands will either flip it to one of the big guys like Coke or Pepsi or whatever, then they're the brands that ultimately instantly bring it scale and profitability for the most part. You know, I think we're interested in a dual path, right? Like, and we want the optionality of maybe it is an acquisition or maybe it is a potential IPO and following the footsteps of someone like Monster or Celsius and being a public company.

55:52You know, we're not, we just want the optionality and we're going to do everything we need to do to give ourselves the optionality. But as long as we're just focused on continuing to build a great business and focus on profitable growth, we're going to have a ton of options. Now, I must also ask you about some of your investors as well, because you've got a pretty cool set of investors behind you. Just explain who's invested in the business. Yeah, I mean, we definitely have a lot of the fun sort of celebrity type investors like Tony Hawk was an early investor in Liquid Death. Even, you know, we, we, uh, we had, you know, we did a, a cool thing with Martha Stewart, who is now a shareholder in Liquid Death.

56:32So I think we have a lot of interesting, uh, a lot of interesting people on the cap table. Live Nation, uh, is an investor in Liquid Death. Uh, they've been a great partner for us. Um, and they recently just turned us on, um, for Live Nation in, uh, in the UK. yeah um we're the title sponsor of the download music festival there now um and getting really great responses so um yeah we have a really interesting cap table and i think because the brand had so much growth and what every time we went to raise capital you know we had way more interest than we were willing to take on which gave us the luxury of being really selective about who we brought in.

57:15Like we want people that understood the brand, what we were trying to do, what the vision was. I think there's a lot of startups that don't have that luxury where they end up with just really awful investors on their cap table that sometimes can be the reason that the businesses don't succeed. So I think we've been really lucky. That's really good advice. Now you've built a phenomenal brand. How do you maintain that kind of challenger spirit? I mean, you don't seem to be giving up on it at all, but how do you maintain that as you get to scale, as you're in different markets and you've got more distributors coming on, you've got more people in your team.

57:47How do you keep that kind of spirit alive? Well, you have to build a team that's designed to do it. Really what we're doing is we are a beverage company that is building outsized brand loyalty through entertainment. And that's not a new model. Red Bull did that. Monster did that. Now their specific kind of entertainment is action sports. I think there's way more entertainment in the world than just action sports. Our entertainment is comedy. We are the best at making people laugh. We invest in comedians the way that maybe Red Bull invests in athletes. It's, you know, we've got people who are investors and ambassadors like Burt Kreischer, Tom Segura, Whitney Cummings, Pete Lee.

58:34We just focus on making entertainment. And entertainment is hard. Like, you ask the average person, could you come up with a great idea for a commercial? Most people will say, yeah, I think I could. Because the bar is so low. But you ask someone, could you write a hit stand-up comedy special that could be performed on Netflix? They'd be like, no way. What are you talking about? That's like for professionals. So when you really take entertainment seriously as entertainment and know that the bar isn't other commercials, the bar is Netflix comedy specials, actual films, television shows, that's the bar.

59:12And you start looking at, oh, Liquid Death is so edgy. Well, compared to real entertainment, we are tame. We are very tame. I look at what the biggest comedy special is and what jokes they make. Look at the most popular, highest grossing comedy movies, what happens in there. So I think as long as we are always focused on the entertainment side and taking it seriously, we have to build a team that can legitimately create entertainment. So on our marketing team, we don't have a lot of very typical marketing people. We have people that were comedy TV show creators that had successful runs of tv shows that are now a creative director we've got comedians that are in our network that we reach out to for ideas for flavor names or commercials or things like you kind of got to bring professional funny people into your circle you can't rely on marketing agencies or traditional marketing people to do that well one of the things like one of the genius things that you've done is like you know people would look you can't possibly call a brand that you can't possibly be that extreme in your videos but as we were talking about earlier what are people watching on Netflix?

1:00:12What are they, you know, what, what kind of entertainment, you know, are they watching? And it is horror is comedy is, you know, these are things that kind of excite people, entertain people. And you've tapped into that, which is hugely mainstream. You know, people might go, you know, Mike, dude, that's, that's very niche. You're going after this kind of very niche audience, but actually you're tapping into a very mainstream entertainment, uh, property, aren't you? Yeah. I mean, I think the last, uh, Jordan Peele horror movie, called Nope at the box office outperformed like a Disney movie. Like that's major big business stuff there.

1:00:45And that's a horror movie about death, blood, murder, you know, and even it was kind of funny in some parts too, you know? So yeah, I think CPG or beverage as an industry, it just is kind of in its own little bubble in a way compared to other industries out there. Like when you look at the video game industry, you look at the entertainment industry, Even if you look at the fashion industry, like Nike, they don't run commercials that say, our materials last 47 days longer than Adidas. You know, they're not functional. It's emotional. It's like, believe in the brand for a reason that transcends functional benefits.

1:01:22In fact, that's how I define what brand is. Brand transcends functional benefits. If your brand is functional benefits, you don't have a brand because you can't own functional benefits. you know that's why again the rational business-minded folks early days of liquid death were like oh it's in cans you need to make all your marketing around how aluminum is infinitely recyclable because that's your differentiator i can't own aluminum cans so the minute coke or someone else makes a can water i spent all my marketing dollars to tell people why their product is great too that's good point yeah now let's finish up with a question uh so if you were to let's say someone's listening and watching now and they've got this idea you started out this conversation by saying anyone can have an idea an idea is worth nothing it's all in execution so true so what would be your one bit of advice to somebody that's got the idea that they're sat there with the liquid death of tomorrow right what do you tell them now i think the number one thing is be incredibly honest about what you are better than anyone else in the world at and what you are not.

1:02:35And that's going to help you figure out who you need to execute. Because I think a lot of founders, they want to do everything. Yeah, you know, I'm a marketing guy, but I'm going to be in the weeds of operations and I'm going to be in the weeds of this where you don't really add value. and yes you're going to have to bring on smart people smart people are not cheap you're going to have to give them a piece of the company you're going to have to be okay with a smaller piece but at the end of the day would you rather own 10 of a company worth four billion or 80 of a company worth five hundred dollars um yeah don't get hung up on ownership and that kind of thing It's like, be really honest about you need in every department, people who are the best in the world or one of the best in the world at what they do, whether that's marketing, whether that is operations, whether that's finance.

1:03:32And there is nobody in the world who is the best in the world at all three of those things. It doesn't exist. So I think that's the number one thing is figure out who you need to actually turn this into reality, because that's the hard part. Idea part's easy. turning it into reality like that's that's the hard part mike that is incredible advice thank you so much i thoroughly love this it's been uh been so much fun to do it and congratulations on enormous success and long may it continue thank you appreciate it awesome thanks mike thanks thank you very much for listening or watching uncensored cmo i hope you enjoyed that if you did please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast if you're watching hit subscribe there as well.

1:04:13I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to contact me, you can do. I'm over on x at Uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn, where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.