Barbell Shrugged - Building a Business and the Journey of GORUCK - Business of Fitness #74

Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, everyone, and welcome back to the Business of Fitness podcast. I'm Jason Klepot. On today's episode, we have the founder of Go Ruck, Jason McCarthy. And if you haven't heard of Go Ruck, they make excellent, excellent bags, a variety of different types, but in particular ones you could also ruck with or go on long walks with weight in your bag. You could work out with them. You could travel with them like I do.

Starting point is 00:00:23 They have a number of different types. But what I was really interested with Jason was the story of GoRuck. How he got out of the military, founded this company, took it from nothing, just an idea, and has built it into something extremely special. I love what he's done, not only with his product, his product is excellent, but also with the community focus, with his events, and this network that's been created on people that just ruck all over the world. It's really incredible what he's done. And I hope you enjoy this episode. Before we dive into it, just want to thank our partners over at Whoop. If you haven't checked out their products, they make some really cool stuff to track your sleep, track your strain score. Go to whoop.com, use the code Jason for an awesome discount. And I hope everybody has a phenomenal day. Let's get after it. All right, everybody, and welcome back to the business of fitness

Starting point is 00:01:18 podcast. I am here with Jason, who's the founder of go ruck. We already introed him earlier. And Jason, I thank you for taking the time and I want to dive into your business. So you started a company called Go Ruck, which makes rucks, packs. I want to know a little bit more about what rucking is, but how'd you start the company? What's the background for it? A lot of people who listen to this show, they're interested in starting their own business, but they're not quite sure what to get into. You kind of fell into something that you were passionate about that kind of taught you a lot about who you are, right? These packs, these rucks that you went on. I want to just know more about the background, man. Tell us, how did Go-Rack get started? What was your background

Starting point is 00:01:57 to start this company? Yeah. So, I mean, most directly, my background was in Army Special Forces. So I joined up after 9-11 because of 9-11, went through a lot of training, and then ultimately deployed to Iraq and Africa and a little bit of time in Europe as well. And so if you want to start a business, you need to do what you know, right? I mean, you probably could have been a great day trader, you know, as you talked about in your stuff.

Starting point is 00:02:20 You could have sold, you know, ketchup to the lady with white gloves on, ketchup popsicle and all that stuff. But you need to, you need to do something that you know, and that you're really passionate about. You need to have both of those. So for me, what I knew about from the army was I knew what it meant to carry load, like to carry a load on your back to, to rock if you will. And, and so I didn't know what that was until I joined the army. And then as I was transitioning out, I was married. My wife was posted in West Africa with the state department. And so I moved there and I wanted to transition this sort of special forces mindset that I had. I didn't know any better again. This is just an extension of myself at that time in 2008,

Starting point is 00:03:03 made her sort of a go bag or a go ruck full of supplies that she might need just in case. You know, they love a good coup in Africa. So extra pair of shoes, radio, batteries, flashlights, water, all that kind of stuff. Drove around everywhere with that. And then started making them for other people at the embassy. And like, hmm, this could be pretty cool. Well, our marriage came to a screeching halt after not living together for four or five years. And she was in war zones. I was in war zones, just kind of crazy. And after, after that though,

Starting point is 00:03:35 the idea of go-ruck kind of lived on, but it morphed into, Hey, design a backpack, design a rucksack. And the company would be called go-ruck. It just kind of made sense. Click, felt, felt right. You know? And so that was a really long process. Cause I didn't know anything about manufacturing. I didn't, I wasn't just sitting on money. I didn't know anything about business. I was a guy that knew how to rock and new gear from the army. And so I focused on that and it took a couple, two and a half years, found a design team in Bozeman, Montana to help because I placed an ad in Craigslist, New York City. Just crazy stuff like this. Let me pause you for a second. So, okay. 9-11 hits, unfortunately, obviously, but it created a spark in you to enlist. Yeah. I mean, I'm not grateful that 9-11 happened. I just don't know how to adequately

Starting point is 00:04:25 express my, it's a very complicated thing because I'm grateful for the clarity that provided for me because I wanted to serve America. That's what I needed to do. And so it just, it's a really weird, it's a really weird thing because out of the sacrifice, out of those ashes came so much good. Yeah. And I wanted to be a part of that. Right. And so you go and you well, yeah, you're in the army getting a special forces and you recognize the value of this pack. Now, when you go to Africa and you create this pack for your wife and because I imagine when you were on deployment, you always had some type of pack with you with specific survival tools. And now she didn't have that. So how did you make that first one?

Starting point is 00:05:09 I'm just curious. Yeah. So I actually borrowed or used one of the rucks that I'd been given and just took it. And it was an assault pack at that point. So in the army, you use this pack called an Alice pack and it's, it's really big and it's, you know, got frames and stuff. It's not something that you use, especially in say Iraq, because it's more urban stuff. You want assault packs, they're smaller and stuff like that. And so that's what we became comfortable with. And when we'd go out on missions, I would put my assault pack, my go bag, my go ruck for

Starting point is 00:05:41 slang in the trunk of the Humvee and it would have extra supplies, right? So bombs and batteries and radios and water and ammunition and all that kind of stuff. And it was just in case your vehicle's disabled and you have to fight. So did you call it a go ruck back then? Or what was it called back then? It was mostly called a go bag. A go bag, right? Okay. So you had these go bags that, and then you started kind of, basically you saw a need for it in those environments like Africa or other areas. So tell me when you, this concept's kind of flowed into your mind. And at the time you, you didn't have a job, right? I mean, you left.

Starting point is 00:06:15 Yeah. So it was a really, it was personally and professionally complicated because I'd been married to Emily. We met when we were 15, right? She babysat my siblings growing up because I was gone summers, goes visit my dad and stuff. And so, you know, we had been friends for forever. I finally told her I loved her right before I joined the army. Like I'm joining the army, I love you, right?

Starting point is 00:06:37 Yeah. Almost, I guess it was almost 10 years after we'd met. And so it was just, you know, getting out, we got married very early on when I was in the army, she went and served as well. And we kind of just wanted to skip to the end, like, Oh, it's going to be great. We've known each other for forever. I'll be out of the army. I'll come live with you. It wasn't perfect by any stretch when I showed up and I was back on a plane flight home like two months later with marriage that was just, you know, crashing and burning. And that was really difficult, right? Marriage is crashing and burning. Career path was uncertain at that point,

Starting point is 00:07:12 right? I mean, no, no job, no wife, no purpose, like feeling really, really low. My transition was, that was the low point of my life because I just felt like I couldn't do anything right. And I think everybody's been there. Yeah. And if you haven't been yet, it's probably going to come at some point. You're going to reach a point where everything is called into question and you have to figure out how to fight through it. So how'd you figure out how to fight through it? How'd you figure out how to start a company called GoRuck? I mean, cause right there, I mean, I'm just looking at it. You met this woman who you said, you know, you were in love with, by the way, they're married currently. So they got divorced and they got married again. That's another story for another day, but I'm happy. Three beautiful kids. It's, it's a really

Starting point is 00:07:53 neat story. And I, I mean, I just love that girl so much. So it's, uh, you know, it's, I'm smiling, just thinking about him right now. So you get, but, but, but back to that point, because to your point, a lot of people have had this similar struggle, right? They, they, they lose something here, they lose something here. And to go out on a limb and start your own company, that's like, that's a really big deal. Cause if you're feeling like a failure in certain areas of your life, what made you think that you're going to be successful to start a company? Yeah. So, you know, I think that part of it was that I hedged, I did not just go all in. I, I went back to business school. I used the post 9-11 GI bill. You know, it's kind of like, if you're going to start a company started on someone else's dime by acting like an owner, which you talk about, right. Act like an owner before you are an owner

Starting point is 00:08:42 and see if you like that. Yeah. Right. Be the person that's always the first in and or the last out. Like the guy that does the jobs that nobody else wants to do. Go clean the head, right? Be that person that just takes pride in everything you do. Well, for me, the hedge was I was at business school and I had a couple years there and I had a little bit of time and it was costing real money. Like this wasn't no money that it was costing to get this bag developed and a lot of mistakes and spending a lot of time on it. But frankly, I was grateful for the time that I was getting to spend on GORUCK because the worst thing you can do is just get in your own head and say, what am I doing with my life? Just stay busy. So people transitioning

Starting point is 00:09:25 out of the military, it's like, use your post nine 11 GI bill, stay really busy and get a dog. And that's, that's what I did. And so, you know, it was not overnight success by any stretch. And I was not born to be an entrepreneur. I never had an, I never had a lemonade stand as a kid. I would describe myself as not good at selling stuff. I don't know anything about accounting or business or finance. I went to get a school, I went to get an MBA and I left with some case studies and I knew how to kind of talk about it, but I didn't know how to hustle in business. I didn't know how, what kind of work it was going to be. And that's just something where you have to be really passionate about something that you know about.

Starting point is 00:10:06 And if you do that, then when it gets hard, it's easier to say, you know, I know what's going on here. I know that I can get through this because I love it. Well, I think you're just hitting on something I think is super valuable is that you're becoming passionate about something that you know. And I think that's really, really, really, really important because if you don't know about it, right, if you're not an expert in anything, then you probably should just take a step back for a second and evaluate what you are an expert in. If you're not an expert in anything,

Starting point is 00:10:31 then go seek out something and learn about it. Go find a trade. Yeah, go find a trade and you could become an expert at something. And so you're in business school, you get out of business school and it's been how many years since you've had GoRuck now? So that was, quick timeline, officially started Go Ruck in, in I think February of 2008. So early,

Starting point is 00:10:50 and I was still in, still in the army at that time. I still had that year to go and spent that time kind of designing and napkin sketching and stuff like that. What, what this bag that, cause it transitioned from, Hey, here's, we're going to fill a bag with stuff and make it a go bag, go ruck to, we're going to design our own rucksack, right? And so then in May of 2010, it was finally done. That was, we almost had a website. We could almost sell it. Nobody wanted to buy it, by the way, because it's expensive. We made it in America.

Starting point is 00:11:19 It's spared no cost, spared no quality control. It just, it was meant to be the best. I never wanted to build something that the special forces community would look at and say, that sucks. He's a sellout. I only want it to be the best. And that's like that. I had nightmares about that. That was like the fear of letting that community down in any way, because that's where I learned so much about a way of life that I want to live for because that's where I learned so much about a way of life that I wanna live for the rest of my life, where it's not about you,

Starting point is 00:11:50 it's about the person to your left and the person to your right. It's about a community of people that you just love that you'll do anything for. And I just refused to let them down. And so nobody wanted to buy it. Started the Go Ruck Challenge in September of 2010. And I thought that it would basically be me with my camera,

Starting point is 00:12:07 which it was in a small group of crazies. And all I would do is take, take pictures and show the, the rucks in use. I didn't know anything about Google AdWords. I didn't know anything about Facebook ads or social media. I mean, you don't do that stuff. This is also 2000, uh, 2010. Yeah. It's a little early and I didn't even really want to do that stuff. Right. I didn't, I just, I wanted it to be a meritocracy of I've got this great product, build it and they'll come. Guess what? They didn't come. So, you know, like all good things come to those who wait after everyone that's done hustling gets theirs first, you know, and I had to go out and hustle. And that turned into also falling back on what I knew.

Starting point is 00:12:50 And what I knew was how to train and how to build a team. Cause that's what we did in the army. We worked by, with, and through local partner forces to achieve our desired in-state. And so we worked with the police force in Nazaria in Iraq and worked by, with, and through them, went out with them on missions, taught them how to keep the peace in town, taught them best practices. And the goal was to, to work ourselves out of a job. And through that, you build a lot of rapport. You build a lot of trust with them. They, they trust you, you trust them. You don't trust them as much as you trust your own team, of course, because that's like blood family, but you have to learn what that, what that is, that trust that you have with others. And so the challenge

Starting point is 00:13:29 became, the Go Ruck challenge became a small slice of the training that we would go through, where there's a special forces guy and he's in charge of, he's the leader, if you will. And his job is to build a team out of the people who show up. And what I did not expect was the impact that that event would have on people. They would overcome adversity. They would learn about someone who had been in the military. I mean, how often do you get to spend 12 hours with a Navy SEAL or a Green Beret or someone like that and ask them anything about their service? Ask them, you know, tear down these walls between the military and the civilian world.

Starting point is 00:14:02 And so that became kind of the vessel of the experience became tied with the product and the community was built around that. And that's what we've been doing ever since. It's very, it's, it's a, it's a unique way to build a business. And I don't know that, I mean, without the Go Ruck Challenge, without that, I probably wouldn't be around because I really just had no interest in just being a things business. It was kind of a step of, I'd put a little bit of money down to get a prototype for a ruck.

Starting point is 00:14:38 And then it's like, oh, this isn't quite right. Got to get another prototype. And this is incremental, incremental. This wasn't, I raised a million bucks and I started and I said, all right, I've got a million bucks. I'm going to run this until it's gone. I'm a Facebook ad. What I like about go rock. And you know, I think a lot of the gym owners can, or small business owners can appreciate this is that you didn't take on a bunch of outside funding and go out and do huge Facebook ads. You've really built it from the ground up with

Starting point is 00:15:05 the community and the culture in mind. And so now you have what a thousand go-ruck events a year, a thousand a year, 300 official go-ruck clubs around the world. And so that's grown exponentially since 2010 till 2000, almost 20 that we're in now. And I mean, over the last 10 years, you know, I think there's a lot of people who could look at GoRec and see it as this big brand that has a thousand events, sells tons of bags, has a bunch of products. You have what, 30 people at HQ plus a bunch of cadre that go out and go teach these seminars. But that process from 2010 to 2020, it's not like that stuff just happens overnight. And so you like, tell me a little bit more about as the business has grown, you talk about being an expert at something.

Starting point is 00:15:46 You talk about falling back on your roots, about developing these teams, which I think is really valuable. But as a business has grown, what have you had to delegate out? What have you had to learn about business? Because I think that you look like an operator, right? You're a guy who likes good product, is American, whatever you align with certain cultures, but business is business and it has to have finance in mind. It has to have all these different things. So how did you know when to

Starting point is 00:16:10 delegate and how did that process look like? Yeah, it's, it's never, it's never simple. And anybody that's telling you that it is simple, they're probably not used to sort of balancing a budget, right? I mean, business is a war of limited resources, just like war is a war of limited resources. I mean, money is oxygen in business. And if you don't have it, you can't get to where you need to go. And so for me, it was, you know, I mean, out of the gates, I really cared about the brand of Gora. That was the surest way. If I messed that up, if I got that wrong, it never would have survived because it was kind of leveraging my past and special forces. And if I would have alienated that community, I wouldn't have felt good about it first off,

Starting point is 00:16:58 and it would have died. So I've always been, no detail was too small on that front. And then on the new product development front, that, that took some time to really develop the confidence in. And there's a lot of people out there. They're like, how do I become a better leader? How do I become more confident? And even if, if you don't want to say that publicly, everybody thinks about that. I mean, you, you do, I do everybody, right?

Starting point is 00:17:21 How do I become a better leader for my team? How do I grow confidence in this? Well, first off, you have to keep doing more of it and you have to be willing to fail and you have to be willing to fail fast and pick yourself up and try again. And so a lot of it was the new product stuff that took a little bit longer

Starting point is 00:17:40 to where I really felt comfortable seeing. I always knew how stuff would fail, but figuring out how to evolve something or adapt it over time was, it just takes time where, so building one thing in an, in an R and D environment is a lot different than when they bring it to scale manufacturing and they want to make a thousand or 2000 or 3000. How does that process even work? I mean, how do you start identifying? So I imagine getting this done on scale and utilizing different warehouses. And now you have people that ship out your products. You have people that manufacture

Starting point is 00:18:16 your products. You have a at-home base for all these different events. I mean, how does that, I think a lot of people, you have one location, maybe if you're a gym owner, or you have one product, but to go to two products, three products, four products, and multiple locations, you have to scale it out. And so you talk about failing fast. I mean, we're really bad at that, right? We fail, we haven't done as well, especially with our staff, right? If someone's not working out, we let them stay on for too long. I mean, what does that process look like for you? I mean, if you had these things where you failed too slow or an example of failing fast, like I'm curious

Starting point is 00:18:53 to dive into that more. Yeah. So, I mean, an example of failing fast is we, we built an obstacle course in 2013. It costs us hundreds of thousands of dollars. And you know, it was, where was it at? It was in Massanut in Virginia, outside DC. It was awesome. I mean, it was, it was a military style obstacle course and just the economics were bad. We did a couple hundred thousand dollars in gear revenue at this event. There were 2000 people that showed up, but we needed a lot more to really make this sort of profitable we wanted to be able to scale it it took so many people so much time internally to to put this on and we just were not able to scale it to other venues this is when you think tough mudder is

Starting point is 00:19:36 kind of at its height spartan race is kind of like really big that ocr market is starting to get a lot of people and the the truth is, is we had a different product. It was more of a military, like a true military themed obstacle course. And yet the economics didn't work. And people still to this day, they're like, when is go rock nasty going to happen again? We call it nasty after nasty Nick, which was the obstacle course that every green beret has to pass in order to become a green beret. And it's like the economics just aren't there. So we just never did another one. We did one and we were done. Right. And that didn't, there was no kind of final analysis on the reporting or the finances or anything. It was just so obvious that this was not going to happen

Starting point is 00:20:21 that it was bad. That is like, we're just done. Yeah. And so, so let's talk about that event for me. Cause that's really interesting to me. So you spent a couple hundred grand to build it. Uh, you got a couple hundred grand in sales. So like, let's just say you were even on the whole thing. Well, so let's differentiate between revenue and profit. Okay. All right. Yeah. Okay. So you, you took a loss on it, but was it even more of the fact that you had your staff allocating their attention to something that wasn't driving a return for your business? Yes. So the hard part as we've grown is that it's easy. What I've found is we have to learn about ourselves.

Starting point is 00:20:58 I'm good at the brand and I'm good at new product stuff. That's where I can provide some unique value to go rug finance and all of this stuff, the accounting side and you know, all of that is just the operational side. I've, I've learned over the years how to, how to cut corners from the standpoint of, we don't need to do this to add value. The quality will be as good or better if we don't do it. And the cost will be too great if we do. So let's not do that. Like adding features onto shirts or shorts or whatever. Like if you remove a zipper, you save, let's say five bucks off a piece of clothing, right? Now, do you need that zipper? Do you need that pocket? Absolutely. Well, you're going to have to create

Starting point is 00:21:45 a multiple of that cost in the final price, which, you know, supply demand price, fewer people will buy it. So, you know, how do you not do that and provide value by having it be simpler? Anyway, the things that I am good at, those are what I really pour myself into. And the things that I'm not, I have to kind of just make sure that we don't cross any big phase lines. And I have to learn from our team because I don't have those skills. I didn't grow up at PricewaterhouseCoopers as an accountant. I didn't run a manufacturing facility. There's so many things I haven't run a manufacturing facility. I haven't, there's so many things I haven't done and I love the education, but I'm not the expert. Yeah. But for you to be able to

Starting point is 00:22:32 even say that took you having to take a step back to kind of see the forest or the trees and kind of be humble enough to say that. Cause I agree with you, right? I didn't go to, I didn't work in accounting and I got a guy I'm looking at across the table from you that worked at PWC and he works at our company now because he's an expert in that particular field. But it took us having to take a step back and kind of not have an ego about it to recognize we need to delegate out things. So how was that process for you? I mean, did you have any huge, I mean, when did you know you had to hire someone to do X? When was your first employee on board? What is that process? First employee was Polly Brown. So we were, I was still in DC and I was in business school. I'm thinking, man, I gotta, there's a lot of stuff going on. I gotta get someone else that can help.

Starting point is 00:23:16 And so found Polly through a friend, friend of a friend, and we just chatted and, you know, it was kind of like, okay, here's everything that we're doing. We talked about everything all of the time. And so, you know, the sad part is that we ended up moving offices down to Florida where I'd grown up and stuff. But it's kind of beside the point. There's people that you work with out of the gates and they won't always all survive the transitions of the business. And, you know, those are hard because you lose some friends along the way. It's kind of like someone that you dated that you loved, but it just wasn't meant to be. You know, it just didn't work out for timing or for, you know, take your pick.

Starting point is 00:23:58 You dated in high school and then you went to different colleges. Not everybody has your story, right? Where you wanted to go, you want to just hustle and get to where Ashley was, right? But not everybody has that story. Sometimes just life goes different ways and you have to make your peace with that. And, and so I think the key is to just do right by people and, you know, have as much communication as possible and always look to upgrade your team. And by I mean hopefully it's only additive you're only saying I okay now I need to I need to allocate a salary to this job that's really important and you'll take a big step up in your accounting or whatever but just realize that that money is coming out of

Starting point is 00:24:40 marketing which might help with growth and so for me the hard part is is I don't really want to ever hire an is I don't really wanna ever hire an accountant. I don't ever wanna hire someone that wants to do that type of stuff. Now, if they listen to this, I mean, I love our team, right? It's just, I am more interested in new product and getting the message out there and building the brand. And that stuff's really fun

Starting point is 00:25:03 because it connects us with people yeah but if you don't have a sound business you're going to fail if you don't have a team that compliments you you're going to fail and so you have to learn when i mean i don't know how to create the the financial reporting that our business needs to be empowered. I have to learn how to understand what the KPIs are, the key performance indicators, or what we're measuring against because that's where eventually when you have people at different parts of your business,

Starting point is 00:25:36 as hard as you try, the communication between and amongst them will never be perfect and you will ultimately get more information funneled up to you. And it's your job. You have to connect the dots. Yeah. I want to touch base on something you said, you said, upgrade your team. I thought that was really interesting to me because you said, that's not just when you're talking about upgrading your team. So if you're thinking

Starting point is 00:25:57 about like a military group, or if you're talking about a sports team, you have a team, you can upgrade in a number of different ways, right? You could pull from outside or you could take internally and elevate them i thought that was really interesting touch point that uh you could take them from internally right but you got to find ways to continue to upgrade your team period including yourself by the way this is not just you can't just like the moses form of leadership like i'm going to go up to the mountain and come back with the answers that's not my style and i don't think that works very well unless you've got a one-on-one conversation with you and the big guy upstairs, right? You have to build consensus. You have to be able to delegate. I mean, it's, so the,

Starting point is 00:26:35 the biggest challenge for me very tactically is it's, it's, I can kind of bounce around from project to project, to project, to project. project, it takes a long time to execute. Ideas are not that, they're not as valuable as ideas people think they are. The execution is very hard and to do that well and to do that in a repeatable and consistent manner, that's even harder. So to design and build one perfect GR1, that's something, right? But to get that built to scale over tens of thousands of units, you have to put systems in process and you have to empower someone whose job it is to do that. And you have to have sort of thresholds of spot checking and quality control and all these various things.

Starting point is 00:27:20 And for me, in my head, I'm like, well, we've done it and now someone's in charge. Great. Just make sure they're all great. I'm on to the next thing. And if you start eating into all your people's time with all your new ideas, then they're not going to do anything well. They're going to just keep chasing everything. funnels up and you have to sort of allocate not only budgets, budgets are important because they will determine, you know, where the resources are going. You have to determine how people are measuring their performance, like define success, like define success. Everybody thinks they hear something and then it's like, oh yeah, go, go, go. Like, no, no, let's talk about what you think I just said. And then let's make sure that we're absolutely clear. Yeah. Right. Boy, you're hitting on a lot of really good points. Yeah. He's cause

Starting point is 00:28:12 you're, you're hitting on all the same things, all the same challenges that we have in our organization. I know other people have, you're hitting on all of them, but I think creating those KPIs, understanding that funnels up to you, creating what does success actually represent? Like what is success in this situation? Right? Because what you think might be success and what I think, we need to be in alignment there. Otherwise, we're going on two different paths, right? And you're being held accountable to something that might be different than what I'm holding you accountable to. That's very interesting to me. And so as your business has kind of scaled up, you're obviously talking about how you've delegated things out, how you're recognizing, but do you actively think to yourself, and this is

Starting point is 00:28:49 something I was thinking about the other day, do you actively ask yourself the question, where do I drive the biggest return for this business? And if so, just because I find that in our business of gyms, owners have a tendency to go towards things that they enjoy. And they might be good at, right? But it might not drive the biggest return for the business. And they have to kind of switch the gear between, hey, just because I like to do something doesn't mean that I necessarily should be doing that. Because it might not drive the biggest return for my company. Or do those work hand-in-hand for you? I don't know. No no i got lots of like we could do another six hours on all

Starting point is 00:29:29 of the things i've done wrong and all of the failures right and then we'd only be a fraction of the way there right so exactly what you're saying is true i love the community i love the people of of go rock i mean that's what fills me up when someone gains empowerment or someone, you know, my favorite stories are always, cause our, our events have men and women, and it's kind of just one big team. And a lot of times you get people and they'll count out the small people or they'll count out, you know, the underdogs, if you will, they're not as big and strong as I am. Well, then it's three in the morning.

Starting point is 00:30:01 And that person's the one that's got the better plan. That's, that's organizing people. It's usually the smallest girl there or something like that. And it's just all these big guys that think that, that they can just carry their, they can just pull a tractor through life. That's really hard. You need motivation. You need a plan.

Starting point is 00:30:19 You need someone who's a leader. And I love it when the underdog emerge emerges and that's, those are the feelings that I get from our events and from our community of weight loss and empowerment and all that stuff. So I have really poured my heart into the event side of the business. And as, as I take a step back and I start to look at things as a business events is is kind of flatlined for us like we're at 35 40 000 participants a year through our events which is a lot but which is great right but it's nine percent of our revenue right and we are first and foremost fueled by great products whether it's the rucksacks or the footwear or the apparel. And I have to dedicate more time to that

Starting point is 00:31:08 and less time in some ways, less time to making sure that we have 2000 events a year in three years. That's not what that is meant to be for us, as important as it is. Now, we would love to see more people rucking in their neighborhoods. So there is still that, I believe, in activity and community. America needs a lot more of that with

Starting point is 00:31:30 some leadership thrown in from people. When someone gets up there like JFK style and says, do something for this country, empower people to do more where they are and they will respond to that. That's how America works. And we're missing that right now. And I want to be part, I want our community to be part of that solution. And so yet, yet as a business, we have to continue to innovate on the product side as well, or else we won't get to do that stuff. We won't have a voice because we'll still be really small, really small, really small fries in the grand scheme of things. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:08 Well, you just said, I mean, I just hope that any gym owner in particular, if you're spending hours and hours and hours programming for your gym, or you're spending eight hours a day coaching, you just gotta take a deep dive and just ask yourself, hey, is this driving return for our business? And even though, I mean, Jason,

Starting point is 00:32:23 you lead to a really incredible perspective. When you look at your overarching revenue, 9% is built up by events. Yet that is the thing that you are most passionate about because you're true to who you are. But as a business, you need to be, you need to recognize that 91% of your revenue comes from something else. And so if you're not, if you're oblivious to that fact, then you're never going to grow and develop just like a gym owner who just wants to program all the time or just wants to coach all the time. I get it. You have to mentor your other coaches. You have to make sure like what I see you do, you know, we popped in on a couple gyms yesterday. You're just sort of checking in on people. It also makes you more accessible. It makes you more, Hey, he cares.

Starting point is 00:33:02 Presence implies interest. You show up people like oh wow cool right got it you know and and so that role has to shift and sometimes you have to break your own bad habits or your own habits and so for us in the early days events were that thing where we would launch more events because i also needed the money right so if i launch an event and it's 10 months out and people sign up for that and I get that money today, of course, you're not supposed to spend it. And in the early days, of course I did because I had to put down payments on rucksacks that I needed to sell in three months, right? Or four months, whatever. That's where we were at the relationship between the events and

Starting point is 00:33:40 the gear. And, and so events is really what allowed me to retain most of the ownership of GORUCK and to not go out and, and chase dollars to, in order to, to fuel growth. Like, and so that was a dependency that took years. So I talked about failing fast earlier. I didn't fail fast in that mindset enough. And you know, that's, that's cost us. And now it's, it's, it's going back to the beginning almost and saying, how do we figure out how to get more new products out there faster and more consistently across different types of products, you know, training category stuff, women's stuff, stuff like that. And then how to finance it. I mean, what are terms on, you know, the stuff that you order and can you afford it? And then it's, it. I mean, what are terms on the stuff that you order

Starting point is 00:34:25 and can you afford it? And then as you're getting into cashflow analysis and all that stuff, and that's where I can't do that stuff. It's not my, I can look at it and I can sort of help prioritize and work with teams on budgets, but there's other people that are a thousand times smarter

Starting point is 00:34:41 than I am on our team that are just vital to our success. What's really unique about this is when we sit down with people from any industry, everybody in business has similar challenges and you're just sharing it from a different light. You're talking about how you start off with these events and you shift to the product. I think it's really, really, really helpful. And I hope that if you're a small business owner out there and you're listening to this, that you take what he's saying to heart, because I wish that we had failed faster for myself sooner to, to kind of focus on other areas of the business. Cause

Starting point is 00:35:14 had I just stayed in the weeds for so much, you know, I was in the weeds for so long, coaching all the classes, coaching all the classes, but when you're coaching all the classes all day, there's no one that's there to kind of focus on building the business as a whole. And that becomes really challenging. Now there's a fine line with that, right? You want to make sure your product is great. You want to make sure you have culture through your events. We're not saying that, but you just got to know when the right time is to start delegating some of that out. So you can focus on the bigger picture. Now, Jason, I really appreciate your time. You have thousands, you know, events, you have clubs, you have, you know, a brick and mortar, you know, you have your events, you have clubs, you have, you know, a brick and

Starting point is 00:35:46 mortar, you know, you have your office, you have all your very different bags, which I'm a huge advocate for, right? Just so you guys are aware, as a business owner, I travel a lot. I rock the GR1 as my daily carry. GR2 is my go-to for airplanes and travel like that. And I have a Rucker also for it. So I don't want to go out with a 20, 30 pound plate in the, in the back. Where could people find more information about you, the company, um, and, and just go ruck in general, because it's just go rock. I mean,

Starting point is 00:36:15 if you Google go ruck, G O R U C K, I mean, our website will come up, you know, we're on social, we play that stuff like, like, like the universe does. So, um, you know, there's lots to it. It's there's, there's different parts, you know, there's more, the, the things are sort of more front and center on, on the website. The events are also there. There's rucking education and stuff. I mean, there's, there's a lot of layers to this and we're kind of working to, to focus for people and segmented out a little bit more, but there's, there's a lot there. So thanks for the opportunity for the, for the long form here, because it does require some explanation. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:49 I mean, the business of go-ruck is an exceptional story from a true path that was created out of passion and seeing a void that was, that was needed. And now we're just trying to get more people to, you know, stop, you know, stop just only exercising, but also just move more with a pack or a load on their back, which is more rucking in this concept. And so I can't wait to continue to see these things grow. I can't wait to see more people utilizing them at airports, wearing these rucks, using the stairs, walking more, lose the rollback, lose the rollback and, and build their business. So thank you for your time today, Jason. And guys, I hope everybody has a phenomenal day.

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Barbell Shrugged - Building a Business and the Journey of GORUCK - Business of Fitness #74

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