The Nick Bare Podcast - 021: Building A Multi-Million Dollar Brand From Nothing - Preston Bare

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

Today we have a very special guest, my little brother, Preston Bare. He is the COO at Bare Performance Nutrition and has played a crucial role in building the brand over the past ten years. After college, Preston gave up his safe career and moved across the country to take a chance on the future of BPN (when we were making less than no money). And today, we are sharing stories and lessons that helped us build BPN into the multi-million dollar brand it is today. Enjoy the episode! Save 20% sitewide at BPN Supps: https://bit.ly/nickbare20 (valid July 3rd, 9am CT until July 5th 11:59pm CT) Follow for more:  IG: https://www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness/ YT: https://www.youtube.com/@nickbarefitness Keep up with Preston here:  IG: https://www.instagram.com/prestonbarebpn/ Topics: 00:00 Intro 1:30 Preston’s high school stardom 3:34 First job after college 6:43 Becoming chicken farmers 12:32 Taking the risk on BPN’s future 19:51 Humble beginnings 27:09 Opening the gym 33:58 Most challenging times building BPN 38:42 Find great people for your organization 41:54 The moment we knew BPN would be successful 46:04 First million-dollar month 48:08 What happened to the 5lb protein tubs? 52:39 Product, brand, people 56:35 Preston’s garage door incident

I wish we could just paint the picture of how inefficient this process was because we had one room that our parents gave us that we could use for fulfillment. It was upstairs, this bonus room that was above the garage. So inventory would land at the house. We'd carry all the inventory, which wasn't much. We'd carry the boxes up to this room. From the palette, yeah. We had to print the label, but the printer wasn't up there with us. It's in the basement.

Sorry. So we'd get into flights of stairs. We go down two flights of stairs We'd get the label Come back upstairs Print it out Tape it on the box And then carry that box

To the first floor To take it to the post office Oh my gosh Before we dive into today's episode I want to let you know It is a big day Today is the day That our Go One More Sale

Goes live So from July 3rd 9 a.m. Central Standard Time Until July 5th Midnight Everything on the BPN website is 20% off.

And if you've been following the BPN brand for the last couple of years, you know we typically only do one sale a year. And that sale is Black Friday. But to stick to the Goin More mantra, we are adding one additional sale in for the 2020 year. And that is over the course of these next couple of days. So if you're looking for a new pre-workout powder, you want to restock on your weight protein, nutrition bars, multivitamins, whether you're, you're looking for a new pre-workoutouture.

whether you're looking for performance, endurance, or wellness supplements, we get you covered. So head over to BPNSups.com to save 20% off during our sale. Today on the podcast, I have my baby brother, who is three years younger than me, Preston Bear, chief operations officer of Bear Performance Nutrition, and prior hometown still. high school athlete. There was a cheeseburger named in his name, in his honor of Pomar, Pennsylvania.

Preston Bear, welcome back to the show. Good to be here. Good to be here. I don't think we need to bring up high school sports anymore. The worst is when I go home back to our hometown with my grandpa,

you know how grandparents are super embarrassing. Me and my grandpa will go to like Starbucks and my grandpa will see someone wear like our old high school t-shirt. I'll say, Do you know my grandson? He played high school football. And it's like, I'm sitting there.

It's just the most awkward thing. So it's just like... Oh, when did you graduate? 11 years ago. 2012. If we're being, for real and honest, though, there was a cheeseburger named after you in our hometown. Yeah, I think it was a burger joint that was up there for two or three years.

I don't think they're in existence anymore. But kind of cool back then, I guess. And it was named after you because, you were like the stud football player, baseball player of your year group. Growing up in where we grew up in Palmyra, our football team was, and you remember it too, like we would go to the high school football games. When we were young until we were, you know, in high school, our team was always like the worst team in the league.

I think every year we were like, oh and ten or one in ten. And then finally our year we had like a decent, decent team. I think we were like seven and, or no, eight and two or something like that. So we traditionally, the school we grew up in was just terrible, not very good at football. But hey, you led. We had that one good year. So glory days. You led the bad news bears.

Glory days. My first question to kind of get things started. When you went to college, you graduated, you started your first job. What do you think your life would look like seven years later? No, I didn't know anything about business. When I first went to college and enrolled in business, I honestly just, enrolled into business because it was sort of so broad and everything.

And when I got there, I wanted to get an internship during the summer. But I remember when you began VPN, when we were, I was a freshman in college and you were a senior. By the time that I was, I was then a senior in college, the business started

to pick up. And, you know, things really started shifting in my mind where I previously wanted to get into the corporate nine to five, which I always worked toward with internships and everything like that. As we got closer to graduation in 2016, my approach totally sort of flipped and switched to,

you know, leaving that 9 to 5 corporate structure and joining you down in Texas to help grow BPN in the business. So it was like, I would say, the last three months of my college experience, my senior year, that's when I was like, okay, I 100% want to do the whole BPN thing. I don't care if I get paid. This is what I want to do.

So I want to give it a chance. And growing up, I really wasn't like that. I was usually more conservative, but I just saw great opportunity and wanted to go after it. But after graduating college, you did have a job for a short period of time. Yes. So I had a job in procurement, which is a buyer, basically, out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. That's Amish country for those that don't know in Pennsylvania. There's actually like horse and bunnies.

Yeah. Where our corporate building was in Lancaster. there would be horse and buggies that I'd have to pass in order to get to the parking lot. But it was a great place and it was a great business that I learned so much in and everything. But I only stayed there for, I think it was two or three months after graduation. And then, you know, when I started there after Bloomsburg, which is where I went to college, I knew I was only going to be there for about two to three months and I had it in my mind, 100% that I was going to go to Texas and move the business down there.

but I knew I had to keep working until then. But I did work that job for about two or three months before I gave my two-week notice and then moved the company from our house in Pennsylvania to your house in Texas. That is one of the things that makes us different as brothers is I've traditionally always been the riskier one and you've been more of the conservative.

But before we even thought of building BPN, there was always the option of being chicken farmers. Chicken farmers, yeah. Chicken farmers. I always put it, I actually always say it's like this, like, if you, if we would have been back in like 1600s, 1700s and wherever our family was from, Germany, you would have been the person getting on the boat over to America for like just to, you had to keep moving around.

And I would have been still stuck in Germany, like living in some small village. So that's sort of how I see it. That's actually very accurate. Yeah, that's how a lot of the people that probably came to America were like that, like that personality had to get, you know. Well, growing up, so to give some context, our grandfather, my dad's dad, grandpa bear, he was a dairy farmer in central Pennsylvania. He had a dairy operation.

So my dad grew up, our dad grew up, milking cows morning and night and working on the farm. And when we were younger, he sold the farm. moved into just like a regular neighborhood. He retired from farming. I can't remember exactly what year it was, but we were probably like... Might have been like 96 or 97, I think. Yes, I was like seven, seven, eight years old. Yeah.

Something like that. But he always had, and he still does have deep roots in the farming community. So he was really encouraging us and pushing us to be farmers as we were growing up. And he wanted us to be chicken farmers because he saw this huge opportunity with a bigger a return financially in the chicken farming space. So he was always taking us to view these farms and walking these chicken houses. And I remember him vividly telling me, you know, he used to take out this massive loan to build these chicken houses.

Because these chicken houses are, you know, a quarter mile long, and they're like two stories sometimes. And it's risky because if your chickens get a disease or if the AC shuts off, In the summer, you can lose your entire flock. Yeah. It's a lot of money you're living in. Sometimes the houses catch on fire. So our grandfather was trying to encourage us to do this.

And I remember him telling us, you used to take out this big loan to start this chicken farming operation. But after like 10 years, you start making your money back. And I was thinking 10 years. Long time. Scraping by. Scraping by, yeah. It's a long time where a lot can also go wrong.

Yeah. And a lot of time, once you hit those 10 years, I think he said you have to. rebuild the houses again or something like that. So your margins are like so tight from what it sounds like because you've raised the chickens and then you sell them to basically like a processor who turns the chickens into chicken wings, breasts, everything like that. So you're kind of the middleman, obviously.

Yeah, I remember he was already setting up meetings with us. It was very premature, but he was like setting meetings up with us to talk to Tyson, like Bell and Evans. Yeah. And I started viewing my future as, that. This was before I started BPN and I knew I was going to serve in the military, but I was already starting to think of like, what am I going to do post-military? And my backup plan was always, well, if nothing else works out, I always got chicken farming. There are only a few decisions that we've

made over the last 11 years since starting BPN that have shaped the trajectory of where we're at today. we very likely with a few different decisions and something going in a different way we could be chicken farmers right now in central Pennsylvania raising chicken broilers right

they call them broilers broilers so having some cows on the farm and but I miss I miss personally manual labor yeah yeah I mean there's nothing nothing that feels more rewarding after you know a long day even just cutting grass

or something like that. You know, it's like you're out there all day, getting your steps in, working hard, and then you come in, and it's just like so relaxing and rewarding. Which is why I think we have always been so into working out too. We've had to work for it, sort of, and you get that reward system then.

Yeah. But I think growing up, just maybe our genetics and what our families come from because not just our dad's dad was a farmer, but we've had other farmers in the family as well, especially if you're from central Pennsylvania. and yet such a agricultural area. We've always had that sort of in our DNA, I think.

I mean, I think it's why, like, the first phase of building BPN, taking it from zero to one. And I referenced that a lot in this podcast and kind of some of the content I create. Like, going from zero to one, that scares a lot of people. That, for me, is some of the most fun times. And for us, it's probably because we do, love the manual labor. Like zero to one for us, we can talk about this throughout this conversation,

it was like standing up a warehouse and putting the racking in and moving equipment and packing boxes and, you know, traveling across the country to just like meet and greet and get things done. Like that manual work and labor was just so fulfilling. Yeah. The beginning stages of it, especially too, because there's so much like hope on the horizon. It's like your imagination's so big of what it could turn in. into it and everything. And it's obviously just like two or three people in the beginning, too,

and it's super fun. And you're trying to figure it out as you go. And when you see those first flashes of, you know, higher sale days or you're running your first Black Friday sale and you see it go crazy, it's like there's nothing more exciting than that. It's an adrenaline dump. Yeah, you're adrenaline. And it's just, it's, the whole process is, is the exciting part. I was in South Korea. I was stationed in South Korea with the Army. And this would have been 2016. And I remember the business was growing and I owned a house in Texas in Temple, Texas at the time. You were back in Pennsylvania working that first job out of college.

And I realized that I was going to be coming back from South Korea in a few months. I was going to be transitioning out to the military shortly after. And we had to start putting a plan in place for the future. Because if we didn't put a plan in place, we'd be trying to. chicken farming. Yeah. The reality of. Explain to me that day I called you. I called you on the phone. I said, I asked you, can you quit your job? Can you move to Texas with all of our inventory? Start building a warehouse and just get things started. What did that feel like? And what was that experience, you know, like for you? I mean, I remember when you on the phone were very, very convincing and

basically everything you said I actually believed in. A lot of people talk about their dreams and aspirations and what they're going to do, but a lot of times it's kind of BS. I think when you talked, I knew it was like true and I think that's what

got me so excited then. And it was just like a jolt of adrenaline and hope and I knew anything was basically like possible with this business and everything, especially with the traction it was starting to gain. which was a small attraction.

Yeah, a small attraction looking back on it. Relatively. And it sort of just gave me the outlook that I don't have to be in the super conservative position. It's like if you're going to have a chance to take in life, it's like right now. You know, you're fresh out of college. You're 22 years old. You're not married. You don't have any kids.

Barely, you know, I had the clothes. I own my clothes. Sometimes that's the best thing in life. And I tell the younger. guys that are working here and people that are working here. It's like it makes it so efficient. You can move so much easier. It's like, you know, when you have all this physical stuff, it weighs you down so much. So I was like, I literally just was able to put that in to a single car. Well, we actually run into U-Haul because we had to move inventory, but I could have easily

fitted in my Chevy Coble back then, everything I had to move and I would have had plenty of space still. And I think just listening to you, I was just so convinced. And I was like, you know what? I visited Texas a couple years prior when our family came down to visit you, and I really liked it a lot. And I knew I could see myself living there. So I was like, it's the time to at least, you know, try out a different place. What was it about when you first graduated college and you went and worked this corporate 9 to 5? What was it about that lifestyle that was attractive? Was it the security of that kind of lifestyle that was attractive at first?

Yeah. Yeah, and it was a, I mean, definitely the security. It was the job that I got in procurement was better than what I ever thought I would get. You know, when I went into college, I wasn't very confident at all because I knew nothing about business. I didn't think I was going to make very much money coming out of college. And I did get a position that was really good compared to, like, my peers, where I was making pretty good money and everything. And obviously, I was living at home. Do you remember what you were getting paid?

It was $55,000 back then. Which, back that's not back then, but it was still, you know, seven, eight years ago. That was a lot. I would have been happy with 40,000 out of college. I mean, I was making out of college 55,000. Yeah, you think you're like. As a second lieutenant in the army. Yeah, and it's, especially if you don't have any living expenses.

Like, I was living with our parents. I thought I was bowling. Yeah, I thought I was bowling too. And I was like, this is too good to be true almost. It was definitely interesting for me because I was always someone who was so conservative, and it's like I was someone that would have been tough to break like that mold. But for some reason, I just had an urge to come to Texas and believed in you and believed in the company. And even said, I don't even care if we don't make money.

I still want to try it. It's like something, you know, I think it's great for everyone coming out of college to at least live somewhere different. It's like you can always come back to your hometown or hometown area or, maybe even original job if they'll take you back, but it's like just getting out there and seeing another spot, I think is really healthy. Bagging on your hands and knees for your old job back. Oh, I'm not saying I would do that, but some people.

Some people. I think it's good for everyone, dude, to go off. I agree with that. I mean, one of the best things that ever happened to me was graduating college, going to the Army, like right away going down to Fort Benning, Georgia, and being in Georgia for a year and then getting to Texas

and being on your own and having to just be independent and figure out and create solutions for the problems you're experiencing. I think everyone should leave home if they have the opportunity. Yeah.

After high school or college or their internships, whatever, like get out and do something that is, it's far away and different and uncomfortable because you will grow so much professionally and personally. I even see like

some people still that are in their mid-30s that are still living at home with their parents. And it's like just because they never branched down and got uncomfortable. And it's like at some point you got to, the longer you stay in that, you're going to just stay in that and stay comfortable. It's like you got to go off and try to do it yourself. Well, to give context of this whole kind of situation we're explaining too, it wasn't like it was six months after starting the business. This was four years after starting the business. Business was started in 2012 and tried scaling it for this first couple years. Sales would trickle in, like one or two orders every couple days.

2016, four years later, I'm sitting in a barracks room in South Korea calling you to move down to Texas to build out the future of BPN. Can you kind of explain at that point when you moved to Texas, How many orders were we doing? I think we were doing probably 15 to 20 orders a day at most, maybe 20. I remember you launched T-shirts like a month before I graduated college

and our dad had to take off like a half day or the day from work to pack the orders because he was the one that was packing the orders when I was at college. That's right. We did our first 20% off sale, I think, in June of 2016. and I had to take all fork, I remember,

because we got like 100 orders or something like that, and I thought it was, like, so exhausting. Well, our process was so inefficient. We didn't even have label printers. We were printing out shipping labels on actual, like, paper, then cutting them out with scissors, and taping the, just, I mean, how far we've come and everything. That was pathetic.

Do you remember, though, when we started printing labels, how game changed it was? Yeah, we discovered that there was a label printer. and like we could have been doing this all along. It used to take an hour to print and package six orders, which is just like, I mean, that was way back then when my dad was showing me his process. And literally you can do six orders in like, I don't know, six minutes now.

Which is why you had to take off of work to fulfill the orders that came in. And I remember then too, like our house in Pennsylvania, the air conditioning was always so bad. And the upstairs room would get so hot. and that's where we would be printing the orders. And I just remember getting so frustrated up there because it's like 80-something degrees. You're trying to pack these orders

and tape the paper onto the boxes and it was like middle of summer. Our parents were very supportive of this operation. Like Preston just mentioned, our dad was packing orders when we couldn't. Like when I was in training for the military and then you were at school. you were at college and you know you were working he was back home fulfilling orders which at the time

there weren't many but i wish i wish we could just like paint the picture of how inefficient this process was because we had one room that our parents gave us that we could use for fulfillment and it was the second floor was upstairs this bonus room that was above the garage so inventory would would land at the house we'd carry all the inventory which wasn't much but we'd care of carry the boxes up to this room. From the palette, yeah. We had to print the label, but the printer wasn't up there with us. It's in the basement.

So he's getting two flights of stairs. We'd get two flights of stairs. We'd get the label, come back upstairs, print it out, tape it on the box, and then carry that box to the first floor to take his post office. Oh, my gosh. And I remember my dad was such a perfectionist, too. so like that's why it would take him so long to pack orders because he would probably double, I mean, not double like four or five times check the product and ensure he was putting the right product flavor in the order,

which is good, like it's always accurate. But there was one time where we got an international order, which was really rare, and he sent out the wrong incorrect flavor of flight. He sent out orange, I think instead of blue raspberry. And when he found out he sent out the wrong flavor, I've heard like every swear word in the book. He was like just screaming at himself. And I think that like instilled it though when he was packing orders like, I need to make sure that I'm always sending the right stuff out.

And I think that's like kind of stayed on our team to this day that it's like ingrained in all of them that like, you know, we do things the right way and we just don't like slack off or anything. I don't know. It's just when I saw that how upset he was, I was like I cannot, I got to do whatever I can to not send out the wrong flavors. It's like dad comes down and helps us. Pack orders for Black Friday every year. And I think this was two years ago. He was packing orders.

And it was an hour later after he packed this one order. And he came to me and he said, I can't put the wrong flavor of flight in this box. I was like, dad, there's like literally a... Thousands of orders. Multiple palettes with thousands of orders. You're not going to find it. Like, we'll just ship them the new flavor once they get it.

If it's the wrong flavor. If it's the wrong flavor. Because, like, he wasn't 100% sure. he spent hours. He spent like an hour, yeah. Going through these boxes to find that one order, cut it open, and realize he did put the right place. He wasted the entire day of like being able to pack orders

only to find out that he did send the correct one. So that's how much it shows sort of how much we've cared though. That is a definition of hard right over the easy wrong. 100%. He wouldn't have been able to sleep though that night if he knew he didn't check. No. He's definitely got a little bit of OCD where he's always double, triple checking. So when you first came down in Texas, you were obviously fulfilling orders out of my house I owned in Temple, Texas, which they give some background on that house.

So when I first got it in Texas, I rented an apartment in Belton, Texas. Love this apartment. And then I decided I wanted to buy a home. So the town next to Belton is Temple, Texas. And I found a home. It was a brand new, three-bed, two-bath. I think it was like 1,300 square feet home that was four or five miles from my apartment. We actually just drove by it.

Great spot. Good location, close to the lake. We just drove by it like a few weeks ago. Yeah. I bought this house brand new for $130,000. Use the VA loan. Didn't put any money down. My mortgage was like nice.

$900 a month. That's amazing. So I thought I was crushing it at that point. And when I was in Korea, you moved down to Texas, and that's the house you moved into. I kind of gave you the direction of, hey, like, when I get back, we're going full speed, we need to move into a warehouse. So I was like, you got to find a warehouse and sign a lease. What was that process like?

It was great. I had a YouTube channel at the time, which is still up there. But that was really cool to document that. But I remember you gave me a budget of like $5,000 per month. with like rent and utilities and all that. But I didn't realize, and we didn't realize that like Austin, the commercial real estate market, it's super expensive. So like the places that I was like trying to find for the price range,

they weren't like, there wasn't many out there. But finally we found a spot that said Round Rock found it on like LoopNet or one of those websites. And it worked out perfect. It was our first warehouse, 6,300 square feet. But during that whole process, I had no. clue what I was doing. Absolutely no clue. The real estate agent, I remember we brought on, I don't think he really did anything either, but he probably still got paid out on commission. Definitely. I think we literally did all the work to, not all the work, but like, we found

the place, sourced it. It was a crazy experience, though, because I remember, like, rent was due shortly after we signed the lease and everything. So we were like, okay, we got to build this gym and make sure we're getting some revenue in here from gym memberships and everything. So it was definitely a scramble at that point, but it was so much fun. Yeah, we were like, we had nothing to lose. Yeah. Let's just go all in. We have nothing to lose. If it fails, screw it. Yeah, what are they like? And they're like, well, if you can't afford rent, we're going to come after you for everything you're worth, or not worth anything. So. Yeah, it wasn't anything worth it. Come and get it. Yeah, I can't, I, looking back, I'm surprised

they actually rented that out to us. Like, we barely had like, we had a business plan and everything, but it's like there's no way enough revenue was coming in from like the supplements to pay for that expensive of a lease. No way. were really expensive then and they're even more expensive now. I think we were paying like $9,000 a month. Yeah, $9,000 a month. For 6,300 square feet, it was like 25% office and then the rest was going to be the warehouse and gym, mainly the gym and then just a little space for the warehouse and shipping product. But yeah, I remember we launched like the gym and everything and memberships were just hard to get because our gym, was so hidden back into a industrial park. Our philosophy and our plan was we knew we had to stop operating out of our house.

One, we were out of space. We had supplements and boxes and pallets in the garage, in bedrooms, in the living room. And there were 18 wheelers coming into a residential area to drop off pallets, which just did not work. Yeah, you couldn't do that. You can't do that. So we knew we had to get out of operating. in my house. So we found this warehouse. And the plan was, okay, the supplement sales at this point aren't enough to sustain this lease. So we're going to open a gym and the memberships are

going to pay for the lease and then we'll work on building the supplement business. Well, we quickly realized the location we had was tucked away in a business park. No one knew it existed. We didn't have enough money to buy enough equipment, so it was a pretty empty gym. It was a sweet gym. It was really, really cool. There's a lot of inflection points of luck

that are the result of this compounding consistency of work. It just so happened that within the first 90 days of opening that gym and building that warehouse and HQ out, the supplement business started to grow

enough where we could close the gym down. to the few members that we had. Yeah. We actually, one of our first employees, John Byers, was one of our first gym members. So we closed the gym down

and went all in on BPN in that space and we just made it work, which was really challenging and tough, but we made it work. I mean, there was definitely some stressful points. I remember like two or three months into the gym memberships and everything trying to sell those

because obviously not much money was coming in from gym memberships. But at the same time, then the supplements took off, which was huge. So, I mean, it was a relief, too, to close down the public gym because, you know, you're opening it up at whatever, 5 a.m. and closing it at 10 p.m. And it's like. And there were only three of us. So I remember we would lift like three times a day then. That was the strongest I've ever been by far because I would do like two a days. And you had so much time on your hand in there.

Well, essentially, we lived in the gym. In the gym. Yeah. You know, in retrospect, maybe that's why the supplement business was able to grow at the rate that it did because we were forced to be in that HQ from 5 a.m. till 11 p.m. So we were filming videos. We were creating content. We were working on new products. We were like rebuilding the website out. All we did was work because we didn't have an option of not being there because someone had to be there for the gym to be open. Exactly. Yeah. I definitely, definitely agree with that.

And now it was super thankful that it took off right at the right time. I don't want to be in the gym business. Yeah, that was tough. I would argue that it was probably the most exciting time of my life. Maybe your life as well? I would say the same exact thing because that was, I think, especially with anyone's business, when it really starts taking off from seeing the supplements take off,

that's like when you're just so jacked up with energy. You know, you see when we did our protein launch, I think that was like the same. The gym was still open when we did our protein launch and it just exploded. I think we sold like a thousand bottles of weight protein and we were never anywhere close to that at a day of sales. And like when those things happen, you just think about what could eventually happen and where this could go. So I think just that excitement and energy like seeing the infancy of the crazy sale days, that was. There was nothing like it, excitement-wise. Yeah, I mean, 2017 was the first year we did seven figures in revenue.

It's five years after starting the business. 2017 was also the first year that we started paying ourselves a little bit. So up until that point, we weren't taking any money out of the business personally. We were investing all the money back in. But I transitioned out of the military in 2017. we had to start taking some money out of the business to pay ourselves so we would have died. You know, we needed food. Yeah, we lived in a bachelor pad.

You and me and Joe. We rented a house in Round Rock, and I remember the cable to the TV ran from the wall all the way through the living room to the TV. Like the cable guy just ran it like that. I guess he didn't think there was going to be an issue with that. But there was just a giant cord running through the middle of the, living room. Dude, I remember that because we were working all day and we told the cable guy he'd come in and set up the cable.

Well, he asked me if that was all right. And I didn't understand his question. And here he just thought it was fine to run it through like the middle. If it was anyone else, they would have like complained. But we didn't, we just kept. We duct taped it down. Yeah, it was duct taped, this giant cord running through the whole living room. You know, before when we were fulfilling orders out of my home in Temple, Texas,

me, Preston and Joe were living in that house together. And then once we signed the warehouse lease, I sold that home and we pushed towards Austin. We rented a house in Round Rock. I remember our lease for that house was $1,800 a month. And I was like, holy crap. Like, this is an expensive house. Yeah, I mean, that was a big house. That was nicer than anything I've ever stated at that point.

Yeah, it was a nice place. It was convenient. It was like three miles away from HQ. and we knew we were going to pretty much be living at HQ, so we needed something close. Yeah, it was actually at a great location. That was still my favorite location where I lived. Mayfield Ranch.

Mayfield Ranch, yeah. This journey is massive. Yeah. This journey for us has been massive. It's like we're 11 years in at this point, and things aren't going to change overnight. There's not going to be this occasionally great. It's going to be the result of consistently good,

and it's just showing up day after day, after day, when the days feel the same and it doesn't feel like you're moving the needle. If you look back through the weeks and months and years, the needle has moved significantly, but you have to just keep showing up and be patient with a build. A lot of, because we always say it, like a lot of people can, employees or whatever, can come into a place and come out hot for the first three weeks, one month, two month, but it's like, are they going to be doing that in three or four months? You got to sustain it.

Yeah, it's the consistency. So growth is obviously painful. We've had a lot of hard days, long nights, stressful chapters. What stands out to you as some of the most challenging times of building BPN? It goes back to when we were in the gym, but I remember seeing the bank account and then seeing rent was due the next month. I think the rent we talked about was $9,000 a month, and I think our business bank account was like $6,000. So now whenever I think there's a stressful time, like if something majorly stressful comes in the business, like it's nothing that's going to compare it to that. Because imagine having $6,000 in your business bank account, but the next month, $9,000 is doing like two weeks. And that's just to cover the rent. That's not even like utilities and all that other stuff. We dug out of it in the nick of time, I would say. Every time, somehow. Yeah, somehow. And like the feeling was, it was so. many ups and downs, like, you had

just filled with energy all the time almost. Because I feel, remember thinking back as how I felt like at my corporate job out of college and it was like very, you know, just level all day, basically. Yeah. And then here it was just like, you would have

like these jolts of energy, but then like other times where it was like just doom like when you saw those numbers. I remember during those times logging into the business bank account and like keeping my eyes closed and he's like you had yeah that's hard to look at you got look at it but like you just open one eye up slowly and and sometimes it's like who don't know where

that money came from but that's yeah good day I'm not checking this bank account for another two weeks yeah it's hard it's hard to it's hard to look at things when you know they're like terrible and there were days there's days where you like you log in thinking that like you were going to have some money in that business bank account and it was much lower than you expected yeah Because the reality is, like, Preston and I, we weren't and we're not finance guys. Definitely not, yeah. We were not, like, managing this balance sheet and this P&L. We were just building.

And building is messy. It's just fast-paced and just do what you got to do. And it wasn't like we were going through spreadsheets every day and every month, making sure we were managing all this cash flow. We were sprinting. It was me, Preston, and Joe. We were just doing what we had to do to make it work and grow. We talked about $6,000 being the business bank account in 2017.

When we were doing seven figures in revenue, people might be listening to that saying that doesn't add up. You got to realize that cash flow is king. Yeah. And at this point, we were working with a manufacturer who didn't have any terms with us. So you can have net 30, 45, 60, 90 day terms, which means that once you receive that inventory, you have sometimes 30, 45, 60, 90 days until you have to make payments on that inventory. If we placed a purchase order with the manufacturer, we would have to put 50% down. And then we'd have to pay the other 50% just to have that product shipped once it was completed.

And it took like 12 weeks to complete. So all that money's tied up and inventory you don't even have. And because we couldn't afford to place these bigger POs, we have to stack POs, production orders. So like say today I placed a production order for 500 units. and then I knew that we could afford to place another 500 unit production order in three weeks. We'd start stacking these just to kind of like manage cash flow intuitively. That's what really stressed me out building the business, especially those years. I get stressed down even just watching those like restaurant TV shows with like Gordon Ramsey,

restaurant kitchen nightmares or whatever it is where they go into the restaurants and businesses. and it's like they have no cash in the bank. They're a million dollars in debt. You have all these employees. It's like, no wonder restaurant owners and some of these other business owners are so stressed. It's like, that's so hard. I will say one thing we never did

that we probably could have benefited from was leveraging debt to finance inventory and build the business. At the same time, it's probably good. We didn't, too. I would agree. I would agree. We didn't have a business background. We didn't have mentors or our parents,

entrepreneurs. And I think dad's side of the family being dairy farmers, you were told you just spend what you have. Yeah. You don't take out credit cards. You don't touch debt. So like leveraging debt to finance inventory in the business was never even an option for us because what we spent was what we had in the business bank account and that's it.

Yeah. Our first warehouse was 2590 Oakmont Drive suite 420. It was 6,300 square feet. Mm-hmm. Then we moved into, which is literally a mine. mile away. 3161 Eagles Nest Street Sweet 360. We were the first business in this whole business park. That was, is it 9,500 square feet? Yeah, the first building was like 93 or something like that. Yeah, 9,400 square feet. Now we're operating about 50,000 square feet. Yep. But the first

space that we kind of secured in this current business park wasn't that mid-nines. And when we moved in here, we were the first business, the parking lot still weren't paved. We moved in, super excited, moved all of our inventory over, all of our shelving, racking, gym equipment, desks to quickly realize there was no internet

in this whole business plan. Did AT&T even line like the, put the lines in yet? No, nothing was lined. So I remember calling AT&T. I was like, hey, no, I just moved into this new business park. We're just calling to get

internet set up and they called and said oh there's no lines run out there yet and they had us move in like already so they had us move in before any lines were pulled for internet we had to operate the business off of a verizon hot spot yeah well a lot of times too i remember me and john would use my truck to take inventory back to the old warehouse to ship out of there still because they still had a wifi there so it would be like this dark ominous warehouse or either me or him were working in order to ship product out.

John Byers was our fourth employee. Yeah. I remember John came to the gym opening. That's when we first met him when we had our gym opening. I was scared of John. Yeah, he's an intimidating guy when you first meet him. He didn't even, I don't think he followed the YouTube channel or anything like that. He just

heard there was a gym opening and that's sort of how he showed up and ever since then he became part of the team. He saw our vision of what we were building and what we wanted to create and how we wanted to create it. John has done whatever we asked him to do over these last couple years.

I mean, a clear example is when our mom got sick and passed away from cancer in 2019, you and I both had to go to Pennsylvania for two weeks. John Byers held down the entire fort here at BPN. He packed every order. He responded to all the customer service. He was the only person.

Yeah, it was literally it. And the whole business park, you know. He might have been working another job too still. So he was like doing that job and doing all the BPN work still. Yeah. Which is pretty amazing. So, yeah, John's always been there for us and has always had our back, which, you know, you love coming to work and seeing people like that every day.

That's what makes a business as the people. Yep, 100% people. And it is really hard to find really, really good people. But John is one of those people who's just. like solid to the core. Solid. Shows up consistent. At what point did you realize that BPN

was evolving into something that you never imagined it would be? I would say probably during that protein launch, don't you think? When we launched protein for the first time, it was three different flavors. Mint chocolate, I remember, cinnamon roll and milk and cookies. We'd launched all three flavors at the same time.

And we did like 40,000 in sales that day, which we were never even close to a day like that. I knew it would be a good day, but I couldn't believe at how many sales actually came in, and it was just like mind-blowing seeing that. I mean, there was other times, too, where you ran your first sale in 2016 for 20% off when we were still packing orders in the house,

and we got 80 to 100 orders, and I thought that was big, but I still, I think when we saw the protein launch and those actual numbers, that, like, is what we're like, okay, here it goes, and it just kept going up from there and everything. And then I remember, you know, from 2017, I think that was in 2017 to 2019. It was pretty, you know, there wasn't a, it was growing, but there wasn't a ton of growth.

But then, like, 2019 to 2020-ish time period, it really went up the next level again. 2017, I want to say, don't quote me, but I want to say revenue was like $1.7 million. And then 2018, we went to 3.2. And then 2019, it went to like 5.6. Yeah. From 5.6, we went to like 22. Yeah, that was... That was the big one.

There was a big jump from 19 to 20. And that's when we started experiencing a lot of just growing pain, supply chain issues. That was during, you know, the pandemic too, where all these manufacturers were running into their supply chain bottlenecks. Which bring... I mean, that was probably the second most stressful time of our life because we were getting products out of stock on the website. and you just can't sleep at night when that stuff's occurring. At one point we had two flavors of weight protein on our website out of nine. So we had seven out of stock flavors just because these manufacturers were so bottlednecked

because they were receiving so many POs. Lead times went to ridiculous amounts of time. That was tough, yeah. But we got out of it then, and since then supply chain's been good. But looking back at that, there were some times where I'd just be in my office, like and scream because it you know it's like what can you do right now it's a point where you're helpless yeah yeah that because you you have this demand but you just don't have the product for them to buy for example strong reds we ran on a strong reds for a while and it was only because

there was one ingredient yeah that was delayed and that was on a stock and we we had all the labels printed for this product so we couldn't change the formula we didn't want to change the formula so we're waiting on this one raw material which just to be manufactured to send over to our contract manufacturer to put into the blender. And we were just waiting on like one ingredient. But that was like a common issue during supply chain shortages during the pandemic. Yeah, like these manufacturers would have products ready to go to the blender, but they would only have eight of the nine products to complete the product.

So like their warehouses were just stuffed with ingredients because they were waiting on these one ingredients to complete the product. And it showed how like globally reliant we are on all these different countries and especially all these ingredients being imported and exported. But yeah, now that we're gotten through that, it feels a lot better for sure. We learned a lot for that process for sure. You know, any time that your systems, your operations are stressed and tested, it's a great way to refine and rebuild. Every pivotal point in the business, every time there's been a stress or a challenge or an obstacle, it's forced us to learn and grow through that. And like I said, you keep just showing up day after day after day and you build this,

this callous to these stressors that you experience and it makes you stronger over a period of time. Exactly. I used to write down business goals on printer paper and I would thumbtack it to a wall. and I remember writing down $100,000 in revenue each month. I remember writing that down and I remember thumb-tacking it on the wall. I vividly remember writing down $300,000 a month in revenue on a piece of printer paper and thumb-tacking that to the wall.

And then I remember writing down $1 million in revenue per month and thumb-tacking that to the wall. And I think it was Black Friday of 2020, 2021. 2020 or 2021 that we did our first seven-figure day. It might have been 2019.

Was it 2019? Or seven-figure month, I think. Yeah. 2019 when your friends came down or Black Friday. That's right, because Jordan was here at that time. Jordan was here.

It was still only like me, Joe John and Mike Bear, I think, in the warehouse. Yeah. Somehow like four people packed enough orders

for like, yeah, a million dollars of merchandise that month. It was like 10 days of straight packing. I mean, yeah, I remember we didn't see the sunlight for 10 days and we came out after it and it was like the sun hits your eyes and you like, like you've been locked in a clock. I don't know.

That was just a grind that year. That's for sure. I mean, that was a lot of volume that we did. I think it was 9,000 orders for back then, which was, which is big. You were still packing full time at that point, right? I was still packing order. Yeah, we were all kind of doing just like multiple jobs. So we might have been doing some of.

us customer service in packing or packing and purchasing. And we kind of just shared a lot of duties where it's like there wasn't just a full-time warehouse. So I think after that, though, we learned that, you know, we need more warehouse employees. We started building up the operations. I mean, you were pretty resistant to it at first. I had to work to pull you out of the warehouse. Yeah, I was probably just being stubborn.

Probably just being stubborn. But now look at the warehouse team. It's like the strongest stops team. I mean, I was thinking about this. I'm going to run this morning. Just trying to think of some of the stories I'd like to share with people about building the business. And there's so many. And we've shared so many over the years.

We've probably shared this one, but it's still to date one of my favorite stories. And this story kind of puts everything that we've just talked to into perspective. Since our two pound weight protein launch went so well, we thought, well, we need to launch five pound containers of weight protein. We have since discontinued a five pound containers of weight protein. because just cost of commodity way have skyrocketed over the past couple years and it'd be such an expensive product. It's like a 70 serve protein. There's no way we could ever do a five pound container of way again.

But because a two pound container launched so well, we decided we were going to launch a five pound container. And I think we first launched with milk and cookies. I was so excited for this launch because I knew how well the two pounders did and during this time were stressed over. cash flow. Yeah. You know, you're looking at the business bank account thinking like, we got to get this in-house now. We've got to sell it because we've already paid for it.

Yeah. So you've spent all this money on inventory that hasn't landed at your warehouse yet. And you're watching the business bank account just get lower and lower and lower. So I was tracking the tracking info from Estes for this shipment of five-pound containers of way. And it said it was going to be delivered on like a Thursday. So I launched it on the website I was like okay it's gonna be here this afternoon

We're launching it We need this money to hit the business bank account Or like we're not gonna make it So we launched it We're watching the tracking info from Estes Delayed Thursday wasn't delivered Friday wasn't delivered

So what do we do? We had to go get a U-Haul It was from U-Haul Yeah we got a U-Haul A 22-foot U-U-Ha And we drove to Estes To pick up up the protein, loaded the U-Haul, and then went back to the warehouse.

I think we drove up to Temple, the Estes' warehouse and Temple. And yeah, I think that's happened at least twice, I think. Another time, I think you launched, we launched new protein flavors or something like that. And I don't even think the manufacturer ever, like, I don't know if they weren't, didn't have the flavor ready for production or something like that. So, like, we launched it in, like, the manufacturers, like, we haven't even made this yet. So, like, they scrambled to make it, got it to us just in time. And we were, like, shipping it whenever it came in as well then.

Those were also stressful times. Yeah, those were stressful times for sure. Because it was supposed to be made, but it wasn't. That's when, after a while then, we always waited until the product actually landed to sell it. I mean, I remember Y and Joe going and picking up that U-Haul. we've logged it. There's a YouTube video on this. We went and picked up this U-Haul.

We drove to the S-A's and Temple and pretty much banged on the door said like, we need our protein powder. We loaded it up and then we got back to our first warehouse. And we probably had to unload it by hand. Our first warehouse was

we didn't have loading docks. It was just like ground level bays. So we had to offload all these boxes and pallets off the truck onto the ground and then rolled them into the warehouse. And at that time, we also couldn't afford a forklift

or a pallet stacker. So in order to get inventory on the second level of racking, we had a ladder and so on the ladder with the boxes. John would be, he was like the guy that would always move the boxes all around and like they were heavy boxes

stacking them on top of the the shelving units. Yeah, we We got shelving, a few shelving kids, but never got a forklift. We could afford it. Actually, I remember the first time we ever had like a whole shelving rack of three aisles. And it was filled up for the first time. And I remember a picture of that. There was nothing cooler than that, too.

That was when we first moved to this unit, this warehouse we're in now 360, when we were only in 360. And we had that whole first racking filled. I was like, that's insane to see. It was like 30. palettes it looked like on wall. And that was pretty cool to see. I mean, I talk about this a lot, but I learned this from Ben Francis, the CEO and founder of Jim Shark.

He says there's three things to determine the success of a company. It's product, brand, and people. Now, product is something that we focused on building the right way, the right formulas, the right flavors since day one. Like product has always been my baby And it's always been just at the forefront of starting BPN Brand however is something we had to learn how to build That wasn't intuitive necessarily In the beginning like I had a vision for brand

But I had to learn how to build brand and community and engagement And tell a story People is something that You know we have focused on since the beginning and I would argue and say that that is what has allowed us to grow at the rate and sustainability that we have, bringing the right people and the right team, putting them in the right seat to operate in their role. And as people who are bought into what we're doing, mission, the vision, our values, the lifestyle, the community. If you focus on those three things, product, brand, and people, you can be a great organization.

Not just a good company, but a great organization. Definitely. So I kind of want to hand it off to you, like, over these last nearly 11 years now, this August will be celebrating 11 years since the business was started, which is crazy to think about. You know, it's going to be 20 years before you know it. What is one of the greatest lessons you've learned through this time? Even in the beginning when I was doing like a bunch of the admin jobs,

whether it's shipping out orders consistently or responding to customer service consistently as in every morning tickets are getting answered you know you want to put your yourself in the customer shoes like I don't want to go to a website order something send them an email and never hear back

it's like being able to just consistently bring it every day I think it builds it up to a macro level those micro wins are built up to a macro win at the end of the day and I mean I see it with everything even employees too just staying consistent you can come out hot for a couple months but then lose that kind of that work ethic

I've seen this in a lot of people actually that I've worked with outside of BPN over the last couple years is people get really excited about this new thing yeah or like you say you'll always hear people say

I want to do it because it's my passion but then like they'll go do it they'll do it for two months and then they say, oh, it's not my passion anymore. Then go do something else. Yeah. I've met so many people who have had this burning, hot desire to start something and they're passionate about it.

And they get started. They're two, three, six months in. They realize, oh, it's not all like bright lights and glamorous all the time. And they get bored and they lose some of that passion and energy. So they go and they start something else. their focus shifts elsewhere. And I've met so many people who jump from thing to thing to thing to thing. And they're looking back 10 years later thinking, well, this just isn't for me.

I just haven't gotten lucky. No, you haven't focused on one thing for long enough and been consistent with it because it's not always going to be sexy and fun and engaging and glamorous. But that is the result of just compounding consistency. I think that's the hardest thing, yeah, is just sticking. into it. Well, Preston Bear, baby brother. Did we need any more stories? Any other

I mean, you got any of want to share? The garage door story always comes up. I feel like this is like your favorite. You always want to tell the story. So, I'm going to let you tell the story. Well, I ended at this. Let it rip. But I think I talked about it in your YouTube video. Back in when we first moved to Temple, Texas.

I moved down to Texas. I think I came down with like six or seven grand in my bank account. And obviously we weren't making any money. So I was like, you know, You got to be smart with this money. I'm living at your house for free. You were covering that, so that was good. But I was like, okay, I can use it for groceries, just be smart with it.

And I remember I was vlogging the one day. Middle of the summer day, it was hot outside, like July. And I'm pulling into the driveway. For whatever reason, I would, like, turn the camera off. I shouldn't have been vlogging at the same time anyway. I was, like, messing with the camera. But I must have had something on my mind or whatever. And instead of hitting the brakes, I slay.

slammed onto the gas and absolutely took the entire garage door off, which I was just like, like, it shocked you, like, when it happened and everything. I don't think anyone saw it either, but that thing was absolutely destroyed, and it cost me like $1,000 to fix. And it was like, I was so worried because I was like, this is like 20% of the money I had left. But we got the garage door fixed. I'm sure most of the neighbors probably thought I was like inebriated. Absolutely.

But I was actually sober. and like somehow did this. Actually, to be honest, I didn't, I was driving your truck at the time too, because I didn't have a car, so I was driving his truck that he left while he was in South Korea. And the truck was actually fine, though. To be honest, though, based off the neighborhood I was living at the time, it was probably just a normal day for those people. Seeing someone just slam.

Oh, man. There's another one. Yeah, classic. You know, everyone in that neighborhood had like these beige tan. Yeah. I'm sure HOA was pretty tough. garage doors. I come back home from Korea. There's this massive white garage door.

Cream white garage door that clearly didn't abide to the HLA, but they never said anything and you sold the house. I mean, it was a pretty like loose H-O-A man. My fees were like $100 a quarter. Yeah, they weren't saying too much. That's a good story. That was a good one. There's some other ones that maybe we'll do it on another podcast,

go over some old stories. All right, guys. Thanks for tuning in. that's Preston Bear C-O-O-B-P-N or signing off. Thanks guys.