The Nick Bare Podcast - Archive - Kat Thomas & Josh Holley | BPN's Retail Expansion Strategy

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

Episode #148 Nick sits down with BPN leadership Kat Thomas, CRO, and Josh Holley, CFO, to discuss why BPN is expanding into retail. Even through all the success BPN has experienced, having products on store shelves will be a huge jump for the company. The team explains the decision making and thought process behind BPN's next big move, along with answering questions such as: "What advice would you give your younger self?" and "How much money does Starbucks make from their pumpkin spice drinks?" More Resources: BPN Website - Supplements and Apparel: www.bpnsupps.com Nick’s Website: www.nickbare.com Nick’s Instagram: @nickbarefitness Nick’s Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/barelifenutrition Follow Us On Social Media: Instagram: @thebareperformancepodcast Facebook: The Bare Performance Podcast

Welcome back to another powerful episode of the podcast. I'm your host, Nick Baer, founder and CEO of Bear Performance Nutrition. Every week, we bring you insightful stories, knowledge, and inspiration to help you reach your full potential in life, fitness, and business. If you enjoy the message we're promoting in this podcast, we would greatly appreciate it if you would leave a rating and review on the platform you're listening to. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes. that embody the go one more mindset. All right, ladies and gentlemen, today on the podcast, we have back for another episode, Josh Holly,

Kat Thomas, welcome back. Excited. Thanks for having us. It was such a big hit last time. We had to come back, I guess. People were begging for you guys back. I highly doubt that. It was not the blockbuster we thought it was going to be.

Happy to entertain it, though. So some announcements before we dive in, on October 3rd, we are launching a limited edition special offering pumpkin spice weigh protein powder. This protein has 25 grams of protein per serving. It is certified by informed protein and informed support, which means one, all of our products are tested for banned and prohibited substances. And two, informed protein BPN was actually the first brand to receive the informed protein certification,

which means that our products are tested to ensure they are not amino spiked. And if we say there's 25 grams of protein per serving, there's actually 25 grams of protein per serving. Because if you remember years ago, people were amino spiking their protein powders. So they were telling you there was 25 grams of protein in a scoop. But in reality, there was like 7 grams of protein per scoop. So you were just taking shit. But I can tell you right now, the pumpkin spice, BPNA weight protein, launching October 3rd is one of, if not the best flavors we've ever created.

So are you guys ready for it? I am. Absolutely. On that note, we're going to dive into some fun facts about pumpkin spice. I'm going to quiz you guys. Oh, gosh. How many years do you think that Starbucks has been selling their PSL, their pumpkin spice lattes? 18.

Whoa. You think it goes that far back? I'll take, can I just take the under? I was going to say like 10 to 12, so. Kat, you were very, very close. 19 years. This is their 19th year. I've studied Starbucks a lot in my life.

That's crazy. Well, then let me ask you this another question. How many PSLs does Starbucks sell a year? Average. Oh, God. I don't know. Let's see how many stores they have. I don't know.

This public math is tough. I'm just going to say like 35 million. I have no clue. Cat? It's probably way more than that. I'll go 50 million. I'll take that over. 20 million.

Oh, okay. At least we had millions, right? Yeah, exactly. Because it was like a hundred. At least we didn't go 750,000. The number of commas. Yeah, we'll take that. That's, you know, to put it even into perspective even better,

in a Venti PSL, 470 calories. Oh my gosh. 16 grams of fat, 65 grams of carbs, 63 grams of sugar, and 18 grams of protein. Oh my gosh. 20 million in a pretty tight. How long do you think they run it for like eight weeks, maybe? Maybe.

August 31st to like maybe October 31st. I would say like that's the, that's a lot in a small window. Holy cow. That's insane. You have to think if it's 65 grams, you're looking at like, you're looking at, you're looking at one eighth of a pound, you're looking at a quarter of a cup of sugar, I think that is.

I think if my baking is correct. It's a shit ton of sugar. That's a lot of sugar. You know, I go to Starbucks sometimes in the morning and I pick up a coffee on the way to work. And I do the same thing when I'm grocery shopping too. I'm very judgmental of people's coffee order and their conveyor belt grocery cart

Oh yeah. I feel judged in the grocery store. What do you get? Normal stuff, but you still feel judged. Let's be fair, I don't go to the grocery store a lot. It's a lot of Instacart now, but when I do go, it's definitely, it just you put it on the, you just feel judged as soon as you put it on the thing. Not me.

I'm so proud. I'm very proud. I put that stuff down, I look around like, you see this, this belt? This is what the belt is supposed to look like. I'm like, the belt is all just bags of vegetables and then there's like the loaf of bread at the end. You're like elbowing the guy behind you, like, hey, check this out. Check out this belt. I literally, as I'm putting them on the belt,

I'm making eye contact with people. Like, you see this? Grass fed, grass finished ground beef. I eat that. From New Zealand. You're from New Zealand. Yeah. Yeah.

But when I go to Starbucks too, I'm looking at some of the drinks these people are getting. Oh, yeah. And it's like a smoothie with a loaf of whipped cream on top. I know. Chocolate syrup, caramel syrup. And it's like 6.30 in the morning. Like, do you need that? Do you need that?

Yeah. I think that was the thing. And I don't want to hate it. on Starbucks because, you know, it's obviously we all love Starbucks for the accessibility. I had one in my hand and Tony took it away from me before the episode started. So we're being honest. So we don't want to, just black coffee. I'm boring. Yes, that's acceptable. But we don't want, we don't want to like hate on it. But if you think about it, so much of their revenue comes from like these sugary beverages. It's almost like

they've tricked the consumer into thinking that they're consuming just a coffee. So like they kind of get a get out of jail free card because they're not making it. So they don't like, no, what's actually in it and know it's that it's so bad for them. How do they get away without having to post all the calorie and interest? That's interesting. Like, you would think if they, you know, like, they set the cup out. It had to have, like, the calorie facts on the side. Like, I'm surprised they get away with not having to do that.

It's not on the board or anything. I don't think. It's not on the board. I don't think so. The sugar should be on the board. Because when you're giving a kid a medium caramel for apacheino, you can imagine that thing's like approaching 100 grams of sugar. It's like, you give that to a kid.

It almost needs a warning label. on it honestly. It's like, hey, just so you're aware, like this venty pumpkin spice latte has, I don't know how much you said. 470. That's so much. But the thing is, I honestly, I don't think people realize there's calories in beverages sometimes. I think people associate calories in nutrition with food. Totally. And they'll go order these drinks, but they actually don't think about the calories and the sugar that's in it. It's sneaky. Yeah. You know what would be a really interesting development in society as if in our lifetime, just like California has Prop 65 for heavy metal testing, it'd be remarkable if all of a sudden we had some form of prop,

which had to be a declaration on products that had a certain amount of added sugar. Yeah. Be like, I'm sure it's in the future. Moving on to one more thing, Pumpkin Spice, before we talk about some meat and potatoes of this podcast talking retail and BPN moving into retail. What is your favorite seasonal pumpkin spice? flavored item other than BPN's pumpkin spice weight protein. Kat?

I don't eat a lot of pumpkin spice, honestly. I eat a lot of pumpkin pie if that counts, but during this time of year. But you add pumpkin spice to pumpkin pie. You're supposed to do that? Have you ever made a pumpkin pie? This is not my way. I would just say pumpkin, I would just say, well, one, like truly roasted pumpkin. You know, you can roast pumpkin just like you are squash, right?

So just like olive oil, salt. pepper, that kind of thing. But also pumpkin puree. I think Libby's is probably the leader. I love Libby's. Yeah, I think Libby is an OG. She's been around for a hot minute. But that with, honestly, with oats is really good.

I used to do Libby's pumpkin in overnight oats for the longest time. Yeah, that's a really nice combo because of the consistency. You know, it breaks down like the odiness and it's like a little bit smoother. It becomes a little bit more like a moose. You can do it with coconut milk, some sea sauce. I'll sweeten it with a little like maple syrup if you want some sweetness sweetness in there. Any numbers on that agenda?

I can't add to this. Well, I do have some. We talk numbers. So, I mean, during this time of the year, people add pumpkin spice literally everything. Some of the craziest things I found online, sprouts does pumpkin spice kale chips. Ew. Land of Lakes does pumpkin spice butter spread? Oh, wow.

I bet you that's actually a very popular one. Yeah, I would see that. I was at a wedding two weeks ago, and there was salmon-flavored cream cheese. That's like a, yeah, that's like playing on the New York bagel with locks kind of mentality, but inside is just, that ain't it. Yeah, that just threw me off. That ain't it. There's actually pumpkin spice flavored spam.

We should probably do a spam test one day. Yeah, I'm out on that. If you fry it, I'm in. Have you ever had it? I had it as a kid. My grandma used to make it for us. I don't think I've ever had it. a skillet and like serve it on a sandwich kind of thing, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, I had a roommate in college. He used to eat spam a lot. Yeah, like a frying pan. That's how she did it in a frying pan. Yeah, yeah. There's pumpkin spice cup of noodles. Oh, really?

The craziest one, native, you know, native who does like body washes and deodorant and stuff, they do a pumpkin spice tinted deodorant. No. We got to draw the line somewhere. That makes me sick. I was going to say that, yeah, that'd be a little bit of headache material. Do you want to smell like that? Smelling yourself?

Is anybody? I mean, I walk into the creative's office over here and it smells like, they have like pumpkin spice plug-ins everywhere. Yeah. Funny story. When I first started dating Steph, she was coming to visit my apartment for a weekend. And I was nervous that my apartment smelled like shit. And I was like sweat.

And I bought all these glade plugins and they were apple cinnamon. Oh gosh. And like months later after she came on that trip, she said she came home and everything she had like in her. case and like her clothes and her hair, she could not get the apple cinnamon sent out. You got to go more neutral, like a linen or, you know, ocean spray or something a little bit. Sea breeze. Yeah, sandalwood.

Yeah. Cedar. Well, you got her, so, you know. Apple cinnamon. Well, with that being said, you know, we're launching our limited edition pumpkin spice weight protein October 3rd. You get all the protein without the added sugar. You don't have to put it in your armpits or down your pants or spread it on your

your bread. It's everything you need and nothing that you don't. Now, diving into retail. And I think this is an opportunity to really educate people on why we're moving into retail now, the reality of retail, and why it's not what most people think. I think a lot of people think that, one, it's really easy to just get your products in shelves.

and if your products are on shelves, you're already successful. And if you walk into a store and you see anything on a shelf, whether it's a grocery store or a supermarket or, you know, like a GNC in supplement space or vitamin shop, you automatically assume this brand's killing it. They're crushing it. But a whole lot more matters than just that. So I'd love to really dive into why retail now.

And Kat, if you want to take a lead on our retail approach going after Texas and specialty grocery, specifically why as opposed to just going mass shotgun blast nationwide. It's a great question. So the tricky part about retail is if you jump into retail too soon, then you're on shelves and there's no awareness that the products exist. So that's where, you know, grassroots approach, like getting in stores. demoing, really selling your soul to the consumers who are walking past your demo booth and saying, like, we created this product, please try it, please buy it. So sometimes companies will launch into

retail, but there's no awareness that the product exists. So they struggle to actually have velocity or sell through on the products. And then there's something like BPN, which we have a tremendously loyal following an absolute awesome community. And so the unique thing that strategy that we're using is this idea that we can launch in regional growth. and we can utilize our social ecosystem and drive them to store to really launch trial and really prove velocity in retail. And so the main approach was sticking with regional was BPN's foundation is a Texas brand. You know, our roots are Texas. Nick, you know, move down here right after you started the company. And so it seems really fitting to lean into kind of central

market in HEB, where everyone's favorite grocery store is central market in HEB in Texas, and we would love nothing more than for everyone's favorite supplement brand in Texas to be BPN. So our approach has been, let's start kind of in our backyard where we can actually support the launch, we can get into the store, we can meet the managers, meet the people stocking shelves, and we can drive our kind of social ecosystem in store to prove velocity. And one thing to really point out is, like, we understand that e-com sales and performance doesn't necessarily translate to retail. One of the things that we've kept saying as we're pitching these retailers, you know, we pitched central market a few months ago. Now we're in all central market stores in Texas.

We pitched H.E.B a few weeks ago. We're waiting to hear back from HEB, but hopefully we're going to be in all HEB stores in the spring of 2023. but just because we're performing well on e-com direct-to-consumer doesn't necessarily mean we're going to perform at the same level in success in retail because, well, a few reasons. One on our e-com site, we don't necessarily have competition. If someone comes to BPNSups.com, they're determining if they want to buy pre-workout, protein, greens and reds, meal replacements, field bars, all within the same brand. But if they're going to, say, an H.E.B., a central market, any other shields that carries BPN products,

now they have all these other competitors to choose from. And we're trying to compete in retail against competitors in our same category. That as well as we're trying to convert a possibly cold audience rather than a warm audience. So people are coming to central market, HEBs, and we're trying to convert them into buyers into customers. You might have never heard of the brand as a whole. If you're coming to the BPN website, you've probably at least heard of BPN.

It might be familiar, it might be warm. If you're walking into a retail supermarket shelf, you're probably cold and you might not have ever heard of BPN. So we are humbling ourselves going into retail with the approach of now we're going back to zero. We're going back to the foundation. We're starting from square one. We have to build the brand again in a retail space.

Now, there's obviously crossover. There's some of our e-com customers who are going to go buy our products in retail. But I think if you go into it with that approach and that mindset, you're setting yourself up for failure. We have to go into it of we're building from the ground up starting. all over again. So from a financial kind of lens, why retail now, why are we ready now and why

haven't we be ready or why weren't we ready in the past? Yeah, I think if you're going to scale a business like BPN, you know, retail's inevitable. You know, if you have the aspirations that you have and, you know, the lofty goals that we have, you know, down the road with BPN, it's only a matter of time. So we're kind of at that point, right? We've done really, really well on e-com. And part of this is convenience for our customers, too. Like, we know they're in central market. We know they're in H-EB, and there's a convenience factor that they can just grab it when they're there, even though it may not be as good of a margin to us. There is that aspect of it, too. Like, it's just a convenience factor for our customers. But you want to, Kat kind of touched on this. Like, in a perfect

world, you want to wait as long as possible to go into retail because it is a gamble. And we're doing everything we can to increase the probability of success in retail by waiting, by, you know, requesting brand blocks as opposed to individual products, by making sure it's retailers that fit the brand ethos like central market and HEB that can complement what we're trying to do and make sure we can ship direct the store. We're doing everything you possibly can to increase the probability of success. However, retail is a gamble. And if like all else, equal. Ecom typically represents higher margins, more predictability, more control, whereas retail represents lower margins, bigger bets on inventory, and just comes with risk. And so if you take that risk or

that gamble too early and you don't absolutely nail it, like the margin for error, if you go early into retail is very, very thin. And what happens if it goes wrong is that you end up with way too much inventory. You end up with no cash. You end up with no way to continue to fund the business. And that's why you really don't want single customer or, you know, customer concentration risk too early. And so we just weren't ready. BPN wasn't quite ready up until, I would say, you know, middle later later part of this year. And the analysis that you do at a very high level is if you look at your sales mix, right, we really are trying to. to thread the needle of, let's say, 60 to 65% of our sales through D to C long term, our website,

direct to consumer, call it 15% retail wholesale and 15, 20% Amazon. That's like the perfect mix. Once D to C becomes less than two-thirds of your sales mix, your margins absolutely get impacted. So we were at a point to where we had enough volume in D to C to where we could turn on retail in a meaningful enough way, but not be too exposed. So we were trying to balance all of those things. The last thing I'll say is you kind of think about D to C versus retail. It's not as simple as to say, you know, retail is lower margins and D to C is higher. And I think the part that gets missed in that equation a lot of times is the cost to acquire

a customer on the D to C side, right? So if you sell a product for $100 on your website and let's say you have $60 a profit on that, but you're spending $50 to acquire the customer, net of that acquisition cost, you're making $10 on the product. and you look at retail and you're like, man, I can't sell my product for $100 there. I've got to sell it for 50. You have the same $40 product cost, your profits 10 because you don't have that customer acquisition cost. So what's happened with a lot of DTC brands more recently is that as customer acquisition cost starts to rise,

it does kind of make the idea of retail seem more palatable in context when you're weighing the two. We get the benefit of a very sticky, loyal crowd like Kat talked about to where even though we have to spend money to acquire a customer, or they come back. And so that does kind of make e-coms still far more profitable than retail. But all of those things go into it. And we've had a lot of conversations about this. And like I said, we're just trying to do everything we can to make sure we don't jeopardize the foundation

of the business and give ourselves the best probability of success in retail. So if success isn't just being on shelves in retail and just securing these accounts, so when you secure the account, that's just your... your ticket in. It's like, okay, you can come in our doors, but now you've to perform. What does success look like in retail? Because it is different from, like, the data we measure from e-com, direct-to-consumer from our website, that data from a performance metric is very different from a retail performance metric. What does success look like for retail? How do you measure

that? The short answer of that is velocity. So number of units you sell per skew per week per store across all of those stores. That's the really short answer. But the thing that's interesting about retail is if you look at our website and let's say that the customer that comes there is the demographic is 25 to 34 years old. When you go to retail, the demographic might change, right? Our parents might go into retail and be like, oh, this looks like a quote. brand, but I don't know anything about it. So one of the challenges of retail is there's actually a level of education that has to happen. And with D to C, the BPN team and Nick has done, everyone's done a really great job of educating the customer and people have been

along the journey with Nick and they understand where these different products slot into their life on a daily basis. But it's important for us to understand that not all customers at the retail level already know that. They don't necessarily know where an electrolyte product might fit into their life. They don't necessarily know where a way protein might fit into their life. They don't necessarily understand or know, you know, how hard this team works to ensure that the ingredients that go into that field bar are whole food ingredients and not a bunch of added nonsense. So I'd say there's a twofold answer to that question. One is the velocity of the units that you're selling in each store. But then two, it's raising awareness of the products to a different

customer base and educating that customer base on why they need these products in their daily life and empowering them with that information to then go and tell people in their world. And that's like the power of retail is if someone comes in, they're cold, they don't know it. But if we can get that product to jump off the shelf at them, they try one product. They have a great experience. And they come back and they buy a second. And then they tell their daughter, they tell their son, they tell their aunt, they tell their uncle, whoever it may be. And then that's when you really reap the benefit of word of mouth. And it becomes super easy for them to say, hey, you can just pick it up at your local central

market. So I think for us, that's where we're really trying to stay humble and start with like a grassroots approach in retail, knowing that the success that we have found in e-com is not guaranteed in retail. And so we have to be in these stores. We have to be educating the people on the ground at the store level who are stocking the shells because they inevitably become BPN's representation on the ground. If we educate, you know, Sam who stock shelves at Central Market in Lover's Lane, for instance. I don't know if Sam actually works there, but let's say he does. There might be a Sam. There might be a Sam. Sounds like a great guy. Sam, if you're there right now, you've got a $200 gift card from BPN.

But if we go in and we empower Sam and we say we educate him on all the products and whatnot, we give him samples, we say try it for yourself, let us know what your experience is. Sam has such a great experience as now he works for Central Market, but now he's an advocate for BPN. So when someone taps Sam on the shoulder and says, hey, you know, I'm looking for something to help me, you know, like build muscle mass and whatnot, post-recovery shake, things like that. What would you recommend?

Sam's going to say, oh, you know what, we've got this new problem. product BPN. And the more we can do that and put in that effort at the ground level, that consistent effort, that's what compounds over time. And so that's kind of one of the approaches that we're taking for retail. What happens if you, you know, you get a P.O. for in HGB's case north of 400 stores and in United States and Mexico and you're a brand that's not ready and they say we want you in all 400 plus stores

and you launch you don't have the people you don't have the education you don't have the manpower to facilitate that and you fail velocity. What happens to that brand? I mean that's like a very common thing in retail for CPG brands is it's too big too fast

And to your point at the beginning, you were like, the perception is that when a product's on the shelf, that they've made it. But that's not it. You have to get on the shelf and you have to consistently sell. And the challenge is when you're getting a brand off the ground in retail, if you don't have that field marketing out there, if you don't have that demo squad,

if you don't have those sales representatives supporting those launches, it is possible that the product is going to sit on the shelf because there are so many products for customers to choose from. and it's so hard to just differentiate yourself when you're simply just sitting on a shelf. And I would argue that that's why we've seen traditionally with like CPG, we've seen this movement towards this kind of poppy-like color,

these like fluorescence and these pinks and these yellows because these are all marketing team's efforts to make something literally pop off the shelf so that people engage with it for the one, two, three seconds, pick it up and at least try it. I think too, like in full transparency, like what we haven't done in retail says as much about us as opposed to what we have done, right? We were approached by GNC.

I don't know if we can talk about this. Yeah, we can talk about it. It was earlier this year. And they made a very, very large offer on a, you know, Monster PO nationwide. Very attractive. Yeah. And I think five years ago you would have jumped all over that and been like, we're going to do it. Even though you wouldn't necessarily know how you're going to deliver on it, you'd say, yeah, we'll do it.

then you'd go try to figure it out. And I think had we done that, one, we weren't ready for that. And two, there is a lot of thought that has to go into where you position your product. And not to disparage GNC, but that wasn't the message or the affiliation we were looking for for the brand. We kind of vision and vision BP and a little bit of a different, you know, set, right? Because you do get typecasted if you go into a GNC early and that's your first retail account. There's no coming back from that. And so we turned that down and it was a big, big offer.

But what I was worried about in that scenario and where this can go wrong is they put this massive PO in front of you. The first thing you do is you call your manufacturing partner and you start placing massive purchase orders yourself. And you know that there is a 8, 12 week lead time on that. So let's say we launched in all these GNCs and because we were spread so thin, we couldn't mobilize and we couldn't show up at, you know, 1,600 stores. That's just physically impossible. and we didn't have the sell through. Well, we've already placed purchase order. So GNC would say, hey, it's not selling.

So now we're going to have to discount the product to move it. And they push that discount back on you. If it's not moving and they have to discount the product, you eat it as the brand, not GNC. Right? And there's all these hidden things when you think about retail margin. Like you can talk about margin on the surface, but there's all these other little things like trade spend and rebates

and damage products and sales and things that kick back to the company. at the end of the day, it would be PN at the end of the day. And so if it didn't work in GNC, you can't really recover from that in a number of ways. One, you're already committed to these purchase orders you've made, you know, on your side. They're coming and they don't care. They don't give a shit that GNC, it wasn't selling there.

You're still obligated to take that product, okay? And now you've lost a massive forecast, you know, forecasted revenue and you're stuck with it. And then from like a building a business to sell standpoint, point because, you know, we want to sell this business one day, clearly. A failed retail launch is like a scarlet letter. If you try to go to retail and it doesn't work, then people, whoever ends up trying to buy BPN years down the road would look at that and see that as an indication as to your ability to work in all retail. Whether that's fair or not, that is ultimately what happens. And so

you're judged very harshly in the private equity and strategic, you know, acquire market as to your success in retail. So when you when you weighed that G&C move and you're like, okay, there are some benefits to it, but here's all the things that could go wrong. And the probability of success is relatively low if we're being honest. Is that worth all the things that could fall out from that? The answer was no. And in hindsight, it seems like an easy decision when you put it that way and we see what's happened with Central Market in HEB, which is the antithesis of a 1600 store PO from G&C. But that was a tough decision, you know, and I think that says a lot. about what we're trying to do. I think what we also have not done is we haven't put single

products on shelf. I think that's a very interesting insight for a lot of people if they're considering retail. And the messaging around this has been very careful. And you and Kat have been the ones to shepherd this message and you've done it in a fantastic way. But it's like, hey, we need a brand block for this to work. We're not saying we deserve the brand block, but if you're going to take the product, we're pretty certain that if you just stick our weight protein on a shelf with all the other way proteins to your point about competition, it's going to get lost in the sea. Like, we know that. We don't think we're so good that we can overcome that. But because of the product set that we have, you know, the brand block can really resonate with people. And so we've been, that's probably kept us out of some retail stores because a brand block

is a very, very, you can speak to this, very aggressive request and something that is not typical to get. But we're waiting to make sure that if we go in, we can get the brand block. We can get these relationships with people that, you know, improve the brand. So there's been a lot that's gone into our thought process around where, when and how to go into retail. But this is also how we're leveraging our social media platforms and followings where, you know, previously I said, we understand that social audience and e-com doesn't necessarily translate directly to retail. But what we're doing is we're leveraging our social following and our customer base to get these.

brand blocks and what a brand block is if you know we're in all central market stores which is it's 10 stores right now if we get into heb which we're going to hear back in the next couple weeks that's hundreds of stores could be hundreds of stores but in central market if you walk into those stores right now it's in a brand block so we have like an end cap of an aisle and all of the bpn products and skews are positioned, so it's just BPN products. You see our greens, our reds, our creatine, our protein, our pre-workout. Like you walk past, it's, oh, here's the whole BPN product offering. And it's not just like you said, one product here and there, like our protein with the proteins,

our greens with the greens, our multivitamins with the multivitamins. And we have this really good looking brand block. It's so cool. It is super cool. But we've been able to activate our community. said, go to Central Market, buy the products, please take a photo in front of the brand block, share it. And people have been going nuts. And like, what has the response been from Central Market? The velocity is phenomenal, that the brand's doing great, which is really cool to see.

And I think to that point, though, one of the unique things about BPN that other brands don't have is traditionally when a CPG or sports nutrition brand launches, they launch in a single category. Now, we're what's deemed the healthy living category of call it Central Market in HB or for HB to be sports nutrition. But BPN has a number of products, be it pre-workouts, be it intra-workout, be it post-workout, sleep support, foundational health. So the really unique thing about BPN is whereas other companies are just launching kind of a flagship product. Think of it as if, like, today, BPM was just like, we only have flight and we're going to go and try and launch flight into retail. It'd be tough. But the power of the brand is that people consume these products throughout their entire day. You know, they wake up and they have their reds and greens. They have their pre-workout

before they work out. They have their intraflight while they're working out. They have way protein or vegan protein post-workout. They're having sleep support at night. They're supplementing with multivitamin omega and joints during the day. So the goal is let's just give them all those products up front. Let's let them shop the set. And over the course of time, our hope is that they start to engage with more and more products because they add value to their lives at different points in their lives. And that was kind of what we've been telling these buyers. And it's something that we can say authentically because we do consume all of these products. But it's something that I think super unique to BPN because we're not just selling a protein powder. We're not just selling a pre-workout.

We're not just selling a bar. We're selling like a holistic solution to people's health on a daily basis. One thing I want to comment on too is the way that you and Nick kind of approach this whole thing and we had conversations about this cat is we were working with a broker before. And I think a lot of companies that are earlier in their life trying to get into retail think you have to go with a rep group or a broker. And this is. Well, it's funny because last night I posted about us trying to get into HEB and we asked for people to support. Essentially last night I made a post on Instagram and I said, hey, please go to HEB's website. I shared the link and do a product request for BPN because we essentially want to hit it from all angles.

We want H.E.B. to know we want to partner. We want to build a relationship with you and we want to be your best selling health and performance supplement brand in all of your stores. And the response I got from a few people, not many, was, hey, I'm a broker. You need me to get in. And this whole kind of gives some color to what you're about to say. And sometimes you do. like we have a secret weapon in cat who's you know been through the retail gauntlet before um but i would say if you sit in front of a buyer no one is going to be more passionate about that product and trying to get that product and then the founder right um and if you rely on a broker what happens is they go and they're pitching you know three or four other products in the same meeting and they have

these existing relationships and it kind of you know it's hard for one there's only so many times that they can show up and say okay this one's different right like that the only worked so much. But like when you and Kat, and we decided not to, you know, we had a broker, we ended that relationship. We talked about, you know, hiring another rep group and ultimately, you know, and Kat was wise to think this way was, let's just do it ourselves. You have built this brand off of authenticity off of doing it yourself and just being honest and transparent about what you want to do. Let's just go tell that story to the buyers. And again, the common theme you'll pick up here with BPN's retail strategy is that may mean that.

that we grow retail slower and we sacrifice some growth, but the relationships that we do land, it's going to be people that understand what we're trying to do and there's a deeper relationship there. So that was a really interesting observation for me to watch, you know, a stiff arm, a rep group and a broker, which felt like the instinctive thing to do and then watch you guys go into these meetings and absolutely crush, you know, and I think it's just because they could sense the excitement and authenticity of what you guys and what we're all trying to accomplish. Well, kind of going back to what we mentioned before of, you know, there's certain times and situations in life and in business where you get presented to this opportunity and you say

yes and you make it work. There's a lot of those and I've done a lot of those. However, this was one of those where with GNC, for example, we could have said yes and then worked our asses off to try and make it work. But the risk was so great that if we didn't. make it work and we failed, we are marked as a failed brand in retail. And you don't come back from that. Correct.

It might take years, decades to come back from that. So our retail approach is very intentional. It's very deliberate and it's very strategic. And right now it's shield stores and at central market stores and hopefully soon it is HEB stores. But it is very intentional and strategic. And our goal is that I want to build this. relationship. I want Central Market to say, oh, BPN, that team, that crew, they're all in.

They will come here. They will do demos. Tomorrow we're going to do a demo at Central Market, North Lamar of Austin for three hours, and we're activating our community. And we're going to show Central Market, hey, like, we're in this together. We're here to show you that our community, our team is going to show up. They're going to buy BPN products while they're in the store, but they're also going to shop your store and they're going to buy other brands and other products to support your entire retailer. So we decided not to go mass and to go concentrated and to build slow.

But when you build slow and you build it right, that's also how you build a reputation. And we want to have a great reputation that is successful. Yeah, totally great. Yeah, that's like a big, I don't know what it came to mind yesterday on my run, but this idea of when you build loyalty, you don't need hype. And I think that that's something

that BPN does incredibly well. It's like we don't need to just hype up every single experience because the foundation is there, the loyalty is there, the community is there, the team is there. And that's something that we're really excited

to show central market. And I think the unique position and, you know, it's great that BPN is in this position. But when we've been able to go into these meetings and talk with these buyers, we've been in, we've been able to go in and know, hey,

we don't need this, we want this, but we want it to be a great partnership. And if we don't feel like it's going to be a great partnership or we don't feel like we can get the economics to work to ensure that BPN continues to be profitable, to ensure that we can keep this entire awesome team on payroll, then it's probably not the right time or not the right relationship for BPN. And this has been something that, you know, I've been very, very, very transparent with these buyers on like the margins that we need to hit, the prices that we need to hit, ask them, you know, to also be very transparent about the margins that they need and that they want to ensure

that we can continue to grow within retail. And that's actually been really well received because we both have presented that transparency up front. So we can kind of back into these prices and then ask ourselves like, does this work and is this the best decision for BPN at this at this juncture? And I think the, to Josh's point, D to C, you know, you have this increasing customer acquisition cost. Well, retail, you know, we're in a very beneficial position that we're shipping direct to central market as it stands. But what a lot of people don't understand is when a product's on the shelf,

all that money is not going into BPN's pocket. So this isn't true of central market, and it might not be true of HEB, but if we were ever to go into any other retailers, we would most likely be selling to a distributor. The distributor would then be selling to the store, and then the store would then be selling to the consumer. And so what ends up happening is your margins get crushed along the way.

And so we have to be very, very careful to ensure that, yeah, it'd be great to be in more stores, but we don't want to do it and sacrifice margin and profitability of the business. Yeah, Wegmans is a real-life example. Like we're having to go through UNFI, like if we're going to go that route and we're having real-time discussions about they only want to take a handful of products and we have to go through UNFI and it's only a certain number of stores like, you know, do we want to do that? It's not, we would love to be in Wegmans. Don't get me wrong. Like, that's a perfect, you know, group to affiliate with fantastic company. It would be a great retail partner in the

Northeast, but there's all these things that come along with it. And it's so it's just like, I think the best purchase retail is just like, it's like delayed gratification. The longer you can wait, the more you compress that spring and the bigger the spring gets to where once you're in there, you can take the top off of it. And that's definitely been the approach. Well, kind of turning the page in this conversation in regards to margins. And if you kind of start sacrificing some margins to get into some of these retailers, how does it impact EBTA? So if we can break down what EBTA actually is,

so then we can describe how we think from a financial perspective of scaling and growing a business, but still maintaining healthy EBDA. Yeah, and that's the really difficult balance, right? So EBDAs an acronym for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. It's a very long way of saying, like, what's your normal operating income? Like, cut through all the accounting bullshit. What's your operating income? And that's really what we kind of drive the business towards.

I know we've talked about this previously, but we try to drive the business towards, you know, call it mid-teens, EBITDA margins. And we've been able to very much control that because it's predominantly D to C, direct a consumer right now and the cost of customer acquisition, you know, is the lever that we kind of control to keep that EBITA margin intact. But once you start going into retail, again, all else equal, retail margins are lower, especially when you have a distributor in the middle of the relationship. And so going back to the sales mix that I talked about, you have to have a very good handle on your mix, right? And I think that what we've learned more recently, like if you're, you know,

I kind of put myself in the shoes of entrepreneurs that might be listening to this. Like there was an old adage, I say old, even five, six years ago, this was the belief. In order to hit a big home run and sell a business for $200, $300, $300 million, whatever, you know, you got to be 50-50 D to C and retail or even 60-40, you know, retail and D to C. And I think that led a lot of businesses to try to get into retail too early. And the only way to really do that because margins are so low, Not only our EBDA margins low. And remember, EBDA is like a, it's a backward looking, how is your operating income.

It is not necessarily a proxy for your cash flow. The bigger way on cash flow is your inventory and how you manage purchase orders and how far in advance you have to pay for them and all that stuff goes into cash. So even more important than the impact to EBITA is the suck of cash and inventory that retail requires, especially when you're growing. And this adage of like, hey, it's got to be 50. if you want to hit a big home run, led a lot of folks to try to get into retail sooner, try to raise money just to support a retail launch, try to take on a lot of debt just to support

a retail launch. That's not necessarily required anymore. We've heard this from folks in the industry that that 50-50 mantra is not a requirement anymore. It'd be great to see, but it's not a requirement. So we're turning on retail slowly and we're trying to manage that EBITDA margin. And more importantly, trying to manage cash. You know, we don't have any debt on the business. That's a very, like, strict discipline that we've all kind of adhered to. Um, that is going to restrict your ability to grow quickly in retail. There's no question about it. So it's threading the needle on taking on enough retail to where it doesn't overwhelm our total mix, right? It stays in that 15, 20% category. It doesn't stress cash. We're not betting on too much inventory to where if something went wrong with

one retail partner, the whole ship goes. down, we're not going to do any of that. But it's very easy to do that if you take the bait on a, you know, 1600 store G&C purchase order, right? So you're trying to thread all those needles when you're considering when and how fast and how much retail to go after. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently is one, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

and the amount of people that we've interviewed and talked to, brokers, sales reps, they always over promise under deliver. And there's been so many times that we've heard something that someone would come in and say they could do this for the business. And I can visualize it in my head right now. I would go to Preston. I'd say, yo, this person just told me this. We're about to change the game.

We're about to blow up. Yeah. And it always sounded too good to be true, and it was. Yeah. And there's a lot of things in life and in business that you can buy. And you can get from point A to point B just by buying that or investing in it. But there's also a lot of things that have to be built. You cannot buy what needs to be built.

And over the last decade, we've built a brand. A brand is not bought. It is not created. A brand is built. A product is created. a brand is built. So I think that we're in this position now to prove success in retail

because we have an organic social media following. We have a tribe, a true tribe and community, people who support and want to represent the brand. Clear example last night when I went on my Instagram story and I said, guys, I need your help.

I need you to follow this link. Please go to the H.E.B. contact us page, select product request and submit BPN. We need help. We want to attack this from so many angles. And the response was amazing. So many screenshots, hundreds of screenshots of screenshots of their submission and DM saying, like, you guys have given us so much, this is the least we can do.

That's awesome. We're going to show up. And, I mean, I got goosebumps just thinking about the interaction and the community and tribe that's been built. And when you build something like that, it is not overnight. It takes years and years and years. That is trust, that is respect.

That is loyalty. Loyalty is everything. And we have now the product. We have the people. We have the brand. This is the perfect opportunity for us to leverage what we have built to prove success in retail.

But again, we're being intentional, we're being strategic, and we're being deliberate. I think the people part internally is important. And I think a big piece of our confidence, the three of us and going in this retail path is the guys out back do a fantastic job. Like if we didn't think we could fulfill on time when needed, because that's another thing.

Like if you land that account and you're not able to deliver and have products show up when it's supposed to, that can ruin a retail relationship very quickly. But we were confident that we were going to appear buttoned up to central market and hopefully H.E.B. And a lot of that confidence stems from the guys in the back to, a really good job. We've been throwing a lot at them and they've been able to keep up with all these these new retail channels and I think that's been a core reason why we felt comfortable kind of going

that route to you need that in place before you jump in too fast. Well Kat and I went to pitch H-EB in San Antonio a few weeks ago. I think we should dive into that that experience. Yeah. It's me, Kat, Yoli went and was filming. That is what truly like fills my cup. that part of the business and that experience because you're going into something, which makes it feel like startup again, like ground zero of I need to perform. We need to sell this because this could change everything for us. So we were jamming out the tunes on the way there, like getting hyped up. I felt like I was in like high school sports again.

What song was that? Y'all sent me and I was like, this is Vegas. Vegas by Doja Cat. Yeah. What was funny is we were driving up and we were supposed to meet the rep who was taking us to the meeting. And I was saying like, yeah, we'll pull up. She was going to get in the truck with us. We'll blare this music and not say anything.

So we're lost. You're going to put the rep in your truck. We were going to put the rep in the truck. We said it would be so funny if she just like happened to get in the truck. If she happened to the truck. And then sure enough. Did she get in? We're lost on the campus and we can't figure out where we're going.

And we're blaring like. Yeah. P. Diddy, Doge Cat, all of this, just, like, hype up stuff. Biggie. And I look through my left and I see this lady running to our truck and she had a H.E.B. name tape on. She's like, can I hop in with you guys? I'll show you where it's at. To unlock the doors. I quickly turned the volume down. Turn like Doge Cat off. Sat up straight.

Like, buttoned up. Like, yes, ma'am, we will go wherever you want. And we went to the meeting and we pitched like the BPN story. And those are like the moments where you're just pouring everything you have out. I want you to understand the DNA that is in this brand. And we really want to build a relationship. This is mutual. Like we know we need HEB to grow and scale. But we also know you need BPN to have a really good performing health and performance supplement company in your stores.

We need to do this together. and it was a great visit. Yeah, it was a great experience. I think the line that was so telling to me was one point she's looking at, and we make decks for these meetings, and sometimes people like to stick to the deck, and sometimes they just start kind of asking you questions, and it goes off the cuff a little bit.

And, you know, we got to the point where, you know, we were talking about operational rigidity. And this goes back to what we were talking about. If, you know, if you try to go into retail too big, too fast, pull the rug from under your feet. Like you place too many purchase orders, you get in over water, you know, you crush EBITA, all of those things.

And we were talking about operational rigidity and we were talking about kind of revenue of the business and we were talking about active customers and 12-month retention and all of those numbers. She kind of looked up and she was like, where are you guys been? Brown Rock. And that was really telling to me

because I think for the first time I finally realized and, you know, we all talk about this, this idea of running a profitable business versus leaning into kind of venture money and super high growth. Yeah. And I don't know if it's a personality thing, it's a culture thing. It's just, you know, maybe that's why we all get along so well together. But, you know, based on that comment, it told me there's so many businesses that are coming in here that don't necessarily have like the numbers and the team and the operational rigidity to support this, but they're coming in and they're basically saying, like, take anything I can get. And that's the best thing about being able to go into these meetings is we're able to

confidently say, like, hey, we would love to be your best performing sports nutrition brand, and we would love to partner with HEB, and it would be a huge part of our identity as a Texas-based brand. But at the same time, like, if you don't think it's the right time, then that's okay too. And I don't think a lot of brands are in that position that they can advocate for themselves in that regard. Well, to answer the question, where have we been? Yeah, where have you been, Nick? Head down. Yeah, let me give a little perspective on that.

So right now we're doing this rebrand for our labels to prepare for a very successful retail launch and experience. So we're working with this company called Interact Brands. It's like a nine-month process of brand discovery and strategy and creative discovery. and then we'll have our new labels created. We're working very closely with them. They're great partners. It's a great experience. And they just presented us this past week,

the BPN strategy before going to the creative process. And the one thing they said BPN is is genuinely driven. 100%. So where have we been? We've been head down. Fucking doing shit. Driving and doing this and not talking about it. Exactly.

So it's like, Everyone wants to start a business and they want to raise their hand and say, look at me, I got a business. Or raise money. That's what they raise their hand on. Raise their hand to raise money. Yeah. Give me money.

Yeah. And we've been genuinely driven, head down, building in the past 12 months, it's the first time we've actually lifted our head up and says, oh, there's a bigger industry out here and more opportunity than we thought. Let's go explore it and take it over. Hey, I think it'd be interesting to hear you. I'm kind of fascinated by Fort Worth Central Market. And the idea of somebody going into Central Market

and putting flight and endo pump in their cart, like if you follow the space and you kind of know Central Market, that's a really interesting experiment or result of an experiment. And I think it kind of speaks to how the consumer is changing and how they think about the space and this whole hybrid athlete. I think it would be interesting to hear your perspective on that and why someone at Central Market might be picking up flight and endopump and what that says about, you know,

our core customer and how it's shifting a little bit. I think about this a lot. Well, I think the industry has changed a lot in the last 10 years. You know, I started the brand in 2012. Supplements were viewed as sketchy, untrustworthy, dangerous, and made in your, you know, parents' bathtub. And there's been some really good brands

and industry leaders, BPN being one of those in the last decade, that has brought light to. This is what manufacturing for supplements actually looks like. We're going to take you to our manufacturing facility and shows you what that looks like. We're going to show you the blending process, the supplier relationship and sourcing process.

We're going to take you to InformSport in Lexington, Kentucky, and show you how our products are tested for banned and prohibited substances. This is the depths at which we test, certify, analyze, and produce products. and this is what we're creating it for. We're creating it to train to be healthier, to improve every aspect of your life. We're not just talking about and showing what we are doing. We are saying, watch us, watch me.

We're going to show you why you should think about supplements in a different way. And the consumer of the last decade has become more educated and informed and interested and curious. They've been doing their own research. They find companies like BPN who are doing things the right way, and they support and change their lifestyle to see how much better they can become. So you have these people now

who maybe used to train and not use supplements because they didn't trust them. Now they train and use supplements because they see the edge that it can provide. They see the benefit that it can help with. And the consumer who used to maybe just focused on health and wellness is now focused on performance

and the consumer who used to just be focused on performance is now thinking about health and wellness. So there's this this bridge that's being filled and fixed between health and performance where they're not independent anymore. They are now parallels in the way that people want to live their life. And supplements help them achieve what they need and want to achieve. Yeah, what's your take? Because you know the natural grocery space. The fact that because Wegman's had the same commentary about like they want performance supplements. And that means different thing to different different things to different people, but just like central market, like they're all kind of like

chasing. They feel like they're behind a little bit on offering quote performance supplements in this natural grocery space because maybe five years ago that wouldn't make sense. Like what is that? I'm curious of your perspective on that. So I think I was very wrong when I first showed up at BPN. And I love being wrong because it benefits BPN that I was wrong. But when we first had this discussion on retail, it was like, okay, nutrition bars, reds, greens, multivitamin, collagen peptides. Like, those are going to be the retail products. That's the playbook.

Yeah, when we sat in that buyer meeting in Dallas with Central Market, and the first word that came out of her mouth was creatine. It still gives me chills thinking about it. I was like, I am so wrong about this. Right. And, you know, thankfully, we, you know, we had presented the entire line. We presented, you know, the performance silo and the endurance silo

and kind of health and wellness silo. but the buyer was so much more interested in the performance products and then wanted a foundation of health and wellness but was very into the performance products. And I think that I think that I got it really, really wrong in that the consumer is definitely evolving. And then I even think, and we had this discussion, I think back to myself as like a college athlete. And I was even joking around with Nick. I was like, we need to go back to university and I'm going to go and run. the mile test and the 800 and the beat test in my 60 meter with like the current kids there and

I'm going to beat everyone and I'm going to be better today than I was when I was in college for four years as an athlete and I think a big part of that is one how I fuel my body two how I train and three how I supplement and I'm I can say this because I was someone who in college I I never really touched a supplement with the exception of maybe like a multivitamin that was more so just delicious than it was probably helping me. Flintstones? Yeah, something like that. Maybe the Ollie, the red one.

But, you know, and then I've come over into this world of, no, there is a place for these products, especially like for me, a Reds and Greens products, ensuring you're getting those micronutrients. Strong joints is a great run. Great one with all the running. Peak sleep. Like, I don't do well with melatonin. So that like flipped the book for me for sleeping.

And so I think selfishly, I can use this analogy, but just as me, you know, my mentality has evolved into supplementation, and I'm your traditional health and wellness consumer, I think a lot of other consumers' mentality in regards to supplementation is evolving as well. And their training is evolving. Yeah. Right?

I mean, you've been kind of the, one of the pioneers, let's just call it, and kind of this hybrid. I'm going to say, what does that mean? I was the pioneer. I'm going to own it right now. I was the pioneer of the hybrid athlete. What does that mean?

Like, why is that, how does that play into all this? It's interesting. BPN is a challenger brand. Yeah. We challenge people, and we challenge. the industry, the challenging community. Hybrid athlete training

is a challenger style of training. Where it challenges the people who say, you can't run and you can't lift weights together. You can't get stronger and you can't get faster. Again, it's going back to watch us. We're going to challenge that thought process.

We're going to challenge the industry to become better to test more, to certify more, to make better products, to market with integrity. Everything we do is to challenge what is already there. That's what hybrid athlete does. It challenges the thought process of what is actually achievable because nothing is unbelievable. Yeah, I think all it's, I hope people can kind of understand like there's so many nuances that go into when and how and where

to go into retail, right? And all of this sort of matters and is relevant, right? And central market's been in the product set that they asked for has been so eye-opening, I think even to us. And it's really kind of, you know, I don't know. Not that we think about the market differently, but it's definitely, I think if anything, it kind of confirms what we've had our head down, to your point,

trying to build something, you know, that we think is authentic and that other people will resonate with. And I think the performance in central market and the products in particular they're grabbing for

sort of confirms what we've had our head down, you've had your head down building for the last, you know, 10 years or so. Yeah. Can I make one more plug for retail? Send it.

All right, one more plug for retail. The really interesting thing about BPN is we have built out every aspect of the business to support direct to consumer. So, you know, rigid content creation team, digital marketing, customer success, operations, you know, pick and pack, everything like that. The unique thing that I'm excited to explore with retail is, you know, we talked about that rising customer acquisition crossed. And so, you know, we actually start, don't necessarily maybe make money on the first transaction or maybe we do, but it takes time to make money on the transaction. versus in retail, you might actually, you will make money on that first transaction. Retail doesn't come with that customer success component per se. It doesn't come with that digital marketing silo per se. So you can build your book of business without actually having to

your support changes in regards to field marketing teams out on the ground. And then your operations changes rather than having to pack over 30,000 orders a month, it changes to where people are taking pallets, they're labeling it, they're putting on a truck, they wave goodbye, and then you invoice them and it's done. So the overhead that it takes to pack, you know, a hundred, or let's call it, you know, $1,000 of orders versus the overhead it takes to actually sell $1,000 of product to retail are very different numbers. And so what's going to be really interesting to see is we're constantly going to have to do this cost analysis of pick and pack is a 42-cent box and nine cents of packing paper and tape and a label. And, and, you know,

you know, overhead of labor and compare that to pallet shipments, freight, shipping, you know, from Round Rock going to store, and then everything that comes with that. So that's going to be a really interesting model that, because we don't have that built yet, we're going to have to continue to build it, and then we're always going to have to circle back to that kind of EBITDA and understand, you know, what is most profitable for BPN

and what is the best to kind of like lean into, or maybe it does become something that's just, you know, forever split. These people taking photos in front of the brand block and, like, that's crazy to me. And we have a Slack channel and text threads and like almost every one of them will screenshot and send around. So I just, I appreciate that. I mean, it's just so we don't take that for granted. It's very, very, very cool to see that happening.

And it's been a massive reason why we've had early success in retail and can't be more appreciative for that. Yeah, I mean, super appreciative. It's crazy. So unique, too. It's so cool. It's unbelievable. I've never seen anything.

It's awesome. Like it. Well, that's why I'm excited for the Central Market. Friday night. Tomorrow tomorrow. Yeah. The meet up because I want Central Market to see we're here for you. Like we're showing up to, we're going to leverage the community that's been built.

And we're going to prove to you why you want to have a successful relationship. We don't just want to be successful in Central Market. We want to be successful together. We want to build a relationship. And I know that's going to go so much further in the next couple months and years. My daughter's excited to meet Mr. Nick. Oh, really? Yeah, she's excited.

She's been talking about it all week. The real or the cardboard cut out? I hope. Are you going to be there, right? I'm going to be there. No, she's excited. Mr. Nick, Friday night. I can't wait.

Mr. Nick. I'm into that. I showed her the one time, the video of you hitting the cake with the bat. Now we have to watch that like every night. Mr. Nick hit the cake like cake. like a cake, like that's what we have to watch every night. I love that. Yeah.

I got one more question for you guys before we wrap this one up. And I was thinking about this and it's all about, you know, we have a younger audience that follows us on certain things. And a lot of people want to be entrepreneurs, but also a lot of people don't know what that means or what comes with that responsibility. But if you had to change a part of your life, you just start over from the age of 18, what would you change? And I'm going to talk about what I would change first. It's good. It buys me time.

Holy crap. Just high level. It can be education. It could be experience. It could be travel. What is something you wish you would have known that could have advanced your career, your success, your family, or any of your ambitions and goals? Mine would be one to allow myself to think bigger, earlier.

If I think back to 2012, when I first started BPN, the goal was to have 20 orders a day. If we could do 20 orders a day and if I could hit 10,000 subscribers on YouTube, that for me was a home run, a grand slam. Now, in the position we're at today, those goals, those are ambitions are much larger. And that naturally is going to happen over the course of life. if you build confidence with some more wins that you achieve. But I wish when I was 18, me now would have talked to me, like whispered in Nick's ear, think bigger. Like go for 100 home runs, 100 grand slams because you're thinking way too small.

That's the first thing. The second thing is I wish I would have hired someone earlier on for our finance department or I wish I would have self-taught myself finance. For early on entrepreneurs, especially me as a creative, it wasn't sexy, it wasn't interesting, I really didn't care or want to entertain anything finance. But knowledge is power,

and you don't know what you don't know. And because I was naive and I don't want to educate myself on finance and EBITA and building a business through financial decisions and data, I limited the growth early on. Now it's hard to say, if I go back five, six, seven years

and have implemented some net knowledge, what would it have changed for better or for worse? But knowledge is power. And having a financial foundation of knowledge can only help you make more informed decisions. Two things, right off the bat, that I would have told Nick at 18 years old. You want to go?

You can go. All right. I'm certain I'm going to think of something better later. It's okay. I regret this. You've genuinely thrown this on us on the spot, just for people listening. I guess I'd have I to pick two things.

So I went to UT and Austin in the business school, but I grew up in a town called Mesquite, east of Dallas. It's kind of known for being like a little bit. It's lower middle class, kind of scrappy. And our rival in high school is Highland Park in Dallas. which is like the antithesis of that. So I kind of went into UT in the finance crowd. It's a very like fraternity, affluent crowd

and never felt quite like I was 18, 19 when I landed there. And I was just intimidated by the whole thing. I was like, all of these people are smarter than me because they came from, you know, more affluent backgrounds. That's just something that sort of weighed on me. And I think that lack of confidence at that age slowed down my rate of learning. Because I went into everything thinking like,

oh, this is too advanced. This finance class is too advanced for someone like me. or this accounting concept is too advanced. And I thought that that thought process just slowed down my ability to learn. So like I would say like to my 18, 19 year old self is like, dude, relax. Like you're supposed to be here. You're just as smart as all these other people. Absorb that knowledge more quickly.

Relieve yourself of that sort of self-consciousness because it's going to accelerate your rate of learning a lot more. I think that definitely slowed me down. The second thing I would say is like, you know, play the long game, right? a lot of the relationships that I'm now benefiting from in my career I made four, five, six years ago. And I think when I was 18, 19, 20, you would meet someone, you're like, holy shit, this is going to change my career. Like, I've just met someone that could, like, offer me a job in the future or something.

Rarely is there, like, instant gratification to a new relationship, whether it's personal or professional. All of those take time. And I would have invested more in, you know, both personal, but from a professional standpoint, invested more in, you know, building more relationships back there. because now I see that it takes years and years for those relationships to bear fruit. And I think I was looking for instant gratification on a lot of those when I was younger. A lot of people burn bridges early on for that bridge they need later on.

Never burn a bridge. That's a great. Yeah, personally and professionally. Just don't do it. Like, it'll haunt you. What do you got, cat? That's a tough question. That's a tough question.

I'm going to be through that one. Yours was good. Honestly, that makes me think of early on in business where... I bet you related to that a little bit. Yeah. I looked at people who were crushing it and had these big brands. I never even entertained the idea that my brand would be up there with these big guys. I thought I would just make this small player.

And if I was ever put in a room with these guys, which I never was. But if I was then, I probably wouldn't even said, like, I own a supplement company too. I would have sat in the corner, let these guys talk and act like I was nobody because I felt like I didn't fit in. and I think what happens once you finally get exposed to that space is you realize everyone's just trying to figure it out no matter where they came from

and most of the times the people were putting on this this charade of the success, the money, the wins. A lot of it's bullshit. Yeah. And it's fake and it's false and it's smoking mirrors.

What did Spadier say to us when he first met with this? It was something that resonated with me. It was something like the very first, he's trying to pitch to be a fractional CMO at the time and he's like, I'm just going to tell you right now.

I don't know as much as you think I do. And he's like, let's just all say that out loud because it's kind of liberating. And then we can kind of move forward from here and try to figure it out. And that always resonated with me. I think that's a great lesson. It was very refreshing.

Yeah, exactly. It's true. It's very true. When Spader came in, just like when both of you guys came in too, I was intimidated because like, all right, I have these people who are a lot smarter than me. I got to keep up.

And then you realize, yeah, people were smarter and they have more experience and education, but we're all trying to solve problems that we've never probably experienced before and we're just trying to find the best solution for it and that's testing. We're all human. We're not letting you off the hook.

I was going to say, I thought I did. I think mine would probably be asked for help. And we kind of talked about this earlier on. I think when you're, you know, I'm super type A personality type, absolutely like very high on the wanting to achieve scale, but also that puts me at like super high risk for burnout and all of those things. I think one of the courageous.

Yeah, exactly. One of the, one of the, I think one of the most courageous things you can do is ask for help. And I think as someone who was, you know, young, you quite frequently think that help is synonymous with weakness. And that could not be more false. I think even as someone who is a former founder, like, thinking about back even in my time at Goldman, it was like, you know, I was, I joined the firm at a time when there was a tremendous amount of turnover. I was actually hired to be an equity salesperson. I was called on week one of new hire training in New York City and told that I'm now going to

be a trader that they let the entire sales team go. So then I was on, then I was going to become a trader very quickly when I joined, two associates left, went to business school. One associate made a very large error, got fired. Our senior VP got appendicitis, got an infection from the surgery, and was off the desk. And it very quickly became a VP and myself, just a new analyst, trading the entire book through the algorithm that trading desk. And I still had to do all of the operations at day end of booking out billions of dollars of trades. In Europe, it's very, it's much more complicated. People tend to, you know, execute with a Goldman, but then give the trade up to a UBS or a credit Swiss and you know that happened post financial crisis as people wanted to hedge their positions

across multiple firms so my day ended after the markets closed at 430 but then I had probably a whole other four five six hours of operational component that I had to do on my own and when I left Goldman they hired four people to replace me and that basically told me to me like raising my hand and being like look I need help like this is not reasonable for me to be doing all these things I viewed as a form of like weakness like I was almost throwing in the towel when really if I had asked for help like I might have stayed there longer because I actually would have been able to do things and learn things that I wanted to learn as opposed to being bogged down with kind of all these task-oriented things and the same thing happens when you're an entrepreneur you get to this point and it it leans

into the point that you were talking about which is like you wish you hired someone earlier when you're an owner there's so much there's so much BS that comes with being an owner from like an admin standpoint, right? You're doing everything from dealing with the workman on site to dealing with, you know, your certificate of insurance and adding people as like additionally insured on the policy to making sure that your 941 reports are filed correctly to, you know, manually running payroll every single week, to making sure employees clock in and clock out correctly, fixing their time cards. Like there's so much nuanced admin stuff that comes with being like a founder and an operator that is totally outside the realm of like your actual day-to-day job that you need to,

like move the business forward. And so I think when you're like a young entrepreneur, for me, I got so bogged down with, you know, customer success and some of these admin things that I was so in the weeds that it was really hard to like kind of sometimes objectively look at the business and be like, okay, what do I need to like move the needle, which is what has also made BPN such a rewarding experience because I get to come in with like a clean slate, objectively look, problem solve, and be like, we can improve here. But when you start, you. start in something, it's really hard to do that. And I think quite frequently, founders will look at asking for help or asking for a mentor who can provide an objective lens as a little

bit of weakness. Like, no, I can persevere through this. But sometimes persevering through things can actually be detrimental to not only just yourself from like a wellness standpoint, but also to the business. So for me, I kind of just wish that, and I still need to do a better job of it, you know, even as an adult today, but sometimes I just wish I raised my hand just a little bit sooner and was like, look, like, I'm swamped and like I need help. Yeah, I can relate to that.

Yeah. I know you can. I know if I would have asked for help earlier on, which I didn't think I could afford the help. So, like, that's probably why I didn't. Which is always the problem. Yeah, the business probably would have been a few steps ahead. But at the same time, it's like,

you don't know. You can't go back in time. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know what you don't know. Well, that wraps up today's episode. Covered some retail stuff. EBITA, all things, pumpkin spice, BPN, pumpkin spice, weight protein, launching October 3rd.

Don't miss it because it ain't coming back. And while you're picking it up, grab your pumpkin spice deodorant, be all spicy. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Bear Performance Podcast. Please leave a rating and review on the platform you are listening to if you enjoyed it.

It helps us to grow and reach more people with the intent of changing lives through the Go One More mindset. If you are ready to take your health and performance to the next level, head over to BPNSubs.com to take the first step.