The Nick Bare Podcast - Archive - Nick Bare | Choose Your Hard

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Nick begins by recapping the smashing success of BPN's 10th Birthday weekend. Thank you to all who came out for Athletic Club, our pop-up shop, and our VIP after-party! We had people fly in from Colorado, New Jersey, San Diego, even Amsterdam. Thank you! Choosing Your Hard literally applies to every single person, because every person has difficult decisions to make throughout their day. Don't let your mind venture off into the extreme examples of "hard"; such as running a marathon, starting a business by yourself, or chipping away at student loans. Those definitely qualify, but bring it personal, as well. Choosing to read before bed instead of watching a TV show on Netflix, doing the dishes for your spouse when you come home from a long day, or being patient with the chaos of the first week of school. Nick breaks down the mindset of Choosing Your Hard and the benefits that it brings to the longevity and sustainability of your life. 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.

August 16th, 2020, coming off of an epic weekend. We were celebrating 10 years in business for BPN, and we did this past weekend pretty big. And it was a lot of planning over the last couple of months. So we had a team dinner Friday night downtown Austin, and this was with employees and staff, family, significant other.

It was at this really cool restaurant called Malverde, which was above a Tex-Mex restaurant that I've actually ate at before, but we rented out the entire top floor. And there were margaritas, there was a full bar service. There was guac and chips and taco bar. Amazing. They had this one side dish, actually, which I thought was rice. I walked up in line to get my tacos and I saw the side dish and I said, can I please have some rice?

And the lady that was serving the what I thought was rice said this is a pasta dish. Never saw this thing in my life. It was like tiny little micro pasta that looked like rice that tasted like a dream. It was amazing. And then next to it I scooped on this like Mexican style street corn, all of that. to say like we had a really good dinner Friday night, which was delicious. But when we were there, I gave a speech to the team. And the intent of this dinner was kick off a big weekend being our 10-year birthday.

You know, the following day, we were going to have a pop-up shop and after party and then rolling into a sale that Monday, which was yesterday. So I gathered everyone up at the dinner. and I gave a speech and the way I kicked off that speech was with a story and the story goes something like this you know

I started the brand in 2012 out of my college apartment in western Pennsylvania and at the time when I started that I told my dad and I've told the story many times before I told my dad we were going to make a million dollars that first year and he laughed my face and he said Nick if it were that easy

everyone would do it and I quickly realized how hard, how challenging building a business actually was. And a few months later, after we finally received our inventory and we built our website out and we realized sales weren't flowing in like we thought they were going to, my brother and I, me and Preston, we found this marketing and advertising agency that was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We're from central Pennsylvania. We're from a small town called Palmyra, which is right next to Hershey.

I was going to school near Pittsburgh and Lancaster is located in central Pennsylvania. And it was probably like one of the closer cities to where we grew up. So me and my brother, we find this marketing and advertising agency there. We set up a call.

We traveled down to meet this team in person in their office. And I remember it like it was yesterday. We walk into this building and it was this big brick building. But Lancaster has a little, it almost has a slight Austin hip indie vibe. That's the only way to describe it. I guess a better way to describe it. There's some hipsters there. All right. There's a, there's a hipster demographic moving into Lancaster, Pennsylvania. You get these little cool coffee shops, you know, pop in up and music venues and tattoo parlors.

It's got a little coolness to it now. And we roll into this agency's office. Like I said, big brick building and me and Preston walking to this room to meet with this team. And my intent with that meeting that day was I was going to brief our problem, which was literally no one's buying our products. No one knows about us. And I have no money left because I've spent all.

all the money I have on inventory. And I thought they were going to offer me the solution that was groundbreaking, life changing, and just like flip the switch on what I thought we were doing. But the issue is I had no money to offer them. So me and Preston, we sit down, we present them who we are, what we're doing, what we want to do. And in that pitch, I said,

if we can just do 20 orders a day. That's it. If we can do 20 orders a day through our e-commerce site, we've made it. That's all we're trying to do. And at the time, we might have been doing one to two orders every other day, maybe two to three times a week at max. We weren't moving in any inventory.

No one knew who we were. We just popped up this website. and nothing. And I'll never remember or I'll never forget the response to this, this statement. And me and Preston were sitting on one side of the table. It was a wood table, kind of like I'm sitting at right now. And this team is on the other side of the table. And to the right of us on the wall is this TV with this presentation.

They had our logo up there. And the logo that we had then is different from, the one we have now, a friend designed that logo for free. But we did a rebrand a few years after. And I look at them and I tell them 20 orders a day. And they looked at each other. They looked puzzled. And the gentleman said, sir, I don't think we can help you get there.

And that crushed me. That crushed me because I went to them thinking they were going to solve all my issues to quickly realize they thought my issues were bigger than being solvable. And I told the story when we were at dinner Friday night because one, that's where we started. That moment in time crushed me, for one, but also to paint a picture for the team that was at that dinner Friday, the team and their family, significant others. because a lot of people in this business haven't seen that part of it, right? It's expected.

It's understandable. But over the last couple of years, right, we've grown to the size of a company that we are now, but it wasn't always like that. That's very hard for some people to realize or visualize and understand is it didn't always look like this. We didn't always have 50,000 square foot facility. We didn't always have 40 employees. We didn't always have a gym. We didn't always have a camera we could afford for the business.

There are certain moments in my life that I will always remember. And that was one of them sitting in that brick building in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, being told they can't help me get to where I want to be and then having to go and figuring it out on my own. It's always one of my favorite stories. You know, we had a great Friday night where it was just kind of reminiscing on some of these older stories

with team members who have been a part of the brand for seven, eight years now. And then literally some who have been a part of the brand for seven days now. We've hired a lot recently. And I got to tell this one story because it just, I lost my shit Friday night when it happened.

I could not stop laughing. So one of the friends of BPN, his name's Milan, he's actually the content creator for Dan Churchill. Dan Churchill is one of our best friends. He owns Charlie Street up in New York City, and he's a celebrity chef. And I was talking to Milan as we were sharing some guacamole and chips and sipping on our margaritas as the party.

started kicking off. And we were talking about how to judge guacamole and how to judge chips at a restaurant. I mean, if I go to a restaurant and they offer me salsa and chips or, man, if you get offered guac and chips, that's next level. But salsa and chips, for me, you're already winning. So we're sitting at this table and I dip this massive chip. And it's one of those chips that it's just perfect. It's the perfect chip to dip.

And I dip it and I get this nice dollop of guacamole on the end of that chip. And as I'm going to pick it up out, someone comes up to me that I didn't know but was introduced to. It's recently been a part of BPN as an investor. And I left that chip in there. And the entire time I was talking to this person, I was thinking I left my chip in the guac. And now everyone else that walks up is not going to touch the guac. Because I've left this floater of a chip in my guacamole. And I talked to this person for, I'd say 25 minutes.

And then we walked away. We went to the bar. And as I walked away, I went to the bar, I kept thinking my chip's still back there. I got to go back and get it. and as I turned around to go get it, Milan ran into me, and he's dying laughing. And I knew exactly what he was going to say as I ran into him. And we both said, I know, the chip. The chip is still there.

So I'm back and got my chip. But for some reason, that was one of those moments where I just, I found it hilarious. Do you ever find yourself talking to someone and you find yourself in a situation? And the moment of time, you both find someone. something so hilariously funny that you can't even gather your thoughts, your shit at all. You both just start dying, laughing. That was one of those moments. But Friday night was, it was really good.

It was really good to celebrate with so many people. And what blew my mind the most is sometimes when you're moving so fast and you're growing company and you're building out systems and you're hiring people, every day feels like you're moving a million miles a minute. And most people that come and work for BPN, they learn that very quickly. We move very fast. I mean, there's a reason that we have a mural done

on one of our walls in our office, and it says, move fast and break things. Now, that's a Zuckerberg quote from what I believe, but that resonates with me a lot because we move very fast to BPN. And although we move fast in a deliberate, motion, there is purpose and intention with the way we move at that speed, you would be ignorant not to expect things to break along the way. And that's what happens. Things break along the way.

And as I'm given this speech talking the team Friday night in this restaurant that overlooked downtown Austin, it was beautiful. It was a vibe for sure. It was a Tex-Max vibe, which is my favorite type of vibe, to be honest. And I'm looking at all the people. You know, we have 40, about 40 full-time employees. But when everyone brings their spouse, their fiance, their girlfriend, that's 80-plus people in this building for this dinner to celebrate this business that was started 10 years ago.

And the realization that all these people believe. They believe so much in BPN. They believe in BPN so much in what we're doing and the products we offer and our message and mission and go on more. That they have not only just decided to spend their Friday night with me, for a lot of them, they've moved across the country. They've moved their families. They've made a massive life shift. I mean, the course direction, the trajectory of where their life was heading,

they decided they made the choice to stop moving in that direction change course and move it down to Austin, Texas to be a part of

what BPN is doing I by no means take that lightly and as I'm sitting in this room giving the speech looking at all these people I'm thinking it's not just me

that believes in this brand anymore it's not me that's just fighting this fight anymore it's all of us that are fighting this fight I mean that got me emotional just in that moment of time realizing the power of that impact. You know, these past 10 years have been, they've been hard.

That's the only way to put it, a decade of work, although it feels like two years, a decade of work to build a brand to where we've built BPN. I like to say that I started BPN out of that college apartment in western Pennsylvania, not knowing jack shit with all ignorance to what I was getting into. Yes, I started and founded it, but by no means did I build it by myself to where it is today. That is something that the BPN team did. I could never have gotten this business to where it is today by myself. and promise you that.

It's been hard, not just for me, but for other people that have been part of this journey as well. The thing is, I chose hard. We choose to do hard things. When you choose to do hard things, now it pays off in the future. Now, as easy as that is to say, and the concept is very simple, very few put that into practice. Right now, I would rather choose hard things every single day for another decade, not to have an easier life in the future. I want to be very clear about this.

It's not choose hard things now to have easy later. It is choose hard things now to have choices later. There's a big difference. those choices can be financial freedom those choices can be time time you get to spend by yourself and solitude or with your family and your friends and traveling like right now the way i see my life is and i've seen it the last 10 years choose really hard things because they are going to form and create opportunities being choices in the future everything's hard life in general is hard and i love this quote choose you're hard

you might have seen it circulating the internet or you heard someone else say it before i by no means have just coined this term i've heard it by a lot of different people choose you're hard building a business is hard working for a company is hard being unemployed is hard is hard. Waking up and running every single day and being in shape is hard. Not waking up and running or working out and getting overweight. That's also very hard. Eating healthy can be hard. Eating unhealthy makes for very hard a very hard life. Taking care of your kids can be hard. Not taking care of your kids is also very hard. You have to choose your hard. And I think this is the most honest, real, truthful thing that you can accept into your life is choosing

your hard. Go into things, expecting it to be hard. I mean, when we create new marketing campaigns, we create new products, we create these big series that we do on a fitness journey or a competition or a race, we go into it. knowing it is going to be challenging, difficult, and hard. It is setting that expectation early on. That's what these last 10 years have. I don't want to say it have taught me,

but it's given me a lot of perspective. It's giving me a lot of perspective into choosing hard. Everything can be hard. But choose hard now so you have the choices, you have the opportunities in the future. So that was Friday night. Friday night was a great night. Saturday morning,

and Friday night we probably got back, we got back to our house, maybe around midnight. It was a later night. And the next morning we had a Saturday morning run with the BPN community. And it was part of our athletic. We've been doing this thing with BPN the last couple, just the last couple months now, called BPN Athletic Club.

And every couple weeks, we host an event in Austin or outside the city. We've done some group runs. We've done sand volleyball in Zilker Park. We've done a strength training workout and session at game day barbell here in Austin. We have a lot of things that will be planning. but BPN Athletic Club is this regular social and physical activity event that we host to bring the community together. And what's really cool about it, one of the things that I was talking to to someone this past Saturday, it's really hard to find people, especially when you move to a new city that resonate with what you enjoy doing.

and what the common denominator is of the people who follow BPN in a part of our community is they are high achievers, high performers. They have that mindset. Now, it doesn't mean you have to have gone to college at Harvard, or you run a sub three hour marathon, or you do ultramarathons. High achiever, high performer, meaning you want to get better. You are actively pursuing growth in your life. in all aspects of your life.

And when you come to BP an Athletic Club, you're going to find people like that, like-minded people who are trying to get better and grow. You're not going to find someone who's a piece of shit complaining about their life and their day and their job and how hard every aspect of life is. These people are choosing hard. That's why they're waking up early on a Saturday morning

to do some 800-meter sprints at the awesome. Austin City track downtown Austin while everyone else is sleeping recovering from a hangover. If you want to hang out with those types of people, come to BPN Athletic Club because it's awesome. But that's Saturday. This past Saturday, we had an event. And we broke records. I'll tell you that right now. We did a run on Lady Bird Lake Loop, also known as Town Lake Loop. It's a 10-mile loop around the river down. downtown Austin. It's beautiful. I love this trail. It's one of my favorite places to run ever.

It has been for years and years and years. And when I say we broke a record, we broke a record. Now, I don't have this in writing. It's not like Guinness Book of World Records was here documenting this, but I've never seen a group this large running together on the trail down there. We probably had close to 200 people running on this trail. Now, this trail isn't super wide. You can probably fit four people from the left and right side of this trail. And there's people going in both directions. We were very respectable. We didn't run people over by any means.

But we were rolling deep. I mean, we had close to 200 people running on this trail. I'd never seen a stampede like this in my life. People were losing their mind. They were filming us as we were moving this herd of, mainly shirtless men between 20 and 30 years old moving pretty fast miles around downtown Austin. It was a sight to see. I will tell you that much.

And people were hyped up. So what we did is we went three miles out. We were going to do a 10K. Three miles out, three miles back. Like I said, this is one of my favorite places to run in the entire world, not just Austin. So we went three miles out as we were coming back and we hit the mile four marker. That opened up into this big field that overlooks the cityscape. Most of the time people were coming here and doing intramural sports or they have their dogs there.

And I thought this was a great opportunity to do 100 pushups with everyone. Because right now if you guys are following along on social media, we're doing this thing called the Bear Challenge. It's 100 push-ups every single day for 100 days. And we have thousands of people committed to this adventure, this journey, commit to consistency. I mean, that's consistency in a nutshell. 100 push-ups every day for 100 days. And I knew that most of the people that were here for this run because the common denominator, they are like-minded, high performers, high achievers,

want to get after it, I knew that most of them were doing the Daily 100, the Bear 100 challenge. So at Mile Marker 4, we move off the trail into this big open field, and I led a little push-up challenge that I learned from Aaron Oprea. Now, Aaron Oprea, she was our most recent guest on the podcast. She spent the day down here in Austin, Texas with us. We worked out. We went and got dinner at Peacock. downtown Austin, which is one of our favorite spots.

And I know Aaron is a big fan of Tabatas. I never really got into Tabata workouts, but now they are my bread and butter. Like, I'm loving Tabata stuff. So essentially, Tabatas are eight rounds. Each round is 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. And you do that for eight rounds. So we did a Tabada in pushups at Mile Marker 4.

everyone is covered in sweat. It was a human mourning. And I'll tell you, like, it doesn't sound that brutal or intimidating, but a tabata of anything will wreck you. It will. So it's 20 seconds, as many reps as possible on push-ups, then a 10-second break, and then you go right back into that. By the time you get to round number three or four,

those 10 seconds be like three seconds. and you're not reping out 20 to 25 pushups in those 20 seconds anymore. No, you're getting like 8 to 10. And in a matter of four minutes, you can destroy some souls. You want to choose a hard, choose Tabata push-ups. I'm telling you, choose your hard, choose Tabata. Four minutes will wreck you. So we put people through a little bit of hell there,

and then we gather ourselves and we finish the run. and just seeing that community come together. Just people supporting one another. You know, there are a lot of people out for that morning run who are part of this community who haven't always been at the level of fitness or shape or even not just physically, but mentally as well. You know, their current state,

if you look at someone's current state right now, in that group of people Saturday morning. You might look at someone, say, yeah, they're in pretty good shape. They can run. They're fairly fit. They look active. That doesn't mean they've always been like that. There's been a transformational journey for so many people who are part of the BPN community

that their current state was not their always state. I met a lot of people this past weekend who lost 100 plus pounds. Like, I want two hands. I can count how many people. I talked to you who lost 100 plus pounds over the last couple years because they are high achievers, high performers, the common denominator is they want to get better and they have because guess what?

They chose hard. That is part of it. When I say choose your hard in the beginning and these last 10 years of business being difficult, choosing your hard doesn't have to mean you're starting a business and bootstrapping it from the ground up. It doesn't mean you have to sign up

for a 100-mile ultramarathon that goes to the Rocky Mountains of Leadville, Colorado. Those are extremes. Sometimes choosing your hard is just eating better. Sometimes it's choosing not to go to McDonald's for breakfast and then Burger King for lunch and then having a hungry man TV dinner for your last meal the night. And then before you hop into bed, you have a pint of Ben and Jerry's.

Sometimes choosing hard is just not doing that. Sometimes choosing hard is going home after work and spending time with your family rather than going to play poker with your buddies or going to the bar and having a beer with your friends. Choosing hard does not have to mean these extremes. and sometimes our minds go there. I know mine does sometimes. We obsess and we romanticize about the extremes

because it's what we are comparing ourselves to. But sometimes choosing hard is just making a decision that helps you become a better person or helps the people in your life that are being affected by your choices. Heart is relative. It really is. And taking it back a little bit to the story of running Saturday morning with the BPN Athletic Club downtown Austin on the Lady Bird Lake Trail.

It's a 10-mile loop, right? And after years of endurance training now, I can hit those 10 miles, very comfortable. You know, you kind of just, you clip miles. In the beginning, it wasn't like that. I remember when I first got into running, which was. was relatively harder than than it is now. I remember when I went for my first 10-mile run around that lake, around the river. And when I say it is hard as relative, this is what I'm talking about.

This is why also this trail means so much to me. I mean, I enjoy it and I love it because of the scenery, the energy of Austin. you go to downtown Austin and people are so fit and active it makes you want to work out. Like sometimes me and Steph are driving to dinner and we pass the trail going through the city. And part of me wishes I wasn't going to dinner to throw back a rabbi steak, which I love. Part of me wishes I was actually running on the trail with those people that I don't even know. But that's what Austin, Texas does to you. It just does.

And one of the reasons this trail means so much to me is this is really where I first got into running. I would go down there to do my runs in preparation for some of those first marathons I was doing. And over the last couple of years, the city has obviously grown a lot and the trails become more groomed. But I went on my first run on that trail. It was probably 2017. And the trail isn't super intuitive. I mean, you can get lost. At least I did.

At certain points, I ended up five miles in bushwhacking. I mean, literally, imagine looking into the woods, seeing this guy with almost like a machete, but the machete is a branch, and I'm bushwhacking trying to break trees down because I decided that the trail must go through this thick brush. I ended up in the woods outside of the city trying to bushwhack through to get to the other side. I was so lost on my first run. That was my first perceptions of running 10 miles.

And I was like, how does anyone ever make it through this? But I'll never forget that day of just getting so lost on that trail. And then as I ran more, I got more comfortable. Obviously, I didn't get lost anymore. I learned for my first time. But I also remembered completing some of those 10-mile runs being absolutely smoked. I mean, 10 miles in 2017 to me felt like an ultramarathon. It felt like 100 miles.

I would finish that 10-mile run. I would go straight to Whole Foods. I would get the chunky monkey smoothie, which had like 1,000 calories. And then I'd go straight to the hot bar. I was like trying to refuel on food thinking that I burned 10,000 calories on a 10-mile run. Looking back now, I realize that's by no means even close to that, but I would be wrecked the rest of the day. Relatively, that was very challenging in 2017.

Now, with repetition and experience and doing it more, relatively compared to what it was, it's not hard. It is actually fairly comfortable now because I chose hard for years and years and years. And like I said, it doesn't necessarily make things easier all the time, in this case, for the run it did. But it provided me with opportunity and choices to see how much further I could push that. If you would have told me in 2017 that I was going to be running 100 miles through the Rocky Mountains of Leadville, Colorado a few years later, I would have said you're full of shit. relatively speaking,

it felt impossible at the time. Choose your heart. Hard is relative. You know, after the run downtown with everyone, energy was high. I mean, that kicked off the day so well for not just our team, our staffed employees, but all the people that came in from across the country

and even out of the country for the BPN 10-year event. So we rented a peer space. Peer space is essentially, it's like a website that you can go to that we use here at BPN quite often. And think of it in terms of, like, if you're going into a city to sleep and you don't book a hotel,

what do you book? Airbnb, probably. Well, peer space is essentially the same thing but for businesses or commercial use. So like we will rent, peer spaces for photo shoots or video shoots or pop-up events. Like that's what we use for this pop-up event that we booked in the east side of Austin, Texas for the day for our pop-up and our after party.

And what's so great about when we do in-person events, I think they are absolutely necessary at least once a year, at least once a year, because the outcome from them is always very similar. I don't want to say it's the same. It's very close. Because what happens as you grow a business virtually online. I mean, we don't have remote employees. We work in-house here at BPN.

But sometimes we create this content daily and we're publishing this content. And we've been doing this for eight years now. I didn't start creating content until two years after starting the business. But when you create content for so long and you publish it online, sometimes you get to a point where you forget there's actually people on the other side of watching it. I mean, you see the comments, you have the responses, you have the engagement, and it does mean something. It is very meaningful.

But when you hear that same thing, I mean, it could be the same exact person. saying the same exact thing with the same exact intentions and purpose. If they type that online and send it in an email or they post a comment on a photo, it is very appreciated and it definitely leaves an impact. But hearing that same exact thing from the same exact person with the same exact intent in person, that digs a whole lot deeper. and that's why it's so important for our team to do these events in person at least once a year because when you can hear the stories of people how their life was changed because of the brand

and the products and the message and the videos we produce in the podcast for example when you are looking in someone's eyes and they're telling you they wouldn't be here today literally they would be dead without the company and the mission and the message or someone's looking to the eye and says they lost 100 plus pounds and you see a tear coming down their face to the edge of their mouth that digs a whole lot deeper a whole lot deeper and when our team experiences that and here's that in person connecting with those people. The whole team comes back that Monday, after every weekend we do these things,

and they realize that their job is a whole lot more important than they thought it was the Friday prior to because people's lives are literally depending on it. I like using the word role model when I'm talking to the team here, especially for these vision meetings. So every two weeks, we have these vision meetings where it's my opportunity to cast my vision for where the company needs to move. As an organization grows, it moves in a trajectory.

Just like a bullet coming out of a pistol or a rifle, when you pull that trigger, that bullet is on a trajectory towards wherever you aim it at. And as an organization grows, just like a bullet, a bullet is powerful. As an organization grows and there's more people added, that trajectory is a whole lot stronger. And in order to move that trajectory, it becomes more difficult. So as the founder and CEO of this business, my responsibility, one of my main responsibilities is to maintain the trajectory of the vision and mission of the business so we stay headed exactly where we want to aim. Because as soon as you fall off course with that trajectory,

it becomes very difficult to get it back on track. Very difficult. So we do these meetings every two weeks where I cast my vision for the team to make sure they know exactly my intent, purpose, vision and how they can best execute to solve for that vision. And one of the things that I always lead with is we have to be a role model. We have to be a role model for the people who are following the brand, for people's kids who are following the brand.

I had this conversation with this young lady at the event. And she's a single mother. And she had her daughter there. Her daughter might have been, man, I'm pretty bad with ages. She might have been seven, eight years old. It's my guess. And she brought her daughter up to talk to us at the event.

And she told us because her daughter doesn't have a male father figure in her life. she shows her daughter our content our videos our message our mission what go one more is all about these series that we create the stories we tell because she uses that content to act as a

north star vision and source of role model for her daughter that is also one of those moments a powerful moment that I will never forget because I realize the impact that we have the opportunity and responsibility to uphold with what we're doing. Last night was Monday night and yesterday was our 15% off sale, which you guys have been

following the brand for any amount of time now. You know that we only do one sale a year and that's a Black Friday sale every year. and we decided to do an extra sale. It was 15% off all day yesterday because of our 10-year birthday. We wanted to celebrate. We wanted to give back to the community who's been supporting us for so long. It's also one thing, side note really quick, that I'm always conscious of that we cannot have gotten here without you guys.

Even if I started the company and I hired these people and all these amazing people helped me grow the brand to where it is today. That's great, but without you guys who are listening to this podcast, who are supporting our brand, who are buying our products, we couldn't do shit.

We wouldn't be nothing. Literally zero. Zero, zero, zero, zero. So thank you for all the support. We, when I say we couldn't do this without you, like that is 100% the honest truth. We couldn't do it. count you. But after a successful day yesterday, we processed about 11,000 orders in that day, that 24-hour

period during the sale. We hired on some temporary staff to help fulfill orders, and the operations team is working very hard to get those orders out over the next 72 hours, which they will accomplish. But I screenshoted my Shopify app, and Shopify is what we use for our website I screenshoted my Shopify app that showed our daily numbers in terms of orders, revenue, and site visitors. And I put that in our Slack channel for the team. And my message was, this is much more than revenue. These numbers that you see, this allows us to hire great people.

This allows us to take care of families. This allows us to reach more people. this allows us to change more lives. This allows us to change the world. People who come to work here every day and work so hard to build the business, they know and understand that the impact they're making is much larger than generating revenue,

helping the business become more profitable. Grow and scale the organization. It is much larger than that. And when we have these meetups in person like this past weekend, I mean, that shows firsthand what we're doing and why we're doing it. You know, these sales taking it into kind of a business approach right now, and I talked about this in the YouTube video we documented yesterday. What we're going to start doing is documenting the business side of BPN a whole lot better. And we used to do this really well. We used to showcase everything.

And I've kind of been taking inventory and stock and kind of an audit of the content that I've been producing over the last 12 months and how I kind of wanted to shift. You know, historically, to grow BPN, I would show everything. I would document the fulfillment line. We would document training. we would document like me and Preston and Joe hitting a late night workout and running to in and out having two double doubles before going back to the warehouse to pack orders. We used to document and just record everything which provided this amazing transparency into the

business. And as the company grew, you know, priorities just kind of took over. And we got so sucked into the business that we naturally just stopped documenting. as much as we were previously. And it's one thing we want to get back to doing is just showing this whole process for a few reasons, but one of those reasons is,

I do believe there's this responsibility as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, to show the struggles, to show what's breaking, to show what hurts, to show how hard things actually are. Because when you don't showcase those things, people get the wrong idea that it should be easy and then as soon as they try and they realize

it's not easy and it's actually hard they become discouraged comparison is the thief of joy i've experienced this myself so we want to show what breaks and what doesn't and what hurts and and what doesn't you know clear example is over the last 12 months we've built out a lot of new systems we've launched a lot of new products. We've hired a lot of new people. And Black Friday every year for us, because it's our one big sale, is kind of like our Super Bowl.

We look at it as, let's see how much we grew compared to last Black Friday. Let's see how many orders we get in compared to last Black Friday. It's kind of this key performance indicator that we set that kind of guides us in an assessment of how we grew in the past 12 months.

And we used this 15% off sale we did yesterday as a test for our Black Friday sale coming up in November. Now, you try to be as deliberate and proactive as possible with a big sale. Sometimes you end up being reactive, which is not the best situation to be in, Sometimes you're just blocking and tackling and solving for issues that pop up. And we saw an opportunity with this sale yesterday. We knew volume was going to be higher than normal, obviously, but by no means as high as our Black Friday sale every year. And the best way to expose a weakness is throw more volume, more traffic,

and just more at it. If you overload anything, you're going to find the breaking point. Same thing goes with the body. Like, you want to find your breaking point. You might not find it in a five-mile run that you do every day. You might expose a little bit of weakness when you go run a marathon. When you go to do a 100-mile ultramarathon, you will expose every weakness. And at that point, you can't be proactive.

You're being reactive trying to solve for what's already broken. use that same analogy in terms of overloading a system with volume in preparation for your Super Bowl for us being Black Friday. So we used yesterday's sales as an opportunity to expose weaknesses, see where there were some pain points, where we could improve, and how we can get better in preparation and being proactive for Black Friday. So just from like a business perspective, that's what we used yesterday for to improve upon our current systems. and we found some things that weren't necessarily broken but weren't optimized. And if we would have waited to solve those or identify those until Black Friday,

shit would have been a nightmare. I mean, here's a clear example. A great story two years ago was a nuts time in my life because the company was growing. We were training for and documenting an Iron Man prep journey, which was in preparation for Ironman, Texas. Iron Man Texas got canceled, and we ended up doing Challenge Cancun in Mexico. But during that November, we were in the thick of training.

So the plan was we were going to launch our Black Friday sale, which is always, I mean, it's massive. And we hire like 10 to 15 extra employees to come work that sale. It's all hands on deck. The plan was we were going to launch our sale, wait an hour, and then I was going to get on the bike with Natasha to do a bike workout that we were going to film for the series but it was a key workout that she wanted to be there to put me through.

I knew it was a big deal. So I was a little nervous for this workout because I knew it was going to be a pain cave and it was going to be spicy to say the least. So we launched the sale. Sail went great. Everything was smooth. We spent about an hour making sure nothing broke and nothing was broken.

So I went, got my bike set up, started the bike workout. We're filming. Natasha's coaching me through it. We're about to hit the really hard part of this training session. And this was the meat and potatoes, the video we were waiting to film. And this was what Natasha was waiting to assess to see where I was at in my training so far. As I'm going into this big block, Preston walks into the gym where we're training and filming. And he says, hey, our credit card processor is down, which is.

the last thing you won during a big sale, you're bringing all these people to your website who have all the intentions of buying. And if they can't check out, they will give up and go somewhere else. I mean, you get one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted. And if you don't capture that sale, you're going to let it slip. That's what happened. So I'm on this bike losing my mind thinking my world was ending. Natasha's like, you got to do this workout. I'm on the bike going through the workout, Yule and Tyler are filming this whole thing. Credit card processor is crashing. I'm on the phone as I'm laying down some massive watts on my trainer. The bike was on the trainer. I'm breathing like I just finished a 100 meter sprint, a gasping for air on these big gear

workouts. And I'm talking to this credit card processor company who was probably some, I'm out-sourced agent overseas who had no clue what was going on trying to get things up and running again. Again, one of those moments, I will never forget in my life. And we ended up getting it fixed hours later. But it's a long story to give an example of volume will break things. And the reason that our credit card processor ended up shutting down our account or putting it on hold and locking it is because so much volume and so many orders were being processed so fast

that they assumed it was fraud accounts and spam. So they locked our accounts and no one else could place an order, which meant no one could place an order. And it was a disaster. Guys, choose your hard. Things are supposed to be hard. Go into it with the expectation. of it being hard. Just like the story of me running 10 miles downtown Austin on Lady Bird Lake Trail in 2017,

where it was at that point in my life very, very challenging, very difficult. And now where it's much easier and very comfortable, it's all relative. Same thing goes for business. The things that used to bother me in business five years ago are a daily norm. and if you put this into big picture perspective, think about it. The things you experienced 10 years ago, five years ago, three years ago, even a year that were very overwhelming, provided a lot of stress, made you think you were losing it all.

The things that used to bother you so much, as you grow and you develop, they shouldn't be as hard. they might even become easy. They might, believe it or not, become a daily reoccurrence and is part of your quote-unquote norm. That comes with repetition. That's choosing your heart.

So looking back over this past weekend, huge success. And if you came out to the events, I greatly appreciate it. For those of you who traveled out of state across the country, even from outside of the country, people traveled from outside of the country

to come to the BPN event I don't take that lightly and I'm forever grateful very very grateful for the opportunity of what we've built over the last 10 years and what we're going to build in the next 10 because we are just scratching the surface

so thanks for tuning in guys and we'll see you in the next next episode. 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.