The Pomp Podcast - #1298 Juan Meisel | Entrepreneur Built $100M+ Business In 1 Year

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

Juan Meisel is the Founder & CEO of Grip Shipping. In this conversation, we talk about how he took his business from 0 to 8 figures in revenue, attacking an incumbent industry using innovation & technology, hiring, processes, and how the world is changing.  ======================= Cal.com is leading the charge of scheduling platforms in the open-source sphere, offering you the chance to harness the efficiency previously reserved for elite corporations and tech gurus. That's right, Cal.com is transforming sophisticated calendar management into an accessible tool for all via a user-friendly interface. Discover how countless users are optimizing their time in unprecedented ways. Use code “POMP” for $500 off when you set your team up with Cal.com. ======================= BetOnline.ag is a proud sponsor of the the Pomp Podcast. Use crypto to bet on sports, play poker and enjoy casino games at BetOnline. Visit https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp and use promo code POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline boasts no crypto transaction fees, and processing is anonymous, instantaneous and secure. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's conversation is with Juan Mizel. He is the founder and CEO of Grip Shipping. In this conversation, we talk about how he took his business from zero to eight figures in revenue, how he has gone on to attack an incumbent

industry using innovation and technology, how he built a company in terms of hiring people, what processes they've put in place, and what exactly is going to be this trend of pressing a button on your phone and having cold, refrigerated, or frozen food show up rather than just hot food. This is a peek into the future, and it's one of the fastest growing companies in my personal portfolio. I'm super excited for you all to hear about Juan, what he's building, and how the world is about to change. Here is my conversation with Juan Maizel. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investment. You should not treat

any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. This episode is brought to you by Cal.com. What do I have in common with Chad Hurley from YouTube, toby from shopify and alexis from 776 and the co-founder of reddit we all use cal.com instead of calendly and we are all early investors as well cal.com is leading the charge of scheduling platforms in the open source sphere offering you the chance to harness the efficiency previously reserved for elite corporations and tech gurus if you like to have your calendar organized and be

able to have an efficient exchange when scheduling but you love all of the benefits of open source technology, then Cal.com's for you. They are transforming sophisticated calendar management into an accessible tool for all via a user-friendly interface. You can customize it and you can make your calendar work for you. Use code POMP for $500 off when you set up your team with Cal.com today. Again, go to Cal.com, C-A-L.com, and use code POMP to get $500 off when you sign up. Cal.com, an open source tool that allows you to take back control of your calendar, be efficient when scheduling, and make sure that no one can steal your time. This episode is brought to you by BetOnline.

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BetOnline, go where the game starts. BetOnline.ag, go check them out today. all right guys bang bang i've got juan here with me uh i thought a great place to start is you've taken a business from zero dollars in revenue to eight figures in a little over a year which is not normal whatsoever uh what are some of the lessons learned when you are hyper growing like this i mean i think the the the first place to start is how do you build a team to do this you know at the end of the day like it all falls down on your team no matter what you're doing um in terms of a business like yeah you know you can start a business and and run it small it's a few million dollars in revenue but like if you actually want to go to hyper growth and only have

this as a beginning of your business you need to build the team to be able to support that and then the company culture as well so you know as an example company values company values is huge for us like we live and breathe our company values so as an example we have you know being customer obsessed as an example like you don't know how much we care for our customers what's the craziest thing you guys have done on that front i mean like this is um not necessarily a crazy thing but like this is a funny story is sometimes people internally refer to us as a company instead of a sas as a cas which means company as a service because we literally will do like anything for our customers like we go so beyond for our customers like you know we need them to

be profitable we need them to be successful we need them to be having like the experience of lives working with us we need like their customers to be extremely happy as well given how much you know impact we have in their actual operation so um you know we make make fun of it internally say hey you know we're not a sas we're not a 3po we're just a cast a company as a service so what you guys do uh for those who don't know is um logistics for perishables so food flowers uh could be medicine etc um some people would refer to this as kind of cold chain part of the supply chain uh and what i didn't know before i met you and eventually invested in business is there's tons of people who are focused on logistics obviously amazon's a massive business they don't want to

touch perishables right because it spoils because there's all these issues and so walk me through your time at butcher box like how did you actually learn about the problem and then figure out what these potential solutions are yeah i mean perishables is as hard as it gets um it's very expensive and it's very time sensitive and there's a lot of risk throughout the whole equation because if you don't deliver things to your customer how you need to then they're just not going to buy from you again you're just not going to provide a good service if you're buying a t-shirt in the mail as an example you know not perishable of course you know you might want it for a party sure you might get it a day late and you're not happy because you wanted it for this

party but you still have a t-shirt you can wear it like it's fine but in the case of perishables it's usually something you're eating something you're feeding your family with like a part of your hosting that you know you need the products for pharmaceuticals which could be you know life saving or very important for someone's health or it could be flowers and you know you don't want to mess up a flower delivery right because you're gonna get someone uh pretty mad so you know at butcher box so you know for those that don't know the story bootstrap companies scale from zero to 600 million revenue um you know pretty fast in about six years um so arguably one of like uh you know the most successful direct to consumer companies in the space you know in the last like

decade or so and the interesting part about it is that 10 years ago or eight years ago when we start getting started with that perishables in the mail was not a thing it was like you know we had to get over the hump of hey you buy a box of frozen meat and it shows up to your doorstep frozen like you know what the heck how does this even happen so early days at butcher box it was like hey how do we get people to buy a box of frozen meat in the mail and now through the years consumer behavior has changed because they now know this like consumers know hey i can get online you know as an example butcherbox.com i buy a box of meat and eat one or two days it shows frozen to my doorstep so with that changing consumer behavior of course there's a lot more demand in

this industry and there's a lot more brands and products that have come alive um you know in the last decade or so and with that comes a problem hey you know how do i solve for this like there's so many factors that go into it like you know weather events skyway performance what liners am i using what type of box when am i shipping it where am i shipping it from what type of product is it like so many variables that go into it that you really need a sophisticated solution to be able to like go from point a to point b and make your customer happy the way i think about it is like uh people didn't know 10 15 years ago you could press a button on your phone and a non perishable could get uh to your doorstep right so a book from amazon or whatever now i mean a lot of

people do it a lot like you know in new york city if you go and you look in the lobbies around christmas time they look like amazon warehouses there's just tons and tons of boxes right people ordering things then the next iteration was i can press a button on my phone and hot food will show up and once i started to understand it's like oh yeah the guy down the street made it and somebody just brought it to me but what you guys really are identifying is like there's now a third wave to this trend which is i'm going to press a button on my phone and cold food will show up whether refrigerated or frozen and so what are the things that people are doing with that like obviously butcher boxes meat are people shipping cakes are they like what are the other products that really

are getting shipped here yeah i mean you touched on a good point this gives accessibility to the market and market being the consumer who wants a product out of their house because you can only like you can only keep food warm for so long right like you know maybe 30 minutes while it gets in the you know ubereats or whatever other platform to your doorstep but the cold and the frozen what this creates is you can now have inventory in specific location across the country and you can get your product nationwide like you can make a product here in new york city and you can have it nationwide like the impact that that has you know for so many different products that you can make so of course you know you have meat you have frozen ready to eat meals you have you know

desserts and cake products you have pharma you know you have things of course like you know like flowers which is which is just you know semi different category but you have a wide range of specialty products even you know human grade pet food which is you know a pretty fast growing uh space and wildly adopted across the country but like that's what has changed you can now basically press a button and you get a box of something perishable so frozen or refrigerated in your doorstep and you know with a few distribution centers across the country then you can get to anywhere in the country in one in two days with the right technology of course and the right processes for making that happen but you know think about someone that used to deliver

a warm food to new york city and that was their market and they could only market you know to this market and they could only sell in this market and now all of a sudden you know they get this thing called and they can keep it cold for a few weeks or you know a few months and you can just get it nationwide it's it's just like the whole movement is insane what's so interesting to me about this is um if you go back in history right and i like to fancy myself having read about history uh food was never preserved right and until the invention of either freezing or refrigerating the food there was no ability to actually preserve food through time and so by being able to now freeze or refrigerate all of a sudden you could have uh food throughout different

seasons you could you know ship it places there's all these things that got unlocked by just bringing refrigeration and uh kind of freezing technology to the market in some weird way it's like history is repeating itself again right and now you're saying wait a second we are going to take that same exact you know lesson from history and now apply it to this whole new world where frankly there's you know a gazillion restaurants in any one geography but if they've been previously just kept you know local you now can make them in this case national maybe eventually globally as well yeah totally and you know there's this concept of like flash freezing for example and you flash freak you flash freeze at the peak of freshness what is that that means that you know

like you literally like at the moment where the food is at the freshest point then you basically run it through an extremely fast very cold freezing process and you conserve the freshness you know something's changing the food but you conserve the freshness so when something is not frozen it basically keeps deteriorating over time always so if you have fruit for example and you don't freeze it then you know two weeks three weeks it's not eatable anymore but if you like flash freeze it pick up freshness and then you basically you know thaw it and then you eat it in the next day it's like as fresh you know as it gets of course you know when you're speaking about something that has been um you know frozen before so even when you speak about that like

conserving food at that point and making sure that like through the entire value chain when you know storing process packing process logistics process getting to someone's doorsteps process like if it's kept if the temperature is kept to that point then you know it goes back to what you're saying which is like hey you know conserving food and getting it nationwide it's like a whole other level right now across across the nation so what is the business that you guys are in like explain in terms of you guys have warehouses uh i believe you have a billion dollars worth of goods that have kind of gone through the network like i'm a customer of grip who am i and like what am i interfacing with or what am i getting from you so yeah so let me give you some some history in this

so when if if you were a perishable direct to consumer company you know five years ago basically you had to figure out internally the back half of your business which is hey i create an amazing product i sell it through a point of sale system now how do i get it to the final customer which you know all these companies that have amazing products are not necessarily logistics companies like it's a you know different worlds so what we do which is a lot of just real quick and on that what you're basically saying is like if you were selling i don't know book stands you could focus on the product somebody orders that you just hand the book stand to fedex and you're good to go but now once it's perishable fedex and others may not want to take it you may

have to change the the processor like there's complexity with the perishable that changes what maybe normal business goes through totally i mean they they take it but you focus on what you can control which is okay who am i giving it to when it comes to the carriers and then how much refrigerant am i adding into the box and then what you know how much insulation am i sending this with and where am i sending it from so like if you focus on the variables that you can control and then you give it to the carrier or shipping service that data says that performs the best to that specific with that specific product and then you get it to the final consumer so you know what what i was saying in terms of the history is five ten years ago you had to try to either build all

these complexity internally which means spending you know 10 million dollars internally trying to build and maintain these systems or you would basically just give it to a shipping carrier and hope for the best without necessarily focusing on on what you can control so what we've done now is we basically have like connected all these different data points to say hey focus on your product like focus on your sales focus on your branding on your marketing and what you can actually do best and then let us do the rest it's similar to like when you work with a company like Like Stripe, for example, where if you're running a direct-to-consumer company right now, and you're trying to recreate or rebuild Stripe, good luck.

Why are you spending your resources doing that? So with us, it's basically like, hey, listen, focus on what you can control on your end and focus on what matters for your business. And then you basically send the product to us. So send the inventory to us. Once you sell something, it flows into our systems. We run it through what we call a shipping engine, which figures out what's the absolute best way to get it to the final customers and then we get it to your final customer

so it's like basically the full back end of it now when we first met um you had done this at butcher box figured all this out and you realize everyone else is going to need to do this as well um and one of the things that you use as an example is weather alerts and how weather could delay a shipment and that would change the decision making of what you put in the box describe maybe an example in terms of like how does the software tell people like oh whether you know bad weather could potentially disrupt this and like what are the changes people are making as they're actually creating the box with the goods to center the customer major weather events and perishable products if you combine those two it's a good way to get gray hair

very good you want to you want to fast track your way towards gray hair like combine those two um and that's because like there's let's say there's a wildfire in california and you're shipping 10 000 boxes to california this week and if you just like basically don't have someone checking you know weather page.com and trying to make those decisions and trying to figure out like what's going on with the major weather events and the wildfires on your boxes then you can very easily just have like a hundred thousand dollars on the road just you know like good luck um so that's like one of the biggest changes and things that we went for just because for me was so stressful when i was managing this where we were trying to basically match we had a

guy internally a butcher box we used to call the weatherman which it was like hey you know your job is to go to weather.com and figure this out um you know those resources could be better spent of course doing more value-added activities but it it goes back to like hey you're shipping 100 you know boxes or a thousand bucks or ten thousand or whatever the number is like how do you proactively know that the route of that box is going to be impacted by a major weather event. And then you proactively reach out to the customer and say, Hey, we're about to ship your box. We notice it's impacted by a major weather event. Do you want us to hold it, you know, cancel the shipment, send it in two days or three days after the major weather event is gone. You basically

just like took a bad experience, flip it on the head. I'll make a very good one for your customer because if you know i'm shopping on a brand and with a brand and they send me an email or text saying that i'm like okay these people have their shit together now um what if they say not send it i mean some companies are are you know risk averse some some are not some are basically hey you know we know we send it and now we're gonna also send communication to the customer basically saying hey if something's wrong let us know we'll make it right for you but at the same time like having that information to make it right for the customer it's where basically the data matters now as you uh kind of see this play out maybe what is the most surprising things right i mean again

super fast growing business uh one that you already understood kind of what to build but now you got to go build it for other people not just a company that you're working at um would have been the biggest surprises i wouldn't say i mean not necessarily like a big surprise but it's a reminder and and this is what we started talking about of like how much your team matters because like at the end of the day you only have your team to build a company so everyone needs to be committed to building what we're building here which is a once in a generation company and going like all in on that and that means you know like long hours that means a lot of effort that means like thinking outside the box that means going the extra mile that means

like always delivering a plus work and like as i'm saying not necessarily a surprise because you know kind of knew that going into this and and from my time at butcher box as well but you know i'm always like you know reminded about that like every time i see the team working so hard now where are you finding these employees like is there a certain arch type that you're looking for are there certain backgrounds that you're you're going for you're looking for you know smart hardworking people how are you putting this team together a smart hardworking people for sure that's we need that um but through one of the goals for this year or one of the things that we're focusing on this year is uh defending our company's culture and i say defending

because you know we've built a pretty good company culture and now we have to defend it as we 2x 3x and 5x the team so one of the things that we do for finding these people is through the interview process every single person that's going to interview a candidate they get one company value and their job through this interview process is to screening this person for this one company value so that's something that basically if one person in the team you know raises a hand and says like hey i don't think that they pass the you know relentless improvement company value we're like okay you know we're not hiring this person so uh that's you know that doesn't necessarily answer the question of like what's the source of these people but the the the framing that we use for

hiring people is hey how well can they get come in here and how well can they play within our company values and culture so like relentless improvement is one of the company values how do you screen for that i mean there's like multiple questions that uh you can ask someone but when it comes to relentless improvement as an example we work internally with what we call fast innovation cycles which means that nothing has to be perfect for launching but you work very close with the customer and then you go from idea to product to feedback very fast so we ask for example for situations of hey you know when have you involved when have you been involved in launching a product and like guide us through the full um like guide us through the full cycle of launching that product

um you know something that we don't do internally is lock ourselves in a room for six months work on something thinking that we're building what's right and then go and try to launch it like we bring the customer in day one and we get feedback from them day one and we lunch with them you know day one basically so we try to screen for those things you know asking for situations where they've been involved in in you know building product like that and when you're going through this process how much of it is you're interviewing them versus you're trying to sell candidates on joining like it's a little bit of a dance right between you're trying to screen but you also if you get them to the end you don't want them to be like man these people

we're assholes i don't want to work here right so how do you balance that um i mean we i'm very blunt through the hiring process and i basically shoot straight with hey this is how it's like to work here so it's it's it's tricky because at the same time you don't want to scare people away too much but if you actually do then that means that that was probably not you know the right person to to work in the company but uh as you say you know it's a dancing act of like hey getting someone excited to build an industry to innovate within an industry but then getting them to understand like how hard it actually is and how many sacrifices you you have to do you know on a personal level on a um you know like the work balance level so uh yeah i mean

you're right it's it's it's definitely you know a balancing act between those two now um you all have physical locations as well these warehouses talk a little bit about uh maybe the benefits and the downsides to you know many software companies they're just like hey we write software uh we have office right um you guys have warehouses you're moving you're moving physical products like there's a lot of complexity here and i think a lot of software entrepreneurs would look at this and be like that's not a business i want to be involved in does that actually competitive advantage because it's hard or are there other downsides that that maybe they are right on that's what i want to be involved in like if someone says hey i don't want to be involved in that like that's that's where

we come in and that's where we add value because like software can be very pretty and software can you know look beautiful and and it can do some things but it's really mostly valuable when you get that to connect with the physical world and when you get the software to basically like have the hand inside how the goods move through the through the physical world that's where you basically like you know one plus one does not equal two that's where you now basically like exponentially increase the the like the value of an industry and and the benefits of like you know working with a provider like you and and a lot of people scare away from it and and maybe they're just like not not built for that and and maybe you know maybe it's not the type of company that

they're trying to build but the way that we are approaching this solution we need to have our hands you know inside the process because there can't be any data holes like if you basically ship the orders or the software says hey ship the orders this way but then you basically don't know where your orders are you know within the next five hours or 10 hours then that's a hole that you need to get visibility into because that impacts your uh and customer experience so that's why like that's where we want to be involved because that's where the whole happened now Now, what is like the North Star here, right? Like how big can this get?

What does it look like, you know, five, 10 years from now? When you kind of wake up and you're like, this is where we're going, what is that path? So, I mean, to this point, we're definitely the most innovative company in the space. We are taking these, you know, very seriously from a innovation improvement and like A-plus customer experience standpoint.

So, you know, in five years from now, we're definitely going to be like the company, known in the space for this whole thing and this means that you know as i was saying before if you're a company that ships direct to consumer products perishable which means refrigerator frozen then you focus on that and we are the company that you trust for the back half of that so basically just providing the infrastructure for all these d2c companies now um there's a bunch of d2c companies i could rattle off right now off the top of my head that ship things that are uh perishable um how much of the future business is going to people who have

perishables but don't ship and saying to them hey you should be shipping right kind of hey right now you're sending this stuff in new york city but actually you could do it nationally let us help you do it yeah it's a combination and we see you know a big value out on both because we work with very big retailers that they don't do it because they haven't been able to do it like they don't have the technology they don't have the resources to be able to do this so it's an interesting mix of customers because the the retail the big retailer has already figured out the product itself and they have the resources for the marketing and people know their brands pretty well but as i was saying before that's very different from becoming a logistics company

so they haven't taken a stab at becoming a logistics company and that's where there's a very big opportunity where they basically just you know have these as another massive um you know sales channel for them on the other hand you have you know the companies that are already at you know multi-million dollar companies like a butcher box would be where you know this is just a massive value at versus what they're doing internally because one they can use resources for something else and then two you know i was giving this stripe example like you know if you try to build stripe you're never going to be as good as them for payment processing or some other company that does this because like that's the whole the only thing that they do that's what

they focus on now when you start looking at um the other competitors in the space you said that you're the most innovative. Many people may think, oh, there's another technology company doing this, but actually most of these are 50, a hundred year old companies have been doing this for a really long time. What are some of the main differences between working with like an incumbent that is a big company, but slow moving bureaucratic and kind of like outdated from technology versus with you from the customer's perspective? Like, are there very obvious things where maybe in another industry, it's like, Hey, this guy's got a fax machine. This guy's got email. Right. But like, What is it in this specific vertical?

So how the industry evolved is, you know, frozen storage companies usually do pallet in, pallet out, which means you bring a truck with a pallet of product. Forklift downloads the pallet, gets counted or, you know, verify that it's the right product, gets put in the freezer. And then sometimes they pick a case of that specific product and ship it out. Or most of the time they take that same pallet and they get it somewhere else. So basically pallet in, pallet out. the industry over the last years have innovated and has been forced to move into the itches what we call it which means hey you now take the pallet you open it up and you actually grab the product and put it into the box that is going to go to the final customer so it's not the pallet being

moved and it's not even the crate that's being moved it's actually the individual skew is getting picked up correct so and and the industry has been evolving into that because of the you know direct to consumer offering that has been also coming up, coming up online over the last few years. But, you know, it's a very different offering when it comes to padding padded out to the eaches and then getting that to the final consumer because of how much more complex it is from a variable standpoint of how many more things you have to do and then how much more data you need to actually do it right. So, you know, there's great companies from like a warehousing and storage space that have been forced to move into this but that's just a one small piece of the

puzzle like when you take that and you add technology and much more scanning and data to that and you interconnected them with hey what happens before that and then what happens after that which means before that you say how do i decide how to send this box and then after that how do i monitor and how do i control how that box is getting delivered to my final customer that's the biggest difference uh in this space what are some of the numbers you can share in terms of like how big these markets are right so you said that you've overseen a billion dollars worth of goods already which is to me like that's a massive number um you scaled the business in a little over a year from zero to eight figures of revenue how big is the market like do these

businesses do tens of billions of dollars in revenue or what i mean multi-billion dollar market um for sure you have when you split it up you have basically the the like the direct to consumer meal kit companies which is a multi-billion dollar market then you have the specialty products which is multi-billion dollar market and within this you have like you know things interesting as like frozen pizza from chicago like there's thousands of people across the country that you know buy frozen pizza from chicago on a daily basis and that's a multi-billion dollar market by itself then you know flowers like five plus billion dollar market and then you have the whole pharma industry which is you know insulin in the mail it's basically shipping that in the mail it's

very similar to shipping you know a piece of refrigerated or you know frozen something on the product in the mail so that within if within itself is also a billion dollar market so when you combine all these things you know you're talking about multi-billion multi-billion dollar market and like let's say uh the pizza from chicago the people who are selling that how many them are like i have a pizzeria in chicago it's good pizza and i figured out how to sell online versus somebody in chicago is like man none of the people who have you know pizza parlors here in chicago know how to sell online so i'm going to create like a brand and it's like frozen only right versus no this is just an extension of an existing brand it's a combination i mean if you

have a brand that people already recognize and you open the market to then nationwide that's just you know just like so many more sales that you can get through the same market like to the same people and nationwide but then you also have the people that basically say hey you know pizza from chicago has a massive like you know ring to it and people know it you know deep dish pizza a lot of people love it so i'm just gonna build that and focus on that because i know that they want i can get nationwide coverage so you see both for sure because if you have a very recognized brand like why not get a nationwide and how much of this is like consumer uh changes right so like butcher box is a good example where um obviously people want to get meat like they're

gonna go to the grocery store they go to you know a costco whatever um but there was like it gets delivered in the mail there's a subscription element to it and also it's like healthier food and so is that more so like the offering is so compelling or is it no the consumer's just gonna to go on their phone and order stuff and like you got to be there and if you're not there they're going to order from somebody else i think it's accessibility uh comes down to that because that way you get access to like what you really want not just what you have available around you and that's the biggest difference of it because if you say hey i want to buy this product and it's made in new york but i live in miami then you just have it accessible you go online you

buy it and it shows up to your doorstep before that it was like okay i want to buy this product but this is made in new york i'm not really going to go to new york right now so like what's similar to this around me in miami so that whole like accessibility um question i think is what marks the biggest difference on what this used to be you know 10 years ago versus what it what is it now and when you think about lessons learned at butcher box that you are replicating with grip what's like maybe the biggest one or two outside of the team like just hey i gotta have a high quality team but what what are some of the other lessons that you're you know i have to make sure i implement this um i think having a a mentality of getting things done now like an urgency

urgency correct correct urgency because like oftentimes companies fall into this trap that they talk about initiatives and they talk about projects and innovations for months and months and months or weeks without necessarily acting acting on it so um you know one of our company values is actually you know bias towards action and that means that we go into a meeting and if we chat about something or we discuss something we do not leave that meeting until the next step is figured out. And it happens right there. Even if the next step is like, hey, we're not going to go forward with this, we decide it and we do it. But we don't leave things in the air. We don't leave things in a state where you basically don't know what the next step is, even if there's no

next step. So when you think about that, that makes you move so much faster, which is, hey, we're going to decide this now and work on this now versus, hey, this is something that we might do. And we're going to work on these like in two weeks, which means that it ends up being pushed two weeks because when you meet again in two weeks, it's like, wait, what did we chat about, you know, two weeks ago? Like, which is what we're going to do. So, uh, that's, I think one of the biggest lessons, um, from ButcherBox and, and how we got to move very, very fast initially. And that's something that we definitely, you know, taken over to grip. I mean, implement it here as well. What do you think the biggest mistakes so far has been like,

everything is this amazing success story, fast growth, but like, what are the, what's you look back and you're like yeah you know we we messed up and we learned from that um it's a good question um i think for me personally uh it's probably a like doing too much initially um because like i get so obsessed with quality work and with A-plus work that I sometimes hold too long to that work and do it myself. But something that I've learned over time is that you need to trust the people that you work with to do A-plus work. And if you don't do that, they're just never going to grow and never going to get to do A-plus work if they were not doing it before. And I think initially for me, that's one of the biggest

mistakes where i think if you do that you just end up building you know a longer term stronger team it probably takes more investment initially you know personally by you know like letting go of something or teaching something uh to someone but you know after you get to do that like that's when you get to exponential growth when you look at um the pharmacy space i know that you guys are doing a ton there yet but but i think that there's a belief that there will be a big market there um what will that look like what are the similarities and differences to you know d2c uh kind of food or beverage stuff we have all the the weight loss industry is massive now you know cempic it's has been blowing up everyone is you know supposedly trying that and and consuming

that and the the similarity is that you get a product of refrigerated something to a doorstep like it's a it's a very very similar process i think regulatory wise it's different on the pharmacy side of course because you know everything needs to be checked out by a pharmacist so you need to have the infrastructure for that and then sometimes you can't get some products from one state to the other as well so like from that standpoint it's similar but when you look at the logistics behind it the decision making behind it the customer experience behind it a lot of it is extremely similar and is your thought process that uh right now people obviously are ordering a lot of non-perishables i would actually argue in some cities like a new york

uh i mean you see the delivery drivers carrying hot food around everywhere right and so maybe there's not as much hot food being delivered as non-perishables but like definitely it's rising very quickly eventually will cold be the same i think it's a it's it's for different uses and different needs people usually go to cold food when they want to eat healthier because they know that they can get this product to their to their doorstep and they can then control what they eat inside their house by either like they get the ingredients and they cook it themselves or they have a very uh strict routine of how they eat with basically like the meals you know prepared for them or almost prepared for them so that's like one segment of it the other segment is as we were

talking like the specialty products. Um, I mean, we've talked about these, my mom's favorite cake, um, Lady M. Um, if anyone from Lady M is listening to this, please get in touch with me. We've been trying to get to the CEO for a while, but he's ghosted me. Backstory on this is my mom loves this cake. This cake is made in New York. And every time that we used to come to New York with my mom, we buy this cake for her. And now, you know, she moved to Miami. Uh, I moved to Miami, actually not she didn't move to miami and every time that she visits me in miami i order this cake and it's in the freezer when she goes there so that's like the whole of the market it's like you know specialty products like oh damn this is thing is made in new york when she comes to miami

i just ordered a couple days before that and it's just in the freezer waiting for her she's probably happy and she's happy yeah um is there other customers out there that you're like man we really want to work with uh these people i know there's a whole bunch of like you know customers on a list but like what are like the two or three dream customers um lady m lady m lady m and lady m i'm kidding that would make my my mom happy um but um i mean like we really like innovative products and innovative companies one of the feedbacks that we've gotten from our customers is that they like that we move as fast as they move um which it's definitely different and new in this industry so my the companies that i like the most is companies that

you know we complete their onboarding process for like a week it's like so fast everything just happens they get integrated into our api or shopify app and everything just happens so fast So, you know, I'm passionate about these companies because I think that those are the companies that are going to succeed. And given that, according to the people internally, we're a company as a service, instead of a software as a service, we like, we get to basically get very like interconnected with their teams and their systems. And that's what excites me when it comes to new customers. All right. Before I let you go, give me the like one minute pitch to a customer. Why should they use Grip? So if you are a direct-to-consumer, refrigerated or frozen company, and you want to improve your bottom line and service your customer better, you need to be working with us. Because there's not a single company that we've worked with where we can't make their operation better. I've been very proud about this because every time that we get to chat with someone, look into the data, there's always a massive value add. in terms of how they're doing things now

and how they would do them with us. And that's two things. One, you're starting a new direct-to-consumer and you're a retailer. Or two, you already have a bunch of frozen or refrigerated products in the mail that you want to basically get to your customers in a better way.

What is the one minute on why people should come work at Grip? If you want to grow professionally, personally, and you want to help us build a once-in-a-generation company, uh, this is, this is a place for you. And then, uh, what is your message to all the people who think that you can't be successful? I've had some of those. Um, I'll keep trying, you know, I'll keep trying. Uh, there's a, I love to work. I mean, you, you, you've seen me work. This is

something that, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm passionate about. And, um, you know, I, it's something that I saw, uh, my, um, you know, growing up, uh, looking at my dad, basically working hours and hours a day he's a beast yeah he's a beast um there was things that he liked so like that's basically what i know how to do so uh yeah the only thing i'll say about juan's dad is uh you warned me uh he came into miami and you told me beforehand uh he's you know like look he just he works a lot and uh i was like yeah okay whatever and uh then i saw it in person and i was like wow i work a lot one works a lot one's dad might work longer than both of us that's crazy yeah it's funny i um you know like if you grow up in a household where you see your dad work yeah 24 7

there's one or two outcomes one is you say i don't want to be like this guy and i don't want to work so you're going to like hate work yeah or two you're going to go and you're going to say hey you know this like i want to become this guy and i look up to this guy so i'm going to work harder than him i don't think that i work harder than him by the way but you know at least i like i got that you get the positive impact yeah i got the positive impact of that yeah and not to say that you know you don't need to take care of like other things right you know you still have a you know beautiful family i need to take care of that i need to build relationships and have experiences and and you know have friends but if you're working towards something that you're really

passionate about and that passion it's not necessarily like the product but having an impact in the people that you work with and the customers and employees and changing their lives for the better then like work becomes life and life becomes work like this thing of work-life balance at that point is irrelevant because it's just you know the same thing that makes you happy basically well the part that too that i think um as a parent now uh there's times where i'm like if i work a lot this is a good example to a kid and i and i actually think that like it's just it's the other end of it where um i wonder if you did a study of a bunch of parents like do they end up actually working harder knowing that their kids are watching i don't i don't know but like

it i catch myself sometimes being like it is good that i am working because my kids will realize that you know you have to work hard to get things in life totally i mean i've seen your kids at the office while you're you know in meetings so they're just like around you so you know growing up what are they going to remember they're going to like oh you know i i have this is like there's this fun office culture where you know i can be at and have fun and work and like enjoy the people around me so you know that experience is unbeatable in our office in miami the kids only wanted to come because juan was there and he would play soccer with them he'd never let them win though he would always make sure he won

awesome all right where do we say people find you on the internet and find out more about grip shipping you know gripshipping.com uh it's just way and then the company's only on linkedin I'm on Twitter as well Juan C. Maisel or Juan Maisel you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn as well all right

but gripshipping.com correct I appreciate it very much my friend you're building a fast-growing company hopefully we do this again in the future you're doing a billion dollars

in revenue there you go good to see you