Marketing Workshop: Turning a Failing Nut Shop into Nuts.com

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman today I'm here with Sean busy CEO of Kinesis and we're doing another in our series of marketing workshops as we explained the last time we did this the idea here is to focus on one of the biggest pain points business owners have but with the idea that there's there's no magic bullet so today I think we're probably going to end up talking a lot about digital marketing um there's a lot of jargon involved in this could you walk me through a couple of these let me start with one I just heard that I wasn't familiar with what's CAC yeah CAC is it sounds terrible sounds like it might be a disease but uh it's really just customer acquisition cost you know how much are you spending to get a to get a customer you're also probably going to hear some terms like LTV that's lifetime value so what is a customer worth not only when they buy a product or a service from you today but what what's it worth over the lifetime that they are with your company because if you're thinking about how much you're spending to get that customer you want to know what you're going to get back over the lifetime that's right over the lifetime you're probably going to hear uh cpg which is um consumer packaged Goods think about when you go into the grocery store all the stuff on the shelves those are cpg items our Our Guest today has a lot of cpg stuff the last one I I think you'll probably hear is DTC and so that is direct to Consumer meaning rather than going through the grocery store to get your customers a manufacturer actually sells straight to the consumer usually through the internet so direct to Consumer has been a real kind of Rage for the last I don't know five 5 10 years or so so again the idea uh Behind these conversations is that because there's no magic bullet U marketing solution we want to just try to Workshop it and talk to business owners and entrepreneurs about the strategies they've tried what's worked and what hasn't today we're going to talk to Jeff Braverman who calls himself Chief nut at a family-owned business called nuts.com I've known him for more than 10 years now we wrote about him when I was at the New York Times uh when his business was much smaller he's got an amazing story of taking uh business that his father and Uncle were running a little failing retail Nut Shop turning this business into an internet Juggernaut and doing that without taking any outside capital is there anything in particular you're hoping to hear from Jeff today I mean it's amazing you know cuz he's gone from a what looks to be like maybe a four-person retail store to a maybe 500 person company somewhere in that range um that's doing everything from manufacturing to fulfillment to marketing of the offering and so I you know I want to hear about that Journey you know especially uh how to transition in a family run business because that's often a super hard thing to do all right as usual this episode is brought to you by our principal sponsor the great game of business let's get started welcome Jeff to start could you give us a sense of uh how big a business nuts.com is certainly bigger than we last spoke years ago um but we're well into the stratosphere let's put it that way I think when we first met we were probably doing 30 something million dollars or something like that so so we're doing multiples of that now how many employees do you have probably about 500 or so wow you have a wonderful story about how you actually got into the nut business you went to school you went to Wharton you got a job uh on Wall Street with an investment bank then what happened I gave that about six months s months and I just decided I wanted to build something I want to do something special and a little bit more socially redeeming I grew up in a little nut store that my grandfather started in 1929 and I just had an idea years before I graduated was a freshman in college I I did start what became nuts.com but at the time was called nuts online.com I left banking my dad and my uncle as you know told me I was nuts literally I'm not kidding uh cuz I was you know doing making more money than they were and and doing great in my career you know I just had a belief in myself and and you know I'm not at heart and uh the rest uh became history we still had modest expectations and we we blown through all of them what year was this where you uh started nuts online.com that started in in early 1999 and then I joined the business full-time in 2003 so that's before the.com Bubble Burst correct early days in the internet very early not that many people rep buying nuts online then you know orders would trickle in a few orders here and there it was like the most exciting thing in the world to my uh four person family business yeah I remember when uh in those early days too it was like there was just so much hesitation about putting your credit card online like just getting over that threshold was was like a a big barrier back then 100% And even and even if you fast forward a bunch of years it was still a barrier you just have all these assurances on the side you need to we would do AB testing showing credit cards and and you know credit cards accepted and you know these nordan secure whatever stuff you know to try to you know mitigate and laay people's fears um you know I don't think those are as necessary these days what was your basic idea for how you were going to find customers and how the customers were going to find you when the internet was just getting started yes early on it was hard it wasn't even a Google that you could pay maybe there's a Google but you couldn't pay them edwords didn't exist so I actually started out for example this was uh and I know he's passed but Tony Shay from zapo had this called link exchange and you would like put banners and and share banners and pay commissions and stuff like that that's why I started driving people but then SEO also organic search was an easy thing those days and you can manipulate and rank very high just by doing some very basic things on the page you know then there was a tool called goto which became Overture which then got bought by Yahoo so these were like paperclick so yeah I I I date myself here and then obviously the Holy Grail became Google it's like a history of the internet when I came into the business in this was like February of 2003 I didn't know that the internet was going to be the end all be for a little store I actually thought the opportunity was to to sell to a superm market who started buying from us but after a few months I just really wanted to lean into to where we could you know differentiate ourselves and and realized it was online and then put together strategy rebuilt the website there were techncal hurdles or really you know go after advertising online and we launched of course this stuff always takes longer than you expect relaunched on December 4th of that year and I told a developer who I hired him when I was a sophomore in college and he's still with us today wow but I said it's Christmas time let's go we launched and it was like the fire hose opened up type of a thing where volume just exploded but we just then had you know strategy on how to advertise on Google and you know what what we realized really early on was budget what budget right if there are returns you just find the money and you spend it and also then and it's a big challenge for lots of people especially these startups of the last couple of years it's just like you know taxs were just nothing well we actually got to point where we were grandfathered in with some platforms for like a penny bids for a penny eventually they graduate those things be 10 cents or sense or whatever but but what I did you know the early secret to Our Success Beyond just like we already were ranking organically was really understand in Google there's a guy who wrote one of the first books on Google and instead of me running the campaigns I decided let me hand it off to him and for several hundred dollars a month it was actually I remember about $600 a month he didn't know he didn't know what his work was um and then I was just like completely off the races yeah I remember that time you know we did uh we were doing SEO back in 2005 and you know it was B2B but it still worked very similarly where you know if you created content you just put a lot of content out there with the right keywords you could really drive a lot of business and there just wasn't the competition it was they were sort of like houseon days you know such a such a great time if you were ahead of everybody else yeah and then we used the tools so when I came into the business we maybe had a you know think of like a little nut dried food candy store for 150 products or so you know today we have thousands of products but we leverage the tools so we would use again even before Google we used another keyword tool and it would tell us how many how many searches are there for this thing in a given month we would take supplier cataloges dump it in to the to the tool to start scaling the offering if x number of people are searching for this thing God bless let's uh let's let's sell it and see how it goes and it was a very simple you know strategy but it worked just steping back a minute you know I run into a lot of Second Generation Um business owners where the where the parents are still involved and it sounds like you've faced kind of a common situation where there's a status quo there's a way of working it was you know boots on the ground retail presence and you had a vision and a transformation you wanted to bring about how did you navigate you know your big ideas and change and all that and and and also manage relationship with your family yeah yeah it's it's a great question and I think I I was I was lucky and at a little bit of a special situation here because I think often whether it's a strong patriarch or matriarch but there's someone strong who's reluctant to seee control to the Next Generation I've I've had unique relations with my dad where like in high school I was investing his money and managing his money so there was something a little bit different there you know I did come home my freshman year of college I put together a little business plan my dad and my uncle had probably never had a business plan to um you know try something with the internet they gave me a very small budget it did cost me more than that um but you know they had strong belief in me you know like I said when I decided to come into the business and this was exciting I'll speak for my dad he's just a creature of habit uh when the store the store was actually struggling so when there were no customers on a Saturday he'd be nervous and when it was right before Christmas and really busy he'd be equally nervous and and just you know a reluctance to change and kind of you know set in their ways my grandfather was the exact same way you know my dad told me that when he was came into the business he wanted to put in display cases in the store this was like old school you wouldn't know what to ask for you couldn't even see the product and it took my dad years and finally cried to his mom and finally you know she said you know Saul listen to him and give it a shot and they finally put in display cases and sales went up so I think like you know he probably forgot a little bit of that once I came into the business but right but he was certainly more open-minded and one thing uniquely that they did was they gave me the keys in a much more generous way than would normally happen and there were challenges like at some point I said hey we need QuickBooks and I remember dis stingly it was about $299 at the time and my dad said let's wait for business to be a little bit better and I just said no and like you know he just had no choice because I just bought it right you know we were dead and on Saturdays in the retail store I put together the case and said hey we need to close were actually not making any money on Saturdays and their response was well poy saw would never let us close and you know they wanted to start with a half a day and sometimes I just dug in and they didn't have the fight in them but then what happened was things worked so we didn't have a we have business was not a good business was not making much money and then we start growing and it becomes super exciting yes when we turn on that website again the new version in December 4th 2003 my dad actually said shut it off because it was too much business and he was scared scared he couldn't fulfill it just so just nervous yeah and it's like we we we we got this you know like we had uh still example but we had a Wholesale customer we had to have a wholesale business because the retail store was just you know going down and down each year and uh you know I just visited them asked them questions said how how can we help you they're like well we really love packaging will you package for us my dad and mle said no too much labor because for them they didn't want to think about hiring people I showed them the map I was like oh my gosh we can make retail margins at wholesale volumes let's go so I was the person who packed it right and just of drag them along but then it starts getting faster and then we start hiring people and like and it worked you know we grew this business very quickly and profitably and so like I think that covers up a lot of stuff but I think there was a deep love and respect that they had for me which is which is like I'm not saying that's not in other places but they were much more trusting and then you know one to my Dad's credit and all of a stubbornness in life because he's pretty dogmatic it was you know he pledged that if wasn't expecting have a kid to come in the business like he had to kind of go into the business but if he did he would you know give them a lot more latitude so like very quickly like that retail store of ours got bulldozed in 2005 wow that was 50% of our business fortunately we had the internet that's a symbolic moment yeah and I was there at that sa save of the day and um you know again things work we grew 50% a year for 10 years or whatever it was and you know got paid before we paid our suppliers it just it just a model that worked you were what in your 20s at that point when you were sort of hustling hard yeah so so I came in when I was you know 20 started full-time when I was 23 wow and then within you know we get bulldo move up to a bigger facility I was nervous it was too big well we took over the neighboring facility two years later then we went to move out again and then you know we scaled tremendously now we got facilies over the country but uh yeah you know right we we really hit our groove you know three four years in you know we're really hitting our groove and growing ni SCH at what point did you start thinking that you had regrets about the name nuts online.com and decide to go after nuts.com yeah so never regrets I had no op I had no I had no money right what was I couldn't even contemplate buying a domain that was already taken and those were like candid those were you know less less less appropriate sites at the time that you would even want to be thinking about so so n online.com was actually my seventh choice but previous six were all taken at the time um but then there was always in the back of my head you know I had files from 2005 because then domains by proxy came out and you didn't know who owners were websites but I had files from an old computer which told me who the owner was so I have that going back from 2005 of nuts.com so it's always in the back of my head you know there were small instances like in 2008 you know we made these uh Tully circles with Jordan amond for Rachel show and I help tie the D both and at the very end she says well I really want to thank uh we were nuts online.com she says I really want to thank nuts.com for contributing these things like oh my my God and Lauren knows all these details it's a very long story but you know I I I tried to buy it in in 2008 and turned out a lot of that major the type and traffic was from a different country with a different search intent so we passed and the seller was wasn't really you know super interested in in in in uh in selling for the price we offered but then it come 2011 you know we kind of had the for sight for where the world is headed you know you can see this today where Amazon's done a very good job promoting Amazon um so we had a sense that the brand would become even more important so just one of these things active negotiation end of 2011 I thought it was going to fail fortunately worked out and uh kind of the rest is a history there you said the brand would be very important can you that's one of those words that it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and I would love for you just to articulate what it means to you and and how you think about brand yeah and to be clear we're in our infancy right now even we're to this day we're doing deep brand research and what is nuts.com what can it be can it scale can it transcend just the word nuts so like I'm still not that smart but we had a good business right we were doing tens of millions dollars under nuts online.com so so I couldn't complain you know far greater than you know my junior of college my goal was 10 orders a day right this is that's much bigger scale than that and um you know I just saw like basic stuff just from a retention standpoint or it's just easier it's four letters it's more memorable nuts.com versus nuts online.com uh you can imagine from a competitive threat standpoint it's just just all around just a better name there's all there's gives it much greater weight and Authority you think about it so if someone's looking in a search results and they're trying to buy a nut product it's nuts.com yeah it's more more more weighty than uh you know have more trust and than than than just uh you know nuts online but again like I I we were always trying to be personable and when we rebranded this wasn't hey Jeff just use your your college friend anymore to do do the design work this is like hey let's invest we're spending a lot of money on this domain let's go out and find some of the in a business on on kind of the brand identity and and this and the surrounding imagery and so on Jeff I believe it's been reported in part by places where I've been employed how much you spent do you mind telling us again how much you spent for nuts.com sure because you could Google it chat chat probably know tell you yeah never supposed to get out but it got out but $700,000 and that's $21 correct I mean it wasn't that long before that that you were negotiating $299 for QuickBooks yeah how did writing that check feel how big a risk did was that for you at the time well it wasn't like a bet the house or anything like that to be clear we're already doing really well um so it was still right like our our profit could handle it let's put it that way you know so wasn't like uh this this you know massive Financial gamble that was going to make us insolvent um but like you know I had conviction I believed I was trying to justify the math and it's was like well if you improve your retention rate by 1% then all this stuff but it's all Bs I was saying well what if you could hire employees better like is it a better brand that resonates with people you go to hire and then right you could get a return if you just hire that one person um so you know I just had long-term conviction and basically right there's no MTH this but I was like you know what if it pays off in 10 years right like I had confidence it would do that obviously Lauren as you know our organic rankings tanked for the first couple of months which made me panic because Google had to figure it stuff out and then they came roaring back and you know I I don't remember the exact math I did back then but I figur it did pay back in about six months so so It ultimately worked out well I love for you to talk about your journey of going from these like early Scrappy days when you're like you know I've got to like pinch every penny and be really cautious to a place where you're like I'm gonna I'm gonna take a flyer on this thing and wi are the right times to be thinking bigger like that yeah yeah it's a good question look I think what's been imbued me from the day I was born was frugality it doesn't stop even now we've we've scaled our you know or payroll probably by 10x that in the last year or so so like to give you perspective but there's still just this High degree of frugality you know I would say my dad was more Pennywise pound foolish um and I'm trying to be Pennywise and pound wise and that's how I've been you know so for that that was like a big number but again it wasn't it it wasn't bet the farm right and there was not like it wasn't like it was worth a zero you know it's worth something so it's just like you know but it came down to gut because I again yes I did math but like who the heck knows what would have happened so I think it was I just believed and sometimes entrepr I think an entrepreneur definition of entrepreneur is someone who takes risks with limited information right right right and and that's what I did but again this wasn't I was never going to create existential risk I can't remember what our profit was then right right I don't know what my frame of mind was then um but uh I think we're at the scale where like we wouldn't miss it MH um so that was certainly helpful but that wasn't the sum total of your investment at that point is I I think you were starting to say before when you were talking about brand I think you made a decision that it wasn't just buying the domain name you were going to invest in the brand and I think you're probably talking about some the graphic design which correct correct which wasn't cheap but still orders of magnitude less but like but yes there's a lot of work and you have to reprint all your assets but those were still small compared to the $700,000 but I can tell you we did Lean in right didn't go cheap on the brand agency and one of the best feedback we got afterwards or the most consistent Feb was oh my God your boxes are absolutely incredible because we went nuts on the boxes right we had fun with it and we always had these cutesy cartoon characters because I kind of built this business in my image and I liked cartoon characters and I wanted to make be personable and have a connection with the the customer uh and lean in did and this is look this is a business where we we we still are work on a direct response model right we're not putting much money out there for Branding in terms of budget and so on this is we put in X and we get back y so that was like a little bit more of a leap than a lot of the other stuff so along those lines of taking risk which is something I love to talk about in terms of when what what makes a good decision you took some other risks so you're you're over here tinkering with the online space you're really in this kind of like a test B test you know inputs outputs very what I would call kind of um left brain activity and then I was reading you did this thing like where you shipped a bunch of nuts to CBS and and you have this kind of history of like these like goofy kind of ballsy moves that have no direct correlation to return on investment and yet they made a difference in your business can you talk a little bit whether the it's the Jericho thing or other examples like that I feel like it's not an isolated incident either yeah and you know the Jericho example reminds me of some listen to the how I built this podcast by Guy RZ and he always asked how much of this was like hard work and smarts and so on versus luck and I think I'm not going to be smart enough to answer that well but you know I think luck presents you have to be open to receiving the luck yeah and and with the case of Jericho this was a long time ago this prob years ago or so but uh long story short a show was being cancelled on CBS it's a long story but fans decided to send nuts and protest I had never seen the show I thought I see some orders come in we have a fraud system I was like oh it's getting tripped up as fraud and start poking around and uh just latched on to this thing where again mind you it took me several weeks before watching even the show because I finally did have to watch it but like I never posted on a Blog we launched a Blog we put up remember when I was you know when you see fun rais is just like a thermometer and you want the red go up you know we was like hey let's raise $4,000 in you know that's the campaign and and you know 40,000 pounds later and you know we donated we raised $20,000 for shirts and whatever we donate all those types of money we just like wrapped our head around these things yes for about three weeks I didn't sleep you know taking interviews at midnight and hopping in a truck and driving a truckload to CBS were those nuts paid for or were you just you were donating those nuts no no no so what we did was people started buying a pound of something and then shipping's expensive what we did was say hey we became a facilitator we became like the focal point of a campaign we're going to put in $25 put in $100 we're going to give it to you at the wholesale price and we're going to ship this in bulk 25 pound cases H we were like we were freshly roasting these were gorgeous peanuts um and then they wanted they realized they wanted to ship it to another executive in La so I was like uhuh you guys this ain't me so then I arranged with a company in LA to do the final delivery for us so we were still the focal point of this campaign and what's interesting is they brought the show back they they flew me out for the fall lineup party in LA and I'm in and I'm in season 2 DVD which is kind of kind of funny and mind you like I wasn't a fan I thought these people were crazy at first you know I had no idea I had no idea what what what this was about but then ultimately what happened was we did analysis to say hey you know what do we gain from these customers and turn off these people were rabid fans but not didn't turn out to be rabid customers there wasn't a lot of lifetime value there but when you have links from The New York Times and all these other Publications about this campaign we then ended up what did we do we took that Jericho page where we had pictures and this blog and like all the stuff going we ended up just saying okay let's put that page somewhere else and let's take that page and redirect it to our nuts page and then our rankings went up yeah so like we didn't maneuver it once this whole thing died down but I think it's just being open right and flexible um and being able to pounce when you have a you sense there's some opportunity I didn't expect it to be like crazy like that did you have the help of uh a public relations firm through any of that or did you just wing it all yourself no what we had was a couple of programmers and then we had a kind of a a designer and we just like you know I didn't s i no I was like to be honest some guy was like Hey let we want to interview you I had no idea who he was turn he was like a major person in this campaign I had no idea I would just get on the call I was reluctant I was like I'm tired I got on and then that spawned K I was on krock and all this other stuff happened and suddenly I mean you go to supermarket and you saw me in the N National Inquirer are you kidding are you kidding me this is such a cool story from a lot of like marketing concepts you know you saw something in the data right which was wow why are these nuts getting delivered to CBS what's up with that and then you kind of scratched at that and you learn more and you learn more and then pretty soon you found that there's like a community out there that's really passionate about something it's not nuts but somehow you got tied into that and then the the ancillary benefits to that far out you know out stripped the the nuts that they ordered or the passion that they had in the moment it's really about the long game there what are some other examples that you can share of like this is another kind of pillar of our marketing Foundation that we developed over time and I'll give you something that's much more recent yeah so all these DDC businesses now so many are struggling but so many of these things you know everyone thought they were God during the uh the first year of the pandemic have all these cpg startups calling me bragging about how how great their acquisition strategy is on Facebook their genius business people right oh yeah and and I would interview I would interview people too it's like what what did you do right what did K do versus what did you do but um we had a sense for what was happening with the pandemic for most people we have a chocolate business and it had some product in uh Singapore believe it or not some package product and they had said oh thank you so much this is topping us tremendously in our quarantine this was in February of 2020 oh wow and I was like what I heard of Wuhan what the heck I quarantine in Singapore so we start we're already moving I remember because I think it was a leap year February 29th we set on an email to customers which was early and we said hey something's something's going on it was just like guys stock up we're going to wave shipping you know it's free shipping no minimum just just stock up something's coming and uh and then you know for the next three months I lived in the in the plant and this is where I I'm in a YPO Young business organization and my peers were like Jeff you've got this substantial business and it's much bigger than ours and uh you're the CEO you need to stay home and protect yourself and I was like uhuh that's not the business I built and I'm not going to let people my people assume risk I'm not willing to assume so I literally was in the plant for the first three months just picking imp packing orders because it was hard being in New Jersey these were tough times Yeah March and April right that was like the epicenter in in the United States so you know we struggled we had 70% worker call at our worst moment in time we hired maybe a thousand temps over over a matter of months and so on um but then you know we put on a night shift it collapsed because workers were too scared to be by the temps and so on so forth we scaled again and then the you know kind of the third week of April and I read an article in the journal wsh Journal I think that was saying something like the big boys entertainment and hospitality and my car MERS were all pulling off a TV I'm picking orders in the warehouse I'm doing manual labor and I called a guy I know was very smart and connected I said we need to get on TV cuz while I was working all my friends were home everyone was home just watching TV sure you remember everyone was the challenge is all those people watching TV were also baking Breads and it that means they were buying we sell flowers we were selling truckloads of flowers oh wow we're not.com but like you know our one of our best is a dried mango people are buying all this stuff and bean quinoa grains all that type of stuff I said we need to launch TV in now and the first week of May 2020 we launched TV so like when I look at this the growth of the business as a result of the pandemic yeah 50% was free and I don't say that lightly because my team we worked very hard just to keep up with the volume and keep people healthy and keep this thing running because we were we were probably five minutes from having a shut on the factory it was that hard to keep keep people there but so like I would say 50% was hey Market forces but the other 50% was we we leaned in when everyone was you know terrified when Amazon was shipping I don't if you remember but like it would take two two to four weeks to get some stuff from Amazon early on in the pandemic right we were still you know shipping 50% of our orders the same day right we kept this yes we had to restrict demand and do all this craziness because we didn't have enough human beings we manufacture the stuff we're not just buying something and then shipping it we're packaging every 100% in house we're we're roasting we're doing the chocolates and so on oh wow it's not a business you want to have with this is high labor intense huge number huge number of SKS you had to keep people apart right so they didn't get sick and a lot of stuff is hand packed because we have so many skews and there's small runs like not everything's packed on a machine yeah not a great place to be but we we we Rose to the occasion and literally launched TV which became a huge percentage of our budget and we got the learnings in so it's like you know this is opportunity presents itself and you just got to be open to it and seize it look a week before I was having a nervous breakdown like literally a nervous breakdown because I was getting very tired physically working so many hours in the plant and then trying to save the whole business at night um but we had some hope and then we we we we stepped up and you know that was a really opportune time because for us it's about to buy on TV and there was no better time and probably I don't know right yeah I don't I didn't do this before but the last 30 years to get in and get your learnings in before CPM normalized did you get help with the TV like did you you know at that point you were a bigger company you probably had an agency that you were working with on a regular basis or maybe you had an internal marketing team or tell us a little bit about how you moved into a space you were totally unfamiliar with and managed to make it work yeah so I knew a guy a smart marketer out externally and I just again literally I called him from the warehouse floor and I said I need to launch and I need to launch now he's like I have one company identified an agency they'll do it all they'll do creative they'll do testing they'll do strategy analytics and so on and and and the buy well we could go out to RFP but that's going to take time I said no no no we don't have time this company had like some they said the launch in 10 days type of a thing wow then they came back and said two weeks I said no no no you promised 10 days and we just like we then went to war internally we before we had a kickoff we prepared every possible asset anything they could think of so that we could hit the ground running I think they we spoke with them on a Thursday they wrote a script on Friday and this we like I didn't know what I was doing we didn't know exactly what we're doing so I told my team let's be quiet these are the Prof experts yes we think we have opinions and stuff but shut up we're going to launch Sunday I remember I had some like this is like sitting outside with friends because you know couldn't be inside with people I remember pulling away because they ready were showing me this cartoon thing they spun up super fast and we were just commenting on minor things and then launched a few days later so it's really really incredible but no leveraged an agency this is something that is very hard to ever be able to do in house even at massive scale so was your instinct to go to TV so much as you you felt like the there was just fresh customers to be had here uh was it that you know the Google search thing you were starting to kind of run out of runway in terms of your cost per lead and cost per acquisition tell us more about your thinking there yes Google I've viewed Google don't let the Google people hear this but like I view Google as like a a morphine trip for years now you got to you got to just pay to play and it's like is it incremental or not but at that point in time Google was an unbelievable channel right it was unbelievable channel for everyone because the the audience just exploded right conversion rates and then conversions went through the roof so no to me was just fundamentally like holy crap the world is our oyster this is opportunity to acquire so many more customers and then a supply and demand in Balance everyone's watching TV and the advertise they pulling off so you have a buying opportunity not Arbitrage because we're not selling but like you can buy you can buy on the cheap and it was one of these things let's go let's move super fast you know I don't love the buzzword like the you know the you know the MVP acronym which is I don't know if that's still buzzword or not but minimum viable product but this was like let's go let's apologize later let's break things and let's La you know but then it opened my eyes I was like okay great if Google's really performant now and TV is really performant well why the hell isn't Facebook performant and I had a junior team at the time working on this stuff and you know I didn't know Facebook super well we've been on Facebook forever but I'm always skeptical of the uh Facebook look I've been Aver on Facebook since probably you first compay them in 2005 and I've seen them become opaque and they don't show your result and they take credit for everything and suddenly with iOS 145 it became like this wakeup call but I was just listening to my team and they're like well here's the ramp up and here's the you know the CAC and LTV analysis and I was just like like if Google's working and TV is working there's got to be something for Facebook so then it didn't last long to be honest but then we scaled the hell out of after the summer so we launched TV in May I think in September we went after Facebook aggressively and that was like massively performant you know that lasted only so long you know I think you started seeing reversion to the mean by February and then that summer Facebook died because of the apple apple changes yeah but to me it's so much of My Success in business one thing is I was the customer so I always have the customer first mindset because I am I like eating the stuff we have delicious stuff and and like two cartoon characters great quality freshness quick delivery like we've got five distribution showes around the country because I want stuff quickly and I think the second thing is so it's a lot of common sense and you just connect the dots in places so again that example TV is working H Google's working right everyone's on Facebook too because they got nothing to do be conservative so if you don't believe it fully it's very hard to figure out attribution it's only getting harder and when you when we launched it was like the Cs the acquisition costs were just so low it didn't matter it was right or not you you gave two examples there one in which you said hey let's just trust these professionals you know we got to go and that was you know the your TV experience right and the other example you just gave was like I don't trust what my team is telling me maybe I'm uh simplifying it a little too much but maybe you can help folks from your own experience how to how you think about decision making and how do you think about trust and when to go with your gut and when to rely on Experts yes I'll answer this in a few ways recognize I'm still learning I'm still in office at some points I said hey I should hire an executive team so that was I was the highest paid manual labor for far too long let's put it that way and you know I struggled I said how should I reinvest in this business I struggled for years I didn't know and I should have invested in people the problem is I didn't know how and I have confidence in myself in hiring the right people um so I did go on a crusade start hiring people and kind of the mistake I made was I certainly emphasized intelligence because that was easier for me to measure there's a lot more to it than that and so I probably over indexed there but some stuff was much more theoretical than practical and you need to be able to execute but I think then I was much more of a trust like hey I'm bringing on these very intelligent people just go few years later I learned that you should really trust but verify that's a that's a newer principle and for me now it's like really try to spend a lot of time hiring great people you bring someone in that's not good fix it and fix it quickly but then Empower them but still verify right and until people are ready because sometimes it's too much pressure and like for me I've got 20 plus years of deep institutional knowledge where for years I knew everything and um right that doesn't scale the other thing I did I brought I did hire an adviser because I would get informed advice from people but that's not enough so I don't have a board of directors yet one day I'll figure that out but I think a little over two years ago I did bring on an advisor and it just gave me a lot of confidence because then when you go to make highing decisions there's someone else in your Cor Corner that understands the business not just at a superficial level but you know like I was spending probably four hours a week with the advisor then MH and like even though I've done great in life I'm still like I said an office at this and there's some things I'm really good at there's some things I'm not and that's for like you know you know I had someone to talk to and and look I'm in young presence organization we have your kind of board but like it's a little different we meet mons and month for four hours but they don't know the intimate details and the ins and outs and they're learning too but like that did help where then I had someone who I could go to for advice I made a big move you know you know we were thinking about how do we how do we map my path out what do I like doing and how do we get there you know and he'd said Hey in three years you could focus on people strategy and then Acquisitions all of which sound good to me you know and I said why three years and uh you know saw someone Dynamic along the way and then we h a president so well ahead of we were planning to do it um but like it begin to have the structure in place and and the advice to help make these right decisions nice I I don't know if that exactly answered it but like in my heart of hearts I want to just delegate and that's different most people are reluctant to se control I probably am too trusting of people right hence that that emphasis on being able to verify but I think like you know what we're trying to do is how do you create a culture environment where things are give guidance from up top but let the team set their objectives let them feel empowered turn people l I think you mentioned that you are doing some kind of deep brand research could you tell us about that yeah this is some area where people had to twist my arm to do it because I didn't fully understand it and it's expensive and I don't see immediate returns and so my brain doesn't work like that but you know can we to become a billion dooll business can we do that as nuts.com that's the goal there's no real it's like hey how do we keep this going for 90 years is probably the real goal and do great great work with great people people uh for me it's there's less about a end point it's more about the the journey but sure you got to put numbers up to inspire people but like let's put a number up there like that you know there's a lot of people who just think that we sell nuts when that's a minority of our products can we through branding work can we stick with nuts.com or not can that take us to where we want to go we have a gifting business we have a gifting business that's substantial do we need to create a a sister brand we don't know the exact structure of this what's going to come out of this from a brand architecture stand point but do we need to elevate a brand there you know we have a B2B business that's just really healthy we have a chocolate business that actually has a retail brand and how does this stuff all fit together so we're doing this extensive research project to try to understand again where where where we can go and how do we get there right for me to try to move away let's say from the name.com right I'm gonna need a lot of convincing evidence because there is there is value there and right whether we like no we have created a brand and I was just on a trip and many people came up me says oh my God I love nuts.com or it's like it's my it's my little secret uh store type of a thing so so there is stuff there but we now need to be able to articulate it much better and architect is much better it sounds like as much as you've grown you still see yourself as a little bit of a a a secret so suggesting there's a lot of room to grow yeah these markets we serve are massive that's why like when I think about what we need to do it's less about Amazon and the competition the Mal the Mals are there is Amazon your main competition is that how you think I mean yes I mean Amazon's gonna be everyone's I hate to say it anyone who's got significant parts of GDP is going to be an Amazon competitor right unless they get broken up is there another business like yours like nuts.com out there that's fits the basic mold of what you're doing I would say I would say that a lot more of them were like offline businesses versus online business businesses there's lots of smaller online businesses but then again we have a gifting business there's many large gifting businesses or bigger gifting businesses you know online um you know we operate on lots of different verticals but I think at the end of the day right like you know there's a wallet share and if people are going to go buy stuff online they going lot people go to Amazon so how do you get the people who want better and I think that's where we need to figure out how to how to lean in yeah that seems to me like the real opportunity is is Amazon seems to be in a bit of a tail spin in terms of quality and Trust corrup and food's an intimate thing yeah right we have this we have this Heritage a real Heritage this is my grandfather started the store our suppliers we've been doing this to our suppliers for Generations most the people can't say that and I think there's an opportunity for us to look in my mind we've won now it's like though it's still early Innings like I think customers and people want better they want to have a relationship they want to trust you know we're we're we're putting ice in our boxes as late as possible in the day so stuff doesn't melt you think your medal dates that are coming from Amazon are stored in a 90 90° Warehouse you know we're shipping them with ice you know that's so cool well I know we're coming up on time here and uh we' like to end this with a question uh for every guest and and that is the idea of of good habits and you know a lot of great marketing which is what this show is about is really about figuring out what are good habits and continuing to beat the drum and I'm curious what are your good habits that have that have served you well over the years that have helped grow the business yeah and I think this relate more broadly than just marketing but like measure measure right don't just like especially if we spend lots of money measure everything as best you can right and I know some stuff is harder um but for us for me it's like what are the returns like there's always some math make sure there's math and and you know and have a plan you know I think something that I've learned in the last couple of years um and this may not exactly answer your question but I used there's saying man plans and God laughs so for years I just ran with it right I didn't really plan then something like Co comes you're like damn I wish I had a plan and now we're a much we much bigger scale business where we have to put together a fber plan like how can we justify scaling wages so much like where are we going so it's like no matter how smart you are you're only so smart you know have a plan and then you know measure measure against it all right this was great Jeff thanks for sharing all right Sean well that was interesting uh now that he's gone any thoughts on uh on how he built nuts.com wow I mean that's a fire hose um yes I'm a reasonably good marketer here but I think that like Jeff is next level yeah it seems really clear doesn't it that he he really is his own Chief marketing officer um he did talk about bring in advisors and it's interesting how he chooses to use them and what he uses them for but but he really trusts his own instincts and and that's obviously worked for him he clearly has good instincts what do you think of the way he's mixed you know going with his gut making big decisions placing big bets but also bringing in experts at certain points yeah yeah gosh that's a I think we could have a whole show on this you know decision making and risk-taking um and and where to get help and when to trust your gut um you know I think the interesting lesson for for Jeff here is how he's using his advisor if you listen carefully on the section about television he didn't ask an advisor should I go into TV or not it was like his hunch right he was like I think this is an opportunity but what he did is he brought in a guy who knew TV really well to help him accelerate that hunch and so like within like 10 days he's like capitalizing on this idea and and I think that's a really important uh thing to understand if you're you know business owner am I hiring an advisor to bring new ideas because I need help you know kind of innovating and creating new things am I hiring an adviser to help pull out good ideas out of me but I can't quite get them without some help or am I hiring an adviser who's really a subject matter expert and is accelerating the idea I already have and all three are totally legit ways to work with outside help which brings us back to I mean the whole purpose of of these conversations that we've talked about which is you know the notion that there's no one size fits all in terms of marketing strategy there are all kinds of ways to do this and you know what he's done has has worked for him I I would like to think that people could take pieces of this and you know maybe take some lessons that might they might be able to apply mhm but you know not everybody has his instincts It's Tricky all right my thanks to Jeff Braverman Chief nut of nuts.com and to Shan busy Chief nut of Kinesis and of course to our sponsor the great game of business which helps businesses Implement open book management and employee ownership you can learn more at Great game.com thanks [Music] Sean wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's l r n 21h hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think he can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by Jess thubron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone hey [Music]