Scale Without Burnout: Lessons from Bottlekeeper’s Co-Founder Adam Callinan

Foreign welcome to the Victory Podcast.

Hey Victors. Welcome to this episode of the Victory Show. If this is your first time joining us, I'm Travis Cody, best selling author of 16 books. And I've had the privilege of helping hundreds of business consultants, founders and entrepreneurs write and publish their own best selling books. In that journey, I've discovered a fascinating pattern. Most businesses hit a revenue plateau, usually around seven figures a year, and they struggle to break through it. So on this show, I sit down with some of the world's most successful CEOs, leaders and business owners to uncover the strategies they use to overcome those plateaus and scale their business to two heights so you can figure it out and do the same. Get ready for some deep insights and actionable takeaways that you can implement in your life and business starting today. Today's guest is a master at building brands, driving predictable revenue, and engineering intentional profit. Now remember that it's a very important phrase and we're talking about that today. And he's done it with remarkable efficiency. Adam Callanan is the founder of Pentane, where he helps brands unlock sustainable growth and profitability. But his track record speaks for itself. Adam co founded Bootkeeper. I'm sorry, Bottle Keeper, a bootstrap consumer brand that skyrocketed to $8 million in revenue with just three years. And get this, he did it without employees.

How great.

That's amazing to me. That success led to an eight figure acquisition in 2021 with just four employees at the time, making Adam's second successful exit. Beyond his business acumen. Adam shares his insights as a writer for Inc. And as the host of Growth Mavericks podcast. When he's not scaling brands or sharing game changing business strategies. He's a devoted husband, dad, and also an avid outdoorsman. So if you want to learn how to build a thriving business without unnecessary complexity and create real scalable success, this is an episode you don't want to miss. So let's dive in. Adam, thank you so much for being here. Excited to have our conversation because you've achieved things that to me seem mystical.

I mean, with an intro like that, all I can do is hope to not disappoint. That was exceptional.

Well, besides me mixing up Bootstrapped and Bottle Keeper, not important. All right, so let's talk. I'm sure there's tons to cover here, but just the fact that you took a company to 8 million in three years with no employees like I want to like. We'll get there. Let's take a step back. Did entrepreneurism Find you or were you sort of. I like to say you were infected with the curse at a young age, where you're like. You're like, this is. I got to do this. I can't work for anybody else.

I was not the kid that was Saran wrapping rocks and selling them to my neighbors and, like, you know, organizing. Did you hear stories of that? I'm like, man, that is epic. I definitely was not that kid. I wanted to be a doctor since I was 6. I went to college, got a crazy science degree at the end of, you know, halfway through college, I had heard enough doctors tell me not to do it, that the idea of coming. The idea of coming out of college with half a million dollars in debt and starting my life at 35 got a lot less attractive. So I went into how you had.

Professors going, don't do it. Yeah.

It was literally every doctor that I ever met since the age of 14 when I was wearing a ER coat in Flagstaff, Arizona. Literally, like, playing doctors, dude. I mean, the doctor gave me the code. He told me to pretend to be a doctor, so I just followed him around. Every single one of them said, it's not what you think it is. Like, we know you have your heart in the right thing, and when you're young, you don't care. It doesn't matter. But then you get into college and you're like, oh, wow, I really am going to be 35 and dead broke and single and alone, and then I get to start my life. And I don't know, just didn't sound that fun. So I went into a medical device company that was. It wasn't a true startup to the extent that it was like, concept from nothing to something.

It was bootstrapped at that point.

It was always bootstrapped. That never had raised money. But it was three people. I was the first salesperson, or maybe it was five people, two medical billers, and, hey, family, we can talk about that if you want. It got crazy.

So what was your family's response of going from I'm going to be a doctor to like, hey, guys, I'm a sales guy.

Yeah. Hey, I'm gonna go work for free, earn commission only, and take massive risk. And I did that. I turned down jobs with, like, big medical companies with company cars and KS and like, real pay. I was just always, you know, I was comfortable with risk. I just always knew that I could figure it out. And my degree, frankly, as much as it doesn't really apply to what I ended up doing. What it did is teach me how to solve problems. That's what chemistry is. That's what math is. That's what physics is. I took an incredible amount of all those things. And Sol, you know, doing solutions in any of that is a real deep dive into problem solving. And guess what? Business is like the never ending puzzle of problem solving.

No matter how many you solve, there's always more.

Yeah, it. It actually translated the experience that I got from studying the things that I studied actually translates a lot better than you'd expect.

So how was the journey then? That first couple of years doing commission only sales.

Oh, it was brutal. I mean, I was young and impressionable, and I, you know, I went into this space where I basically got, you know, put in a position as a salesperson to go and build, like, here's the keys. Go figure it out. And I had guidance from. This was a family that was doing it. So the father in the family, who was a very brilliant business mind and an absolute sociopath, I didn't realize how bad it was until years later. It was like the classic, you know, money is an accelerant to whoever you are.

Yeah.

And as you make a lot more of it, it brings. It literally just adds fuel to whatever your fire is. And if you're great, it can make you a lot more great. And if you're awful, it puts you down. That whole.

I worked in Hollywood for 20 years. My father.

Oh, good for you.

I saw that over and over again.

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, look, I learned an incredible amount over the course of that. I expanded that company to Santa Monica, restarted it again in a garage. So, I mean, I learned so much about building and hiring and firing and structure, and frankly, mostly about what not to do, how not to treat people, how not to incentivize teams. And we had spun off a. Like a health insurance tech company from that that I was a small partner in, in 2008. And I. When I left that medical world, I exited that position, which is when Bottle Keeper. It was literally like the perfect time when Bottle Keeper was invented. So I went into Bottle Keeper with an incredible amount of what not to do scar tissue.

So. So you did a lot of school, but then this sounds like that was your actual, real education.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, you can't. You can only learn so much in school. I was having a conversation with a friend about this this morning who's doing some teaching here at msu. The students keep asking him, like, is it all worth it? Is it all worth it? Are you Learning everything in school that you need to learn in order to go and be productive. And it's like, no, that's not the point. The point is to teach you how to learn so you can go learn. The second you go out and start executing is where you learn everything. Go and start doing.

My bachelor's degree is in business management. And I remember my last semester, we had an entire semester where we were studying the Amazon business model. And the textbook and the professor were like, we're studying this because this is the stupidest business model ever. Jeff Bezos is a thief who's stealing billions of dollars and this will never work, so don't ever do that. And then I got. And then I like, I got in the real world and I was like, boy, they were. That was off the mark.

Yeah. There are endless numbers of those. And the reality is you get to make it up however you want to make it up. You get to skin the cat however you want to skin it. That's ultimate flexibility.

You know what? I love that. We'll talk about that a little bit better. Coming from the direct marketing background, you know, I've been doing sales copy for 10 years, worked with some of the biggest online marketers in the world. And I was just having a conversation with somebody who's been in the game for 30 years. You know, I've been in at 12, and they were talking about, you have kind of these old school guys that were making money starting 2006 and 7 online, and it was all about the money. Right. Here's this business model. It's going to make you millions of dollars. And now we're 10 years down the road and like, you know what, none of them ever talked about lifestyle. No, it was all about the money. So it was like, you can make a lot of money, but you are going to be miserable and you're never going on vacation and you're never going to see your family. So now we're like, maybe you should focus on business, on the lifestyle first and the money.

There's a cost. I mean, you're trading in every circ circumstance. You're trading one thing for another. In that case, time for money.

Yeah. So with Bottle Keeper, was that an insight you had while you were going through the exit or was that like, did something start kind of sparking and then you were exiting and went, I have the freedom to pursue this thing.

Bottle Keeper as a product was invented in the fall of 2012 by my cousin Matt, who is my partner in Bottle Keeper.

Wow.

So I exited that position in May of 2013. And he had this product that he had literally hacksawed together a prototype. I bought an off the shelf water bottle, hacksawed it stuffed with neoprene. That's on my shelf actually behind me, original prototype. And he. And so now I now had time and we're super close. He was the best man in my wedding before all of that happened. And, you know, he pushed me. And I say he pushed me because I honestly didn't believe the product was viable. My emotional response to the product was, that's really cool. Sure, I'll use it on the beach, drinking a beer or on a boat or whatever. Glass bottles are a bad idea and sometimes not legal. But I don't think that that's a thing people will pay real money for. It's just like. And that's my emotional response. The good thing is that he got the same degree I did. And we are both very scientifically minded and emotion doesn't play in that one. So we, we finally agreed to go and test that product. And so I built a landing page and shot a video with a GoPro camera duct taped to the outside of a bottle keeper on the beach in Manhattan beach and put it up and spend 500 on Google AdWords and collected emails. And it was enough emails that it was like, okay, well, like, other people are interested, but we don't have a price on it. The key here is that you can't take interest guidance from people that, you know, you just can't. Yeah, your mom and dad and your sister and your brother and your friend down the street. Like, they do not have honest. That they can't have unbiased opinions. So you just have to accept that, take their opinions, but, like, stick them in your pocket and test it with people that you don't know.

Yeah. In the writing world, one of my mentors talked about, you know, people. His thing is like, you got to get feedback, unbiased feedback. And people go, no, no, no, no. Like my family and friends, they give me. They give me brutal. He's like, they're as honest with you as they know that you can handle. It's like, so that's why to your point. And so was that. So you collected enough emails, then off of a $500 ad spend that. That, that data for you was like, oh, maybe there's something here. And you use that. Then this kind of the launching point.

We use that as the go to the next point, which became the launching point. And that is. We used crowdfunding to to see if we could get strangers to swipe their credit cards at a real price point.

So you. You were like. When crowdfunding. People weren't even talking about it yet.

It was pretty early.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, Kickstarter was around. We tried. They wouldn't let us on Kickstarter because they were focused only on art projects at the time. So, I mean, how far they definitely. I know, I know. It was pretty early on, but it was, you know, it worked really well because it was. It was a really inexpensive. I mean, if not free, I don't think it didn't cost us, you know, may maybe 500 bucks or something to do. It might not have cost us anything. I don't remember. I mean, we did it on Fundable. My friend owned Fundable, so he hooked us up with all sorts of PR and press and stuff that probably wouldn't have got otherwise. But it worked. I mean, we sold our. Our thinking was if we could sell $5,000 worth of product to complete strangers, that would be enough to show that there's a thing here at real price points. At a $20 price point.

Yeah.

Not a $4 Spencer's gift price point. And it worked. We sold 13,000, or a little over $13,000, which, again, it wasn't like a ton of money. But we didn't, you know, the whole business. And only we each put in ten grand at the very beginning. And that was after we had proven that people would pay for it.

Yeah. So you validated it, and we're like, okay, we got a validated offer. So I love it. So once you got it validated, what was. How did your thinking change at that point? Did you sit down and map out like, okay, here's what we're going to do, or did you just kind of scale? Okay, the next step is here. Let's just focus on that.

We did not map out a. This is what we're going to do outside of a very specific guardrail that I put on the company. And it was part of my agreement to participate in the company, and that was that we have no employees. I mean, it was just. This is a strict guardrail. I will build the technology. I will figure out how to do the things. I will put the puzzle together and iterate that puzzle until it works. But I'm not. We cannot say yes to opportunities that require us to hire people.

So did that come from your experience in the sales?

Yeah. I couldn't get away from that company. My honeymoon was the first time my wife and I Had traveled outside of North America. I mean, really out of the U.S. like, we'd been to Mexico. That doesn't count. And we were in Italy on my honeymoon. And, like, it was. It was awesome because we were in Italy. It was the first time we had ever been to Europe. But I was, like, tied to the thing. I couldn't get away from it. There were, you know, it was like the emails and the. To be fair, it also wasn't set up correctly. That kind of business could have been run better. But leaving that, it was like, I want to travel, I want to build a thing that I can operate from any in the world, anywhere in the world with Internet.

So I just, I find that interesting because I think most people in business think, oh, you got to build a business, you got to have employees. And your thinking was, I'm going to build a business without employees so you.

Don'T have to do anything.

Did your partner look at you and be like, what do you mean we can't have employees? Or was he like, oh, that sounds good.

Great. I was like, great, figure it out. We agreed early on that we, like, from an operational standpoint, he was in Phoenix, I was in Manhattan beach in la. He was going to manage the manufacturing, our shipping and fulfillment, our financial stuff. I was going to manage everything else. So the website, the copy, the images, the email, the customer service, and all those things develop over time. It's not like you go and they want to have to build all these things. You build them as you need them. And so it was up to me to figure out how to assemble that puzzle in a way that, you know, could scale to some extent, depending to scale off than we thought it would, but could scale without needing to have people involved to push buttons. And timing was lucky. In 2005, that would have been. I don't think that would have been possible. But in 2013, 14, like, we were on WordPress with WooCommerce for the first year, and so we were enlightened to Shopify. And Even then, like, WordPress, WooCommerce, you could connect anything to it, you know, and if you couldn't connect it themselves, even, like, Zapier was around at the time, you could zap the stuff around. You could really automate a scalable online business really effectively in 2014.

So what did that first year look like from the point that you said, okay, we got it validated, you're doing operations, I'm doing everything else. Like what? Like, take me through the first six to 12 months. What did it look like for you?

Yeah. We shipped the first product from that crowdfunding campaign in January of 2014, missing Christmas by, like, a week, which was sweet. And our fulfillment center, we went into way too early, lost half the product immediately, and then shipped half the remaining half to the wrong people. So, I mean, like, we literally did everything wrong from the very beginning. So then we brought it all in house. I mean, bought more product. It was relatively inexpensive to make, so we bought more product. We. Matt started fulfilling out of the. He has another business in Phoenix, so he had space to do it. And we fumbled along at a couple thousand dollars a month while I figured out how to market the product like this, the Bottle Keeper product. You. It's really difficult to understand what it does or what it is without seeing it move, without seeing it in action. And at that time, there wasn't a platform that you could really effectively advertise video. It was all static images. And so I was just one. I had never done paid media before. I had never built campaign structures before. I had never done, you know, copy or creative. Like, these are all things that I was having to learn. And so we fumbled along at a couple thousand dollars a month until about August that year, and that's when Facebook launched their video ad platform. And I went out on the beach and shot a video of, like, hands coming in their mind with a camera propped up on a backpack. And you see the Bottle Keeper, like, unscrew and go over a beer bottle and screw back on. And I. In imovie, I just put a caption over and said, yep, that just happened. And we went insane. It, like, exploded. We couldn't. It was the heyday of paid media. For the next three years, we, like, couldn't spend it fast enough, though. I mean, we went from that, you know, that year, at that point, we had probably done $12,000 in sales. We closed the year at 150. The next year we did 1.8. The next year we did 8. And it was all on that one video. Like, we didn't even have to change the creative.

So from so. So year two, you did 1.8 million, and then year three, you did 8 million. Yeah, it's like.

It was insane.

And how. And how did you do that without any employee? How did you handle that scale without any employees? Like, especially if you're fulfilling in house, We.

Well, to be clear, at the end of 2016, which is the 8 million year, the wheels were falling off the wagon rapidly. And the problem with that, the reason for that and the Problem with that business, which was really difficult all the way to the end till we got acquired. And then I just became. Not my problem anymore is we were. Our revenue was really, really cyclical. We would hemorrhage money in Q1, we'd make money in Q2 because of father's Day and Summer. We'd lose money in Q3. Not hemorrhage, but lose. And we'd make half our revenue in the last six weeks of Q4. So in that year, like, following that math, we did over $4 million between, like, November 20th and December 20th, with no team, like, automated, outsourced, you know, EA customer service, all hands on deck. Like, my wife was doing customer service, Matt's girlfriend was doing customer service. Anybody that we could find was, you know, helping with customer service tickets. And that's, you know, from an AI standpoint, that's all stuff that could be completely managed now without bodies involved, but separate.

We'll get to that.

And then it just got to the point that was just way too much. I mean, we were falling apart at the end of that. And it was clear that my lack of openness to having a team was going to bottleneck the company. We were not going to be able to go beyond that. So we did hire our first person in January of 2017 to oversee customer service as the first massive pain point.

So how did your role as a founder and a leader sort of evolve as you scaled from 200,000 to 2 million to 8 million?

Well, I don't think. Think it had to evolve because, one, we were sort of operating with our heroin fire, and I didn't have a team. Like, I wasn't managing anybody. We had some contractors that were doing, you know, a random thing here or there, but I was largely doing all. Like, I was writing every single email, and I. I learned how to manage email flows and, you know, between mailchimp and at some point moved to Klaviyo, like, I knew how to do all those things. And that's. That's the. The upside and the benefit of being in a situation where you have no employees is that I had to learn how to do all of them at a $8 million revenue level. And then what that meant is by the time that I wanted to go and hire, I knew exactly what those people needed to do, and I knew exactly what we were looking for, which is really, really helpful. And I knew how to hold them accountable. Cause I know I knew what good looked like.

So this was all automated. So let's talk about that then. So what were. What were the first processes or systems that you put in place? And how did that kind of evolve as you went along?

The biggest risk in automation, and I knew this early, and so I built for it early, is losing personality. And you, you know, you see this even now. Like, you know, you buy something and you get your confirmation email, and it's like their template email from Shopify or whatever, and it's fine. Like, that's just normal. And you submit a customer support ticket because some shipment got lost or whatever. And it's clearly somebody from another country that doesn't speak English and barely understands what you're saying. That's basically copy and pasting something from somewhere. And they're really. And I'm not suggesting that's bad, like, do whatever you got to do, but there are really, really simple ways to make all of that feel really personal, even if it's not. So I focused an incredible amount of time on the type of communication and interaction that any customer that ever saw anything that came from us or that they saw on the website looked and felt extremely personal. And it was personable. It was fun. I mean, look, this is, like, this is a beer cuzzie brand. We weren't, like, selling cancer therapies. So it was fun and sarcastic and kind of goofy and, like, up against the line, but not over the line. And, you know, and that lived because I was the one doing it. It was really easy for me to control. It was just my snarky voice. So. And, you know, in social media, when someone would write a, you know, like, my beer gets too cold or gets, you know, I drink my beer too fast was like a common bread to need that. Like, I got to mess with those people. And people loved it because it was fun. And you saw that type of personality live throughout all of our systems, most of which were automated. So when you placed an order, what you got, what you got after that, who you talk to in customer service? Like, all of that content I wrote and was saved in those places so that when they got executed, it was done in a very specific brand voice that was super personal.

You know, it's amazing to me, even at this day and age, how many people I come across. They're not entrepreneurs, right? That when you explain what an autoresponder is to them, like, their brain's like, wait, what? So the fact that, like, you can send a mass email and have them be like, hey, Adam, how's it going? And they think, oh, this guy's emailing me personally, I Have no idea. Idea that that's automation. It's amazing to me that, you know, I think sometimes if you're in the business you're like, no. That people know that that's what's going on.

Most people don't even, you know, you're 100% right. And the reality is what happens when that person hits reply, that's where things get really interesting.

Yeah.

Like one of the most successful components to that business that, that in hindsight played a huge role in retaining a fervent customer base is that every single customer, which turned into millions of orders, every single customer the next day after their order got a personal email from me. There was no images in it. Like clearly I didn't like sit down and type them out on email. But it was like, hey Susie, you're what makes bottle keeper great. Thank you so much. We cannot believe that this has turned into this and it's all because of you. If there's anything I can do to help, anything you need, please reply and I will do what I can. Like 10% of the people would reply to that, not thinking it was a person. It legitimately came back to my direct email and I replied and dealt with every single one of them. And it used to blow people's minds. But even then, like I wouldn't sit down and go through 50 emails in the morning. Like one by one I had textexpander, which is a great little super cheap tool that has most of the time it's like I can't believe I got an email from a founder and you type TTY and it responds back this paragraph of oh my gosh, I'm so glad you're whatever. And again, it's just a really easy ways to hack together automations that are extremely personal and that stuff, especially now in the world of AI is extremely important.

Yeah. And I think that's it, right? There's somebody I've done work with, he's in the marketing space with AI. He's probably one of the top three guys with what he's using it for. And I remember watching a Q and A with him and somebody said, well, how we're in this age of AI, like what's my. How do I use AI to be my competitive advantage? And his response blew everybody away because his response was your ultimate competitive advantage in the age of AI is to become more human. And that's it. Right. I talked to my marketing clients all the time, like how do I stand out? And I was like, just be fricking authentic.

Yeah.

I'm like, stop sounding so businessy. Stop sounding so serious. Like just be, you know, love him or hate him. One of my, one of my, my arguments is the reason Trump is in where he is today is because the guy is just authentically himself.

Yeah.

And I think we're especially after social media and this sort of like polished, like perfect life, whatever. Like, it's really interesting now that we're even starting to see in YouTube, like people going, let me show you how all the influencers are lying to you and are fake. But I think people are just like, I'm so tired of like the facade can like just have a real person. And so, yeah, especially in business today, I think that's going to be the advantage for everybody is just treat people like real people. So you finally, so you grow up, you exit, you got exited in a great, fantastic time. Did what at that point, what did you decide to do? Is that when like, did the Growth Mavericks podcast come out around then as just something to kind of keep you busy or did that kind of come later? Or did. Did you actually take some time off for a little bit?

Yeah, well, yeah, the first part of that Growth Mavericks. No, that came up like two months ago. Because I see what's happening in AI and I have a SaaS company and human is going to continue to be extremely important. And I'm generally a very private person and I know that I, there are parts of my experience that can be helpful to people and it's a way for me to authentically try to help people.

I love it. So where does pentane come in then?

Yeah, so that ties into the second part to that question. I did. So my. We closed that transaction. We sold to a private equity group and they, they put us with another of their portfolio companies called Arctic Outdoors. So our products now you can buy through Arctic Outdoors.

Wow.

And I, my role as the CEO was to say through the end of the year to help oversee that transition of just our company into their company. So I was out at the end of that year happily. And I was told by you were.

Getting dangerously close to having a lot of employees.

Oh man, dude, talk about eye opening. I mean, again, we had. There were Matt and myself and four other people as part of that acquisition and we went into a company that had 500 people. Like, so we suddenly. And it was a well run company. Like the CEO of that company's name is Bill Pond of Arc Outdoors. That one point put in place, he was incredible. But it still was a massive company with like boards. And, you know, a lot of the decisions were made by committee and you. It was so. And we were this super fast paced, nimble, like, eight figure business. It was so different. It was so different. Again, like, you have to be. When you're doing clash of cultures, right? Yeah, maybe you have to do that, I don't know in that kind of business. But, yeah, it was. It was an interesting experience. I did take some time off. I got into carpentry. Like, I was told to not go and start another.

So did you make that thing on your wall behind you there?

I did. I did.

Nice.

I mean, I. I did. I got bored one day, but the. I did a lot of stuff in carpentry, which was really fun. Like, I got to learn a new skill that I, you know, uses just the different. Slightly different part of your brain.

So. Is that Montana?

Yeah.

Love it.

About six or eight months into that, I woke up one day and realized that my hardest decision for the day was what to have for breakfast. And that was a problem. I could literally feel my brain melting.

I didn't laugh, but that.

No, I mean, in hindsight, like, what a. What a fortunate problem to have. You were like, well, but you just.

Spent what, a decade of being, like, dialed to nine and a half, like, all the time.

And that's why, I mean, I was seeing a performance coach at the time saying, Dr. Jeff Spencer's this epic guy. And he told me right at the beginning he was. I was seeing him through the transaction. And I mean, he had coached. I mean, he was the head of all the performance stuff for all the cycling Tour de France stuff. He's coached like Tiger Woods, Branson, all these crazy people that operate at insane levels. He's like, look, this is what's going to happen if you go and start another company. I can tell you exactly what's going to happen. And of course I went and did it. Totally didn't listen to him. And it was a disaster. It's like, damn it. All right, Dr. Jeff, I'll listen. And so I did nothing. I got into carpentry and I let. I got bored. And he basically said, okay, now it's time to go. Start doing. Go find a company that you can go and consult and find what their problems are.

That's funny. He made you, like, purposely. You're like, you got to slam the brakes on everything until you're bored and then you're ready to go, because otherwise you'll just.

Exactly. I mean, I remember the conversation with him, like, Dr. Jeff, my brain is melting. It's like, okay, let's go, let's go. He calls it soft offense. Let's go apply some soft offense. Go find a company that you can help do it for free, and just find out what the problems are. And we had companies that we had invested in, my wife and I, and so I did that. I went to two companies and basically just said, I'm bored. Can I look under the hood? And they're like, yeah, sure. Great. And I realized one of them was a $20 million business. They were profitable. They had no idea how to make money. And that's not a negative judgment. Like, they were profitable. And $20 million a year, like, that's a good company. They were great operators. They didn't. But they weren't experts in finance and experts in customer acquisition, which I was and am, because I had to be, because I operated a company with no employees. So there was no choice. You had to learn how to do those things. And so I rebuilt some of the systems that we used at Bottle Keeper to operate the business and those companies, and it completely changed them.

Wow.

And that's where pentane came from. So the next step, you know, Dr. Jeff's, you know, iterative process was, okay, great. Now take that process and go find a company to pay you money for it. See if you can find a company that will pay you for that solution. And I did. I went to a consumer product. I found through Network, a consumer brand that was struggling, losing a lot of money, and got them to pay me as an advisor to come and help them turn it around. And I implemented that same structure. And three months later, they were profitable. They were losing $100,000 a month. Three months later, they were profitable. Two years later, they're up 300% and profitable. Completely changed their business. This. And that was the point that was like, okay, this needs not just be.

So to that point, you were doing everything in spreadsheets and Google Docs.

Exactly.

And then you're like, maybe we should. How do we now. How do we automate that exactly?

How do we make that scalable?

So is pentane is that short for something, or is there a meaning behind that?

Pentane goes back to my molecular and cellular biology days. Pentane is a 5 carbon molecule that's part of the hydrocarbon family, like propane, methane, octane, hexane. It's a really simple, highly combustible molecule. I mean, it's in your gas tank right now. They put it in rocket engines. They use it for nhra, like drag racing.

So it's really just a nerd's way to say rocket fuel.

Yep. And I could buy the domain for $2,000. And there was no business sound around outside of people selling Pentane for, like, oil refineries. That was. That was the big thing. I literally went, they're part of this thing called the Alkane family. I went and looked for all the Alkanes that I could buy the domain for because, like, Octane is a very business thing. There's a company called Octane A.I. sure.

Yeah. There's Octane Mastermind.

Yeah. There's all kinds of. So Pentane was the one. I could buy the domain and there was like, no noise around.

That's hilarious. I love it. All right, so. So what is, like, now that you're in Pentane, like, where's the sweet spot? Like, who. Who's your ideal person that you can. There's two parts of the question here. One is like, as a consultant, who's your ideal person that you can get the best results for? And then the second part of it is for pentane and for the process, who would be best suited to use that?

The math inside of Pentane applies to every business on the planet. It works at Exxon, it works at Uber, it works at the landscaper down the street. Who Pentain is focused on are consumer brands, namely because of or mainly because of my experience at Bottle Keeper. That's where I can be the most helpful and where I can build systems that are the most helpful for those kinds of companies. So that's where we focus at Pentane on consumer brands between a million and about 40 million in revenue. And I mean, it effectively takes in all their expense data via APIs. It takes in the revenue data, their ad, and they set a goal, a profit goal, and it tells them exactly how to get there. Like, do you want to get. To break even? Do you want to set a 10% net margin, whatever that is? They input that. Like, they set that as their destination and the system backs out all the math from that and tells them exactly what they need to do to accomplish that. How to build their ad budgets, how the ad budgets need to perform, what happens if they add a discount? What happens if they hire a new person? Like, all of that stuff becomes dynamic and functional.

That's amazing.

Yeah, I mean, it's been well received. There's so much noise in the E comm space, I, like, forgot how noisy it is. And it's obviously now it's worse with like, AI. You know, half the noise you hear is AI driven anyways. But yeah, it's worked well thus far.

So now that you have the software and you're seeing behind the curtains between some pretty significant brands, what's to your point? You came on this company that's doing 20 million a year and you're like, man, they didn't know how to make money. So from your perspective of seeing that what. What's maybe like the top two or three mistakes that million to $10 million a year businesses are making, the number.

One mistake by orders of magnitude is that if you're. I mean, just flat out is that they're setting ad budgets that are just completely emotional and made up and have nothing to do with what the business actually needs to operate. Like, your business is like an engine. I mean, this very literally. It is like. It is like an engine. And that engine requires fuel. Now you can add fuel if you're really good at organic and you have a 10 million listener podcast and that can provide the fuel to your engine, that the fuel is profit exceptional. If you're not and you have to spend paid ad dollars in order to get fuel in the engine, how you spend those paid ad dollars and how efficient they are dictate how much fuel gets in the engine. But the size, not all engines are the same size. Like, if you're spending $100,000 a month on payroll versus the next company that's spending $10,000 a month on payroll, your engines don't have the same requirements. And so. And there's a lot of math in there that answers those questions. But it's. It's complicated.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because linear algebra and because of the noise you have, from my experience of consulting with, with businesses, is you have solopreneur or one or two employee businesses that are trying to operate like they're a $10 million. Like, we need this and need this and need this. And you're. Why? Well, because that's where we're going to. And I was like, but we're not there yet.

Yeah, I mean, the big. The big thing is just the ad spend. I mean.

Yeah, well. And that makes it. And the other thing is, is nobody actually tells you. You know, until now, nobody's had a formula to figure that out. It's just been like, let's just throw a bunch of money against the wall and, you know, cross our fingers.

The risk. The risk there is is obviously the money. It's risk capital. If you don't Particularly if you don't know what it's supposed to do.

Sure.

The problem is that that business, that $100,000 a month fixed expense business, if they're like, we'll make math very simple. If they're spending $100,000 a month on office payroll, fixed expenses, things that exist regardless of whether or not they make a dollar, and their margins, their variable margin, which is their cost of goods, their shipping, fulfillment, their credit card fees, all that stuff, which includes advertising and blah, blah, blah, we'll take that out, is 50%. So that means for every dollar they make, 50 cents of that dollar is contributes to the business that goes to pay for the fixed expenses. Right?

Yeah.

So if they make, if they have $100,000 in fixed expenses, they need to make $200,000 in revenue in order to just pay for the fixed expenses because only half that is going to contribute to cover the fixed expenses. So now you add advertising dollars in there. They can't spend $1 on advertising in that scenario. So it's like. And they create an ad budget. They say, we'll spend $10,000 a month. Well, maybe that ad budget might need to perform like a 14x in order to get you to profitable. But you don't know that. And then it doesn't work. And nobody can figure out why. I don't know. I mean, maybe that's like a confusing, convoluted way that only mathematically makes sense.

But somebody once asked me, how did I go from Hollywood into direct response marketing and copywriting? The answer was, when I was working in Hollywood, I worked with a huge producer and one of my friends was in direct response copywriting. And we were talking about something one day and he brought up this idea of like, oh, I spent so much on Google Ads. And he was going through the math, right? Oh, I spent 10,000. And I know that over a 30 day period, I'm going to make 11,000. And so now we're going to sing. And I'm like, wait a minute, what do you, what do you mean you're tracking your ad dollars? And so I'm going to the marketing teams going, okay, so we're about to drop $5 million on HBO ads. Why? And they're like, well, that's what we do. I'm like, yeah, but how do we know what we got back from that? What do you mean? I'm like, out of that 5 million, how do we know how many movie tickets? And they're like, oh, Travis, that's silly. It's not what you do. And that's what Hollywood, they literally are spending $150 million just throwing it at everything. And they go like this and hit Monday going like, ah, we hit number one, our job is saved. And if Monday comes around and you're number three, that' entire department is fired. But no one can answer why, why did the movie hit number one or why did it only end up at five with the same ad spend? Right. So I originally my goal was like, is there a way I can bridge direct response marketing of like spending money here and tracing it to ticket sale? I never did figure it out. So then when I left Hollywood, I ended up in direct response marketing because I'm like, I want to figure this out. This sounds great.

Yeah.

So are you now focused on pentane more on the software side now or are you still doing consulting with the companies you're invested in? Or do you do consulting like Jeff consults you?

I don't. I'm entirely focused on the software. I mean my chapter, this next chapter in life is built around helping other early stage operators, business operators, solve problems, solve complicated problems. You know, in some cases they may not know how to get the answers. In some cases they may not even know the questions to ask. So the best way for me to do that scalably right now is with software. Like, I mean I can consult two companies at a time and I, although I really, really enjoy doing that and can be really helpful doing that, obviously it doesn't scale super well.

Sure.

Dedicated to pentane right now.

I help people write and publish books. I get it. A lot of people want to work with one on one. So with, so let's, let's talk about the elephant in the room right now in terms of automation, which is the AI agents and what's that, what that's doing to the business landscape like you want to. From your perspective of having the software that's around a lot of automation, what are your thoughts about where we're at and where we're headed?

Yeah, it's difficult. I mean, my straight answer is I think much of it is overblown, but not for long. And that the knee jerk reaction amongst particularly young technology companies to bolt on some AI thing to their thing and then call it an AI company is ridiculous.

I'm laughing because I saw three of those last week.

Yeah, it is insane. I mean, I get it. If it helps them raise money and they have to raise money to get to the next thing, like whatever, I guess do what you got to do. But I Mean, the term agentic is very key word right now. I mean, keep paying attention to that. And we are starting to see AI models that are full agent forces that get, I think, quite interesting. Look, I mean, from a development standpoint, it'll be hard for an AI to, to @ least for a while, not forever, but for a while to like fully develop deeply financial Systems because frankly, AI sucks at math. It operates at like an 8th grade level at math. And that'll, that'll get solved and let's not pretend it won't. But it's going to compress, you know, massively compress. Legacy SaaS like they're in trouble, they know it, everybody knows it. But I mean, I use AI a lot. We just, I don't build it. I intentionally have not built it into Pentane because I have not seen enough use case yet to make sense to do it. I have a number of ideas of things that I want to do, but they'll take some time.

So three years from now, what do you think will be possible for some young guy to cite? He's sick of medical school and science and is like, I'm going to, I'm going to go out and bootstrap my own business. What's going to be possible for him?

I think it'll be sooner than that. What's going to be possible is, is that person, let's take that in a slightly different bent. Someone that has a consumer brand will be able to. So even that, that guy, that kid that comes out of college is like, I have an idea, I have a product. That person will be able to fully automate literally every aspect of that business. So using Pentane as an example, they can have a financial model made. You could do that right now with literally any of the AIs. You can have a financial model made, create a projected P and L. You can automate getting that into pentane. Pentane can tell you exactly what you need to spend and how you need to spend it. At some point in the near future that will, I mean, it already connects to your meta account, your TikTok, your Pinterest, like all the places you're spending money. You'll be able to pull all the data from all of those things will be done automatically. It will tell you where you need to spend it, how you need to spend it. You'll click a button to click approve and AI will create the video ad that goes on that place. It will write all the copy, it will optimize all of those things. You can do that now with icon and probably other tools. That's one I saw recently. That was epic. And you will, you will not have to touch anything. That customer has a problem. It will go into your gentic AI customer service force. They won't even know it. They'll know it, but it'll be so good that it'll feel like a human.

Yeah.

Shipping and fulfillment is already automated. I mean, there's people doing it, but at some point there will be robots. I mean, Amazon warehouses are already robots doing it. So that will continue to spread that. I mean, that person will literally not have to do anything. Now my question is, what happens at the point that everybody is doing that and then none of it is unique. Where does it slide to that?

Sure.

And I think human. I think just like the full knee jerk react back to human.

Well, and what's interesting too is like when you think about that going so for someone like you, you know, with the Growth Mavericks podcast, once you've got 50 episodes into that, you transcribe that, you put it in. And now your AI agent, that's your customer service, is you. Sounds like you. Exactly. You'll read the emails the AI has written for you. Going like, one second. That's as good as what I'm writing. All right, so for someone's listening to this episode, they love what you're doing and they're probably going like, oh my God, I need pentane right now. How do, how do they get involved with what you're doing? How do they find you? Where do they go to if they want to, like, look at pentane and possibly use it for their business?

Pentane.com the One Hydrocarbon Alkane URL available. P e n t n e dot com. Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. That's the only social platform that I spend any time.

Awesome. So I like to end every episode with three personal questions. So if you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be and why?

I would say that I question everything is a huge, huge part of my life now. I wish I would have done that a lot earlier. It's hard to say that I would have changed anything because frankly, what your past is, is what made, makes you who you are today. And I'm very thankful for that. But I, I went through a lot of, a lot of pain for a long time. That was probably not necessary had I been more skeptical.

Yeah, there was, there's a business advisor named Joe Polish. He runs a Genius network. And I heard him one time where somebody asked him something about advice and I don't remember the context of it, I just remember response. He said that the worst, the most expensive advice you'll ever take is the wrong advice. And the reason it's the wrong advice is because people aren't asking enough questions about the advice they're being given. That was all I have to say. I agree. That's a good insight. What believer mindset shift has had the biggest impact on your success or your happiness?

Time is more important than anything.

Yeah.

That's where you put it is it's all that matters at the end of the day.

And finally, what's the best investment you've ever made in yourself?

This comes from sort of a red pill experience out in the woods. Montana. But forcing myself to go and do really, really hard physical things that have a massive mental component to it. Like I mean that's top mudder growth matter. You're talking about top mudder. Like I run 50k trail races. I go on multi day horseback backcountry mountain hunts in the snow. I go and seek out, you know, they have some danger element to it. Not outrageous. I have young kids so I'm very conscious and careful of that. But go and do things that are really uncomfortable for long durations of time because I come back from those things a different human every single time. And that is their life changing. That's a big part of the growth mavericks. That's like half of that podcast is talking with people that have gone through and do intentionally or not really hard things. They just get really comfortable being uncomfortable and it's. It's life changing.

Well, I think if you're not comfortable being uncomfortable, then the life of an entrepreneur is probably not for you.

Yeah, I mean that's. The physical things are a great way to push the boundaries and under and figure out what discomfort is. Because physical discomfort and entrepreneurial discomfort are not the same. And if you can get comfortable physically being uncomfortable for long periods of time, like the mental up and down of dealing with something at work becomes non existent. And for me that. That's a massive realization that I had in the last probably six years.

What's the toughest trail run you've had to do in the last two years?

The rut. It's called the rut. Runtherut.com, i think it is the rut in Big Sky, Montana has a. There are a couple different distances since I've done the 28k and the 50k but it climbs 10,000ft.

Yeah, I was gonna say, what's the altitude on that?

Goes out. I mean, it starts at seven, goes to 11, two and a half times. I mean, up these, like, treacherous. Fairly treacherous ridgelines. One of them is called Bone Crusher. I mean, you can look at it online. It's pretty wild, but it is. It is an unbelievable experience.

Well, Adam, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. And can't. I can't wait. I'm gonna go check out pentane. I need it for my business.

Thanks, Travis. Appreciate it. Sat.