Collin Rutherford of Founder Brands

Business brain episode 640 for Wednesday, April 16th wear pajamas to work day 2025 greetings folks and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take a few ideas, we analyze them, we dissect them, we use them to tune our business brains to so we can each keep living those charmed lives. Selectquote.com BusinessBrain is one of our sponsors. That's where you can go to get the right life insurance for you for less and of course shopify.com businessbrain. That's where you can go to sign up for your $1 per month trial period. We will talk more in depth about both of those in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in Lafayette, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, man?

I'm good. I'm down in St. Petersburg, Florida. Awesome.

Great. That's perfect. Good to have you here. Colin, we're here. We have Colin Rutherford on the show today. If you're not watching the live stream and listening like most of you will be. Colin, we met about a year ago up on X, right?

Yep.

Awesome. That's great. So I, I've been following you. I, I think my, the one of the biggest things I followed in the beginning you got took off on a viral post about Bottle night and got like 9 million views or some crazy thing.

Yeah, it was actually 62 million views. No, 62 million views on that one post. And then I had some, some comments underneath it and then some subsequent posts. It, the total bottleneck experience we can say was about 75 million impressions on X.

Were you monetized before then?

I was not. That got me over the hump. So I was like a. Two thirds of the way there, I would say at the time that got me over the hump. I made $602 basically from that post.

Oh man, that's cool.

What? Yeah, yeah. Something. What the thing about what. I loved watching that and watching you and I want to get some background on your business and then I want to talk about the, the way I've seen you maneuver in the last year, which is great. So tell our listeners about, you know, tell us your story, the businesses that you've been in, what you've started, what you're doing now. Give it, give us the, the key points.

Absolutely. So originally from Buffalo, New York, I grew up my whole life playing ice hockey. I was lucky enough to get recruited to play hockey at a Division 1 level at Dartmouth College. So while I was there at college, I actually launched My first business there, Green Box Storage. So basically what we do is we provide a summer storage service for college students. So the end of the spring semester, we pick up their items, we store their items over the summer, and then we drop their items back off in the fall when they're back on campus. So that was my first real experience launching a business, and that was back in 2019. It's 2025 now, so about over five years. Been running that. We've been running well. We've been growing every year. We're at about 23 schools across the country right now. We've been scaling it. I've got a great team underneath me now that's been able to help a lot with that, and. Yeah.

Okay, so I have a question already. You and I have never met before, though it's possible that In November of 2019, I saw you here in Durham, New Hampshire, as. As the UNH team. I think. I think it was a tie game, and I think it ended in overtime. But there is a stigma. Stigma is the wrong word. There's a presumption that D1 athletes don't really study and don't have time to do anything other than whatever athletic endeavors they're recruited to. To be involved in. You've already proven that to be incorrect. Was there resistance there when you started doing this? How. How did you manage your time?

Yeah, I think back about it now, and it's like, I can't even believe I did it. Really.

Okay.

Like, you're spending. I was spending 30 hours a week on hockey, and then I had an obviously rigorous academic schedule going to an Ivy League school. So, yeah, that. That took a huge amount of time. And then somehow I figured out time to. To launch Green Box Storage and also have at least some semblance of a social life. So. Yeah.

I mean, did you. Did you just defer sleep for four years?

I didn't, though. I. I really didn't. I.

That's great.

When someone asks me, like, what's the most important thing you learn in college? Or a question like that, I always say time management because, like, my skills and time management from freshman to senior year, like, they tremendous. They tremendously improved, and they had to, or else I wouldn't be able to have done everything I did.

Oh, you would have burned out before you ever began. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you described that business in, like, two or three sentences, and it sounds like, oh, that's just so. So make. Totally makes sense. But I. I know. I know what's behind it, all the work and effort. Not only that, you brought on a partner, you sold part of the business. I mean, all this. Stu takes it, you know, to. To make it happen. That. That's. That's a massive amount of time.

Yeah. And I, I appreciate that. And it sounds like a simple business. Just pick up, store and drop off, but with the logistics that go on behind it and storing thousands item. Thousands of items, tens of thousands of items for thousands of college students across the country simultaneously. It's not super easy.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

And it's amazing that not only did you do it sort of for, you know, spending money while you were in college, I mean, I suppose that was probably the start was like, well, we got to do something.

You.

Understood that you needed to learn how to scale this and do the things we love. Mistakes here. I can only imagine the first. What was it like opening the second location when you thought you were a genius after having succeeded with the first?

Yeah, it's. It's a very. So we. We launched at Dartmouth and caught fire immediately. Like, we. I knew it was. We had product market fit right from the get go. So that was great. I never really struggled with product market fit. And my buddy Aaron Partridge, who. We grew up playing hockey together, he went to Liberty University. And he's like, I want to open up a branch at Liberty. So that was our first expansion branch.

He.

He ran that branch and I basically gave them the trade secrets, explained to them how to do everything. And it was also like during the beginning of COVID too. So we were navigating that, but it was actually a blessing for storage because colleges sent like all the students home. They needed storage. So it was like, we gotta get this going now and take advantage of COVID And we did. We got one branch launched before that happened. Some other companies, they were able to take even more advantage of that, but we were not as mature at the time as a company.

Sure.

But yeah, that was our. That was our first expansion branch. And then Shannon also mentioned that I sold part of the company. I sold 20% of Greenbox storage to Aaron because I wanted to bring him on full time. He did such a great job at Liberty.

Interesting. What a great way to. To. To source a business partner to have them essentially work. Not just essentially work for you, but in a. In a. In a environment where they. Aaron clearly was on his own. To succeed or fail with your guidance. It wasn't like you were over his shoulder every day in that location. He had to make it happen.

Right? Yeah. I was, I had never, I've still to this day, I've never been to Liberty. So, yeah, it was all him.

I love that.

Well, and the way you have to think to, to put a deal like that together is very different than when you started. And it's a. Know you mature as a, as a business owner, figure that stuff out. I bet. I would argue that I want to talk about what you're doing now, but I, I would argue that that helped you get to where you are today as well, you know?

Absolutely. You just, you just get the experience underneath your belt. Like, people always wait. They are like, oh, I'm not ready yet to start this business. You'll never really be ready, in my opinion. You just got to do it and learn on the fly.

Oh, I'm.

Yeah, that's huge.

That's. That's some of the best advice we've ever heard on this show. I'm still not ready to, let alone. I'm not. Forget about starting another business. I'm not ready to run the businesses that I have, let alone start a new one. And yet you just have to keep doing.

You just do it.

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Okay, Colin, I've been trying to grow on X, like for the last year or so, right? And especially in the beginning, I just copied you. I would watch you try new things over and over and over. And when you mentioned how many subscribers you had on your newsletter in a post, I just did that. When you did something like this, I was like, you know what? That's the way, you know, he kept trying new things, coming up with new ideas, and even if it didn't get traction, he, you know, he even did just roll to the next. So number one, thank you for that. I always say best practices, but I'm just copying. But talk about pivoting and being, you know, the mindset that's required to try all this new stuff. Much of it that doesn't work. Some of it does work, I imagine. But tell our listeners about how you power through that.

Yeah, I could go in a lot of different directions with this. Uh, I think my overall thesis with social media is you have to get in post content that people engage with that boosts it in the algorithm. And then they'll also see your other content, maybe that's more valuable that you're teaching them and then that'll drive views and followers on your profile. So that's kind of like my overall thesis on how to grow on social media in general, I guess, regarding pivoting. Yeah, I started in June 2023 and it was, it's, it's been quite a ride. It almost been two years now. I'm at 10,000 followers and I, I didn't really, like, I'm not that smart, guys. Like, I, I don't really invent ideas on my own. I usually just see other people doing them and I try to implement them myself, either in a slightly different way or the same exact way or in an underserved market, which is exactly what I did with green box storage. And if it works for me, I continue to do it. So, like a lot of those things you're mentioning, Shannon, I bought a course from Justin Welsh, super popular creator on X, and he has this awesome course, spent 150 bucks on it. And it really just provided me so much insight for how to grow and how to drive leads to your subscribers with a pre CTA and a post newsletter. Cta. And just like so many different things, the content, Flywheel he calls it too. So like, you just have to figure out what works for you and if it doesn't, after a really good effort, move on to something else.

Yeah, how do you know when the, that effort didn't work? I mean, I know you can, you know, the, the numbers and the analytics and everything else, but sometimes I'm concerned that I didn't give it enough time or maybe I didn't do it right. How do you know when it's time to pivot and try something different?

Yeah, I think you mostly just. I don't know if there's a framework you can really use for that. I, I just mostly listen to my gut and I have a gut because of the experience I've had being on there for almost two, two years now. So if, if I wasn't starting and if I didn't get going, I would not be able to have that gut feeling. So you just kind of give like try, like really try, really try as hard as you can. If it doesn't work, then, then move on.

How many posts have you done on X? Do you know?

I wish I knew I could check, but it's gotta, it's. Man, it's gotta be, gotta be tens.

Of tens of thousands, right?

Tens of thousands. Yeah. Yeah, easily tens of thousands.

Yeah. That's great. Okay, so I want to wrap these two topics into one kind of question. So we, we always talk about mistakes on here, probably because I've, I've made so many. But you learn so much from them. I say, you know, we say mistakes are tuition, but sometimes those mistakes can tap your motivation. Right. To keep, keep yourself going and keeping everything. Talk about some losses or mistakes that happened to you and then wrap it into, you know, hey, here's how I got through it.

Yeah, definitely important to, to make mistakes actually as learning experience so you can keep on living that charmed life. But yeah, this one experience I had growing Green box storage from 6 to 18 branches in one year. So I think it was 22 to 23. We tripled the branch Presence of the company. I had graduated from grad school. I went to Bentley University for a year of grad school because of COVID That gave us an extra year of eligibility for hockey. So launched a branch there. Done with my masters. I'm like, all right, full bore, green box storage. We're doing it. My mom's like, hey, so where are you going to work after college? I'm like, I'm not. I'm content. I'm just going to keep rocking. Yeah, just keep rocking.

Yeah.

And, yeah. So we went from six to 18, went into overdrive, and I was like, I just took any school possible, hired any interns I could to launch branches, and, man, was that a mistake.

I was going to say there's no way this worked out. Well, no, it did not.

So, yeah, we didn't have a lot of experience, like, understanding which schools were a good fit for our service, and I just wanted to grow at all costs. So we ended up losing money at six out of the 18 branches that we expanded to. So, like, our profit margins tanked. Lost money at a lot of schools. And I was like, okay, we can't just grow recklessly like this anymore. We have to be focused on profit margin as we scale. So learn that the hard way. We took a. Took a. Yeah. We slowed our growth. Profit. Profit wise. That year.

That's. And.

But you still made money that year is how I'm reading between the lines. Yeah, okay.

No, we did still make money. Our profit margin or our net margins contracted.

Your net margins contracted. Yeah, that makes sense. Interesting.

That's great.

This is Shannon. I'm having an interesting experience here. Watching. As I've been sitting, really trying to just be a fly on the wall for the last few minutes, I see so many similarities between the two of you, Colin and Shannon. And it's not just because you have two letters doubled in the middle of each of your first names. But, like, when you said, I'm not that smart, guys, what you. What you mean by that? And I think the valuable lesson, because Shannon says similar things, it's clear that you're both very smart, obviously. But how I interpret you saying that is I am not impressed with how clever I am. You are willing to learn from other people. You are willing to just figure things out. You are willing to say, I don't know, it doesn't have to be your idea. You just need to implement that idea. And that's one of the things, the most valuable lessons I learned from Shannon over the decades that I've known him Is implementation is more important than ideas. And now I'm famous for saying if you want an idea to be worth $100, write it on $100 bill. Right? Because ideas aren't worth anything without execution. But like that phrase, I'm not that smart guys. And you didn't just say it as, as, as a line. You said it because you meant it. And I, but what I think you mean is that you're just not impressed with how clever you are. You don't need to be the most clever person in the room. Yeah, I think that's hugely valuable.

I prefer to surround myself with people like you guys because I'm, I'm definitely not the smartest person in the room. And that makes me grow as a person.

Yeah. Yeah. What's the experience? Right? I mean I, I think I've, you know, Colin and I've had a few calls and I, you know, often say, hey man, if, if, if I was, you know, your age and at your stage of developing entrepreneur business and everything, I would, you know, you're going to be way more successful than, than I am at my age.

Either one of us put together, man.

It'S a way you think about things. And this is why I come back and talking about pivots and motivation and losses because we could sit here and break down a lot of these guys, you know, break to break down the numbers and it's all transactional and that's important. Obviously you got to pay the bills and you want to, you know, but making money is not that hard. Building wealth is difficult. And over time and that stuff, you know, in your brain, man, is what, what carries me forward at least.

Well yeah, I mean that, that's what we're doing here every week is, is unpacking the mindset of success. And, and Colin, I mean you are like the epitome of this and I, I, I mean, I mean that like as stated. Yeah, you've really got it, you've got it figured out in that, you know, you don't have it figured out.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I, I gotta give credit to my parents really on that. Like awesome. My, my mom was a first grade school teacher so like she taught me everything really. And then my dad is a youth hockey coach who, who runs his own business doing camps and clinics and yeah, he taught me the, like, he instilled in me the innate drive that I have. And it's like that I have a never ending pursuit for personal growth. Like I always want to read books, I always want to meet More people. And that's really important in business, I think.

Yes, it is. That's awesome. Okay, so tell me what you're doing now. What, what, what's, what are you building now? Share with us.

Yeah. So I, I've been able to, I've been fortunate enough to recruit a great management team and a great team underneath me at Green Box Storage. And it's freed me up some time to focus on other things. It's also a seasonal business so there's not a lot going on part in parts of the year. So I launched another company called Founder Brands. We're basically a content agency, slash digital marketing agency. We do a lot of different things to help people grow their personal brands on social media. And typically the reason people want to do that is there's a few different reasons. One, they might want to drive leads to their business. They might want to raise money from investors. They might want to recruit top talent. So we help business, we help business owners do that.

That's killer.

And is this, is this founderbrands IO in case people are interested? Is that right?

It is, yeah. FounderBrands IO.

Great. That's great. That's awesome.

Make sure people know.

That's great. So talk about managing your businesses. You know, it sounds like everything's remote. What, what tools do you use? You know, give it, give us some feedback on, on how you make the magic happen.

Yeah, I love remote businesses. Just the freedom that comes along with being able to manage a team remotely is unmatched. But I also never really had that in office experience because I'm just, I'm 27, so my only office experience is an internship my sophomore year of college. That's it. But I do like being able to be remote tools wise. Use a lot of tools. Probably just mention the most important ones. I think Google Workspace is probably the most prominent one in my business just for organizing SOPs, organizing communication, documents, files, videos, all that stuff Slack, I use across both companies for communication. So that's the primary mode of communication. We use a bit of AI too lately, especially with, with Founder Brands to make the content, not creation process, but the organization of it. And for first drafts and then there's a lot of human editing that goes in after the AI. That's time consuming and it has to be or else the content's going to suck.

Yes, that's great. We find the same thing here. Obviously. We do a whole segment on Fridays called Friday AI and a lot of what we talk about is where you can use it and where it makes Sense to step in as the human and. Yeah, that's exactly right, man.

Very cool.

Yeah, yeah. So I say those are the most prominent tools that I use.

Yeah, yeah.

And X, of course, if you call that a tool to drive.

Oh, yeah, it's definitely a tool.

What.

What is your username on X for our listeners want to follow you.

It's Colin with two Ls, underscore Ruth 89. So Colin underscore Roth 8, 9.

And I did. And we'll put it in the show notes too, at businessbrain show. I did check and you've posted over 18,000 times, so just wanted to call that out.

Ye. Yeah, consist.

You got to put in the reps, dude.

Right, Absolutely. I don't know if that includes comments, but I post three times per day, every single day for the past almost two years now. Just original posts. So, yeah, it's a lot.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

Well, this is great. I. It's super motivating, man. Give us tip or two. You can leave our listeners with as we wrap things up, things that, you know, you found important that you'd want to share with them.

Absolutely. So going back, obviously, as the business show, I think in my brief experience so far, to scale a business, you need to put the right people in the right places. And I've been able to do that. Thankfully, this year was really the first year I've been able to do that at Greenbox. I have such a great management team, customer support department, technology department, and it's just made my life so much easier and less stressful because we have great systems and a great team. So I think that's the number one thing to scale a business is a great team.

Yeah, I would agree. That's awesome. And you know, it's just like you said, starting, starting small learning. I imagine you wouldn't have known how to put together that great team five years ago or six years ago. The key is getting involved, getting in the game, starting something, see where it goes. And I love hearing, you know your story and, and watching you grow. It's fantastic. And, you know, thanks for coming, hanging out with us.

Oh, this has been a blast. Let me know when the next time you want to have me back on. I'm have such a good.

All right, man. Absolutely. We will do it. Absolutely.

It's great. But yeah, go follow Colin. You can watch just a master class in making something out of nothing and, and turning it into something that people want to be involved in. And that's great. I commend you for everything you've accomplished.

Thanks, Shannon. Thanks, Dave. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, pleasure having you, man. Really, really great, folks. Visit the Show Notes at Businessbrain Show. We'll have links to everything, including where you can follow Colin and find out more. Keep on living that charmed life. We'll see you on Friday.