Fearless Starts | Nutrisense Co-Founder & COO, Dan Zavorotny (Podcast 222)

The feeling of being comfortable with failure and the fear of failure is what really stops you from starting. Yeah, it's the concept of like, but what if I. This happens? Well, and it's these, it's this paralysis by analysis.

Right?

I think it's like, what if this happens? What if this happens? What does this happen? Sometimes you got to just do it.

Our guest today is Nutrisense's co founder and chief operating officer, Dan Zabrotny. Nutrasense is a metabolic health company that helps anyone discover and reach their health potential. Under Dan's leadership, Nutrisense has become one of the fastest growing startups in America. Leading the company through rapid growth. He's built a team of 120 employees to serve tens of thousands of members in just over two years. Before co founding Nutrisense, Dan worked as a healthcare management consultant at KPMG where he advised Fortune 500 clients in two of the top five hospitals in the U.S. passionate about travel, Dan has visited over 100 countries before he was 30. Dan, welcome to the second Grand Podcast.

Hey Cameron, how's it going? Thanks for having really well.

I got a whole bunch of stuff I want to even ask you just off that, that bio, but I'm super intrigued about the travel because my wife and I are living globally and, and traveling and I, I've always had a goal to make sure I've been to more countries than my age. But you, you're already in the century club, so 100 countries. Can you kind of give us your top three?

Yeah, I mean, I think I'm always a big fan of segregating information to different data points. So I always say like, best for food, best entertainment, best for sightseeing.

Okay.

It's hard to cup us all of it. I think for food, my favorite is Peru. So Peru has a lot of like, it's a mix of kind of like Japanese plus Mexican in some way that's kind of fusion like that people don't realize, but a lot of time the former president of Peru actually was Japanese descent.

Oh, well, interesting.

And so there's a lot of immigration from Japan that happened in early 1900s. That brought a lot of cultural mix in there. So a lot of the food is mixed with that kind of flavor. I mean, I think from, ironically from landscape. I think Japan is the place I really like.

Number one on my wife's list to go to is Japan.

It's incredible. And I think what the Japanese have done that's really well is they've insulated their culture. Meaning if you go, whether you go to France, London, you see McDonald's everywhere. You see the Burger King, Starbucks. So we Americanize the whole world, which is great for us as an economy. But culturally, sometimes you feel like you're still partially in the US So you can find a little US Little mini island in Japan. They were really good at just maintaining their culture and keeping things the way they were. So it feels like a really authentic experience. And I think that part is really fascinating to me. I think more entertainment perspective. I think countries like this one's a little harder because there's a lot. It depends on what you're looking for, entertainment. But like, countries that are usually on Southern hemisphere or somewhere on the warmer weather, like countries Colombia, Brazil, Spain, they're usually a lot more fun because I think people, you know, love the siestas.

Yeah.

You know, have a glass of wine in the middle of the day for three hours. So that's the entertainment. Depends what you're looking for.

And Columbia's Columbia is super high on my list. My wife, just a month down there, and she loved it, and now it's. It's really gone. Shot up pretty highly on my list after hearing all of her stories.

Yeah, it's. It's always hard because, you know, we always go from, you know, we as Americans love to work really, really hard, but some of the cultures, they look at work as a way to pay the bills, to enjoy life. And, you know, sometimes having that mindset shift is a little bit difficult for us because we want to, like, take a break, but it's hard.

I think it's an important shift. So talk to me a little bit about business that you're running right now. We'll switch gears and go back in to Nutrisense. So tell us a little bit about Nutrisense. What is it you do? I know you said that it's a metabolic health company, but what exactly does that mean? And then, you know, the tens of thousands of members, what exactly are the members doing and how are you?

So when I was working healthcare consulting, I was consulting for some of these big hospitals, and I saw over and over two facts that stuck out to me a fact. Number one was that we kept spending more per capita every year in healthcare, while simultaneously people getting sicker and sicker. And so right now in the US about 89 million Americans are pre diabetic. That's one in three. And no one is slowing that number down. And we keep constantly trying to make. When somebody becomes type 2 diabetic after pre diabetes, we Try to help them manage their diabetes through insulin, through dietitian, advice, through exercise. But why don't we just stop that ahead of the time? Right? And a lot of this is based on lifestyle, bad lifestyle decisions. We as Americans are incredible marketers, and sometimes we're a little too good at marketing poor quality foods. People. And so people eat food that's not healthy, they don't exercise, they work too much, and they gain unnecessary weight. Cause we cause a dilemma in our country. So we said, why don't we stop you from becoming type 2 diabetic in the first place? We focus on people at the earlier stages. We're like, hey, maybe you have some glucose control and we help you before you even reach that point. Or maybe you're actually healthy, but you want to understand so you don't get unhealthy in the future. So we'll give you this device called a continuous glucose monitor. It's a device that's been historically used by type 1 diabetics only. And it's become more affordable now, where you take this device, you put on your arm, and it tracks your glucose 24 hours a day, nonstop for 14 days straight. And it sends it to our app. And our app is basically a food tracker that combines that data with glucose. So now all of a sudden, you could see, hey, I ate a banana. How was my response? I ate an orange. What was my response? Are you able to start correlating what foods impact you, what ways in real time?

Wow.

And so historically, if you think about people, when they want to get in shape, they would use a scale, right? But the problem with a scale is like, as a muscle, as a fat. Did I eat early? Did I not? How much water do I have? This is telling you specifically to your body, how you're responding. What makes us unique is that we start realizing that, like, I will eat rice. It has no impact on me. I eat potatoes and looks like I'm diabetic for two hours. And so there's such uniqueness in this information that we start realizing what is helping us, what is not. Because you don't know what you don't know. Right? So you think you might have a healthy diet, but your entire life, but it's actually hurting you.

How unique is diet for the individual?

I've heard that it extremely. It is, yeah. And it's a thing like. And a lot of times people say, oh, we're all unique. But when you see in real time, like, literally you eat something within five minutes, you see in your phone and you see how you respond and you all of a sudden are in shock. You're like, wait, I've been eating blueberries for 10 years. People told me blueberries have all these antioxidants, but my body responds negatively to them.

Wow.

There's different reasons for it. Some is genetic, some it's microbiome. Some of actually how you slept last night. Right. Or did you exercise earlier? Do not exercise. And so those factors all play a huge role. I used to eat bananas and blueberries, strawberries, every for breakfast. I thought, hey, gain my vitamin C. My potassium and my glucose kept spiking like crazy. And then a crashing and I was just like, wait. But I thought I'd been healthy for a decade and I wasn't. I was actually hurting myself and causing fatigue. Uh, and other folks just like have a smoothie for breakfast and they love it. It gives them actually better energy levels. Just because we're so unique, people don't realize it. I think coffee is a big one. Where some people drink coffee and they actually have an increase in energy and it improves them every possible way. Some people just absolutely terrible for them and they don't know they're just doing it because everyone's doing it.

Wow.

And some people have no impact at all by the way, which is fascinating to just zero.

Super intriguing. And is all of this. I mean I'm. I just had to pull this up on your website because my wife is big into nutrition right now and I think we're going to take a look at even getting both of us hooked up to this. Who are your typical clients?

So it ranges from people who are type 2 diabetics that don't use insulin. We currently don't see people who take due insulin because we want to make sure we can help them in a natural way through data and through coaching all the way to Olympic athletes. We have a lot of Olympic athletes signed up for this as well, professional Olympic athletes, some actors. So it's really from super ultra healthy to early stage type 2 diabetes, non insulin.

Very cool. Okay, so how the hell did you get into this? It sounds like you were in the fitness space or you were in the health space before, but you're doing like Fortune 500 and.

Yeah, yeah. So it's.

Yeah. How did you make the transition into becoming a co founder and an entrepreneur?

So I was working, consulting. I saw these trends I mentioned earlier and then I was in San Francisco for a healthcare conference and I ran into one of my childhood friends that he was living in Silicon Valley for a Couple years he just sold a company in the childcare space and we had lunch and he was wearing one of these devices and he said, oh, do you know anything about this? And I just so happened to be an expert in this area where both from a healthcare perspective as well as my sister's type 1 diabetic. So she's been wearing these for 10 years. And we saw the progression of these things. They used to last six hours, then 12 hours, then one day, then seven days and 14 days. So I saw technology improve and the price dramatically drop. And so I just happen to know more. He's like, oh, that's great. Nobody else does. Everyone I talk to, they think I'm a cyborg. And he said, I'm thinking about starting this company. Would you be interested in joining with me? And I said, well, there's no person better to start than someone who's been doing companies for four years. I mean four times. Because he's constantly been an entrepreneur, either joining early stage companies or starting companies himself. And so I said, I mean if I'm going to do a first time company, I might as well do someone who knows what they're doing. And so I quit my job three weeks later and we started a company.

Crazy. It was super interesting. I dated a type 1 diabetic as well. She was child onset diabetic from the age 2. Or an insulin pump. The whole deal it was strange. I mean, you know what it's like when they have like a tube. You know, you're getting intimate and you got this device hooked up from across the room or bed. Okay, what's the price? How does your pricing work?

And then I got to running a company. Sure. So the pricing is still relatively higher end. It ranges from 200 to $300 a month. The reason is because these devices still require a lot of. First devices are still expensive. They require medical prescriptions. So we write digital prescriptions off of these states. There's regulatory laws around this. Then there's software and we also give people a dietitian as well.

Why is there laws around using a device to monitor your health? Why is there regulation? That doesn't make any sense.

That's a good question. I don't know.

They'd rather us get medicine versus I.

Don'T have the answer to that. I know in Europe this does not require a medical prescription. You can walk into any pharmacy in Denmark and just pick it up. And I know that your device or.

Other companies, the same device.

This device. Yeah. So we use third party devices. These are third party devices.

Okay. Okay.

What we built as a software on top to make it more intuitive and help people gather all this data. And you can also do a finger prick. You can just pick it up at a pharmacy and spam.

That's. That's gross.

Yeah. And so I don't have the answer to that. I do know it's regulated. I mean, I think what makes it more complex is every state has different laws for medical prescriptions. Wow. You have to be licensed all 50 states compared to their laws. And some of the laws are like, send us a paper document filled out by hand. We have to wait six months. So there's complexity and costs there associated. And also we realized like not everyone is going to be an expert in glucose. So we also added a dietitian on the platform. So you get unlimited dietitian support. And what's fascinating is people a lot of times will say, oh, I don't want a dietitian, I know how to eat, I eat all the time. And they forget that there's a lot of bidirectional relationships between food and stress, food and sleep, sleep and food. So it's like, you know, and working.

Out sometimes even between food and food. We were, we were on a catamaran trip down in the Grenadines about six months ago and our chef that was on board is a dietitian and health expert. And she was telling us about certain foods that if you eat them against another food, they're bad. If you eat them separately, they're both good. And we're like, wait, what?

Yeah, I mean, there's a rule that we say called where timing or sequencing a food. For example, if you have three things on a plate, one carb, one fat, one protein. If you the protein or the fat before the carb, you actually have a much better response from a health perspective. The exact same meal, just the order.

Of the food, the order of operation. That's interesting. You know, you said it's monthly. Is this something that people sign up for six months and then they know enough and they can get off of it or something. You want people to be on for life. What's.

Well, so our ambition is to help people with this. And so we, I mean we have a ton of blog articles we write about nutrition and specifically glucose control. And so people can actually just not spend anything. Listen to our podcasts like this. We do a lot of health podcasts and just learn as much as they humanly can on their own and they don't need to spend a dollar with us. If they choose to spend some money with us, then it's people who sign up for three months and they do it three months, let's say once a year. So they learn. Yep. Then they leave, they try and change their life, and they come back a year later and try again for three more months.

Check it. Check it again. Yeah, that's kind of what I thought as well. It's almost like I used to coach a lot of CEOs, and I told them that after 12 to 18 months, I wanted them to fire me because I didn't want to become their shrink. Right. I wanted to teach them how to scale the company. You know, that whole story of if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man, if you feed him for a lifetime. I didn't want people depending on me. So I think that's kind of what you're doing, is you're trying to grow them and then they'll be advocates. Now they come back and check in. That's great.

The one thing to remember is this. People don't realize, but their body changes so much. People go through menopause. People have women who get pregnant, women. We all age. Like, even when we change where we live, the pollution in the air actually impacts the way you respond to food. People don't realize that. But one of the things we've noticed that when somebody goes to Europe from us, they eat the exact same foods. Their response actually not as bad for glucose. When they eat the same bread in Europe than us, it's the chemicals we have in our food.

I spent six weeks in Italy and I ate pasta two meals a day for six weeks, and meats two meals a day for six weeks. And I lost weight. Now, I was also walking around constantly, but. But if I ate two meals or two meals of pasta and meat a day, I would literally have become obese and didn't happen.

It's fascinating, but, like, we just don't know what we don't know. And that's the thing. This gives you information about you because you hear all these diets. Or someone goes, be vegan. Someone else says, go be keto. Someone says, be carnivore. But for who? And we're also unique. And this tells you for you, you should do this. And this isn't my advice. This is you literally eat something and you see your body's response in real time. So there's no guessing here. There's no, like, what do I believe? Is this an idea or is This a theory or is this a fact? And this is factual for you?

I want to find out a little bit about when you were starting out the company. And then you. This is something we actually talked about at a recent COO alliance event. We talked to a lot of our members about how did they and the CEO divide and conquer? How did you split up the roles between you and the CEO? So how did you and the CEO decide who was going to do what?

Yeah, I mean, I think we were in a very unique position, those two of us. And my co founder comes from an engineering background. He said, and he kind of brought this up to me and I made a lot of sense where he said, in an early stages, only two things matter. Build product, sell product. He said, I'm going to build, you're going to sell. And I actually said to him, like, I don't know how to sell. I've never done sales. I worked in finance my entire career. I was a finance strategy. And then before this, corporate finance. And then he asked me a simple question. He said, well, if I'm building, what the hell are you doing if you're not selling? I said, I'll do finance. He's like, well, finance for what? There's no revenue, there's no. What are you doing? So I think that's how we decided to conquer it. And so my goal is how to do sales and marketing and started doing that and then started ramping up. I think first month we got like 10 customers. Next month we got 25. Next month, 35 next month, 50 next time, 100 every month. Just kept growing it.

Okay, so have you raised money?

Yeah, we raised money for venture capital firms. Okay. So we've had a couple of rounds of funding.

Okay. Can you talk about how much you raised or.

I know this is going through. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So historically, we've raised 6.4 million.

Okay.

And we're planning to raise more.

Okay. So 6.4 million gives you a pretty solid base or a bench to be able to grow this off of. So that that allowed you to. Then you didn't necessarily grow organically. You did have the benefit of having some of the VC money, which is smart.

Well, that's what I would say would be the better. But that's not exactly what happened.

Right.

What actually happened is we started this company and said, let's go raise venture capital money. I quit my job and I was like, great, we'll raise money. I have my founder, who's been a former founder as well. And then we started this about three months before COVID And so we started pitching investors like two weeks before COVID started. And then just nothing. It just dried up. And so we had to just say, okay, do I go back to work or do you go do something else, or do we keep going with this? And we just had, at this point, we said, let's just use our savings. So we just started just driving or draining our savings and paying our employees, trying to grow the business. So we actually at that point didn't raise any money really. We had a couple. I think we had maybe like $150,000 from thing called Techstars incubator that we use. But again, that doesn't last very long with employees. And so we just did that. And it just kept grinding, grinding, paying people from our savings accounts. And finally when we came out of the early stage of COVID like maybe nine, 10 months later, people were like, wow, you survived that. And you grew every month, 20 to 30% month over month for last nine, 10 months. Then they were interested in investing.

Nice.

And so that helped.

And how much had you and your co founder put into the company at that point when you were draining your savings? How much do you think you guys had invested? Stuff that nobody ever talks about.

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't really, because we just kept. It's one of the things I just started not to think about because we just kept seeing the check account is to go down, down, but probably a couple hundred thousand each or something. Okay.

So this is, you know, everybody's like, oh, it's so easy to grow companies, go and get VC money. Like, really? Like, are you really prepared to drain everything and like, not take a paycheck?

Oh, I think that's what happened. We thought the exact same thing. We'll just raise venture capital money and it'll be great. And then it just didn't happen. We're like, wait, what? How does this work? And every month you have money coming from a job. Your bank account goes up here, you're paying for your expenses and then other people's expenses, and you see like this constant drip. And it's pretty fascinating.

Now, neither one of you were marketers.

You were either one's marketers.

Yeah, Finance. He was more engineering. So how did you approach marketing? Did you use agencies? Did you hire people? Did you just wing it?

The first year I did it all by myself. I had a belief that, hey, how can I hire someone if I don't understand it myself?

Okay.

And so the first year I basically said, I need to learn what marketing is. I actually just googled marketing strategies and all the marketing opportunities and there was like hundreds Facebook ads, Google Ads, Twitter ads, Pinterest ads, everything you can imagine. The problem is that my budget is very limited to I had to pay people salary. I couldn't just go spend thousands and hundreds, thousands of dollars on marketing as well. So I basically looked up and said, I looked what are the cheapest ways to do marketing and better freer. And so influencer marketing popped up as the number one way. And I basically started talking, just reaching out people on Instagram, just messaging. Hundreds and hundreds of people on Instagram who are celebrities in the space be like, hey, do you want to work with us? And most people said sure, give me 25,000, give me 100,000. And I said, how about I give you $100 or $50 for every conversion we have. Most people ignored me, some people said, okay. And then we started doing it that way. This person market for us, we generate revenue and then we pay them out 30 days later. So we didn't have to use any of our own cash flow to actually pay them.

We yeah.

And that started helping us. We started working with influencers as a way to build more relationships, more influencers. So we started networking with them, made more friends, influencers start working more marketers and who are helping us. And then we started scaling from there. Once we got to a place where we had a good network of influencers, then we said, okay, now let's start doing things like paid media, Google, Facebook, Instagram ads, things like that. But it took more than a year to even get to that stage.

Has your website always been so clean?

It's been pretty clean, yes, from the beginning. Alex, my co founder, he's got just a brilliant eye for design and so he's always been very detail oriented. So I think we started that day one. But I will tell you that when we started, our page was just one page, pay here for the first like three months. That's only the whole website was pay here. And I had a credit card for him. Nothing else for a while.

No, it's very, very clean. What percentage of your clients are women? What percentage of your clients are men?

Sure, I would say about 65 to 70% are women. What's fascinating, when we started this, and this is where it's important to be flexible. When we first started this, we actually thought it was going to be what we call tech bros, right? 20, 30 year old men, Silicon Valley, you know, biohackers. And we Quickly realized that's not our audience. Our audience are people who care about longevity, about their health, about importance of their health, or even understand what glucose is. Most people, especially men, have no idea what glucose is. They've even heard, you know, and why is it important? Why is glucose control so important? And women understood that. And what's interesting is a lot of times the women brought their husbands, boyfriends, fathers in to educate them.

Yeah, it's interesting because most of the photos on the website are women. When you get down to some of the testimonials, the men start to appear. But it seems that the female focus and yeah, the women, women talk, women share information. That's. I always think if you've got a product that's tightened to focus everything on the women because they're the ones that are going to talk about it for real. Right. Like there's actually a book called Trends. Tom Peters and Kimberhood's co author was. But she said that, you know, women never stop talking. Women take an idea and they share it with everyone. You know, if a guy and a woman both stay in a five star hotel and they both have the same mind blowing experience, the guy tells no one, she tells 74 People. So if you're gonna, if you're gonna market to people, market to the people that are gonna share your story. And it seems like you guys have done that. Was that a cognizant decision or is it just so.

I think we first were just marketing to market because we need some customers to pay some of our employees because we were like, we're going to run out of money. And then as we saw that the men would come in, they would try and they were like, okay, this is cool. Some people would stay forever and like they keep liking it, but I might have tried for a week and be great and they would stop. Versus women found more value. We saw the results continuously where women improve the glucose control. Some would lose weight, some would improve other things like thyroid issues or Hashimoto's. There's other areas that they were able to find improvements in and they start telling everyone. Referrals started going up and we started getting this flywheel of just constant feedback of new customer acquisitions organically. We found a lot of value in that.

Interesting. Sorry, another product question. Are people able to sign up and use the app if they're buying the devices separately? Like if we, if someone was buying a device where I am in Denmark, can they actually just use the app on top of the device? Or do you need to use Your devices?

Yeah, no, we let people do that. I think if people really want to do that, we let people try that out because we find people find value in that as well. I mean, our goal is to help people improve their health. And I think from. We believe that long term, as you help more people, you get this kind of positive karma that we believe in that will drive more value to our customers and us.

Yeah. So you really are building this more as an App and a SaaS company than you are off top of the product.

Exactly. Yep. I mean, if this tomorrow becomes over the counter and everyone can buy it, we're more happy. Like our customer base will 10x or a hundredx?

Absolutely. All right. Who are you selling to? Are you selling direct to consumer? Are you selling three businesses, all direct consumer?

All direct consumer. Yeah, we now are. We started getting influencers then we actually started doing podcast marketing specifically around health and health and wellness. And then we just exploded. Started doing everything you can imagine. Pinterest, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter. TikTok's huge. Probably one of our biggest grown channels around TikTok.

There's a few of my former clients are from the CEO alliance and also coaching clients are pretty massive influencers in the health space. I'm curious if they're clients of yours yet. If they're not, I'll introduce you. But Dave Asprey from Bulletproof Coffee, has he ever used your product?

He's tried it. He. Yeah, but he hasn't currently used it. But he's tried it before.

He's quirky as fuck, so that's okay. David, David, I are good friends and he'd be totally good with me saying that. Ben Greenfield.

Yeah, I know this guy's. I think he has never used our product, but I know he is. Yep.

Interesting. Yeah, we gotta get Ben doing because his CEO, Angelo, from the on, Angelo was a CEO alliance member as well for a couple years. And then JJ Virgin would be another one.

You know, jj JJ Virgin. She actually has used our product. She is. I think she's worn a product a couple times. I think. I'm pretty sure one of our. Our VP of health actually was on our podcast. Yeah, JJ is amazing.

You've never done this before and you've had to figure out the role of the coo. Where have you. I'm sure it hasn't all been easy. What were your big struggles and pain points and where have you had to grow the most?

Well, I think one of the things is, I think with starting a company, there's a lot of rejection. And I wish somebody told me that, like, hey, you should have like a ratio of rejection to yeses. And somebody said, like, hey, for every yes, you're gonna get 99 no's. It helps you stability. Kind of like, okay, I'm at 45 no so far. Right. Versus every time you get a rejection, it hurts. No matter how confident you are, it like hurts ego. And so someone telling you, like, hey, you need to get 99 nos to get 1 yes. Then you kind of have this frame of mind or like, okay, this is normal. Nobody told me that. And every time someone's like, no, no, no. I'm just like, it just dagger into your heart, like, am I failing? You question it. And they call it like imposter syndrome. Right? Yeah. And now looking back and I talk to more founders and they're like, yeah, you only got 99 no's for one. Yes. I got 199 no's for one. Yes. And I was like, wait, what? He's like, you're killing the gear, doing really well. 1% is incredible conversion rate. And so I think having that like, framework of like, what is the ratio of good versus bad, I think is would be very helpful. But I think when you're grown fast, it's constantly switching new jobs because every single time your company grows 2x in value, you yourself have to grow 2x in information and or skill sets for sure. And I mean, I think you mentioned we have 120 employees. This is when I sent you that email. Now we're at 145. Right. So from that email one month ago, we hired 25 more people. Yeah.

Every.

Every day.

This is the biggest thing you've ever done.

Exactly. Every single day. And so like, and I look at my team members where within two and a half years, people went from individual contributor to manager to director to VP to C suite within. And then like, and people have to get upskilled constantly. Yeah, Overplace. And it's people, you know, corporate world takes 20, 30 years to do this and here we're doing it within six to nine months.

Yeah. I was talking to the founder of infusionsoft and Clay Mouse. He and I were talking at an event that we were out together. We were both speaking at. He said that. And I concur that a mid level manager can only go through two doubles in the size of the company before they're unable to stay in their role for the third double. So if you kind of go from 2 million to 4, from 4 to 8, they're probably not going to be able to run the company at 16. Or if you go from 10 to 20, 20 to 40, they probably can't really do the 80 and it's because they can't keep their skill levels up. Right. I've launched a course called invest in your leaders just to give managers those skills to really excel as leaders. So what are you doing internally to grow the people and to help them, you know, continue to grow so that you don't have to replace them or so you don't have to have. Often we don't have to replace them, we just have to have somebody that they start reporting to. You know, we bring in the external hires. How are you growing people internally?

There's three ways we do it, I think. The first one is we try to actually coach people consistently. So we consistently have coaching and evaluation of upskills. The second one is we try to find mentors for every individual who is specifically two to three years ahead of them.

That's huge.

I think the problem we've seen people do is they'll be like, oh, I found this person who's a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. And that person's like, you know, they have 10,000 people, they can't help you, they're too far ahead. So we always look for two to three years ahead of someone who's doing something similar. So we specifically say, okay, if we're direct consumer, who else a direct consumer. And maybe in the health and wellness space in two, three years ahead, I think that's been. And specifically that position, that's second. The third one is. Funny you say it, but coursing we're trying to sign up people for courses or bring in outside folks to teach people. Because again, my belief is at a certain level, everyone, for example, when you become like a VP or higher, everyone has to be extremely good at finance, everyone has to be extremely good at recruiting, everyone has to be extremely good at self awareness. And these are skills. If you were, let's say, a dietitian, you might be the best dietitian in the world. What the heck do you need no finance for, right? And now all of a sudden you're expected to be an expert in finance. And whether you're engineering, whether you're dietitian, whether you're operations, you have to have these skills at a certain level because you're no longer writing code, you're no longer answering custom support questions, right? You're now leading organizations. You're not even like people managing as much as you are thinking about the vision and the grand vision of what does this look like now versus the future and what does the budget need to look like.

Yeah, totally. So how about yourself? What are you focusing on growing yourself now?

Right now, the way we've done this is I will take over a function, I learn it and then I will basically try to hire someone to take over that function. And my ambition is to always hire someone who's at least 3x or better than me. If someone is not at least 3x better than me, then there's a problem. Because if I've been doing this for six months and this person's been doing it for 10, 15 years and they're worse than me or not, or even they're the same level, that's a problem. And by the way, you'd be amazed how people are worse than me after I've been doing it for six months. I'm always amazed by that.

Well, you know what I've also noticed with a lot of seasoned executives is they're not necessarily seasoned. They've just been doing it for a lot of seasons.

Right.

Somebody who's got 20 years experience might really have four years years experience five times in a row.

Yep.

Right. That, that they. So really it's. They're no better off than they were when they were 26. They just happened to be 46. So yeah, you're right. So how do you assess whether their skill level is 3x better than yours?

So a couple things. One is I try to learn topics. So if I want to do Facebook ads, I'm not just going to go interview people Facebook ads. I go and I just run some Facebook ads, number one. Number two. So I actually just execute it. Number two is I try to deep dive on a knowledge of whether it's books, podcasts, interviews, whatever it is, I need to buy Facebook ads. The third one is what I did for other people I do for myself. I go find mentors who are experts on Facebook ads who are two to three years ahead of me. So I look at the revenue of the company and say, hey, who are people who have two, three times revenue where we are? And then I go get five, six, seven of those mentors and I set up weekly calls with these people and they again teach me everything I can. So I dive into details because you're not going to get those random ad hoc questions or this really in depth knowledge unless you have that. And I think it's a way to streamline because I think it helps you skip decades of Experience. Sometimes by doing it, most people just do the surface level knowledge. I try to go deep where I'm like obsessed with a topic. And I may spend like one week. I may say, okay, Facebook ads is my week. This week I'll spend 80, 90 hours just obsessing about Facebook ads.

Wow.

Next week I have like hundreds of questions I have that are very nuanced. People don't even know what they mean half the time. And I get to call these experts and I just ask them questions, all those. And I try to get answers to all of them. And the key there is, remember, you will always have the one person who's contrarian and you want to listen to that. And the nice thing about if you have five, six people, if you have five people saying do this, one person saying this, you can kind of ignore that piece. And you use a five people ratio versus the folks that sometimes you listen to one person and they might have gotten lucky. Right? You might have. The person might have gotten lucky. But they think that's the way the world works. So you have to make sure you now listen to just one person, device or something. And there is this confirmation bias all the time where you know, someone succeeded and immediately imagine they're the ones that did it.

Right.

Sometimes they were just there at the right time, the right place, or they joined the right company. Right. And sometimes people that failed actually learn more than people that succeeded. And so I think having a couple people to choose from and then looking at like what is the majority are saying is good way to think about it, especially when you don't know the topic deeply.

Yeah, I love that. I had a guest on the show recently and he said that get a second opinion on the expert opinion.

Yeah. And when I interview people, I actually pull in these folks during my interview process and so on. Like last round, I'll have them jump in and interview that candidate as well to confirm am I missing anything or not? And the amount of times they caught some like, oh, this is not the right person. I'm like, great, thank you. I missed it.

Did you guys ever have an office or have you been entirely remote because you started right as Covid was kind of starting or we. I mean, you started about six months before we.

We started. Yeah. It's even early. Yeah. Like we. Not really. We kind of like worked at a coworking space for a couple months, but again, fully remote. I mean, so we are over 140 people now. Or 140. I lose track of SBH person, but I Think in Chicago. We're based in Chicago. There's three people in Chicago.

Interesting.

Right. We're registered in 42 states.

Wow.

And right now our team is in like 36 countries.

What are some of the complexities of managing a team that's that distributed, that remote and how are you dealing with some of those?

Yeah, I mean the negative about this. There are negatives. Right. I can't lie and say everything's a positive. There's the cultural idea of hey, let's everyone be friends, let's everyone hang out. It becomes harder to replicate than in the office. Right. And also hard to tell when people work too hard. Some people are really type A people and they get burnt out and it's important to slow them down. There's a lot of times people I see where people working too hard and I need to be like, please do less because I want you here for the long term. And there's other side where people, simple, probably could just do nothing, watch tv and like how do you know? So it forces you to be very KPI driven.

Okay.

Which again, it's a double edged sword. It attracts certain type of people and repels other people.

Yeah.

But you have to realize that's something you have to sacrifice in order to get.

Do you think we are going through this stage where many employees are burned out or do you think we're going through a stage where many employees just don't understand hard work and they grew up on participation ribbons? You know, I came back and I got a ribbon.

It's hard. It's hard to say that because I mean there's people I've hired that I'm like, it really depends on a person. I think it's hard to say because like I think the bigger piece is. It's hard to distract yourself. Right. Because I think it's more of like you can come work really, really hard and. But once 5pm hits you, maybe you clock out and you're done and your brain turns off.

Yeah.

But when you're at work, you never turn off. So even if you're not doing any physical work, it's always in back your head like another Slack message, another email, another notification. And I think that's number one. And number two is like as much as it's great to spend family time, you know, like not everyone understands like your kids may not understand that just because you're in a computer, they may think you're having fun or your wife might understand like that a zoom call doesn't mean a zoom call you know, like, I went to visit my parents one time and we had a meeting with a very important person. It was like, probably like top 100 richest people in the world. And my dad just came in and asked me to shovel the snow. And I'm like, what are you doing? I'm on a phone call. And my dad just didn't understand the concept. He's like, but it's zoom. It's just tell them to call him later. Right. And the concept doesn't make sense versus if you go to physical location, they can't do that. And so we don't have the same kind of awareness. So it's the ability to constantly manage at home situation plus work. It's hard. So even when we work remotely, I usually go to a corking space. And I've heard a lot of people do this corking space coffee shop. Because the per. It's the mix, the personal and professional makes it very difficult in my mind.

Yeah, I definitely find that when I'm in a location like that, I definitely have a little bit more heads down and focus and I don't get as distracted. I've worked from home now for 15 years, so I've been used to it. And I also started my first company from home, you know, when I was 21. So I. I have been doing it both pre tech and post tech, and then I've worked from offices for years as well.

But one thing people don't. Something sometimes forget is they. They think, they always say, like, I don't like being micromanaged. And I hear a lot of people say, I hate micromanagement. That's why I want to work remotely. But what they confuse is micromanage with managing.

Yeah.

Because a lot of times people will be like, all right, go, go do stuff. And they're like, what do I do? How do I do it? You're like, I thought you don't want to be managed. And I think people just take these extreme views on things when there's a lot of gray areas you want to be in between.

That's actually one of the core 12 modules in my invest in your leaders courses on situational leadership. And it shows the leaders or managers how to actually adapt their leadership style on a situation by situation basis for the same person. Because at some point they absolutely want to be micromanaged. And they wouldn't call it that. But if they're brand new at something or if they're overwhelmed or if they're confused or if it's a bigger problem, you ever Solved. Yeah. They want to be totally told exactly how to do it. And then once that competence gets up or confidence goes up, style can adapt. But if managers don't lose that, they're dead.

I mean, I find it fascinating the amount of times people tell me, I just want autonomy. I hate that someone's always checking my work and then you give people full autonomy and they're like, wait, what do I do? How do I do this?

Where is your co founder and CEO based? Is he Chicago? Is re Bay Area?

He is in Chicago, but he's currently in France. He's been in France for a while. I mean, to give you guys context, last year I was probably 10 months abroad, and he was probably also 10 months abroad where like he was all over the kind of. He was in France for a while. He was in Ukraine, I was in Austria, then Malta, then Canary Islands in Spain, then Mexico. We met up Mexico. So, like, our company's full remote. Yeah, I think they're, you know, as people always talk about, like the difficulty hiring talent, which is very true in us right now. One thing we said is like, hey, we can't pay the salaries of Google's and Apples and Facebook's pay. We just can't. But how do we still attract good people? We realized that we have to give up something else. And we want fully remote. Fully. Like when you say remote, like you can live anywhere in the world. So we have folks who we hired who are Americans who will be like, they'll live six months in South Africa, six months in Mexico, six months in Australia. And that flexibility lets people feel comfortable giving up maybe taking a pay cut. Right?

Yeah.

And you're able to get some really talented people. Like, we have this.

Or they show up, they show up with a lot more loyalty because they know that you care about the machines.

Like, we recruit this one woman, she's like Olympic athlete, went to Stanford, worked at Facebook, and just like top notch, and she just travels the world. Another woman, she's like, every month she goes to a new state in the U.S. i think a lot of companies say they work remotely, but what they really mean is as long as you stay within the same state, that's not really remotely or remotely but work from your house where you live and not moving anywhere else. We truly believe in fully remote work. Even at ours, we say, hey, as long as work gets done, we don't need to have meetings all the time.

Right.

And again, people want to be in meetings all day. We try to be anti meetings as much as humanly possible.

I like it. All right, let's go Back to the 21, 22 year old Dan. Dan had to give Dan Zavrotti a little bit of advice. You know, you're just starting out in your career. What advice would you tell yourself back then that you know to be true today?

I think it's the feeling of being comfortable. Failure. I think I had such fear of failure even now. And the fear of failure is what really stops you from starting. Yeah, it's the concept of like, but what if I this happens and it's these, it's this paralysis by analysis, right. I think it's like, what if this happens? What if this happens? What does this happen? Sometimes you just got to just do it and it's okay. And I think this I learned from my co founder. He just dustings and he fails. And I don't know anyone who fails as much as me, my co founder now, but I got that from him because first for a while I'm like, dude, you're failing all the time. What are you doing? You're just constantly failing. He's like, yeah, but we got it done in a week. It would have taken you two months to do it. I failed 17 times, but we got it done way faster. And so this concept being okay with failure and I think the reason this is important, it's specifically for early stage startups, mid stage startups. If you think about a corporate world, the goal for them is different. The goal for them is to grow 5 to 7% year over year. And they played a game of risk reduction, how to reduce every possible risk. So they actually quite opposite, they don't want to fail at all. They want to make sure they eliminate all failures. But if you're starting a company and you're trying to grow the company, the opposite speed is what you have. You don't have money, you don't have the brand. So speed's what matters and failing's okay. And I'll give you an example. Like if you want to bring a new, let's say shipping software to your company and you're General Electric or Google, it didn't take you a year and a half to two years. Just get approvals to implement that, right? We will go and literally buy seven pieces of software and just test every one of them and within a week we'll have the best one that works for us. Yeah, and it creates a mess for that week, but now we have the best one that works for us. No question about it.

Versus momentum creates momentum moment.

Exactly. And the nice thing about it is we know it's the best versus a lot of corporations. It's who the best salespeople are that sold you on that. Right? And it's like, maybe Google had better salespeople than Facebook. And then before you bought the Google product versus the Facebook product here, you can just test it out.

I'll tell you something. You're doing well. One of your. You said one of your very first things you had to get better at was sales. You are good at selling the business and good at selling the product. And, and you clearly are passionate about what you built. So I appreciate that.

Thank you so much. Yeah.

Dan Zabarotny, the co founder and COO from Nutrisense. Super appreciative of your time today. Thanks very much for sharing with us on the second McFlan podcast.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

You have to be very careful about who you hire in terms of culture fit when you're working remote. One of the definitions of culture is what do employees do when nobody's looking? And that's kind of key here when it comes to, like, remote hires. You have to really nail who you hire. So you have to be extra careful around the culture component because you have to trust when people are at home, what they're doing.