How Intelligent Threads is Changing Wellness | Ronald Beauford VP of Development (Podcast 395)

Our guest today is Intelligent Threads, VP of Strategic Developments and Commercialization and General Manager Ron Buford. Ron has more than 20 years experience in the medical device market as a high level executive in sales, leadership strategy, contracting, training and business development. He's also spent over 20 years in the US military in both high level staff and command positions. In high school Ron was a standout quarterback on the football team and all state center fielder in baseball. Ronald an Allstate timpani and band and he spent four years active duty USAF where he was an acquisitions and finance officer as well as he was part of the USAF track team in Europe and an all military baseball team in the Cape Cod and New England leagues. He retired after 20 years as a colonel in the medical device market. Ron has worked and led in the top 100 fastest growing medical device companies. He's worked for Fortune 500 companies and global Fortune 100 companies, Johnson & Johnson, Car Caldera, Medical Mind, Gray North America in high level executive positions, leading sales organizations, corporate accounts, contracting and radiology and operating rooms. He's had been a consistent high performer and he's also got his MBA in supply chain operations. He's going to talk to us about Intelligent Threads, the commercialization of their product, how their product is helping people with medical issues, amazing sleep results and how they're going through some really rapid global expansion. Going to love this episode. You'll also love their products. I am also a fan. So Ron, welcome to the Second in Command podcast.

Thanks for having me, Cameron.

Yeah, looking forward to to chatting with you. You and I met a couple of months ago. I was at an event of Dave Asprey's biohacking conference in Dallas. I flew from Europe all the way back to that with my wife and we were walking around the trade show and there was you guys at one of the smaller booths, but one of the busiest booths in the entire trade show out of 100 plus probably exhibitors. Yours was absolutely slammed. Why was it slammed? And why don't you tell us what Intelligent Threads does so that we understand why there were so many people at your booth?

Sure. So this was our third year at Dave, so we've developed a little bit of a of a following at this point. We developed a new technology that interacts with the muscles of the body. As soon as you come in contact with any of our materials, something as simple as a T shirt, shorts, sheets, blankets, even topicals, it'll take your engaged muscles that are holding your body in pain or at a posture to immediately release. And what that means is that those muscles that are holding the skeletal structure to let go. So you naturally go back to anatomical correct position, barring any scar tissue or other issues within the body. But it can improve your alignment within your body, blood flow, some structural body pain if you, if it's associated with alignment issues, as well as set the hips, back, knees, all within a few seconds and a few movements. And then our sleep study is now one of the top in the world at an 88% improvement of REM and deep sleep with just our pillowcase or our eye mask. Our full sheet set is actually showing greater than 140%. Imagine for biohackers, that's kind of the foundational elements of getting everything right in the body. So then they could then progress in the different areas they want to look into.

You make clothing and sleep stuff, pillowcases, bedding, but it's with fabrics or these intelligent threads, as your company would say, kind of fabric. I was pretty skeptical. Still am slightly skeptical. Even though I bought one of your swipes.

Oh yeah.

But.

Oh yeah.

So what's in the fabric that's doing this? I mean you don't have to give away the, the entire trademark, but what roughly. And how is the fabrics made that it's doing something like this? What's, what's going on?

The fun answer is the fabrics don't matter at all.

Right.

So we have everything from a polyester T shirt, workout shirt, like an athletic shirt, all the way to a cashmere blanket. It's the technology that our founder invented, Brian Brzezinski invented, that's able to bond on the molecular level to any type of fabric textile gel. And then that particle that he developed actually sends the signal to the muscles. So when we bond it to anything, then you can wash it, you can dry. It has never come out in eight years of our testing. And then that sends the signal to release those muscles holding the skeletal structure out of alignment.

It's the particles that are bonded to the fabric that are doing the trick or that are doing the science.

Correct.

And are these particles like microscopic? Are they metallic? What are they like? Is that, is it some kind of woo woo shaman who's blessing them and they're coming down from space? What are these things?

I didn't put that past it. When I first saw it. I was just like, what are you doing with this thing? This is totally different than anything that I've ever experienced. No, it's just really high end particle physics. The appropriate name is a propagated waveform. It's a Propagated waveform particle that Brian spent 15 years of research and development on to make his job essentially easier. He's a structural therapist by trade, and his thought process was, if I can get the muscles to release and maintain this good structure, then I won't have to work on people day in and day out, week after week, month after month. So in our clinic, SRM out of Kerrville, Texas, we usually see people around once a year, if not once every, you know, probably a year and a half.

So. So again, sorry, is. Is the, the material something that's being sprayed into the fabric or bonded? Pre manufacturing? How's it working? Approximately?

Think about it. Think about more of a. Of a machine that we put down. Conveyor belt. We put our products down a conveyor belt. The machine then, okay, I would say laser encodes our technology onto the fabric itself. Pre.

Pre manufacturing them or after they've been.

Manufactured, it doesn't matter. We could do it anyway. Post manufacturing is a little bit easier just because you're not wasting any of the material as you're cutting it out.

So you're going to take like a pillowcase that somebody else might have manufactured, you throw it through a machine, and you guys are encoding it with the material or the science part of the technology, and it comes out the other end. And now it's going to have these properties that I tried on a sweatshirt in the booth and one of the women did like these tests on me, and then I put the sweatshirt on. She did the test the second time and everything changed. Is that one of those, like, carnival magic tricks kind of thing? Or what was I feeling? Because I felt enough that I went and bought a sweatshirt and they weren't entirely.

Yeah, it's not cheap stuff because 15 years of R and D on a machine costs a lot of money. But we get that all the time. We have our flagship store in Fredericksburg, Texas, right on Main Street. We get that all the time. It's like, are you guys magicians? You guys. Is it psychological? All kinds of different things other than it actually is just great science. But it's new science, right? It's something that's no other company, no other. No other person has. So delivering that knowledge base of, yes, an article of clothing does in fact correct your internal structure. Honestly, seconds of putting it on, it's. It's a little wild. You know, when, when I was starting to try to develop this company, it was very much like, okay, what is this? Like, what can I base my foundation of building this market, building this Company off of. And it's really hard. I mean, you have to go to some major developments in the world to actually say, hey, this is brand new. It's like magic. You know, like you first in the 1800s when somebody flicked on a switch and the light turned on.

Yeah.

They thought, oh my gosh, what's this magic? There's, there's no way this thing could be going through this wire and turning on a light. Very similar to what our technology is. Put it on the body. You do the we. That's why we opened a store. We have to do the movements and stretches with people. So to show them, because we did it online, it's just like, well, I don't feel it, I don't understand it. So the more we can talk, build the bridge of understanding what this technology is, feel for yourself, try it for yourself, the more that we can then progress.

Yeah, it's like there's no way planes can fly and there's no way WI fi can work either. Right. That's gotta be a trick too. So it makes sense. This is a science thing that we're just not used to yet. Now, you mentioned to me before we went live that you've done some testing with about 30,000 people. Is the testing that you're talking about having done the testing that was done on me in the booth, or is the testing that's been done like actual testing in labs or a combination of.

Combination of both. Absolutely right. It's one for our knowledge base. When we test everybody, we want to see if it doesn't work on somebody.

Right.

Because that's one of the, the aspects of it works. A hundred percent effectiveness every time with every person plus animals. So we have pet line as well. We haven't found a person yet that it didn't affect. Right. There's some people that can't feel it or understand it, but when their body goes from down here to up here in seconds, then we're like, yeah, that worked. But we've also done a lot of academic testing and very focused clinical testing. Especially on our sleep. Like I said earlier, sleep product blew us out of the water. We were testing on a bunch of higher end athletes. We're more in the high end athlete section. When I first came on board and everybody was coming back telling us that they were sleeping so well and recovering so well. And I was like, brian, I think we need to do a sleep study. This sounds real interesting. And when we did that, it just blew us out of the water. 88% improvement of REM and deep sleep, there's nothing that compares to it. I can't find anything that compares to it on the global market, especially the REM aspect of it, because you're getting that consistent dreaming and recovery of the brain as simple as a pillowcase.

And is this sleep studies that have been done in the lab, like brain scan kind of stuff, or is this sleep studies that is done? Both. You're, you're like using an OURA ring and you're asking your clients, is it both?

We, so we did a whoop strap study, was actually kind of similar to an OURA ring was our initial study. And then we've, we actually took it to Braintap and they did the brain studies of it. Dr. Porter, the developer of Braintaps, is the only product that he's found that actually raises his level of brain activity. Only thing that made a consistent impact. I think he said around 30% increase in his brain activity. And then we did another one with there's an AI mirror that is the only FDA approved instant hrv. So you stand in front of the mirror, gives you an instant hrv. So when we were talking to this company, I just threw a shirt over the guy and he's like, what did you do? It just starts raising the hrv. I was just like, oh, I didn't know if that would work or not, but it did. So just a lot of random type of testing products. One of the top longevity scientists in the world's doing a lot of our testing. Ian Mitchell runs Wizard Sciences is actually doing a lot of our foundational, foundational testing in the product. So we try to get. Anybody that wants to test, has tests. We're always open to like, yes, prove us wrong, do whatever you want to do with it. We don't care what the outcome is, just go for it.

Have there been any kind of naysayers or critics of the, of the brand from like either a competitor, because I don't imagine there's a competitor. Like you're either selling normal stuff or you're selling this. What are you kind of facing in terms of headwinds, you know, from anything in that perspective, like negative PR or.

Yeah, we really haven't faced any negative, I would say negative large pr, as Brian would say. We really want to work with everybody this product. Our mission is to help people feel better, get better. That's, that's what we're all about. We, we have gotten pushback with some professionals as far as doctors, chiropractors, stuff like that, mainly because of Our business model, but again it's developing new science, new technology and as we progress, we have to come in with the times and I think that's really a focal point and we're trying to help people and fix them almost instantly. So sometimes it doesn't work with certain business models that you have to come back over and over again.

What do you mean that because of your business model? What does that mean?

Well, our business model is to give some, get somebody a shirt, get them in the clinic once and then have them be good. You know, if something doesn't, something crazy happens like they get hit by a car or fall off a ladder, sure come back. But we want to be able to give you the technology to actually fix your alignment to your internal structure on a root cause, permanent basis versus having to see a clinician over and over again.

And was the original starting point around alignment and has that moved towards sleep or is it. Or are you kind of going in a couple of directions at the same time to see which plays out?

Yeah, we've, there's, there's so many different verticals that we have and that we're working on. The, the original was alignment decreasing injury rates. Within our athlet, which our injury rate study was a 90% declination of any type of soft tissue injury, which is profound. It moves into different areas. Sleep, mobility, stamina, recovery, a lot of different aspects, especially for the high end athlete. And then for people that are just truly in pain, have hip issues, twisted hips, women that have given birth, it's a great way to get the hits, the hips set back to where they should so they don't have any of that pain. That's actually how Brian and I reconnected. My wife had horrible, horrible hip pain from the birth of our first child. She tried everything possible. We lived in Austin, Texas at the time, so there was plenty of different types of people to assist. I told her, you need to go see my buddy Brian. He should fix you. Probably in one session. He's like, that doesn't exist. That's not a thing. I was like, just go try. So she comes, she goes down, didn't call me afterwards, comes back and I was like, so how'd it go? Like, yeah, he fixed me in one session. Like I can lay down again. He goes, but you need to look at his magic shirt. And I was like, magic shirt? I was like, yeah. I was like, did you buy one? She's like, oh, they were super expensive. They're probably double or triple the price that they are. Now I was like, but if it works, who cares? Buy it. So that's how we reconnected and got started commercializing this thing.

That's amazing. Years ago, I was working with a supplement company and helping them scale. I was coaching the CEO and their COO and their leadership team for about two years and they were talking about giving away some promotional products. And I said, the one promotional product you should be giving away is your sleep medicine, your sleep supplement. Because people take it, they get sleepy, they go to sleep, they go, wow, that shit worked. But if you have like your brain health or your performance one, like nobody knows if it works like electrolytes, like, we, we don't know if it's working. The sleep one, you know, works. Is the sleep side of your Intelligent threads technology the one that most people can quickly identify, or is it a feeling? What is it that they most identify with quickly? Or is it alignment, that kind of thing.

When we do podcasts or anything e commerce wise, and we can't physically show them like in the store or at a conference, the easiest one to relate to is the sleep, as you said, because you're going to start, especially if you don't dream or haven't dreamed in a long time. Once you start hitting those dream states, which usually is night one, you'll be like, oh, wow, I really woke up refreshed and, and ready to hit the day.

Yeah, you just, you just completely know the difference. Very quickly, I'm going to get pillowcases for my wife and I. We're digital nomads and we sleep on the road and that's something we can definitely do. I bought one of your sweatshirts, but I'm going to pick up pillowcase for both she and I, because I think that's the one that we can know because we track, right. We use the Oura ring and we'll know that we can have that kind of instant effects. I want to talk a little bit about the business. You know, we've talked about the product of intelligent Threads. You joined the organization about a year ago and it's been in, in the third year now of commercialization of the products. What's the growth been like over the last 12 months? Where are you focusing on your growth? I know that you mentioned before we went live about going into the the UK and getting expansion into Europe. And as I mentioned, we meant we met you at Dave Asprey's biohacking conference at the trade show. So I know you're doing some trade shows. Where are you growing how are you growing and, and what's the growth been like?

So over the last three years? So I consulted with, with Brian and developing the company while I was still doing a full time job. So we stay up late at night, 1 2am in the morning, work on the weekends. Just as, just as much time as we could to actually put it to a commercialization aspect. Then we took it to our first conference and we had no idea what we were doing. It was, we got a table, we had a massage table out there. We had bins in the back. Our POS system didn't work. I had to type in all the credit card numbers. But it was a great experience. We, we wanted to do X amount of dollars and we tripled what we're, what our expectations were and we're like, oh, like this is, this is commercially viable. It's not just a clinic. And so that was 2022. We did four conferences that year. 2023, we kind of went full time doing conferences, all that stuff. And we thought what was like a conference full time, what can we do that's day in and day out showing people, you know, doing the pushing, mobility, mobility test. So we opened our first store that was in March of this year in Fredericksburg, Texas. It really has, you get all kinds, you get like, oh my gosh, this is the greatest thing ever to do. You have pins on your fingers. Making me feel different. I mean it's like pins on my fingers, you know, it's, it's wild, right? And now that we have the store, we have a lot of wholesale clients around, around the nation. And we're actually starting oem. So our, our version of OEM is we have different clients that will send us their products and then we will put it through their machine and then they sell their end. So that's a big vertical for us, revenue vertical for us. Really expand on. Once they believe it, then they can grab it, put it in their product lines and sell it on their own.

Is it a patented technology? What's the terminology? Patent, trademark, that. And how do you prevent somebody from coming in and gutting kind of intelligent threads or intelligent material? Like what, you know, what's the, the rip off version?

I honestly don't know how you could rip it off. Brian's the brilliant scientist behind all of this. I'm a supply chain and finance geek, so the science just goes right over my head. But he went to several high end patent attorneys and I had several friends that were patent attorneys as well. All of us told us not to Patent it because those equations, that information would be then public and we'd only have the patent for a certain amount of time. It's deemed as a trade secret and it would be very difficult to replicate. I mean, at my knowledge base there's, there's no way to actually replicate it. You know, you could, you could maybe find something close. But Brian's always really good at understanding the, the high end science behind it.

And is this the kind of like, is it kind of like Colonel Sanders with his 37 secret spices or whatever it was that the. Basically, yeah, it makes sense. All right, so the growth was trade shows. You're doing some oem, you're doing some wholesale, you're opening up retail. What do you think the big growth is going to be then over the next three years for you?

I think replicating what we're doing here in Europe over the next three years is going to be our big growth model as well as getting other companies, sports teams on board with the OEM side and having their own line of intelligent products.

And what would those, can you talk about what those would be or would it would again be just streamlining what's working in North America then?

Sure, yeah. So example, we signed with one of the largest sports complex in Texas this past month of doing all of their uniforms. So they'll sending all of their uniforms down to us. We treat them with our technology and then their athletes, roughly 20 to 30,000 of them, then get to where our technology and their uniforms, their practice gear, so on and so forth.

A dollar per item kind of thing.

Or something like that.

Yeah, something like that. Okay, where's the challenge been? I mean, you've been there for a year now. Has the challenge been growth? Are you scaling the team? Is it marketing, is it fulfillment? Where, where are some of the challenges that you're bumping into as an organization and what are you doing to solve them?

I think our number one challenge is still the understanding of the technology. Finding the different ways to market, whether it be radio spots from somebody that understands this, loves us, or podcasts like with, with people like yourself. Different magazine articles starting. We're, I would say not great in social media, but we have social media platforms. Both of us are, you know, in our 40s and didn't really grow with social media. So that was a, that's a harder one for us to manage. But really that knowledge bridge of what the technology is, does and people believing what they're telling us there, what we're telling them, there's so many different Products out there that are just work or more fluff. And ours is, you know, extremely beneficial to the body. And we just want people to, to know that it does work and it's a huge quality of life difference for the individual. As far as I would say personnel, we spend a lot of time with our employees, with training, with development, making sure that they have the right standard operating procedures. That's what I've been doing the last few months is here's how we ship, here's how we order inventory, here's the inventory process, you know, making sure that we're very process oriented. Even in our sales process, from somebody entering the door to checking out. We're very specific in how we introduce the technology, demonstrate doing the push and mobility test, walk them through all the different aspects of our product line, which now we're sitting at 241 SKUs somewhere around there. So really that first step into, okay, what do I, what do I get? Then it's, it's that process then closing them out. So everything that we do is very highly trained and highly processed.

And why is there 241 SKUs? Is it because a golf shirt has, you know, small, medium, large, extra large, women's as well, different colors? Is that kind of it? So how many types of items would you have? Would you have like 20 items and that come. That makes up 240 skus. Is that kind of how it works?

We have about 60.

Yep, about 60 items. And okay, so yeah, like a pillowcase is a pillowcase kind of thing. Right. You got like.

Well, but then you have your standard pillowcase, your king size pillowcase.

Yeah, right.

Then it's in bamboo or organic French linen or mulberry silk. And then there's different colors. Right. So it gets, it gets pretty detailed pretty quickly.

Pretty detailed pretty fast. Yeah. How do you say no? How do you decide what skus to say no to and what skus to double down on?

Always go back to data. You know, what's selling well, what are people asking for in the stores and the conventions? We know we have very detailed analytics showing us what products sell well, what's consistent. They're on bar charts, they're on graphs. So when we do our product reviews, we, we take that data and say, do we need another color? Do we need another size? Shirts for us are our best seller. So we have our athletic T shirt, which is our relaxer, which is a poly based. We have our 100% cotton as well as camisoles and some other items. For women, there's a modal spandex cotton blend. There's a mulberry silk blend. Right. So actually it's not a blend, it's pure mulberry silk. But it's just a matter of seeing that data. Where does it go towards what are we seeing? And if we're getting a lot of requests, we got a lot of requests for long sleeve T shirts. So long sleeve T shirts is on our list of development some higher end items like alpaca cardigans, gloves, stuff like that. So we just have to. I run, actually I run a spreadsheet that has about a hundred different items on there ranging from a navy blue cotton T shirt to a vicuna blanket. Lots of different areas for us to progress into.

Incredible. And is it all direct to consumer or are you doing anything via Amazon? My guess is you're going all direct to consumer.

Direct to consumer, post seller, oem. Yes sir.

And you're staying away from Amazon because there's no need to be like, no, there's no competitor on this stuff. And your price point would almost hurt you on Amazon because people would start shopping a pillowcase against a pillowcase. Is that kind of why you're going direct to consumer then?

Correct. I would say the benefit to Amazon would be shipping, shipping costs, you know, being able to deliver something day one versus, you know, three days. But you know, again, we're a higher end item and it's, you don't see a lot of higher end items on Amazon. Plus the, the margins that they take are a little bit more than we're, we're ready to spend.

Yeah, makes sense. All right, so you yourself then, how do you stay focused? I mean, you've got a lot of opportunities for distraction in terms of what you could be focusing on day to day with the business. How do you decide where to allocate your time and how much time to allocate?

Each day of the week is allocated to different sections of the business. Example, Monday is really focused on inventory for both the store and the clinic. Any type of products that we need to align with and then order and then Tuesday, focusing on new products. Is there anything that we want to bring in? Is there anything that we need to change every month? We do detailed analytics of all of our numbers to make sure that one, we're getting what we need out of each product, what we're getting out of each vertical. And then doing an alignment with, with Brian and myself, with our senior leadership team to make sure that we're, we're tracking marketing the right way. People are coming in at a, at a good pace within the stores, a lot of different aspects. If you, if you could see my desk, I don't have a lot of post it notes, but I have all these dry erase boards with all the notes from operations samples, new products, hot list marketing events, OEM deals, conferen conference and developing. And that's how we keep ourselves focused.

Yeah, it's interesting. I, I kind of think back to our days at 1-800-got junk and when I was first starting, I remember drawing an org chart for the company and the CEO. Brian's like wait, you can't hire all those people. I'm like, no, I'm not planning to hire them all right now. I'm just thinking about all the business areas and beside every title I put the percentage of my time that I'm going to allocate. Like I just wanted to get a kind of a thinking of it. And I was like, I realize we have too many business areas already for me to even spend any time on. We do actually need to get ahead of this curve. And one of the early ones was hiring a PR person and we really kind of doubled down. I wrote a book called Free PR and it was how we landed the 5200 stories at 1, 800 got junk including being on Oprah. It was massive for our growth. So is PR something you guys are doubling down on and, and are you hiring a social media person? What are your kind of core hires over the next 12 months?

So we do have a digital operations person. She does a lot of our social media, email marketing, affiliate programs. We have quite a bit of affiliates around the world all for social media based big hires. Really is. I spend a lot of my time on wholesales, OEM getting out into the public itself, you know, just the community itself. Here in Fredericksburg we've already had three or four shops. There's a big wine, wine country area. So we have several people that are already picking us up for oem, picking us up for wholesales. But I think a lot of that community involvement is higher. Number one, as well as some OEM and wholesale different organizations that I've been working on over the past year or two.

Yeah. So I'm interested on the affiliate strategy. How do you decide, you know, which, which people to bring on as affiliates? What kind of affiliates do you look for and can you walk us through that?

We usually meet our affiliates at the conventions. Most of them are either some sort of practitioner, higher end biohacker that wants to add our product into their formulation, a couple of strict things. They have to buy something from us, they have to understand what the product is. Jamie goes through a lot of different aspects of making sure that they can talk about the product at a high level. Usually what we'll do is have them write us up. Why do you want to be an affiliate? How does that work within your framework of social media? And then what are your thoughts on what products that you would present? So after they go through all that aspect and Jamie then trains them on different ways to showcase on social media.

Yeah. So you're not up there on clickbank and pushing this out high wide enhancement. You're going with a select group and. And is Intelligent Threads then going to be kind of like a Gore Tex label? Like you buy a North Face jacket with Gore Tex in it. Are you buying a Ben Greenfield T shirt that has Intelligent Threads embedded?

I think that's the, really the biggest vertical for us is having our technology into products all over the world from a Nike to a Tom Ford.

That makes like the growth becomes pretty stratospheric pretty quickly too. Why did you join a startup? I mean, what was it? I know you mentioned that your wife had tried the product and liked the product, but that's not usually enough to get somebody to quit their job and hop over. This was relatively a startup at the time.

It was, I've always, I've always loved the entrepreneurial aspects of bringing your product to market and building companies. I worked for a lot of Fortune 5000 in different sections that it was like okay, here's a 10 year old product, make it great. The CEOs usually gave me fairly free range to just bolster up sales, deliver the marketing, really the customer interaction and facing of the product and make it grow. And I love that challenge aspect of it. I've known Brian for 20 plus years now. I think we met in 2000 when we were at college at Baylor and he fixed my foot after a track meet that I'd strained my foot and he goes, I can fix it. And this is a random guy fixed my foot and I, instead of being out for the season, I was back the next day at practice. So he, he had me pretty, he would, he would say perfect as far as alignment goes. And then I got in a really bad car accident my senior year and pretty much destroyed my entire body. And if I didn't have a single broken bone, torn ligament, nothing because of him. So at least in my view it was because of him. Because when you're, when you're up here and you take a hit. Then I was down here when I saw him again. But if you're here and take a hit, you don't survive.

Yeah.

So he's put me back together so many times and we've been, we've been really good friends for, for decades. And when I saw him I was like, do you need any business help with this? He's like let me, let me, let me think about it. And you know, about a month later he was like yeah, yeah, let's, let's work on this. And it was funny because it was right when Covid happened is when he brought me on board and I was like, well I have a lot of time because our company just went under and we don't. We went from having 10 million sales a month to zero. I was in the medical device area at that point in time. So when they did all non essential surgeries or cut from the hospital, we pretty much lost the company. I mean we, they didn't lose it but they pretty much you let go every higher end person in the company to actually weather the storm, so to speak. But then we had a lot of time, we had a lot of time to spend and develop while I was looking for a new job and just kept on beating the horse to make it work.

And we did similar to how things happened for me with 1-800-got junk. I told Brian I would never work for him, but I would coach him for a few months. And then six and a half years later we were wrapping things up. Can you walk us through your growth as a leader? How have you had to adapt and change? You're working in, in medical sales and now you're, you're really leading a business as the VP of strategic development and general manager. How have you had to adapt as a leader?

You know, I, I spent a little over 20 years in the military so I ended up, I was a wing commander. Had a little over 10,000 people under my command. Ran special forces, special operations, search and rescue as well as my last job was the head of HR for the state of Texas. So it was really interesting taking that career, all that leadership, learning all that education, a lot of strategy, a lot of tactics, especially in the war, war fighting scenario. And then the 20 years with Johnson and Johnson MiAndrae USA. A lot of major Fortune 5000 in the medical device space. And then taking it down to we really have to build the foundation of a small business. And it was Brian developed this phenomenal product and was selling it out of his, out of his clinic. And I was like, we have to build the foundation, the understanding of what it is, bringing it to people, really focusing in on the little bitty things to build this huge platform that we can then build it and rise. And you know, really I've always gone back to the most important thing in a company is its people. Are they trained well? Do they understand it? Do they, do they understand the culture? Do they really push themselves to, to get to the next level, you know, and then are you as a leader doing those aspects to get them to the next level? And that's really what I've been focused on my entire career is making sure that, you know, always find a replacement, always find somebody to get them to the next level. Getting the right people, the right job with the right, right culture and you win.

That's absolutely my focus as well, has always been that. And we used to say it at 1-800-got junk. It's all about people, right? It's all about getting the right, as Jim Collins mentioned, the right people on the bus and focusing on the right people. All right, I want you to go back and give you give the kind of 22 year old Ron Buford some advice. What advice would you give the younger you that you know to be true today?

Don't worry about sports, focus on academics is what I would say. Well, and, and I did, but this is going to sound funny, but I was like I wanted to be a general, a CEO and an Olympic athlete all at the same time, right. So I got close on a lot of those. But it's just like focus on one thing, make it great academics, build your foundation of understanding, knowledge base and then help your company grow and help people develop. And that would always say would be my number one people development. Help your company grow.

I love it. Ron Buford, the VP of Strategic development and general manager for Intelligent Threads, thanks very much for sharing with us on the Second in Command podcast. When you get to about 5 or 10 million in revenue, you're starting to bring outside experts that have the wisdom, have P and L responsibility, have the autonomy. They've built three or four companies before and they know what they're doing. It's very hard to groom those people from inside because you're often promoting people to their level or ceiling of complexity in an earlier stage company. Yeah, you promote from within.