The Science Behind LIFEAID | COO of LIFEAID Beverage Co, Andy Halliday (Podcast 172)

Don't be so focused on making good decisions about your career, but rather make the decisions that you took good ones by your effort and your application of your disciplines and your excellence and just make it happen. Leave everything that you approached bit better than when you found it.

Our guest today is the COO of Life Age beverage company, Andy Holliday. Andy is the son of an Air Force B52 aircraft commander and spent his high school years in Tachikawa, Japan when his father retired from the Air Force to become a 747 captain for Japan Airlines. Left Japan to go to Dartmouth, graduating and spending six years in the ski industry where he became the director of skiing and guest services for manager at Sunshine Village outside of Banff, Alberta. He left skiing in 1981 for Harvard Business School and subsequently spent 15 years in the specialty chain store business at a New York Stock Exchange chain store conglomerate with 3,500 stores later, between 2003 and 2015, Andy had become the founder or CEO of four startups which received 18 million in venture funding, including Our Story.com, tagVault.org and the Student community mobile app Eroder. He was also an executive team member of startups like spoke.com, merchantcircle.com and reply.com and in 2011, Andy met the co founders of Life Aid and became an advisor as they sought initial funding and commencement of operations. In 2015, the Life Aid brand took an offline and CrossFit gyms where he then joined as COO. So, Andy, welcome to the Second In Command podcast.

Thanks for having me.

I didn't know that you were Canadian or had lived in Banff.

I was a landed immigrant. Yeah.

For four years.

And yeah, my first wife was from New Liskert, Ontario.

That's amazing. I was from Sudbury. I've been to New Liskert a couple times.

Yeah. So you know it?

Well, I think I planted trees up near New Liskerd. I. I moved to Western Canada because of Banff, Alberta. I went out to Banff in 1979 and it blew my mind.

And then I went there at the same time. Cameron.

Yeah. And then I went out and skied around 1981 and it was. Was Brewster the name of a run at Sunshine?

Yeah, Brewster is the name of a mountain there.

Okay.

I remember the Great Divide lift.

Yeah, the Great Divide, yeah. And there was like a big mogul run on one part of it. And then I remember that really clearly. And then I remember, yeah, Lake Louise. I actually got to ski a couple runs with Ken Reed at Lake Louise when I was like 17 years old and it, well, I was pretty much in a full talk and he was like free skiing down the hill. But we ski skied two runs together and he was my idol. It was really cool.

I think this means that we'll have to find an occasion to go skiing together.

Oh yeah, well, and then did you, I'm sure you got out to Fernie bc, did you or.

I've done all the, all the mountains there at events like you know, instructor trainings and that sort of thing. And recently I went up to Ski Whistler Blackcomb with some ex colleagues.

Are still my colleagues from the Sunshine Village days.

Oh yeah, please ping me next time. I live part time in Vancouver and I used to have a place up in Whistler and that's why I moved out here. I was just so blown away and growing up in Northern Ontario where the hills were, could actually see from the top of the mountain to the bottom. My dad would have like a little flag to count us down and we would tuck to the bottom in like 11 seconds. So anyway, you did your MBA at Harvard. I couldn't spell Harvard in school. I was, I just wasn't that guy. What was it like?

It was a wonderful opportunity to read intensely and discuss energetically. I mean let me just paint a little picture. You throw 80 plus people into an amphitheater classroom. Everybody has to have read the case. The instructor walks in, says oh, good morning. Okay, Andy Halliday, you start off and you have to lay out your analysis of the case. So you have to be prepared. So everybody's prepared. They all have their own unique position on that. And then for an hour plus there's a thriving discussion that ensues and you have to be really paying attention and find the opportunity to actually inject insert something that's progressive of the discussion, that active listening and that intellectual engagement with set of problems that everybody has studied carefully overnight. And everybody coming into that room is really well prepared. Even before they ever arrived at Harvard. You know, they've been hand selected in many respects to be capable of engaging in that conversation. I've had no experience like it since.

And what a time to be there too. I mean I think the very first business book I ever read was what they don't teach you at Harvard Business school by Mark McCormick.

Oh, I missed that book. What did they teach me? Tell us what the gaps are, please.

This was a long time ago. It was like 40 years ago. I don't know, it was just like the stuff that they don't teach you. But I don't even remember it. I just remember that was the book. But that was the day when Harvard was the preeminent MBA program of its time. Back then for sure.

Yeah. I think Stanford was equally prestigious and focused more on quantitative things. I think people who are really quant jocks would prefer to go to Stanford. And then Harvard is much more general management in its focus.

And was it Dartmouth College? You went to school for your undergrad? Did you ski race there?

I was on the ski team for one year, but I was not. I was a good skier, but I wasn't athletic, athletically Tiger, like. So I was always the guy at the end of the, of the run. You know, there's huge ruts now because everybody else has gone ahead of me. And so it didn't turn out. I ended up shifting over to being.

An instructor at the Dartmouth Ski school.

Oh, cool.

You know, Ski Way Dartmouth Skiway is its own ski area at Dartmouth. And so I started out doing the pedagogy of alpine ski instruction there.

Yeah, I raced against Dartmouth twice in the Canadian American Championships back in like 85, 86. And you guys blew us away. So I was in the ruts behind your ruts. So what was it like kind of transitioning from an MBA and then into all of these startups that you had the experience with?

I first did a stint in New York Stock Exchange company, as you know, Edison Brothers stores for 15 years. So close to 15. I had 12 years there and then.

Subsequently three years with Simon Property Group.

That was a major transition from the outdoor world, but definitely focused on management. I had significant management responsibilities both for, you know, the hotel operations and for the ski school and all these sort of customer facing, guest facing staff on the, on the resort. It was a pretty big resort, 400 plus employees.

Yeah.

Moving from that to basically sitting in an office and working on. I was one of the very first people to get a personal computer, you know, in that company. I started to do analysis and then also developing macro driven Lotus 1, 2, 3 programs to actually deliver things to the field. It was both interesting, but it was also a bit of a disappointment in how contained I felt just in terms of that transition. So that's one aspect of it. But overall it was exciting and challenging and it gave me broader responsibilities over a much larger budget, if you will, than I've ever experienced in the ski industry.

Do you think that was kind of your real world MBA combined with your MBA then when you were there for that 15 year period. Did that really.

No doubt. I really understood after that. I understood the ebb and flow of the seasonality of a business, the importance of things like margin. And the business I was in, especially chain store retailing, had a lot to do then, before the advent of systems that would actually track the cost of items, it was using the retail inventory method. And so planning for open to buy using the retail inventory method and trying to avoid the mistakes that would lead to huge markdowns that would crater your overall contribution margin for that set of stores. That really taught you how important it is to really keep your hand and your finger on the pulse of what's.

Going on in the business.

I've been making up a data point or a ratio, for lack of a.

Better term, to work with some companies that sell exclusively on Amazon and helping them trying to control their inventory. The number I've come up with was you take your gross margin multiplied by the number of inventory turns per year and it has to come out to 240 or greater. So if you have like a 60% gross margin, you got to turn it four times, come up with 240. If you've got a 30% gross margin, you got to Turn it eight times.

Do you have any kind of a.

Number like that to optimize inventory so you're not sitting on too much?

It depends in part on what the lead time for your supply chain is.

Yeah.

And you know, in the apparel business and shoe business, all of those things were being manufactured abroad and shipped in, so you had to plan for a subsequent season. Six, nine months ahead.

Yeah.

So there, you know, you're really throwing down a bet about what was going.

To work and what wasn't going to work.

Right.

On Amazon, it's. There's, first of all, supply chains are much shorter now, even if you're buying from Asia.

But nonetheless, if you have rapid production.

Capabilities or just in time, supply chain, you don't have to worry so much about that. So it's really dependent on which industry you're in. I would say. I'll test your 240 though, later.

Yeah, it would be interesting to see if you'd test that for me and I'd love to get your thoughts on it. I'm also curious whether companies are making a mistake or maybe being shortsighted without looking at the data in manufacturing in Asia or in other markets. When they have that long lead time, would they be better off maybe paying a little bit more and having a faster, you know, turnaround in North America? Any thoughts around that at all.

I haven't had to face that particular question.

You know we life a beverage company does compact. We have canning companies in effect, we.

Use the 12 ounce C can model.

And like many other beverages, we deliver all the raw materials to the co packers doorstep. They run, you know, in very high.

Volume, you know, production lines, the delivery of the cans to pallets and then those pallets are delivered to our warehouses and we distribute them.

How many co packers would you work with?

The co packers, we work with our.

Portland bottling company on the west coast.

And big beverage in North Carolina.

So you've got two?

Yeah, we have another smaller one that does sort of trial runs and small production runs for us when we're experimenting with different can designs or doing new formulations, that sort of thing.

But the main volume of production is.

Done by those two co packers.

I mean I'm familiar with Life aid. Can you just tell our listeners exactly what life aid is? If they're one of the random four people who haven't bumped into your product yet.

Good, I hope you've seen it.

It's generally available in most every grocery store around the country and now around the world. Not in grocery stores but we have distribution and gyms everywhere. We are the functional beverage company. Our lineup is different supplement blends for various use occasions. And a good example would be one of our top selling blends. It's called Fit Aid. This is the company logo but you would see I'm showing Cameron here the can.

There you go.

But there's Fit Aid. Fit Aid is the number one post workout recovery beverage and it's the performance and recovery choice of great athletes in CrossFit, the NFL, NBA, MLB. Another example is Focusade. So this is a different supplement blend. It's our nootropic stack energy drink. It's a blend of cognitive enhancers plus energy for natural caffeine, green tea and yerba mate. And that energy blend aids mental acuity, focus, concentration, memory. And so it has by the way, secret tip to everybody out there, all our products are priced the same but Focus aid is the most expensive for us to produce because of the cost of those important compounds that are helpful to the cognition. Specifically I'll mention alpha GPC for memory and cognition. That's alpha gamma phosphatidylcholine. That's one of the key compounds that works in your brain cells.

Another is GABA gamma aminobutyric acid.

That's stress relief, focus and clarity. We also add rhodiola rosea for concentration, acetyl L carnitine and a dose of American ginseng for retention of learning. It's a really amazing set of supplements. And by the way, what's common about all of our products is these are not pixie dust formulations. This is not milligrams in our. There's several grams of supplements in each one of our formulas.

If anyone hasn't seen the packaging, it's usually it's always a solid color with white on every can. Right. The word is in red and then it's like a dark black or a dark blue or a dark red or something with white. That's how you.

That's generally true. We have a brand new can this design that's out. What's common about them all is the the a so fit aid or focus.

Aid or immunity aid or party aid.

Which is our post weekend recovery drink.

All of them have aid with a white cross in the D that aids in red.

And that'll, that'll be the thing that catches your eye.

That's how they'll spot it. So for my, my kids who are going off to university, their, their party aid will be every day of the week drink, I would imagine.

So let me mention one other thing.

Since you brought up kids.

Orion Melihan and Aaron Hind are the.

Co founders of the company and came up with the concept for the whole life aid line. Their motivation was that they were sickened by sport and energy drinks that were being marketed to kids and were primarily caffeine and sugar. And so they conceived a way of producing something that would be filled with things that are good for you and nothing bad. So no artificial sweeteners, no artificial colors, no sucralose or aspartame compounds that make for sweetening but are not good for your body. And so all of our blends are designed to do that to be a.

Better for you drink that can provide.

You with important supplements and energy when you need it.

Let's go back to the time in Banff, Alberta for a second when you were doing all that customer facing. Was that hard for you to give that up or did you find other ways to stay connected with the customer? As you moved into an office and you know where you weren't talking to and facing customers so forefront every day it was gone.

To a large degree, my audience changed from being the guests of the resort and being directly visible to them and extended through the staff that were delivering the services directly to them. Instead store operations in a chain store with a thousand stores as the president, I wasn't going out to everyone in the stores. I would do store visits for sure.

I would do store openings.

I would be there, but it was generally off hours. I wasn't working with customers and so I think that there was a gap there and I hadn't thought about that. Interesting question to pose, but I missed that.

Yeah. I'm wondering if it's been kind of part of your DNA now that need to connect with the customer. Even though the maybe model is slightly different, it's interesting.

You know, one of the things that I like about E Commerce and a lot of my history has been, you know, since 1998 when I came out to Silicon Valley, it has been involved with E Commerce. That's a big part of my portfolio. And one of the appeals of E Commerce is you have a very direct and immediate feedback loop with the customer. But it's invisible and ghostly. With the exception of the customer service team here at Life Aid or at an E commerce company a that's providing other services, the customer service team has engagement directly with consumers. But other than for that, it's mostly the information systems and the visibility that you gain about the customer behavior. There is what's feeding your interpretation of what the customer's involvement is. But you really have to extend that to focus groups and to observational research in effect to really understand what the customer's experience experiencing.

Talk to me about what it was like then. You know, you had some roles as CEO. What have been the differences between being a CEO in some of these firms and then being a coo now?

I've been a COO a couple of different times prior and then now I've been the COO at Life Aid for six years.

The main difference is that the CEO has encompassing authority and an encompassing responsibility.

For outward facing presentation, whereas the COO is more back office like making sure the trains run on time behind the scenes. While I was a CEO, I was the frontman for the company. I would do all the press, I would be involved in all the events and so on. But hopefully the work that I do behind the scenes is really important to supporting both Aaron and Orion as they do their front and outward facing roles and as they focus on the specific functional areas that they've chosen to divide between them. In our case the CEO is focused on finance and operations plus production. That's Orion Mellohan. And then Aaron Hind is sales and marketing and customer service. So he's got all of those more outwardly facing roles and he is both of them together present very well as you Know, Aaron is really the one with our customers, our main customers, major retailers, major distributors, et cetera.

He'd be the one who would be.

The main face of the company. Although Orion's right there. And both of these guys are incredibly articulate and great proponents of our vision and our strategy.

I've been in a couple of Mastermind groups and been around Aaron a few times. Was the Mastermind community part of their brand outreach or getting thought leaders or did I just happen to bump into them and there was product there?

No, it's really part of the inception story of Life Aid. Life Aid is a different kind of beverage company in its founding because never before had a company really attempted to do something like be an online beverage shipping cans of 70% water around the country. And would that even work before the advent really of free shipping on Amazon? The company was founded in 2011. The company did all of this direct both to consumers and to gyms early on. Where that started out was the self education and the work that these two guys did to develop their own understanding of the business and business in general was profound. And it involved the Mastermind programs that you're referring to. In that context, they were meeting largely with people who were marketing digital products online, not physical products, but they found a way to translate the methods and the mechanisms of that digital marketing machinery and do that for beverages. They grew this business to the point of about 10 million $12 million by 2014 without any meaningful distribution on store shelves.

Oh, wow.

All done through small parcel shipments to gyms and to consumers. When I first joined the company in 2015, there were just seven or eight people and these two were the ones who were managing online email marketing system. They were creating the campaigns, they were interacting with the customers. They were simultaneously creating the products and develop. They did an E commerce company startup using beverages, and that was the platform from which we then extended to retail distribution.

Wow.

Amazing. Is that why you joined them? Because they had already kind of figured out the direct to consumer and they had a brand and they needed your kind of expertise on the retail side?

No, actually my portfolio is E commerce, largely.

Okay.

So I was impressed with what they had accomplished and I've been an advisor from 2011. They presented to me the concept before they'd ever produced the product. I'd been along for the ride in many ways. There was a big gap in there in between. When they really took off with CrossFit gyms in 2014, then they reached a breaking point on the E commerce platform that they had developed through A connection of one of the people who was an early participant in the company. That platform was going to crater under the weight of the demands of a growing population of consumers. I came in first as a consultant to help them make a transition to a bigger E commerce platform and to develop the systems around that. And then it became very clear internally in 2015 that they needed somebody they were going to grow more rapidly than would be supported by their personal conduct of all of those management tasks. And so they saw the need for somebody to step in and do the work alongside them. And so I came in and one of the things that I recall when we were making the transition to retail, we knew that we were going to find our way into distribution. We were being approached by Whole Foods, for example, in that year. And that as a result of one of the buyers in one of the regions of Whole foods being a CrossFit enthusiast and was a consumer of Fit aid in the CrossFit gym, and turned to a broker and said, why aren't you presenting me with Fit Aid? Where are these guys? Get them in here. I can recall in our tiny little office that we had at the time.

When there were only seven or eight of us. I remember sitting with a whiteboard and.

I was saying, okay, what I think is going to be required here is you're going to have to build out this whole sales and marketing organization. There's going to be all these people who are going to have to be used to do this part of the business. And so how many is that and where do we get the money to do that? And that's what triggered our first efforts to get private equity funding, because we knew we had to hire some staff to support that sales and marketing outreach to retail.

You're in the same approximate geographic area as the CrossFit head office, Santa Cruz.

They were founded in Santa Cruz. In fact, the CrossFit gym that Orion and Aaron both went to is how they met. They also had some other common connections, but they were CrossFit enthusiasts together. And they were also great golfers. Hence Golfer Aid, one of our products. We're interwoven with CrossFit here.

But the Golfer Aid does not help you with your putting. So I think it's like a false advertising. You guys just raised some money. What was the purpose for this raise and how many raises rounds have you raised?

I'd say there are cumulatively maybe four different private equity rounds. Raises, I should say that have been done. Our first private equity round was in 2016 with Carp Reilly, a very Prestigious and sort of top level consumer products portfolio. Those guys have been great supporters of.

Ours all the way through.

This most recent round that we raised was for something in excess of $15 million. There's some press out there that you can read about it. It was led by one of our other private equity groups, Cambridge spg and together with a whole host of new investors, Hart Riley and Cambridge SPG have supported us in the transition we're making right now to play in the big leagues. Right now we're in the beverage industry. We're compared to all the energy drinks. Red Bull, Monster, Rockstar, Bang, Alani Nu those players are at a certain level.

And if you look at the top.

Half of the energy drink category, we're at the top of the bottom half in volume and velocity. We're in a position to break through and enter into the big leagues with them. But that's a very capital intensive and a very expensive proposition to gain the market awareness and the distribution support in the form of DSD operators out there to deliver to many, many more locations than you could reach if you were going simply through major wholesale distribution and or direct retail as we do to H E B, Whole Foods, Walmart, etc.

How many markets are you in currently?

Countries? Yeah, so there are a lot of distributors. I'd say there's 20 different countries that were sold in.

Okay.

But most of them are small. We have wholly owned subsidiaries in Canada, eu, which covers all of the eu. So all the countries of the EU are supported by our EU subsidiary. And then Australia, New Zealand. So altogether we have those international companies those are focused at the moment primarily on the gym market. That's our route to market. As we go into the gyms with our energy drink for athletes. That's what our entry point is. We have the other products that are available to them for different use occasions. The number two product, Focus Aid is sold in gyms as well. People buy them there or they buy them off the grocery store. Not for their workout, not post workout, but you know, for their work day.

Right, yeah.

Where you really want to have the Focus Aid, it's much better for you in many ways. Better for your brain. Spraying food, that's the one coffee provides.

That's the one I've been looking for as well. I got to get off this whole third cup of coffee every day thing and I've been looking for the Focus 8Up in Canada. What are you focusing on day to day in your role as coo?

My interest has largely been in systems. Right. So I been involved in E commerce development, of course, but the platform and the business intelligence systems and the financial reporting systems that work here at Life Aid are all products that I negotiated and then delivered through our development teams. Integrations across all these different components of our system stack. So that's a key part of my responsibility. I have people reporting to me who manage the development team. We have a really crack PHP and Magento development team that does extensive customization. If you look at our website, it's unlike any other. It's not like a me too kind of thing on a standard platform. It's highly customized and it's uniquely suited to this business, which is a combination of direct consumer, direct to wholesalers like gyms. Very small businesses. Some of them are very large. I just saw, I was looking at an analysis that I did and just looking at the max average volume per month for a set of fitness centers who had just joined us within the last two years. And one of them has an average of nearly $13,000 of purchases from us per month over two years. That's a very big gym. Right. So it can range from a very small operation in a garage that has our little refrigerator is providing the drinks to our. So we have that business and then we also have the wholesale businesses.

So we have very distinct businesses and.

All our systems have to support all of them. So it's been a really wonderful opportunity to apply the experiences that I've had prior to designing and implementing and maintaining and managing those. And so that's been a focus of mine internally. As far as the internal operations. I'm. I'm of course partnered with Aaron and Orion in the leadership of the company. And so all the department head meetings and all of the cadence of our goal execution process, all of those things are managed partly by me and again the guy who keeps the trains running.

Make sure all of those meetings ensue.

How many employees do you guys have now?

We have a little over 100.

Well, I'll tell you, at 13,000amonth they've either built or your product either built a real cult following or it's a front for their cocaine operations. Operation. That's a lot of.

It's the former. You know, one of the most satisfying things in the early days was finding out how significant the conversion from trial to continuous purchasing was for consumers.

I was using your stuff at the Genius Network events. It was constant and I don't know whether there's something in there that made it kind of addictive like. But I liked the flavor and I liked the results. And it didn't. And I didn't have the kind of sugary taste of like the Gatorade and certainly not Red Bull, which is disgusting. Your stuff actually worked and tasted good.

Yeah. Well, thank you. And it's not because there's something addictive like, you know, for example, Bang and others have as much as 300mg of caffeine for someone who isn't aware of what they're consuming there. That can be really addictive.

Caffeine is an addictive drug.

Yeah.

And it's also at that level. It's too much for your system. We have 45 milligrams of caffeine, not 300.

Yeah, it's dangerous.

So it's got a little bit of an acuity boost, but it's not crazy. Focus 8, by the way, has 100 milligrams of caffeine. Because the purpose of Focus 8 is actually to give you that concentration that comes from the caffeine boost.

Now, you guys, because of COVID had a shift in your business. We were talking earlier and it was that your couple of main distribution points flipped. Can you speak to that at all?

So the biggest impact of COVID on the company was the closure of gyms. Right. In most countries and in most. Well, even now in Europe and in Australia, they're facing new shutdowns of gyms and other gathering places. And so it's been difficult to maintain the gym business. And in fact, that business dropped down to about 70% of what we saw in 2019. But that's also a good story.

Right.

70% of our volume was retained despite the COVID closings. That 30% on such a large business. There's thousands and thousands of gyms who sell our product. 30%. That's not that big a loss, but it's also a very big number in terms of sales. But it was almost completely overcome by the growth in direct to consumer. So there's this huge buy in that occurs in March of 2020, where suddenly a whole new host of direct consumers are coming on as new to file customers for us. And then they show as retained all the way through to the present. There's been a step up, a step function increase in our direct consumer business that is covering over so that between 2019 and 2020, we had about 25% growth. We expect a similar kind of growth this year.

Is your direct to consumer business higher margin or does the fact that you're shipping out the small shipments chew into some of that margin?

It does chew into some of that margin, but it still remains the highest contribution margin channel for us.

How about on the people side of the business? Did Covid, were you guys a full office based company prior to Covid or did you have any impact or change there?

Most of our count, our headcount is outside the office. 2020, we started out with maybe 65 employees total. Of those, maybe 25 were in the home office. The rest of them are in the field. So those people work remotely and always have. We shifted to all remote work and because of our systems did not miss a beat. Everybody's working on SaaS systems today. And with the advent of Zoom meetings, then everything proceeded apace.

What were all the people that are out in the field working on? Were they like it was a direct sales.

These are people who are merchandising in effect. There are area sales managers primarily the largest headcount is among area sales managers.

We have area sales managers almost every.

Important region for our distribution. And they go into accounts, they talk to the management, they assist them. We also have field teams that did not work in 2020 that are in demo mode, if you will. So we put up demonstrations of our product tent with our logos on it and we give out free samples. An interesting result from those is that the number one product that is chosen by people who demo all our products like from the general consumer public is the lowest volume product that we sell. That's the one they like the most.

Which one's that?

That one is called Life Aid and it is our supplement blend that's designed to reduce inflammation based on components that we know have anti inflammatory properties. It's got one of its primary component supplements is turmeric. So you'll see that on the can when you see it in the stores.

Are they buying that just because that's your brand name and they think that's the one they have to point to?

No, no, just the opposite. This is just where, you know, we have the lineup of cans. You can sample every one and then they say, okay, we say, which one would you like to buy today? And we're going to give you a coupon to buy that today.

And they go to Life Aid.

50% off, you get it. And they pick Life Aid more than most of the others, than all of the others. Right. It's the number one choice. But that's probably based on flavor and the idea of turmeric and the other supplements that are in the Life Aid formulation. I think the opposite is true. When you look at our lineup on a grocery Shelf. You know, you've probably heard of Fit Aid. You've never heard of Life Aid. And it's not clear what the purpose of that particular drink is. Focus Aid is very clear. Immunity is very clear.

It's interesting. Like, I'm just kind of running through what my gut instinct reaction is, and I would have gone for the Life Aid as well. It feels like the thing that draws me in. Focus 8. I gotta wonder why I'm getting it. The party Aid.

I'm.

I'm not really hungover. The golf Aid, I'm like, I'm not the golf course, but the Fit Aid, I'm like, like. But the Life aid just feels like for every occasion, all the time, kind of. I wonder if there's anything just even in that. I wonder if you called it like something else aid, if people would go for it or if it is the flavoring. I don't know.

It's weird. That's possible. That's possible. Life Aid is. Is a daily drinker.

You should drink one every day.

It's really good for you.

And, and, and.

But it doesn't jump off the shelf.

Oh, it doesn't jump off the shelf. They like the taste, but it doesn't go off the shelf as much.

That's right. I'm just saying when a customer doesn't have the opportunity to sample and compare, they don't select that one over the other one.

Oh, I was wrong then. Okay. That's the opposite.

Yeah. So it's not leaping off the shelf.

By itself, but when you do a.

Demo and you offer an explanation for what each of the formulations does and.

Absolutely.

And sample the products. Life Aid was the one that, you know, got the most choice.

How about on the outsourcing component of the business? You mentioned that you outsource the manufacturing and distribution. A couple. A couple of facilities. What else do you outsource?

There are a number of resources that we turn to to do, you know, some of the art and production, you know, for our brand. But we also have an internal art department that does some of that work. But it's a lot of work for all the many brands that we have and so on. So we do outsource some of that. Beyond that, there's very little that we put outside of our direct control.

What are the challenges you're facing right now? Have you had any challenges due to this recent round of funding at all? Does having more money cause any problems?

I can say definitively no, it doesn't cause any problems. Whatever.

Okay.

Having money, especially In a business that is so competitive and where we have such a big opportunity ahead of us is really essential. And there are competitors who are public at this point who are raising 10x what we're raising now in order to play on the field against the big players, Bang Celsius, Aulani, Nu, who are really well capitalized as public companies and are really knocking it out of the park.

How do you not get sloppy with raising money? How do you not over hire and we just raised a good amount of money in the kind of eight figures range. How do you not get sloppy and waste that?

The founders have always been very, very careful about the capitalization and we have been extremely capital efficient to date. Even this round is a very small dilution of equity in order to get that given the valuation that we were affording. There isn't this spend money at all costs. It's really focused on roi. Where are we going to get a return on the investment? Where is it essential to, you know, make investments in businesses that we want to build a moat around, particularly the gym business, key business for us. And it's subject to intense competition. All the players would love to have as big a footprint in the gym market as we do for sure. So they've got war chests to come after us. So we know that there are strategic placements that have to be made. We also know that there is an opportunity for us to make a step function, increase in the level of awareness and appeal to the general consuming public out there right now. I would say that unprompted awareness of our product is very, very low still and penetration is very low. Some of that money will go towards the determination of what the most capital efficient ways are for us to extend that.

Do you do any private label at all or white labeling where you have your product under the Fit Body brand or the F45? You know, is there any.

We've had opportunities to do that but. But it just is. It's outside our, our core competence and.

Focus at this point.

Yeah, it makes sense. All right, I want to go back to the final question. We got to go way back in time because you've been around and through the MBAs and the school and everything. If I want to go back to the 22 year old self, you know, graduating Dartmouth and getting ready to start on your career, what advice would Andy Holiday have for Andy Holiday back then?

When I look back on all of the twists and turns of my life and my career, what I think about it is I didn't really have a plan didn't really have an objective. I was in some respects a bit of a dilettante. I took the opportunities that seemed tastiest at the next moment. And my advice to my younger self would be don't worry about what choices you make. You know, don't be so focused on making good decisions about your career, but rather make the decisions that you took good ones by your effort and your application of your disciplines and your excellence and just make it happen. You know, leave everything that you approached bit better than when you found it.

It's funny, that's my. My sister was an elite ski racer as well and that's been. Her approach is in ski racing, you know, you runs in most of them other than downhill and you know, first run you go balls out and if you finish great, you get a second run. But you don't leave anything on the hill like you, you go for it. And in business she's just been that way as well as you just give everything to whatever part of your career you're in and then that'll lead you to your next one instead of worrying about it.

That's exactly true. Although my experience in skiing is a little odd because the one professional race that I actually won at Fortress Mountain, I thought I had gone down really slowly. I felt like I had not given it all, but it was smooth enough.

And fast enough that I won the race.

Just that you were in flow. Andy Holiday, the COO for Life Aid Beverages. Really appreciate the time sharing with us on the Second Command podcast.

It's been a pleasure. Thanks Cameron.

That was great.

My staff has. They labeled me the chief extrovert Officer because clearly I'm not shy. I am a leader that is committed to leading from the heart. People are really important to me, making sure that my team feels valued and seen and accepted and appreciated and empowered.