From Zero To $500 Million In Five Years: The Rise Of Quest With Tom Bilyeu

Hey fastlaners, welcome to Freedom Fastlane. Ryan Daniel Moran here and you're about to listen to one of what I would say is the one of the best podcasts we have ever done here on Freedom Fastlane. You're gonna listen to my chat with Tom Bilyeu. Now, Tom is one of the founders of Quest Nutrition.

You know those Quest bars that are.

So popular that everybody's carrying around, including myself. Tom is speaking this year at Freedom F. Lane Live in December. But I know that not everybody's familiar with Tom. They might be familiar with Quest, probably familiar with Quest, but they may not be familiar with Tom and his story. Now, quest went from zero just a few years ago, five years ago actually, to now a 500 million dollar a year company. How the heck does that happen? How does a business that is bootstrapped, that that is in a highly competitive industry, go from just an idea to well over $100 million in sales, up to half a billion dollars in sales and now working on the processes or how they're going to go to $1 billion, how the heck does that happen? That's what we're going to address in today's episode with two Tom. And if you like this, when you like this, you can get more with Tom this December at Freedom Fast Lane Live, when we'll be diving deeper into the actual process of scaling from a $10 million business to a hundred million dollar business and every stage in between. As you are listening to this episode with Tom, you're going to hear some things that are going to sound familiar. Tom talks about his launch process and how they used small audiences on the Internet in order away free product until they had enough customers. Hmm, does that sound familiar to maybe any podcast you listen to? He talks a lot about developing raving fans and building up the audiences and having subsequent product launches. And I was sitting here pumping my fist saying thank you for edifying everything that we teach here on Freedom Fast Lane. You're going to hear that Tom built his entire company based on the same principles that we teach inside of our Brand Builder Bootcamp and inside of the tribe and what we talk about here on the podcast. So if you are building a business or if you have been hearing us talk about using Amazon or launching physical products, building up million dollar businesses, but you're not at the level that you want yet, I would invite you to go through our training inside of the Brand Builder bootcamp. It's@freedomfastlane.com bootcamp. It will teach you the exact same principles that Tom to launch his business. And we have duplicated it over over $100 million case studies. And we go through those processes inside of the Bootcamp. It's an implementation course made to get you results. So I hope to see you inside of the bootcamp and at Freedom Fastlane live this December. Until then, enjoy this chat with the founder of Quest Nutrition, Mr. Tom Bilyeu.

Hey, everybody. Ryan here. Welcome back to Freedom Fast Lane. Today I'm thrilled to be joined by Tom Bily, one of the founders of Quest Nutrition. Tom, thanks for hanging out with us, man.

Thanks for having me on. I'm very excited to be here.

Well, Tom, I told you when I made my list, my dream list of keynotes for Freedom Fast Lane live, you were the first name that I wrote down and the last one that we secured. So you round out the lineup nicely, my friend. We're really excited that we're going to be featuring you this December.

That's really cool, man. And I'm very excited to be featured. I'm very sorry that it took you that long to pin me down, but glad we could make it work.

Me too. So, Tom, you know, I have been a Quest super fan for quite a few years now. And I bake with it, I cook with it, I eat it as a snack. I put it, you know, I put some variation of Quest products in just about, in something just about every day. And I'm curious for you, knowing your kind of humble beginnings in terms of where Quest was five, six years ago. Is it surreal to you now to see it all over the place to be nearly a half a billion dollar a year company? Let's skip to the end here. Is it weird being on the other side of such what seems to be a meteoric rise?

It's interesting. It happens so slowly, even though it was truly meteoric and from just a growth rate perspective.

Really, really unparalleled. So you would think, oh my gosh, like, this is all taking me by surprise. But the reality is like, you still have that day to day grind and a year is still a year. And you know, six years is a long time. So there was a bit in the middle. Right around the time we were awarded the Inc. 500 award for second place, I was like, okay, this is crazy. I mean, you're staring out at the Ink Dinner and it's just like this massive ballroom full of people and you, wow, like, we are a long way from Kansas, Toto. So there have been moments like that that's just like really hit you. But at this Point, we're trying to grow the brand. We still feel like we have a lot to do, a lot to offer, so we don't sit back and reflect on it too much, if I'm honest.

That's interesting. I mean, I can think of being at the Arnold Classic two years ago, and even then Quest was all the rage. The line to get into that booth was a mile and a half long. And, you know, from the outside it seems like such a crazy rise to success. I'm curious of, you know, what are the things that we don't see? What are the things inside of Quest that have really made the difference in that surge? And what does a grind look like when you're going from zero to 400 million in five years?

Yeah, that's really an interesting question. And even the way you phrased it, what does it look like inside Quest? So we created the show Inside Quest specifically to really answer that question, because I felt like, okay, we're marketing the products, we're doing a really good job of telling people what makes the product special, but we're not explaining to people the mindset that allowed us to be successful. And I really feel like when you take a much broader view of wellness and transcend just the body and really look at the mind and body as a connection, what does that look like? And that's a big part of how we were able to be as successful as we were. That we just had a mindset that you're going to destroy all obstacles, you're going to find a way over, around, through, under to get where you're trying to go. So we were a mission based company from the jump. We wanted to end metabolic disease. We were out there focused on really bringing value to the customer. And that was the thing we wanted to put at the forefront, was forget about money for a second. Just think about, can we make something really, really great? Can we make something that people would say objectively, this has delivered value to my life. It hasn't been fancy marketing. It's really been something that's incredibly valuable. And can we deliver that value both at the product level and at the community level? And this was, you know, we were conceptualizing back in 2009. So this is before social media had taken off. So people at the time were saying from a business perspective, like, what's Facebook? How you know, it's just a distraction. And we thought, you know, what if you're trying to build something value based, community driven, and that has a mission at its core, then social media just becomes a Megaphone for you to communicate with your audience, for your audience to communicate with each other. And that was the driving force. So having a why to our company and really trying to help people and being able to communicate, that allowed us to transcend our products. And so in the early days, people were referring to us as a cult, and they were saying that because there was, like, such this cool mindset and sense of community around the product. And I don't think people had seen that in a really long time, certainly not in our space.

Space.

And from the word go, we were saying, we're not a protein bar company. That might be our first product. But we're a food company, and we want to revolutionize the food industry because we've got this pandemic that we're facing. You've got people two, 300 pounds overweight, and they're dying of malnutrition. It's like, crazy. So could we acknowledge the part of the human condition that says people eat for pleasure way more than they eat for sustenance? And can we do the hard work of making that food good for them? So to your point about what does the grind look like when you're doing all this? In the beginning, it was making some really counterintuitive, hard decisions. So we went to all the contract manufacturers out there and said, hey, would you make this product for us? Because we never intended to be our own manufacturer. And they all told us that the product we wanted to make couldn't be made. That the equipment that existed really had grown up in lockstep with the use of high fructose corn syrup and other liquid sugars. And so once you strip that out, and this was a thing we didn't see coming, once you strip out that sugar, the texture of the bar is just different enough that it won't go through the equipment. So now you're in a position where no one that has sort of off the shelf equipment can make it for you. So you either have to change your product or you have to change the way manufacturing is done. And I remember my partner Ron was the one that said, you know, we should become our own manufacturers. And we're like, you're out of your mind. Like, who on earth would do that? And he was like, no, this is really going to be the thing that we have to do to move forward. And it ended up being that the thing that really propelled us forward. And I think we always thought that the recipe would be our contribution, but it really ended up being our willingness to change the manufacturing landscape.

I remember when, first of all, I love that you said that you were a food company and not a bar company. Thank you for edifying everything I tell all of our students and listeners. But I remember when the bar came out and I follow a mostly keto or at least low carb diet and looking at it and be like, holy cow, I can eat this thing. And.

Having a major impact on me. But I discovered it probably two years after the business launched. What was the launch plan to bring out such a different product that was so revolutionary to the industry at the time?

It was entirely around building a community and giving away the product. So we knew we've created something special and our goal is just to get people to try it. Because we knew people are going to say one of two things about protein bars. Either all of them are junk or they might be good for me, but they taste terrible. And so we felt like we'd created the first bar that really tasted great but had just a really clean macronutrient profile. And so we were trying to give the bars away, give the bars away as much as humanly possible. And that combined with building this fan base of what we referred to as the thousand screaming fans. If you've read Tim Ferriss book, the Four Hour Workweek, he talks about those thousand screaming fans in there and wanted to do that by delivering value to them, by going above and beyond from a customer service perspective, by evangelizing them at every touch point, putting a little bit of free product in their order by I've hand delivered product before. We've refunded people that ate all their bars but then said they weren't happy. I mean, we've just gone like way out of our way. And then all of our marketing material was meant to be value adds. So in the beginning we didn't even talk about our products. It was all about doing a cool recipe or something or showing somebody a way to work out or an article they might not have read that could be useful to them and just didn't talk about the product at all. And it wasn't until the fans started creating content around our own product and sending it into us that we came up with this idea of mirror marketing. Like show them themselves. Let them, like if this is how they interact with the product, then let us reflect that back. Let us create more recipes using our stuff. Let's show the content that they're sending us, which was really cool. I mean, you have people going to like Machu and then taking a picture of the bar. I mean, it was crazy. At the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, wherever they went, on a beautiful beach somewhere, they were taking pictures with their bars. And so it became a way to celebrate them, to celebrate their transformations, which really found its way to the heart of our marketing, just human transformation. And we all became just junkies for that. And really highlighting and celebrating some of these just amazing tales of change. It was really cool.

So you were doing your own manufacturing. You're giving away product. And I know that it is not cheap to both formulate and to manufacture. I mean, the profit margins on food are razor thin. So the capital requirements to start Quest had to be more than your average company. Where did that come from? And you had to have a big vision from the very beginning to, you know, take that bite.

We did. But it's important for people to understand. We. For almost. God, it had to be eight or nine months. It was all, I think, less than $10,000 that we had invested in the company.

Really?

Really. And we were running our. So we had a software company, which will explain how we ended up buying the equipment when we did. But in the beginning, we were making the bars by hand. So we would run the software company by day, and then at night we would go and make the bars by hand with rolling pins and handheld knives sealing three at a time. I mean, it was really quite the undertaking. And we used to joke these are the most expensive protein bars ever made because you've got these three executives from a software company who were making them. So that was pretty funny. But, yeah. So for the first roughly eight months, I don't remember the exact timeline, but around there, it really was very little cash outlay. And we didn't just jettison our company. We played it safe, man. And I think for any entrepreneurs out there listening, have to risk everything. You have to be willing to fight for what you believe in, for sure. You have to be willing to clock extra hours. Absolutely. You've got to put your nose to the grindstone. You've got to learn. But at the end of the day, you don't have to take these big crazy risks.

Is it fair to say that the software company then funded the build out of the rest of Quest?

Yeah. So in the end, we ended up selling the software company and leveraged that to invest in Quest. And that's when we bought the equipment. But even then, like, you'd be surprised, we didn't just throw a ton of money. The equipment wasn't cheap, don't get me wrong. And for sure, at that moment, we were all in and we're like, wow, this really has to work now.

Which is another cool moment. So you don't have to take big risks, but when you do, it has a way of clarifying and laser targeting your focus. So there's, you know, there's really benefits to both. But at least we didn't have to jump all in until we'd proven that there was a market for it. So that was really, really powerful for us. And then, yeah, once we kicked it off and had the money in, we were learning as we went.

With such a massive influence that you have now, there have to be some, I guess, ethical discussions about every little decision that you make, like how using sucralose or erythritol or monk fruit or whatever ingredient that you put in, you know, someone's gonna agree, someone's going to disagree. I know you've very publicly switched from. You've switched prebiotic fibers to corn fiber because that has been healthier than what you were using before. And that had to be a major decision. What is it like being in the boardroom or the back office or whatever it is, kicking around what you know is going to be.

Mixed reviews in PR and some of your customers will love it and some of them will write nasty blog articles. You have that type of attention now, and how do you navigate that? And what's it like making those types of decisions that you know are going to be received strongly, either positively or negatively?

Yeah, it's something that we think about, but it's really not something that we belabor. So take this switch from IMO to soluble corn fiber. For us, that, that was like a five minute conversation about whether we do it or not. And then days, weeks, maybe even months of how do we message this? But the how we message it is pretty irrelevant to whether we needed to do it. And from our perspective, if we're really going to be the company that we want to be, that we say we are, we have to do whatever's more metabolically advantageous. And that has been the guiding light from day one. And, you know, we're three guys that are just really, really focused on our own health. We care incredibly deeply about what we put in our own bodies. And so, first of all, we're not going to make anything that we wouldn't eat ourselves.

We haven't even made products that we weren't hungry for in our own lives. That's been a huge part of the R and D processes. Is this something that I wish I had in my life? And so when you get down to that, like you said, you're never going to get everyone to agree. And man, honestly, food is like religion people are really intense about. Our thing is we just want to give people control. I'm not telling you one way's right or wrong. I'm telling you everything I put out I believe in. And I'm going to make sure that somebody that if you really do not want products with sucralose in them, cool. I've got products without sucralose, no problem if you don't care. Like me personally, I'm all for it. And I love the taste that you can get out of sucralose, man. We've got those for people that where taste is just super critical to them and we've got everything in between. So for us, we obviously do eight lot of research on the metabolic impact of the ingredients that we use. And we only use things that we believe are neutral to good for you.

But at the same time, like you said, with our transition from one fiber to the other, we're constantly engaging with science, with well respected scientists, with people that are really pushing our understanding of human metabolism. And when we find that either an ingredient is not as good as we thought it was, or when we find a better one, we're going to change. And that is absolutely a core principle of the company.

I remember when I became a Quest superfan and it was when I discovered the multipurpose protein for no other reason than it was marketed to me as I could cook with it. And all of a sudden I'm sitting here making pancakes and pizza crusts out of my protein powder which I'm sitting here going, why has no one told me that I can use this as a flour? Like I've been using protein powder for 10 years. Why has nobody told me that I could do this? And that's when I was a super fan. I made my Quest pizza for some friends a week ago, made my pancakes a week and a half ago. And it just seems like this little twist is present in every product that makes it almost multi use. Like I can use my Quest products for multiple things which makes me want to use it more and buy more. Who is the person or where do the ideas come from that give you that small differentiating factor that increase the use and the love of the product so dramatically?

You know, it's interesting people in the health and fitness space, competitors, things like that, they're really hardcore about finding ways to make their typically boring diet a lot more enjoyable. So we had people sending us like, hey, I rolled my bar into, you know, I rolled it out flat and cut it into cookie shapes. And so it was a cookie dough bar, but now, now it's an actual cookie. And so we were getting stuff like that. We tried to mirror it back, we tried to push the envelope. We have a huge R and D team, about 40 people that are constantly looking not only at new products, but new ways to use the products. We have chefs that create all the content that we have in our show, so they're actually making real recipes. So we don't make a recipe unless it actually tastes good. So we've got those guys on staff. So it really is this cool interplay between the people that we have on staff that are totally of that sort of health and fitness universe. They love to make healthy food delicious and use it in fun, new, cool ways. And then the community of Quest fans out there that are experimenting and trying things and sharing not only with us, but with all the other Quest fans out there. So it's been just a cool symbiotic relationship between us and the community.

One of the reasons we do Freedom Fast Lane live is for purely selfish reasons. You know, I know how to take a company from 0 to 1 million. Done it many times. I know how to take a company from 1 to 10 million. I've done that. I don't know what it looks like to take a company from 10 to 100. And I definitely don't know what it looks like to take a company from 100 to 500. You've gone through all of those stages. Have you seen them as transitions? Like there's a new skill set that, that needs to be learned to go from 10 to 100 and so on? Or has it been more of a natural evolution? And my follow up question will be if that's the case, if they have been in stages, which one has served to be the most challenging?

So there is definitely phases and things change dramatically and the needed skill sets required are dramatically different. And that's been part of the fun for me is not only evolving myself. So I'll give you an idea. When we first started the company, I didn't look at resumes. I was hiring for heart and heart alone. I needed people that would come in and hustle. And I used to tell them, I don't care where you've been, I'm only interested in where you're going. I don't read resumes because that tells me like who you were or who you are today. And I want to know who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there. And so we had former drug dealers, ex gang members, like just crazy people that most people wouldn't hire on our line because they believed in the opportunity. They believed that they could leverage Quest to make something new in their life. And when you give somebody that didn't have hope, hope, like magical, and I mean magical things happen. And that was really, really incredible. And one of the most emotionally rewarding parts of building the company was to see these guys go where they couldn't even get interviews to, coming in, interviewing, shining, working their asses off, building up a said, improving their lives, improving their family's lives, all the while helping make Quest what it was. And then you begin to transition into professional management, where you've got to bring people in, you've got to start reading resumes. You need to get people with experience. You need people that aren't learning on the job. You need people that really understand structure and scale. And scaling is, you know, if you want to talk about what's been the most challenging for me, certainly personally, scale is a beast unto itself. And as we continued to grow, at some point you as an entrepreneur, really as anybody in life, you have to ask yourself, what skill set does the business require? And what skill set do I want to acquire? So recently I've actually transitioned into a founder role in the company. I'm no longer involved in the day to day. And the reason that I did that is when I really stop and look at the skill set that I want to acquire, it's no longer the skill set that the company needs. So really recognizing what your path is, where you want to take it, and as I think about going from 500 million to a billion dollars.

That is a very specific skill set. That is not the skill set that I'm focused on. So I'm much more interested in broadening the view of what wellness is really going out and impacting people's lives and getting more people aware of what we're doing at Quest, believing in what we're doing at Quest. And so I think of myself now as the chief evangelizer and just getting people to really understand the power of change and how Quest can help them do that.

What hire or hires served most pivotal in the early stages or as you were really ramping up, that allowed you to grow the company or that grew the company bigger than or faster than you thought was possible.

I'll give you two. One, maybe not so sexy. And then One super sexy, but both very important. The first was I was running production. So for about the first year, it was me, I was wearing a hairnet, lab coat, gloves, and I was making protein bars every day. And you know, you get to a point where now I'm holding us back. My skill set is no longer sufficient for how big we're getting, how fast we need to produce bars. Like, I'm not the guy you want fixing equipment. Let's just start with that. And so realizing that we needed to bring somebody in and we made just a really key, amazing hire for the person who came in and ran production and just killed it and allowed us to really begin to scale and grow. That was amazing. And it was one of the first transitional moments for me in the company where then I moved into a sales and marketing role. And then that was another key, key hire for us was our chief marketing officer who ended up really galvanizing that concept of the thousand screaming fans translating into exactly how you do it in a rapidly changing social context. And he really helped us build that massive community. I mean, We've got almost 3 million people in our ecosystem now. It's just utterly astonishing the number of people that we're able to reach. So cool. And he was really instrumental in building that and he had a tremendous vision for that. So that was another key hire.

Forgive me for belabor the point, but as you're explaining that, all I hear is how expensive it must have been to run a company like this. And again, I know the margins on food are not great. So if you are in there making bars and you're hiring people and you're building up your thousand fans, where's the profit coming from? Or maybe a better question would be at what point did the scales tip and take you over into the point where you're profiting and you're able to really start to focus on scale.

Well, oddly enough, growth is your biggest enemy. So growth is a capital consumer. So it really wasn't. And this would, it would be unfair. Not to mention my business partner, Mike, is insanely gifted with managing finances. So we were able to bootstrap all this. We self funded the only investment we took. We took like four, four and a half years into our life cycle. By then we had experienced all of that explosive 57,000% growth and we were just taking a small investment to diversify. And he was able to really reinvest the cash super wisely back into the company. We did a little bit of bank debt just so that we could float cash Flow stuff, but really it was just a willingness to funnel all of the profits back into the business. And then certainly in the early days, we've since made the product more expensive without raising the price. So we have shrunk our own margins just for reasons of feeling like we could improve the quality of the product. But before we did that, the margins were maybe better than average. They were certainly better than average for a manufacturing business. But if you're cognizant that every dollar matters, if you're not just throwing money around, then there are ways to manage it, as long as you're not siphoning cash out of the business, you know what I mean? So we were careful not to. Instead of funneling the millions of dollars of profits that we're making into our pocket, we were reinvesting it in the company.

And what was the primary sales channel in those early days? I know that you got your thousand true fans that I imagine were ordering online, but what was the primary sales channel that really ramped you up? Because I think of you as more of a retail company, although I know you're one of the top selling products on Amazon as well. But in those early days, where did your buyers find you in order to place the order that you focused on as your primary sales channel?

In the beginning, it was all on the website, and that was really important to us. And we actually had to make a fundamental decision, do we want to build a community online or do we want to go into retail? And we decided to build it online, which ended up being just a critical moment in the company because what it allowed us to do was go to retail from a position of strength. Normally, people are going to retail like, please, oh, you know, put me on your shelves, help me build my brand. But the retailers understand that. They know they have the leverage. They know that they represent, you know, in some cases, hundreds or even thousands of retail outlets, and that putting you on their shelves, some of them are even going to charge you for the privilege just to be on the shelf. And then of course, they take their margin. So if you go to them totally from a position of having no brand awareness, they know that they're going to have to build that awareness. They know that they're essentially renting you space so that you can get eyeballs. So they're going to leverage that to their advantage. And this was where we were able to put ourselves in a good position because we could tell people no for over a year that we weren't going to go on their store shelves, even though they were calling and asking because we were profitable. We had already become profitable just off what we were doing on the Internet. And so that completely changed the dynamic. And anybody that's out there, man, look, if you're trying to build a business, you live in the most magical time for entrepreneurs ever. You can find out if there's a market, if people will buy your product immediately, if it meets a need. You can start small, you can do it while you're running your current day job. You can outsource most of stuff. It's literally crazy. It is such a cool time to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur, get your feet under you. Don't try to be the billion dollar company overnight. We weren't even thinking like that. The growth was happening because we were making these really simple basic decisions and just trying to bring value. And that's the thing. I cannot overemphasize that enough. If anybody out there is considering launching a company, the primary driver needs to be the value that you're delivering to the end consumer. As long as that's real, as long as that is there, man, you'll be able to find your audience, you'll be able to build something. Now, if the audience that you're delivering value to is very small, your business will be small. If the audience that you're delivering value to is huge and you deliver little value, then your business will be small. But if you find a huge audience and deliver more value than anybody else in the space, you can build a big business. And that's what we did. We were in food, so you know that that's huge. Everybody needs it to survive. That's a great place to be. And then we just tried to deliver more value than any anybody else in the space. And then we just piled all the profits back into the company to keep feeding that growth. And that's a decision that maybe some people wouldn't make because it's certainly, you know, it's actually risky because all of your capital is being reinvested. It's not being even necessarily saved for a rainy day. It's going back into buying. You know, we had to get more space, we had to buy more equipment, we had to invest in ingredients before we'd sold the product. I mean, it's a lot of risk. But when you believe in what you're doing and you're taking care of those fundamentals, and those fundamentals are taking care of your business, then all of a sudden you can do what we did.

I'm fascinated with the levers that people pull that really put them on the map and help them grow faster. And it sounds like, at least in the early days, anybody can put up an e commerce presence, but if you have the community, if you have the audience, you can cash that check whenever you want. And it sounds like that's what you focused on. And I would still consider Quest to be a community with all the content that people make, the recipes that they're posting. I myself have found myself posting things on Instagram of the things that make with Quest products. So in those early days, since that's the lever that was pulled, were you just throwing out content and giving away free products on Facebook when it was still on its rise and building a community out of that, were you doing it on the site? What was it actually tactically, that where you built that community that you launched to.

Tactically, it was purely social media. So it started on Facebook. And I remember the day when we got our thousandth fan. That was such a big deal. Oh, man, I was over the moon, excited. Funny to think now, but that was really where we started. But we were really paying attention to new platforms as they came out, new ways of communicating, communicating with the audience. As Facebook was evolving, as Twitter was evolving, all that stuff, we tried to really evolve with it, but always with an eye towards when we put out this content, it needs to be value add. It can't just be content for the sake of content. We really have to understand our audience. We have to understand what they're interested in and then deliver it. We made huge investments into media and content creation and really did some really cool, super innovative stuff that not a lot of brands take a chance on. Because at the end of the day, there's no hard roi. We did a music video, you know what I mean? And how do you determine how well it worked? Now I can say that we did it for our Blueberry bar, ended up being our number one selling bar. Was that because of the music video? Probably not. But that kind of innovation keeps people talking about you. It keeps things fresh, it keeps things interesting for everybody inside the company as well as the fans outside the company. If you're not pushing the envelope, if you're not trusting trying new stuff, then you'll stagnate. And so that's always been a critical part of how we go about things.

What has the relationship been like between you and the other founders?

It's not a common story to hear three dudes bootstrap their way to a half a billion dollar company. I mean, my partner Matt and I, I love the guy to death. But there's times we disagree and we think the other person is absolutely crazy. Andy is one of my best friends. So what has it been like for the three of you and how has that relationship evolved? And I know you've stepped away. What about the status of the other two?

Yeah, so we've been together for 14 years. They were working together, I think for over 10 years before I met them. So it's really long term relationships, relationships. It's about dealing with it like a relationship. Like everybody in this relationship has equal value. And so, yes, I may think you're crazy, but we've got to talk it through. And I'm going to approach you as an equal, as somebody that brings tremendous value. So even if I can't see your opinion, let's talk it out. And then once we decide on the direction, man, then we all commit and we go in that direction. So 30 seconds before that, we might have been saying, you're out of your mind. But then once you pick a direction, you've got to switch that part of your mind off and say, this is a direction that we're going, going. And the only thing that becomes dangerous is if you're not marching in the same direction. And that's when things can get problematic. So we were really, really thoughtful about that. As we've grown and as the company has evolved and our individual passions have evolved, that's exactly why I've stepped out of the day to day is what I want to do was the, you know, the skill set that I want to build was beginning to pull me in a different direction. So rather than that become a point of friction, they're still there, they're still working the day to day. Totally brilliant entrepreneurs. I know that the company is just in amazing hands from a day to day standpoint. And now I can bring the value from the angle that I want to get better and better and better at, which is really evangelizing people, which is really creating a community unlike anything that's ever been seen before. And that to me, that human connection that showing people what you're about and creating something that really transcends the products, like that's where I'm pointed. And so yeah, it's talking through all that stuff, recognizing when it makes sense to move in a different direction, always being willing to evolve, always recognizing changing passions. That's the key.

From that perspective, always being honest with each other, honest with yourself, and, and then go in the directions that make sense.

I know that the goal of the company is to end metabolic disease. And it started with bars, it then became multipurpose powders and then chips. Are you allowed to disclose what is on the horizon for Quest and how you are looking to solve that problem and achieve that goal together?

Yeah, absolutely. We've got some amazingly cool products coming out. We've got some more products coming out in the high protein genre, We've got more products coming out in the high fat genre. And our big thing is really, if you imagine the best party you've been to with the coolest snacks, now imagine all of those snacks were good for you. So we used to say, imagine going to a Super bowl party and you've got chips and all kinds of stuff sitting out on the table. Right now those things are a metabolic disaster. But could we make versions of all of that? That stuff that's good for you. So that's what we're working on. We've literally got tortilla chips coming out that taste amazing, but they have the macronutrient profile of a protein powder, which is crazy to me. I eat six bags a day of those chips. They are ridiculous. They're so good.

I think legally I'm not allowed to say what they taste like, but I will say, think of the most famous bag of chicken chips on the planet. They taste like that. They are so unreasonably good. And I'm saying this, knowing people are going to try it. So over hyping it doesn't make any sense. You go buy a bag, you hate it, you're just going to tell people you hated it and that I was over hyping it. I really believe it. They're ridiculously good.

Why do some Quest bars make me fart while others don't?

Wow.

That is a good question. So now let's talk about the microbiome.

Why one would and one wouldn't is almost certainly going to be unique to you and other people that have the same or similar microbiome that you have. So this is an area of huge interest for me and I think it's going to be a huge wave in health is to really understand the microbiome. So obviously something is being fermented rather than being digested now, and why you don't have the enzymes or the bacteria that you need to process it without it becoming gas, I can't speak to. But man, really going in and learning about your microbiome, testing your microbiome over time, watching it change as you change the things that you eat, that is really fascinating and is one of the things that I'm most interested in.

I just love the fact that you actually answered that question. Question that makes me so happy you mentioned the X Prize and you know that Peter Diamandis is keynoting Freedom Fast Lane lives. Day three, Day two Keynoting is John Mackey of Whole Foods. Which leads me to an interesting question that I just have been dying to ask you for years. I've wondered why Whole Foods didn't. At least I live in Austin, Texas, where the flagship Whole Foods is and they didn't carry Quest for a long time time. The week we announced that both John Mackey and Tom Bill, you are speaking at Freedom Fast Lane Live. I kid you not. My local Whole Foods started carrying Quest bars.

That's hilarious.

Did I put you on the map in Whole Foods or is there a fun story there?

Yeah, it sounds like you brought us together, man. So thank you.

You're welcome.

So what. What really has happened? So here's how Whole Foods works. They can approve things at the corporate level, but that all the purchasing actually happens at a regional level. So they can decide to bring us in or not bring us in. And for whatever reason, there have been two regions of Whole Foods that just haven't brought us in, despite the fact that every region of Whole Foods we're in were the number one selling bar. So I literally have no idea why. We've tried. We've asked nicely, but just hasn't happened.

Tom, tell me about InsideQuest. You've had our friend of the show, Jeff Hoffman, on. You've had. I believe you've had Tony Robbins on fairly recently. The list of guests that have been on are pretty stellar. What's the reason you started a show and a podcast and tell us a little bit about it.

Yeah. So InsideQuest is really about showing how wellness encompasses both the body and the mind. And. And there are so many amazing people out there in the world, and they're willing to share what they've learned. And I wanted to learn from them. I wanted to honor them for all the things that they had already taught me before coming on the show and the inspiration that they provided. And I felt like changing my mindset changed everything about my life. And took me from scrounging in my couch cushions to find enough change to put gas in my car to being able to build a business. And I wanted to pay that forward. And so I knew that to really do that justice, we were going to have to create a platform. And so, you know, we. We live in this awesome era where podcasts are a thing and people know and understand them and engage with them. And was another community outreach objective. And so that was a big initiative for us to also transcend the products and really just bring more value to people's lives. And has become just my obsession and my passion. Really, really love it and think that it's an opportunity to continue to fuel that movement and build that community and help people change their lives. Which at the end of the day, creating the foods that we're creating was to help people change and transform and become a better version of themselves and healthier and happier. And to be able to extend that to the mind is very, very meaningful.

Well, Tom, I'm so glad you did what you've done in building Quest. As a fan of the company and also just watching the different that you're making in the world, I believe that entrepreneurs and capitalists are the change we need in the world and we're our own best shot. You know, especially when everybody is hoping a politician or a party does something about the change we need. I think entrepreneurs are our best shot at that. When you speak at Freedom Fast Lane Live, I can't wait to ask you about the scale process, the hiring process, what it looks like. Like to go from 10 to 100 and then what you did to go from 100 to 400. And we'll dive into that this December in Austin, Texas. Thanks so much for hanging out with us. This was one of my favorite interviews I've ever done. I'm really proud of what you're doing and can't wait to go deeper this December.

Thanks, man. I'm really looking forward to it and it's really an honor to be invited. So thank you.

It is almost hard to believe the potential that is available when you do things the right way. When you release good products to audiences and you build up your sales processes and you release subsequent products. It's almost scary how fast it happens. And consistently difficult to believe what's possible. But that's the reason why our students have built so many million dollar businesses. It's wise to some of our students are able to sell their businesses for 5, 10, $20 million. All of this is happening. It's happening in the tribe and it's happening as a result of people building really sustainable and scalable brands. And that's what we aim to do. Inside of the Brand Builder Bootcamp, we teach people to build businesses like Quest to build real brands that have scalable and sellable potential. Potential. And it's a 12 month plan to build up a million dollar business and then package it for sale or to scale from there. And that's@freedomfastlane.com Bootcamp if you've been hearing us talk about our success stories, but you haven't yet built a successful brand or you're not seeing the results that you want, I'd encourage you to go through the bootcamp. And if you are building a brand and it's growing and you're ready to connect with audience leaders and investors and people who are at your level and above, apply for the tribe that's@freedomfastlane.com tribe hey. If you enjoyed this chat with Tom, you can hear more from him in person and even shake his hand at Freedom Fast Lane Live this December in Austin, Texas. We even now have the elite access paths, which means that when Tom gets off stage, you go with him and you hang out with him backstage as well as all of the other speakers that are going to be there. It's the most intimate level that we have created in order to get you the results that you want by meeting and connecting with our highest level clients and those who are sharing from stage. I'm so proud of what we have been able to do and I don't want you to miss it. So come join us at Freedom Fast Lane live December 9th, 10th and 11th 11th. Hope to see you there and I can't wait to hear about who you.

Meet and what you accomplish as a.

Result of attending Freedom Fast Lane this December. As always, I so appreciate you listening and supporting to the show and I will see you on the next episode.