Tom Bilyeu: From His Kitchen To A Billion Dollar Food Company ("From Scratch") #BrandBuilderPodcast

The questions you ask yourself will determine the course of your life. I had been asking myself, what do I need to do to get rich? And it left me really unhappy.

So I changed the question.

Welcome to the Brand Builder podcast presented by capitalism.com I'm Max Kerwick and I advise physical product brands to find their story.

I'm Ryan Daniel Moran and I invest in physical products brands. A physical products brand is arguably the most predictable path to a seven figure business and we advise them, build them, buy them and sell them.

The show goes behind them, tracks their success, and hands you the keys to what's working.

Let's dive in.

Hey capitalists. You're about to listen to a keynote from Tom Bilyeu at the Capitalism Conference. Tom is the man behind Quest Nutrition and impact theory. In this keynote he talks about what it took to scale a brand from hand making protein bars in his garage to building a billion dollar food company with a mission to end metabolic disease. Enjoy.

Hey gang, I'm interrupting you briefly to talk about cash flow and investing. My strategy for financial independence for the rest of my life is to build businesses and invest the profits. But the investing piece can be confusing sometimes. Where do you start if you're just starting out in your journey? I always suggest looking into dividend paying stock. It's an easy way to generate cash flow, but if you're further along in your journey, the foundation of my strategy is by setting up a wealth warehouse. A wealth warehouse is kind of like a second bank account except it's tied to the market so it goes up in value, but it does not go down in value. It's a really cool strategy that a lot of my really wealthy friends use and Tony Robbins recommends this in his book Money Master the Game as well. And the team that I use to set this up is wealthwarehouse.com it's run by my buddy Sam Prentice. He is the sharpest person that I have met on this topic. He also has access to some really cool investment opportunities to buy cash flow as well. He shares them in some of the podcasts that we've. But if you go over to wealthwarehouse.com or if you search for my name and Sam Prentice, you'll find any of the podcasts that we have done together as well as some of the opportunities that are available when you deploy this strategy, it's who I use. He's one of our backroom partners and it's the team that I go to for some insider investment recommendations as well as setting up my wealth warehouse which is the foundation of my strategy. That's wealthwarehouse.com.

Please join me in welcoming Mr. Tom Bilyeu.

All right, what's up, everybody?

Wow, man. Some people are going to miss some pretty good secrets here. I'm going to do my best in the next 60 minutes to give away every secret that I have. That is very much the way that I approach business, because I think at the end of the day, what matters is execution, and we're going to talk a lot about that. I'm not at all secretive about ideas. We'll give them away like candy. All right, so first of all, thank you guys for that warm welcome. Ryan, it was awesome to have been on the podcast. What you put together here is really incredible. I'm pretty blown away, not only by the group of people you put together, but just by the overall production is pretty incredible. All right, so somewhere my slides exist. All right, the first thing to know about me is I am not a born entrepreneur. Now, there are many people that consider themselves a born entrepreneur. I am not one of them. I know that there were kids out there that had lemonade stands when they were like six months old. They couldn't hold their head up, but they could sell. That was not me. I was totally retarded when it came to stuff like that. I had a paper route, and they gave your money in two ways. One, they just gave you sort of a blanket weekly payment for delivering the paper. But then the other part of it was you were supposed to go collect that money, and I was too afraid to knock on the doors to collect the money. So I never got that part. But I felt so obligated that I said I would do it that I kept delivering the papers, essentially for free. So that's where I started as an entrepreneur. My parents biggest frustration was that I was epically lazy. And if they handed out gold medals for being lazy, I would have won. I assure you, hands down. There was a period in my life where I would spend between two and three hours in bed because it was warm in bed and it was cold out of bed. All right, that's true. I actually did an interview with Jocko Willink. If you guys know him, extreme ownership. His book totally blew me away. And in the middle of the interview, I confessed that. And he said, tom, don't worry, we'll let you edit that out. I said, jocko, I actually don't want to edit that out, because right now, the narrative about what it means to be an entrepreneur is to be naturally gifted. And I call total Bullshit on that. Because I'm not naturally gifted. I don't have any natural talents. And all of us are born as this lump of jelly that can't hold its own head up that poos in its pants. And we all learn to do things, and it's that ability to specialize that makes us great. And the things that you choose to put your time and energy into, those are going to be the things that allow you to accomplish something. But all of that is a choice now. My entrepreneurial journey began because even though I was a slightly chubby kid growing up in a morbidly obese family in Tacoma, Washington, I always knew two things about myself. One day I was going to be rich and I was going to have six pack abs. Like, those are the two things is that kid that was, you know, jiggling his belly thinking, one day I'm not going to have to suck in my gut. It's not going to be pushing out my T shirt. I'm going to figure that out. I had no idea how I was going to do it, because what my parents had taught me to do was eat really bad food. Though my mom, in her defense, wouldn't let me eat chicken nuggets because those are clearly unhealthy. So she let me have turkey nuggets because those are way better for you. So I spent my teenage years deep frying turkey nuggets and living the dream. It was amazing. I shuddered to think how much fried food I've eaten in my life. And that's where I started. I had this sense that I could do more, that I could be more. But what my parents were teaching me how to do was to be a good employee. And to them that meant keep your head down, do as little work as possible, and avoid punishment at all costs. And so at one point, I actually considered myself the king of remedial jobs. And I said it with pride. I was so excited. Every interview I went into, I would get the job. I would know that. And how did I know? Because I would look through the newspaper for jobs where I knew the person interviewing me will be less educated than I am. And those were the jobs that I actually went after. Now that's where I started. Now, I'm going to tell you in a minute how I end up very, very, very far from there. But I want people to really think about that. When I left for college, my own mother, who had always been my biggest cheerleader, quietly assumed I was going to fail. She was one of those amazing moms. She kicked me out of the house. She forced me to go. She said, you've got to chase your dreams. You've got to do this. And then once I left, she spent every day after that trying to get me back. And I said, mom, what gives here? You literally kicked me out of the nest when I'm 18 and then spend every day guilting me into coming home. Why just kick me out? Let's get the middleman. And she said, I never wanted you to say what if? And I just assumed you would fail. And she said it with no malice. But I didn't display any signs of being able to accomplish. I had cheated my way through high school. I didn't take it seriously. So when I got to college, she just assumed that the big bad world would eat me up. But what she didn't understand was I knew one day I was going to be rich.

Now, what I didn't know at that time that my quest for money would take me to some amazing and interesting places. But first, I had to meet my version of the white rabbit. If you know me, if you follow me socially or anything, you know that I'm obsessed with the Matrix. If you don't know that now, you will definitely know that by the end of this talk.

And the reason I'm obsessed with the Matrix is it is the perfect metaphor for my life and I think for the lives of many people. And we'll get into the detail of exactly how that is. But these two guys that were successful entrepreneurs and bodybuilders happened to walk into a class when I was a teacher, and I thought, oh, my God, six pack abs and money. It's right there. Like, this is what I've been looking for. These guys are my white rabbit. I'm gonna follow them, I'm gonna figure out what it is that they've done. And they were just starting a technology startup and they said, hey, we need a copywriter. Why don't you come be a copywriter? They said, but don't think of yourself as a copywriter. Think of yourself as an owner in this company. Help us overcome these problems. You can have any job you want within the company. You just have to become the right person for that job. And so I was just young enough and just dumb enough to believe them and take them at their word. And I went all in. And for the first time, I really got to show people that I was wildly ambitious and that I was willing to suffer. And we all have a superpower. And my superpower may be the willingness and ability to endure suffering And I'm not necessarily saying that's always a good thing. And in fact, I want to introduce you to a quote which hopefully most of you know. And this is the positive side of suffering. This is a Nietzsche quote. This quote is so meaningful to me. And you'll understand how this idea ended up changing my life in a minute. I'm going to read it because it's worth everyone hearing. To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities. I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self contempt, the torture of self mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished. I have no pity for them because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not. That one endures.

That one endures. Shitty things are going to happen to you if they haven't already, and I'm sure they have. Many tragedies have befallen every person in this room. And what I want you guys to recognize right now is thank God.

Because those are the things that weed out the sick and the weak. Those are the things that weed out the people who just. They don't have the fortitude to see it through. And if you don't need to be an entrepreneur to succeed, but you do need something, what is that something? And I'm here to tell you that something is the ability to endure.

My ability to handle suffering, my ability to keep going when something is boring, my ability to learn a new skill long after everybody else has gotten over it and gotten bored and they are no longer interested. All I can see is its utility. And in seeing its utility and becoming obsessed with what that thing is going to allow me to do, I endure. No matter how hard it gets, no matter how painful it is, if it lives in service of my goals, I do it. And that was the one thing nobody could see. That was the one thing when I was a kid nobody could understand. They didn't know that the reason I wasn't doing the paper route was because I didn't care. And because I didn't care, I didn't push. It didn't mean that when I found that thing I cared about that I wouldn't push.

And the first thing was get rich. And I used to say to myself all the time, you're going to get rich or you're going to die trying.

And so starting as a copywriter, I started busting my ass. Step number one, I convinced my wife we're going to. Because there were Two other partners that hired me. I'm going to pick an apartment that's no more than five minutes from either of them. That way, if they call me at 2 in the morning, I'll be there in five minutes. And they're going to know no one else in their company is as serious as me.

And I'm going to claw my way up this company and I'm going to get whatever job I become the right person for, and I'm going to work my way up.

And by the time we ended up selling that company, I had clawed my way through sweat equity into owning 10% of the company and being the chief marketing officer. From starting as the copywriter, the person that everybody asked, who's the kid in the server room? Was the only person that didn't have a window. They literally put me in the room with all the computer servers.

But starting from there, I knew I could wow people because I was willing to grind it out.

And that is one of the most valuable things that anybody can do. All right. Now, that company.

We grew to the point where in 2010, it was a technology company. It was named as the 42nd fastest growing technology company in North America. I had suffered a lot. I hadn't taken a day off in like six and a half years, except for Christmas. In fairness, I wouldn't let my wife go on a vacation because I was so hell bent to get rich. And then I realized, almost eight and a half years in, here we are, we've just been named the 42nd fastest growing technology company in North America. We're making money, we're winning awards, beautiful conference room overlooking the Pacific Ocean. And I turn to my partners and I say, I'm completely miserable. I quit and I hand back your equity. I'm not going to cross the finish line. I don't think I should get anything for that. And they said, what are now famous words for me, we could do this without you, but we don't want to. And in that moment, I realized what had been missing. I realized the reason I was living the cliche of money can't buy happiness. I was realizing why what Tony Robbins says about success without fulfillment being the worst kind of failure was because what I cared about was connection. I'd gotten into it and gotten to know these guys and along the way had become so myopically focused on this promise I'd made to myself as a kid that I never stopped to ask, why do I want to get rich?

What is it that I plan to do with the money? The money in and of itself, it's inert. It just sits there. I'm sure you guys have a bunch of it in your pocket right now and it doesn't do anything. But it has latent potential. But the question is, what are you going to do with that potential?

So I'd finally had enough. I had hit my breaking point from suffering. And I got so mad and I was so unwilling to do it anymore that the three of us said, we're now going to totally forget about money. We're not going to think about it. We can't take it anymore. Life is too short. This is your one go round. So what are we going to do? We're going to build a company that's predicated on value. We're going to build a company that's predicated on passion. We're going to ask ourselves a fundamentally different question.

And boys and girls.

The questions you ask yourself will determine the course of your life. I had been asking myself, what do I need to do to get rich? And it left me really unhappy.

So I changed the question and I started asking, what would I do and love every day even if I were failing?

The second law of thermodynamics is that everything moves towards entropy. Life is chaos. It takes an inhuman amount of effort to bring order to that, to find success in the middle of that. So while I cannot promise you success, I can promise you failure. I cannot promise you happiness, but I can promise sadness.

So if you know those are the guarantees and the other things are the things you have to strive for, you better be striving in service of something that in and of itself is interesting to you.

There's an awesome quote often attributed to Mother Teresa that says, no one will act for the many, but people will act for the few.

I started thinking about my mom and my sister. I had my six pack abs, but they were profoundly overweight. I started thinking about my uncle who ate himself to death when I was 12 years old, and how much that scared me. And it made me sad. And it made me sad to see that there were millions, if not more than a billion people that were in the same kind of abusive relationship with food that my mom and my sister were. So I said, I don't know if it's a big business, but I know it's a big problem.

And that's the problem that we're going to solve. And so we decided to build a totally new kind of company.

Based around value. In 2014, private companies averaged 8% annual growth. We started Quest Nutrition in 2010, just as we were coming out of the Great Recession.

From 2010 to 2013 alone, Quest grew by 57,000% in manufacturing. We were engineering and making our own equipment. We were making the bars. I was wearing a hairnet and a lab coat every day. And my employees were former gang members, ex drug dealers, felons. We were in Compton, and we literally told everybody in the neighborhood, I don't care if you've been convicted of a crime. I just want to know if you're willing to bust your ass to change your life. And if you are, you're going to get an interview. And I'm not going to ask for your resume. I don't care about your resume. Your resume tells me where you've been. It doesn't tell me the price you're willing to pay to become somebody new.

And that's how we were able to grow so fast, because we weren't focused on the money. The kids on the street that were coming in and working for us, they weren't focused on the money. One of the kids, his sister, was shot to death in the heart with an AK47. She bled to death on his front lawn. Another guy, his stepfather, was shot in the head and died in his arms.

Okay, that's growing up hard. Now imagine you tell that person, I don't give a shit if you're a born entrepreneur. I don't care if you've been to jail. I don't care if you dropped out of high school. What do you want to become and what price are you willing to pay to get there? You give that person hope that their life up to that point isn't a death sentence, that they can become anyone they want to become, and everything changes. You think those guys were leaving at 2am on a Friday when we had a deadline to hit? Hell no. One kid came up to me, said, you believe in my success more than my own mother?

That person will die for you. And when all you're asking them to do is make a protein bar, you're doing all right.

And so we were able to move so fast. And in moving that fast, in growing our revenues as much as we did because we were thinking about the customer, make sure the product was amazing, that it delivered results. We got to number two on the Inc. 5000. You can't imagine how perfect that number is for me. Just enough to be amazing and just far enough from first to piss me.

Off.

To put that chip on my shoulder, to make me want to keep going and keep grinding. All right, we're valued at over a billion dollars. We became officially a unicorn company startup. No investment capital from the outside. Our first eight months, I don't think we spent more than $10,000 and we made a valuation of over a billion dollars. All right, that's how I ended up there. That's how we did it. But to me, this stuff is formulaic. Anybody can do this. And I am proof of that. And what really winds me up, it's really easy for me to show you guys my before and after when I used to be fat when I was £230. And to show you a picture of six pack abs. And people go, wow, that's amazing. But it's really hard to show you what it looked like when I was afraid all the time. When I believed to the core of my being that I was stupid and incapable that I could never start a business. I didn't know anything about it. I felt lost and hopeless. And now to be where I'm at now, to have built a company, to have started as a copywriter and climb my way up, to know time and time again that as long as I can learn, I can do anything I set my mind to. So if you guys want to follow in these footsteps, you've got two jobs. Job number one, develop your mindset. Nobody thinks about this. This is crazy to me. If you want to talk about business, don't even worry about the mechanics of business until you get the mechanics of human psychology. If you don't know the anatomy, yes, the anatomy of the human brain, you are at a disadvantage. Why?

Because.

Because I do know it. And I know when that kid comes into my office, whether he's the wunderkind out of Harvard or he's a kid off the streets in Compton. I know what's going on in his brain at a neurochemical level. And I know what's going on in mine. I know when I'm lying to myself. I know when I'm lying to myself and it doesn't help. And I know when I'm lying to myself and it does help. And I know when to do what. We'll get to your second job in a minute. I really want to go through job number one. The Matrix has you. Who's seen the movie the Matrix? My kind of audience.

All right, the Matrix is just a movie. Maybe we're living in a simulation, maybe we're not. Peter Diamandis will be keynoting at the end of the conference. Ask him that question. He's an amazing guy. Can talk pretty Eloquently about how maybe we really are living in a simulation. But right now, I don't need you to believe that. But right now I do need you to accept that you have pulled the veil of lies over your own eyes.

If you believe that you're limited in some way, that there's something that you can't accomplish, if there's something that you can't do, like if you say, well, man, it's good enough. That Quest was able to grow their company from 0 to 500 million in revenue in it was actually less than six years. But, you know, that's them. I couldn't do that. That's the Matrix. That's a lie. And it's a disempowering lie. Let me be clear. I love lies. They're amazing. I tell myself lies all the time. You're going to see one in a minute, but I only tell myself empowering lies.

If you know the movie, you want to take the red pill, the blue pill, you wake up back in your bed, you get to decide anything you want about having heard of the Matrix, but the red pill wakes you up in the world. The reason that this is important is I'm not promising that it's going to be easy or fun. Remember, the second law of thermodynamics is that things move towards chaos.

It is going to be hard, it is going to be difficult. And finding your way through that maze will be some of the most difficult things that you're ever going to have to do. But if you accept that it's the truth, you become in control. And I want to tell you a story. And the story is either going to make you love me or hate me. It has that effect on people. The story goes like this. My wife is British. Some of this story is true and some is made up. I'll try to delineate. My wife is British. That really is true. Let's say that she was in London visiting her family. She's in the bedroom that she grew up in. The doors are locked, the alarm is on. Her mother is sitting quietly in the next room, protecting her from all kinds of woes. And right at that moment, a meteorite comes screaming through the atmosphere, smashes through the roof and kills my wife. Whose fault is that? Now I know what most people are thinking. It's nobody's fault. It's divine providence, it's luck, it's fate. It just is what it is. That's not how I live my life. And I invite you all to adopt the following belief System. It's all my fault. Now I use the word fault because it jabs people in the ribs, it gets people's attention, it makes them angry because they think I'm victim, shaming or blaming the victim. And I'm not saying I refuse to ever be a victim. And if I maintain control, then there's something that I could do about it. Now, I use that example because it seems so absurd. And yet at the same time, I know this is true. There is a group that track what are called near Earth objects, and they are trying to make sure that if one is ever on a collision course for Earth, that we'd be able to do something about it, whether it's a laser or planted nuclear explosion, whatever the case may be. Now I know they exist. I even know where they are. I've never called them to give them encouraging words. I've never sent them a dime of my money. I've never sent them ideas. I know they exist. I do nothing about it. So why on earth, if it comes around and that decision bites me in the ass and my wife is killed by a meteorite, would I blame anyone else?

I could have done something and I chose not to. Now, here's the great news. I think it's a wise choice. I think the odds of that happening in my life are so slim that it would be a total waste of time, but it shows you the lengths to which I had to take my mentality in order to learn the skills that I needed to learn to get where I wanted to go. And the way that I define an entrepreneur is somebody who encounters an obstacle and gets really pissed because the thought of giving up never occurs to them. And now they know they have to go over, under, through it, around it, whatever, but they're not going to slow down and they're not going to stop. Whereas an employee might be a beautiful human being, but when they hit an obstacle, they think, finally I can relax. And I used to be there. I was the king of if the cat's away, the mice will play. And then I remember one day asking, wait a second. If I'm actually trying to get at the time rich, then why would I ever want to slack off? Why would I ever want to let off the gas pedal? And if I don't actually want to get rich and what I want is an easy life, why am I doing this weird ass in between where I work really hard, if somebody's watching and then I stop as soon as they're not?

Just embrace the world that you want to Live if you want to chill, chill, man. I've got no moral judgment on the person that wants to smoke weed all day, hang out, chill, and eat a bowl of munchies. Like, I'm down. If I could ask that it be like maybe a Quest cereal bar or something, that would be awesome.

But truly, I don't pass a moral judgment on it. It's just not the life that I want to live. But I wanted to be honest with myself about what life I wanted to live. So I took the red pill. I accept that we make our beliefs. We choose to believe things. Every belief that you have, and I'll even throw in gravity just to make this really obnoxious. Every belief that you have is a choice.

Now, if you try to disbelieve gravity, you're going to have a real hard time. Or so I suspect. But maybe that's me with a limiting belief.

Someone in the front here is already throwing it out. No gravity for them. But the things we choose to believe really are choices. And this is something that I see time and time again. When somebody. Was it Ford that said, whether you think you can or you can't? You're right. I love that. That was one of those quotes. It hit me so hard and I realized, wow. Because here's the thing. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's just limits and humans can't do as much as I think they can and that we're all going to fail. But what would happen if I scaled back my belief system? I believe I would accomplish less. So that's a big one for me. I choose to believe that human potential is nearly limitless. I think in movies, by the way. So you're going to see a lot of film references here. And this was the belief that changed my life. Because once I realized. If you truly believe, really think about this for a second. If you truly believe that human potential is limitless, how you decide to spend your time is a spiritual consideration.

Because you can do anything. And when I look at Elon Musk, the man is going to make us an interplanetary species. Like, that's crazy. But he's going to do it because he had the audacity to believe that he could. And he's aiming his high powered belief system at what he sees as being some of the world's biggest problems. Showing exactly what I mean when I say that once you believe that human potential is limitless, how you spend your time is a spiritual consideration. So whatever your business is going to be, make sure that it matters. And I'm going to tell you why. That's going to make you a lot of money. All right, mind the gap. Here's the hard truth. You're not yet the person you need to be in order to achieve all the things you want to achieve. The great news is you're here because you realize that most people fight against that. You're here because you want to learn something. You're here because you're actually open.

But what you have to figure out is what is your kung fu? You have to figure out what is that set of skills that I need to learn. And that's how, when asked. So I do an interview show, and at the end of the interview, I used to ask people, what do you think, essentially is the meaning of life? I didn't use those words, but that was the gist. And in the beginning, I realized it was because I didn't know the answer for myself, and I wanted to hear what other people were going to say. And then, in hearing enough people say it and really thinking through my answer, I realized that, for me, the very meaning of life is to see how many skills I can acquire that have utility and then put that utility to the test.

Said another way, I want to wring every bit of potential out of myself that's possible. Because having potential is very different than doing something with that potential. And in all of us, I believe, is a massive reservoir of latent potential that can be applied to accomplish the extraordinary. But you have to know what it is. All right, here's my method for developing new skills. To cross that skill gap between who you are today and who you're going to need to become in order to execute on the things that you want to execute on. Number one, always be reading. I believe the greatest gift that any great thinker can offer the world is to take the time to write down all of their insights. They say a fool never learns. A smart man learns from his mistakes, and a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. I don't know about you guys, but for me, I have spent a lot of time being a fool. I've spent a reasonable amount of time being smart. But, oh, man, it is precious few times when I've truly been able to be wise and learn from someone else. But virtually every time I was able to get some wisdom, it was at the hands of an authority. When people ask me who my mentors were, I always tell them it's the authors that I've read.

Books contain the secrets to the universe, and right there on my Slide, if you can pull that back up, is the most important mathematical equation you're ever going to see. I. I equals IO Ideas in, equal ideas out. That is so important. If any of you have ever struggled with feeling worthy because you don't have original ideas, do not fret. I'm willing to accept. Fine. All the original ideas that are ever going to be thought. They've already been thought. Doesn't matter. To me, it's totally irrelevant. What makes each and every one of us the beautiful snowflake that we all know that we are inside is that we make unique connections between old ideas.

The very time that you're living in with the very experiences that you had mean that you're going to make connections that other people just wouldn't make. But you've got to be getting that stream of ideas in in order to make those connections. And might I suggest meditating, which puts your brain into an alpha wave state, which makes weirder connections between more remote areas of the brain. I didn't meditate for a very long time. It sounded so woo woo. And then finally I met a Navy SEAL who made me feel cool about meditating. And I finally did it and was like, oh, my God, this is amazing, because it lets you calm your nervous system down and your brain begins making really unique connections. All right, next. Open yourself to being changed. Whenever I read a book, I actually say to myself, be open to being changed by this information. It's incredible to me how many people encounter a book, an idea, a speaker, a movie, whatever, and it's amazing. And they go out and they're jazzed and they tell people about it, but they're not actually changed by it. They don't actually go out and act in accordance with that new piece of information. And at the end of the day, what the takeaway, the takeaway from my talk is, this is all gonna boil down to execution.

It's all gonna boil down to your ability to do it and to do it really well. So open yourself up to letting ideas actively change you. And you're gonna have to do things, create habits in order to make sure that they stick. All right? Realize that what you believe is a choice. We've talked about that. Be an eternal student in all things. I'm always trying to learn. I know this is a room of people who already get this, but if we all remind each other and remind ourselves that everyone we meet has something to teach us, we'll be able to collect those pieces of information that go into our brains, into that math equation. Of ideas in, equal ideas out. I will take a good idea from wherever it comes. We're going to talk about building your self esteem around that later.

All right, who has read Antifragile by Nassim Taleb? You guys are in for a treat. You're going to want to read this book. This book changed me. You want to talk about a book? I was open to it. It came in, it completely impacted my life. This book is absolutely incredible. It's so important. We're going to go through it in detail in a second. And the last thing is develop grit. We'll talk about grit as well. All right. Becoming Antifragile. The important thing here to note is that everyone needs an ego. Everyone needs self esteem, everyone needs to feel good about themselves. And the crazy thing, when you really stop and think about suicide, and this is a new obsession of mine, if you stop and think about suicide, what has happened? That person believes falsely, but they believe that they'll never be happy again, that they'll never feel good about themselves again. And that's why it's referred to as a permanent solution to a temporary problem, because that will pass.

But in that moment, it feels like it couldn't ever go away.

So we need to find things that make us feel good about who we are. Because when you lose a sense of feeling good about who you are, life truly feels hopeless. So that's critical. And people often talk about, you know, to stay away from an ego, to not pride yourself on things. But I'm telling you, that person prides themselves on not having an ego. And so it becomes what you pride yourself on is absolutely incredible. Now don't make the mistake that I made. I used to want to be smart. When I talked about being the king of remedial jobs, it was because I wanted to put myself in situations where I was the smartest person in the room. And in doing that, I was always going into smaller and smaller rooms. But it felt so good to be right. And the problem was I was wrong a lot of the times. Now, when this one finally came to a head, my business partners, who were far smarter than I am in terms of IQ processing data, which I define IQ as your ability to process data rapidly. They could process data very rapidly. And we would get into arguments and I would always lose. And it was very frustrating. And I remember one day, finally I actually convinced them to do something my way. And I realized, oh, shit, I just won the argument. But I know I'm wrong. And so now what I've gotten what I thought I wanted. I finally won this victory. If I don't feel smart myself, at least I'm getting reflected back to me that I've solved the problem. And now I feel totally stuck. Because if I really want to move towards my goal of getting rich, it does not help to do things that I know are against the company just to be right. And in that moment, I realized what I had to do was switch my self esteem from being right to pursuing the right answer faster than anyone else. And then putting energy behind that and being like, oh my gosh, Timmy came up with the idea. It was Sally and Sally. Oh my gosh, it's amazing. And giving them so much energy to try to see it through, because that's the right idea. And then I began to develop my reputation of being the guy that even if three seconds before that I'd been fighting for another idea, once I realized I was wrong, I would admit it. And it's amazing what reputation you can build around that. And it is way more effective for business. All right, grit. If you haven't read Angela Duckworth's book on grit, I highly recommend it. It is amazing. I'll give you some of the key takeaways. The biggest part about grit is sustained effort over time.

If you lose interest quickly in something once or twice, no big deal, it is what it is. You realize that it wasn't your thing. But if you lose interest over and over and over and over and over and you always only enjoy the first six months of a business and then you want to move on, you lose interest very quickly. You need to work on developing your grit, being able to sustain that over time. Because building any business, you're going to encounter hard things. You need to be able to do those hard things, focusing on the hard things. In fact, I try to start every day with one of the hardest things to get it out of the way to remind myself that I'm willing to attack that. All right, you want to be able to persist through boredom and suffering. I told you guys, that's one of my superpowers. Long after everybody else gives up because they're not having fun anymore, I'm still there banging away at it. That's really, really important. In order to create momentum, to keep things moving and to finally get them across the finish line. A lot of people are able to get something, something to the 50 yard line or maybe even the 1 yard line, but they just can't quite push it over the finish line. And that is the difference between somebody who's A wantpreneur and somebody who ends up being successful the way that they want, they can get it across the finish line. All right, learn to tell the difference between a lack of grit and genuine disinterest. If you're not interested in something, you need to move on quickly. But like I said, if that becomes serial, you may have a problem. And if you're only good in the beginning, that's the sign you like grit. All right, who here already has their passion?

Man, that's awesome. I did not expect people to be honest. I thought everyone would raise their hand. Okay, that's amazing. The number one question I get. And I get this question so much you can't imagine. How do I find my passion?

The good news is passion is not something that's handed to you. It is not a lightning bolt moment. It's another nice, simple mathematical equation. First of all, you need to identify your areas of interest. Everybody's interested in something. And I find the big problem is people stop themselves because they say, yeah, well, that thing that I'm interested in couldn't possibly be a business. So let's take video games. Back in the 80s, back when everybody thought that video games were a joke. You're ruining your brain. It's like intellectual candy. Kids, get off the computer. Go play outside. Nintendo's a joke. It's ridiculous. And then we have an entire industry now that's born up around video games that has made untold numbers of millionaires. I met one of the founders of Riot Games that created League of Legends. The guy is like, I don't know, 31, maybe younger. I mean, just crazy. They do a billion dollars. A billion dollars in revenue from microtransactions of things that are not essential to play the game. The game is totally free to play. You don't need to pay for anything. Imagine that for a second. You're in an industry where they don't need to buy anything to get full use of your game. And yet you do over a billion dollars in revenue because they said, I love this. I like being around games. I like the competition of it. I think it's amazing. I'm gonna find a way. I'm gonna be inventive. I'm gonna look for areas to add value. And so they have. And more people now watch esports, the finale of League of Legends, than watch the finales. I think, of all major sports combined. It's crazy. They fill arenas.

It's absolutely bonkers. But that was somebody who said, this is something I love. It's Something I want to be around. It is an area of interest. And I don't care if other people tell me that it can't be a business. It's what I want to be around with enough ingenuity and enough forethought into what actually can be a business. Because some things can't. You can really do something with something that's an interest. Alright? So an interest, you need to gain mastery in it. During the process of gaining mastery, you'll find out whether you actually like that thing enough to become great at it. It is my belief. Whatever it is you set out to do as a business, there should be one litmus test you should be able to ask and affirmatively answer the following question, Do I want to know more about this than anyone else in the world?

Don't get into something unless you plan to be the best. That's my piece of advice. I know that's not going to sit well with everybody, but if you want to have the passion to make something big, to make big change, it's got to be something that you believe in beyond reasonable doubt. It's got to be something you've just got to make happen. So ask yourself, do I want to know more about this than anyone else? Because you're going to have to get better at it than anyone else if you want to be excellent and deliver on the promise. Interest over time plus mastery equals passion. That's how you find your passion. All right, you had two jobs I mentioned in the beginning. Job number two is build your business. Here's how we're going to do it. It's a new world, and a new world demands a new kind of company. Now, the reason that quest went so fast wasn't just because we had done something to our minds and gotten to the point where we were so angry that we were going to push this forward no matter what. It was understanding the timing of the marketplace and the technologies that were emerging and the technology that was emerging in 2009, when we first started thinking about the company, everybody thought Facebook was a joke. Everybody thought it was a huge distraction. And what we understood was it was just a megaphone. We didn't pass judgment on it. We just knew it was a megaphone and it was a free megaphone. And if we could give them reason to say something good within a couple of minutes of an interaction with us, they could have a global audience and tell people about that. So we saw that the timing was right there. And we also understood that people want to have impact.

Take this superhero Iron man, the movie franchise is off the charts. And what is it? At the same time that you have people occupying Wall street, you have them celebrating one of the richest people on the planet. Why? Because he dresses up like a superhero and he tries to save the world. People don't mind money. People don't mind that you want to create a beautiful lifestyle for you and your family. They don't mind people getting rich. But they care a lot about how you do it. They care a lot about what you do with it once you have it. Nobody likes Scrooge McDuck. Don't ever leak a photo of you swimming in your money. I promise it will not go well.

But if you have a vision for how your company could make the world a better place and you use social media to allow people to touch and be evangelized by your brand, if you're thinking, how can I make a product or a service that actually makes the lives better of the people that work at the company and the people who buy the product, if that's the question that you're asking, man, they will rally around you. And we live in this amazing time and you've got to take advantage of that. And it really freaks me out when people think that we're like, either the social movement is cresting or it's behind us. It's only gaining steam. The TV's going away, the mobile phone is becoming the television. Like these changes are a one way ticket to difference. I don't know exactly what it's going to look like. I just know it's not going to stop and it sure as hell isn't going to go in reverse.

And what I always try to do is get to the psychology of the problem Elon Musk talks about. In his business, it's all about breaking things down to the physics. If you sell the people, the physics in your world is psychology and understanding what motivates them. So your company needs to have a why. If you know Simon Sinek and his brilliant book Start with why, you'll know what we're talking about. The golden Circle. Most people know what they do. They may even know how they do it, but they oftentimes don't know why they do it. Why did we launch Quest Nutrition? Because we wanted to end metabolic disease.

Now, nobody knew that from looking at a protein bar, but our marketing material was about that. We didn't do features and benefits. We said, stop sacrificing. We said, you should hold food companies to a new standard. It's ridiculous that food companies Aren't engineering new equipment to make food that's both good for you and delicious. It's just ridiculous. Nobody's held their feet to the fire. People have been buying the same junk products for years. They're not going to change unless you force them to. And so we came along and said, we're going to be the bearer of standards. We know why we're doing what we're doing. So I can't release a product that has sugar in it. Why? Because that's not going to end metabolic disease. And that is my driver. I show up to work every day not thinking about making it rain and counting my money. I'm not swimming in it like scratch Scrooge McDuck. I'm coming every day thinking about two people, my mom and my sister. And I ask a very simple question. Is this advantageous for my mom and my sister, yes or no? If it is, I do it. If it's not, I don't. Now, a lot of times, what's advantageous for my mom and my sister was really fucking expensive. It was super annoying to have to do it because it was like, you watch a profit margin, it's like, oh, God.

But it becomes an easy filter. And every business has to have a filter. Every business needs to know what they say yes to and what they say no to. And if you don't have that blinding guiding light, when you scale, you will fall apart. And the reason you will fall apart, your customers won't know who you are. They won't know how to communicate your message to somebody else. Your employees won't know who you are. They won't know what to communicate to each other, let alone the outside world. So it has got to be blinding. You have to be able to write it down. It has to be super clear. It's got to be direct, and it's got to be meaningful, and it has to be real. It's got to actually be something that drives you. Because let me tell you, on those 2am Friday nights when my knuckles were bloody because no one knew how to repair our machines because we had engineered them ourselves, that was frustrating. That sucked. I would have much rather been doing something else at 2am on a Friday. But I believed in what we were trying to accomplish. The team believed in what we were trying to accomplish. And we weren't going to let ourselves down and we weren't going to let our customers down. Be transparent. It's a new world order, man. When I was coming up, you didn't be transparent. You put a marketing message out. You spun that shit like you tried to be as close to the truth as you could, but you didn't worry about transparency. But these days.

Consumers expect transparency. They want to know who you are, they want to know what you're doing. They want to know what it means to support you. Because it's not enough that your product is good. They want to know that your company stands for something, but it's also incredibly meaningful to your employees. You want to keep top quality talent around for a long time. You want to make sure that they know what's going on in the company. Alright, focus on value. Only value is sustainable. You want to make sure that you're delivering value at every touch point. Your customer service should deliver value. Your marketing message should deliver value. Your advertising in and of itself should deliver value. Your ads should be served to the people who, even though they can skip it after four seconds, they don't. That's when you're actually delivering value. All right, Be authentic. God, this is embarrassing, but this is actually. My wife and I, we actually go see Santa Claus every year and I actually posted this on my Instagram account. Why? Because it's real. That's really who I am. My wife and I are goofy as hell. And one of the things that we bonded over originally was that got a big response. People love seeing that kind of thing. They want to know who you really are. Now everybody has to decide where to draw the line for themselves. Most people would say, I should have drawn the line before this one. But this, that's us. All right? It's about connection. In today's day and age, you can argue about whether social media is fake connection or real connection, but I will tell you this. It is the predominant form of connection and one of the things we all need to think about. Stop passing judgment on this stuff, man. Just look at the truth of how it's being used. Go where the attention is. If people are using technology and you're like, yeah, but I don't think it's real connection. Someone else is going to eat your lunch because they get how to talk to people in the lingua franca. Okay, People today, consumers today. My mom and dad are on Facebook. So leverage technology to connect. Don't build or don't market, Build a community. This is so important. Social media is going to allow you to have real, meaningful relationships with your customers. I will tell you one very fast. In the very early days of Quest, when all of us had to go out and actually make the bars, I'm out Making bars. Our chief marketing officer's out making bars. Like, everybody's out there. There would be periods of time where we wouldn't respond to somebody on Facebook, but this one woman started responding, and we thought, wow, that's so weird. Like, did somebody create a fake account? Like, is that one of you guys? Everyone's like, no, man, we didn't do it. That's the real person. And she would tell people, like, oh, don't worry. I'm sure they'll get back to you quickly. They're really great company. And we were so. And this is, like, early 2010. We're like, what is happening? And so we reached out and said, hey, we want to put you on payroll. She's like, I don't want to be on payroll. And I'm like, whoa, okay, now I'm getting freaked out. Like, what do you want? And she was like, I just want you to continue to deliver a service. I'm a nutritionist, and I use your bars with a lot of people. I just want to make sure that you're around. So we developed this really cool relationship with her. We all got to know her. She held us to a standard. She was not always nice. She was always fair, but she wasn't always nice. If we were doing something poorly from a product standpoint, we. Weights and measures will let you ship product that's heavy. You just can't ship light. Okay, so imagine, get your bag of Doritos. Your bag of Doritos is going to be heavy. It's never going to be light now. So we're thinking, okay, cool. We have to comply with weights and measures. But we're a health and fitness company. So people are like, If I'm buying 60 grams, and that's what I have in my diet plan, I want to make sure I'm eating 60 grams and not 65. And so she would call us out on it. So we ended up buying a piece of equipment because of that relationship that we had with this woman that we'd never met. And then one day, she went silent. We wrote to her mom, hey, is everything okay? And her mom said, she passed away. She was, like, 28. And I got, like, really emotional, and I'd never met her, and I'm not like that guy, but I got legitimately emotional, and I wrote.

A manifesto, and I said to everyone in the company, basically, we exist to serve these people. Every one of them is trying to do something that we may know nothing about, and they're using our products. And so we started celebrating her, her name's Joy Romita. We've been doing it for four years now. The Joy Romita Superfan Award. We bring somebody in that's been amazing to the community. We just give them a big blowout party at our headquarters, give them behind the scenes access to cool stuff just to say thank you. And that's when we really realized it may not be the kind of relationship you have with your mom or your brother or your sister or your spouse, but it's meaningful, man, in a way that business relationships haven't been since like the local general store. And you saw the same people come in every day. It really is like if you can flip that switch in your mind and see it as something beautiful, I'm telling you, it will open you up to a whole new way of interacting with your customers. Because there's a lot of amazing stuff going on in your communities that you may not even know about or that you could really feed into and build into something amazing. And if you stay focused on it being a community of people that are supporting themselves, each other and your company, then you can do some pretty incredible things. This is how you build a community. This is very straightforward. Understand this pyramid of influence. At the top you have thought leaders. Thought leaders are the people that nobody understands. They're the doctors, they're the person that talks over your head. They're the people that never make it on radio or TV because nobody knows what they're talking about. Under them are the influencers. Now the thought leaders are the ones that really get it. They're the ones that can explain a Krebs cycle to you. So for instance, by the way, I own a nutrition company, but I am not a thought leader. I'm an influencer. I have a thought leader that I trust that I listen to, happens to be my business partner.

But I'm the one that then translates that for the masses. So when you're trying to build a community, the person you're looking for at the top, you want to make sure the thought leaders believe in your product. So you're going to send it to them, you're going to explain it to them, you're going to make sure that your product is real. Because they will smell BS a mile away now if they're into it. And then you go after the influencers who will then ask the thought leaders what they think. Thought leaders will give it the green light. The influencers then will begin telling the masses. Influencers in my world are people with six pack abs. They're the guy at the gym, they're the girl at the beach in the bikini people that other people walk up to and say, whoa, what did you do to get in such great shape? And we wanted to make sure their answer was, I ate a Quest bar. And that was how we grew the business. And we wrote individualized letters to a bunch of influencers and a bunch of thought leaders saying, hey, we know who you are. Which, by the way, we were very sincere. It was all real. We know who you are. We think this product brings value to you and the people that follow you. And we just want you to talk about it. If you hate it, tell people you hate it. And if you love it, tell them you love it. All right, you want to find your thousand screaming fans. The thousand screaming fans are those influencers that are going to get attention for you identifying them. Most people think of these people as getting to your thousand screaming fans for you. But what they should be thinking about is this. Now, I'm sure most of you knew the people in the previous slide. I'm sure most of you don't know any of the people in this slide, but this woman here. Anybody know who Jenna Marbles is? Show of hands here. A couple yeses. There we go. All right. Jenna Marbles has a daily reach of 20 million people. That's bigger than the biggest show on TV. That's crazy.

This is the world of social. It seems hidden to most people over 35, but it is in plain sight.

These are the people that you're going to be going after. Jenna Marbles, we sent her dogs sweatshirts and a whole stack of our product. Now, why did we send her dog sweatshirts? Because her dogs are little chihuahuas as skinny as hell, and they always look cold. So we had some custom made sweatshirts sent her. She loved them so much, she started promoting the bars and showing people what we had sent her and thanking us. Now, no money exchanged hands. It was just us doing something that she would think was cool, that her followers would think was cool. And we got to tap into that reach. That's the power of social. I won't belabor these points. Social is still, despite what you may think, largely free. It's real time connection, raw feedback. Think 30 years ago how much you would have paid for real time feedback from your actual customer, written right to you, telling you if they think you're amazing or a jerk or whatever they may think is absolutely incredible, and they want you to respond and win them back over. It is amazing. It lets you test things rapidly, which is amazing. And it lets you build a community very rapidly. All right, this is my favorite meme. What if I told you customers hate your content? Because they probably do. Most people are so focused on selling, they forget to add value. So let the test be when you run an ad on especially YouTube, if you give people the option to skip it, do they? And if they do, your ad sucks. Data, data, data, right? Trust the data. That's the beautiful thing. And look, I have put up so much content that people hate. That's just the way it is. But you've got to look at it. Iterate, change, adapt to make sure that you're adding value at every touch point that you have, because only value is sustainable. We talked about that. All right, Execution. This is our final movement. Only execution matters. Being able to close your eyes and envision the future the way that you want it to be is meaningless unless you can open your eyes and then execute against that. And it starts with step one. Have very clear goals. I find most people have a nebulous idea of what they're trying to accomplish, but they don't have the clarity of something that can be transmitted. So let that be your test. Can this idea be rapidly transmitted down a line of people? Or after one or two people, does it become unintelligible? Because people don't know exactly what you're doing, because you haven't codified it, made it tight and concise in terms of what you're trying to accomplish. All right, don't be romantic. Be pragmatic. You may love. And this has happened to me so many times, it hurts. And I share your pain. You may make an ad. A video. We once made a video called the 12 Days of Questmas. And we wrote this. We wrote a song and we had carolers come in and sing it. And there was actual snow. It was unbelievable. Everybody at the company was freaking out. It was so fun and so cool. And if you were my mom, you loved it. But if you weren't my mom, you did not care. And so nobody watched it. We even had Chihuahuas eating the bars. It was so cool. But we had to be pragmatic. We thought it would be neat. We thought it captured the spirit of the brand, but nobody cared about it. So we have not repeated that mistake. You want to make sure that you're looking at the data. All right. Going back to that earlier conversation we were having about knowing more about something than anyone else in the world, that is the position you want to put yourself in. And my father in law once gave me this advice, he was the first person I met that had really been successful. And he said, what you want to do is know more about any situation than anyone else in the world. And I actually remember what I said to him. I said, yeah, my boss doesn't really think like that. I have since apologized to my father in law for giving me such an amazing piece of information and me doing nothing with it for like six years. But once I understood that the only path to excellence is to truly become an expert, the only path to excellence is to actually get good at something. These days, in a hyper connected world where within minutes of an interaction with you, your product, whatever, someone can have a global audience and tell people what they think. That product better be awesome. But the great news is the world's been democratized now. You no longer have to have 150 million dollar ad budget in order to cut through the clutter. In our first eight months, we were profitable at month six. In our first eight months, we didn't invest more than $10,000.

Because we had a product that actually delivered value.

Our marketing message delivered value.

And if you focus on that, if you focus on making something that's better than what other people are doing now, you really can cut through the noise very, very quickly. And you got to grind, baby, grind. That was me for almost two years.

People see where the company has gotten. They see me up giving speeches. But what they don't see is that in the middle of the night my hands used to wake me up. Cramping, closed. Because all day I was making protein bars. And in the very beginning, we were running the technology company during the day and then going and making protein bars by hand at night with rolling pins and hand handheld blades that we cut the bars and then wrapped them three at a time. We wrapped them three at a time. We would make 1200 bars. I think nine of us made 1200 bars over a six or seven hour period. Now in a day we make 1.5 million.

But that's where it starts. It starts with the willingness to persist long after it's boring. It starts with the ability to focus your end customer long after you're exhausted. It starts with the ability to think about those people that you really want to serve when you're scared and have no idea how you're going to pull it off. But you chose to believe that you could do it. You chose to believe that. And because you chose to believe that you were able to achieve excellence.

All right, I'm going to leave you with this. This is the central mantra of my life. It doesn't matter who you are today.

It really doesn't. So if you feel like you're incapable of something, maybe you are today.

But just because you're incapable of something today doesn't mean that you're not capable of learning that thing. So it's not about who you are today, it's about who you want to become and the price you're willing to pay to get there. And I promise you, the day that you're willing to pay any price, you'll achieve what you want to achieve. Thank you.

Hey Brand Builders, we hope you enjoyed this podcast by capitalism.com check out our website for upcoming events and additional content about building businesses, building brands, and investing. My name is Max Perwick and my mission in life is to transform businesses into brands. If you have any feedback about the show, any guests you want to see, case studies covered, topics explored, or frankly, just any questions about branding in general, just shoot me an email@maxmaxrandbuilderstrategy.com again, that's maxrandbuilderstrategy.com and I'd love to hear from you. One quick note, if you could subscribe to the podcast or even leave us a review on itunes. These things really do make a big difference in helping us book amazing guests and then also helping people just like you find the podcast. So thanks and we'll see you next time.

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