How Did This Founder Execute 5-Year Plan Within 18 Months? | Founders Wisdom Podcast With Dale Dewey

Well welcome everyone to another edition and of the OR podcast Founder Wisdom, we have Dale with us today. Dale Dewey. He is the founder of Luxury Solutions and also Founder Solutions and he has founded various business in the past, some of which are in France, Paris in the luxury field. So it's going to be an interesting interview for sure. Del, can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your entrepreneurial founders past?

Sure, sure. So briefly, I started my career in consumer products at Colgate Palm Olive in New York. Spent five years there, I was recruited into the fragrance business and I moved to Europe for an extended period of time working in the fragrance business for Firmaniche and Givaudal creative side of the business, working with clients like Unilever, colgate, Elizabeth Arden, L', Oreal, P&G, et cetera. After about 10 years in Europe doing that, I moved back to the United States and I became an entrepreneur and I started a series of companies. The first company I started was called Fragrance Solutions. And we were sort of the JD Power of fragrance. Fragrance. We did all the research for the companies. At the time, Unilever was buying a portfolio of fragrance companies like Calvin Klein and Elizabeth Arden and P and P had bought licenses for Gucci and Hugo Boss and Giorgio Beverly Hills. And these big consumer product companies were extremely interested in having data. And it's an industry that traditionally had no data at all. It was all based on like a fashion sense of just intuition. But as these businesses became very large and some of the brands became 100, $150 million, they desperately wanted data. And so my timing was good. And my first client was Estee Lauder and the second was Chanel. And before you knew it, pretty much the whole industry was buying our data and our stuff, which is called Fragrance Track. And after we had a five year plan that we accomplished in the first sort of 18 months and sold the company to the NPD Group, which is a large market research holding. And after that.

I have a question. Sorry to interrupt here, but basically I am surprised by the fact that Calvin Klein was. Are you telling me they started as a fragrance company?

No, no, that's not what I'm saying.

Okay, okay. Not at all.

Most of the.

They started in fashion, right?

Yeah, all of. All of the fashion companies eventually market fragrances. And more often than not they offer. They do that through a license arrangement. So they'll have a beauty company market the fragrances for them. It could be Elizabeth Arden or it could be Estee Lauder. You know, for example, Estee Lauder markets Joe Malone, Estee Lauder Markets, Tom Ford and so on. Calvin Klein was eventually bought by Elizabeth Arden, who was in turn eventually bought by Unilever. So Unilever was the large consumer products company that owned the license to the Calvin Klein fragrance.

Yeah.

So go ahead.

So I have like I own the brand, say Google boss, and I want to develop my fragrance. What type of deal happens? Can I, why don't I just hire, you know, like a chemist or a fragrance expert internally or do I go see a consulting firm? Then we do, we do a rev share deal or do I just pay this company to develop the formula? How does it work?

Because if you're a fashion company, you're in the business of selling in your own stores or to Neiman Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue or whoever it is. And you're not a consumer products company, you're a fashion company. So the expertise, also the distribution. Big companies like Unilever or P and G or Estee Lauder, they have hundreds of salespeople with thousands of points of sale. It's a distribution thing and it's just, it's more convenient. They have the expertise, they have the resources. It's pretty much how it's always done. Not always. A few companies try to do it in house, but the fact, you know, fashion and fragrance are very similar from an image perspective, but very different in terms of how they're marketed.

Yeah, I mean it's different senses, right? The eyes is, you know, the clothes you're wearing and then the smell that comes with it, that's another sense. So that's super interesting. I also have a follow up question. How does one execute a five year plan in 18 months without dying?

Well, just that things. It became more successful more rapidly than anticipated. So I can't remember it's been a while what the exact business plan was, but it might have been like we're going to get six or eight clients the first year and another six or eight the next year and then another six or eight the third year and grow to 25 or 30 major companies as our clients for this research. And we pretty much got them all in the first 18 months.

That's crazy. And well, congrats on selling the company to NPD Group. That brought you to Catrion's Fine Accessories, right?

Yes. Yeah, that was another business that I bought simultaneously. I had an idea to create a fragrance specialty business. So kind of like what Bath and Body Works is to toiletries, shampoos and bath foam shower gels I wanted to do for fragrances. That eventually is like somewhat similar to what l' Occitane has become or some of the other types. It was kind of ahead of. I was kind of ahead of the curve there. I also wanted to do custom fragrances, which eventually did come into vogue. But as it turns out, this business that I went to see, this location in Greenwich, Connecticut to open the first store, but the real estate person who was showing me the space had it wrong. It wasn't the space which was for lease, it was the business which was for sale. And the business was this fashion accessories business. And so I had decided that it was interesting. So I bought the business with my own money and with a loan from the sba. And it was a fashion accessories business in Greenwich. Greenwich is a very wealthy community. The main street, which is Greenwich Avenue, had a lot of traditional stores on it, like, for example, you know, barber shops and restaurants, shoe stores and stuff like that, but didn't really have luxury. And I really felt like it was going to become a big luxury, sort of like the Rodeo Drive of the East. It's not quite the Rodeo Drive of the east, but there's a lot of luxury business like Tiffany open there and Saks Fifth Avenue open there and Bottega open there. We sold a lot of Kate Spade at the very early days and before or just after I started my third company, which we'll get to in a minute, which is E commerce business, I decided I had too much on my plate and so I decided I wanted to sell it. So I. I called up Andy Spade, Kate Spade's husband, and said, you know, you should buy my store. And he said. And I said, well, this is where all your customers live. And he said, I agree. And so he bought it. And that. That was the store that's there in Greenwich, which was my store, was the second Kate Spade store in the world. The only other one was one in Soho at the time. So then after I sold Fragrance Solutions, I wanted to take advantage of the Internet, the E Commerce that was just starting. And I started a company called jasmine.com and it was all to be a lot of contextual marketing. We had Museums online. We did a partnership with Procter and Gamble, which was one of my former clients from Fragrance Solutions. And we had an exclusive deal with them to market Hugo Boss fragrances online. We had a marketing partnership with Procter and gamble. They invested $12 million in marketing. We raised $5 million in venture capital. We had a joint venture with Ulta Cosmetics, the big retailer, to do our back end and inventory and you know, that all worked extremely well. But that was sort of Internet 1.0. They're talking about Internet 3.0 now. Internet 1.0. You know, hardly anyone had a computer at home. Almost nobody had Internet connections. If they did, it was just simply a dial up connection. So we were just too far ahead of the curve. So we sold ourselves to a company called ashford.com, which was a luxury portal backed by Sequoia and Benchmark as well as Austin Ventures. It had been taken public by Goldman Sachs and it was also an investment from Bernard Arnault. So it was a pretty big deal at the time.

But

everything blew up in spring of 2000. The famous dot com meltdown.

Yeah, that's a good domain by the way. I don't think that's the one that. I don't think you own that anymore.

No, there's a very funny story behind that.

Okay.

After, after we sold it, they weren't using our domain anymore. They were pointing our domain for our traffic. But ashford got sold two or three times and someone sillily allowed the domain jasmine.com to expire. I was on a business trip in Palm beach one day and I'm reading the USA Today and in the front page in the lower left hand corner where they have those statistics, it said top, top three URLs sold in whatever year it was. And the first one was sex.com $12 million. And the next one was something else. And the third one was jasmine.com $1 million. $1 million. Sold for a million dollars. I bought it for $9.959.95 and we had a very sensuous ad campaign. The word Jasmine is, is a, is a sensuous word. We chose Jasmine because it was a short name and it's also a, you know, a flower that fragrances, used often in fragrances. So it was a great name. But you know, it's very hard to find good URLs and the shorter the better. And this, you know, sex company bought it and it's now the largest sex company online from what I understand. Really.

And

I was giving a presentation to the French American Chamber of Commerce several years ago in Houston and they said, well, we've been reading your bio and see that you used to be the CEO of Jefferson.com. can you tell us a little bit more about that? So I had to tell basically the story I just told you. It's a pretty funny joke, but it's actually true.

Yeah. I mean, what a coincidence. And yet I guess in 98 is a good domain to buy today would probably be worth like 2, 3, 4, 5 million. That type of domain. So kind of interesting. And that brought you to Christophle, or Christophle as English people would say.

Christophe. Yeah, yeah. So I had done some consulting work for a luxury catalog business in New York and woman who was the founder knew the principals and Christoph is still a family owned company dating to 1830. They were looking for CEO and you know, I spoke French and had lived in Europe for a long time and obviously was also American and it was a good fit for them and they hired me as their CEO and I did that for not too long actually. But I learned a lot. It was very interesting experience. And after that I was asked to be CEO of Fauchon, the French gourmet food company. So that those two experiences really gave me a lot of luxury good experiences.

And one year only at Christophe. Like what, what happened? Like did, did you had like your, your whole thing after a year where you was the CEO thing, not like the, your ideal job? Like what happened by only one year?

Well, in a nutshell, I just didn't really get along too well with the management. Management. They had a very different philosophy than I did or I had a very different philosophy than they did. There was some disagreements and misunderstandings so I decided to leave.

I have a question regarding that. You know, like one of my first early childhood experience listening to my entrepreneurial dad. He traveled to Paris various times. He was in marketing in textile field. And he told me that French people were very bad at doing business. They got very emotional at the negotiating table and all that. How different is the culture, let's say the North American culture, Canada and US is somewhat similar via the European way of doing things. Is it that different and have you found it a pattern, like a problematic pattern?

Well, I lived and worked in France for quite a number of years in a French company. I also worked in Geneva, Switzerland in a French speaking company. I also worked in London and that's an English speaking country obviously. But it's also. Well, until recently, until they Brexited, it's part of Europe, more of a European mentality than American. You know, when you're an American working in Paris for the first time, you can't understand why they do things the way they do. It doesn't seem to be efficient or make sense. When you're an American who's lived in Europe for a number of years and you come back to United States, you can't understand why Americans do things they do. So the Answer is that things are different. You know, things are, but things have changed. The French, for example, who I know the best in Europe, they were always behind the curve. You know, they were. If we got computers in the early 90s, they'd get computers in the late 90s. If we got online in the late 90s, they get online in the early 2000s. They were always sort of five years behind us. They didn't speak English very well. But that's all changed. They're very advanced. They're very much in line. Certainly in the luxury goods business that I worked in, they lead the world. They dominate the quintessential leaders. So there can be no reproach. Although the European approach is just different. It's a very different culture and different lifestyle. It doesn't make it worse. It doesn't necessarily make it better either. There's things that are much better and there's some things that are less good. It just takes use. It takes time to get used to. And it's to try to find the best compromise or the best. The best of both worlds.

Yeah, different cultures. And like you said, I think some were kind of slow to adopt new technology, especially in retail and luxury. Good. I mean, maybe, but luxury sometimes is cinema with like latest tech and all that. For example, yesterday I was looking at the comparison, the new Rolls Royce versus the Maybach. And the Rolls Royce is still very much old school, but the Maybach is like very, very high tech, everything inside. And some prefer the Maybach to the Rolls Royce, which is more authentic, traditional. More on that later. So tell us about like Fourchon, which brings us to that company, which looks like it's still active today as well. Yeah.

So Foshon, that's quite a story as well. I was asked by the primary investor who had recently taken control of Fauchon to help him turn around the US market. There had been a previous CEO who had been very ambitious in trying to expand into New York, who over expanded much too rapidly and created a lot of financial stress. And then they had also bought another. They bought Flo Prestige, which is another gourmet food catering company in Paris. And they just got stretched too thin. And you know, Fauchon's been around for a long time, but, you know, there are. It is the school of pastry chefs in the world. The finest pastry chefs in the world have come out of Fauchon. It's an incredible company and culture. They've recently, in the last year or so, run into very great financial difficulties because of COVID because all their Stores and everything were shut down. And I know that they're in some. Some degree of financial difficulties, but they've been around since I think it's 1886. It still has a great following. They're just the quintessential, you know, they're the quintessential gourmet food company in a country, which is the quintessential source of gourmet food. So it's quite a company and quite a brand.

Yeah. And I must ask, like, you started your career 84. I mean, you were the owner of some of your companies. I mean, you look very successful. Ten years later, you were CEO of Christophe, then Fauchon. How was life back then? Like, I mean, you must have got like a very nice salary. Like, how's life? I need to ask, and probably you've made lots of money in your life. Lots of kids are based their life goals on how much money they make and how was life back then? And tell me, what's your philosophy on wealth, money and what's a life that's well lived?

Well, I wrote a book called, which I would recommend to your listeners. It's a guide to retirement by 35. And I can tell a brief story about that. Yeah, there you see it there on screen. I was hitchhiking. This is when I was in college from Denver back to Michigan, where I grew up. And I got picked up by a man in the white pickup truck. And he were very early in the morning and I'd probably been out having some adult beverages the night before. And he says to me, so what are you going to do in life? And I said, well, you know, I'd like to, at the time I'm interested in going into the foreign Service. And goes, oh, very interesting, yes, I've got some friends in the Foreign Service. And then he said, and then after that, I said, well, I'd like to go into international business. He goes, oh, interesting. Yeah, that's kind of what I do. And then I thought to myself, this guy is not just your average guy driving a white pickup truck. He's obviously some, you know, internationally involved guy. And I started asking him, I said, well, what is it that you do? And he says, well, you know, I go places where they don't have things, and I go to other places where they have those things. And I put those two people together. I said, I said, what does that mean? Well, so for example, in Russia, this is 1981 or two, you know, the heart height of the Cold War. You know, Russia doesn't have Hair dryers. And I'm like, doesn't have hair dryers. What do you mean? He goes, yeah, no, they can't get hair dryers in Russia for the most part. I said, oh, okay. So what do you do? He goes, well, I go find places that make hair dryers. And then I put the two together, and I'm like, oh, this guy's doing these deals behind the Iron Curtain. This is amazing. And he says, yeah, well, it is. I said, yes, been a good life. Except that, you know, all I've done is work. I mean, all I do is work. I. You know, I had to give up two possibilities of getting married. I hardly have any friends. I've got no social life, you know. You know, it just hasn't been that great. But my father had worked for some company from the time he was 22 to the time he was 65. He retired, got the proverbial gold watch, and two years later died of a heart attack. And when that happened, I just said to myself, I'm not. I don't want to live my life that way. I want to. I think I'll just work my ass off until I'm 35, and then I'll retire and I'll never work again. Wow, that sounds like a good plan. That sounds good. And he looks at me and Sundays, and I'm 34, and next year I'm going to retire, and I'm never going to work another day in my life. Wow. And he goes, okay, I gotta drop you off here. Now I'm exiting

that brick of a knowledge like that bomb, you know?

Yeah. And that just resonated with me all this time and for years. And I started having a. I don't know how much money he had to retire for the rest of his life. I have no idea. We didn't discuss that. But I came up with this theory several years later that if you had a million dollars and you owned your own house, you could retire for the rest of your life. And, you know, if you make 10% return on a million dollars, that's $100,000 and $100,000 salary can give you a pretty darn good life.

Right.

Especially if you own your own house, which means you have no mortgage or no rent. And about 10 years ago, I arrived in California, and I had some time on my hands, and I said, I'm going to write this book. And I wrote the book, and this is kind of part of the FIRE movement, if you've heard of financial independence retirement.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I've heard it.

And I was kind of ahead of the curve on that idea. I didn't invent that, I didn't call it that. But that's essentially what this book's about. And the book is kind of. The first part is describing what the definition of retirement. I speak a lot of people your age and they'll say, well, I don't want to retire, I like to work. What would I do?

Yeah, exactly.

If you don't, if you don't want to be, you don't have to stop working. The definition, you have to read the first chapter. The definition of retirement is that you don't have to work. Okay? You have to work. If you don't have enough money to pay for your rent and your food and your utilities and whatnot, then you have to work. Right? So you're obligated to work. If you have enough money that you don't have to work, you could continue to work because you choose to. And the day that someone, you know, something or some job is something you don't like, just walk out. Yep. Because you have the means and you have the financial means to be independent. So that's the whole idea of the book. I had always meant to, you know, get behind it and market it, but I just got so busy with so many different projects over the years. I would, I'd love to, you know, go on a speaking tour or speak to young people. Half the book is a sort of a theory and philosophy. This goes back to your question, you know, what's the definition of a good life? You know, for me, the definition of good life is living lots of different places and experience lots of things in life and enjoying life, you know, your family and your friends. Money is a part of that equation. You have to have a certain amount of money to live comfortably, but you don't have to, you don't have to have millions and millions and millions in my opinion, to live comfortably.

Oh, no, like definitely not. I'm in Mexico and I can tell you that like at, let's say, 30k a year here you're a millionaire. Like you can have everything. I live a very good life, you know, and I don't consider myself rich. Well, I mean financially, but I'm rich first. From so many other perspectives. Time, energy, you know, like the Tony Robbins definition. Do anything with anyone at any time, something like that. Well, I, I'm kind of the definition of that, so. Well, that, that's cool. I have so many follow up questions. First, I thought that you were the, the man, the white pickup. I was like, huh, okay, like luxury. And he lives in a pickup or something. I. I mean, that. That was my. My first thought, you know, maybe because I'm. I'm searching right now, like, for a truck that I will convert in. Well, a van, let's say, in some kind of camper van. They call it van life, you know, to travel a lot with, like, everything that's happening with COVID I think it's one of the best ways to travel and, you know, be in nature. Very, very nice definition that you put up. Then.

You.

You mentioned, like, 1 million 10%. Well, I think to get the 10%, you need to be kind of good at knowing where to invest your money. Would you manage your own investments or would you outsource it to some kind of financial advisor?

Well, the simplest answer to that is you can invest in the S&P 500 index fund. One good one is IVV. That's the symbol. It's just a. It's from. I think it's from Vanguard. It's a 500s and P500. It mimics the S and P500.

The.

You know, right now we're going through a lot of turbulence in the markets, but over the last hundred years or so, the average return of the stock market is about 10 or 11%. Sometimes it drops down to 9, sometimes it goes up to 12. But it's been about 10% on average for. You can Google that. You know, average return of the S&P 500, historic average or something like that. And you'll get that so that, first of all, you only pay capital gains taxes on that. You don't pay income taxes, so you would only pay 15%. So you would net $85,000. That would give you $7,000 a month. Now, if it was a terrible year in the stock market and it went down 10%, okay, well, it depends on how much you need to live on. But if you needed, say, I don't know, three, $4,000 a month, that would be $50,000 for a year. You would have to steal $50,000 from your principal. So if the first year you had a million dollars and it went up by 10%, you'd have 1.1 million. If you spend 50,000, you'd have a million and fifty. If the next year it went down by 10%, it would be down to 950ish. And you'd have to steal money from your principal. You have to take 50, you'd be down to 900. But the next year, it might go up 20% over time. And if you're retiring at 35, you have a very long term horizon. You can live to 100, say. So it's 65 years of investments. Right. So it can go on for a really long time. And over time the averages will come back to that. Right.

I need to talk to you about your diet. If you plan to live to 100, your, your daily routine, like, are you serious with this 100? Because I plan to live like 150 and I'm serious about it. I'm a huge on biohacking. Like, do you have, is that a serious plan for you?

It's been a serious plan for a very long time. Okay, so good.

By the way, you must take care of yourself, like in a pretty good way. Like, you work out, do you?

I was skiing yesterday.

You know, King is epic, but yet like to live 100 not the best sport.

Well, it depends if you don't judging

on what happened to Schumacher and.

Well, that's true. Yeah, that was a freak accident what happened to Schumacher. Well, so I, I had a guy who I work with and I also talk about this in my book and also have a new book that I'm working on called Life by the Dozen.

Okay. Do you have a landing page on that one?

No, it has. I haven't. I've just. It's just at the very beginning. I could send you a copy of the prologue if you're interested.

Yes, I am.

And what is about so life by the dozen? So about 12 years ago, because I'm about to turn 60, I was playing golf with a couple of buddies back in Michigan. And at the end of the game, one of my friends is not bad for a couple of 50 year olds. I said, well, I'm not 50, I'm 48. I don't want to be 50 yet. He goes, well, whatever, it's more or less the same thing. And I thought, yeah, I guess he's right, you know, it's more or less the same thing. And I'm driving away. I said, 48, I'm 48. 48. I said, no, it's four dozen. And I said, yeah, four dozen years old. And I was just. Silly conversation with myself.

Yeah.

And I thought to myself, why do people make such a big deal of like the big three zero, the big four zero, the big five zero, whatever. What's the big. Why not count by the. By the twelves, by the dozens. And I started thinking, it's like, does that make any sense I said, well, zero to 12 year kid, right? No one would argue with that. 13 to 24, you're an adolescent. You know, I wouldn't say teenager, but you're an adolescent. And it's true. In real life, your brain is still developing until you're 25.

Rough waters, I'd say.

So that makes sense. You know, for example, you got out of College at 22. At 23, if it's a Tuesday night, one of your buddies says, let's go down to the bar and have a couple of beers. You say, yeah, let's go. Right? But if you're 33, you say, no, I got work to do tomorrow. You know, you get more serious about things. So 25 to 36 is sort of the first stage of career. Maybe get married, maybe start to have kids. 37 to 48 is, you know, the heart of your career. And raising your family 49 to 60 is, you know, getting toward the end of your career, becoming an empty nester. And then 61 to 72 is sort of like the transition between career and retirement. And then 73 to 84 is like the beginning of older age. 85 to 96 is. Is old age for sure. And then 97 to 100 if you go over is like, you know, you're into your golden years of like an extended life. You know, there's a guy who I read, I recommend this book to you. Living to 100 by Thomas Pearls. Okay? And he wrote this book and he described how you can live to 100. And it's based on 3500 interviews with centenarians in New England, people who have lived to 100. And he came up with this acronym, Aging Age. Yeah, that book. It's a really good book. And he said, these are the factors that help you live to 100. Based on statistical research that was done with Harvard, I think, in Boston University. It's a very serious medical study. A is. Hang on a second.

Aging acronym. Thom Burrells. Google that.

I'm having a blank here. A is attitude. Sorry. Hey, I lost my.

That's a good one.

Having a positive attitude is not just a concept. It's statistically found in research that people with positive attitudes live longer.

It's obvious.

It's just truism.

Okay?

G is the only thing you really don't control is genetics.

Okay?

Okay. If you have family with good genetics that have long living genes, you're going to live longer on average than people who have bad genetics. Right. E is exercise. It goes without saying, a lot of These things are just sort of like. Of course, right? If you exercise, that's going to be better for living a long life, right? I is very interesting. Intellectual stimulation, curiosity. It's not just that, it's. So the best examples of intellectual crosswords

like that could be part of it.

But the really, the best example is learning a foreign language, learning to play a musical instrument because it forces your brain to use a different part of your brain. So it enhances the synapses in your brain. It literally stimulates you. It's like brain exercise. And you see that with people who retire and then just do nothing except become couch potatoes. They kind of lose it. Whereas people are like really active mentally and physically. They're like all together and on it. Yesterday I skied with a guy who was 70 years old. He skied just as fast as I did and I ski really fast. And he's like the number one ranked guy nationally in Nasdar.

Wow.

So, you know, it can be done.

I want to be like that.

Yeah. Age I. I said. And it's nutrition.

Yep, nutrition.

The biggest thing about nutrition is to stay away from red meat, you know, doesn't mean you can't eat any of it. Just don't eat lots of it. You know, eat the right types of oils, you know, olive oil and not, not some of the bad oils. And it just, just common sense. There's a lot of good diets out there, but you know, just if you eat properly, that's important, right? H E E I G G G. So he said, I don't have a good G. So G is get away from the bad shit. Okay?

And the number one genetics again.

No, it's not, it's not. The number one bad shit is smoking. Statistically for people who smoke like a pack a day, they will live 15 years longer. Less. 15 years less now, you know, there's smokers who say, well, my grandpa lived at 102 and he smoked a pack a day for 80 years.

Genetics. Genetics.

Yeah, but, but on average that's the worst thing.

I think stress is even worse than smoking. I'd say like, you know, and that comes in with the, the A attitude, I call it mindset. You know, people that stress all the time and that let. Lets a lot of toxic shit come out of their mouth. You know, these people just don't get it. You know, every time they do, they reduce, let's say a week or two of their lifespan. But yeah, that's very cool. And talking, talking about exercise. Do you exercise daily and what, what does your typical diet look like.

Well, I haven't been doing such a good job recently on exercise. We moved because we moved here to New Hampshire. We've been fixing how. I mean, my exercise has been more like fixing, painting, you know, moving stuff around. And in the summer, I do a lot of swimming. Swimming, I think, is probably the best exercise you can possibly do.

Yeah, it's very meditative as well. I'm reading the Atlas of Art by Brittany Brown, and she mentioned that it's a form of meditation, and I agree. You know, as an Ironman, I spent lots of time in the pool and just swimming and looking at this black line, you know, and it's very meditative. I mean, it's quiet. I thought at one point of buying an audio thing that I would go and listen to podcasts. And I have this obsession with always learning, but sometimes it's good to chill as well, and swimming's very good.

Did you do the Ironman?

Yeah, yeah, I did various Ironman.

Did you do the one in Kona?

Kona? No, it's on my list. I also have the Vermont one on my list, which is near where you are. I might do the Montremblan one as well. In Quebec. You've probably been there as a skier. Yeah, I have it on my bucket. I did. I did the Los Cabos one, which was kind of nice. And I did the Cozumel one, which was even nicer. The most. Well, one of the clearest water in the world. Could see the fish as well.

Beautiful. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, it's. It's a very nice place.

One of my clients was Mark Sisson, who wrote the book Primal Blueprint.

This guy's a beast. I know. Mike Sisson. Yeah. Primal Blueprint. So what. What did you coach him? What kind of service was it?

Well, he was my client. I helped him, you know, with the strategy of his business and helped him pivot from. He was selling a lot of supplements. And I, you know, when I spoke to him, I said, you know, Mark, if I follow the Primal Blueprint, why would I need to take supplements? And he said, well, you really wouldn't have to if you. If you follow his diet and his approach to living.

I kind of agree with that, you know. Well, you know, like, I started. I had my. My own supplement startup. It was a brain optimization supplement. And I started it because I used to take 50 supplements a day. When I started, you know, biohacking big time, was like, yeah, let's make one pill with all of these things. And, yeah, in an ideal world, you wouldn't need that, but I mean, you would need to eat all of the colors of the rainbow. Me on my side, I have problems digesting vegetables and salads, for example. So it's kind of hard to have the perfect diet and include all of your macronutrients in one plate, right?

Yeah. Well, he was a marathon runner. He was the first alternate to the U.S. olympics. He's, he was an Ironman athlete in Kona. He was the head of the anti doping commission, I think, for triathlon.

Interesting.

He's a fascinating guy, very successful, but he was constantly in pain. And he said, why is this? You know, what is wrong? I mean, it's like I'm one of the finest tuned athletes in the world and I constantly have these aches and pains and problems and issues.

Yep.

And he's, he spent a lifetime or, you know, at least 20 or 30 years or more studying every type of diet and whatnot. And he came up with this, that picture of him.

He's like, he's ripped.

Like, he's like 70. He's like 70 is ripped. You know, he's sick. Yeah, I think he's close to 70. Yeah. And he, he sort of took on this whole thing. He created this whole Mark Staley apple, which became very successful blog. And then he had Primal Blueprint site and then he started Primal Nutrition and you know, he sold it for $200 million to Kraft Heinz. He's a highly successful entrepreneur.

Yeah, I've heard that. That's, that's such a great deal. Laird Hamilton, I mean, that's another very fit person. He's fit.

I met Laird Hamilton in Malibu with, with Mark.

Okay. Okay. I mean, he has some kick ass trainings in the, in the pool. And yeah, he's, he's definitely one of my top guys. You know, just, you know, the fear thing is always on my mind. You know, I restarted sparring recently, boxing and you know, like. And I restarted it because last year I was like, I don't have fears anymore. You know, but that's not true if you dig. You always find fears, you know, fighting another human, for example. And another one of my fears is surfing. I mean, I almost drowned like two or three years ago in Huatulco, Mexico. The waves weren't that big, but they were probably, you know, like three, four meters. And I got freaked out, man, in the water and was like, shit, am I going to die today? I got like rolled by wave and it took me like five seconds to go up as the waves were so big. But yeah, that those things are super interesting and these guys, they're kind of cool. Although the supplement business, I'm not sure if you, while you probably checked the economics of it, it's not too attractive yet. Like sure, for the cashing out and selling for 200 million, that's cool.

But running that was based on the foods, not based on the supplements, you know.

Okay, okay, yeah. But you know this business. Well, I mean your retail guy. I tried this business. Obviously I'm younger and I'm more like Internet type of person but I wasn't that pleased with the, you know, like E commerce side of things and getting into stores and all of that. And it's one reason why I dropped that business, you know, that supplement business. Well, would you agree that these businesses are a bit more challenging than say a fully online service based business like yours or mine right now with top leads, for example, what are the difference between these two business and my experience was that it was harder to the day to day in that business. Stay in the green, like I like to say, make it a profit on a daily basis while investing in ads and all that. Vs A service based business which you're almost always profitable and it is scalable but a bit less so. Any comments on that?

Well, you know, there was when I first, you know, there was retail and then there was E Commerce or E Tail and then a few years later they talked about bricks and clicks. You know, they kind of had to have both. And now they talk about direct to consumer or they talk about Omni Channel and you know, honestly they're consumer businesses. You know, there's two types of businesses. There's business to business and business to consumers. B2B or B2C. You know, if you're, if you're selling to other businesses, then your list of customers might be 100 or 200. And if you're selling to consumers, it could be millions of consumers. Right. So how are you going to get to those consumers? Well, obviously the most efficient way is online, you know, either through your own website or Amazon or whatnot. But you know, consumers don't only buy online for certain things. They want to try on shoes, they want to go into a shoe store, they want to touch and feel what a sweater feels like. You know, people just like to shop, you know, just like, you know, if eating food was only about eating food, there would be no need for restaurants. You go to restaurants not just for the food. You go to the restaurants for the atmosphere, for the music, for the people. You know, so, you know, Omni Channel, I think that a lot of companies are getting as much as 50% online, but 50% still through stores. So, you know, some, some do as much as 70% online. Some, some are natively digital. They're 100% online. And is that, is that good? Well, you know, the cost of selling online is not as cheap as it used to be. Fulfillment costs are very expensive. It just depends, you know, that's the reason why Amazon does so well, because they can send you a box of something that has 12 different things in it. You know, if you've got a box with just one bottle of your supplement or one sweater or whatever it is, you've got to pay for the whole box, the whole fulfillment, the whole, you know, so those are the things that drive it. But at least right now, the smart thing in consumer business is to do both. Now, it depends on the business, but I'm definitely very pro digital. I was in it early.

Yeah, I'm, I'm.

A business is a business, however, it's kind of like a hierarchy of exposure. So if you have some stores, then that's. Every store is like a big advertisement for you, right, for your business. Right, yeah. And people might walk by it or they might walk in it, and then they might go home and order it online, but they might not have ordered it online if they didn't walk by it or walk in it and touch and feel the stuff. So the combination makes sense. Yeah.

Putting your eggs in various baskets Covid makes things uncertain. Like there's waves, you know, and it's on and off. That's. That's a bit less cool. Facebook ads cost have probably doubled or triple. Amazon, you cannot do organic stuff anymore. You need to pay for Amazon ppc. I think it's so worth it if you calculate the ROI of it. My point is more like the cost of making the product. For example, I built my own formula, you know, for that supplement. And mean, that ate up like probably 60, 70% of margins upfront, then. Yes, shipping. I also think there's various types of business. You know, there's lifestyle business. So obviously that was a lifestyle for me. You know, I took my. I still take my own supplement up to this day. And it's a thing I'm passionate about. But the cash side of things is always bigger than the passion. I think, you know, it will extinguish the passion if you don't see any cash coming from it. Because last time I checked, we still live in a, a capitalist society. So I'M just wondering, you know. Well, I think one day I will restart a physical brand and you know, be an E commerce, something like that probably when you know I have other pockets of money that are generated by other of my businesses. But yeah, I'm just wondering, you know, if it's possible to be highly profitable. There's you know, for example Bulletproof by Dave Asprey. That's a huge one. Are they profitable or will this guy like sell out to craft for 1 billion in two years and that's his exit strategy. But I mean we've got like six minutes left theoretically and I've took like way more of your time but obviously you're a super interesting person. Like lots of advice to offer. Want to finish up with you telling us about Founder Solutions and Luxury Solutions and maybe like tell us a bit like quickly about Interstate and install so that the timeline is full here.

Well, there's no point in talking too much about Interstate and InStyle. Interstate was a wireless retailer startup in Austin, Texas that I was asked by some private equity friends to come and turn around, which I did. InStyle Products was a mass market fragrance company with similar situation and needed some, it needed to be restructured. So I did that for a couple years, two or three years. In terms of Founder Solutions and Luxury Solutions, Luxury Solutions is a consultancy. I've worked with a lot of luxury companies. Usually project based things, very specific thing for three months or six months, sometimes longer. Something that needs to be addressed. Okay, but Founder Solutions is sort of. Founder Solutions and Luxury Solutions are basically the same thing except that Founder Solutions work specifically with founders. Okay. It's helping founders to get to where they need to go. So you'll see in this list of clients there you'll see some are startups and some are big luxury goods companies. They're all the two websites are essentially the same. I've worked on a lot of different companies but founders.

And what is the other website? Is it like founder hyphensolutions.com yeah, and

luxury solutions.com and founder solutions.com.

okay, got it. All right. Okay. And I mean okay.

So you know it's like a luxury company could be a hundreds of millions of dollar billion dollar company and I'm working division or they need some market research done or they need there's a specific project they want help with. Founder Solutions is more like helping the founder with the whole company. Whether it be, you know, restructuring or figuring out growth or raising money or a new strategy to help the company or help the company exit So I like, I'm a founder. I've been a founder. I like working with founders. I can cut through the bs, you know, it's like, you know, founders are pretty wary of people who are big time consultants. You know, I don't consider myself a consultant. I mean, but I can't say I'm not. I'm someone who helps people based on my own experience. Right. I know what it's like to be a founder, so I know how they like to be treated and I try to be helpful.

So if I want to work with you, what are the causes you take? Equity. Like, what's the deal?

It's combination of things. Typically I do what I call a business audit. The business audit is sort of, you know, as short as one week to as long as three months. I try to interview most all of the executives in the company. And it depends. If it's a small company, that might be three people, and if it's a bigger company, it might be 25 people. Most recent project I did, I, you know, I even interviewed a bunch of factory workers to try to assess the business. And I always say I'm not here to criticize. I'm here to evaluate and recommend solutions to whatever the problems might be. I always tell founders I'm here to make you rich, you know, help you be rich, you know, and then once I do the analysis, that might be all they want. They might just say, thank you very much. Thanks for those analysis and those insights. We appreciate that and we got it from here, you know, or they might say, well, typically they would hire me to help them with their strategy, but I don't do the strategy up front. I do the analysis up front. I need to understand the business. Okay. But I can do it pretty rapidly. And then I work with them, then I work side by side with them to develop the strategy. And then the third phase of the process would be, do you want help executing the strategy? And if they want help executing the strategy, that could be another few months. And then after that they might want me to be on the board. Compensation could be either just fees or a combination of fees and equity.

Do you have partners to help you execute that strategy or do you execute it by yourself?

Mostly, mostly I execute it by myself. Usually I have one, one or two clients at a time.

Okay, well, your experience is pretty striking, so I would definitely understand, you know, like, for the need to hire you as a consultant as per se, and yeah, your personality is, how do you say, more flexible, I think, than like typical consultant. So yeah, that's super interesting. And I'd understand why founder would go your way. Last question if I understand. Well, nowadays you segment your days between writing books, skiing when you can, consulting. And is that. Well, I'm trying to phrase that in a proper way, but what are your goals for 2022? Do you live like your ideal life and what's, what's your plan for the next 10 years?

That's a good question. That's quite a question. Yeah. Well, so before I would do these consulting projects with the objective of getting involved for long term. So they would hire me to do something and then, you know, usually they would hire me to do some more. And then before I knew it, I'd be like the, you know, the CEO or the chief marketing officer or chief operating officer and then I'd be part of the company. Okay. And, and so this process was either working with private equity company or working with the founders. A way to get involved in something. Because I decided I didn't want to do any more startups. Okay. I did several startups and they're just, they're very hard, they're very long, there's no guarantees. And I didn't want to do startups anymore, even though I love startups and I don't mind working with startups. I just didn't want to start from scratch. So this was my way of being involved in early stage or privately oriented companies. I never wanted to be a consultant. I wanted to be an operator, someone who was helping to run the business. Then recently when I moved here from California, I realized that some of these projects were becoming, you know, people. I could have two or three of these projects and it could be a sort of a business in and of itself. I could be involved in a lot of different things, which is interesting to me because I get bored with just one thing. I like to do lots of different things. You know, one of my clients now is a luxury furniture company. I never worked in the furniture business before. The other one was a sock company. So yeah, I've done a lot of socks. If you look at my clients, I've done a lot of different things. Right. And it's been very interesting because that, so I enjoy that. And also there's a, it's, it's, it's sustainable because it could involve equity, it could involve, you know, being on a board or, you know, there's. So it is kind of an ideal situation for me and I do like that.

Yeah. Looking out, looking at it from a third person, you look like it Looks like you have a nice life, you know, so that part, then the book, then the skiing, for example, that's, that's a life well lived.

Well, when I, you know, part of this, the man in the white pickup truck philosophy. Yeah. You know, retirement by the age of 35. I didn't make that up. He was the man on the way pickup truck. He's the one who said 35. I didn't choose 35. It wasn't a magic number for me per se. I actually said I wanted to get to the age of 40 and have no regrets in life. I wanted to live overseas, I wanted to learn other languages, I wanted to do lots of things. I wanted to start my own business. And by the time I got to 40, I had done all those things.

Yeah.

So it was, it was fantastic. And then I was like, kind of like, now what? You know, and you know, it's not, it's not always a perfect world, but I think that, you know, I have a lot of friends who have a lot of money and continue to work. And I'm like, why continue to work so hard? And some people, a lot of people get married to their career. Like the career is the most important part of their life. I want the most important part of my life is to enjoy my life. Career is part of that, but not, not the only thing.

Is it like an addiction? Is it like, hey, if I give up my work, who will I be? Is it an identity thing? Is it like a children that inside you that, that fears that if you don't have that in your life, like something big will be missing? You know, that's the question.

I think it's, I think it's a slave to have it. You know, if you wake up every single day at 6:30 and then you, whatever, you take a shower, brush your teeth and get dressed and you go off to work and you do that until whatever time, and then you come home and you have dinner and you just do that. You've been doing it for 40 years and you're all sitting whatever age and someone says, well, you got plenty of money, why don't you retire? I said, well, what am I going to do? This is, this is what, this is my life. This is what I do.

Exactly. It's a comfort zone. Right. It's the danger of staying in that zone that we, us humans, I think we're naturally attracted to. I think it's important to constantly reinvent yourself and be in some kind of R and D position in your own company and in Your world, right? Me and my company. Not sure if you know, the Gino Wickman traction chart in a company, but like, there's the visionary in there, there's the executor. Me, I always love being in the, the visionary seat, right? In which I'm in charge of R and D and coming up with new stuff and making sure that it's implemented, you know, so that I constantly get out of my comfort zone and so that I don't fall in that trap. I think life would be kind of sad, you know, if I would. And I can feel it daily, you know, like, it's tough sometimes. You always get in the same routine, you know, and you're like, is it progressing or. And life becomes very boring sometimes when there's too much of habits. It's a fine equilibrium because most people that start, they don't have these habits, they don't have the discipline. So first, like, get those, those habits and those disciplines and like every rule in the book, once you master them, then you need to rewrite them. Right?

Well, reinventing myself has been something I've done many, many times over. You know, it's, it's, it's partly it's failure is not an option. Also part of it is it's interesting, you know, once you reinvent yourself once, it's easier to do it again. And people, you know, boring is easy, you know, and comfortable, but it's also boring, you know, trying something new all the time, different is hard and challenging and frustrating and stressful and it's not always easy. But it is interesting, that's for sure.

Yeah, I think it's about equilibrium. Not the boring sense of equilibrium, but just, you know, the bright dose of something and being in the gray. Sometimes darker gray, sometimes lighter gray. But yeah, interesting conversation. I feel like we could talk for like 20 years. Del, you have so much knowledge and interesting experiences to share. But yeah, like, we'll, we'll, we'll shut it down for today. Thank you so much for, for your time here. You've been very generous with your time. And don't forget to send me the sample of your book. I'm also writing something. I've gone in a ten day silent meditation not so long ago and took around probably 50 pages of notes. And each of these notes is like a point, right? So I segment my book with like one note and I write one paragraph to make it more digestible. So I'm entering the author game too. I'm gonna send you an excerpt if I feel that you can like, get something out of it because for now, it's really broad and some and, you know, it's weird, but it's very interesting insights nonetheless. So, yeah, thank you for coming on. It's been amazing. This conversation will be. Yeah, I think the OR listeners will enjoy the conversation a lot. And I'll send you the. The recording as soon as we're done editing. Okay.

Okay. Thanks so much, Gerald. Enjoy.

All right, man. Have a great day. Talk to you soon. By.