HUMAN Healthy Vending CMO Andy Mackensen on Building a $10M Company by Disrupting the Vending Market

Hello everyone, welcome to this week's edition of Growth Everywhere where we interview successful entrepreneurs and bring you tips on business and personal growth. This week we have Andy Mackinson who is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Human Healthy Vending. He also used to be my boss and I interned for him as an internet marketer. Andy, how are we doing today?

I am doing phenomenal, Eric. How are you today?

I'm doing great. So Andy, you know, you've done some phenomenal stuff with the business. I mean, you guys have gone from $0 million to How many million are you guys at today?

0.1 million. No, I'm just kidding. We've gone from 0 to 10 million in about 3 years.

Cool. Can you give the audience a little insight as to what Human does exactly?

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, a snapshot of today, Human Healthy Vending is a franchisor of healthy vending machine businesses. Healthy micro-market businesses. We operate under the franchise model. We have approaching 2,000 machines and markets out there in the US, a lot in schools, hospitals, gyms, health clubs, and some YMCAs. So that's kind of where we have our machines. We're launching into the new micro-market category, which is basically It's a mini convenience store for your office with 100% healthy food and it's got a self-checkout kiosk so it's all unmanned automated retail. The big market there is for offices. So we're launching into that.

Got it.

Cool.

I think the first question, a lot of people in our audience are more on the software side. They're asking probably why would you want to launch a Like a vending machine business when first of all it's probably pretty competitive and it's, you know, the costs are so high to get started. Why a Healthy Vending company?

Yeah, well, I like to tell people we got into the vending industry because it's just, it's one of the sexiest industries you could be in out there. That would be a joke obviously.

Well, that's why I joined first, you know.

Exactly. Well, you know, it really comes down to not really why did we get into vending. I mean, vending itself is just a channel. You know, there are 5 million vending machines across the US, which based on the US population is about 1 vending machine for every 70 people. So it's a ubiquitous channel through which we can distribute products. So for us, it was how do we get healthy products into the hands of people as conveniently as possible? And vending is a very great channel To deliver that. But to answer the question, why did I decide to get into healthy vending? Well, it's one of those things, the paths that life takes you on. Back in 2007, I was helping a friend bring a hot food vending machine to market. It's a machine with a patented microwave assembly inside of the machine. So basically, from the consumer standpoint, you push the button, the product inside the machine falls into the microwave inside the machine.

Wow.

It cooks the product, and then you end up with a hot sandwich or a meal item that comes out of the machine about 30 to 60 seconds later. At the time, I had zero experience in the vending industry. I thought it was a very interesting and novel product. In order to help him get that machine out into the market, I had to do a lot of research on the industry to really understand what the industry was all about and to see the opportunities. What I realized in researching that and figuring out how to bring this product to market was that The vending industry itself is a very— first of all, it's been around for a very long time. It's been around for over a century, one of the oldest industries out there, very well established. Also realized that it was very slow to evolve, very slow to adopt new technologies. You've got the standard mom-and-pop vending business that has been around for decades doing the same thing, the standard brown or black vending machine delivering products via coils. Not much innovation there. And I realized that there are some, some pretty big opportunities that the industry was not harnessing. And some of those opportunities, such as credit card readers, offering— basically offering the consumer another option to buy. You know, you've got cash, coin, and now with credit cards, that raises the average revenue at the machine because Let's face it, a lot of people don't have cash in their wallet as much anymore. They use credit card more. So I saw credit card readers. I saw remote monitoring as a very big opportunity. Remote monitoring is the ability for the owner of that machine to log in from home, look on their computer screen, see what products have sold through that machine, and then run their route more efficiently. So in the past, vending operators, they go and they drive a big truck around with a lot of food. They pull up to the location, they go to the machine, run an inventory on what was sold, they run back to the truck, they grab all the food items, put it in a bin, and then they run back into the location and stock the machine. And what remote monitoring allows us to do is to get all that intelligence from home, know exactly what was sold the day before, go and stock that from your home, put it into a bin, and drive directly to the location, walk right in, and stock the machine. So it's a much more efficient way to— to run a route. You save on fuel. You save trips. Sometimes you get the intelligence from the remote monitoring that you're about to stock out on a lot of items and you need to go there sooner than you had otherwise planned. It actually helps you increase your revenue because with those stockouts, you would have lost revenue. Credit cards, remote monitoring, I started researching the energy consumption on vending machines. Traditional vending machines are big energy hogs. You've got fluorescent lighting that is a— in some cases uses up to 40% of the vending machine's energy. Well, why not have LED lighting where there's relatively low energy consumption, no heat in it at all? And I'm actually getting a lot of— Ah, there we go.

A lot better now.

With LED lighting, it's a big way to reduce energy consumption, reduce the heat generated inside of a cooled compartment. Then, of course, looking at 5 million vending machines across the US, I asked myself, why were there not more digital signage solutions to attract the customer to the machine, make the machine look brighter, more high-tech, educate the consumer at the point of sale? Having an educated consumer is important for sales.

Yeah.

It creates a stickier customer too. So kind of giving the background of this is what was going on in 2007, and I'm seeing all these opportunities. Why aren't vending machines using all of these available and ubiquitous technologies? Well, right around that time, I met Sean Kelly, my future business partner, and he had been operating healthy vending machines for the last few years. He owned and operated those machines, and he was experimenting with all the different combinations of healthy products in machines? Do I mix healthy with unhealthy? Do I make the machine look differently? When we met up and I talked about some of the opportunities that I saw, he saw the same opportunities, and it just made sense for us to come together as business partners and say, let's create Vending 2.0. Let's create a machine built from the ground up specifically catered to healthy vending, which at the time, it did not exist in the industry. Let's create a machine that has all these technologies that offers 100% healthy products to help thwart the obesity epidemic. There's a big push for convenience these days. People are outside of their homes more today than they were just a decade ago. They need convenient access to foods. Let's make them healthy and let's make a really badass machine, vending 2.0, to serve those products. That was the genesis of Hüman. The other key thing for us was to have a social mission as well. We donate 10% of our corporate proceeds to fight the causes of childhood obesity. We also needed to have a name that really encompassed a movement. That's where we came up with HUMN, which stands for Helping Unite Mankind and Nutrition. If you notice, the word vending is not in that name, and it's not in that name on purpose because we see HUMN as a way to fix the broken healthy food distribution system in the US. Vending is a very important channel for us right now, and it will continue to be. But we're also expanding into other channels. I mentioned micro markets earlier. We're talking about expanding into— we're not talking about, we are expanding into home delivery with snacks for, you know, you think of the busy mom that needs healthy snacks for their kids. And so creating an overall nutritional product distribution platform of which vending is one channel.

Got it. Cool. The feedback just turned off right now. Yeah, we're good. I'm hearing a bit of an echo, by the way. Or no, it's gone now. But so first things first, it sounds like, you know, you're in an industry that's ripe for disruption. And, you know, it sounds like the main thing is you need to take advantage when you can. Does it sound like that's like something you guys did? Like, hey, it's like no one's disrupting this. This is a really old industry, and I'm just gonna jump in and do it.

Yeah, yeah, it's all about disruption. It's— the vending industry is a very fragmented industry. As I mentioned, 5 million vending machines. The largest vending company in the US operates somewhere in the realm of 200,000 vending machines. So it's a very small percentage of the overall market share.

Right.

Vending is a very geographically focused business, and it's very fragmented. So it's an opportunity to come in with a— basically build a better mousetrap, have a way to run more efficient routes, and also present a product that the consumer wants and that the market needs. And back in '07, when we were first coming up with the concept, it just didn't exist in the industry. And frankly, a lot of the traditional vending operators had tried so-called healthy vending. The problem was, is they were switching out, you know, they get a request from the location, hey, we want healthier products, and the vending operator says, okay, let me remove a SKU of Snickers, let me remove a SKU of Reese's, and maybe a soda SKU, and let me put in a healthier option. Well, the reality is when a consumer walks up to a vending machine that looks the same, they've been— we've all been trained since day one, and when we see a vending machine, a brown or black inanimate vending machine across the way, we know what's going to be in there. So when you walk up to it and you see 40 unhealthy products next to 3 healthy products, well, you're still going to go buy the unhealthy products. So we said, listen, you've got to do it completely different. Totally remove the unhealthy products. Get it 100% healthy. Make the machine look different. Make it bright, friendly. Make the consumer— the consumer experience with that machine more fun and interactive. And that's what sets our concept apart from traditional vending operators putting in a few healthy products in their machines.

Yeah, and you guys have all these different technologies, and I want to kind of go into that part where, you know, you and I kind of discussed, you know, neither you or Sean are like super technical, but somehow you guys figured out how to get all these new technologies into these machines. Can you tell us a little bit about the struggles, any struggles that you kind of faced in getting these technologies kind of integrated?

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I've got a business background. Sean's got— Sean's got a biomedical engineer background. But what kind of— the common thread among us is that we're kind of scrappy. And the key thing to overcome technological challenges is to find the right partners. You know, a lot of entrepreneurs think that you've got to do it all on your own.

Mm-hmm.

You've got to figure it out all on your own, and one of the key things that we learned is that if you find other smart people and other smart companies, you bring on the right partners, and now you can kind of plug and play the elements that you need into your business model. And so, you know, we outsource some of our technological implementation. You know, we use a third-party company for our credit card readers. We use a third-party company for our remote monitoring. The digital signage is installed by our contract manufacturer, not by us. So one of the key things that we did when we were building this model was, who do we need to team up with as the right partners across the board to plug and play and get everything that we need into one box?

Got it. Okay. So do you guys have like a CTO or any like technical people in-house right now?

We have a CTO that Kind of moonlights with us. Very talented, bright individual. Again, finding the right partners, but he's not in-house per se. He's remote.

Okay. Can you kind of walk our audience through like how you kind of find this technical co-founder? Because in the Valley everyone's like, oh, how do I get a technical co-founder? So I think this is a great way to give the audience some insight.

Yeah, well, my business partner Sean Kelly had an e-commerce company before Healthy Vending. They had to build a lot of their stuff from scratch, a lot of their ordering and fulfillment portal and all that, the pipeline of how they fulfill products, and they had to build some stuff from scratch. He had met randomly a guy that was a talented programmer. They started doing some small projects together and realized that it made sense to work full-time together. I actually entered into my business relationship with Shawn with him already having that relationship set up. I don't know if I have a great answer for you on how you find a technical CTO, except that our mantra here is when you want to work with someone at a high level, let's do a project or 2 to kick it off and see how the working relationship is, and then build it from there if it makes sense.

Got it. Okay, cool. And I think this kind of segues perfectly into your hiring process. Like, what is your criteria for hiring stars? Because everyone wants stars.

Yeah. Well, we have a very— We have a very detailed and intense hiring pipeline. I treat the hiring process very much like a sales process, very much like a sales pipeline. We outline what are steps 1 through 10 of— we want the candidate to move through these steps, and let's define what each step is and then move them through very much like a funnel, like a sales team. And so first off, you have to have a very well-written ad. It's amazing to me when I look on Craigslist and LinkedIn and Monster, CareerBuilder, these places, the company ads that are out there for the most part are incredibly boring. They have no flavor to them. A lot of them are really short. We believe— we're direct response marketers here, and so we believe in long copy, especially for an ad for a potential hire. And so we've got basically a long-form sales letter For our, for our job ads, and we use a similar format for every role that we use. There's a lot of stuff that we keep consistent with talking about who we are in our company, and then we change some verbiage up on the specific needs for that particular role. But the first step in our funnel, our hiring funnel, is a well-written ad, and that's— that would be my biggest piece of advice for, for any company. I mean, make, make it exciting. Make the, make the candidate on the other end of that computer just absolutely want to jump through the screen of that computer wanting to come on board because your company is so awesome. So that's step 1. Step 2 is really filtering through. You know, I hear a lot of HR directors saying, oh, I've got all these resumes to look through. Well, for us, we don't— on step 1, we require a cover letter and a resume, and we don't even— on step 1, we don't even look at the resume. I look to see that there's a cover letter, and probably shouldn't admit this to the public, but I don't even read the COVID letter on step 1. I glance at the COVID letter to see that there's some semblance of formed paragraphs and that they halfway know how to write. That's literally step 1, because you're going to filter out probably 60 or 70% of the people just on that first step. Step 2 is say, hey, congratulations, you made it to round 2. Now you have to submit a video, and that's where the rubber meets It's submit a video of yourself, answer the following 5 questions, and then, oh, by the way, to make sure that you know how to do things technically on a computer, create a Google Docs spreadsheet, put this phrase in this cell, make the phrase green, bold it. So there's basically 10 different instructions in this round 2 email to make sure that the candidate can follow instructions. And create a video. And oh, by the way, you got to upload the video to YouTube. So there's some tests there to make sure that you're computer savvy. Once I get those responses from round 2, now the fun begins because now I've got a much smaller subset of candidates that are serious and I get to watch videos and I get to say, okay, I like the vibe of this person, I like what they're saying. If that happens, if I do like them on the video, then I'm going to go and look at their cover letter, I'm going to read through their entire cover letter And the last thing that I look at is their resume. So I kind of do things in reverse there. And then finally, if they pass that round, it's a video Skype screening. That's step 3. It is a 10 to 15 minute screening. It's not an interview. It's me assessing a little bit more of the quality of the candidate. And then finally, the candidates that pass the video screening, I'm then calling in for an in-person interview. So if you look at that funnel, I'm starting with probably 100 candidates at the top, and by the time I'm doing face-to-face interviews, I'm doing 2 to 3 face-to-face interviews. So I've really cut down my time in the hiring process to get that done. And that's been our key to success with our hiring, and it really delivers the best quality candidates out of the overall batch.

Yeah, and I remember going through that process, and it was really rigorous, but it's probably the best one I've been through just because it's so detailed and it really figures out whether people can do things or not like you said. A lot of companies, they'll be like, hey, you know, write an essay or whatever, but that's really not enough. Like I think the way you've done it, and this is probably like one of the biggest key takeaways, this is really how you hire people. You create a marketing funnel for it or some kind of funnel, but I think that's really great advice. Next thing I want to jump over to, you know, a lot of founders are, or entrepreneurs are unsure of like how much they should pay themselves, how much money they should have in the bank or what percentage of money they should keep in the bank. What's your take on that?

Yeah, well, it's a great question. It depends on what stage of the business you're in. Big picture, if you as the entrepreneur are not paying yourself a market wage, then your model is upside down. Basically, if you look at your net income, At the end of the quarter and you're not paying yourself a market wage, you need to subtract that out of your net income to actually get the real net income that you're making.

Uh-huh.

So let me back up. I talked about it depends on what stage of the business you're in. I mean, personally, for us to get up and running, Sean and I took— it took us 18 months really to get our product to market and first start getting revenues. We had a lot of complex partnerships that we had to pull together. We had a model that we had to create, and so we didn't pay ourselves obviously during those first 18 months because we had no revenue.

Mm-hmm.

And so as a startup entrepreneur, you do have to expect that you're going to have to put in some sweat equity, and it really helps to have some savings on the side to make that easier. I personally, I went into debt on credit card to continue that process. It took a lot longer to get our product to market than I first thought. The old entrepreneurial optimism at play there. But once we started getting consistent revenue, that's when my business partner and I decided, hey, all right, let's start paying ourselves a very modest wage. We're not looking to make 6 figures here right out of the gate, but a modest wage so that we could actually look at our financials and when we have a net income number, we can feel confident that that's an accurate number. Investors are going to look at the same thing. Are you paying yourself a market wage? So as we progress and as the revenues continue and as we grew, we just started inching up our pay very, very conservatively.

So how about money in the bank?

Money in the bank, as the business scales, you've got You've got some bigger variations on month. You've got a big cash flow month. It depends on what business you're into. We're in franchise sales, so our sales can sometimes be lumpy. We're building more recurring revenues on the back end to kind of get a more flattened line, an increasing line, but get some of those recurring revenues so we always have money coming in. But as far as when you're first starting out and you're just trying to get those sales, it can be lumpy. As you scale, you can have some bigger variations month to month on cash flow. So you need to assess what are those variations that I'm having on cash flow, and you need to have enough money in the bank to cover— I mean, it's really helpful to have 6 months of runway. If you were to say, hey, if sales stopped today, would we be able to run our company for 6 months from now? And if not, you need to start looking into lines of credit and potential investors so that you can get that comfort level. But I don't have a set answer on how much money you need to keep in the bank. But there needs to be enough to withstand some of those cash flow variations from month to month.

Good. I think that's a good takeaway there. 6 months of runway. I guess it might vary per industry, but I think that's a good number to start with. You talked about investors and things like that. Are you guys— I mean, when you guys started out, were you guys Did you guys take some financing from anywhere?

We're 100% bootstrapped. We used our own personal funds and sweat equity to get it going. That's why I mentioned going into personal debt to get this going. There's no stronger thing than having your back against the wall with no other option, with yourself in debt trying to get your business going. But no, we're 100% funded. To this day. Not to say that we wouldn't be open to raising some capital here soon.

Got it. Okay, cool. And I guess the next topic I wanted to move over to was, you know, as marketers, we always talk about there's masterminds and things like that. Can you explain to the audience what a mastermind is and why people should try to join masterminds?

Sure, yeah. I mean, I think every entrepreneur— I don't think, I know every entrepreneur needs to read the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. For those of you who are not familiar with Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill was Andrew Carnegie's right-hand man for a number of years. Andrew Carnegie said, hey Napoleon, I want to figure out the equation of success. I want to know what makes a person successful. What are the main elements? If we boiled it all down, what are the main elements you need to have in order to be successful? And Napoleon, I am going to commission you for the next 20 years to interview successful people across all industries from business to government to church to politics, everything. Everybody on the top of their game and I will set up those introductions for you to interview. Do you want to do this? And I guess the kind of the lore goes that Andrew Carnegie had a stopwatch going and he gave Napoleon Hill, I think it was 60 or 90 seconds to give him an answer. If he wasn't going to give him an answer within that time, then the deal was off. But Napoleon didn't know that. Regardless, Napoleon Hill said, yes, I'll do it within— I can't remember what the time was, but it was a very short amount of time. And that was the key test for Napoleon, was that entrepreneurs, you need to make decisions. You can't be wishy-washy. So Napoleon signed on, said, yes, I'll interview all these people. Long story short, he ends up well over 2 decades of interviewing thousands of top leaders and successful people. He boiled it down to the laws of success. One of those laws is the power of the mastermind. And a mastermind is bringing together a group of like-minded people, whether it's entrepreneurs or if you're in industry, doesn't matter. It's like-minded people that are there to help each other achieve a common goal. And so there's a very powerful concept with the mastermind where you have Yeah. A group of people all putting their brainpower to a person's specific issue where there's no agenda, there's no monetary arrangement where, you know, hey, you pay me or I pay you based on the information you give. It's just everyone there with no agenda trying to help each other out. And there's a very amazing power that comes out of that group. And I've been a member of masterminds, geez, for the last 5 years since I went— when I discovered the concept. And it's been a very important thing for my development as an entrepreneur, for the development of my business, and bringing like-minded people together so that we can figure out problems. It's amazing the ideas that come out of it. Something that, for example, you come to the mastermind group with an idea that you're going to spend $100,000 to get going, and by the end of that 30-minute discussion, you realize that your mindset It was totally off, the idea is horrible, and you would have wasted $100,000 and potentially a couple of years of your life pursuing. That's what comes out of the mastermind. But then they come up with a different idea. It says, no, you need to tweak it this way, spend $100,000 this way. That's the real opportunity because one guy in the group says, hey, I've already done it. I can give you the blueprint on how to go from A to Z on that, and so you can fast-track your success. And that's the key with a mastermind. You don't know what's going to come out of it, but there's a lot of good Got it.

And how does someone go about finding a mastermind to join?

Good question. Well, there are paid masterminds that if you're plugged into the internet marketing community, there seems to be a pretty big abundance of masterminds that you can join with some of the top people. The Evan Peggans, the Frank Kerns, the Yannick Silvers got Maverick 1000, you've got Joe Polish's $25K group. So there are definitely some really high-level masterminds. Dan Kennedy's got a great mastermind that I'm a member of right now. So you can go that route. The other— so it's basically researching. You should already be on some of these influencers' lists. That's the other thing. You got to keep in touch and be on the mailing list, the emailing list of these top individuals. Besides paying to be a part of a mastermind, which there are a lot of benefits to pay to be in a mastermind because you take it more seriously. But the other route is to form your own, to go and reach out to people and say, hey, I'm forming a mastermind and here's what it's going to look like and these are the types of people that are going to be there. So forming it on your own. And then the other way is go into an unpaid mastermind. Maybe someone else is organizing the mastermind.

Mm-hmm.

But I believe that you should be in 2 masterminds. One where you're more junior and most of the people in the mastermind are senior to you. You can look up to people and get mentorship. And then the other mastermind is the one where you're one of the most senior people, one of the most successful or experienced, and you're helping mentor the other junior people in that mastermind and you get a really good dynamic of looking up and looking down to help grow.

Huh, okay. Yeah, really helpful information again. It almost sounds like it's kind of like an internal board of directors almost.

Exactly, it is. It's exactly that.

Cool. So I kind of want to dive back into the beginnings for Healthy Vending or kind of how do you guys sell. So obviously, big companies, they have a ton of vending machines already and they're very slow-moving. The last thing they care about is It's probably like a vending machine, right? So how do you convince them that they need to buy like a vending machine? How does your sales team do it?

Yeah, well, first off, we don't convince the location to buy any of our machines. So that's, that's the key thing. We operate under a franchise model. We also operate under a corporate-owned model. So there's 2 different paths there. Focusing on the franchise model, our franchisees are the ones that own the machines. So our key deal— so there's really 2 sales pipelines that we have. One is We need to attract franchisees into our program, you know, like-minded people that really believe in health and wellness, that are passionate about helping their community. Also, it's a business, so they need to be money motivated. So that's one of our sales pipelines. The other one is how do we attract locations? And so the location sales pipeline is completely different because we're talking with principals of schools, we're talking with gym owners, we're talking with HR directors at offices.

Mm-hmm.

And so the messaging to the location pipeline is more of, here's the benefit that we provide to you. It is a free machine. We don't charge you for the machine. In some scenarios, we pay commissions to the location so they can get a percentage of whatever the gross sales are, but ultimately, it comes down to us giving the location convenient access to healthy foods. For offices, it's Their employees benefiting greatly from that. There's productivity enhancements, there's morale boosting, there's less absenteeism. There's a whole slew of benefits that our program provides to offices. On the flip side, with schools, it's us providing convenient access to healthy items for kids and for students. There are a lot of benefits for students to be eating healthily throughout the day as opposed to snacking on really high sugary items and junk food.

Right.

So the messaging for our location pipeline is much different than for our franchisees.

Cool. Yeah, and this goes directly into like the sales portion of the, I guess the questions I have on that side. So obviously you guys have to have a pretty robust sales team. So how do you kind of motivate them? Like how do you pay your sales team? Because every team is like different.

Yeah. Well, There's 2 main ways that I see. There's probably a lot more, but the 2 big ones are, first of all, you can't motivate anyone. My belief is you hire motivated people.

Uh-huh.

So it's not my job to motivate someone. It's the quality of individual that we bring on the team that is already self-motivated. So that's a key differentiation But beyond that, once you've got a motivated individual, it is about, especially for sales, is constructing the right comp plan where you do have a high, you know, a commission element. So based on their performance, based on their results, they get a very— the variable component of their pay is a large percentage of their pay. So the better they do, the more they get paid.

Right.

A good salesperson needs to be money motivated and the comp plan needs to reward them for their results.

Yeah, perfect. I mean, I totally agree with that. So what percentage would you say is commission-based, what percentage is salary? Just so our audience has an idea.

Yeah, sure. And we have different sales roles here at the company, and so we've got some roles that are 100% commission-based.

Yeah.

No base salary at all. And if you look at— well, you know, so let me just back up. So we oftentimes give an option to people. We say, here's option 1. It is a base, small base salary, you know, probably 20% to 30% of the overall comp, and then the rest is commission, okay? And then the other option is no base pay at all, 100% commission. And if you look at the 2 plans side by side at the same level of results, you're going to make more on the 100% commission side than you are accepting a base. And that's kind of Economics 101. If you accept the base, you're taking on less risk.

Uh-huh.

And if you're taking on less risk, you don't get as much reward. So we always encourage people to go full commission. You'll make more if you're confident in your sales abilities. That being said, we also understand that there are some younger folks that we bring on that maybe don't have some money saved up in the bank. They're really high quality, they've got a lot of potential, and they're going to take some of the base salary option to help them through. And then we give the option that you can switch over to full commission. In, you know, 3 months, 4 months, whatever we stipulate. But that gives them the opportunity to prove themselves and perform and then switch over.

Yeah, I like that you give people that option because not a lot of— I mean, for a lot of sales teams, it's either commission only or like it's mostly like base. But the fact that you give them the option to kind of switch over and they can kind of like see the light once they have that money saved up means a lot to them. Because like you said, a lot of young people don't have that money saved up. So really good tips there. And I might have to ask Thank you for those materials too. Cool. So wrapping up here, a few more questions. How do you— I mean, as an entrepreneur, I always ask people, how do you stay productive? What are some hacks that you use?

Yeah, and I was joking around with you. As soon as I wake up, I check my email, then I go turn on the local news to see what's going on, and then I just kind of hang out and drink a cup of coffee and think. No.

Super productive.

Yeah. No, I mean, productivity hacks for me, there's this cool— well, I'll just run through. I just had a kid, so my productivity hack is I wake up when he wakes up because he's crying. That's my alarm clock now. I actually hang out— now I hang out with my son in the morning for 30 to 60 minutes and feed him his bottle and all that. That's a cool change for me as I've progressed in life. But the key thing is, for me, is planning. And you have to plan time to plan, if that makes sense. So every week at the end on Friday, in fact we do this company-wide now, there is a half an hour block that everyone has on their calendar on a Friday afternoon to plan the next week. For me, it takes about an hour, so I've got an hour block. But it is putting together based on What our quarterly goals are, deconstructing those quarterly goals and saying, what do I need to do next week? What are my main crucial results that need to happen next week? So breaking down those quarterly goals into smaller bite-sized chunks. And we have a Google Docs. It's not complex. We don't have this big goal-setting app and use all these resources. It's literally a Google Docs.

Mm-hmm.

Very simple. And you have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday on the Google Docs. And you've got your main crucial result for that day. And so what we do on Fridays here is you identify what are the 5 crucial results, one each day, that you need to accomplish the next week. And that's the key, is knowing what you're going to do for that day. One of the productivity tips that I believe Andrew Carnegie had or Napoleon Hill was Write down the night before, the night before, write down the top 3 things that you need to accomplish, even if it's with a pencil and a pad of paper, because when you go to sleep, your brain, whether you know it or not, your unconscious brain is working on the results, working on the solution to get those things done. So you asked me what my productivity hacks are. It's planning ahead and knowing when I wake up, my day is already scripted.

Uh-huh.

It is already planned out, blocked on my calendar. Do I get 100% of the things done? Often not, but at least I've got that plan in place to get it done. And the other key thing is don't check your email right in the morning. If you've got your calendar blocked off, when you wake up, you know what you got to do. Block off time to process email, and I recommend you don't do it before 11 AM. Get that time maybe during lunch or something, and then maybe once at the end of the day. Block off time to process email. The rest of the time, your email inbox is away from you. You're only in it to— if it is— you're only in your email inbox if it relates to one of the items on your calendar that you have to get done and you've got to go outbound, but you're not processing inbound emails. So that would be my biggest advice, is stay off email until later in the day and plan time to plan.

Totally agree with that. And for you entrepreneurs that have your push notifications Oh, and that's the other thing.

I see people with— they've got their Gmail push notifications and their phone is buzzing every time an email comes in. Get rid of that. Turn that off. Turn off your Facebook notifications. Turn off all that stuff. In fact, when you're working in your— when you've got your calendar blocked off during the day and you're working on your tasks, you've got your cell phone ringer on off and you've got your cell phone face down on your desk with no buzzes and no push notifications. Mm-hmm.

Yep, that's the everybody shut up, I'm working time.

Exactly, exactly.

Cool. So favorite book that you'd recommend to entrepreneurs?

Well, I already recommended Think and Grow Rich, which is an absolute must. Another one that I just read that's awesome is Time Warrior by Steve Chandler, and it's broken up into very small, like 2-page chapters. I think there's just over 100 chapters in the book. But they're bite-sized nuggets of stuff and it is about slashing your thoughts and perceptions of time management and actually getting more stuff done. I highly recommend that book. It's called Time Warrior.

It sounds like a game, man.

It does and it's entertaining too.

Cool. Great. Final piece of advice to entrepreneurs that they can kind of take action on in the next 24 hours.

Yeah. Well, I've got 2 main pieces of advice that if I could go back and do it again, most of the stuff I would keep the same because entrepreneurship is a learning process. And when you fail, that's when you learn. So you got to fail fast. Fail as fast Yeah. As fast as you can so that you learn, so that you can continue to succeed. But the 2 things that I recommend is number one, map out your sales process, and number 2, have tracking and metrics and reporting. I guess that's 3 things in one, but tracking, metrics, reporting kind of bundled together, that would be my second piece of advice. So on the first So the first piece with mapping out your process, you got to look at, for all entrepreneurs, what is the product that you're selling, what is the service that you're selling, and what are the steps that my prospect has to go through, steps 1 through whatever, in order to get that sale. And you need to have those stages identified. When is it that my prospect— so just a quick example, in our process, when a prospect hits our website, they have to opt in. So that's step 1, you've got to opt in. Step 2 is we've got to do an initial reach-out call to them to pre-qualify them. Step 3 is get an appointment scheduled with them. Step 4 is the prospect has to show up to that appointment.

Mm-hmm.

Step 5 is we then need to get them to the second interview. We have a kind of a— we have a 60-day sales cycle with our franchise. It's a $100,000 opportunity, and so it is a longer sales process. The key thing there is have each stage defined, and then when I talk about the second thing that I recommend with metrics, tracking, reporting, know what your conversion rate is at each of those steps. So it's this big funnel, and you've got 100 people here, and then 80 people make it to here, and then 60 people make it to here, and know what those conversion rates are, because you can see once you have those metrics around those sales stages, Those, in Salesforce speak, would be opportunity stages. You can then see glaring holes. You've got a massive hole in your bucket here at this stage. All right, well, what's going on here? It drops from, you know, I've got an 80% conversion rate, and only like 10% of the people are getting through to the next step. All right, well, what's going on at that stage? What's being said? What's being done? What is the customer experience at that stage? And you can laser focus on that. One element, and improve it and fix it. And then once you do that, then the funnel starts flowing more again, and then you see where the next hole is, and you just systematically plug. And then guess what? When you get to the bottom, there's probably some stuff that you can do back at the top again to further improve. And, you know, just use the 80/20 rule as you go down through your funnel. So track your— know what your sales stages are, and have metrics and reporting around those sales stages. That's— if we had done that earlier— Geez, I kick myself. We'd be a lot farther along.

Got it. Cool. So Andy, thanks so much for doing this. I'm sure our audience will definitely appreciate this. Definitely a fresh breath of air. So thanks so much again.

Sure, absolutely. And if you want to check us out, it's www.healthyvending.com.

healthyvending.com, guys. Thanks.

Bye.