Preston Rutherford | On the Homefront with Jeff Dudan #37

We too were in the place where we were shackled by the cubicle for a long time. Right. Working for the man. And for a lot of folks, we represented the American dream. What's possible that a few friends with no real experience could get together and start something that people love more than anything? We were pulled by a desire for freedom, the potential for controlling our destiny.

I have my Chubbies on right now.

So amazing.

I got.

Yeah, the neon light.

Hello and welcome to on the home front. I'm Jeff Dutton. Today we are talking to Preston Rutherford, the co CEO of one of the hottest and trendiest apparel companies, Chubbies. We get right into it when Preston and his buddies had the idea to reintroduce short shorts as a fashion trend. What it took to build their brand's audience and what he would have done differently at the start of their business. Sit back as we dive into the deep end and discuss what it took to quickly build a hundred million dollar clothing company around Fun and the weekend. Thank you for listening. Preston Rutherford, co founder of Chubby's. Welcome to the home front.

Thank you, Jeff. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, man. How you doing today?

Well, very well. Yes, thank you. Excited for some Thanksgiving turkey?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We're sitting here on the Wednesday before. We always start with going back. Would you care to share a little bit about your journey starting with how you grew up?

Of course. Would love it. Born and raised in Tucson, Arizona and to two awesome parents. I mean I had such a. I'm very, very blessed. Very grateful that they, you know, we didn't come from much but they did everything they could to expose me to everything. Sports, arts school, best schools. And I think one of the main takeaways for me there is just having a lot of gratitude towards my upbringing because I know not everyone, you know, had that sort of exposure. But you know, I was just a, I was just a fun, happy kid. Lots of energy. Maybe too much energy sometimes according to some of my teachers, especially my fourth grade teacher from what I remember. But played all kinds of sports. You know, in Arizona you've got really long sports season and you know, I went to, ended up going to Stanford for undergrad which was just amazing. I have no idea how it happened. Dream come true. And ended up studying urban planning and design which ended up not necessarily being related to what I ended up doing in the future. But I think more than anything met a bunch of really wonderful people who ended up being my best friends. The saying being, you're the sum total of the five people closest to you. I really think that rang true for me. And these folks inspired me, taught me, and I'm forever grateful friends with all of them today, almost 20 years later, after college, it was 2008, so it was tough. I couldn't really get a job. And many of us, I mean, that was relatively consistent with a lot of us. And ended up joining a startup started by a friend who lived with me as an intern and ended up being there for over four years. This was in the consumer Internet space, as was kind of the norm in Silicon Valley. And learned a lot, learned a lot of. Mostly, I'd say learned a lot about what to do, but a lot about what not to do. And I'd say the big thing that I took away from that experience was you gotta be solving a problem rather than creating a solution in search of a problem. I'd say that's one of the things that we ended up doing. We chased interesting technology, but didn't really have a customer, a real problem to solve. I'd say number two was the worst thing is not for people to hate you or what you're doing or what you stand for. The worst thing is for there to be apathy towards those things. So in a lot of ways carried those two learnings toward the Chevy's experience, where myself and three of my closest friends, we had been working for the man for going on five years post graduation. And we just felt like we wanted to start something we didn't know what. None of us studied computer science, so we weren't going to go out and do the crazy social network or iPhone app or whatever it might be, but we felt like we could create something that didn't exist. And I'd say we were, more than anything, we were pulled by a desire for freedom, the potential for controlling our destiny, the potential for creating something, something that didn't already exist in the world. And then just the realization of how great could it be to work with our best friends. There's really nothing better than that.

Well, so. So you're at Stanford and.

Yeah.

Now, did you have any entrepreneurial influences in your early life at all?

Yes, more from. More from. So this is going on 25, 30 years ago in Tucson. Not a lot of. Not a lot of startup activity, but I saw a few of my aunts and uncles who had started some small businesses. And then my mom actually started a small business, but being a real estate agent. So falling into an existing context, but sort of owning her destiny and I saw the power of that. I saw the flexibility and the freedom that it offered. Sort of the infinite, let's call it earning potential based upon sort of like up to you. So those were some of my early experiences, but honestly, some of the ideas really became obvious to me or I was exposed to some of these early ideas while in college. I took one class called Technology Entrepreneurship and it completely inspired me in terms of how you can create something. And it completely changed my mindset of, I think admittedly having some limited mindsets around and limited beliefs around. I can't do something like this person from Arizona who kind of doesn't come from much. Can't be a person who owns a business, who starts a company. You know, the word company has a. Has a pretty big weight to it. So there was a lot of, oh my gosh, this is possible. There are other people around me doing it and it makes those things that I think were previously very scary, you know, much more normal.

So in your first role with this technology or the software business that you were in, were you in on the sales side of the business? Business development?

You know, it was business development very broadly defined. You know, it started just as a grassroots marketing intern doing in person events, going to conferences, being at the booth, kind of, you know, just doing the stuff of, you know, transferring enthusiasm to other people about what we were doing. I think that was the basic piece. And then, yes, it did evolve into business development where there was more of a. A partnership component to the product, which was very fun. And yeah, effectively it was sales. And I'd say that experience, no formal training was extremely beneficial in terms of just figuring out how to generate the maximum result with whatever fixed or creative constraints you had. So, yeah, learned a lot there.

Yeah. So let's jump to 2007 and you're employed, you've got some buddies from college, you go out to Lake Tahoe, it's 2011 and you're on this bros trip. And like, what? And you guys, you were already of the mind that your clothes were a little bit loud and you were looking to look good and, you know, be noticed and all of that. Like all young guys do. What happened on that trip and that was the kernel of the idea for Chubby's.

Yeah, great question. I'd say leading up to that, there were some initial thoughts around, gosh, it would be great to create a product that we felt didn't exist. Go back to 2011. Oddly enough, short shorts are much more of the norm and louder prints much more of the norm. But back then it was very much the very long cargo, short vibe. And, yeah, like board shorts, you know, board shorts, but then, you know, even longer, you know, it was just a very, very kind of like, opposite vibe from what we thought should exist, you know. So leading up to that trip, we were kicking around some ideas. We actually had an old pair of Lacoste shorts that one of us had that was passed down from one of our dads. And, you know, we thought that was the perfect sample to try to use as inspiration. Just thought it was a great product and thought there was nothing out there like it. So made a few samples, made a bunch of mistakes on the way to getting that first sample. Picking the wrong manufacturer. We didn't have really any money at the time, but took whatever money we had, which is a whole different story, but ended up finding someone who ultimately ended up making some of the product and did a very small run for ourselves and maybe 10 more units. And that ended up being the set of products that we wore on this sort of July 4th trip and gave a few to our friends. And it was a very special and notable experience for us because it was something that from day one was very community driven. It was us as a group of friends, guys and gals. I mean, even at that time, we tried to make some women's product, but realized there just wasn't the pull that we saw on the men's side and the response. But it was very much, wow, this is something special. Not that we weren't a group of friends having a great time before that, but there was something that was sort of inextricably tied and very tight knit, which ended up being central to what we ended up building over time. But it was just a very, very sort of special organic time where it was very much, here's a problem we had, let's try to solve that problem for ourselves. And hopefully there would be other people out there who would be interested in what we were doing. But huge assumption to make, but that was sort of the core of it. And it was very much just a fun time where the core of it was just friends and community. And what was so interesting was, to my earlier point, about the worst thing being apathy, people would come up to us because they saw these crazy people playing games on the beach, having a great time, looking, you could say stupid or looking awesome. And some people would come up saying, this is so dumb. What are you wearing? You guys are a bunch of idiots. Other people would come up, just be like, what are those shorts? Where Do I get them? These are awesome. And no one really.

Either way there's differentiation. So it might not be for them, but they noticed which is getting people's attention. That's the first challenge. So you had this background in events. So you're out there, which is by the way, it's tough to get out into the marketing space and do remotes and do events and, and, and all of that. So that's some good chops for this. What were the skill sets of the other partners that were initially involved?

Yeah, great question. Finance Ops was one of the four co founders. Another one, a very deep, sort of an amazing mix of studied engineering at Stanford, but was one of the most deep thinkers on consumer psychology and marketing. And then there was actually someone, the fourth founder who knew how to make clothing, had done it before.

Who had what?

Who knew how to make clothing.

Oh, okay. So you've got an engineer. So I think 40% of the world's billionaires are engineers. They're process based problem solvers. You've got somebody in finance, you've got your marketing chops and then you have a product person on the team. What are the like there's nothing else you could have done with that team other than build Chubby's.

That's a good point. That might be the case.

Now you of the group, at some point they decided you should be the CEO. Now is that only because you're the best looking?

Oh my gosh. First we were all co CEOs for what we learned was far too long. So we were co CEOs and then ultimately we ended up going through a process together where one of us ended up being CEO and it was actually one of my other co founders, Kyle. And so that was the CEO process and then to the good looking piece. I very much appreciate the compliment. But the other three co founders were also just very stunning individuals as well.

Well, I mean you have, I mean when to scale an organization you've got to put the right people in the right seats. And, and you know, the, the inability for founders or partners to do that is what keeps small businesses small. So you know, kudos to you guys and you're highly educated people and clearly had trust and relationship and a shared vision. So that makes it easy. And then, but the ability to scale, especially inside the clothing industry, I know if you think about, you know, Damon Johns, you know, and anytime anybody comes on Shark Tank and they've got a clothing product that they're pitching, he's like, do you realize how impossibly hard the Clothing industry is and the, the entrenched companies in there. The fact that you've got to create product nine months before you're going to land it, depending on where you're manufacturing it. And you got to try to forecast like what's going to get pushed through supply chain. I mean, it's probably. I got to imagine one of the more difficult startups to do, but you developed really differentiation and then raving fans. Now I'm a little bit older, so I've got. Now I do. I have my chubbies on right now.

So amazing.

I got. Yeah.

The neon lights.

Yeah. So, you know, so cool. I'm up for the game, but so cool. It's my first pair, so. But when I, when I ask my, my kids, they're more than familiar with the. Everybody else is familiar with the brand and I have to say these are exceptional quality. Price point was not uncomfortable for me, but like, I feel like I got what I paid for. They feel great. They, they fit well. So, you know, fantastic product. How did you initially, you know, from the original 10 pairs, how did you initially take this product to market? And I think if I'm correct, it was direct to consumer through Shopify.

Exactly. You're exactly right. First of all, thank you for the. Thank you for the support wearing the product. That's amazing. And thank you for the feedback.

100%.

That is so cool. It is so cool.

I just got back from Turk, so, you know, I just hadn't changed yet.

Exactly. Why, you know, keep the vacation going. So to your point, Shopify, Yes, a couple points there. But even. Let's take a step back. Before Shopify, we did. You were mentioning events. We did events in person. We sold in person. We would invite our friends and friends friends to a bar, take over the back room and just sort of like layout the product, have just a little event and sell. We would also. This was also the time that in person, credit card transactions, the square card reader just had come out. So we would carry shorts in our backpacks and, and go to the park and play some cornhole or whatever and people would just come up to us, as I was mentioning earlier, like in Tahoe, saying, what are those? Where can I get them? We didn't have a website at the time, but we had them in our backpacks and people could try them on and purchase them. So before Shopify, it was doing everything in person. One of the sayings is do things that don't scale at the beginning. And that's exactly what we did. The tight feedback Loop, the high fidelity feedback loop, the speed of learning that comes when you just hand to hand combat, sell to a person standing right in front of you was invaluable then. You're exactly right before Shopify to get an E commerce business going maybe six months and a million bucks, the barriers to entry were very high. Shopify very early at the time made it a million times easier. We could be up and running in 15 minutes. And so something like that where very recently completely prohibitive to get started with our kinds of budgets. You now had this macro tailwind that was just making it infinitely easier to get going to start something to just put a product up online and start to get feedback. So yes, Shopify and we're, I mean the business is still on the Shopify platform. It's a great platform. But then after a period of time started opening stores. You can find some of our product on Amazon. So then and in a variety of stores. Dick's Sporting Goods, Nordstrom. So there was that expansion. But yes, in terms of getting some of those initial, that initial customer feedback in person and then the slightly larger scale of just being able to put something online and reach a much broader audience, that was exactly how we got started.

Yeah. So Burton's snowboards, there's a. I think it was in a book, I forget exactly which one. But he would spend nine months of his year traveling the world to see what the kids in the slopes all over the world were doing and what products were they buying. And then he would take that back to their company and say this is what next year's trend is to be able to do that. At some point you went direct to consumer, face to face. There must have been a tipping point where like vans did it. Like they would go out and they would seed product with, you know, kids and influencers before there was Internet influencing. They would see products in neighborhoods with kids and then everybody would see them wearing the vans and then they would go and buy the van. So you followed a very traditional and proven method. Or you could even say you could make the argument that Nike was done the same way. Phil Knight, out of the back of his car, used to drive around to college campuses and give away shoes. So you follow that traditional product introduction, do the hard work and go out there and belly to belly, make, move the product. At what point was there a tipping point where you became people, your raving fans started attracting other people to come to you. And what triggered it?

It's a great question. I'd say there were two things. One, once Our friends started wearing the product. We started what is now a very obvious strategy, but UGC or user generated content that was very much not obvious at the time. It was if you were selling something, you had to take the highest quality, especially apparel, clothing. You had to go out, spend a million dollars, do a photo shoot with models, and that was the way you got your content out. We didn't have money to do that, so we would just take pictures from our friends, post them on our new Instagram channel or account with 10 followers at the time. And that snowball started rolling. But it allowed us to, with $0, start to show what chubbies meant to other people and what that fun could look like. Because it wasn't us telling you what we want you to believe. It was actual people. The social proof component, having fun wearing the product and then the basics of the power of social media. Their friends would then see it. They would, they would be curious, they would be intrigued, they'd know how to find us on our Shopify store and go from there. The other piece, you talk about, seating. We did a very similar thing, but on college campuses and just found communities on college campuses. And we did the whole thing of make becoming a college ambassador seem like you were applying for something very exclusive. Even though we took everyone who would go through the process, but made it seem like this is a very exclusive process.

First 25 and now we're doing the next 25.

Exactly, exactly. So that was a wonderful way to. The people who we went to got it immediately, they, from a product perspective, they were used to wearing shorter shorts. They couldn't find them anywhere. The ones that they could find were way more expensive or they had to go to Goodwill or something, or they had to cut their own show. So there was a real need there. And so these folks were so excited to wear our product, talk about our product, etc. So it was those two things that I think really got a semblance of momentum and traction. Mind you, we were still working our day jobs at this time. This was a nights and weekends thing that we were doing because we didn't know we were risk averse. We wanted more validation. We had no idea how this would go. So nights, weekends, but that was the way that we could de risk this thing. And it was right around that time when we started hitting a meaningful revenue run rate where it became a little bit more obvious that we should ditch our day jobs. But in these early days, it was all nights and weekends.

There have been trends and changes in digital demand generation. Monthly since you started this business.

Two.

Things I'd like to touch on, number one, Shopify and how that platform has changed. And maybe one would say that people, sellers get middled a little bit now on that platform from Amazon and some of the other big players in that space. And then number two, if you were going to start this business today again, I'd be interested to know how you would do it.

Great, great questions. So massive change, right? I mean, so much has changed. I'm just sort of running through the long list of things to the Shopify point and to the Amazon point. One of the big things we learned, and I think this also starts to answer the second part of your question, which is how I might do things differently is Shopify is a great place to start the learning process. Make a small amount of product, see what takes, what doesn't take, do more of what takes and go from there. But then the big thing we learned that I think we wish we would have done earlier, so if we were doing it again, we would start selling across multiple channels. Earlier on, to your point, getting middled out on Shopify, there was this whole idea that going direct to consumer was the future of business. But the reality is, again to your point on middling, it's not direct to consumer. Rather than selling through a retailer and paying them a bounty, you're paying Facebook and Google. So it's just a different toll, different toll road. Once you realize that, and once it became much more obvious that the economics of strictly focusing on scaling your online direct to consumer business, you find that, gosh, I'm spending 100% of my marketing dollars and I'm only reaching 5 to 10% of my total available market. With the simple math being e commerce is 20% of total retail. Amazon, Walmart, et cetera, own half of that or more. So we're fighting for just a very, very small pie, but again, spending 100% of our dollars. So I think one of the key things that we would do if we were to do it differently was do less of the easy to measure, hardcore direct response sort of advertising, focus more on big memorable. Whether it be, I don't think stunts is the right word, but things like that where spend $0 but just come up with a really awesome idea that gets people really excited or really just focusing on building our brand, telling our story, knowing that it may not.

So you're going directly at an emotional response and emotional connection to the brand as opposed to a transactional approach saying click on this and get X percent off or you know, buy one, get one half or something like that, 100%.

Which in the last 15 years became so enticing because you could do that. These new platforms make it so possible to put a dollar in and get three and a half out 15 minutes later. And that's a very powerful dopamine hit. It's a bit harder to play the long game and make these emotional connections that don't translate to short term sales, but do lead to growing, resilient baselines of revenue longer term, which is the way brands have been built over hundreds of years. But just when the middlemen of Facebook and Google came about, it just became a different game. So, yes, making that emotional connection, becoming broadly known and people understand broadly why they're going to choose you versus anyone else. To your point on price, you can go to Amazon or Walmart and get a pair of shorts for 799 and people do that. A lot of people do that. But then there are also some people who choose us and they do so for a reason and it is not a rational decision. So appealing to folks. Logic and rationality works in the short term, but not in the long term. And I think that those are some of the big lessons. So I think the building of the brand and the multichannel are the two things we'd do differently.

Yeah, I mean, huge risk in losing your customer permanently to intermediaries. One of my best coaches constantly reminded me to disintermediate any intermediaries between you and your customer because absolute power corrupts absolutely. And if you want to get lazy and you want to think short term, you want to outsource your customer acquisition to an aggregator, look, I buy that way, so, you know, it's not. I buy a lot of things that way and we all do, but it's dangerous and it's a dangerous strategy because then the game can be changed completely outside of your control. Everybody's trying to figure out the new strategy or the new algorithm all at the same time. And that doesn't help the fact that you're not getting in front of your customers now because they've chosen to sell that attention to somebody else for some other reason.

Yes. The slight nuance that I think we learned is that we don't necessarily have to own exactly where the transaction takes place, but we do want to own, to the extent possible, our audience. And it's building up that audience, that follower base, whether it be email list, SMS list, even on social. And that growth of owning and building that audience, I think we learned, is Huge. And then it becomes endlessly monetizable in a long term, sort of sustainable way, where the key with any of these businesses that we're trying to build is to make more deposits than withdrawals in our audience on behalf of our audience. And I think fundamentally that becomes very doable when you're building up this community, this audience. And there are endless ways to build a community where the main way you grow is people understand why you exist, you deliver on that promise and then people tell other people about it. And that hasn't changed. That will always be true.

Exactly. So if you were to launch Chubby's today, how would you go about it?

I think Shopify would still be the place where I would get going. And I would also be earlier into Amazon and I would be earlier into going multi channel because you would still use Shopify to learn quick because you need that feedback loop. You need to understand what is resonating. But then I think as quickly as possible, we need to be where a consumer is. And then we'd focus much more on just doing free brand building, things that are just very memorable. We did some of that stuff in the earliest of early days, but then we started getting on the hamster wheel of handing money over to Facebook and Google and candidly, we got lazy. So I think we would just not be lazy. We would just do the things that you do when you've got no money and you're scrappy and hungry and do that forever. I think that allows you to grow more profitably and it might be slightly slower, but that's not necessarily a bad thing because you're laying a stronger foundation.

Would you have a podcast?

Yes, for sure, 100% I would have a podcast, absolutely. And it's YouTube channel. YouTube channel. It's been a lot more time on LinkedIn, which is now what I'm trying to get a little bit better at. But yes, this, this evergreen content creation is amazing. The amount of time I spend listening to podcasts is just unbelievable. And it's.

Everything I do now is literally there's going to sleep at night or I mean, you know, I got Netflix, I've got Hulu, I've got Amazon Prime, I've got all of that stuff, but equal, if not more. I'm just watching, I'm watching a podcast. It's just more interesting to me. It's unscripted. You can, you have lots of options to pick a flavor of guest host that you're interested in and it's. And anyone can do it. But to Your point? They say if you're going to start it, commit for three years.

That's the main.

Because it takes time.

That's the main thing. Yeah.

And you got to have enough content.

You got to have enough content. And it takes a while to build trust and to figure out what the heck you're doing. And that's the hard thing for a lot of people. I don't know what the stats are. You probably know this better than I. But the amount of people who quit before three years, 99%, I don't know. But that's exactly the point is committing to this stuff over the long term. Because this stuff doesn't deliver overnight. But you grow that catalog so that once people find out about you, they can really engage, they can go deep and they can really get to know you and have a relationship with you. And I think that's just fundamental truth of business. If your inputs are great, you're not going to see the results necessarily right away, but just got to be internally validated and just keep doing it and it'll pay off. It inevitably pays off. And it's the overnight success that took three years or five years or 10 years, where we all have stories about that. That was our story. But, yes, I love your point. You just got to do it and keep doing it.

Yeah. One of the first rules of leadership is accessibility. And making your brand accessible to people in a very authentic way is fundamental to building a relationship with the marketplace.

That was absolutely. One of the key things that our audience loved is they felt like they knew us. They felt like they knew the four co founders. They felt like they were friends with us. Our big thing was, you're not a customer, you're a friend. We are not a company selling product to customers. We are just people making stuff we love for our friends. And it seems slightly trite, but it really changes the way you behave and operate, the standard that you apply to the product you put out there, the content you make. And you're 100% right. People really react positively. And our experience completely validates this, that people were so much more excited to talk about us because they felt like they knew us. And they felt like we were just normal people really, just going after this dream. And I think there's an aspirational component to that. Where we too, were in the place where we were shackled by the cubicle for a long time. Right. Working for the man. And for a lot of folks, we represented the American dream. What's possible that a few friends with no real Experience could get together and start something that people love. And we were transparent, we were honest. We made mistakes. We tried to just be honest in the same way you would with a real relationship. And so yes, to your point, that relationship, that trust that you can build by being an actual human, not just a logo and a corporate entity.

Do you remember your brand archetype? I know you may or may not have. I'm sure you went through these branding exercises, but there's hero brands and there's outlaw brands and there's, you know, do you remember, you know, is there a word that the consumer public would say that Chubby's represented to them?

The Weeknd.

So the weekend.

Yeah. So that is the space. Everything associated with Weekend is the patch of land in the mind of our audience that we intended to own and slightly expand over time. So one of the key manifestations of that was we talked about Friday at 5, feeling constantly. And the use case around that where you take off your slacks and throw on your chubbies and then the weekend would begin. And all of our content was around the weekend. The fun where you're in control of your time, where you're making memories with your family. So yes, that was the one association we intended to create and basically just spent the last almost 15 years telling that story in a zillion different ways.

I almost hate to ask this question, and we can edit this out, but what is behind the brand name Chubby?

Yeah, probably worth editing out, but here's maybe an answer that. Because there is obviously this sort of sexual joke which to the point about being notable and memorable, pros and cons associated with it, of course. But people remembered that right away. They're like, that's what. That's the name of the company. Okay. So there's an immediate. Rather than some think of any apparel brand out there where it was either of our names or some fancy sounding. This was just ridiculous. And it was kind of the opposite of what you would do. You wouldn't start a company with a ridiculous name. It's much more common now, but it was very uncommon back then. It was like what they did what. So there was a bit of the idea that this is just notable and very different that I think led to some of that early awareness. But one of the things that we just like to talk about publicly is and. Or just in general. There's another component of the story is just we intended to be the opposite of at the time brands like Abercrombie and Fitch that, you know, had this six pack person with their shirt off, the house music bumping. You kind of felt like it was this taking themselves way too serious, you can't come to my party sort of thing. You're not invited unless you're the cool kid.

Oh, here, here. I think the entire world takes themselves way too serious. Nobody resonates with that.

Right, right. And so we just existed to do the opposite of what was done at the time. Like, let's. We're. If you've got a little bit of a dad bod or a beer belly, shoot. That's why we've got elastic waistbands. If you get a little chubby, eat a little bit too much steak. Again, we're the guys for you. We're not going to judge you. Come on in, let's barbecue together. Let's have a beer together. Let's just have fun, be who you are. And that was just very different at the time from what existed because it was very much, be a model, try to look like the model, try to get that six pack. And our idea was just, that's ridiculous. Let's just have fun, be who we are. And so that's what we wanted to represent.

Based on what I can find online, and I'm not asking you to confirm or deny this, just to hear it. Small SBA loan to get started. You guys pitching in friends and family, getting the prototypes done, working your jobs, working it off the side of your desk and on weekends, selling it out of backpacks. And at some point somebody comes along and drops $129 million on you guys, according to what I found online. Could be right, could be wrong, but you were very successful and the company was acquired. And that gives you opportunities to be more purposeful in your life, to be more selective and do things that are interesting to you and that you want to do. I know you've got family and it's important and you also are involved and it looks like a good number of startups and maybe some social causes. What matters to you today and how do you choose to spend your time on purpose?

Yeah, great question. I'd say. I'd say one of the first things I would say is I can't comment on, given it was a private transaction, on any kind of exit values or anything like that.

You started it with a little. And then there was a lot at some point.

First of all, yes, very blessed that there was any kind of an exit. Just as well, could not have happened. So feel like we are so blessed, so grateful. We've been given so much by. By the ecosystem, so grateful to the team, to our customers, all of those sorts of things just filled with gratitude on that front. So that then I think is the segue to the purpose now, which is try to give back as much as possible to the world that gave so much to us, which is the E commerce, dtc, selling stuff, online ecosystem. Folks who are just trying to build brands that resonate with folks and be able to start a business, achieve some semblance of freedom, control of time, et cetera. So it's serving entrepreneurs, I think in a lot of ways how you are Jeff where hey, we've learned a lot. I've made every mistake in the book and fixed learned some stuff, solved a bunch of problems that I think could be applicable to other folks going along their own entrepreneurial journey. So early days, but trying to get better at putting some content out there on LinkedIn. It seems like that's a place where a lot of people are reading stuff, open to learning, you can reach folks who are really building companies, building brands, entrepreneurs, and hopefully over time can get a great podcast going with. The goal of my particular niche is just helping folks think about how they're going to profitably grow via building a brand. And so I'm really just trying to challenge a lot of the preconceived notions about how it's done today, how you have to spend a ton of money buying transactions online and you can actually step back and invest your marketing resources and activities in building a brand where you're changing people's minds, where they'll come and buy from you when they're ready and create this compounding flywheel that unfortunately not a bunch of folks are doing because they really want to just get that immediate term transaction, which is great in the short term, but it erodes fundamentals of the business or it can, it did for us. So we had to learn that lesson. And so my goal is to just try to share a little bit about how we went through a transaction or a transition, I should say from really focusing on the highly measurable near term revenue pop sort of situation to thinking a little bit longer term growing a little bit more of a a stable base revenue and just sort of getting to compounding where again people you can't necessarily measure the transaction in the way that you can with more transaction or conversion based advertising or marketing. But over time you do start to see it and it's real. But it's a risk, right? Because it's very different from the way people have been trying to grow or do Marketing over the last decade, decade and a half. So my purpose is, hey, made all the mistakes, did it, saw how it hurt our business. It worked for a long time, stopped working, and we found a path that worked for us. My goal is to just try to tell that story and be as helpful as possible so that, ideally, if you listen to what we're doing, it'll slightly change the way you think about growing your company, allocating your marketing resources, measuring the financial impact of building a brand, but ultimately thinking about, why am I here? What is the brand that I'm building? Why fundamentally, do people choose me versus someone else versus a cheaper competitor versus someone else who's telling a different story? Why do I exist and being able to be very clear about that, but then how specifically does this tie to my financial performance? Because you build brand to become more profitable, not to have a cool logo and a color scheme. So just really trying to tell that story, be as helpful as possible. I like to say that as marketers, we kind of control or can be accountable to revenue. Yes. But generally revenue is a vanity metric, in my opinion. We very much just want to focus on helping folks drive variable profit. So if I can help drive an incremental billion dollars in variable profit across the people who are reading my stuff, listening to my stuff, that would be amazing. That would be so cool.

Yeah. Reflecting upon your time with Chubby's and how it started, what advice would you have for people about partnerships?

Do you mean sort of like with co founders?

Yeah. So there's a correlation in our business in helping people get freedom and financial security through franchising, where it can really be a benefit to have partners because they can divide and conquer, and they can. They have a sounding board. They're sharing a journey and a vision together. So partnerships are powerful. That being said, sometimes they don't work out. There's always going to be conflict. And I'm interested in your perspective on the partnership that you had with your. With your buddies and anything that you learned along the way that could be beneficial for other people who are considering partnership structure in a new business.

I am the biggest advocate of it. Fundamentally. You can clearly start a company, run a business all by yourself. Many people can do that. I'm not one of them. Having three other people as partners, the main thing that it did that, I would say, is that it allowed us to keep going. The only failure in starting and running a company is quitting. And that was the key. You mentioned sounding board. You mentioned support structure. You got to have someone to Pick you up when you're feeling down, when you feel the friction, when you mess up, when something doesn't go that well. You got to divide and conquer. Absolutely. Very tactical, of course. But having other people there to pick you up, keep you going so that you just don't quit, so that you don't stop was the biggest thing. So my biggest piece of advice is, and this is from my n of one experience, is find people you respect the hell out of and that then allows you to have that trust to where you know they have. We are aligned. There will be conflict. There will be endless conflict. But that's great because we're seeking truth and it's not easy. It's not easy to be wrong. It's easy to feel right. But that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to find truth. We're trying to do the absolute best thing for a customer, for the company, for our team. And I think it took us a long time, a lot of growth in emotional intelligence, if you will. But conflict on behalf of our customer, conflict and innovation on behalf of our customers is just sort of why we exist, why we build companies. So I couldn't be a bigger advocate for partnership and just finding people you respect the hell out of and trusting that they have the best interests of the company at heart. And that conflict is a beautiful thing, to embrace it and seek truth. Right. Not trying to be right. And over time you'll certainly benefit.

Yeah. The ability to rush to conflict and then to resolve conflict in a healthy manner is an accelerator for velocity in an organization. And where I sit in our organization, one of the most important things that I do and that I need to pay attention to because we've got a bunch of executives that all come from large multi billion dollar, multi brand franchise platforms. And everybody has their way of management and trying to, as fast as we've grown, build a cohesive team. And then to manage that, we use an outside resource where we go once a month. And I interviewed a guy named Jake Carls who him and his couple family members started Midday Squares.

Yes.

And he said they started. I don't know if you know Jake.

No, not personally or of him. I do know of him. Yes.

Yeah, he's great. Yeah, he was great. And you know, they started their company by just videotaping everything live as they were having their meetings. But before they even started their company, they all had to agree to weekly therapy with each other, like counseling. And he said it was the best thing that they ever did. And I thought that was very smart and very bright and probably made for good, good YouTube television as well. But I don't know if they recorded that. But it's, you know, organizational health, man, has so much to do with attitudes and partnerships and people. I've had some people tell me partnerships and sinking ships, avoid them both and they're both bad for you. But I've had to learn later in my career and especially where you are and to extent where I as I sold the business in 2019. Now, if you're trying to leverage your knowledge and to help as many people as you can be successful, invariably you can't operate everything. So that leads immediately into partnerships. So partnership, partnership dynamics. Picking good partnerships, good expectations set up front, head off bad disagreements down the road, making sure that you spend enough time between an idea and a decision and a commitment to make sure that it's absolutely clear. So not rushing into things. I mean, I've learned a lot in the last five years. My anniversary selling my business is in six weeks. Five years.

Congratulations.

Yeah. And it's gone really, really fast. But, man, I have to say I've learned more in the last five years than probably the previous 15 years combined. So I'm just always interested for people like you who had such a successful partnership with some people that you knew before. So that in and of itself can create problems because you have this history as friends. They say one thing, they say, don't go into business with your friends. Well, maybe, but. Because you could lose the friendship. But on the other side of that, you also know who these people are.

Exactly, exactly.

So I think being a good partner aspirationally will help people be more successful and expand their sphere of influence inside of the businesses that they choose to do.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, two additional learnings I might just tag on to what you mentioned. One is there are sayings, pretty much saying anything out there, just like these quips, partnerships and sinking ships, whatever it might be. And I'd say one of the biggest lessons or pieces of advice I might pass along is it just doesn't matter because you could just as easily say, oh, I don't have a co founder, so I can't get started. My biggest takeaway is there are infinite ways to do this. As I've learned more about other brands, it's just amazing how some single founder, some grow in ways that I would have never imagined. So it's just very humbling. My realization is, with whatever you got, it just happened to be organic. That there were three. Three other really close friends who I loved and respected who were in the same place in their lives at this time. But acknowledge that there might be excuses that you're making just because you're scared to get started, and that's okay. But just acknowledge that you don't have to have a co founder, for instance. It's fantastic. I'm a huge proponent of it. The second thing that came to mind as you were speaking, Jeff, was the idea that therapy might have a negative connotation to it. I wish we would have done that. That's brilliant. I love that. But I like to call it coaching. I mean, in everything we did growing up, we had coaches, right? And why would we not? We did a little bit of it and it was hugely beneficial. Wish we had done it more consistently and with our broader leadership team as well. It's just so valuable to have someone able to take that third party perspective and just walk us through stuff. I mean, coaching is awesome. I don't know. I wanted to get really good at soccer growing up and I had a coach. I don't know why it shouldn't apply to one of the most important things in our lives.

100%, somebody looking at it from the outside. We need diversity in every aspect of our team that we build with the exception of probably shared vision and values. When we're at work, we want to make sure that we share the values that we're going to make decisions by, we're going to hire and fire by. We have to understand, we have to have clarity of purpose and why we exist. And that's going to lead right into who is our customer. And, you know, but inside of that now you have all these different roles where you need, you know, you need philosophers, you need coordinators, you need technical people, you need visionaries, you got to have trail. You have all these different personality types. And we're a culture. We use culture index to figure out who everybody is. And man, right down the line, that's exactly who they are. So you have to understand that. Not if we, if, if we built a company, all of Jeff's over here, or you built a company, all of Preston's, it would not work. It wouldn't. You'd row in circles just because we can't do everything.

Exactly.

I mean, there's not a person in this company that is not better than me at what they do. I have my role and it comes with a certain perspective and experience and I'm responsible to bring my piece to it. But I mean, getting the diversity of, of talents and then. And then those people are naturally not all going to work together immediately. So, you know, making sure that you have a third party that is helping everybody understand who everybody else is and why people are in the positions they are and why they behave the way that they do. It's very healthy. It's coaching, it's therapy, it's consulting. You tag it for whatever you want to. But for us, because, I mean, I'm pretty simple in my organization, if, you know, we talk a lot about fake work, right. Anytime that anybody's doing anything that is not immediately connected to the strategic goals of the organization or the department or the area they're in, then, you know, we call that fake work. And fake work has the. It just, you know, it slows everything down. So when departments or people are not getting along and they're letting anything get in the way of the goals of the organization, I'm pretty simple. I say, you guys need to go and work it out and come back and tell me that it's worked out or who's leaving.

Sure. Yeah, absolutely.

So seems to work. And you don't have to like each other. You don't have to love each other. I don't expect people to hang out after work. You got to work together.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's in service of the mission. Right. I mean, it's the whole missionary, mercenary sort of thing. Right. We are on a mission, and as a leadership team, set of founders, we need to be very good at conveying that mission in a way that it is easily understood because it's commitment that we're looking for. We can learn anything. Our team can learn anything. But got to have commitment and devotion to the mission. And I mean, Jeff, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts, but that's one of our biggest roles and responsibilities as there becomes a larger team. And I think you mentioned vision, but how do we do so in such a way where it has a missional component to it? Because that's when I think it really unlocks the special sauce that can come out of people where they just take things a million miles further and make it a million times more amazing than I or you could have ever done. That's one of the coolest things in starting and building a company is when that stuff starts to happen.

So I know that you're looking at different businesses. You must get asked all the time to look at things. I saw something called Bodacious Brands. That was a LinkedIn link that you had on your LinkedIn, and it's you and Tom. It's probably your. I signed up for the newsletter. We'll see what I get. And I also saw the word lovegasm on there, so I'm not really sure what that is.

What's a. It's just I saw that somewhere.

Is that a chubby's word? A lovegasm?

It's just a ridiculous word that I think was used in a video that Tom and I did, gosh, maybe a decade ago.

Oh yeah, on YouTube. I saw that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So that wasn't part of the culture. That was just something that fell out of somebody's mouth and I should probably say.

Exactly. I mean, you could say. You could say whatever you want. I think it's one of those things. It's kind of ridiculous. And then it's like, I'm never gonna forget that word.

No, no. It's a great. It's probably has something to do with raving fans.

Yes, yes.

So I'm interested though, your perspective. You're out in California, kind of a hotbed of ideas and things like that. You're venturing a lot of tech out there. You're obviously an expert in both branding and building brands online. What do you see as far as trends? I mean, has anything caught your attention here lately that you're looking at and saying that's really going to be interesting, Maybe a new platform or a new way that business is going to be assembled to deliver consumers to products and vice versa?

That's a great question. I think. Two thoughts. One is, and this is not surprising, but new approaches to influencer, whether it be sort of deeper partnership, bringing in people with existing large audiences who might be a fit for what you're doing, and I don't know what the economic structure necessarily needs to be, but just being able to hop on people's existing audiences and giving these folks who already have existing audiences the ability to monetize that audience. I think one of the big things that I'm realizing is there are a lot of people who, whether they be athletes or they've built up an amazing audience doing something, they're. Some of them are just not able to monetize that audience. Being able to bring brand and audience together in new ways where maybe there's an equity component given to that person with the audience, where they can co create, where that person can become a co founder is something I'm seeing that is, I think, interesting and really powerful for being able to very quickly access an audience. Especially given that accessing an audience is becoming ever More expensive via the Facebooks and Googles, paying for eyeballs. That's one thing. The other thing I would say is I, and I think we as entrepreneurs can suffer from shiny object syndrome where we're just constantly chasing the new trend, the new thing. And I, as I reflect, part of it is, gosh, I wish I would have ignored some of that noise a little bit and just do simple better, right? It's just what are the fundamentals? What am I trying to do? Block everything else out, be internally validated and just go. And there's no silver bullet, no trend is going to be a silver bullet, no new piece of software, no new blah blah, blah. It's just do simple better, you know, what's best for you. Don't get pulled in all these different directions. Don't worry about competitor aware, but customer obsessed I think is how Bezos says it. But it's kind of just blocking out the noise, ignoring the trends and just doing the old fashioned hard work of making great product, serving customers, telling a story that matters, right, that is resonant and doing that over and over and over and over for decades.

So I know that you've been involved with causes, Chubby's had a foundation and I've seen your evidence of your involvement in different social causes along the way. Of the things that you're concerned about or you worry about, are there any that you believe today are irreversible or inevitable?

That's an interesting question. I tend not to think that anything is irreversible. I guess the eternal optimist in me, and I'd say maybe comments of many an entrepreneur is one of the reasons they ultimately end up being successful. Is that commonly held wisdom? Is that something the way it had been done was irreversible or something couldn't be changed and they figured out how to change it. So I'd say that's maybe idea number one. Idea number two. And tied to what Chaviz is doing is just the idea of mental health. And that was a big, that was a big piece of, you know, the, what was really difficult coming out of school in 2008, for instance, you know, all of the stress associated with, you know, how am I going to get a job, how am I going to make sure I, you know, find something where I'm, you know, getting to my ultimate success day one sort of thing and the anxiety associated with all that sort of stuff and then maybe the difficulty around starting a business, it's just very hard. So I think that's something that we really care about. And the way Chubby's, I think, has approached it is just through fun, positivity, levity. Right. It's just a totally different perspective. If we're going about our days with a big smile on our face, that in and of itself has a lot of power to trickle and influence how we do everything else. So if we could just bring a little bit of a smile to people's faces, that's really important. And I think it unlocks all of these different things where people can more actively pursue their dreams, dive in on something, commit to something over a period of time, do a podcast for three years before they get any external recognition, for instance. So I think that's one of the things that I think really matters. A bunch of things matter can only do so much. I think that's one of the things where we feel like we can have an impact, hence the foundation.

Yeah. We're also very concerned about mental health, and particularly in one of my brands called Rockbox, we're partnered with a charity that's to write Love on Her Arms, and it's about suicide prevention and mental health. And as I think about social media, And I have three children, 25, 22, and 19, right now, I look at the way that they're wired and they have higher expectations now of what life is supposed to be and how it's supposed to play out. And a lot of that is just online. You're looking at life online. It's not somebody scrubbing the toilet. It's people are up to something and going somewhere and having fun. And then I think grace and kindness is down. So, you know, appreciating for everybody. You know, all work is honorable and appreciating for people for what they do to contribute, because all of these roles need to be filled. And, you know, it's just not the people driving the Bugattis that are contributing to society here.

Right.

And it's all of us working together. And then I think this has an impact of making resilient individual resilience lower because you're just. You just. You lose hope. The Internet, anybody that has a great idea now, you go to the Internet and you real. You thought it was one of one, and you realize there's a thousand variations of it out there. It's like, well, why. Why should I even start this? And. But what I like about what you had to say today is that you start at the beginning. You start at the grassroots, you start in the park. You have a great product, and you take it to People and you connect and you build that way and I think anybody can start 100%. And franchising is definitely a business plan to follow. It's a leverage model where you're sharing the cost to build a brand and the technology stack and the customer, customer acquisition. So more and more things are being franchised and franchising is accelerating at an accelerating rate. And it's a great business model, it's great for wealth creation on Main street usa for families and people that want to leave that job and, and, and join something and you know, so it, it's, you know, but if you, if you go online I think you're going to find a thousand reasons why you shouldn't and you know, take a chance. So I always encourage people to, you know, you mentioned it in the beginning, self limiting beliefs, you know, limitations that are self imposed, you know, why me? Why can't we do this? And it's just, it's just not true. Like you can really do anything that you're willing to commit to long enough.

That's right.

And hard enough.

Speaking, speaking of franchising and just being a wonderful model, one of our chubby's co founders, his dad was a Wendy's franchisee and that was just an amazing way to support the family, grow, leverage an existing brand which is huge and reduce the friction to becoming an entrepreneur which is one of the things I love so much about franchising. Just lowering the barrier to entry to be to that freedom. Not that it's easy, not that this is ever easy, but it's just a beautiful structure and yes, I mean completely agree if you're just looking online there's going to be tough stuff. I do think however, and we'll see how, I mean I have a six year old so we'll see how I do on this front. But one of my beliefs is, and I'd be curious to get your thoughts, it's slightly loosely held but that this stuff has always existed in some form for a long time. This idea of, I mean you had magazines, you have tv where there's this, oh, there's this amazing life out there. And I think some of the narrative somewhat removes the responsibility that we as individuals have to control our information, diet just take ownership of what we choose to think about, look at, think, participate, where agency has seemingly been removed from the individual. And that is something that I goes back to just entrepreneurship franchising, where we have agency. No one's going to do this for us. Let's take ownership. You've got this one relatively short period of time on this earth, let's be the owners, let's be on offense, let's be the creators rather than the consumers. My hope with my daughter and my son, who's nine months, is that I can help them put all of that stuff that they might see on social media in context. Great. Glad that exists. But I am the owner of my destiny, this world. I'm so lucky and blessed that I live in the United States of America, that I have the ability to create anything I want. None of it's going to be easy, but really the outcome isn't the goal. The joy is in the journey and the joy is in the work. The joy is in the struggle, and that is the beauty in life. And I think a lot of that is not talked about enough. And I think it's our job as entrepreneurs, as parents, as content creators to kind of change the narrative there where it's cool to create rather than simply consume or criticize. We can build things, we can be constructive. And it's never been easier to do that, honestly. And those are some of the things where it's just kind of like, it'd be great if we could change the narrative around some of these things, especially for our kids. And that's something I don't have the answers, but I'm curious about.

I believe you're on the right track, and I think that is an incredible sentiment for us to wrap up on. I've got a final question for you. First of all, I've really enjoyed this, Preston, thank you so much for being on and sharing your story. There's been so much wisdom.

Thank you, Jeff. It's been an honor. I'm very grateful. Thank you. This was a lot of fun.

Yeah, awesome. If you had one sentence to make an impact in someone else's life, do you have a go to as to.

What that would be? I'll just say just start and don't stop.

There you go. Keep it simple. Just start, don't stop. Got it. Preston, if people wanted to reach out.

To you, LinkedIn, come find me on LinkedIn. Just Preston Rutherford. In between the Preston and the Rutherford is a little shorts emoji. And I'm trying to write some posts where I just kind of try to share some wisdom and it'd be awesome if you'd take a look, comment help this learning process. Collective learning is sort of the experiment on LinkedIn. So yeah, just check it out, let me know what you think. What can I share that would be useful? And then hopefully someday, Jeff, I can have a podcast that does as well as this, but that'll be. That'll be something again to eat my own dog food, as it were. Be working on for three years before anyone hears it, right? That's right.

Well, thank you again. This has been absolutely amazing. I've really enjoyed it, and we appreciate everybody out there listening to Preston Rutherford on the home front.

Bye. Bye.

Take care.

Thank you.