[Greatest Hits] There’s No Reason To Leave Your Job Right From The Beginning with David Simnick

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on ready. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

I'm here with David Bimnick and Daniel Dahl. They have a couple of companies and they've got a lot of products. They're big in marketing products to the masses and I appreciate having you guys with me today. Thanks for joining us. David.

Yeah, absolutely.

Larry.

Well, it's a privilege and honor to be here.

And Daniel Dahl.

Daniel yeah, thank you so much Larry. Great to be here.

I'll let you guys decide who to answer and how to pass the ball back and forth. I'm sure you guys are well versed at doing that. But one of your companies is Soapbox. Soapbox Soaps and Soapbox Thing. And so talk about, describe for people, give them a little overview of the products that you sell, how they might know you in the marketplace.

Yeah, absolutely. So Soapbox is a mission driven personal care company. We sell shampoo, conditioner, hair treatments, we sell body wash, liquid hand soap, bar soap. We just sell pretty much as much personal care and hair care offerings that we find. We can make the best product at an affordable and accessible price with natural ingredients. And then pretty much everything we make is here in the United States. So we sell on Amazon, we sell on Grove, we sell on box.com, we sell iHerb and then in store we sell at Target, WalGreens, Rite Aid, CVS. We sell in pretty much every grocery store in the United States. So definitely check your local grocery store. But it's been such a privilege to be able to build this with Dan and our amazing team. And every time someone buys one of our products, we donate a bar of soap. Our website is actually a little out of date. We have donated over 22 million bars to local homeless shelters and food pantries. Believe it or not, Larry, food stamps or supplemental assistance programs don't cover hygiene products. So one of the most requested items at either food pantries or shelters or whatever it might be are actually hygiene items. So we really step in there as the whole mission and purpose behind our brand is to go in and help there and help our neighbor out.

What is your other company or other businesses that people might know you from?

So in the mid part of 2018 we took the first step to build what we call impact driven brands, which is a portfolio of brands that either some way, either society, societally, environmentally or economically, preferably all Three, benefit the world and leave it a better place than we found it. And the first entrant to impact driven brands was a company called Bushwick Kitchen, which is a high end sauce and condiment company born in Brooklyn, New York that sell things like spicy honey and other flavor infused honeys, a line of gochujang srirachas as well as maple syrups.

Where did this idea come from? I mean, what was your background and.

What led to this?

Well, I wish I could say that Dan and I knew what we were doing, but we absolutely did not. My background is fortunate enough to graduate early from college, went and worked for the United States Agency for International Development as a subcontractor. That's where the idea for Soapbox came from. Gave Dan a call along with two of our other really close friends, Eric Vong and Stephanie Appiah. So we started Soapbox with really humble origins. We basically started making soap in my college kitchen and then we just did it as an evening, as a weekends project for two years. I went off into Teach for America. Dan and Eric went and joined IBM. Same thing with Stephanie doing Teach for America. But a long story short is we were all young and we did not know what we were doing. So I think that's where we had the hubris to believe that we could take on P and G and Unilever and Colgate, Palmolive and l' Oreal and all these, you know, multinational billion upon billion upon billion of dollars of revenue businesses in such a competitive category. And it was that experience over the years, actually over the past decade, that has now given us the expertise and we've also been able to hire up and bring on people more talented than ourselves in their respective areas. So we started hiring people from those aforementioned large multinationals and it's just awesome to now have the team that we do across the four different brands that we have in market. And we're super eager to either launch or acquire more brands that fit the criteria that Dan was talking about before. So we're a little different. We're like a little mini Unilever moving faster than our bigger competitors. But we're incredibly excited about creating great quality products that give back.

What college we both went to?

American.

American. Where is that? You have to help me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so it's not an online college, but it's, it's American University. And not that there's any problem with that. Not at all. Yeah, I've definitely taken a bunch of online certifications, but it's American University in Washington D.C. oh yeah, I know.

I was born in Washington D.C. why.

Did I not know that?

So where about Walter Rainey, ladies and gentlemen, where they take presidents to die? That's why I was born. And so American University. Now you guys are college friends, is that the deal?

Yes. We had a number of classes together throughout college and really got close in an entrepreneurship class in my senior year. And what would have been Dave's senior year, when he mentioned he graduated early, he came back to alumni audit a class in entrepreneurship that I was also taking. The end deliverable was to write a business plan for a class for a business concept. And so with his experience at the subcontractor to usaid, sort of saw this need for improvements to what they call wash water, sanitation and hygiene projects and came up with the concept with his childhood best friend Eric, who was at Purdue, an entrepreneurship class and said, can we take that same model as Tom shoes of this one for one donation and apply it to something that you buy more frequently than shoes like soap, which you buy every time you go to the store. And so from there the idea was born and of course graduated college and all of us went off to our individual respective job posts around the country and kind of treated it as a nights and weekends passion project until we got into our first whole food store in March of 2012. That's when Dave and I left our full time jobs to try to build a soap company into a household named Brent.

So this was a passion project that was really motivated for more to have a business of your own, a business that made a difference from a humanitarian standpoint rather than hey, people have done this soap thing all wrong. We're going to show people how to make soap now. And it wasn't so much a soap thing, but a business where you could make an impact in the world. Is that, am I understanding that right?

That's exactly right, Larry. And I'd say, you know, to go a step further, had we known better, I think that we would have from the onset probably gone into a different category and or gone about the go to market a different way than we did. But we didn't. And that actually allowed us to consistently fail forward. Emphasis on the fail.

But what I would say is that.

A lot of people ask us, did you start a personal care company with a mission because you thought it was a great marketing concept to then build a personal care company or did you start a personal care company to solve a societal ill that you thought needed to be addressed? And it's definitely the latter in retrospective And Dan and I laughed about this a lot. We wish we were the former. I'd say that now when we look at our brands, this is a tidbit that I think your listeners will really enjoy. And I also hope that it's really valuable for any entrepreneur out there, either currently in the trenches and or prospecting, to jump on in. People don't buy us because of the mission. They might buy us again because of the mission. And when you're on a shelf at Wegmans or Walgreens or H E B or any of the retailers throughout the country that we sell in, as well as a couple other countries abroad, they're going to buy something that is great for them and they're going to buy a shampoo that has all the things that they're looking for, that is sulfate free, that is color safe, that is going to tame that frizz, whatever it might be. They're there to buy the best shampoo at the best price for them. And then the fact that we give back as a cherry on top, I would like to say that we figured that out a lot faster than actually the time it took for us to figure that out. So. So that was a very important lesson. And surprisingly, there's a lot of people out there that still think it's the inverse, that you should take the thing that you're most differentiated in and shout that at the top of your lungs. But if the consumer isn't. They don't care about the thing that you're shouting, then it doesn't matter. So I think for us it was a hard lesson learned. But the interesting thing about our missions is it gives us and our platform and each of our brands authenticity. And that's something you can't manufacture. It's gotta come from within the brand. It actually has to be positioned in a way that, you know, whatever, you know, whatever reasons to believe that that brand is actually saying to the consumer that that consumer believes it and that it comes from a place and, or, you know, an actual authentic backstory that that consumer goes, okay, this is why this brand is here. This is why I should be interested in this. And that's pretty difficult. And I think it's also, you know, it's the wellspring of a lot of our success. But it's also just one aspect of, you know, the many lessons that we've learned over the decade plus that we've been in. Consumer.

Yeah, they might buy it on a fluke, you know, just for the novelty of the story. But the thing Is has been beaten into my head many times. Yeah. The stores only keep you in there if what they put on there disappears because people buy it. They're not going to restock something that just sits on the shelf. It's only going to disappear. If people like it, they use it, becomes a regular part. Now, how long did it take you? And by the way, those other avenues you might have pursued, they're still available for you. You can still go that way. You don't have to be limited. I get the idea. You guys are going to go to a lot of places and cover all of these approaches before it's over. When did you learn that the product must tap into what the consumer cares about more than what you care about to resonate or how did you get this light bulb to go on in your mind? You said you want to save yourself a lot of failures along the way. What were those kind of failures?

I think it's a culmination of a lot of learnings throughout the years in doing business. And I think if you talk to a retail buyer as a consumer packaged goods company, their differentiation, they look at you as a social mission brand and say, okay, that's the number one thing that differentiates you in the category. But like Dave mentioned, the reality is that the consumer shopping the hair care shelves is not necessarily looking to make an aid donation. And so while it might be the most important thing for the retail buyer, we've got to appeal to that consumer at shelf. And so we made the biggest switch in our company's history in late 2017. We did a lot of quantitative and qualitative research and studies and came up with a new packaging design and sort of overhauled our entire brand image. And really that purpose of that was to make sure that we communicate the things that are most important to the consumer in those individual categories. So does our packaging look and feel premium and natural, which is something that we wanted to convey. Does the hierarchy of the product we're selling in the individual category, whether it's personal care, hair care, and so is that packaging hierarchy set up in a way that the thing that the consumer cares about the most in those categories is communicated first in those categories? And that was, I think, the biggest switch for us where we really started to see our brand grow, our sales grow, and start to rely more as a larger growth brand. On looking at sales data, which all these mass retailers report to places like Nielsen and iri, where sort of no one's. No one's sales are hidden. And you can sort of Tell a story with sales data versus the worry Young Startup Company with a Mission. Give us a Chance.

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You know one thing that drives excitement early on is, especially in a startup, is you're learning so much. You know, you're learning things about yourself, about the market, and it is an exciting thing to go through while you're going through the failures. I'm intrigued that you guys kept this going after you left college and it sounds like it was like a part time thing that you let it continue to swell up until you could make the jump and do it full time. What was the plan?

Yeah, so I think that's one of the pieces of advice that we tell people most often is that there's no reason to leave your full time job because you want to be an entrepreneur. What's most important is that you create a brand and a position, solve a need and actually prove that in market first. Take the security of your job and your salary and your 401k and your benefits. Because when you jump full time, you've got to jump and cut all the strings. And one of the best analogies that we had a mentor, Ted Loss, is that being an entrepreneur is like jumping from a plane and you can pull the sort of parachute rip cord the second you leave the plane and float down pretty safely. Or you can let that thing go as far as you can until you're about to crash and pull that parachute. And that's sort of a representation of risk tolerance that people entrepreneurs in the space might have. But the reality is that there's no reason to take undue risk. Prove it in market, get someone not only to buy it once but to buy it twice and make sure that the people buying it aren't just like your Aunt Sally who is going to support you no matter what you launch. Someone who's actually going to give you critical feedback, give you ways that you can improve your brand, ways that you can take it to the next level. And for us, that was at this point over a decade of learning, iterating, trying to be as resilient as possible and really having the stomach for the ups and the downs. Because I remember a time where we left a buyer meeting at a food retailer and at the lunch celebrating the win of getting distribution, that food retailer received a call that we got discontinued from another retailer. It just is a microcosm of the kind of ups and the downs that you have in entrepreneurship and also in consumer packaged goods, where you're at the whim of a buyer's decision, which could go in your favor or could not. And the outcomes are very binary.

Yeah. And what would you say? How did you reach the point of being in school and find yourself looking for an entrepreneurial outlet? What was the background that kind of led up to that? Experiences, prior experiences, or for some reason you wanted to go to school, so you wanted to get an education and you got jobs, so you weren't that crazy. So where did you get to? Where did this entrepreneurial lean come from?

Yeah. So for me and Dan, definitely you should tell your story after my go at this. But long story short, I have always been an entrepreneur and I've always been driving my parents insane by trying to build this or launch that. And to my parents credit, they just were phenomenal, phenomenal parents. They just in so many different ways, they nurtured and built and reinforced. And I wanted to start a candy stand when I was, I think in like first or second grade. So I would just, you know, start start hawking candy that we'd buy at a club store that I would mark up 50%. And we would just do that every parade. So every parade in our hometown in this suburb of Chicago, I would just be going up and down the parade route selling candy. And then that moved into. I had this bright idea that I wanted to start a local cul de sac newspaper for the handful of houses in our subdivision. You know, none of it was really well thought out, but I was in fourth grade, so give me a pass. I, I, I hope, but you know, I used my dad's printer and would create this, you know, double sided little gazette and started going up and down and you could buy one issue for 25 cents or you could get five for 20 cents if you bought the summer subscription. So it just, you know, there was always something inside me that wanted to build things that were meaningful and wanted to coalesce the neighborhood kids into trying to drive towards some type of common goal. And I think that just always was there. And I know a little bit of Dan's story, so it's going to be really interesting to hear his as well. But I think what would be really an insight that I've learned that I think would be fascinating for your listeners is when I got into middle school and high school, a lot of the leadership opportunities that I was afforded were in student government. So I thought that government was this amazing place of entrepreneurship and leadership and creativity and all these. And it is in some respects, but it definitely is a lot more rigid and rightfully so, than allowing people to come in and have a lot more freedom to create new things, you know, very quickly and shift things around. So I go to school, you know, as we talked about in D.C. with Dan, and we were friends, but I wouldn't say, you know, like, we live together or anything like that, or dorm mates or, you know, it was so interesting because when I finally got to Washington, D.C. i started doing all these internships within the government. I was like, oh, this isn't. This isn't the type of entrepreneurship that I expected. It was super interesting because, like, growing up as a student in public school, the opportunities for me to be a leader were mostly around student government. And I therefore thought that government was the place that I thought I wanted to go into. So it was a really interesting realization. And it wasn't only until my junior year, where I accidentally fell into this startup that my friend was starting, that I just fell in love. It was so apparent and so true that I belonged there and that I was an entrepreneur, that I called up the other job prospect that I had and I said, hey, you know, I am sorry, but this is where I'm meant to be. And that thing blew up at three months and then basically had an opportunity to think about what we wanted to do. And that's where the idea for Soapbox started.

Yeah, it served its purpose, absolutely, in terms of helping you crystallize which direction.

You want to go on.

And that's another thing, you know, it's like pursue where your curiosity is, because you'll either find out that is what you thought and you're going to keep racing down the road, or it's like, no, that's not what I thought it was. And then you can shift. But if. Until you race down and chase down that curiosity, you never know if it's for you or not for you. So you could have gone through your whole life and said, well, I wish I done that. But that's the great thing about even pursuing things that don't turn out. At least you found out that wasn't the answer. And the rest of your time, you can go look, spend your time looking for what's the answer. So let's see. Was it Dave we got to hear from on that?

That was Dave. That was Dan and his fun. Because I got. You're not the only one that gets our phone voices confused. We've had some stakeholders of ours for over a decade that still confuse our phone voice. So we do sound pretty familiar.

Okay, thank you.

No worries. Dan.

Yeah.

Yes. You know, my story is in a lot of ways similar to Dave's. My entire life growing up, I sort of wanted to go into law. I wanted to be a lawyer and eventually go into be a judge, believe it or not. Inspired by the O.J.

Simpson trial.

I was like young when that happened, but was like my parents recall me being like glued to the TV for whatever reason. Obviously I didn't know what I was watching. But like law was fascinating to me as a young kid and negotiation was fascinating to me as a young kid. And so when I went to American, the year our freshman year of American University were the most politically active campus in the country. Probably not from my doing, but that was our ranking. But I studied a, what I call affectionately the major of minors, which was my attempt to not get stuck into a pre law track in case that changed my mind. Turns out that I guess I stumbled on good foresight there. But the major was called clegg, which was an acronym for Communication Law, Economics and Government. And then during my time there, had a double major in business administration and did exactly what you would expect, Larry. You know, someone in the D.C. area to do got recruited into consulting. So you either end up on the Hill for those that aren't from D.C. or you end up on a government contract or in a defense contractor. It's kind of like your predetermined paths in the D.C. area. So did that for just shy of a year. And as Dave mentioned, sort of being a pseudo government employee is about as far from entrepreneurial business as you can imagine. Knew that I wanted something different. Not sort of the corporate consulting track, which is a great track for a lot of people, but for the entrepreneurial minded, just need a little bit more freedom and a little less red tape. Went over to a startup in D.C. at the time called Living Social, which was the daily deals company now owned by Groupon. But at that time it was sort of like Groupon And Living Social, the two biggest in the country. Living Social was based in D.C. had a great run there for a period of time and then left to start Soapbox full time with Dave. And the sort of slightly longer story is that we had a second startup in the education technology space. And our kind of jumping into entrepreneurship moment was some rationalizations, probably late at night where Dave and I both said, well, we have two companies. We got a chance that one will fail, a chance that one will succeed, or a slim chance that both will succeed. So that's enough cushion for us. Let's jump and go full time. And did exactly the quintessential entrepreneurship. Things like eating ramen noodles and going to the discount buffet after 8:30pm at the local grocery store to get half all food. Living in my sister's basement and like packing soap out all the things that you would expect while simultaneously driving around to Whole Foods all across the east coast and Midwest trying to get our. Get them to carry our product.

Well, it's important to have a model. And you guys mentioned the shoe example. Was it Tom's shoes or.

Correct. Yeah.

What spoke to you about that model? Because the thing about models, some people say heroes, things like that, is the thing gives you a picture. You have to have a picture to pursue or it saves you a whole lot of trouble. If you could follow a picture, follow a path, because it takes a lot of the questions out of it. Questions stall you out. And when you get a model, it helps to clear the clutter and allow you to know which direction to go in. And so many different areas. Where did you come across that and how did it speak to you?

I would say that TOMS was definitely a source of inspiration. We wanted to do the model a little differently. Instead of everything being donated from the United States to the places that we have the privilege to serve. So when we work abroad, we work very hard to have that soap actually come from the communities that we have the privilege to operate in. It's a little bit different of a model, but absolutely. I think the other thing is that we saw this and said, could we do well by doing good? And that really is the dream, is that if you can build a meaningful brand, that while building one's personal success and wealth also is giving back along the way, then you don't have to live this traditional model of go make a decent living and or store or accumulate wealth, and then only after you reach a certain point engage in philanthropy. So we wanted one to kind of turn that on its head. I think the Other thing just for me personally is Dan and I both believe that we now, especially now after having decade in of consumer experience both on that physical and digital shelf, what actually gets you out of the bed? You're just selling another shampoo compared to other people's shampoos. So if it's not for your own glory or your own team's glory, then why are you doing it? And I think that was really difficult for us to come to a conclusion of. Why does this matter? Like why does moving another piece of plastic through the ecosystem and we're desperately trying to move away from plastic and one of our brands is actually all about plastic free. So we're incredibly excited about taking that to the next level. PCR and a bunch of other things. But really just to say it as simply as possible, we wanted what we were doing to be meaningful not only to ourselves, but also to our customers. And then we also wanted to help someone in need who is not a part of that buyer seller equation both here at home and around the world.

Thanks so much for sharing some of your background that got you locked into this business opportunity right from the beginning. It's interesting. Just see how these puzzles come together and look back and see how they came together where a lot of times you don't even realize it.

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