Part 1 - The $8M Secret: Why Having Zero Employees Was His Competitive Edge

Foreign 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 winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Hello everyone.

We're talking with Adam Calavin. And Adam, you're up in Montana today, is that right?

I am. Beautiful fall day in Montana.

You lived up there all along or are you new? Are you native or what?

I was born and raised in Flagstaff, Arizona. So I grew up in a, in a pretty similar climate and environment and started having kids and wanted to go back to that but didn't want to do it in Flagstaff. So we ended up in Montana.

And so the surround, you've got a lot more probably support around you now to run a business. A lot of people have moved into town, I would imagine.

There is a burgeoning early stage ecosystem in Bozeman, which is where I live specifically, which has been really, really great to see frankly. All of our development team for this new company I'm sure we'll get to at some point is actually here in Bozeman, which is pretty wild to be able to do that today.

Well, you've start, you've been through, we're going to dig into the different stages, but you started off founding a company, co founding a company called Bottle Keeper and pretty much ran that up to what, 8 million in sales in three years with no employees, investors or debt. Talk about that. How did that happen other than a lot of homework?

Yeah, I mean what that is the highlight. That was the first three years. We ran that company for nine years. So we got bigger than that and a little heavier than that before we got acquired. But why that happened the way it did came from the thing before that, which was out of college, I went into a medical device company, not as a founder. And we, it was a big heavy company. It was hard to operate. We had 80 people in multiple states and delivery vehicles and warehouses and just tons of stuff. It was difficult, it was heavy. It was a big heavy business. And we spun off in 2008 a health insurance tech component. And it was a handful of people in cubicles executing documents and it just printed money. It was, it got bigger from a revenue standpoint than the device company in its first 18 months of operation, which was a big aha moment in my entrepreneurial journey that efficiency matters and there are smarter ways to build businesses. So I sold my position in that in May of 13, which is right about the time the Bottle Keeper idea came around. It was my cousin's idea, drinking a beer on the beach out of a red solo cup. And honestly, I just vowed to never do that again. I had scar tissue from the prior decade of running big heavy stuff. And so Bottle Keeper had a no employees guardrail which forced us to think and operate and execute differently.

Talk about how you got. Well, you had a major success early in your career. How did that happen before? For it's one thing to say it was a heavy business, but I mean it was a business, a big business, successful business. So how'd you get yourself involved in that?

Going back a little further. I wanted to be a doctor since I was really young. I started having these weird dreams When I was 6, about 7 people on operating tables. So I had I and I dedicated, to be clear, I was still a kid, so I did a lot of kid things, but I dedicated a lot of my free time and study from really middle school, high school and certainly into college towards being a doctor. I spent huge amounts of time in operating rooms and I got nursing certifications and I, my degree was molecular and cellular biology, which is very heavy science and math. And about halfway through college decided I, I didn't want to be 35, starting life with half a million dollars in debt, which was the path that I was on. So I was, in essence, I was kind of growing up. And what I did was right out of college I took the risky route. I had offers, job offers coming out of college at big medical device companies with big salaries and bonuses and company cars and all like the amazing stuff that I would say probably, I mean anybody would love to have right out of college. And I did not do that. I turned those down and I went into an orthopedic device startup working out of an apartment and worked on commission only, where I literally, I made $0 at the beginning. It was a draw against commission, 100% at risk. I went for that instead.

Orthopedic device?

Yeah.

And is this something used in surgery or something they wear or something?

It was mostly postoperative. Over the years we got into a number of different things that did include some surgical stuff, but it was, it started out as a post operative orthopedic device company. So if you have any surgery or an elbow or shoulder surgery, there's a bunch of stuff you're going to get. We supplied you with a lot of that stuff.

So you get out of college and you've had an awakening. You look down the road, it sounds like what I went through with architecture At Georgia Tech, unfortunately, let's say the light bulb went on, I guess, in the spring of the sophomore year, where the professor took the time before we started the semester to described a career path. And when he got to the point that of saying that you can't make any money, probably not going to make any money till you're about 40 years old, you're going to have to be leave, leave school and get a job being a draftsman at minimum wage for a minimum of three years before you begin to flunk your architectural board exams.

Yeah, it's quite similar. Mine was about sophomore, junior year in college. I was like, this doesn't sound that great anymore.

Within the same process, 20 minutes, I had a new major. And I think the words I said at the guidance office was, I knew I wasn't going to quit because I wasn't going to have that over my head the rest of my life because the implication is then you're not good enough. And it wasn't hard, it was just annoying. And so I think my words were, my mission was, what's the fastest way out of this hole?

Yeah, I'm sure they love hearing that.

Right. And so anyway, yeah, I went through a similar light bulb experience. It saves you a whole lot of time, doesn't it?

Yeah. And a lot of pain and a lot of time and pain and suffering and in this case, money.

I did not realize a half a million dollars in debt. People go, plus your health. What? I've talked to a lot of doctors, a lot of successful doctors, and their health just goes right down the toilet. They gained 40 or 50 pounds.

Yeah. Stress does incredible things to our bodies. And when you combine the stress that goes with. Not just the schooling part, it's largely the stuff that happens after the schooling part.

Yeah.

Where you just work outrageous hours under difficult conditions for really long periods of time.

Yeah.

That does incredible things to your body.

Yeah. And so you're looking out there and you were thinking of more important than medicine, which had an obvious appeal to you. More important than that was actually having a life.

Yeah, it was it. It absolutely was. I mean, those. As you age and learn, your priorities change and shift. And I loved what I was studying, so I continued it and I finished it. And that has played a big role in my entrepreneurial journey. Because learning, learning math and science is by definition problem solving.

Right.

All calculus and organic chemistry and physics and algebra, all of it is. You start here and you need to get here. It's your job to fill the stuff in between. And that's what startups are, that's what entrepreneurship and problem solving is. I got to do a lot of that in a very technical place, which I think has, has been really helpful through my journey.

Well, the thing is that I don't know if that's addressed or brought up to kids going through college, but you do hear a lot of people say that in the educational system today. So many of the kids are, they're indoctrinated, they're educated, but their ability to do critical thinking and problem solving is pretty much non existent. And other than with mine, I put a degree of difficulty on there because early on I decided I was going to see what's the highest grade I could get with the least amount of study. And so that became my game. It's like two graduating fifth year seniors got a hold of me my first week at Georgia Tech and told me no one cares what your grades are when you get out. And I said, you've got to be kidding. They said, unless you're going to graduate.

School, it honestly doesn't matter.

Or they said, unless you're going to be a research scientist and you're just, you're too dumb for that.

Nice.

So I said if, if the degree is what matters, I. Let's, let's make a game out of it. And so I know that there's more to it than that, but the thing is that you were doing some critical thinking about your future. And so when you wound up with that job, how did you attack that job? You obviously came out of school and you had developed some strategies, life strategies, some approaches that served you well for getting off to a, a great start once you hit the business world. What do you think those were?

I think a big part of it and I can't honestly tell you where it comes from. There's not a defining moment in my life that I can point back at and say this is from that. But I was just always comfortable with risk. I was confident enough in my capacity to solve problems that I, I honestly just believed I would figure it out. No matter what the problem was, I would just figure it out. And I carry that through today. And now I have more experience to add into that sort of bucket. But that made a huge difference in, in going into, I mean I effectively went into a position at a brand, almost brand new. I was working out of an apartment, orthopedic device company and got handed the keys to sales and said here, go do like, go figure it out, go build it, do it. So I had to do it and then it, as it worked, new problems come up. And then we. I expanded that company from Arizona to California in 2008 and got to redo it again, restarted it in a garage, rebuilt it in Southern California and said, you just sort of get this like rinse and repeat of building and problem solving.

You first started in sales, but then you went into what, what was that? What did you have to figure? What do they.

Yeah, it's an interesting. It was an interesting. The way the company was set up was interesting. I would call it atypical. At minimum, it was family. There was a dad and two sons and there was one or two other people and that was the entirety of the company. So the sales part was I was the first outside salesperson to come in the company. So they literally just said, here's the keys, go drive the car as fast as you can. Drive the car. So over years I figured out how to do that and got really good at it. And then as the company grew and built up, all of that happened below me in a downline. So then I was responsible for a whole team of salespeople that I hired and I trained, which then converted to great. Now we're going to expand the company to, from Phoenix to Santa Monica, move to Santa Monica, rent a house and start this company in la. Like, great. So you go there, you move, you start it over by knocking on doors at doctor's offices and making appointments. And then you get enough, generate enough revenue. We've. There was no debt in the business or investors. It was all profitable and built on, on retained earnings. So you grow and you hire as fast as you can afford to grow and hire and rebuilt it again and ended up with a couple offices and a team of 15 or 20.

Where that different or unique is that usually you would get out, you go to work for a big company, they would have training programs, number one, they would have training programs, they would teach you how to sell the systems, the procedures, the manuals. And it would have been. They would have been doing it for many, many years. So they would have it refined down and then they would also have territories that already developed. And you go out there and you work, they give you a territory, assign you, and early on maybe you traveled with somebody else and they would, you know, till you got got your feet wet and then you could go on your own. And then instead you show up and they say, go sell this stuff.

That was the world. It was a startup. I know my wife was in the other version of that, which was with big pharma and big medical companies that they did that they'd go on a. Spend a week with somebody in Pennsylvania and do training seminars and do all the things. It was just different. And you was way more comfortable in the figure it out environment than I would have been in that structured environment. Yeah.

Much more freedom.

Yeah.

And so the thing is that how did you evolve in your ability? How did you learn the things you needed to know to recruit and train and manage other salespeople once you got overloaded and you needed to add some more people out, how did you move through that? Was that hard?

It was not. Well, yeah, sure, it was hard from the standpoint that it's all learning on the fly and that can be painful sometimes. Yeah. I mean, look, frankly, you learn, and I still do to this day. I think everybody does. You learn from mistakes, you learn from breaking things. You don't often get to talk about the things that you break, but the reality is like, that's where education typically comes from. You build up scar tissue because you, you interview somebody and they seem amazing and then you bring them on and they're a completely different person. Like, so you learn that's. There's all sorts of learning experiences from that one thing. And then the more you do it, the better you get at it.

Yeah. And then of course, you have teams of people, you're managing managers. And distribution is a very complex build. Being able to build and run salesforce is a really elite skill. And you had to figure it out on the run.

I did, but it wasn't. We didn't get to the point where I was managing a huge team of salespeople. I would say that at the height of that, between Arizona and California, I was responsible for all of the California operations, which was a lot of people that weren't doing sales because we also had like service technicians, we had warehouse staff, we had a lot of other stuff. But from a purely sales perspective, it was probably a total of maybe 10 people. So it was managing one manager in Phoenix who was managing four or five people, and it was managing one manager in LA that was managing three people.

Yeah.

So it wasn't a massive. I mean, you know, it's. I. I have friends in other companies that have that distribution where they're at the top of a company with 40,000 people in it. I mean, that is mind blowing to me.

Yeah. How.

How that distribution, the management of that whole system takes place is incredible.

Talk about what you. What's your fond memory that you retained from that stage of your career? And what are your non fond memories of that stage of your career?

Well, I can tell you that the fond is grossly outweighed by the not fond. Much of which is is just frankly based on the premise that that environment was a very intense lead by intimidation. Father and two incompetent sons and then some outside people, one of which was me. And they were not the people that money made them better. Let's just say they were the sprinkle money on it and they just continuously get worse and worse. So frankly I will get to the good part but the. I mean there was so much unnecessary challenge and I learned most of what I took from that, from a leadership perspective around what not to do and how not to treat people and how not to behave.

That probably turned out to be a big blessing for you.

It totally did. It absolutely was a blessing. And, and the on the positive to that is I got to the point which was a massive inflection point in my life where we literally, my wife and I drew a line in the sand and said if this specific thing doesn't happen by this date, like plugs getting pulled and that didn't happen and we stuck to it and it forced a transition out of that and the sale of a position that led to a beautiful subsequent. Now it's been 15 years, but that, that set the foundation for the decision making for the next 15 years which was a radical lifestyle change and profession change.

And how did you find that and how did you make that move?

The technicals of how I made the movement were, were actually quite interesting. But the, I mean look, in reality we knew that we couldn't be in this position anymore. I had, I was a partner in a company that was involved in this system. I had a means to sell that position. I sold that position that bought us time. We were young. My wife did really well in medical device. I got to put some money in the bank. We didn't have kids, so we had a lot of flexibility and that gave me the opportunity to not need to go and jam like into another job or jam a startup into the world or do something it'll. It gave me the time and flexibility to let something come up. And that's what ultimately happened with Bottle Keeper.

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