827 Mark Sisson: Building a $200 Million Dollar Personal Brand

Episode number 827 with New York Times bestselling author, Mark Sisson. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur, and each week we bring you an inspiring person or.

Message to help you discover how to.

Unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today.

Now let the class begin.

Albert Einstein said, the measure of intelligence is the ability to change. Welcome to this episode with Mark Sisson, building a $200 million personal brand. So excited about this interview because I've known Mark for a long time and it's been amazing to watch. him continue to change, adapt and change, adapt and change, and not get stuck or set in one way. If you don't know who he is, he's the author of many best-selling books, an entrepreneur and founder of Primal Kitchen and Primal Nutrition. His best-selling book, the Primal Blueprint, is credited with turbocharging the growth of the Primal and Paleo movement back in 2009, before there was really a movement about this stuff. His book, the Reset Diet was a New York Times bestseller and reached the number one overall bestseller among all books on amazon.com for two days. Additionally, he's written popular primal themed cookbooks and lifestyle books and publisher over at marksdailyapple.com, the number one ranked blog for over a decade in its health and fitness category. Mark was a marathoner for a number of years, finishing the top five in the 1980 US National Marathon Championships for a qualifying spot of the 1980 US Olympic Trials. And in this interview, we talk about how arriving at your superpower takes time. Now, Mark didn't find a superpower early on. He's been a seasoned entrepreneur for a long time, since before I was born, and is continually changed and adapted to find a superpower. Talk about the importance of being open to pivoting in life, how you cannot build a brand without authenticity, why always creating is a key to success, and the lesson Mark has learned from his varying jobs and how they have led him to build one of the biggest fitness movements in history. I think it's also really cool that we talk about how to build a personal brand and make it something that could exit 200 million plus dollars with just your personal brand and your own ideas, starting from a Blog to 200 million dollar exit. I think it's really cool.

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And I am super excited about this interview with the one and only Mark Sisson.

Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast. We've got Mark Sisson in the house. My man, good to see you brother.

Likewise, thanks for having me.

Yeah.

You've been in the fitness nutrition space for 30 plus years, is that right?

Yeah.

30 plus years, originally teaching people about health and nutrition. You wrote a book a year, you've got tons of books, you've got coaching and courses and supplements and And then when you hit 61, something changed.

I think in retrospect, it was the natural order of things. It was a natural evolution. But I started out, first of all, I started out as an entrepreneur in my youth, right? And I was always an entrepreneur. And in my 40s, I decided I want to get into supplements. So I started making a line of supplements that was quite successful for a while. In my 40s. In my 40s. I tell my kids I was 47. when I finally decided what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Right, right.

So I start this line of supplements, it's doing very well, and it was based on a model that was using television. My appearances on television as an expert sort of driving traffic, right? We talk about exercise and diet and fitness and all the things that I know about. And oh, by the way, I had these awesome supplements over here, you should try them. Very low-key sales approach, but it was quite effective and successful. A few years into this, strategy, the model just died up. Just dried up and ended.

Model meaning like driving, driving from TV.

Through TV, yeah. And so I thought, well, what am I going to do to resurrect my business? I had grown this business four, five, six percent a year for several years. It was crazy. And then all of a sudden, you know, the television model of infomercials and sales based on TV appearances ceased to work. There were 300 cable channels, there was Dish and Direct, the internet was starting to become a thing, people were buying on the internet, and fewer and fewer people were willing to pick up the phone and call now, you know, in the next 30 minutes and get this and this. So I shifted, I pivoted in that first year that I realized things were going south. And I thought, well, I'll do my own TV show and I'll direct, because I was buying time on other people's shows. I'll produce and direct my own show, I'll star in it, I'll buy time on on TV and everything will be great.

What year was this?

2005. So 2005, I did a TV show called Responsible Health. And I shot 52 half-hour episodes.

Wow.

Each one unique. Each one had, you know, I had a very competent co-host, female co-host. We built a set. I had guests, three guests every show, guest experts. And I tried to use the advertising breaks to sell my products. It was what we call a self-liquidating program. So it's free content. Yeah.

And then selling something. Exactly.

Exactly. And I bought time on Travel Channel. So you could see me on Travel Channel every morning at 8:30 across the country. Wow. 52 half-hour slot. 52 half-hour episodes. That's a lot of content. No, it's a lot of content. Very expensive. And at the end of several months of doing this, I'd lost a million and a half bucks, and I thought, well, I better pull back. I have a wife and two kids that I have to feed. I can't be throwing more money into this. And so I started my blog in 2006 based on that failed experiment on television, knowing that I was good at creating content. I could produce this content on exercise and nutrition and health and medicine and diet and everything people wanted to know about. And I had a unique sort of perspective about it. So I started Mark's Daily Apple in 2006. And again, ostensibly, as a platform to sell my supplements. And I did that for a number of years, and it was relatively successful. But over the years, the topics became more and more about food, and about diet, and less and less about the other tangential peripheral aspects of performance. So as I'm writing more and more about food, and posting recipes and I'm writing cookbooks and I'm doing DIY recipes on how to make your own mayonnaise and your own ketchup, I realized I'm talking about food and I'm writing about food and I'm focused on food. And what I'm focused on most is a concept of clean eating, of having, getting rid of sugar and refined carbohydrates and getting rid of industrial seed oils like corn oil and canola oil and soybean oil. and just incorporating healthy fats, clean source of protein, and minimal sugars and carbs. But when you distill that list down, it's not a lot of food. There's really not a lot of food you can eat. So what makes the difference is how you prepare it. Sauces, dressings, toppings, herbs, spices, and things like that. So I thought, well, there's an opportunity because no one and no company is making like a great mayonnaise or a great ketchup or a great salad dressing. There were a few that were trying to dabble in that area, but they didn't fit my criteria. My specifications for what was a really clean dressing that people would feel good about putting on their salad.

And that's why you just started making them from scratch on your own.

So I did. Yeah, I'd been making them from scratch for 20 years because I didn't trust anything that I could find in the store. So that's always been my thing. And then there was a point at which I thought, well, just for my own comfort and ease and convenience, I would rather buy these in a store, pre-made, and not have to get the blender out every night and clean the blender out of the oily substance that was in there and all the stuff that went with it. So I put together an R&D team and we spent a year looking at different iterations of mayonnaise and ketchup and salad dressings and barbecue sauces. And the first thing we came up with that we could commercially make to scale was this mayonnaise, this primal kitchen mayonnaise. Yeah.

So yeah. We got a bunch of the products in my kitchen.

Exactly. long-winded answer to your question, you know, I started in that company when I was 61 years old. So we launched our first product in 2015. It took off. Wow.

But when did you start doing supplements?

47?

Yeah, I was 47 years old. So, you know, I was in, in 95, I think, or whatever. Thereabouts, 1995 that I started doing supplements.

Supplements. And before that, you were an entrepreneur doing just different things that were working, some weren't working or. First 45 years.

No, no, no. So, yeah, so there's a gap there. Louis, how did I get there? I mean, I worked 40 hours a week when I was 12 years old in the summers mowing lawns. I had a regular five day a week, eight hour a day lawn mowing job.

Wow.

12 and 13 years old, I shoveled snow in the wintertime because I grew up in Maine. When I was 14, 15, 16, I worked double shifts at a restaurant in the summer. I painted houses. When I was 16 through 27, I put myself through college painting houses. And I was so, it was such a good job. And that's during the phase of my life when I was a semi-pro athlete. I was a runner. I needed to support my running habit.

You weren't making any money running.

Was not making any money running. And I had races around the world. So I wanted to be able to travel to those races and compete at the highest level. So I was a contractor, a painting contractor, for a number of years.

Wow. Was this a triathlon or just-- At.

First it was in my just marathon day. So I was just a marathoner in those days. What was your-- Just a marathoner.

Your best time?

2:18.

2:18, it's pretty good.

Qualifies for-- yeah, I qualified for Olympic trials, right? Qualified for the Olympic trials, yeah. And then I went into triathlons. But then I started a frozen yogurt shop in 1981 in Palo Alto.

Yeah, one of the first guys in--.

Before frozen yogurt was a thing. Before it was a big thing.

You should have stuck with it, right?

I could have, would have, should have. But here's, so many lessons in my life. I had a business partner and we opened this, we bought a barber shop because we couldn't find a small enough space to lease in Palo Alto in '81. So we literally bought Gerardo's Barber Shop. It was Gerardo the Barber. And he was thrilled because we bought out his lease and we paid him some money and then we turned it into a frozen yogurt emporium. And we crushed it. Really? It was huge. We absolutely crushed it. And we got so, I wouldn't say greedy, but we said, let's build a bigger one down near Apple Computer in San Jose. So on Saratoga Sunnyvale Road, we put a bigger, by the way, the name of the place was called Cool Licks. Cool Licks. Cool Licks, it was, you know. I like it.

Yeah.

So we then, we built a larger one down there, and it was, You know, now all of a sudden it went from 535 square feet, you know, in a place that was doing $400,000 a year in gross and generating 175,000 in profit. Then we go to a 8,000 square foot emporium. We build it out. We borrow money 1983.

That's the year I was born.

17% interest.

Ooh.

For to borrow money in those days.

Wow.

So it was automatically doomed.

Yeah.

So that was a huge failure on our part, on my part. So walked away from that, came to La to get into sports casting. I did a stint, not as a sports caster, but as an actor. I got my SAG card. Wow. Did that. And I did a little bit of sports casting covering triathlons, 3 SPN, you know, then got a job running the US Triathlon Federation in Colorado Springs for three years.

Yeah, USOC.

Part of the USOC, yeah. So I was the executive director of the US Triathlon Federation and ran that and then didn't want to do-- Didn't want to do nonprofits. Poor. The rest of my life, I didn't want to be poor, exactly. So I got a job as a COO of a relatively large vitamin company in Santa Monica.

Did that for five years and then started my own. So you learned the business. Learned the business, yeah.

Did that for five years. You saw what was working, what wasn't working.

Exactly, exactly.

Started your own.

Did the TV thing, then did the blog, because the TV thing wasn't working. When did you start the blog at 47 or?

No, no, no. So the blog-- no, now I'm-- 2006, I started the blog. So I was 53 when I started the blog.

53, you started the blog. And you started early, like in the blogging world, too.

Yeah. I mean, it felt like I was late to the game in 2006. It really-- it's like, I wonder if there's still time. to rise above all the other blogs that I saw out there. Now it's, now it's maybe is too late. I don't know, it's huge. Right, right. You know, 'cause when I started, they were like, in my space, in the ancestral health space, there were, I don't know, four blogs. You know, there was, Loren Cordain had one, Richard Nikoley had one called Free the Animal, Art DeVany had one, he was sort of my mentor. In fact, I started blogging by writing guest posts for his site.

Sure.

And they got, they were so well received. That's how I started my blog.

Interesting.

Yeah.

I think it's, it always seems like there's, after you wait five, 10 years after blogs that you, it's too late, but then you see a blog that pops within a year. Same thing with podcasting. A lot of people are, feel like they're five years behind. But my friend Jay Shetty just launched one of these in the top of.

The world right now.

Wow. Able to drive traffic from Facebook and YouTube and Instagram to build his podcast. quickly and he does a unique spin on it. So I think there's always an angle to grow quickly if you've got leverage and if you're doing something different and unique. But you really, you were 50 something when you launched your blog.

Yeah.

And you were 61 when you launched the food business. Yeah. And you sold the food business at 60.

65. 60. 6. Yeah. 65.

65.

Yeah.

So the cool story is, you know, you really didn't figure out what you're doing to your 61.

I might change my mind again at some point, you know what I mean? That's the beauty of it. I think that the ability to pivot and see opportunity is probably the single greatest skill set that an entrepreneur can have. To just not be so... And I can go back and I can say that's a lesson I've learned so many times that once I transitioned into the blogging thing and I saw that my sales were not taking off commensurate with my traffic. I mean, I had one of the top blogs around. I had three million uniques a month, Mark's Daily Apple, within a few years.

It's crazy.

And so you would think that the traffic would generate enough sales in the vitamin world, in the supplement business, and yet, you know, I kept instead of taking a step back and going, okay, what am I writing about? Who am I writing for? What do they want to hear? And then what do they want to buy? I'm more like, I'm gonna make this vitamin thing work. I had my blinders on rather than being open to the possibility that there's another thing that I could do that would be much more successful than just fixing what I thought was broken in that original concept.

Interesting.

So when did you start to listen to your audience what they wanted the most?

I mean, I was listening all along, but I wasn't hearing, I guess.

I don't know.

Or hearing, not listening. I don't know what the, you know, what the appropriate terminology is, but there was a point at which enough people had commented that, for instance, how frustrated they were when we'd post a make your own mayonnaise recipe and it would fail. Because may- When they would make their own- When they would make their own mayonnaise. No, no, here's a recipe and it looks great when we show the video of it and everything and it's all frothy and whippy and everything else and they make it and it- Clumpy and gloopy. Yeah, yeah, runny. Exactly, and they throw it away and it's like, and so a lot of people said, I wish you could just, you know, make a product like that. Interesting. You know, using those ingredients. Look, again, as an entrepreneur, you have to always be ready, willing and able to get the feedback from your customers.

How do you know when it's the right time to pivot? For instance, you'd been building a supplement business for over 10 years, it sounded like, and putting all this energy and time into these systems, this team, this vision, and that now's a few people I don't know, maybe it's hundreds of people are saying, Hey, can you just make this food product that you have no clue what you're doing in?

Yeah.

Can you just stop what you're doing in the supplements or shift and put all your time and attention to making me a mayonnaise that I like?

Yeah.

And what gives you the courage and the confidence to go launch something at 61 that you had no clue. Yeah. Relatively no clue.

No, I had no clue. I did not know the food business.

You didn't know the critical manufacturer, food packing, distribution.

I had Hubris, you know, I was like, I'll show you guys how to do this. Another important lesson I learned was I didn't pivot away from what I was doing. I kept making the supplements. So I wasn't abandoning that as a bad idea as much as I was adding a new concept in the food space. So I didn't start a new company. I just added a new line of products to my existing company. So now I had this one company that was doing quite well. and had been doing quite well. I shouldn't put it down. It was certainly enough to retire on if I wanted to. But I wanted to experiment in this food business. And so I started creating products using, we talked about this a while back, pre-tax dollars. So I would take profits from my supplement business and roll them over into the creation of new products in that same company. Rather than take, you know, for every dollar I make in supplements, if I pay 50 cents in taxes, and it's at least that in California, and then I take the 50 cents out and I start a new company, I only have 50 cents to start the new company with. But if I keep the dollar and I just buy, you know, roll it over and reinvest it back in the company, then I was able to experiment and see if there was a market for these products that I envisioned being being successful.

Interesting. Would you recommend people starting new brands within their own company as opposed to launching new companies then?

I think, you know, there's a good reason for trying that if it fits.

If it's related to it.

If it's related, for sure.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I had, I started a coaching business within my primal nutrition business and it stayed within that company, same thing. I spent two years building the product before it ever saw its first customer, probably $300,000 on resources, people to put it together and platforms and all the things that were needed to make it a robust learning experience. And it was all within the context of my original company. So I had the supplements, I had publishing, I had a publishing company within that. And they were all in the same company. And then when I saw that there was an opportunity to succeed on its own, then I would spin it off. And then it was like I'd proven the business model, I'd proven the concept, I'd scaled it enough that I knew that now we could take it off and put it onto its own platform and own company.

What were the biggest failures you had in the last 15 years? Do you think since you started the blog, what were the things that didn't work out? Because you have a lot of things that worked out. The supplements worked to a certain level, the coaching, the course.

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Blogging and all these other things worked well, and obviously the food product did extremely well, but what were the things you tried?

Yeah.

Within the brand that you're like, this is gonna be a hit.

That wasn't a hit.

Yeah.

Well, there's two things that come to mind. First of all, the publishing, which started out great. Publishing was awesome. So I couldn't find a publisher for my original book, the Primal Blueprint. So I self-published. And again, because I had traffic in the blog, traffic in the blog, a platform, I had a warehouse, I had credit card processing from the supplement business, all that stuff. went very, very well together and it was easy for me to do that. And then I found a third-party independent distributor who would distribute it out to all the books. And this is back when there still was like Barnes & Noble and Borders. Borders. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I could make, you know, that was a couple million dollars a year in sales.

Wow.

And it was all, you know, I controlled the price and I controlled the margins on it and I controlled The distribution was fantastic. Well, I don't need to tell you publishing has changed. A lot. A lot, and it's changed from year to year. So now all of a sudden publishing is not an attractive, successful business for me. I used to be able to sell 50,000 books in the first three months of publication. Now you work a year to sell 5,000 books. It's just a different kind of thing.

So you had to shift and pivot that.

As a publisher, that was not my wheelhouse. Now I have a great publisher that I work with, so I continue to write books. And I work with Harmony Books and they're fantastic and we've had some amazing successes and it's all great. But for me, as a business person, when that was not my real wheelhouse, I took a step back and said, I need to focus my energy where it's best used to be successful in areas that I know about.

Right.

So that was the first thing.

That was the first thing. The other thing started A chain of restaurants, a franchise operation called Primal Kitchen Restaurants. And it was a great idea, a great concept. We were extremely successful out of the blocks, sold 18 franchises without having an operating unit. Wow. And just didn't realize that my lack of experience in the restaurant business, some other issues with the partners that I was working with, sort of combined to make it be a a less than successful operation. So we had to dismantle that in the last two years. You can't necessarily, unless you're Richard Branson, you can't have a success everywhere you go. I just sort of say that tongue in cheek, 'cause he's had his failures. He has.

Didn't he sell Virgin the airplane?

Yeah. But I mean, he's like one of my successful, yeah. Yeah, one of my guys that I would look up to and said, that's a guy that I wanna emulate.

Right.

In my business life. So you can't always have a success. In fact, I would say that one of the, you know, key things, one of the key takeaways for me from my life and all of the failures that I've had is that as long as you learn from them, as long as you don't go hugely into debt and ruin the rest of your life, as long as you live your life in real time and enjoy your friends and your family and your lovers or whatever it is that you're doing and living your life, Then it doesn't matter if you have a couple of, you know, a string of failures, because it only takes one success of some reasonable magnitude to have made all the things you did in your life worth, you know, worth having pursued.

And what do you say to the 25-year-olds who feel like they're behind and they haven't made it yet?

I mean, I got socks in my drawer that I still wear that are 25 years old. 25 and feeling like you haven't made it yet, it's gotta be a horrible feeling. But it's the whole process of arriving at, you know, your secret power, your superpower, your secret sauce, takes time. You don't necessarily have to follow your passion. I mean, if we followed our passion, geez, we'd all own ice cream shops, because when we're 12 years old, you know, I wanna have an ice cream shop.

Ice cream shop, ice cream shop.

Whatever, yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's more about finding out what you're good at and what you can serve other people and what they're, you know, what they would benefit from your having served to them. And that takes time for a lot of people. And that takes this willingness to go down a path and commit for sure, but then be okay with an outcome that's less than positive and just move on to the next thing. And my whole life is about pivots and it's about trying stuff. I mean, I had a, you know, I started a shoe company when I was, or a shoe repair company, I should say, when I was a runner. Because I was pissed off that my running shoes would only last 800 miles, which in those days was less than eight weeks because I was running 100 miles a week. And so I started a little running shoe repair kit business and I advertised in Runner's World magazine and, you know, I sold a bunch of the kits, but it was a horrible idea because, well, it was a great idea for one product. but it was not enough to start a business around. So I learned from that, that you might have a great idea, but if it's not a business, then it's not worth pursuing. Sometimes you have to be a little bit more realistic about your dreams and your creations and ask yourself, can this be a $100 million business? If it's only going to be a million dollar business, and that's successful for a lot of people, But in my mind, it was like, no, not interested. I need to have a bigger pot of gold at the end of that rainbow if I put everything I have into this.

Wow. How many things did you think were potentially $100 million businesses?

I've had lots of them. I've had lots of ideas, yeah.

That you took action on?

That's the other thing. You got to take action on these things, right? So I've had some amazing ideas that other people executed on before I I mean, it wasn't like I was going to do it and they beat me to it. It was like, yeah, that was a great idea. And I thought at the time it would be an awesome kind of thing, and somebody else beat me to it. TRX is a great example of that. TRX is a multi-hundred million dollar company. And it's-- It's workout ropes? Yeah, it's workout ropes.

It's like-- Did you hang them over.

And you just did every-- Every trainer I know, including myself, invented that in the 80s. You know, when we were working with clients. And clients say, I'm going on the road. I need something to work out in my hotel room. But TRX, those guys just, they identified exactly what needed to be done. They marketed it brilliantly. They put a whole series of videos behind it. They did everything. The execution was, I'm going to say, flawless on what was otherwise a fairly mundane kind of invention.

Yeah.

But you probably had a vision that the supplement business you launched has potential to be $100 million.

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, the supplement business always has a potential to be a, $1 billion business if you do it right. But for whatever reason, I couldn't get those variables to work for me in this context. Part of that was I had a vision about the types of products I want to make and who I wanted to serve in the marketplace. And it was very sort of narrow. It was the highest end product possible. So that limited my reach and my potential marketplace.

Elite performers running 100 miles a week.

Yeah, no, pretty much. And that's how it started. It started just going after endurance athletes who I felt needed some assistance with their recovery and who didn't want to turn to illegal performance enhancing substances. So I started with that and it was, it was not a very good business because you were an athlete. I was, a lot of athletes are like, no, I work out plenty hard. I don't need this other stuff.

Yeah.

And I certainly don't need to be spending money doing it. You want to sponsor me?

Right, right.

So I got a lot of, you know, that. But then I found, again, I pivoted. I found when I was on television with these products, I found women who were 65, 68, 75 years old were reading all of the research on anti-aging and reading the reports in the headlines and were focused on an anti-aging strategy. And my products addressed that because they were sort of, the name of the product was damage control.

Mm.

And the next thing I know, I have an amazing market with probably the least athletic people on the planet, you know, little old ladies who were, who just want to be healthy.

Want to feel younger.

Want to feel younger and don't want to, you know, they're not into exercise, but they're into eating right. And so it was figuring out, I built the product for one marketplace. Didn't work. And then I pivoted and-- you- shifted, yeah. And I shifted, yeah.

When you got into the mayonnaise and food business, did you think to yourself, this is a $100 million business or more right away, or did it take some time for you to see the potential?

I did. I thought it was going to be a huge business because food is a massive marketplace and massive business in the United States. And I think that food that's better for you, good for you food, is just trending very quickly and we're not going back. We're not going back to the days of high sugar, high fructose corn syrup processed. It's only going to trend forward.

How did you have the confidence to launch it? You said, what did you say, Hubris?

Hubris, yeah.

How did you have the, I guess the mindset though from, for 20, 30 years you had been an employee doing side jobs, started a company with five to 10, 12 maybe employees at one time. But then to switch and say, okay, I'm gonna build something with 50 to 100 employees within a couple of years. Because that's a big change in the way you think and how you lead people and how you manage people. So how did you shift that late into building something with, what did you have, 70 employees? That's a challenge.

It's a huge challenge and for me, it required me giving up this concept that I was the smartest guy in the room. So, you know, my whole business career, I've been successful largely based on my own work, right? I'm doing the work, I'm in the trenches, I'm grinding it out, I know the contacts, I have the sensibilities here. And when I gave that up, Partly because I was entering a space that I did not know anything about, I had to hire people from that industry who were not only knowledgeable about the industry, but who had bought into the lifestyle and the concept that I was espousing. Because it's a major stretch to launch a 12-ounce jar of mayonnaise for $9.95.

How much does it usually cost?

Oh, I mean, Costco, you get a gallon of mayonnaise for like eight bucks. Eight bucks? Yeah, whatever. Yeah, so, but you know, it's made with horrible ingredients. So the, you know, the larger, cheap versions that you can buy. So we wanted to make a demonstrably better, the best in category of every of the one of the products that.

We- Of all the sauces.

Of all the dressings, all the sauces, all of the condiments. We want to be demonstrably the best in product. It has to have no artificial ingredients, little to no and mostly no sugar, unsweetened, and it has to taste great. And those are tough boxes to check off all the time.

Challenging.

Very challenging. I hired a team that I just said, I'm gonna let you guys, you know, I'll be the thought leader and I know where we're headed and I'm the visionary, but you guys execute. 'Cause I just, I don't know what I'm doing here. And when I gave that up and stopped micromanaging, It just took off.

Really?

Yeah.

How did you learn to give it up?

I didn't learn to. I had to.

I was forced to.

Because you couldn't do it all yourself.

I couldn't do it all myself. You couldn't manufacture and do the food. And I gotta tell you that at some point, age drags a little bit of wisdom along with it. And there was a point at which I just go, you, know what? I just don't have the energy to be pulling the all-nighters and doing all this stuff myself and being on the phone, second-guessing my operations people. on the choices they're making. I'll just have faith and trust that I hired the right people. And that's the key. You gotta hire the right people. So I would say, for most entrepreneurs, I would say the single most important part of your job is hiring the right people. And when you're an entrepreneur and you have reasonable success, you wind up, especially if you're a CEO, you wind up managing resources. You wind up managing money and people. Yeah. And that's your job. And then they then take care of the actual business of business. So I think hiring the right people is key and it requires time. I mean, that's, you know, I talked to hundreds of people to come down to five that I really was convinced were the right, were the right people.

Were you wrong about any of them?

Yes. Yeah. One early one that I thought was going to be the magic that we needed in the marketing department and turned out not to be the case. Highly recommended, very affable, gregarious out of the blocks. Just didn't work out. Didn't work out.

Yeah.

And that's, you know, we, from day one, my minority interest partner in this, Morgan, who was my first hire, Morgan Bueller, she's now CEO of Primal Kitchen, a division of Kraft Heinz. We basically had a sign, no assholes. That was the big important criteria in hiring for our company. No hassles. No hassles. No assholes. No assholes. No assholes either, but they go hand in hand. And it was like we would bounce hires off each other and how do you feel about this? And is there a problem, potential problem here? And once you put the team together and you work well with the team, it makes life so much easier.

You'Re not doing it all alone.

Right.

Now, what advice would you have for people that want to, that are building their own personal brand, they've got some influence, they've got content, a following, and they see this $200 million exit that you had, they see the work you put in, and they want that one day.

Yeah.

Maybe they're realistic it's not gonna happen in two years or something. Maybe it takes a decade or three decades or whatever it is. maybe they will never get to that point, but they want to exit something big one day.

Yeah.

And they have a personal brand now or they're going to build one. What suggestions would you have for them over the course of the next, you know, five, 10 years, knowing they want to exit something someday?

Well, so there are a lot of variables, a lot of criteria here. You know, authenticity is probably the key for any brand building experience you have to, be able to back up what you're saying and what you're offering with credibility, with knowledge. So that's an important part of it. I mean, brand building is-- because you have sort of two opportunities in retail and selling people. You could compete on price in a commoditized world. And a lot of people do that and do it quite well.

Or you're just trying to create a product and then you always have to have the cheapest price.

Yeah.

So, and in the space that you and I move in, there are a lot of influencers who will have their own personal brands in, say, vitamins or supplements or food products or skin care, you know, consumer-- Beauty products or, yeah. Consumer packaged goods. And a lot of those are quite commoditized. So you can't really if you want to compete on price, you're just going to get taken by, you know, by, I mean, people go to, they go to the big box stores and they'll pay a lot less for them. They're just going to compete on price. So you have to compete on brand and you have to compete on, you have to be a specialist in your area and you have to be knowledgeable and provide a lot of other value-added services. You have to, like I spent my whole life educating people and that's why my products do so well. People understand what they're buying. I spent 10 years building a brand with Mark's Daily Apple before I launched my first product. Basically before, I mean, I had the supplement. -But before the food came out, I had 10 years of brand building experience so that when we launched it, I wasn't just setting up a table and giving out samples in front of a Whole Foods with an apron on. -Hoping people figured out who you were. -Yeah. No, I had enough people who we're willing to make a leap and buy online, being shipped mayonnaise in the mail because they couldn't get it anywhere yet because we hadn't secured the distribution yet. But it was all about the brand. It was all about spending time building the brand and building the authenticity and building the credibility and the loyalty. And that's-- I think a lot of companies do that backwards now. They come up with a product first and then they go, okay, now we have to start an Instagram account. We have to start building credibility. We have to start. And that's a difficult way to do it. You know, I mean, you could do.

It that way, but it's, if you didn't have 10 years of writing a blog and building that relationship with an audience and you just had this idea to launch a food, you know, mayonnaise brand.

Yeah.

How much harder would it be to.

Get to where you are now? Infinitely harder. Really? Infinitely harder. Sure. You know, I see people at the food shows, the expos, who do quite well, but almost all of them have some presence. They either wrote a book or they hired, they brought on influencers as board members.

To promote them.

To promote them. They gave them shares in the company. So there's some involvement with people who have some reach and can get to new customers. So back to the question of like, what would I, advise somebody who's building a brand, understand what it is that you want to offer. Like what are your product offerings? Are they intellectual property? Is it products? Is it a combination of the two? Who are you and what do you bring to this space that is absolutely definably unique? Like how are you different from everyone else and what are you, you know, what's your own personal unique selling prospect? Coaching is tough. Coaching, you know, we know that our space is full of thousands of coaches, tens of thousands of coaches. It's a noble business. It's a great business for a lot of people, but it's not right for everyone. And if you really want to rise above in that world, you have to distinguish yourself. What is it that I bring to my clients that's unique and different from every other coach out there? You know, for instance. Right.

So figure out what your uniqueness is. Building that authenticity with people.

And in the interim, the beauty of the modern world and what we have with social media is you can keep your day job and you can be building these circles of followers, of influencer friends, and building your network while you're getting ready to launch your product. And I think you can try out new things with your use Instagram or Facebook or whatever as a focus group. What do you think of this? I'm thinking about doing this. What do you think? And at the end of the day, you can always change your mind.

That's it. And you changed your mind a lot. Dozens of times.

A lot, yeah.

To get to where you're at.

Yeah.

And what was the biggest fear in launching the brand?

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Oh, the food business.

So I'll tell you the biggest fear in launching the original company was I left a well-paying job with a wife and two kids, no money in the bank and no salary to start the supplement company. So that was like, people would say that was inappropriate. But I had a plan. I lined up some consulting gigs. So I knew that there was going to be some income while I was building my business. But it was pretty scary for the first year and a half.

2005 or no?

Yeah, no, this goes back to-- this is actually '96. '96, '97.

When you started the supplement?

When I started the supplement business, yeah.

So you weren't really making much money those first few years?

No, no.

20 years ago you were?

Yeah, I mean, I was making enough to live on because I was designing products for other companies. I designed Beachbody, had a bunch of products that they, you know, P90X and all that stuff. I did all their stuff and Sports Club LA down the street here, I did all their stuff.

She has some consulting.

Had some consulting stuff, yeah. And I would not have left my well-paying job had I not had those lined up. But still, the intent was to build a line of products. There was really no fear by the time I started the food company because I had a business that was going fine, the supplement business. So now it was just an opportunity to try another-- Take a swing. Take a swing.

You got money coming in no matter what.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And if you lost, you lose some money developing it and maybe-- Sure.

And we look, I mean we had some major hiccups. Business, if you're an entrepreneur, you know business is wickedly high highs like a roller coaster. It's amazing. And then the worst like lows, like, oh my God, the world's falling apart. This is it. We're done. We had a bunch of those early on. We'd figured out how to make mayonnaise with avocado oil. We sold out the first couple of runs. This is amazing. And then we started taking orders. and then the next two runs, my copacker couldn't make mayonnaise. 7,000 gallons of avocado oil wouldn't emulsify down the drain.

Really?

Yeah. I mean, $15,000 of raw materials that I had to pay for, gone. When I say down the drain, literally down the drain. And we're like, two times in a row, we couldn't make mayonnaise. And we finally figured out what the problem was. It was a chilling pipe. But until then we thought, oh my God, we've started this great business and now we're out of business. And that's the end of that. Wow. That was fast. Wow. You know? Yeah.

That's scary.

And there were a bunch of those. You know, like avocado oil is a very sort of rare commodity. There's not a lot of it in the world. And I wound up buying much of the avocado oil in the world.

Really? Yeah.

And having to buy it months out. We have contracts a year out to buy avocado oil. And so to be sure that we could get enough to make the different products, I had to overpay. I mean, not overpay, but I had to pay a premium. Pay a premium and I had to store it for my manufacturers. So that was one of the costs of doing business, was just having to keep avocado oil that my manufacturers would otherwise just be buying as they needed it, just in time and using it. Now I've got this whole inventory that- storing it, yeah. I'm storing it. for them. Yeah.

How do you make avocado oil?

It's a unique process. Basically, it's pressed. It's the fruit that's pressed. It's not the seeds as some people think. It's pressed and spun out, the particulate matter spun out. Really? Yeah.

It takes time to drain it and strain it or whatever.

Wow.

So how much oil can you get from one.

A significant amount.

Yeah.

Okay. Like a half cup or something or.

Maybe close to that. But the other thing that we need to know about avocados is that the demand for table fruit is just still so high that most growers would much rather, you know, be selling it as table fruit than pressing it for oil.

Make some guacamole or whatever they were like.

Yeah, exactly.

Wow. So they can charge a premium on oil then.

Yeah.

That's why your stuff is so premium.

One of many reasons.

One of many reasons.

Yeah.

But also the brand you've built probably has helped makes it a more premium.

Well, you know, we use organic, we used organic vinegar from non-GMO beets, cage-free eggs. I mean, the whole, you know, it's a great story.

And it tastes great. What about knockoffs? Have other brands tried to see the.

Success you guys have?

Oh, immediately. Immediately.

And they start making these very similar mayonnaise. Yeah, there's a company that, you know, copied not only our formula, but basically our packaging and everything else. Everything.

Yeah.

Yeah. So how do you, when you come up with a good idea, you launch it and the competitors start to copy it, how do you defend or yourself or just take care of yourself during that process?

You just rise above it. You just literally, this is a metaphor for how we, in comparison as a thief of joy and how we compare ourselves to how other people are doing, you just have to like forge ahead for yourself. and not pay attention to what they're doing, other than to maybe identify things that you know they're doing wrong and differently and do what you do better. But otherwise, competition in many regards is a good thing. And I think we launched a whole category of condiments and dressings that there are now other players in. And so there's more variety for the consumer. And, you know, my intention all along was for Primal Kitchen to be a billion dollars in sales. I couldn't do that myself, which is why I sold it. I wanted to leverage the resources of a much larger company to get there. But in many regards, a rising tide lifts all boats. And so the more companies that are doing what we're doing in the food space, the more ubiquitous it becomes, the more accepted it becomes by the buying population, the lower the pricing gets. and you wind up making better food available to a larger number of people. So everybody wins in the end.

Same thing with blogging and podcasting. I remember I launched my show six and a half years ago and then more and more people got in in the similar space. And I could have been angry and like, oh, they're competing with me. But really, they're attracting more of an audience to come and listen. And if they discover me and other people, it's great. Everyone's improving. in a certain way.

So my blog, Mark's Daily Apple, started.

Out, it was-- $3 million a month or hits a month, right?

Three million at least. And it was probably number, I think we got up to like 3,400 on Alexa. You know what that is? That's huge. So Alexa ranks every website in the world, 350 million websites and we were 3,400 or something like that. Over the years, as more and more people have started blogging about the ancestral health space or low carb or keto, or whatever, Paleo, now we have thousands of blogs. And so my traffic isn't growing anymore. It stays about steady. But I'm fine because there are more, now there's 10x more people or 100x more people looking for the information. And if they don't come to my site, but they come to somebody else's site to get that information, then my original mission, which was to affect the lives of 100 million people, I get to leverage what I started and maybe claim a little bit of credit for other blogs getting into the space and doing what they do well, that sort of psychic income, I'm not deriving income from it, but I know that we're changing the way the world eats. And however we do it, however we can leverage that, I don't need to be the one guy who touched 100 million people. I just want to be responsible for having impacted enough people that it trickle down.

When you have the big success, the big hit, 200 million, at age 65. Is that what?

Yeah.

65, 66. Do you think to yourself, this is the biggest success I'll ever have and my life is over, essentially? Like, do you have this high and then think, okay, now life is over in a sense? Or do you think to yourself, how can I make this bigger? Or do you say to yourself, I want to enjoy life now.

Yeah, all of that. So I want to enjoy life now, and that's part of You know, what we talked about earlier is that even as an entrepreneur, you have to enjoy life. People say, well, I'll enjoy life when I'm successful in my business. I'm like, dude, that's the classic thing about burning the candle at both ends, foregoing your kids' little league games so you can get work done or you're out of town. And then when you're 20 years down the road and you finally have your payday, your kids hate you, your wife left you. you're miserable, and now you spend the rest of your life trying to make.

Up for that stuff.

To make up for that stuff. That's bullshit. I mean, the reason we do this is to live life now and to have fun now, right? And so the advice I give young people is just don't get yourself into debt. Don't get into deep debt and trouble. Pay the bills. It doesn't matter today. If you make 40,000 a year or 140,000 a year, you're probably not going to save much. So just invest in yourself. you know, and invest in, if you're, if you're that entrepreneurial person, invest in yourself. Take the courses, get a coach, you know, figure out ways in which you can always be creating. That's one of my big things. You know, we talk about the Mantra that people say, you know, always be selling, you know, but I'm saying always be creating, like, always have something in your mind that you're working toward. Humans are by Nature, we're, that is what separates us from most animals, is that we're creative and we're all-- art is a thing that we invented. Probably one of the first things we invented. Hey, dude, I see you caught three fish and you, you know, we don't have refrigeration. I know you can only eat one of them. How about you give me one of your fish and I will give you this beautiful beaded necklace that I made and you can wear it around. And so that was the start of commerce. It was about art and it was about creativity and it was about figuring out ways in which, you know, we take our superpower, whether it's making moccasins or making bows and arrows to sell to other people who would then hunt and give you the pelts. All this stuff became creativity was the outlet that generated commerce and created what we have today. And so when Steve Jobs figures out the original computer with Wozniak, it's just art. It's just a form of art they're making available to other people and you trade the efforts of your labor to have some of that art so you can play around with that. So, when I say always be creating, it's like always be thinking of ways in which not just to invent stuff, that's only part of it. You know, be journaling, be blogging, be podcasting, be creative on Instagram, do all those things that are an expression of who you are and you'll find out what your superpower is.

Creating. Do you have a process for creating on a daily basis for yourself or.

Is it just, it's freeing up your mind, man. My best creating used to come when I was running. So when I was a runner, I would do 15, 20 mile runs up in the hills here, in the heat.

A lot of time to think.

Alone? And it was a lot of time to think, but I had my best ideas. The biggest frustration I had was I'd have these amazing ideas up there, and then I couldn't remember half of them when I got back down. I didn't have a recorder or whatever with me. I do a lot of stand-up paddling alone. Same thing. I'm out there paddling and all of a sudden, I'm in the water and nature and my mind is an open book and then something comes in. And it's, I didn't force it, I didn't try it, but because I didn't have my mind filled with other crap that I had to, like, I gotta do this and I gotta do that, and I just was open to it. I've had some of my best creative moments doing that. I've written books literally running. I mean, I've come up with book concepts and then really kind of filled them in with those sorts of moments.

Powerful. Knowing everything you know now, would you change anything in the last 30, 40 years?

I can't. I mean, it's perfect. Everything is perfect. You know, the heartbreak and the pain and the misery, it's all perfect. When I started my supplement company, I said I was 47. I think it was, I was 41 or 42. The 47 number is big in my mind because that's the year I gave up grains. Really?

Yeah.

So my main message about eating right and the whole concept behind the Primal Blueprint and emulating, you know, sort of an ancestral eating pattern and movement pattern, it all came to fruition when I was 47 years old because from 14 to 47, I was miserable. I was in pain most of my life with inflammation, gastrointestinal pain. I had IBS. I had IBS. I would wake up with horrible gut pain every morning of my life and I couldn't figure out what it was. And when I finally gave up grains, it was that easy. It just kind of went away.

Right?

So that revelation for me that I didn't have to be miserable all the time and that I could be you know, I could actually wake up and feel interested in what's going on in the world and focus on what I had to focus on was a life-changing time for me. So, yeah.

Powerful. I love this.

My point being, I wouldn't change that.

You wouldn't change the misery.

Because it was such a profound shift. for me that enabled me to write the Primal Blueprint, to do Mark's Daily Apple, to do all these things. It became a much more user-friendly way of looking at accessing health. It became a much more universally applicable technology, if you will, on how to live a healthy life. And until that time, I was writing about eating well and I was writing about cutting out fats and cutting out sugar and all the stuff that we wrote about for the longest time. But it wasn't until I got to that point, the whole veil lifted off and oh, Jesus, this is, now I understand what my mission in life is. And that's, so when I say it, tell my kids, you know, I didn't know what I wanted to be until I was 47. That's the point at which that happened.

Huh.

Yeah.

And also you could, because you suffered so much with that pain, you could then, you realize you wanted to help a lot of people who are suffering.

Yeah.

I don't want other people to feel this way. I've got the solutions now. I want to teach this to them.

Yeah.

It's powerful. This is called the Three Truths. I think I asked you this last time. I think you were on like three years ago probably. Wow.

Do you think it was two, three years ago?

Maybe three years ago.

Yeah.

Maybe three years ago. So I'm not sure if you answered this question, but I'll ask it again. It's called the Three Truths. Imagine it's your last day. on Earth. You get to pick the day in the future. You can live as long as you want, but eventually you gotta pick the day. All the anti-aging techniques and strategies you figured out, the eating healthy. At some point it fades and you gotta go. But if you could, and unfortunately you have to take all the information you've written and wrote about and spoken about and done videos on and courses and training, you gotta take it with you. So no one has access to your content anymore. But you can leave behind three ideas, three lessons for the world that would be kind of your guide to humanity. What would you say are those three lessons or three truths?

Wow, you didn't ask me this last time.

Okay, good.

The three truths. I want it to be simple. So I would say diet is huge in accessing not only good health but energy and positive mood. So that's number one. I know that's a very generic sort of thing. Number two, I would say that everything is perfect. There are no looking back on your life, there are no real mistakes because as long as you were willing to learn from everything to get to where you are today, everything ultimately winds up being perfect and happening at just the right time for you. Number three, and in that same light, everything will be okay. And that nothing, no thought that you have about the future today is benefiting you in any way if you don't appreciate the moment you're in right now.

I like that one.

What's one of the causes of anxiety and stress?

We live our lives so either tied to regretting what we did in the past or fearing what's going to happen in the future that we miss out on the present.

The only thing that matters is now. What is something we can do to support you? What's the thing you're most excited about? You sold this company, you're still working with the company to develop more products and make sure it continues to take off. how can we follow you right now?

So you can still follow Mark's Daily Apple. I'm still writing something, I think, fairly interesting and exploring new avenues every day at marksdailyapple.com, primalkitchen.com for the food company, find out about the food products. And then, you know, for me, where I'm at in my life right now, your supporting me is more a factor of you supporting your people with just continued great information. Like, I just want to see, we're in a tough spot in this country right now. You know, I would, I have a real soft spot in my heart for Millennials. I remember being, you know, in those 20s and 30s and thinking, what, you know, what is my life gonna gonna look like? Yeah. You know? And I think guys like you who are giving some guideposts along the way, that's what I want to see. I want to see more people involved in other people's lives with support and encouragement and not putting people down and sort of off on their own, 'cause we're all in this together.

Yeah.

I love it.

Cool.

I love it. Where do you hang out on social media the most?

Mark Cissna Primal is my Instagram account.

You spend time on there a little bit every now and then?

Yeah, yeah. I try to edit myself more than I probably should. No more shirtless, you know, pictures in there. But I try to whenever I have some-- Paddleboarding. Paddleboarding for sure.

You used to have some great photos of you running on the beach and.

Carrying big rocks and all these kind of things.

I guess I'll have to start doing that. You gotta get back in there.

People will like that. Yeah, cool.

You're inspiring. How old are you right now? I'll be 66 in July. Coming up. 66. You gotta show people the six pack and what's possible. Keep inspiring. So make sure we follow you there. Get your products, primalkitchen.com, check out the.

Blog, Mark's Daily Apple. If you want to be a health coach, I mean, Primal Health Coach Institute, the Primal Health Coach Institute, is where you can find out about this program that basically I took all my information in my head and I uploaded it to this website and now you can.

Do what I do in coaching people. To be a coach. Health coach. You teach people the principles of how to be a holistic health coach like.

You and then how to get clients.

From them as well. Exactly.

Yeah.

And run your own business.

Exactly.

Gotcha. PrimalHealthCoachInstitute.com?

Yep.

Perfect. I want to acknowledge you, Mark, for being an inspiration to so many people because you continue to pivot and pivot and learn and have little success and then failure and a little more success and continue to evolve and you didn't get stuck in one zone. And that's what I think is really inspiring is that someone at 61 can launch something and then sell it for a couple hundred million dollars. in your 60s.

Yeah.

You're like the KFC of healthy living. Okay.

Right, right.

Wasn't Colonel Sanders?

Yeah, yeah.

So you're the healthier version of that.

Yeah.

And you're showing us all what's possible at any age. And the thing I love about you is you're just getting started now. Yeah, I feel like that.

I really feel like, okay, I did.

This thing, but now I really want to get started. Now that you have some resources.

Yeah. On a bigger scale. I think, you know, that's important. that it's my obligation to keep going.

Yeah, you're not like, okay, I'm done. I can retire. You're like, now I can really invest in bigger ideas to make more change. That's what I love about you. So I'm really inspired by everything. My final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

Oh, my definition of greatness. In my world, it's having people better off for your having touched their lives. Full stop.

There you go, Mark Sisson. Thanks, brother. Appreciate you, man.

Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you enjoyed this one. I hope it gave you insights, clarity, wisdom, strategies, skills, tools, everything you need to really help you gain more peace in your heart, to optimize your personal brand, to know that it's okay to pivot a dozen or two dozen times until you're in the right place to get that right thing. You might be in a place right now that you don't love, but it's generating a skill set for you for something 5, 10, 20 years from now. And I learned that lesson from Mark in this interview today. Be a champion for a friend of yours today by just sending them this link, lewishouse.com/827 or wherever you're listening to this podcast, go to your podcast app, copy and paste the link and text a friend or two friends right now this link. Who you think this could help? them improve their life with this incredible resource. Post it on your social media would mean a world to me to help spread the message of greatness, to help impact more people's lives. Just take the link, lewishouse.com/827 and post it on Twitter, on Facebook, on your Instagram stories. Make sure to tag me and tag Mark Sisson as well, as I'm sure he'd love to know that you're listening to this and what you think. and George Bernard Shaw said, those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. Boom. We've got to be willing to adapt and change our thought, change the way we believe about things, change our belief system to see what is capable for us moving forward. If you feel stuck in something in your life right now, It's a matter of thought, changing the thought first to know what is possible. If you don't think something is possible, then you definitely will not create it. You must think something you've never thought in order to create something you've never done. That is the truth. It's time to step up our thoughts. It's time to be willing to change at all times, because the only constant is change. I love you so very much. I hope to see you at Summit of Greatness as well coming up. In less than a month and a half, get your tickets at SummitOfGreatness.com, let me know, let's hug it out, high five, I'm excited to see you, I love you so very much and you know what time it is, it's time to go out there and do something great.