How to Turn Your Creator Business Into an Empire | Ben Greenfield | 142

Don't focus on pure personal brand play as your primary source of revenue because if I get hit by a bus, most of that disappears.

If you ever wanted to see behind the scenes of a massive creator empire, this episode is for you.

My goal is to have everything that we've just talked about right here be optional when I get out of bed in the morning.

Ben Greenfield has been podcasting since 2008, back when only a handful of health shows existed online. Today, he runs a stack of businesses from rural Idaho with that same show still at the center of it all.

Total Total revenue for the podcast, $300K per month.

We break down every dollar he earns up on the whiteboard in a pie chart.

Coaching comes out to $90K, $40K to $50K, it's around $40K, $15K, $5K a month.

This totals up to $500,000 a month, $6 million a year.

Yeah.

But the craziest part is this is just one pie chart. This is actually the small business.

Yes. Doesn't feel small.

A 7-figure business, an 8-figure business, and then—

Shockingly, this doesn't exist. The biggest key is make it not dependent on you. Sub the ego, It doesn't have to have your face, your name, your brand. I love that. This is going to be super fun because this is the first podcast I've ever done where I can talk about this.

Ben, I'm excited to break down all the revenue in your business. But first, you started podcasting in 2008.

Uh, yeah.

Things have changed a little bit since then.

Thanks for making me feel and sound old. There was easily less than 100 podcasts, right? And maybe like 4 or 5 health and fitness podcasts, which was kind of like my niche. And you had to like code your RSS feed and submit it to Apple and like wait 2 weeks. And I forget the name of the website, but it was basically like a feed reader website that you could feed your podcast into every time it broke, which was like every month because typically like the code was over 100 megabytes or whatever. And yeah, it was like Wild West of podcasting. And it started lunch break at the personal training studio that I was running. I would open up my laptop and do like talking head videos of strength and conditioning research.

Okay.

And just like push that out there. 14 episodes in, I did an interview with a professional triathlete, uh, because I was super into triathlon at the time. And then most of the podcasts from there on out wound up either being interview or like call-in or write-in Q&A episodes. But yeah, like twice a year for 18 years.

Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, most people who say like, oh, I was podcasting in the early days are not doing it today. Like there's a lot of people who come and go from the industry.

Yeah.

But to stay consistent is impressive and we'll get into the business.

I'm just stubborn and stupid. No, but, but I mean, like, yeah, we've been talking before, like I, like it's my favorite thing. Like I get to either read a book and know that I get to talk to the author of the book who normally otherwise would never have given me the time of day for an hour and a half, rinse, wash, and repeat for some like Physiologist or coach or therapist or whatever. And yeah, you talk to super interesting people.

What was revenue like in those early days?

Like, do you remember revenue of the product?

Yeah. And just of your online venture?

Oh, well, I was doing well as a personal trainer. I was making like a little over $100,000 as a personal trainer running these 2 gyms, mostly with like group coaching. It was just training, right? No supplement sales or anything like that. But basically all of my training was kind of SaaS-based. So, people would sign up for a monthly program with me and they would get X number of visits and they get group coaching. And so, I was doing okay as a personal trainer, but again, working a lot of hours. And then, leading up to this triathlon training program that I had made, I was maybe making another maybe $60 to $70 a week on online book sales with this. Shape 21 was the name for this one. So, I had the Ironman race week launch week where I was actually racing. And so, I was new on X, formerly Twitter back in the day. And I mean, I went as far as pre-scheduled tweets like, hey, I'm coming out of the water right now, big smile on my face. And, I used my Triathlon Dominator program to complete. And, it was originally called the CEO Triathlon Program, But, I got a cease and desist from some company that owned CEO Triathlon, so I renamed it Triathlon Dominator. So, long story short is for race day and the 6 days following race week, I made about $48K in sales of that program, $97 digital program, $197 physical product shipped by disc.com in Texas.

So, you made 50% of your annual income.

Yeah. And, not really in 6 days because it took me 8 months to make it, but the idea, of course, the light bulb moment for me was like, wait, I I could take my IP, I could put it online, I can do this in my underwear at home, and I could maybe step into a different chapter of life where my kids are literally twin boys about to be born and I can actually have like a home office and do this stuff at home. And that's what I started doing. Like I rinsed, washed, and repeated that program, which, you know, it had things like forum support and ongoing affiliate revenue based on my relationships with like wetsuit manufacturers and bike manufacturers and supplement companies. baked into it. So, the LTV of the customer went beyond the $97 or the $197 initial purchase. But then, I continued to grow my list and I created the Marathon Dominator program, a knee pain program, a low back pain program. I probably had 7 or 8 different programs that I just started selling online as an online content creator. Had the podcast going at the same time, wasn't selling any ads or anything on that. But yeah, a big part of like my initial exposure to just like getting sponsored, especially for triathlon and making a little bit of side money as an affiliate, was doing the travel blogging stuff.

So let's actually put a pin in that. Now I'm thinking about the event that you went to where someone maps out, here's everything that— here's how the world works in online business. Yeah. I want to jump up on the board and basically do that. For people who are watching, right? And so now we have this opportunity, 'cause you're up for sharing revenue numbers and all of that, to basically give, pay that gift forward to a bunch of creators watching and you can say, here's what it looks like at scale. All right, let's do it. So you have a few different businesses going on. We're gonna try to simplify it a little bit over here. Uh, let's get into, we'll just call this like Ben Greenfield Life.

Is that— Yeah.

That's this world. This is the, the content side of the business, probably that most listeners would relate to the most, I think. Give me a sense of the audience and platforms. What platforms are most important to you and how many subscribers?

Yeah. So let's, let's just jump straight into revenue and size then. So number one would be the podcast. Part of it is not because I'm good at it. I've just been doing it for so freaking long that it's just like a very, very slow rolling snowball. I think I've got about 120-some million downloads Okay. Total of that podcast.

What would you say monthly downloads are for the podcast?

275,000 per month. That's for 2 episodes per week.

Instagram?

450,000-ish. 123,000 on YouTube. Twitter, I think it's around 150,000 now. Emails, like, like a quarter million.

That's a good sense of who we've got in the audience or the scale of the audience. Right.

Right.

Let's talk revenue. Okay. So, the big one is the podcast. What revenue do you do on a monthly basis? Everything tied to the podcast and advertising.

Yeah. For Ben Greenfield Life, my personal brand, podcasting would definitely be the biggest. The podcast revenue would be pre-, mid-, and post-roll ads throughout the podcast, you know, anywhere from 4 to 6 per episode. Newsletter feature in the weekly roundup newsletter that goes out once a week. Depending on the package that someone signs up for, because there's different levels of packages, sidebar ad on articles on the website, because typically you've got about 4 long-form articles per month that come out. They would also be getting social reels, social story. So there's the social media piece. And then they can also buy whitelisting so they can take an ad like they're basically buying NIL, name, image, likeness, to be able to run an ad for 3 months or 6 months or 12 months or however long of a contract, I mean, advertising contract that they've signed up for. So because of that, the actual package that my partnerships team, which consists of 2 people, would sell to a sponsor goes way beyond just like, hey, here's our CPM, our cost per 1,000 downloads. And instead, like, here's the full package that you get. We go way beyond just like selling a podcast ad for you. Yeah. So, total revenue for that type of scenario for the podcast right now is at about $300K per month.

Okay.

That's awesome. That's basically for sponsors, for advertisers. It's not like products I'm selling personally. That's—

And so, that— yeah, that's a substantial—

Yeah. Red light therapies and coffee enemas and all the things. Yeah.

That's that side. What's the next biggest bucket?

So, when I was racing triathlon and doing personal training, my biggest source of income was coaching.

Okay.

And I still do some coaching. So, I coach a limited number of clientele. And then, Life Enterprises is the holding company for Ben Greenfield Life, and Life Enterprises owns Triumph Coaching. And under Triumph Coaching, I personally coach 8 people, and then I also do one-off consults with people throughout the week. So, somebody might hop on with me for 20 or 30 minutes or sometimes an hour to talk about like blood biomarkers, health, fitness goals, whatever. So, coaching comes out to about $90K. A month. And that's either recurring revenue or à la carte coaching calls. That is actually an area that we are actively trying to build.

Nice.

Adding more coaches, scaling coaching program. And we are adding next month group coaching.

Okay. And then as we come up here, what's the next? We're getting into some smaller slices of the pie. Okay.

Smaller slices of the pie. If we really want to like grab a hole a little bit, technically I have like Ben Greenfield Life, which is the content piece. Ben Greenfield LLC is where I do like my advising, My speaking and my books. And so advising, speaking, and books, those would all be other pieces of the pie. Advising, that would be like literally a monthly fee that companies pay me to give them, as the name implies, advice. That's around $40K a month.

Yeah.

Speaking is depending on the month, anywhere from $40K to $50K per month. That would mean like traveling and giving a keynote. Sometimes there's like online Zoom appearances, Things like that. But basically, just getting on stage, giving a talk, getting on an airplane. So yeah, speaking and advising fit into those categories.

That's awesome. What are the small categories?

There are more teeny tiny pieces. I, under Life Enterprises, have kind of what you could consider to be the Facebook of health, which is Life Network, which is a membership-based community where experts in whatever, holistic dentistry to biohacking to fitness, have content that they put out for people, whether it's ad-free podcasts or articles or videos. That is mostly a freemium play, although some people upgrade to premium for access to fewer ads, and that kicks off around $5K a month. That feeds into Life Market, which would be more of the Amazon of health. And, that's where people are buying curated products, everything from skin and beauty products to supplements to bars to powders. And that's like around, yeah, so that's around $15K a month.

So, um, that'd be the affiliate side.

That's, yeah, that's kind of an affiliate play that goes beyond affiliate revenue that might be kicked off from advertising relationships that are part of the podcast. Because when someone signs up for an ad package, right, part of their ad package would be, well, yeah, you're going to pay X dollars per month for running an ad or for whitelisting, but then We do get a certain percentage of the sales that are generated.

Actually, I want to take a step back and just look at this as a whole because we've got most—

Did we give everything? Oh, book sales.

Books.

Make a ton of money. Yeah.

How much money are we printing on books?

I make around $5K a month on book sales, but that's literally like 13 books, like all combined.

Okay. So we've got podcasts, really all advertising and sponsorships is $300K. Coaching is big at $90K. And then advising and speaking are $40K or so each. Affiliates would be next at $15K. And then you've got the Life Network and books at $5K. Yeah, there's a lot going on here. And I guess just to be clear, all of these numbers that I wrote up here, they're all monthlies.

That is kind of like the personal brand revenue with a little bit of that personal brand intermingled with Life Network, which is like other experts, and Life Market, which doesn't just rely on me to drive traffic.

Yeah. So that makes sense. So this totals up to basically $500,000 a month. Uh, which is about $6 million a year. And so that's the personal brand side. I want to dive in on the advertising sponsorships, all of that, because there's a few things that you've done here that make it more interesting or more, like, or more successful. Right. So first you're selling integrated ad packages instead of being like, someone's like, hey, I want to pay just for a podcast slot. And you're like, we're not doing that. Right.

You get basically like a rate sheet and then you get a personal call with a sponsorship manager who's going to typically have Often it's a couple of calls or more to actually arrive on an ad package that works for your budget, but that rolls in as much as possible.

And that's the partnerships. We'll get into the team a little bit, but that's 2 people on the partnerships team?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. 2 questions. When did you start doing the whitelist ads and give an example of how those would work? Okay.

And to contextualize this for you, I didn't know I was whitelisting until I saw it on our ad package and I asked, what is whitelisting? Because I actually didn't know myself. And your partnerships people say, let me tell you. And my partnerships people, well, then let us tell you what whitelisting is. So basically people can take an ad and it might be like an ad that they've already purchased, like a social reel or a social story or a social post, and then they can pay to like run that ad on their platform or as like a partner with you, right, on Meta, on wherever. They're usually on Meta, like, like Facebook, um, and they're paying a fee to have access to that for a certain period of time.

So like one that I saw recently was for the— is it Respire?

The— Okay. So yeah, for like mouth tape. Yeah, exactly.

So I'm going through there, you pop up in my feed.

Yeah.

It's an ad run by them.

Right. But it's— exactly. Yeah. They're basically pumping money into that ad to run it. And like they're tracking whatever metrics that they're getting on sales.

Because you're going to convert better than some random.

Exactly. And I'm glad you brought them up too, because we actually— and I left this out of the podcast revenue because I don't know if it fits in a podcast or affiliate, but it's Interesting. We are doing more long-form videos that a sponsor can— so, for like $7,500, I'll shoot an educational video that is hopefully going to bring value into people's lives anyways.

Right.

Like, we did one 3 days ago on sleep. I just had a video crew in my bedroom for a half hour in the evening, and that was sponsored by Respire, right? So, at the end of the video, you know, at the beginning, there's like the hook, oh, stick around for the end. I'm going to give you one final trick that, you know, you may not have heard of before. And then at the very end, I'm like, okay, and then the last thing, and then you bring out the mouth tape and the nose tape. And so those are like long-form videos, not like minute-long social reels that that sponsor can actually like sponsor.

I like that. And the other thing that I picked up on is, so someone would be paying upfront, a brand might be paying in that case $7,500.

Yeah.

But then you're also making money on the performance of it. As well. Is that right? Where there's some affiliate revenue or whatever else for the sales as well?

Right. Because they're running it with my link and/or my code, right? So there's still some evergreen income that occurs. There's a few deals that we've done where the partners are just like, well, no, you know, if we're paying X amount of dollars just based on our COGS or margins, whatever, we're not going to do the affiliate revenue also. Most of the time we like to do the affiliate revenue just because it keeps the incentives along. And a lot of times, like, Those affiliate cookies would be like lifetime affiliate cookies. So in many cases, if I'm signing a sponsor for 12 months, I'm really signing them for like 20 years as long as that code remains active.

Yeah.

Which is work for the partnerships team. I mean, it's a pretty massive Airtable that's like got all the codes and all the tracking and all the contacts. And there's like about 60 partners that are really like the top 60 partners that we really focus on and we follow up on.

That's awesome. So in a moment, I want to get into the 2 bigger businesses. This is actually the small business.

Yes.

But before we do that—

It doesn't feel small, but yeah. It's probably the one that I work the hardest in.

Okay.

Yeah.

And it makes you fuel everything else.

Yeah. It's me. And that's also like cautionary tale for any content creator. If I get hit by a bus, most of that disappears.

Right. So what does the team look like? We have 2 partnerships people as we focus on the Ben Greenfield stuff.

So CEO of Life Enterprises who basically oversees Life Market, Life Network, Triumph Coaching, and the podcast. And, the team basically ultimately answers to him, although I'm the CEO of Ben Greenfield LLC, which is speaking, advising, and books. That's my own deal. That's separate from Ben Greenfield Life. And, that's pretty lean.

Okay.

I mean, speaking, advising, and books doesn't take a lot of work. And most of the people I work with are just like my EA team, essentially. I've got like 3 EAs and it's me and those 3 EAs that are doing most of that stuff. As a matter of fact, if people from Ben Greenfield Life wind up working on Ben Greenfield LLC, they invoice Ben Greenfield LLC and I turn around and pay them.

Okay.

So, if I'm speaking at an event and there's affiliate revenue tied to an event and that requires work from the social team at Ben Greenfield Life to technically promote something, That's a Ben Greenfield LLC source of revenue. Ben Greenfield LLC is just paying the Ben Greenfield Life social team. So then, underneath CEO is vice president. CEO is kind of architecting visionary new products, new businesses. VP is a little bit more in the COO role. Okay. So, like an ops type? Yep, yep. And then, there's also a dedicated ops manager just for Ben Greenfield Life. So, This ops manager is like Life Network, Life Market, everything Life Enterprises. And then there's another COO who's just operating or managing.

I'm just going to go ops times 2.

Yeah. So it's kind of like 2 COOs essentially. And then social team is 2 people. Editorial team, like articles, captions, stuff like that, is 2 people. One tech person who is kind of like gradually becoming like almost like AI architect also. So that has been a role that is expanding in terms of like value and responsibility. And then technically there's also one IT person. So there's kind of like one tech person, one IT person.

Let's go 10.

Yeah. Social, editorial, sales, partnerships, CEO, yes. VP ops. Yeah. That— oh, sorry. 14, 15 people. Coaching, right? So there's technically I mean, if we're not counting the coaches themselves, right? Because there's 6 coaches right now, but they're working as independent contractors. But then the actual, like, the staff for coaching is 3 people.

Okay. 3 plus 6. And anyone listening knows the breakdown of those 2.

Yeah.

So that's a good-sized team running this because it's a complicated operation. There's a lot of things going on there.

If you really truly want to like bring in that type of revenue from like podcast sponsorships, you're just like managing a lot of advertisers and they're all in contact with you every single week. And that adds up when there's like hundreds of them.

How's the performance of this going? How's the timing of that? Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. So that's a big one.

If someone else was like on track to build something like this, what are a couple things that you would say to them of like, oh, make sure to do this part, or you should know, here's maybe a mistake that I made that you shouldn't repeat. Let's say I'm at a million in revenue and I'm looking to scale to the $6 million?

Well, one we already mentioned, like I think ad packages tend to create a lot more revenue and value for the partner than just selling dedicated ads. Another one would be a ton of this is probably related to some of the other stuff we're going to talk about in terms of like, just don't focus on this pure branding, personal brand play as your primary source of revenue because based on other businesses that I've built, my goal is to have everything that we've just talked about right here be optional when I get out of bed in the morning because there are other revenue streams that go beyond that. So, a big part of it is just like think as you create the business about, you know, can I go to the beach for a week or am I obligated to like get out of bed in the morning, shoot a video?

Because you've got Instagram reel to make. Yeah.

But, if we want to talk brass tacks, another couple of things is From a— this piece requires content. And I went for a long time in a very reactive whiplash mode where you'd get partners reaching out wanting a video or a podcast commercial or whatever, and you're just like, okay, so when am I going to shoot this today? I have 2 videographers and they live 5 minutes from my house and they come to my house about once every week and a half or 2 weeks and we spend 4 to 6 hours and we just get it—

Knock it out.

All done. Really well. None of me trying to figure out stuff with like, literally like up until like 2 years ago, it was like, hey, River, Taryn, my son's like, where are you? Grab the phone, or I'm gonna set this up on a tripod, or I'm gonna lean this against a fruit bowl in the kitchen. And that was just, and it was super distracting.

Right.

So batching content, that's a big one.

Now, are those, we didn't list the, are the videographers—

You know what? We did leave a couple of things out and I was thinking about this. Not that we wanna look like total amateurs, but I'm gonna blame it on you 'cause you're holding the marker. Yeah, exactly. We left out podcast Okay. And we left out videographers, and that's a total of 3 people. Those are really a lot of the big things as far as lessons go. I mean, we, you know, of course, from a lifestyle design standpoint, I have so many boundaries, just like, you know, family devotions and family huddle at 7:00 AM, and I cannot be in my office then. And family dinner starts at 7:00, and like work is totally done by then. You know, typically it's like family pickleball or ping pong or tennis or something that starts at 6:00. So usually, I'm out of the office even before then. No calls or anything allowed on my schedule between 2:00 and 3:30 p.m. so I can siesta, nap, test out biohacking toys, whatever. So, all of that might make it look like I work pretty hard, but I actually, I am very, very much sold on the idea of having a lifestyle-based business, being with your family every day, having family dinner every night, Like getting your workout in every morning. So I've built a lot of this obviously very slowly over a long period of time. And I'm super happy with like my day-to-day routine. I feel like with that team and having things spread out like that, like it's still all pretty doable for me.

I love that.

Okay.

Well, let's dive into the other businesses.

Okay.

What's the, like you have an e-commerce brand. What's the name of that?

Yeah. I'm doing that travel blogging and I'm like a race car, right? Like in spandex and I'm competing in all these traffic triathlons all over the world. And then I raced for Reebok for 4 years in obstacle course racing, and I found that I could create a lot of value for sponsors by helping them sell their products while I was out racing. Some of those sponsors were supplement companies. And like at one point during my racing career, just like super nerded out type of thing a homeschooler would do, I figured out how to like basically write out a PHP script that would allow people to submit their credit card information and payment processing on my end and then get that dropshipped by the affiliates. Like, I had like 10 different companies just like in the supplements industry alone, just dropshipping stuff.

Okay.

Just based on a personal relationship I had with them because they were like getting me out to Thailand to do a triathlon or whatever. And, I was kind of like looking at the numbers and realizing, oh gosh, like I'm selling a lot of supplements for a lot of people at like, you know, 10 to 15%, you know, affiliate revenue. And they're all dropshipping it for me. And like, they own a lot of the customer data and the follow-up. And I think I could probably use my own knowledge of biochemistry and love for the supplements industry to just like start to do a lot of this on my own. So, I took what was at the time called Greenfield Fitness Systems, which was kind of like the branch that I had devoted to a lot of this, these like sponsor stuff. And I started a company called Kion, a supplements company. Ki meaning like life force energy, named it after the Japanese kanji symbol tattooed on my right shoulder for ki. A mistake made in college that wound up being a business. So, so Kion, actually what happened was I flew a branding agency up to my house that one of my friends had recommended to me, and I'm not going to call them out, but I didn't Like them very much and I thought they super sucked. But one guy was really cool and his name is Angelo. And I basically didn't wind up doing much work at all with the branding team, but I offered Angelo a job as the operations manager for Keon to help me build it and scale it. And he's awesome. Still is awesome. He's the CEO of the company now. So he vested over like 4 years into about 46% ownership.

Yeah.

in the company, which is a good way to scale if you, if you, you know, want a good operations manager or CEO, but maybe you're bootstrapping and, you know, can't afford to pay them a full salary right off the bat. So Kion is, uh, it's super simple stuff. It's like creatine and whey protein and like amino acids are our top-selling product and fish oil and an immune product. But the, the idea is super high quality, Very simple. We don't want a whole bunch of crazy, like, whatever. They're great products like Athletic Greens or IM8 or whatever. We don't want like 90 different ingredients that we got to go out and source new raw ingredients for when something goes out of stock. We don't do Whole Foods or like GNC or Super Supplements or anything. You're all direct-to-consumer? We're all DTC, Shopify, Amazon, for 2 reasons. A, we don't have to worry about shelf life and stocking and shipping. And then B, it becomes kind of a math game when you're D2C. We know exactly the cost of every new customer that we're bringing in. You know, we've got our own internal last-click acquisition software that we built and it's essentially just like, it's math on very simple but effective products. So that's— Yeah.

Like how many SKUs do you have?

Well, fewer and fewer every year. That's what I love about. So I'm like an idea man. I'm a visionary and I'll come up with these ideas for like, I used to come up with these ideas for like multi-complex, like 20-ingredient formulas where you go like the longevity formula to rule them all. And Angelo, you know, our CEO, he's just like, no, that's a stupid idea. Like, you realize how expensive that's going to be and you're going to have like 1,000 people who want to buy it and that's it. And so, we have, I think, 9 SKUs right now. Oh, wow. Yeah.

It's a very lean business.

And we have literally considered going down as low as 1 SKU. Like aminos outsells everything 10x, just essential amino acids. It's kind of like our wedge for the other products in terms of like people find us through essential amino acids and they like them for like muscle gain and fat loss and satiety. And they, they do a lot. They're like a Swiss Army knife. So yeah, that's Kion and Kion again, same thing with SKUs, like pretty lean, mean team. I think we have 9 people right now.

Well, we're not going to share the revenue numbers for Kion, but it's many multiples of what we have going on over, over here in the Ben Greenfield Lab world.

Yeah. Kion does very well. Yeah.

Just so people know what we have, this other, the circle that is so big. The moon.

The planet.

There's no moon.

You know what we should mention though is like Keon started off like with me as kind of like the rocket booster, right? Like I was the content machine, I was the face, I was the name of the brand. And I think that can be useful for launching a brand, but back to the lifestyle-based business thing, And also kind of like the acquisition piece, if you're building a company to sell, which is what we're doing with Keon, and you have a key person issue, meaning like, let's say I was still the name, the face, doing all the content, all the videos, and they were heavily reliant upon me as a main influencer. That's a key person problem that makes it difficult for whatever, you know, PE or whoever's going to buy your company to actually swallow when they realize, oh, if this person gets hit by a bus, like that's going to drastically affect revenue. I advise an energy drink company that recently brought on Kim Kardashian. I'm like, that's not the greatest idea because, you know, not that she's like a bad person, I don't know much about her. I would much rather do like what we did at Kion where we've got like 100+ micro-influencers, you know, the mommy blogger and the rock climber and the triathlete and the dancer. And so, we're spreading out our influence across a lot of different personalities, but none of them are clutch. I've seen companies in the supplements industry actually get a pretty low valuation because they didn't disentangle some like controversial or lightning rod-esque type of former CEO or founder from the company. And so that person's out, whatever, doing blogs and podcasts and content that might be considered to be controversial, and that can affect acquisition or valuation later on. And then the other issue that you run into is that if I were to take all the Ben Greenfield Life content like I originally did when I launched Kion and use that as SEO to drive traffic to purchase supplements and that company gets acquired, then whoever acquires Kion acquires all my IP that I've been working on for 20 years and can do whatever the heck they want with it in many cases depending on how the contract is written. And, I'm not just making this up. I've seen one very popular supplements company get a low valuation because their founder is a controversial person. You could find articles on my website about like LSD and plant medicine and sex, just like stuff that people would consider not bad. Like, I don't write this stuff to be offensive, but there's just like, it's just stuff. It's just real stuff.

It's not private equity friendly.

Yeah, it's not PE friendly. And then the other issues I've also seen people who have had really, really great content websites sell to big companies and the companies just nuke the content because they don't want to go through 20 years of content and scrape stuff to make sure it's safe. So they just get rid of it and you lose it all.

So with Keon, you used your brand to launch it initially.

Right. Almost like a rocket booster. Yeah.

And then you've been very deliberate about how reliant Keon is on you for your time, but especially for your brand, for marketing, for customer acquisition and all of that.

You cannot find— you would be hard-pressed to find my name, my face, my involvement anywhere on the actual Kion website. You could find it on the internet that I'm like, whatever, co-founder or whatever. But I've extracted myself quite a bit from the company. Even Angelo, like he's doing fewer and fewer podcast appearances just because like we want the company to really like be reliant upon like our product and how good our product is.

It stands on its own.

And no key person, and it stands on its own.

Because then if you have a situation like You know, think about acquisitions in our space, whether it's Primal Kitchen or tons of these other ones, any of these acquisitions that, you know, you want them to buy it for the product, the power of the engine behind it and all of that. And not the fact that, oh, now you as the founder, you've gotta come with it. You now are on the playing field.

There's a certain aspect of like cool kids marketing, like another, like yesterday, this big circle, like I just brought on Tom Brady, right? And so like he will bring in traffic as a big face, big name. And for the initial phases of a launch, I think sometimes that can be useful to get momentum.

Right.

You know, I'm launching a documentary right now and Zac Efron is the executive producer. And like that kind of big name is good, but I wouldn't want people to view the documentary because they know who the executive producer is. It's like, That's a little bonus that might get more people in the front door, but then I want that documentary to be popular because of word of mouth and its value to people. But you don't want to completely ignore like star power that you might have on your team or have access to, but you don't want to make a company that's reliant on that. It sounds cool. Yeah.

What are some other lessons learned as you're launching Keon and really, you know, taking the attention that you have and saying, okay, I want to build a sellable asset on another scale within this business?

One thing would be, I kind of already alluded to this, but just simplicity. Understand that you, if you're watching this or listening to this, are probably just by the nature of you being a creator, a real visionary. If you're going to build a company that's going to generate revenue outside of yourself as a creator, but you're going to use yourself as a creator to give the initial rocket booster lift to that company, then try to have somebody at the helm who's holding the reins, who's almost frustrating you when you get on the phone and you've got 10 ideas and they're really the type of person who's going to say, no, diluted focus equals diluted results. These are all dumb ideas, or we don't want to waste our time on these. And you needed to trust that person and let them just focus on really the numbers, what's working, and keep things simple.

I've seen that a lot where exactly what you're saying, where the founder and I do this, you're like more, more, more. And so you end up with all of the surface area of all of these things that you're doing and they're all moderately successful.

Yeah.

And then really when you find, okay, this is what really works, let's cut off these other things and let's dump it in and scale it up.

You need someone who's just gonna like destroy your dreams.

Like, throw it all out. Yeah. And say, hey, this one thing is actually working. Yeah. Because you had, if I remember correctly, you had like 18 to 20 SKUs before.

Um, we had more. I don't remember exactly how many, but we had more. Yeah. And then you gradually— Um, or we had SKUs with lots of ingredients. I don't, I don't think we have a single SKU with more than 4 ingredients. Which is actually not that common in the supplements industry.

Yeah.

And so, when you see a product launch and they've got like a dozen-plus different ingredients and they're on every podcast advertising, and who knows how much equity they've given away in the company to get the dollars for that marketing and for those products, you don't see those companies lasting that long in many cases in the supplements industry. So, Yeah. Simplicity, concentration, focus. I think it's a pretty good equation.

Okay. So now let's go to this giant circle, which is a company that you've just launched.

Yesterday. Yeah.

Coming to you live.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What's the name of this company? Life Enterprises. It is the holding company for Triumph Coaching, Life Network, Network and Life Markets. And then, we have Ben Greenfield Life and Ben Greenfield LLC, and this new company is called Life OS.

Okay.

And, Life OS is, as the name implies, kind of like an operating system, but it's a clinical play. This is going to be super fun because this is the first podcast I've ever done where I can talk about this. We recognize a need, and by we, I mean me and some friends who are in the functional medicine and physician space and pharmacy company. And our CEO of Life Enterprises, Caleb Applegate, also happens to be my best friend and live like 20 minutes from me up in Idaho.

That's awesome.

So, it's super fun. We recognize that people are really wanting things like peptides, bioidentical hormones. I mean, all the way down to just medical cannabis, like all these things that can technically be fulfilled online direct-to-consumer, but that are kind of dangerous, like sold for human research only, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Yeah.

Or are just like cheap imports from China, synthetic ingredients. You can't even make dosing recommendations because that's illegal if you're selling stuff for And so, that's problem number 1. Problem number 2 is that physicians a lot of times have patients who have wearables, labs, blood biomarkers, previous prescriptions from other doctors, peptides they want to try, fitness plan, a certain nutrition or dietary plan they're supposed to be following. And, this is all just not concentrated in any way for a doctor. It's all over the map. And a lot of it isn't even HIPAA compliant, meaning it's not secure. And, and a doctor technically is not supposed to be using like Claude and GPT and Gemini and feeding labs through that and using all these different APIs. That's not even legal. And then finally, there, there, there's no way for a doctor to actually take all of that data, be able to feed it through AI to get personalized recommendations for each patient. and simultaneously in a secure manner get that patient the pharmaceuticals that they need, the peptides that they need that are actually above board sold not for human research but for medical use.

Yeah.

So, I realize that's a lot, but long story short is we really busted butt for the past 12 weeks and solved all those problems. So basically, we've developed kind of a B2B2C play where we are handing a clinic Essentially a tool in the form of a website and an app that allows them to, in a completely secure format, keep track of all their patients' blood biomarkers, labs data, run new labs whenever they need to, get peptides, get hormones, get anything else that they need for the client whenever they need to, and be able to use AI if a physician is, you know, just needs help, you know, managing all of this. Custom-built AI based on 20 years of clinical data. And then we've also fed in your fitness, your nutrition, your wearables. It's just like one platform that's a single source of truth for a clinic or a physician. So we have been just like onboarding clinics right and left, like for the past 4 weeks at least, because shockingly this doesn't exist. It doesn't sound super complicated, It's a little complicated, but it's not super— it's not a super complicated tech play. The issue is that nobody's kind of put all the pieces together and/or had access to big enough pharmacies and big enough clinics and physician networks to be able to roll it out successfully. We launched yesterday with around 100,000 patients and a lot of—

Significant scale.

Signing up. We did a very small We raised about $500K, just friends, family, and a few key influencers like I mentioned. And that's just for basically all we need money for is initial marketing. And we had to kind of like scale the engineering team a little bit just to roll this out in a timely manner. And then, yeah, and we're able to do what's called IRB studies through our platform. Can you explain what an IRB study is? Even if somebody is not able to just like go online or get a prescription from their doctor for a certain pharmaceutical or compound, They could enroll in an IRB study, which is basically a research study that allows them to try or use the compound because it's being researched. And, they're just basically, they're a research subject and that's how they're getting access to the compound that they need. So, our first major IRB— I don't even know if I'm supposed to say this on the podcast, but I'll say it and then I'll get in trouble and we can remove it later on. But, our first major IRB rollout that we'll be doing is for ibogaine.

Wow.

Right. Which is for like opioid addiction and alcohol. Like people will be able to, through our platform, get access to that through a doctor as a part of a, as a part of a research study.

And then the business model on this is that you're able to make money on providing the—

Yeah, we can negotiate really good prices because they're at scale from the pharmacies. And then the, it's free for a clinic unless they want to totally skin and white label this.

Right.

Which is a little bit of an extra cost. It's free for the clinic to use it to operate their clinic or their clinics, but then it's a rev split when they get any peptide or anything else from the pharmacy. The physician shares some of the revenue from that. We get some of the revenue from that, and then the patient gets what they need in a safe way by a doctor.

Yeah. That's very important. Okay. So, I want to address like why You know, why we drew such a giant circle here. What I noticed about all of this is you have the first business, which is in the single-digit millions, you know, at a very meaningful scale.

Yeah.

This one is like well into the double-digit millions. Right. And then, or so, so we're a 7-figure business, an 8-figure business. And then when I think about the potential of LiveOS, like that's a 9 figures in revenue. Yeah. Obviously you launched yesterday, so we'll give you a little time to get there, but—

Yeah. So if you look at like, yeah, if you look at like 100,000 patients and let's say average order volume is around $150 to $200 per patient per month, and that's—

That per month part is very important.

Yeah. That will scale pretty quick.

Yeah. So seeing the scale that that can get to is really impressive. Another thing that I'm noticing, particularly about both of these businesses with Kion and LifeOS, is they have recurring revenue, right? Where, you know, you have a lot of products people are buying from Keon are either a one-time purchase that's a consumable. And so like, this is great. I'm buying it again. Or it's true recurring where they're like, great, get me on a monthly or quarterly subscription.

Supplements company. Uh, yeah, you, you want subscription, like that's the direction you need to be going.

Yeah. Absolutely. And then LifeOS is the same thing where, you know, if the, Someone's buying a product that's working for them, they're going to keep buying it over and over again.

Exactly. And then, not that we want to get too into the weeds, but the beauty of that is that AI is constantly adjusting that, right? Because let's say you're on a prescription medication, I don't know, for thyroid, right? But then, your doctor's also running quarterly thyroid panels. Well, there will be a point where our AI, which is named Ellen, might pipe in and say, hey, like, Nate actually does not need to be on this thyroid medication anymore, but his, you know, his vitamin D and his cortisol are a little off this month. So, make sure that you address those, but we can actually stop this particular prescription. So, yeah. So, the SaaS model in medicine is like different. Again, I'm not a doctor. Please don't take this as medical advice, anybody.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's a similar idea. It's still like a SaaS-based model in that, you know, you have X number of clinics and doctors who Generating X amount of revenue per month.

And then in all of these cases, right? So launching Kion, it very much launched from your personal brand, but then scaled well beyond that very deliberately. LifeOS, your personal brand, it's really your relationships that got you into this space.

Yeah, that's relationships. That's either me speaking on stage like I did yesterday to a bunch of doctors, or it's me literally like picking up the phone and calling a clinic, or it's me just having a specific conversation where just we're like, I'm going to be spending the morning with RFK on Tuesday and I'll probably mention it to him. And then he might mention it to somebody and it might wind up being a really good solution that the US government likes, right?

Right.

One of the guys who's running our company right now is in Qatar, and it appears that their medical board like wants to use this to run the medical system in Qatar. So, so yeah, there's a lot of opportunities as far as like where this could be plugged into.

Yeah. I think what I want to point out for creators is, is I think a lot of them might be at $500,000 a month in revenue and they could see, ooh, I see a path to a million. And here we mapped out actually that million could be $6 million. But then as you say, like, and that That's an incredible business, especially the way that you've designed your life around it and all of that. But then showing like, and hey, this can be substantially bigger and the relationships and the reputation that you've built can get you into these opportunities on an entirely different scale. That's something that I think a lot of creators should do is to think bigger and realize the scale of opportunity that they have. I have an essay that I wrote called Billion Dollar Creator, which gets into this of like how to take the attention and the influence that you have and turn it into These massive businesses. But how do you think about it?

If you want to, you know, I mean, like you and I both live in Idaho. We know it's dirt cheap to live here. Like we don't need this amount of revenue. I think some of it comes down to impact. Some of it comes down to, you know, especially for this piece of thing, this piece of the pie. Like when I'm, I have like 2.5 hours per day now of just consumptive activity. And by that, I mean, reading research articles, reading books, preparing for a podcast, listening to a podcast, listening to an audiobook. to turn around and package that information somehow to make people's lives better.

Yep.

Which is just like, that's what gets me out of bed ultimately, not to get super esoteric at the end of the day, is like, how many people can I tell like cool stuff to that makes their lives better? And so, when it comes to businesses like this, I mean, even like Kion, it was like, I like supplements, I take supplements, like, couldn't I find better versions of these and take the stuff that I consume myself every morning and make this available for people. Like, I like peptides. I don't like it when my doctor is confused about what I'm on, or I've got 4 different doctors who have no clue and none of them are talking to each other.

And none of them have access to your profiles.

And none of them are using AI intelligently or less than they could. So, for me, a lot of it is just like, this is the stuff I'm passionate about anyways. And yeah, it does kick off revenue, but I don't think you necessarily have to form other big companies like this that exist outside of you. I think the bigger message for me is if you do figure out a way to do it in such a way that you as a creator who has been trained for everything to be about you and your face and your profile and your video and your audio could create something that exists outside of you long after you're gone, that the goal should be, okay, so how could I keep doing what I'm doing because I want to, not because I have to? When it comes to the personal brand and the creator standpoint.

Ben, you've built this massive business as a creator. I think there's a lot of creators watching who are trying to decide, do I build an empire or do I build a lifestyle business?

Yeah.

What would you say to them?

You could technically do both. So, so the empire piece, we wanna call the empire piece, like all the stuff that's making money while you're asleep that you don't necessarily have to wake up in the morning and pay attention to because you've, you've set up systems and delegated and created a team to run a lot of this. If we're talking about the empire in those terms, I think the biggest key is when you're thinking about creating something like that, that you make it, as we've talked a little bit about before already, not dependent on you. Like set the ego aside. Doesn't have to have like your face, your name, your brand. You don't even have to like create a workflow such that you like, you're expected to be on like the weekly meetings and a part of all the Zoom calls. Try to, from the get-go, create a business that besides maybe a little bit of initial marketing from you is not dependent on your name, your face, your brand, et cetera, that would allow you to, based on the revenue that it kicks off, make getting up out of bed in the morning to do your own personal videos and podcasts and everything either optional or not a huge rush Necessity. So, I love my life. I typically do not, besides just checking in to make sure there's no fires to put out on Asana or Slack or whatever, I don't really do much until about 10:00 or 10:30 a.m. And, up until that point, I'm with my family, I'm outside, I'm working out, I'm hanging out with my wife, I'm making a really complex super tasty smoothie. I have, I, you know, I ease myself in in the morning. I work like a horse with blinders, like deep work from like 10:30 until 2:00 PM. Take an awesome nap every day, every afternoon, because nobody's allowed to touch my schedule in the afternoons.

Right.

I catch up on phone calls and stuff between like 4:30 and 6:00. If it's a busy day, I work till like 6:45. If it's not a busy day, like pickleball, ping pong, Bocce ball, cornhole, like all the yard games come out with the kids around then. 7:00 PM, it's like father-son book club and family music and family games. And like from like 8:45 to 9:00, well, I eat dessert every night, which is usually yogurt and dark chocolate and berries. I eat dessert while I look at my email inbox just to make sure there's like nothing crazy coming up the next morning. And then by like 9:10, 9:15, we're like gathering in mom and dad's bedroom for our evening routine where we're all just like hanging out and talking about the next day and praying together and being a family. So I'm consistent. Like that's like 6 days a week and then I take a Sabbath day Sunday, which is pretty much off besides just like calling friends or whatever. But yeah, I feel like you could be a creator and as long as you're consistent and in it for the long haul, And not looking to like, you know, become famous overnight, you know, because I've been doing this for like 18 years, even before that, then yeah, it's totally doable.

So what you're saying is if you're trying to decide between a lifestyle business and an empire, it's a false dichotomy. You don't actually have to choose, but you do have to be very intentional.

You do need to be intentional. Yeah. And like, you still have to work hard. And you know, I say all that, but like, if I'm writing a book, I won't lie, there's usually like Boundless, right? It's like 700 pages. It's like the Bible of biohacking. There's typically like 6 months going into finishing a book where I'm setting my alarm like an hour and a half earlier. Like book launch phase, I'm up at like 4:00 to 5:30 AM. It's just cleared for the book and I have an hour and a half less on sleep for those 6 months. Like there's sprints, like there's sprint phases for sure.

I'm in one of those right now.

As a rule, like every day shouldn't be like that. And I think too many entrepreneurs are just like, hey, I'm like, whatever. Yeah. Modafinil during the day, Valium at night. Let's go, let's push.

And yeah, you just Ben, this has been fantastic to see. One, it's a huge gift for the breakdown of how the business works, all of that. Thank you for sharing all the numbers. Yeah.

This is super fun. By the way, I don't get to talk about this stuff very much at all, so this is super fun. Usually people ask me how to do a coffee enema or whatever.

Where should people go if they want to follow the rest of your content and listen to the podcast, dive into your whole world?

Probably bengreenfieldlife.com. That's kind of like the central hub. Yeah, you can pretty much find anything from there. Yeah.

That sounds good.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for coming on.

Sign up for my newsletter, which is not on the kit yet.

We can fix that. Well, we got to sign off now because I promised you that we would play pickleball. Let's go have a backyard barbecue.

Yeah. Talk about lifestyle. Sounds good. All right.

Thanks for coming on.

Thanks, man.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.