Unlocking Brand Success with Data Insights

Good afternoon. Happy Thursday. We're running a Thursday happy hour with Drink Up with my friend Michael Gallif. Is that Is that the right name, Michael?

Close enough. Gaeliff.

Yeah. Gaeliff, Gaeliff, close enough. And then he's with 3G Group. I think that's what they call— we were talking about the other word.

5G.

5G. Sorry, I missed it by 2. But 5G Group, I apologize. I'm already blowing it. And Adam, welcome back to Drink Up as the co-host. Being that you're in the center of the screen, you get to run point today, Adam. The whole bit. But, uh, anyway, uh, so Michael, I can't remember how we found each other, but it's been a while since we've talked.

Yeah, I'm trying to remember. It was like right around just after Christmas time when we met, uh, Marshall.

Marshall Liebowitz. So Marshall, he's quite the connector. We've had Andy Poe on.

Sure, I know. I've known Andy for a long time.

Right. I just, I just had Tam, Tam Annie. Tam, Tam Annie. Yeah. She's an attorney, intellectual property attorney. She was just on last week. I really enjoyed talking to her. And obviously, uh, just talked to Marshall. I think it was just yesterday. We had about an hour conversation. So are you part of his group?

Yeah, but Marshall, his gift is he's a connector, definitely a connector. You know, there's some people have that gift. I think when you met and I met, we were kind of connecting each other with so many things. It becomes pretty small industry through the beverage and CPG.

100%. And so we're so happy to connect with you. So, Adam, you've been out a little bit. Before we get into, uh, where you been, Adam? Welcome back. And then I'm gonna let you take the helm and introduce, uh, Michael here.

Yeah, no, absolutely. God, where have I been? Um, last week it was— oh, so, um, some of you will know this, uh, my wife is in grad school to become a therapist and she's working, uh, part-time. She may be coming home while I'm on this, so if I mute for an extended period, that's why, because the dogs are lighting off. But the clinic that she works at did a walk on Saturday morning as a fundraiser for the clinic. And so, we were doing that. That's what I was doing this past weekend.

That's awesome.

Yeah, it was super fun. Her family surprised us with a visit. It was really cool. But, as always, good to be back. Planning on being around this Saturday. So, yeah, I mean, Michael, I guess to start us off, my first question is you mentioned before we went live that you had started hundreds of brands over the years or been involved with the start of hundreds of brands that kind of led you to data.

Right.

And, I think I'd be interested to hear, you know, a little bit more of what that, you know, broken, broken, you know, God bless the broken road kind of looked like.

How my journey started or how it's ending right now.

Exactly. Yeah.

So hopefully it's not over yet.

No, I don't think so. But I think the thing is, is that I, I didn't realize actually we go through interesting journeys and I didn't really realize I've always been a, I started as a brand manager for Dole, Dole Foods, and then ConAgra and Set my life around kind of just, you know, marketing and sales and large CPG. But where it started to kind of, you know, I guess started to take a change, while I always was a brand manager or CMO, I always was data-centric. I was the heavier user of Nielsen, the heavier user of household panel data. And what that really does is storytelling. There's really 2 pieces of storytelling, right? That everybody's, the stake of doing business is that I have a good product, it tastes good, and then that's That's just the, that's one table stake. The next is, so what makes you different? And again, that's more brand-centric. But the other thing that can really make you different is your data and your data story and how you talk about household penetration and different pieces. You don't have to be the largest brand in the block to start telling your story. And there's 2 things to that. And I got a little bit off track, but when you're in front of a buyer or so is that If you know the category just as well, or you're giving them insights to what's happening in their category, they kind of think this person, all right, everybody's got a brand, but they know their category, they know my business, and then they can give me a little bit more intel. And it's just those kind of, I call them, you know, favors when you go into, you know, a pitch that you're providing for them. So, but really the data started to tell stories And where my first really large experience was doing that was I was CMO for Emergen-C, which is a little vitamin packet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Emergen-Def.

Yeah. And we, early on, we started to, one is that we started to know who we were, but a little bit of soundbite to that data is when I came into the organization as a CMO, we were white lab coats. I mean, we were a vitamin C brand. You know, and then when we went and we really talked to our consumer, it's like we were cool, we were hip, we were, you know, with snowboarders, we were just everything that vitamin C brand wasn't. So at that point in time, we utilized our data source, which was our users. And at the time, you know, 10, 15 years ago, we would do a survey with our Facebook and Instagram users. So you can do a What they call an attitude and usage study. And as I say this day, you never know your consumer well enough. So we came out with soundbites that even if you're doing social media, even if you're doing, you know, TikTok or whatnot, is that now you understand what is bringing your consumer, your heavy user to the brand. Went off a little track and started to kind of— what?

No, that's fine. This is how we roll on Drink Up. You know, it's just like having coffee with friends, quite frankly. Let's see, let's get back to your company. So, you know, ConAgra, Dole, you were a CMO. Why did you— so you founded 5G, right? 5G, right?

Correct.

Not 3G, 5G.

3G was an old system. But anyway, but why 5G?

What is it that your services are?

So I had 3 tours of duty with private equity. I was hired, I was kind of— normally private equity, just for lack of a better term, they normally hire 3 3 guns. You've got a CEO, some sales executive, and some marketing executive. If you want to call them VPs or C-suite or whatnot, that's usually what happens. And so I was, after, well, one step back is I worked with Roll International, which was Palm Wonderful, Fiji Water, and others, and I had launched those. So that kind of got me into this private equity groups. You know, I helped raise Emergen-C and then went on to another brand called Garden, Gardene. and then another called Rainbow Light. But each had the same problem as, as we were scaling, we just couldn't afford the type of talent that we wanted. And early on in my days of Emergenc-E, it's like, well, I would love to form something that can help emerging brands and growing brands grow at a fraction of the cost. And so we started in more of a sales organization. I call it add water and you can have an instant sales team. I've had so many experiences from you know, raising, you know, probably 25 brands and 150 products that we're like doctors and we can kind of analyze your problem pretty quickly and get you going pretty quickly. And we act as your advocate and your partner in sales. So now my pivot has been sales is great, but now data is king. And so about a year ago, we started to do a lot more data, data analytics in terms of visualization at kind of a C-level. And what I mean by that is that Data is only data unless you can visualize it in a way that a 3rd grader can understand it.

It's just funny. I was, we have an app called Pinata. So we require all our brokers to use this app to communicate with us. Right. So I took the data and I dumped it into an Excel document and I started to create a pivot table. And I'm like, there's just nothing there in the data. It's as good as what you put into it, what spits out. So I'm like talking to Pinata. I'm like, maybe I'm going to the wrong data source. And I did. I used the wrong data source, which you can often do that, I guess, but So kind of, so you offer companies the, um, taking that data, turning it into action to do something with it. So if I'm gonna go, I'm going to Walmart like next week, right? Like you could help me prepare for my call to go to Walmart, I'm assuming, with my brands or not? Absolutely.

It depends on what depth though.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, I asked you a question earlier, um, and chime in, um, Adam, is because this is top of mind. I literally was talking to a distributor today, which will remain nameless. And I have 2 hot brands, one called Even here and another one called Remix. Like these are 2 of the hottest NAs right now in the marketplace. This is like going into Sprouts nationwide. It's the number 2 brand on Amazon. This brand supports golf. Anyway, the distributor turned me down, said no. Right. Sorry, Derek, if you're listening to this right now, we'll find another opportunity. But this particular distributor, we'll find another one. But what's interesting, I guess my data points weren't, you know, good enough for them to make a decision.

What were you using?

I was talking about velocity. For instance, even in Colorado, the latest numbers coming out, they do 2 cases a week per store per week. The reorder rate's at 100%. So it went from 87% to 100% in a matter of 60 days. And then a golf course is averaging 5 cases a week. And I was at Walmart like 3 weeks ago. I'm going to be there next week.

Right.

And the, the average expected dollar per store is $38 a week.

And if I'm selling 2, so that's about 4 or 5 units in kind of general, right? In that category.

Right. But the distributor didn't seem to resonate with them for some reason. And I don't know what's going on. I think maybe it's the category. Do you get into category stuff too?

Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, you have to get into categories because you want to know what those hurdle rates are, right? So, you know, one of my favorite metrics is productivity, meaning, you know, I could have a brand, well, You know, I'll make a gross example, but you have one item that sells at $100 and another item that sells 3 at $5. What would you rather have? You know, yes, my item's gonna sell less. Depends, now you get into household penetration and how many—

Yeah.

Somebody's coming into the store and all that. But, but in a relative example, I can, there's a beverage brand that I'm working with in the kind of better for you protein segment. You know, they all relatively have 4 and 5 units per store per week, but they're doing about $5 per unit more than their kind of peer competition. So every time, you know, every time somebody's coming to the store, they're gaining a $5 increment compared to what their peers are.

So it's kind of dollars in the bank plus movement. If I can sell the $100 item versus 3 or 4 items, maybe I want to sell the $100 item. I don't know.

And if your velocity is pretty good at a $5 rate and very comparable to somebody at a $4 rate, you know, now you can start talking brand value, those kind of things where I, I believe, and a salesperson might want to go in and say, oh, well, I can get it for, you know, soda water is at, you know, $2.99 and we're a brand at, you know, $3.49. I'm just making something up. The first intuition is that, well, I have to be close to that $2.99. Well, not really. Our productivity says that if I kind of I've been time and time again shown against brand A or B or whatnot is that we time and time have gone and had a better productivity, whether it's through Sprouts, Whole Foods, Meijer, you name it. Then you can start to have—

Can we step back on productivity? And maybe Adam may have a question on this. Can you just— what is the math for productivity?

Yeah, I mean, it's—

I don't think the consumer knows.

It's velocity times your price, you know, so you have a productivity.

Okay, got it. So that's what we were talking about, the $100 versus the, units at 4 to 5 bucks.

Yeah.

But yeah, this is because this, this item like here, another example. I'm sorry to show it again. Adam's gonna drive him nuts. You can bring Adam. You can bring Adam's too, by the way, to the table. But I'm picking on him today. He's probably gonna be mad at me after this, after this podcast. But this sells for $24.99 for a 6-pack, right?

Yeah.

So, so, and it's doing really well. And then like this item sells for like $11.99 for a 4-pack, right? So it's less.

Right.

But the productivity on this item might be higher because it's a higher price.

Yeah.

You can sell, you have to sell 2 times the amount of the other one about.

Yeah.

And this, and the other thing is that, so there are some other information, you know, if you're lucky enough to have Numerator or other pieces, you can start. One of my other favorite things to do is let's take the $24.99 product and say, all right, well, I know your consumer. Let's take Wegmans, for example. You know, Wegmans has a higher value consumer or somebody in a higher income bracket. So, you know, not only is this moving productivity, it matches who your consumer is, you know? And so you would start to bring that into the play. You know, some of the other things is go into their 10-K and understand sometimes there's CEO notes that say, oh, well, we're, you know, we're changing gears for Target to, you know, would be a good one. Is that reaching for another type of consumer?

So you would go into the 10-Ks as a public record and basically see what they're talking about.

Interesting.

You guys done that, Adam?

You gotta slow down for me. What the hell is a 10-K?

Okay, is, uh, just a public record of information of that stock. Companies that have a stock have to do fiscal report— well, quarterly reporting and fiscal reporting. So they have a lot of guidelines that they have to say what they're saying, and also that they're, they're, uh, what do you call it, it's a share for their shareholders.

That's interesting. Going to Walmart or like Wegmans or Fresh Market, the accounts— look at your point, if they're publicly traded, go Prepare to call, go look at the 10-K. I never thought of that. That's excellent information.

Yeah. Interesting.

By the way. And in today's environment, how easy it can, you know, how easy you can go look somebody up or look up what the brand is doing or look up what the retailer is doing. It's almost a shame that you're not walking in with, with that information. You know, kind of a—

Michael.

Yeah.

You said something, you said several things, you said something, uh, uh, Right in the first few minutes that said, uh, and I'm, I'm sure I'm butchering it, but, but you can never know too much about your customer. Right.

Consumer. Consumer and customer.

So I, I, uh, I love that. I think it's worth it. It bears repeating, but I'm curious. Uh, so for me, like I, you know, quick, quick preface. I work with folks mostly that are super small. I mean, they've been doing this less than 6 months. Right. So if you had to, right, you know, list out maybe the top 3 or 5 things that, that every, you know, brand should know about who their consumer is, right? So the end consumer, right? So where do you, 'cause to your point, like it's a never-ending list of information that you can manipulate and use and make, make value out of, but where do you start? So like, what's the baseline that you start with or that you recommend starting with?

Yeah. So an early on lesson, and I'm going to butcher his name, but there's about I'd say 5 to 7 years ago, Simon Sinek.

Yeah.

Oh yeah, he writes the, the books like Leaders Eat Last and stuff.

Yeah. Yeah.

He came out with the, you know, Crossing the Chasm. It's an early state, you know, it, Crossing the Chasm has been around for many time, many, um, many years. What Crossing the Chasm means is that you have a core user, early adopter of your brand. They have a certain, and I'm gonna go back just a second because the playing field where, as maybe Sam and I grew up in demographic, The whole thing is psychographic now. I have the same psychographic as my son, who's 26. We both work out. We both kind of hang out at the same thing. So the—

This Adam and I, I work out, Adam.

Yeah. You know, so we're, we're at kind of the same psychographic. There's my, there's not even that much musical difference anymore because it's so at your fingertips. So there's certain soundbites within your, within your brand of why your core user is using you.

Yeah.

And so, and again, so what can you do? You can lead a focus, even if you butcher it, you can lead a focus group with your, like what we're doing now is lead a focus group with your, with your, some of your heavy users. They're all online. You gained them from, uh, um, you know, Instagram and whatnot. So start talking to them. Why'd you get into the brand? What makes us different than the others? Because one of my pet peeves, and yes, we're more about sales with 5G, but one of my pet peeves is that When you look at an Instagram, they, they're just showing their package. They're just showing whatnot. That's kind of brochureware. But if you understood more of what your consumer was thinking about or how they think of you, you can start adding those soundbites into your, you know, your social media, into your date, into your presentations that you're giving to, you know, your retailers. There's just, again, it's really a data point, right?

So do you have a, do you have a use case? Just get into this a little bit because everybody asks. Like, I'm sure when you're trying to get a client, like, okay, Michael, give me your use case. You have a use case where you got those soundbites that someone wants to take on your services?

Yeah.

So the reason you want to use 5G is because— let me give you a use case where I had this problem identified or opportunity I saw, this white space. Maybe give us an example of kind of what you guys do.

So there is a brand— I mean, this is— the use cases happen, but probably the most, you know, I say the word gross, but larger Was we were working with a brand. I'm trying to remember what it was before, but it was called something soda. But the we changed the brand. It was Diabolo French Soda. And so we did. We started. It had this really great following, small follow, you know, small but strong following. We were in stores like Kroger and stuff, or the brand was. It just wasn't moving. So we kind of there was two things that we do is one work on the sales, but also the CEO said, you know. Look, we're kind of just not— our velocities aren't there. We've been stagnant. So we did some focus groups. And what was interesting, he was French-born, and that's the reason why he bought the product. But when we had our focus groups, we didn't realize how much that heritage that people believed in and brought. The negatives was there wasn't a lot of sugar in it. There is only 6 grams of sugar, which isn't a lot in today's world. Well, in any world, it's not that much. But it was the heritage. The soundbite was what we came up with.

Yeah.

was sparkling French lemonade. So we turned it from a soda to a lemonade to sparkling, which, you know, a lot of it, there was some kind of secret sauce in there, but our consumers were telling us they liked the lightness. They really dug into the story of who, you know, this French person who started it was. And then we started the sparkling French lemonade and it really started, it took off from there.

How do you find the data points though? How do you, like, what did you use to discover that from the consumer? Like, where, where does that come from?

Yeah.

So, you know, there's a yes and to that. But, um, is the, the right questions within the moment and having a moderator. My partner's a moderator and he, the good thing about him is he talks a lot. You know, the bad thing is—

So you guys do like focus groups then?

Yeah.

So we will do the focus groups for them at like an almost nothing, you know, to get things started. But the good thing is he, he talks a lot. The bad thing as a partner, he talks a lot, you know, but the thing is when he's with consumers or potential He really teases those things out of them. And he's been in CPG industry for way too long as well. But we're able to tease those soundbites out and then build a positioning of that.

How does that become statistically relevant? Like how many consumers do you need to touch based on what you hear in that soundbite? What is the—

Yeah, it depends on— yeah, I mean, I'm going to say it depends on your budget, right? So, I mean, if you go back to any Steve Jobs thing, you know, consumers don't know what they don't know. So you can go into a, you know, a focus group and you get these soundbites and you can digest them. And I guess I'm, I'm just lucky that I have a small, a good right and left brain that I kind of hear what they're hearing. And I can tease those out in a kind of a more creative process. I can't draw worth poo. I, you know, stick figures, but anyway, so we, we kind of developed that into what are those single things that people are saying? And that's where it came into.

And I have a business opportunity for you, by the way.

Awesome.

So, so, so speaking of that, so I do work with a company called Piñata. Adam knows this. Piñata basically was founded by Josh Wan, who leads Force Brands, and Ian Ferguson runs the, uh, the business, and, uh, Fred Kunda. So if you guys are watching, maybe out there, if you happen to come across— I'm giving you a plug here, but you should definitely talk to them because they work with over 200 tasting agencies across North America.

Interesting.

Hundreds of thousands of consumers every year, and they're actually tasting products like this.

Right.

At the point of purchase, and the soundbites that they're capturing from their data inputs, it's, I mean, from our, you know, RNDC, Gallo, Pernod, Proximo, William Grant, Marc Anthony, so on and so forth.

Right.

I would think that those are some data points you at 5G would be interested in.

For sure.

Like capturing. Yeah, I believe.

Yeah. No, I will get in touch with them.

Yeah, I will make sure that that happens. But my point is, I love, I love data. I think I told you earlier, I know we talked about this earlier, but I literally took a bunch of data because we, we basically have our team track activities in the marketplace.

Right.

But distributors or suppliers want to know, what did you do for me lately? Right. They want to know, how many accounts did you touch?

Sure.

Did you sell me a pod? Did you build me a display? Did you put me in the cold box? Did you sell me a case? Am I on the menu?

Right.

Whatever. So I'm trying to go through this data, but data is only as good as the data you put in. Is that a true statement? Yeah.

I mean, I think there's 2 things is that you were saying you did pivot tables, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Now for the average ADD CEO, a pivot table is, I don't know, I don't think they really like that. So how can you turn that data into something visual that a 3rd grader can pick up? And, you know, not that a CEO is at the 3rd grade level, but They're in some— their mind is in so many different places. If you can tell me the story that I need to in a picture, awesome. And I think—

yeah, so you use like Tableau or Power BI or something?

We use Power BI and then there's these dashboards that we're pushing into. But, you know, I constantly look at what's out there, meaning every time I get sent, you know, oh, there's this data person and I start to look at it and it's like, well, it doesn't meet my standards. It doesn't meet my standards of I have to think too hard to make what this data looks like.

I'm going to put you on the spot. Do you have any data you could share on the screen, like kind of what a dashboard looks like? If you don't, that's okay.

I do and I don't. I would have to get approval for that to—

Ah, okay. But you can, you know, when we go live, we can also put an attachment to or whatever. Love to, because I'm a visual person too. I love the maps that pop up. So literally, The one thing that Pinata does when I go into my data has the heat maps.

Yep.

And I can see, I'm like, I'm like, boy, I'm in Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota. Right. And it's just like really powerful. I can see what's happening. Like I have this team of people that are activating the brand in real time.

Right.

And I can see what's happening. I mean, I'm assuming, I'm assuming like a CEO would love to see that.

Yeah. But the idea there is a CEO just sees it and he gets globally, I'm in 7,000 data points on a macro or micro level. You want that person to say, all right, well, I'm in 7,000 data points or I'm in 2,000 data points. Those data points in my in-stock, my out-of-stock, has somebody not ordered in the last 2 weeks? So now you're, you're visualizing there's 2 pieces to that data, right? There is the PO. That's just the shipments going to that distributor. And then from the distributor, there's their ship-tos. That's kind of where the rubber meets the road.

Interesting. What, what, what is that? What, what is that? What is that? We talked about, does a customer want to know or need to know, or maybe they don't know they need to know it? And then what does a supplier need to know? Or maybe they don't know that they know it.

Okay. So customer, you're talking about a distributor or retailer?

I guess we could start with, let's just start with retailer because they're the true gatekeepers to the consumer.

True. So I think, is it, are we storytelling? Because what, and if you are, if I'm a buyer, I want to know, so What's my category doing? Is it up? Is it down? And then the next kind of, you know, everybody's doing dollars and units, right? I mean, that's kind of the table stakes of getting into data. The next is we talked about productivity, but who's adding more contribution to the category, right? So now contribution is we can go back to your 2 mixes and, you know, I'm sure the one that's $24 a 6 Uh, six-pack?

Six-pack.

Yeah.

Six-pack.

They're probably adding, assuming they're in the same category, is that that is another soundbite that people can use. It's what is my contribution? So if the category's down and you're up, you can say, I'm, I'm contributing over 100% to the category growth because there's a lot of other brands that are dragging it down. I mean, we're going through that right now with a, and I, I'll name the ones that aren't Part of my clients, but there's so Bolthouse and and Naked Juice are the ten thousand pound gorillas in the kind of refrigerated. I if depending on your definition of better for you shakes out there.

Yeah.

So they're the ten thousand pound gorilla. However, they're declining because the consumer is changing, right? The consumer doesn't want more sugar; they want a little more attributes, those kind of things. But there's a ton of brands that are eroding or. You know, so the erosion is coming from— there's 2 things, but what the erosion is coming from other brands. But now some of these other better-for-you brands, higher protein, cleaner ingredient deck, they're contributing to the category much better than anybody else.

Wow. So good. Yeah, I know. So it's funny because I'm learning a lot here and everybody's like paying attention. I'm a brand. I always— I've been like honed in on velocity and reorder. But now you like— now I'm going to talk about contribution. What was the other one we talked about before? Contribution?

Productivity.

Productivity. So there's contribution, productivity, velocity, and reorder rate. And then I hear this thing ACV. What is ACV? Can you explain to me what that is?

Sure. It's called all commodity volume. That's the definition. I think of it as real estate, you know, so it's real estate there. So there's so much real estate in the US of shelf space. I'm just going to take a gross example. Is Walmart, because of its sheer mass, has a higher ACV if you're in there than maybe, I don't know, Meijer. So when you're looking at it as a global level, but when you could be looking at it at the brand level, item brand level, you're looking at Meijer, how much ACV do I have of their availability? You know, just, it's a percent of—

Is that like total space basically?

It's a percent of real estate. That number can get really tricky because a lot of larger brands get into total distribution points, which is ACV times your item level. And so a lot more people look at TDPs, they're called, and your velocity per TDP.

Do you have like a spreadsheet you could share?

I could actually post it. I can. Do you, do you have notes and stuff that go to people after this or whatever?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to post it. I'd love to put that in. Like, here's like, you know, velocity, contribution, ACV, reorder, those things that you need to know, because this is really valuable information. I don't think people think about it. You said it earlier, like People don't know what they really need to know.

Right.

Right. And then how I've approached ACV is, am I doing this right? And I don't know if I am, so I'm just gonna throw it out there.

Yeah.

I always like, we'll take like a benchmark brand. Like, hey, like I ask, I ask the brand, like, who do you wanna be? Who are you benchmarking against? So, uh, I wanna be like Tito's. I'm like, okay, well, Tito's is like, they're like 100% of Walmart.

Right.

Okay. They're, they're everywhere. Everywhere Walmart can sell liquor, Tito's is there. I guarantee it.

Yeah, right. 100%.

All right. But I'm a brand called Fix Vodka and I just want to be like Tito's. You're only in 2 of the Walmart stores, right? But at those 2 stores, your velocity of that item is like 2 cases versus Tito's is only 1.

Right.

Right. Now, the math would be— so I could actually take that 2 cases. If I was in every store, I would be outselling Tito's Walmart. Is that how it works? Correctly. Yep.

100%. There you go. And that's where challenger brands come in, right? We all are, you know, we all know rah rah for the challenger brand, right? That's who we all are. So a challenger brand doesn't have that ACV yet, doesn't have all those pieces. But, you know, you don't want to be everywhere to everybody for everything, meaning stay local, live local, and build out from there. It might be a little bit slower, but you can—

So stay local, be local, and build out from there.

Yeah. Um, when we take on brands, you know, you've got big, you know, everybody wants to be all over the country, but there's so much, there's so many tailwinds that hurt you in that. You're, you don't have the cash and that's okay. You know, so you don't have the finances that everybody else does. So how am I gonna grow profitably? It's gonna be slower, but I have to build a minimal viable product first before anybody's gonna believe me.

Yeah.

So before I go on, I love MVP, man.

That's, it's funny you said that. So you're saying, have you be local, stay local and build out from there? Is that what you said? Yeah. Right. And that's how you build your MVP?

Correct.

Correct.

Minimal viable product. It's actually, it came from, I think—

Phones, cell phones, right? Like cell phones, like, like this is the MVP, right? It constantly is improving, right?

Yeah.

Like they're kind of, but there's a, it's a, I think it came from more tech. Fail fast, build a minimal viable product.

Okay.

So, I mean, if I'm a, if I'm a large brand, I want to fail fast or grow fast, right? You know, if I'm a large brand, but let's just get into the minimal, because the big mistake is that I'm trying to grow too fast. I'm trying to be in too much distribution. So what happens to you? Well, there's the little hidden truths about distributors and distribution is that it costs money to expand and people don't see that. And again, that's one of the other things that we help guide early stage brands in because of the expense. It costs me more to go to the next level. It costs me more, especially in beverage. You're moving heavy product. One more ship point, maybe. I don't know.

Well, I talked about a brand I'm going to rename Nameless, you know, the brand, and that literally was in 38 states across BevMo and Total Wine and More and had like 10 distributors lined up. And the distributors would show up saying, I need my order. Like, well, we got one flavor ready, but you can come back in 4 weeks to get the next flavors. And then it was direct to Total Wine and More. And they're like, well, we're not available until like 6 weeks. Well, guess what happened?

Yeah, they got disco'd.

They got, they got disco'd. And it was a very good brand and very good distribution early on in the beer category. And I feel really bad and awful for them, but they didn't invest money. So I love what you say that, you know, um, start small, go small, you know, build out from there. And then because you give them protection, I talked to so many founders, Alicia and I. Hello, Alicia, if you're out there, and blessings to you today. My heart goes out to you and your family. I, I'm sorry, I just, I lost myself here a little bit. But anyway, um, I love it when a founder says, I wanna go just focus on Minnesota. Like I had a founder actually, it's a little champagne, uh, that we're bringing on. And Alicia goes, well, you know, we got people in New York, we can go to Jersey. He goes, nope, I'm gonna focus on Florida this year and I'm gonna focus on Miami.

Right.

He goes, and I'm gonna build from there. And it's a very successful entrepreneur. He has like several books, he has a game show, the whole bit. So he knows what he's doing. But I've really respected that because, I mean, there's, there's only so much money because production— I wish Adam was here. He had storms, by the way, to let you know. So storms hit. There's some storms coming into Minneapolis. But yeah, I think you can run outta money really quick operationally if you don't, if you can't produce it and you can't fill that order. Like what's the expected fulfillment rate for like customers out there in the marketplace?

You know, you've gotta fill it a, a 90% or above. Yeah, I, I think you do. You know, and what's interesting about that, and we're, you know, kind of a side note to data is that You might be filling a KEHE or a UNFI or a McLane at 100%, but they might not be doing their job to whoever you're expecting to ship to. They've gotten a lot better, but, um, I don't know. KEHE is notorious for not filling, you know, having their fill rates to their customers.

Does your data track that?

Do you track like, yeah, that's kind of one of our, you know, I like to say there's Monday morning quarterback meetings that you have with yourself, you know. One of those as a salesperson was my fill rate. So if I can have that from each distributor on my lap on a Monday morning, I can go scream at whoever I want if it's, you know, it's failing, you know.

Well, it's funny, one of the brands that we represent, they're going to go into 500 Sprouts. And I think Sprouts is either serviced by Kehe or either—

They're serviced by Kehe.

They are. So it's interesting. And it's a 90-day kind of deal, right? So it's like the innovation program, I guess they call it.

It's their Forged program. I think.

What's it called?

Forger program? Yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

So it's interesting. I have to connect you up with Dave Martin as well. He's like an expert in that space. A lot of people we can— I'm so glad we're back together. I think we need to talk more actually, because I'm a data guy. I think we've done ourselves a disservice, Michael, for waiting so long to get back together, quite frankly. But, uh, but it's interesting. They're all excited. We're gonna do 100,000 cans, right? But first of all, Kehe doesn't fill that order and that those 90 days, they have a lot at stake.

Well, and there's an interesting, you know, I think so being in Kehe National, or sorry, not Kehe National, Sprouts nationally is a blessing and a curse, right? The blessing is that you're going to drive sales. The curse is at what cost, right? So, you know, you got to start somewhere. I totally know that, but have your eyes wide open, right? Especially a beverage brand. I'm starting to move, I'm starting to move heavy product to, you know, 6 to 7 different DCs. There's a high To that, right?

I hope one, one of my, um, my owners, 'cause I have 2 different brands, all remain nameless, but one is actually starting local and they're doing direct to retail 'cause we're trying to find a distributor. So we're trying to build that velocity story, the reorder rate, right? The contribution and productivity, getting better at this. And then also to tell the ACV story, right? Definitely. If you can make a cheat sheet, would be really good.

Sure.

All these founders. But what's interesting about the one brand is they're going local. They really are. They started in Colorado, they built the story out, and then the other brand got in with like Ally Libations. They got into the Innovation Program. They're going to KeHE.

Right.

And what do you, what do you call the, whatever the program, the Sprouts program is? What's that called again?

Uh, the Forager Program.

Yeah. So Forager Program. So they're going like the opposite way. They're going like hitting the big chains, the whole bit.

Right.

And I'm not saying one is worse than the other, but if I was me, I would go the other way. Versus the big one, because you only have one shot of going national.

Right.

And if it doesn't work in an innovation program, you're done, right? At the end of the day, or not.

And no, you, as far as I understand, you might get one and a half shot. So that, that client of yours that was, you know, ran out of product, how many times did you go? How many times did they come and want to, you know, pick up? I don't know if they were picking up or they were delivering.

So what happened was in that particular client, it was a beer. They tried twice and then we got the note, hey, we're discontinuing you. We don't need, we, It just, we're done. And then the distributor's like, because, you know, well, here's a question for you. I did some math, but like, if I'm out of stock in a Walmart and my unit costs like $5, that's like hundreds of thousands of dollars across the footprint. Like, I can't, as a buyer, I'm like, I can't, if you can't fulfill me, I'm losing money. I gotta go. There's, there's 18 people in line waiting for that shelf spot. Either you're gonna be ready, it's go time. You can't fill the order. Then you're not coming in my spot, right?

I mean, and that's another reason why Gee was built is that we're trying to eliminate blind spots, right? We lean in. If we were work, you know, if we were with your clients, like, you know, your POs, you're not delivering those things. What's going on with your, I call it order to cash or your value chain, you know, what's going on there? So, and again, they're, they're kind of data, but it starts to say, so, How are you watching your operations as an early-stage brand?

So do you guys do that? Do you offer that service then to brands?

You know, that's— you get a little bit more than, you know, face value. So we kind of dig into that as well. Although we're your sales or data partner, we're there to hopefully— we want to make you successful.

So do you like create like a— so this is the final few moments. I have a couple of questions I want to ask you, but do you have like a dashboard? Like if I sign up for your service at 5G, Do you give me a dashboard and I run like all my data operations, S&OP, the whole bit?

Those are very different modules, but at the end of the day, yes.

Okay.

And what's kind of interesting about that, there's an end of the day yes, and this is a whole nother can of worms, right? We're trying, we're taking all this data, ingesting it, and using AI language, hopefully that we can get there. So wouldn't it be nice in the morning, and we're close, is that you wake up in the morning, And you say, all right, my brand's up. You can actually type in, what accounts are my brand up in? Done. Can you tell me what products haven't been ordered in the last week and where? Done.

Wow. So you're aggregating, you have like a data lake and stuff and all the data sources going in and then you basically, AI's going in and saying, okay, find me the key insights. It's almost like a ChatGPT that basically put all this data in there and then basically you're feeding it and they can come back and spit out the information.

That sounds very easy. And yes. But you have to teach, you have to teach, you know, you do have to teach it that, that dog new tricks. So it is how to interpret the data, how to read it and what kind of consistency it comes out of. But that's the ultimate goal that we hopefully can give, you know, growing emerging brands. 'Cause I guarantee that there's the Procter& Gambles of the world that are probably have thought about this, getting there, whatnot.

So I, so I gotta ask the money question. Brands are like, I can't afford you, man. I'm a small brand. I have no money. I'm trying to raise money. Like, what is the, what is the cost of Poker to work with you? Is there different packages?

There's different packages and different, you know, kind of the depth, but, you know, we as a, we'll just say as a sales organization, we start about $7,500 for a region, um, which isn't bad. Okay. I say you get 5 people that touch your brand that all have 20 years of experience versus you can go out and get 4 people to do the same work or 3, or you're going to hire a director or VP of sales and that person's you know, $100,000 easy. So that's why I say earlier, better, that we can kind of help you get your stage work. And you're going to have a higher— you're going to want to hire a salesperson anyway. Why don't you?

Well, it's interesting too, because like I managed Nielsen and like Data Essentials and all the different data sources came through Breakthrough and I ultimately paid the bill on behalf of the family. And it was, you know, Over a couple million dollars, what we were paying for those data sources. Yeah. And only a handful of people actually touched those data sources. Drove me nuts. But we had to have it to go call on Kroger and Walmart and Target and build the story or deal with the suppliers that we were trying to date. That's awesome. But let me translate. Sure, go ahead.

But that's, you know, that's a symptom across many organizations, right? You've got all this information, but how do you get people to use it? You know, how do you make it easier? And that's the challenge. We're working with a $200 million client that's got that, that's their sales.

Yeah.

Has that symptom. You know, you would think that somebody at that size has nailed it. Not at all.

So, you know, breakthrough in revenue is, I think, $8 to $10 billion or whatever, you know, can't give you the exact number.

Right.

But, you know, it was relatively large. But most people weren't looking at the data points, which is a shame because if you really break it down, And I would love, again, I would love to get that sheet and share it with everybody. But, you know, really, if I'm gonna go tell the story to the gatekeeper, and I have 2 gatekeepers in my life, a distributor and a customer. So it'd be like Breakthrough Beverage, Walmart, and my wife.

Right.

At the end of the day, ultimately, to get to the consumer, I gotta go through them. I gotta give them a reason to wanna buy. And I think when you talk about velocity, you talk about contribution, productivity, ACV, it's like, okay, if I'm a distributor, I wanna know that when I take it in my warehouse, it's out of there in 30 days.

Right.

And I wanna know if I go get distribution for you as a distributor, that it's gonna be outside that customer in 30 days so that I can actually, you know, deplete it and then ship it to, or ship it, you know, that the customer would actually get the takeaway. Then I would deplete it to the customer. Then as a, just as a supplier, I wanna know that I can ship it.

Right.

You know, to the, to the distributor. So if I could tell the supplier story, I actually have 3 people, the supplier, the distributor, and the customer.

Right.

So what you do is so incredible.

And so I'd love to— Don't discount what that, the other side of it, that what that means for your operations, right? Starting to understand your velocities and things like that. How do you throw that into forecasting and all that other stuff?

Yeah. What about, and I want to go a little longer if you're cool with it, but this term KPIs, like what are KPIs as it relates to data?

So there's a I mean, that's another, that's a whole nother podcast, right?

Yeah, we'll do it. You want to come back? Hopefully I'm going to scare you off.

KPIs are key performance indicators, right?

Yeah.

But what I, you know, there's 2 pieces that I, I think about in KPIs is there's the solid yes-ands, right? There's the, I want 5 velocity. How am I going to get there? What's it going to do? So I could have a 5 KPI, but now we're getting into organizational behavior. Of what does that five KPI mean? So what am I going to have to do? And yes, key performance measure is I want my velocities to be. I mean, a good case in point, and I love the brand is Evergreen that we were work that we worked with in terms of waffle. We started with them at five hundred doors in fifteen months. We got them to you know say almost ten thousand doors.

Wow!

And that's wonderful. We took our nemesis and and how are you going to get From zero. Well, they were actually doing very well in Whole Foods, doing you know ten plus units per store per week, which is a lot for a waffle. But how do you tell that story? And then how are you going to gain that KPI within each store? So if I'm going in, I use Meijer kind of a lot, but it's an easy one. So if I'm going into Meijer, hey, what are my expectation velocity or a KPI? So That's one KPI. Another KPI could be fill rate.

Okay.

Right. So what kind of fill rate do I have to be? Now, I talked about I want to have a 98% fill rate. If I understand what my velocities are and such, what does my operational behavior have to be to get there? What kind of cash do I need to get there? All those other things. So there's a, there's a two sides to every KPI. You know, there's a behavior.

I love that. I look at KPIs from a sales perspective. Sure. That's obviously sales too. But it's funny, I've represented many suppliers over the years and they're like, well, I I got the distributor, they need to take like 200 days of inventory in the back room. I'm like, I got news for you. They want just-in-time.

Right.

They want to, they want, they don't want to keep more than 30 days in the form, some days 15 days, or they want it just gone the day later because the cost to hold inventory is high.

Right.

Right. And, uh, you know, so those are KPIs and the whole bit, but we definitely need to come back on another podcast because we could talk about leading and lagging indicators and really go deep.

Right.

Because obviously, you know, and you talked about, actually, you talked about it. I think you talked about joy. By the way, joy is a term that, like, someone told me, if you walk into the boardroom and you see everybody with frowns on their faces and they're not happy, short sell the stock and get out as quick as possible. So, that's a leading indicator that things aren't going well in that company, everybody. So, I always ask everybody this as we wrap up. So, I'm asking you this question. It's not a difficult one. At least I don't think it is. And then just maybe let you leave with everybody whatever you want to leave with, like maybe 3 or 4 things you want people to leave with. And then I'd love people to find you. So we'll actually put how to get connected. Everybody, I'll put like at the end of the podcast how to get in contact with 5G and their services.

Yeah.

I always ask everybody this that comes on. What is the difference between success and failure?

It's a fine line, really fine line. You know, define it. So success is be able to digest the errors that you have. You know, everybody, anybody who's successful has not had problems. So how do you digest it? And then how do you, how do you make changes in your behavior or your company's behavior to move forward? I think you always have to measure yourself on what level, and again, be able to pivot off of that. The other that I kind of like to live by, John Wooden, I'm way, you know, as I'm way, now I'm dating myself, but there's a—

That's okay, I'm with you.

If you don't do it right now, when will you do it right? So take the time to do it right. And then the other thing is be quick but careful because, you know, there's always, there's always analysis paralysis behind that. But if you're thinking careful enough, but being quick, because what do we say a lot is that, um, you know, perfection is the evil of getting it done. So sometimes it's not perfect, but it's good. And, you know, it gets you to the 80%.

God, I love that. So perfection is the what? Say it again.

Of getting it done.

Yeah, I guess so many people, I did this for years, it took me It took me really out of my 40-year career, 37 of it, to realize that you have to hit go and go do something.

100%.

And I became an entrepreneur 2 years ago, not because I wanted to, because I had to. I didn't have another option. Now, if I could tell my younger self, now that I've jumped off the cliff, so to speak, I would do it all over again. But boy, I was like hanging back. I'm not going, man. I'm happy. I got the 15th and 30th, right?

Yeah.

Because I was trying to be perfect. I was trying to put food on the table, and I thought the 15th and 30th It's a promise. So that's really powerful.

Yeah.

Um, and what you share.

Yeah. And I think the other thing, you know, so kind of on 5G is that, um, I paint a lot. I mean, you and I probably both play a lot of business therapists at the same time, right? Our job is helping be, uh, you know, that business therapist for them too.

I spend a lot of time, you know, and I, and I'll put this out there and I'm sure you'd be the same. Marshall's the exact same way, by the way, you know, just to help people. I can help you. And I'm so glad we're just, we're chatting because I wish we would, we just need to chat more because this is, I think told you that this is— I was a data guy. I was a, I was the first original category captain.

That's right. You told me that. You told me that.

So we should spend a lot more time. I love data. I want to get reengaged with it because I don't think if you're really a brand, you're really coming to market. If you don't invest in someone like your company's services, you're doing yourself a disservice because if you're just doing it by the seat of your pants and not putting some money in, it's just so many people. It's like, you know, Roger B. Lee. I'm sure you know Roger too.

Yeah.

So Roger said something very powerful. Like they have what's called the $7,500 package. I don't know if it's still there, so don't quote me. But I said, what are your costs of service? He goes, hey, to get started, you know, our firm was founded by entrepreneurs. It's a $7,500 package. And I'm like, everybody, that's the best investment you could ever make. And I'd say the same thing for 5G is if you're not, if you don't have data, go invest in like, you know, the 5 people on Mike's team or whatever you have, Mike, if I heard that correctly. Like go to the experts. So they're going to talk about velocity, reward Order rate, you know, contribution, you know, what was it? ACV, those things that you need to know to build this. Yeah, what's that?

TDPs, productivity.

There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It says it's great. I can't wait to have that sheet.

Yeah, I'll let you. Yeah, I'm sure Nielsen's got something on it too, but I'll give you.

I know, it's like, I know we could talk about, was it market development index and brand development or consumer development index, market development index?

Right.

We could get into like that, like which is the whole like all these sheets and stuff.

Fair share analysis. Yeah, it gets crazy.

Oh my God. So what would you want to leave everybody with in the kind of the final moments here that you would want people to take away from what we talked about?

Yeah, you know, that's a good one. I mean, I'm pretty humble. So, you know, I don't like talking about our, you know, myself or whatnot too much, but we're really good at what we do. And we can, you know, I think the difference is that we invest in our, you know, the brands that we work with as if we're shareholders. So, you know, it's really important in kind of that value proposition. Yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know, I would say let's have a conversation. It's a conversation and my information is free for what it's worth when we do have that conversation.

Yeah, I love that. I believe I need to have a conversation with you as well. So thank you so much. I'll put everybody in touch with you. So I can get your, probably put your LinkedIn page if you're cool with that, your connection to your company.

Sure.

And then I would love to find another time for you to come back. Thanks everybody.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks.

Thanks for having me on. Please remain on the line, please, Michael, because we are not completely up A lot of times people leave this and we don't know, but everybody enjoy their Thursday. Um, I have to shout out to my friend Jesse Ott. She does Thirsty Thursdays too. So a little promotion of her. I'll get you on that podcast as well. Maybe she'll invite me back. It's been a while, but, uh, anyway.

Thanks, man. Really fun.