Scott Duffy interviewing Chris Stoikos, Shaping the Beard Culture Business & Burgers: Season 1 Ep.15

I'm Alan Taylor. My buddy Scott Duffy and I are in search of the best burger in America. Each month we visit a new city to try some of the top restaurants, pubs and brewhouses while sitting down for a candid conversation with some of the top entrepreneurs, athletes, entertainers and celebrities. I don't know about you, but I love talking business over a burger. Welcome to business and burgers.

We're in Hollywood. We may be in the entertainment capital of the world, but hidden amongst the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles are a handful of the best burger burger spots in America. Nestled amongst the hundreds of shops, boutiques and restaurants of Sunset Boulevard is Pono Burger, where they like to say they do burgers the right way. Everything at Pono Burger is organic, from grass fed beef to the fresh, never frozen potatoes in the fries. Joining us is Chris Stoikos, serial entrepreneur and founder of the Dollar Beard Club. Chris's path started when he left school to start his own business. And after selling that business at a very young age, he moved to la, where he truly earned the title of serial entrepreneur, starting one business after another. His toolbox alternative, Cool Box, landed him in the shark tank. And his latest, Dollar Beard Club has seen meteoric growth since it launched in 2015.

Boys.

Hey, what's up?

What's going on? Welcome to my hometown burger here. No better place for business and burgers than right here.

You eat a little different than average guy, don't you?

Yeah, man. It all starts with what you're putting into your body on a daily basis. And that's why when you mentioned business and burgers, this needs to be a proper burger. And there is only one burger that I will actually eat at a restaurant on this planet right now. Organic, grass fed, grass, finished, seared, rare, super rare. Whenever you don't cook it too hard, the proteins don't turn into tightly knit pieces of carpet. You can just assimilate them quickly. Look at this guy. Minus the gluten. I'll get to get it on a nice lettuce wrap, get rid of the dairy and we'll just fill it up with some mushrooms, little avocado, little Anaheim chilies, and some truffle sauce. And that is a burger. My friends.

Part of your philosophy really is it's very holistic. It's body, mind, business all wrapped into one.

Yep, definitely, man. That's the way it starts. Because I believe that a company is only as healthy as its unhealthiest employee. Everyone needs to be taking care of themselves on every single level in order to Be productive to the best of their ability every single day. So.

So how do you make that thinking, that thought process a part of your culture?

So we just build it in right from the get go. And it's a cool culture. It feels good. You're always energized. The energy within the office is phenomenal. Everyone's always hyped, vibing on just super high frequencies. And when you're able to do that just. It takes away the work from work. It turns it into pure passion and pure fun. Yeah.

Tell us how you got started, man. I mean, you're a young guy and you have this immense, enormous amount of wisdom for a young man. I mean, you're on a mission, man.

It started a long time ago. Ever since I was a kid, I was just hungry for the truth. I was hungry for knowledge. We used to make crossword puzzles during math class. And I would pay kids around me 25 cents to make them and then I'd resell them for 50 cents at recess. So I had the entrepreneurial spirit from a young age. I got into the lemonade stand, the newspaper route, kind of the whole typical thing. And then I went into opening up an electronic store. I sold that. I flipped a house, drove to California, A buddy opened up a restaurant.

How old were you at this point.

When you came in?

I dropped out of school to open up this electronic shop at 19. I sold the store at 20 and then 44 hours straight to the west coast from Toronto, opened up a restaurant here that did well, ended up selling it and we franchised the location. So now we're just silent partners in it throughout this path. Right. These are all different businesses. Experience is what allows you to grow quickly. People worry about business. How am I going to be so successful so quickly? And it's not something that happens overnight. I don't believe that there are overnight success cases. It comes with time.

Did anything not work?

And I'm curious.

Wait a minute.

He's gonna answer that on the other side. So where's ours? First of all, he called ahead, you.

Know, hey, I had to get the salad in. Before we attack the burger, you always wanna get the greens rolling.

Okay, two more of whatever he's got. What do you got here?

This is a nice little carrot and beet nest shaved on top. We got some arugula, different spring mitts, some baby spinach, some. Some shaved almonds, all tossed in a little bit of olive oil, and then a side of their homemade balsamic on the side.

We hear about all of your successes and it seems like they're back to back to back. And I think there's a lot of people out there that wonder, why aren't I having that kind of success? Or were there any rough spots that you hit along the way? And if there were, how did you overcome those?

Michael Jordan, he's famous for his buzzer beaters, right? Yeah. No one realizes how many of those he missed way more than the ones that he made. So failures will happen. A failure is only considered a mistake if you don't learn from it. If you learn from it, then it's a lesson. And as long as you understand that mentality, then you'll fail upwards.

How do you build a great network?

You build a really good network by aligning with other people that can understand your vision. You are a sum of the five people that you hang around most. So you want to be careful who you're surrounding yourself with.

Who is your hero? Who do you look up to?

I have to say that my biggest hero is my dad. He worked his butt off. He was a teacher, had another business on the side. It was always to take care of us and teach us a lot of good lessons about being truthful, being loving, operating from a place of passion. The foundation that he gave me is the foundation at which I operate from today.

That's awesome. So, Chris, what are the three biggest mistakes that you've made and what did you learn from those things?

Mistake number one, not chewing my food. Our stomach doesn't have a set of teeth in it. Our mouth has a set of teeth in it. So when you do the work up here, it digests a lot quicker. We've all gone into a food coma after we eat a big meal and you get tired and you lie down. Doing that on a daily basis literally takes away hours of every single day, which ends up taking away days from your life. Mistake number two, sweating the small stuff. I used to compare prices at gas stations and say, oh, this one's 4 cents less per gallon. That 10 seconds that you spent comparing them could have been spent coming up with a new idea. Mistake number three, not reading consistently. You need to fill yourself with knowledge from books. People put their entire life into a book that takes you six to eight hours to consume. You'll find amazing amounts of stuff that people put in there in terms of their little nuggets that you can pull from and instantly apply to your life. Chew your food. Don't sweat the small stuff. Read your butt off and you'll watch those three things make a huge difference in your business, I can smell beef on rouse, extra rare. Look at that right there. Things still breathing.

What do we have here?

Thank you, Evan. Like I said, organic grass fed, grass finish, locally raised beef cooked super rare so you can absorb it really quickly. You'll take all the protein from it, allow you to put on some clean muscle. We got some organic bacon, also from the same farm, drizzled with truffle sauce, some Anaheim chilies wrapped in lettuce. No need for the bun, omit the cheese. Little bit of cremini, sauteed mushrooms, and nice strips of avocado. And then of course, your burger staples. Little bit of pickles, little bit of tomatoes. Boys, grab this thing. Don't be shy. This is so good. Okay.

While breathing. Two, three.

Oh, my gosh.

This thing is like eating burger tartare. It's so good.

It really is good.

Pono burger, unstoppable. Man, I've been coming here for the last two years.

How do you. How do you be creative?

Everyone is born creative. Think back to when you were a kid. All we did was come up with different ideas, things that we enjoy doing. Society in a lot of ways teaches us not to be creative. We have this divide in our society where it's like, hey, are you left brained or are you right brain? Exactly. And if you're right brained, you're the creative artist. You make music, you make art, you make cool commercials. And if you're left brain, you're by the book. It doesn't need to be that way. There doesn't need to be a divide. When you can remove, like I've talked about, a great book that I read is actually called the Mastery of Self. Talks about removing domestications when you're a child by Don Miguel Ruiz. And when you can remove those, you realize that we all exude creativity.

So when it comes to creating content, I think what a lot of people do is they get so focused on producing everything. So it's perfect. Is it better just to be raw? Or where does, like, production come into this whole process? Creating content.

It's better to be raw. Exactly. Like this burger Scotty. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Too many people are focused on pushing out perfect content. We need to sit on it and then we'll push it out. Just push it. Don't be concerned about it being perfect. Like I said, experience is one of those big things in business. You'll just learn over time. Everyone that I've ever hired to work with me to be on the team, number one, we don't call it hiring. We join each other on a level playing field. We are all friends. We are all business partners. We are all after the same goal. I've only had two jobs in my life. They both lasted a couple of weeks because I didn't like taking orders from a boss. So whenever I'm working with somebody on my team, I don't tell them, hey, go do this. Hey, do you think you can do this for me? Do you think you can put this together? And when you can phrase things in the form of a question, it empowers the person that you're actually asking.

So tell us a little bit about the success of Dollar Beer Club and how you guys went from zero to this explosive growth.

It's been a crazy journey, obviously, especially with Dollar Beard Club. We, we just crossed $14 million in revenue a couple days ago, actually, and we're just over 14 months into the business. That kind of growth right out of the gates. It's been tough being able to stay on that horse and keep chugging forward. It's tough to expand quick people wise because we want to keep. We're all about quality, not quantity. And actually, the team that's run us to get these numbers today, we only have nine of us total, which is very cool. A lot of people find that hard to believe with no venture capital funding.

Nine people and no venture capital.

Yeah. So as we started, we went through a couple problems with our website, especially trying to fix the website, getting the mass amounts of traffic, especially after we teamed up with Dan Bilzerian and trying to fix the website while this kind of traffic is coming. It's like trying to renovate your house while you have a party going on. Right. Not exactly the easiest thing to do, but we managed. We, we stayed up personally. It's been, it's been crazy. It's been life changing for sure.

So, Chris, your whole life is this holistic, very natural thing. I mean, I watch it, I've been around you. But what about technology? I mean, you're also extremely into technology and it's all around you.

Always man phone on me at all times when I'm on the go, when I'm doing business, you have to be able to check it. And then the other thing is, don't be a slave to your device. Yes. When you're out, you want to keep it on you at all times when you're conducting business and whatnot. But try and put your phone away. Try and put it away right now for 10 minutes. Right. Like put it away and see how that feels. Watch how many times your brain says, check your phone, check your phone, check your phone. Whose social media. How many likes? Did anyone share something on Facebook? I wonder if there's an email. Who just text me, who's gonna call me? If you're being run by that Matrix style program that is just do it, do it, do it. It's very tough to be natural. I find it a lot more organic when you can give yourself a solid eight hours a day, even if that's when you know, definitely don't sleep with your phone in your bedroom, Turn the thing on airplane mode or put it in another room. But give yourself a block of time every day where you can be away from your phone. It'll allow you to be a lot more natural. Just like a beard. Natural.

You know, you're actually kind of making me want to grow a beard.

So I got like the Clean Dome. Why should I grow a beard?

First off, one of my favorite looks in the game is a shaved dome with a heavy beard. That's savage status. It's more than just grow out your beard to join the revolution and put some oil in it. When you grow out your beard, you're able to find out who you're really supposed to become. Your beard is trying to come out of your face. You don't have to do anything to have a beard. You have to do something to not have a beard. And what if society didn't tell you to shave? Would you be taking a sharp piece of metal on a daily basis and. And rubbing it against your skin to create razor bumps and rash? And wasting 15 minutes in the mirror? Fifteen minutes, five days a week. Like I was saying before, that's a lot of extra hours you're gonna get back at the end of the year. You can meditate a lot in that time, you can learn a new language. You're gonna save a lot of water. But more than anything, you're gonna find out who you are meant to become as a man. It lets your masculinity fly. It lets you be natural. It doesn't let you care about all the other people beside you. You don't look around you and say, hell, that person doesn't have a beard. Oh, this person. Tell me I'm looking too out of control. No, I'm operating from a natural standpoint. And when you can do that, you can find what you're truly passionate about. And when I decided to start growing my beard, I said that I didn't care what anyone else thought. I was in a place where I wanted to better my health. I wanted to become whole as a person within my heart. And I wanted to get out of the debt that I was in. And I said, I'm not shaving my beard until I fix all three of those things. Couple years later, I fixed all of them. And my beard's not going anywhere because it's become a part of my identity. And if you haven't grown one out, give yourself a shot. How are you going to know if you like it if you haven't? Genuinely give it a try. And I'm not talking about grow it out for a week or two weeks or even a month. Grow it out for six months. Get three inches of hair on your face. Don't complain about the itchy phase. We have cream for that. But aside from that, you're going to start seeing yourself grow into a completely new perfect. You're going to attract a different set of people. You're going to carry yourself in a different way, and it's going to be a different path because there are always two paths we can go down. But when you choose the one less traveled, you'll find out that your future switches itself in a beautiful way that you couldn't imagine. Awesome.

You're awesome.

Good to see you, Chris.

Great to see you too, boys.

Chris's unique approach to business left us with a lot to chew on. Here's some food for thought. A company is only as healthy as its unhealthiest employee. Take care of yourself. Experience allows for quick growth. There are no overnight success cases. Success comes with time. A failure is only a mistake if you don't learn from it.

Next week, Scott and I return to Pono Burger in Hollywood, California to chat with Aaron Scott Young. Aaron is an author, speaker, and lifelong entrepreneur who has helped thousands of other entrepreneurs start, grow and profit from their business. He has made it his life's work to arm other business owners with success formulas that provide exponential growth. So join us as we discuss business and try another one of Pono's tasty burgers next time right here on Business and Burgers.

Check out more episodes of Business and Burgers and our B and B blog at our website, businessandburgers.

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