Episode 107: The Beautiful, the True, and the Good with Ray DelMuro, Refresh Glass

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

So I was picking up wine bottles from restaurants and bars and hotels in the back of my 4Runner, taking them back to my garage, picking up propane and oxygen in the back of that same 4Runner, and they made me sign a release every time that I picked it up. And they had this picture of a blown-up truck that exploded, and they told me that I had to travel with my windows open, you know, so that there was no change in air pressure that could affect these explosive tanks and I had to sign it every time that I went and picked them up. And of course we have it delivered and we have these huge tanks behind our shop now.

Ray Del Muro, founder of Refreshed Glass, is on a mission to rescue 10 million bottles. From his early days driving around his 4Runner collecting wine bottles, to date he's rescued nearly 1.4 million and repurposed them into the beautiful, the true, and the good. Recently featured in Forbes magazine, his glasses have been purchased by Francis Ford Coppola, Wolfgang Puck, Ritz-Carlton, and have even been featured on Anthony Bourdain's show. Many of us have values that are like guides for our business so that things don't go off the rails. But does our mission and do our values shape our business in a way that brings a return to all stakeholders? In today's episode, we visit with Ray about the 3 pillars that his work stands on and how this translates to profit and a profitable and edifying mission. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, the Chief Content Officer at Commscue. We started a new segment called Ask Us Anything on Skucast, and one of the first questions we received was from Bryson Sask, President of Key Innovations. Bryson asks, where have other distributors found success in finding and hiring people? He went on also to ask the question of whether to hire those with industry experience or no experience, and what qualities do you look for in a candidate? Thanks for your question, Bryson. We've seen a shift with distributors who are hiring more and more people with no industry experience. I asked Catherine Graham. She's found success with candidates that have a retail or hospitality background. They're friendly, adaptable, excellent with customers, and they know hard work at a fast pace. She's also found success using indeed.com. If you're looking for folks with experience, there's the PPAI job board. Just Google PPAI industry job board and you'll find it. And there are services like Promo Placement, a recruiting firm that specializes in the industry. As far as qualities and the experience versus no experience challenge, we sum these up in our Path to $10 Million series that we ran. We covered the 8 traits that are essential for any professional in this business, including curiosity, flexibility, Respectful tenacity, interdependence, and more. We discussed the 4 E-myths about hiring for sales: the experience myth, the extrovert myth, the everything myth, and the ego myth. I bring this up only because we have limited space here, and I wanted to give you a few other resources that might answer that question. If you're interested in checking out, there's a link in the show notes at community.commonsque.com. We'll throw this question out to you, the listeners. Where have you found your best employees, and experience or no experience? Share your thoughts with us by emailing me, bobby@commonsque.com, or give us a shout on social @CommonsCue. And if you have a question, send it our way.

We'd love to discuss it.

Two quick reminders. Sessions, the industry's one-day sales conference for distributors who want to ignite their sales growth, will be coming to Los Angeles on May 9th and will be in New York City on May 16th. You can learn more at commonsquesessions.com. And as a reminder, we released the schedule and session details for SKU Camp being held in Pittsburgh September 22nd through 25th. Visit Skucamp.com to check it out. This episode is brought to you by Commonsku, a platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. Begin your free trial now at Commonsku.com. And now to my conversation with Ray Del Muro of Refresh Class.

So Ray, one of the philosophies you've embraced is the good, the true, and the beautiful. Can you tell us what that means to you and how you've learned to translate that and convey that through business?

Absolutely. So the transcendental ideals of Plato was postulated 2,400 years ago. I mean, it was like 1,000 years before people figured out how to put meat and bread together to make a sandwich. I mean, it's old. And so what happened was, is Refresh Glass kind of hit a plateau when we were selling to hospitality and to retail, and I had this opportunity to speak for the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit in 2017, in October of 2017. And this is a group I respect so deeply. So this is a big conference room with couches and 250 or 300 business leaders that do $5 million in revenue or more. Patagonia, Container Store, we're all in the room, Whole Foods, and all these amazing names that I have so much respect for. So I wanted to bring something unique to the table that could help give them a tool that they didn't have before, which is kind of a daunting task considering who was there for that audience.

Sure.

And so I opened up the Conscious Capitalism book, and these two lines really spoke to me. And it was about the transitive— about the beautiful, the true, and the good, and how they've been a part of our lives ever since human beings, you know, have been around, and how they all go together. And so I just did a quick Google search, and I've done a lot of reading about them in general, but what I found is this Wikipedia page. I never thought that like my flux capacitor moment would happen from a Wikipedia page. I thought it would be something like more obscure, like Ken Wilber or Spiral Dynamics or something like esoterically deep and nerdy, right? But here I am on Wikipedia, and what it said is that the transcendental ideals are ontologically one, which is overly complex, but ontology in terms of religion has to do with cause and effect. It's the study of being, right? So it's the chicken and the egg of the Big Bang and creation or God and, and all these deeper questions. But what it really said to me is that, you know, you don't have logic in your life first and then feelings and then purpose. They all go together at the same time. Yeah. And what I realized at that moment was that my life had followed one after the other after the other where I was too much in one category. So when I was an aerospace engineer, I was all about logic and mathematical equations and conversion ratios and eliminating waste. And predictable outcomes. And then when I resigned from aerospace, I went and, you know, I traveled around the world for a year, 21 countries, 39 cities. It was all about feeling something because I enjoy doing photography and to draw. I wanted that feeling component back that I realized that I was missing from my engineering job. And then after my trip around the world and my walkabout, you know, after, you know, a couple scars and beers and great photography and some awesome, you know, people, a lot of Australian new friends, you know, and And then I went and started Refresh Glass. And so I jumped from, you know, engineering to art or feeling, and then I jumped to this altruistic business where I wanted to rescue 10 million bottles and, and help the planet. And what I realized at that point is that I had been over-investing in one dimension systematically to get me to the point to where I can incorporate them all together at the same time. And so now my value proposition for my business has completely changed to incorporate all three. That there's kind of this anti-egoic. And we were talking, you know, briefly in the past about there's a book by Donald Miller called Build a StoryBrand, StoryBrand. And there's another guy named Park Howell here locally who actually taught me about this concept that too many businesses make themselves the hero and make, you know, the clients another part of the story, whereas the most successful businesses actually make your client the hero and you're, you know, the White Wizard or the Gandalf, the Obi-Wan Kenobi equipping people with the tools and the techniques that they need, you know, to use the lightsabers and the Millennium Falcons and the droids to accomplish their dreams.

Yeah.

Stepping back a little bit, when you go from this worldwide journey into beginning this new adventure with your company, tell us about those early days. This is you driving around in a jalopy, literally picking up empty wine bottles.

Yeah. So Here, I'm not going to mince words with the jalopy part because I had this nice 4Runner when I started.

OK, sorry.

You had a nice 4Runner.

No, I completely demolished it. I ended up, after a few years of picking up wine bottles in the back of it, my mom would call me. She's like, hey, babe, you on your runs? And it's like, clank, clank, clank, clank. It's like, how can you tell? She's like, drive safely. And so what I ended up doing was taking it to the shop. The guy, the service writer, asked me, he said, I've never seen wheel bearings blown on the back of a 4Runner and your shocks. What have you been doing? And after I told him, he said, yeah, that makes sense now. So I was picking up wine bottles from restaurants and bars and hotels in the back of my 4Runner, taking them back to my garage, picking up propane and oxygen in the back of that same 4Runner. And they made me sign a release every time that I picked it up. And they had this picture of a blown-up truck. That exploded. And they told me that I had to travel with my windows open, you know, so that there was no change in air pressure that could affect these, uh, explosive tanks. And I had to sign it every time that I went and picked them up. And of course, we have it delivered and we have these huge tanks behind our shop now. So on and so forth. So I was using this torch equipment in my garage— of course, I didn't tell the guy I was renting from at the time— making glasses and selling them at farmers market every weekend for, you know, in my hours, $70 to $80 for Top Ramen and Kool-Aid money, which is the biggest financial hit I've ever taken in my entire life. Going from being an engineer, you know, living a block away from the ocean in Huntington Beach and driving my hot rod around, to picking up wine bottles and selling people's trash back to them in a, like, a more legitimately sourced Fight Club model for wine bottles.

Let me ask you this at this point too. I mean, you're, you're seriously— you go on this, this worldwide adventure and something had transformed inside of you.

This is—

this— you didn't even start this as, like a lot of folks do, as some 'how do I make a lot of money' and then back into an altruistic effort. You started with trying to reconcile the good, the true, and the beautiful, literally.

Here, so let me reframe this. So I didn't know until I had this terminology what I was doing. It's just— it was more of a feeling and a compelling pull in a direction that felt inadequate or missing. So I didn't really learn about the Platonic, you know, transcendental, which I think is overly wordy, so I'm probably going to create a new name for it at some point. You know, Ken Wilber calls it the Big Three. I just got back from Monument Valley for photographing it, you know, on my way home from Vegas. Actually, I think I might have sent you the pictures. If not, I can do that right now.

Beautiful area. Beautiful.

Oh, it's gorgeous. And so they have this on the res, on the Indian Reservation, they have this hotel where you like wake I look up and out of my balcony I can see the Three Sisters. It was amazing.

I know where you're at. Yeah, it was, it was amazing. So by the way, I, I don't know if I told you that I stayed in an Indian mud hut out there.

Yes, I've seen it.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Okay, same question. Go ahead, man.

So I might call it the Three Sisters because the slide on my presentation that I did— we can talk about that later— but that the slide that I put it on yesterday for the Ken Wilber quote saying that these three are indivisible. They can both be used individually and more often seen as a comprehensive whole. I put it on a slide that had a beautiful picture I'd taken of the, the Three Sisters, which are both part of the Monument Valley, because the concept of oneness and ontology, one, non-dual, are all these overly complicated ways of saying that they all go together at the same time without being separate.

Yeah, three cords of a strand.

You know, Einstein says that there are three branches of the same tree, which I think is a beautiful analogy. And the fact that I couldn't find anywhere anyone correlating the beautiful, the good, and the true to that quote, which blows my mind. So it's this thing that's been around for forever that no one's put the stake in the ground on.

Yeah. So let's fast forward a little bit. You start this business out retail. You realize going out to selling one by one is not going to make you a lot of money. You get into the wholesale business selling to the hospitality industry. That's where you find a niche. And then to fast forward even further, you end up in the promotional products business. And I quote, promotional products feels like home to me. What do you mean by that? Can you take us through that part of the journey and where you ended up in the promotional products business and what you mean by feels like home to me?

Absolutely. So there's this beautiful 10-minute video called The Knife Maker, which I implore everyone to check out because it's just 10 minutes, and it explains the journey of this guy named Joel Buckowitz who was a fiction writer, and he couldn't sell his first manuscript, so he just started making things around the house. And I've seen it so many times, I could pretty much quote it. You know, he made oars for his dad and just started making stuff. And he, you know, went to the back shed and started making knives. And the first time he made knives, they were for hunting, and they just ended up in glass cases. And so that malfunctioned for him because they weren't being used. And he ended up being one of the few totally custom handmade kitchen knife makers for chefs, you know, in kitchens, or, you know, in, in chefs in, in restaurants, for them to have that touch of that beautiful handmade quality. And he found this community, and the function was there, which is that, you know, the engineering. So the function is the true, the community is the good, and the altruism and being a part of something bigger than yourself. And he still called it his art, which is the feeling component to it. So a lot of times if I'm explaining this concept to classroom for students or for charity, because I actually think that charities and NGOs can provide more value, more fiscal value and more emotional value. And I can explain that more later if you want. For people that— this is a beautiful example because this guy went through all these trials and tribulations. And I feel like my path has been the same because for restaurants, I was— as much as I love working with Wolfgang Puck and Francis Ford Coppola, there's all these amazing names, Ritz-Carlton, that we've sold glasses to. There's still a commodity aspect. Aspect to it to where they just need to hit their P&L and, and it has to be a certain cost. And there's this big costing conversation of, you know, can you sharpen the pencil or whatnot. And in the promotional products industry, it is so incredibly difficult to gift to people that don't need stuff, right? And so the way I got into this industry and was introduced to it was a friend of mine in EO. You know, he I was having lunch with him and we were talking about the direction I wanted to go. And as he was cleaning the hot wings off his shirt, he calls John Ruhlin, who wrote the book Giftology, and he's like, I got to introduce you to this guy. Go. You know, he kind of hands me the phone type of deal. And so I've been a vendor for, for John Ruhlin, who does, you know, gifting strategies for large corporations for a few years. And that's how I was introduced to, to the concepts and the space.

Okay.

And it feels like home for me specifically because now we can help organizations have their conversations told around these tables of these people who drive 80% of their business or a lot of POs for them with products that have style, function, and purpose, which is my version of the beautiful, the true, and the good in that order. Because style makes you feel something. Function, it has, you know, logical value. And the purpose side is pretty, pretty straightforward in terms of our 10 million bottle rescue mission. And so this is the first market that I've found where we're providing unique value. So many people have problem with that $35 to $60 price point to gift to people, you know. And, and John, to quote John Ruhland specifically, he says that you can't give a fossil watch to someone with a Rolex lifestyle. Yeah. And if you have a $40 budget You know, what are you going to give them? Because everyone that I know has 12 stainless steel water bottles now with someone else's logo on it.

Yeah, what I love too, you touched on this with the purpose-driven side of it, but purpose is woven all throughout the supply chain from the end customer who is trying to drive and purchase this for a purpose. There's, there's a purpose, there's a trigger, there's some kind of ROI they're trying to achieve, as opposed to it purely being a commodity, there's a lot of connections going on with what you're talking about. So not only do you as a supplier, manufacturer, have this purpose-driven business, but everything you're selling to in this industry at least is very purpose-driven.

Absolutely. You can't remove it from the equation. If you have cake, after the cake is made, you can't extract the sugar or the eggs or the flour. It's just part of the cake in terms of it being delicious. And I think that With what I'm finding in the people that truly care about this, about doing good and doing well at the same time, they all believe in long-term horizons and a stakeholder model, which means that it's just— it's more about your shareholders. It's also about providing multifaceted value. And what I'm doing right now is working humbly within my tiny little company to reframe what value looks like, to give people more language around it, about how you can help yourself, the core stakeholders you work with, which traditionally are your, your vendors, your customers, your employees, the managers, shareholders. And then the stakeholders, traditionally people have put as the we category of the different groups that you belong to— customers, vendors. The two places that I have found that stakeholders are lacking, and I literally just did a two-day workshop with Conscious Capitalism implementers, they gave me 20 minutes to present and we also did stakeholder maps. The two areas that are most often left out are very surprising. You know, people will list the environment and the community, which is kind of hard to grasp sometimes without making it more specific, like advocating public policy, you know, mentoring students. There's, you know, being a mentee of someone actually gives that person with all that knowledge a lot of value, more than you understand. But the one thing that was missing the most from those stakeholder maps is the founder.

Really?

Yeah, nobody— only one group out of the seven, I think, put the founder as a stakeholder.

Is that because they were making that as an assumption, or no, they just totally left the founder out as a stakeholder?

Well, you have the shareholders or the investors, and whether you've gotten angel money, you bootstrapped it, you know, VC, or, you know, whatever the scenario is, the problem with that silo, the good silo, the silo of the altruistic mindset, which very much the conscious capitalism mindset is based on core values being that central-centric driven concept. Yeah, is there's this feeling that you have to sacrifice to achieve an overall good, and that's precisely what I'm trying to fight, is that if you bake in all these three aspects to it and you provide that much value for your constituents, then knowing that you've provided all this value to other people, then you can feel more comfortable about taking some for yourself, which I don't think is bad.

Yeah, you obviously— the promotional products industry is a more lucrative business to be in, obviously. I mean, you're talking about moving cases or— I mean, you were in the hospitality industry, so you already kind of knew where the numbers were going and things like that. What have you learned serving this huge hospitality industry versus the promotional products industry? What have been the biggest distinctions, and, and how are you shifting and changing your company to meet those demands?

Well, the hospitality industry is very design-specific for the people that it could afford our glasses So for them, you know, everything right now is coming back to storytelling. Yeah, storytelling in this new framework, because the Heroic Journey is Joseph Campbell. He's the granddaddy of the Heroic Journey. Again, a recommendation, they have The Power of Myth. It's a 6-part series on Netflix right now, which is mind-blowingly awesome because you will never be able to watch a Marvel or a lot of other movies again without seeing this structure of the hero's departure and the mentor comes in, and then you have the trickster, who's that character where you don't know if they're good or you don't know if they're bad.

Yeah.

And you just see this journey of them getting tools and trials and, and whatnot.

But, and by the way, to elaborate on that, so the hero leaves the known world to enter in the unknown world, often a very reluctant hero journey, and it could transform that— transform what's kind of interesting that you keyed on the story like I did, as at least as a service provider and salesperson. Is what I was very liberated when I found out that I was more like Haymitch or Obi-Wan. Yeah, I was the central character of the story, you know.

Absolutely.

But it's more like helping is the new selling, customer experience is the new marketing. It just liberated a part and it fired me up and helped me understand and see the customer's journey and built a lot more purpose into what we were doing. But anyways, I got— wait, don't get me off on this topic.

You started— no way. To answer your question specifically, yeah, any brand— so this is value proposition— any brand wants to differentiate itself from its competitors, and restaurants is super difficult because there's so many of them, right? So to have authentic glasses— and we've been really well published in USA Today, and MSNBC came in and did a video on us, and we were in a few episodes of Anthony Bourdain where they're sitting on the table and he's there at Husk in Charleston with super chef Sean Brock and Bill Murray. You know, they're all drinking out of, out of our water glasses.

Wow.

So the differentiator from a value proposition standpoint is to have a story to tell that shows as a tangible example that they are truly using and walking the talk of sustainability, showing that they care through storytelling.

Right.

And it was worth the additional cost as opposed to us and a clear mass-manufactured glass that is half the cost.

Yeah.

And that's where it— the word value comes in so many times in different aspects. Yeah. It's just that they're used to paying the cost of the clear glass, which is problematic for large-term scaling. Even though I've had people in the hospitality industry try to copy my glass from China, and the freight cost and everything, it ends up being the same cost.

So we still usually win the buy box, but Shifting gears just a little bit, tell us about this waste management project that you recently worked on.

So I jokingly call my business model trash to treasure, and Waste Management luckily has a massive, massive golf tournament called the Waste Management Phoenix Open, the WMPO, here in the town that we're in, which is in, you know, near Phoenix, Arizona. And they've been doing it for many years, and the kind of the, the flag that they fly on it is it's a zero-to-waste event. So they have all this backend logistics and collection points to make sure that 100%— and they actually have third-party verification, which is gnarly, where you have to take pictures and weigh everything and count everything to verify that they're actually doing this. I wanted to be a part of helping to collect their wine bottles because 700,000 people go to this. It's kind of a they call it the People's Open, which is also translated locally to being everyone drinks there and has a great time. Uh, I didn't know what a romper was until I went there, and it's looking at the female onesie, you know, it's just this massive show of people and, and everyone having fun, and, and some people watching golf is kind of how it feels. Okay, anyone who's been there knows what I'm talking about. It's a great time, and they do an amazing job running it, and Being a part of that, since Waste Management is the biggest name and they're the 800-pound gorilla in the waste industry, I wanted to figure out how I could provide value for them and partner with them because of what it does for our brand and the PR, and to set ourselves apart from the very, very few other people doing what we do. So what I did, and I presented on this yesterday, and coincidentally enough, the inside sales manager for the area of Waste Management was in the crowd, and she came up to me afterwards, and I didn't know that she would be there. Is I approached someone that I knew that worked with waste management, and I told them that I wanted to help them by making a 60-second video showing a wine bottle being consumed on site, them collecting it internally on site, my truck picking it up, running it through our process. And on Thursday of that week, they have a sustainability forum where professionals from all these massive organizations meet for a waste management-run conference about sustainability initiatives specifically. So I collected the bottles on Tuesday, we had them transformed by Thursday, which is ungodly fast. What happened was, is I asked them if us as a local company could be an example of a collaboration where we show a closed-loop process of what they're doing to make the big statistics of 18 tons of glass recycled or reclaimed tangible to help their stakeholders, which is the larger audience of the world, their employees internally, the management, the shareholders, and everyone be able to see a real-world example visually. And I knew that I'd be talking to the PR person, and visual and TV is— B-roll is so important to have action and to make it visual.

Yeah.

And it took me 4 steps to get to the decision maker, which was the head PR person ultimately. So I had to, you know, First meeting was with the recycling manager. The second meeting was with the recycling manager for the area. Third one was an email sent to the guy who runs the whole event. 700,000 people and millions of dollars goes to charity through the Thunderbirds. And the last one was the head of PR who came to my shop. And her comment to me was, she said, I have no idea how you actually got to me, but I love your idea and we want to do this. So I ended up having all these glasses and I did this deal for them for free. As a trade for the, the recognition and all the TV and press that we got, in addition to the branding collaboration of being aligned with the number one waste company in the world, basically, and their initiatives to— now they're starting to reframe their messages being not the company Waste Management, but the process of waste management. Yeah. And all of the opportunities that can come from it are kind of galactic for me and my process to bring more responsibly sourced raw materials turned into promotional products that I can engrave, sublimate, or UV print on. Yeah, it's a big play and it totally worked. And I was very hyper-focused that week, which coincidentally was pretty much the week right after Vegas. So we had 3 deliverables. We delivered to them, we delivered to a private meeting that the CEO had with 50 VIPs or who knows who they were. And then I gave a bunch of engraved glasses to the head of PR for her to hand out to whoever.

How many bottles have you rescued?

Right now we're around 1.4 million.

So now obviously you have a bigger truck to pick up these bottles.

We do. We do.

Yeah.

Since you've been doing this, Ray, for a while, how can we position more purpose-driven promotions, sustainable promotions to our customers and with our customers? I think we all get it and know it, but this stuff you live and breathe and it's a part of a way of life for you. What recommendation would you have for those of us that are trying to embrace this, see it, recognize it as a resource that can make a difference and a change in our clients and in their buying habits?

It's something that needs to happen. So in the promotional products industry, and I'm going to attack the beautiful, the true, and the good to help people understand it. So when I usually do public speaking, I usually ask people to take out their wallet, their keys, and their cell phone. And put them on their lap. And I tell them, this isn't like Pulp Fiction and it's not a robbery. And I hope there's no Samuel Jacksons in the crowd, dude, they're messing me up, you know. But what I do is I said, think about your wallet as the true— wallet is emotion, it's about things that can be counted. Your keys, like key to your heart or your feelings. And the cell phone is your connection with the outside world, even outside of the people that you know. And then we start problem solving in terms of their value proposition or their culture or their scorecard. And those are the three that I like to talk about the most: value proposition, culture, and scorecard. So what I think about the promotional products industry is a lot of people order by price. They also want products that their clients will keep and use for a long time and something that's new. So The way I think about it, and I'm going to go back to Park Howell, who's the person, and he has worksheets you can buy for $50 about StoryBrand and making your client the hero and how to incrementally go through it, which I bought them and they're helpful just to start the thought process. So what I think about the promotional products industry is that you're not actually buying for your client, you're buying for your client's recipients' inside circle. So what I mean by that is I design my packaging, I design the wrapping, the handwritten note, the presentation, the water-soluble peanuts, how we handwrite notes, how we phrase things that are written on the box around making the inside circle of the VIPs who are being gifted to feel special.

Yeah.

And feeling special means that I provide style, function, and purpose to the family. So one of my mentors in the past, he owns a hospital, he has a Tesla or two. I don't know, the guy doesn't need cash, right? He does Dan Sullivan. He knows all these amazing, amazing people. He's very high functioning, and he loves giving me a hard time. And I love shooting back and just the banter in general. He's a great dude and very supportive of my project and what we have going on. He always tells other people when I'm around that I make him look good in front of his wife because the glasses that I made for him, she brings them out every time friends come over and they have this beautiful home, as you can imagine. Yeah, with a pool and, and whatever else. And she shows them to all her friends and tells the story of Refresh Glass and our 10 million bottle rescue mission and how Dave mentored the guy that owns this company and how we're growing. And he said, I don't have to do anything. I sit back and I shut up and smile. He's like, it's amazing. I don't have to do shit. He's like, you make me look good. So it's a funny story to tell about how client gifters want their clients to feel. So if, if you're the distributor, someone else was the supplier, you're buying a gift for me to give to Dave because Dave is so important in my world. Yeah, the goal is to get my story told more often as the gifter.

I would often talk with distributors about the who, what, when, where, why, and how, and how that's basic 101. But then what you just summed up in a quick story encapsulated what I've been suggesting for a long time now, and that is what emotion do we want to evoke with this transaction? Because that's huge to me, it's everything. And that's what you've encapsulated in the packaging and all around that experience. We have a diverse audience of both suppliers and distributors of all types, of all sizes, of all success stories, of all ranges. What would you tell young Ray? I mean, you're about to be published in an article in Forbes magazine. You've had this great press. You're building this fantastic organization. It is very mission-minded. What would you tell young Ray who's day one out there driving around in his car about to go pick up some empty wine bottles?

What I would tell Ray post-trip starting Refresh Glass, driving around in my 4Runner, is that my 10 million bottle rescue mission was still about me, and that I was too much in that silo after having gone through the function and the true of the engineering and the subhedonism of my trip. And I had a great time, don't get me wrong. I do it. Absolutely, I do it again. And so what I think specifically is there's a couple things going on here. So The beautiful, the true, and the good, I would tell me that I need to reframe my value proposition in my stakeholder map with all three and to go one step further. And this is what I would highly recommend in terms of something applicable for anyone that could be listening if you think it makes sense to you. And really, if you take the wallet keys and cell phone trick, and you don't even have to be this overt, it's just a very tactical way. To remember these ideals, because what I try to teach— and I love talking to students, and because the students are like me, they're too far in the good right now where they want to give it all away. And the more profit and money you have to do good, the more good you're going to do. Yeah, but specifically, if you talk to your key stakeholders— so pick 5 clients, pick 5 vendors, and talk to them and ask them How can I improve the function that we provide to you in terms of the context of your relationship, which is the true? How can I make you feel appreciated, make you feel the way you want to feel? And, you know, open-ended questions are usually pretty good, but you might have to guide them because they're going to tell you, no one's ever asked me this before. It will be the first thing they said, and they'll be a little bit lost for a second. You're gonna have to talk them through it. And then the last thing is, how can I let you know about the good things we're doing for the community to let you know that you're a part of as well? But then you have to be doing good things for the community or else you have nothing to share if you care. Or it's not even if you care, because me, I was bandwidth constrained because I was working 70, 80 hours a week and just to have cash to pay the bills with, because you can't pay an electric bill to hug. Yeah. So depending on where you're at in your path, you know, a lot of distributors are solopreneurs or, you know, right, very small team. So there might not be enough cash or time to do that, which is totally understandable because, yeah, I'm there still in a lot of ways.

Yeah, but speaking of, then what's the transition? What's the next part of your story?

What I think is that the trash to treasure model for the innovation challenges that I've judged for universities— I'm so sick about hearing about Tom Shoes, and I respect Blake so much and what he's done, but it's the Maslow's hammer. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail type of thing. And, and I really think the storytelling aspect that Forbes and Inc. and, and blogs and everyone else has a responsibility to share more stories outside of the one-for-one model of how to do good and do well at the same time. And you hear the 3 Ps of purpose, profit, and people, which correlate exactly to The Beautiful, the Good, and the True, which no one else has published either. So yeah, I'm finding all these correlations in terms of stakeholder model. So without getting too geeky, there's a guy in the '70s, and I could tell you his name, but He basically said that businesses are built with the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder profit quarterly, which drives decision-making that's not long-term and in the best benefit of the other stakeholders or the world. Yeah. And that's still where we're at. And then that move to the Zappos or Whole Foods customer employee-centric models, which moved from being from the true to the good. And now with conscious capitalism and B Corp, there's the core-driven focus on the good, which is, you know, helping other people. Yeah, make the world a better place. And I think that by being siloed, these are all great positions to be in. It's just you can provide more value by combining them together, is my assertion. So yeah, conjecture and refutation are big words for just like you kind of throw something out there and you let people try to shoot holes in it, or they support it, or some combination of the two.

So are you—

do you think, uh, you're heading— are you doubling down, going all in on promo, or you still have a hospitality division? What's the—

because I want to kind of— there's just been this point of contention, and I'm just gonna hit it straight on, of us selling direct or us selling directly to promos. As of now, we don't make enough money off of promo to be able to devote to it that specifically. So we're gonna be setting our pricing, and I've just been working on our tiered pricing and getting everything set up for common SKU. Yeah, so that we can give this our best shot and give good sales support and customer service and hit our delivery dates to build a great reputation out of the gate, which is why I've been tiptoeing around the pool a little bit. Yeah. And there have been some people who found us even though we're not up there yet.

I think you'll find a tremendous amount of empathy with this audience that knowing your journey and your story, it's not like you jumped into the promo industry and knew about this. And so selling direct is obviously how you built your business. Now you see this great new opportunity, not only a new opportunity, but it's infused you with this strength of passion even more. And so I think you'll find a couple of things. Number one, I think you'll find a fairly generous attitude when it comes to this because of, I think, the way you're wired and the way that you won't go around and try to sell direct to their particular customers.

Exactly.

And number two, frankly, there's a lot of distributors that are sourcing outside of traditional resources anyways and are hungry for something innovative and fresh and something sustainable. That has a holistic approach. So I think for the most part you're going to find a ready market for this.

That's great. I'm excited. I mean, that's actually the answer that I was hoping for, but there's been so many people that give me this kind of deer-in-headlights look, like, oh, I was so excited about you, now I think you suck.

Yeah, no, you know what, they're not saying it.

That's not what they're saying. Yeah, I'm being a little bit dramatic about it, but I just want to approach this very straight on. We're, we're very conscious, considerate people. I don't want to screw anybody because I want to be around for a long time because my vision now, right, and I showed you some of the other products that we're going to launch after this. It's just my glass business is too busy for me to have the bandwidth for it right now.

Yeah, yeah.

I want to develop bundled packages that can either be shipped per quarter for clients or as bundles in other aspects outside of glassware that I can continue to sell to the same distributors, to the same clients that have our same unique flavor, which is the part that I enjoy so much.

Yeah, yeah.

To the same people over and over again, just to the point to where they're like, I want American-made, I want something that's Etsy cool and has a cool feel to it, and it has the style, function, and purpose that I always talk about that supports the community all at the same time, to the point where people are calling me, they're like, Ray, what are we doing this year? What, what's new? And I respect so much what other suppliers are doing as well, but I want to rock it. I always tell my, my employees, don't mistake kindness for weakness. We still want to succeed and to compete. Yeah, but we can— we don't have to be a jerk doing it.

Yeah, that's right. Ray, we've run out of time. Uh, man, I'm— you know, I already feel this way, but I'm really honored to meet you, and I'm so glad our paths have crossed.

Any final words?

I, I really just think that the promotional space is so much about the client succeeding, and finding ways to help them do that in a very genuine way is, is possible. I think that the prevalence of a lot of the products being from overseas and the sublimation and printing and decorating that I truly believe, because I heard an undertone in different places, you know, part of it's at the conference and in the show, the PPAI show, that it's just the same stuff over and over again and we just need to find new ways to package it. And I guess my final thought would just be that I don't believe that's true.

Right.

And I want to be an example of that without being too overt about it. But I think that there's still a lot of creativity, American-made, if that's a criteria for you outside of price, that can be competitive, that can get the job done and make your clients, recipients, inner circle stoked.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of SkewCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKUcast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.