On today's episode of Gathering the Kings. We had very limited money, but we didn't care about losing it all. Like, we could care less. We just plowed it all into the company without even thinking about it. It's it's kinda you totally disregard the fact that you can fail and lose it all. It's like, doesn't matter. I'm not gonna fail. I just devote 100% of my energy into this. And 100% of my resources into this. Yeah. I believe it that much.
You are listening to Gathering the Kings with Chaz Wolfe, featuring fellow 7, 8, and even 9 figure business owners who have real battle scars from business and life. But have prevailed as the king that they are designed to be. We welcome high performing entrepreneurs to the stage in order to reveal the reel of the reel, on what it takes to build a successful business today.
We dissect the good and bad decisions they've made along the way Chaz give a true and accurate picture of the journey of excess and how you too can get there. Through this dialogue, you will learn the value of growing your network and surrounding yourself with power players and keys like today's guest. Grab your pen and notebook because we're about to dive in. Alright, everybody. This is Chaz Wolfe Gathering the king's podcast. I got Rick caustic here on the king stage. How are you?
I'm doing great. Thanks, Chaz. Great to be on. I appreciate you being here. This is gonna be a fun one because we have not had anybody in your industry here on the show. Retail yes a little bit, but, man, you guys are crushing it in your industry. I am so excited for this conversation. Rick, tell us what kind of business that you have, brother. Yeah. We have a a beauty business. So that means skin care, makeup, haircare, bath and body.
We were recently ranked by Newsweek as the 30th largest website in beauty as a single brand. Wow. And if you look at the ones above us, None of them are independent. We're the so we're the top independent brands in terms of our website and the industry is ranked by Newsweek recent issue. Yeah. Congratulations.
I was just on the side Chaz I was telling you before we hit the record button here and some of your some of your products are even fruit based and all kinds of fun stuff that is super unique. And, with me being from an edible arrangements background and and everything fruit in that world, You know, I felt like we were a little bit kindred spirits there for a little bit with, with our fruit offerings, you know, bring it bring a strawberry to the world in lots of different ways. You know?
That's right. Wolfe, Rick, I I wanna know before we get into your story and kinda how you built this business and and your background is just so unique to me, which I love how it's gonna all come together for right here, but I wanna know why first. What what are you doing this for? What's the bigger picture? Why do you push so hard? You've obviously had some immense success, but you're still at it. Why?
Yeah. Well, early on, the why was and I fell into the industry because I was actually a computer coder. And I did websites back in the day and did a website for a salon, and that's how I got into it. But I met my current business partners because we we looked at the industry, and this was this was back in 2003, 2004. And we saw all these ingredients used in products that Yeah. Just you don't you don't know how to pronounce.
And then when you dig into it and you see the studies on it, you actually realize that these ingredients are some issues. And Yeah. You know, back then, it was animal studies, which we don't condone, but they had them, and it was causing issues in animals. And then you wonder why all these, you know, cancer is becoming this major issue with most people. And the problem is is that people didn't care what was in their product.
And they were just using and trusting the big companies that were producing it. And we thought, you know, we wanna produce something that's entirely healthy and good for people going to improve their lives. And so the fact that we can do this and again and again, even though the industry's cleaned up a lot and we led the cleanup of the industry, there's still more room to go. There's a lot of, like, misleading information out there that we have to educate on.
Yeah. Yeah, that perspective of blindly trusting is not necessarily blind trust. It's just that we had trust, and you can look at that from across the way. You can look at you know, the food in the aisles at the grocery store. You can look at the makeup. You can look at the hair products. You can look at nutrition products. The the stuff that I'm supposed to take after I work out, that's supposed to be good for me.
Like, it's it's all this, you know, this this level of trust that we have because it was branded and because we bought it at a store and Wolfe felt really good about it. And so give me, like, okay. So you got this altruistic. I wanna help people. I wanna save save people from cancer. Was it always like that, or did you did you fall into that? Was it is it a combination of that plus something for you, for your family, what what what's behind all of that?
That that was from the beginning of this company. I would say in, you know, every company you need a mission. You can't you can't really drive yourself forward without a mission. You need something to align yourself behind it later. That becomes even more important. Because your staff needs something to be aligned behind, and then your customers to align behind it. And even your partners seem like your vendors and things like that.
I see bring them into your ecosystem and forge stronger partnerships. That's right. They relate to your mission too, and they support you. And so having the mission is critically important. So, For for example, my previous company, I did a hair company when I was doing the websites and a Medi Salon owner, and we started a company together.
So the hair company Our mission was really just to provide hair care for teenagers because we saw that teenagers didn't have any hair care options, and they had money. And that was I would say that mission is not as strong as the current mission. Got it. And, you know, we still got that company. We still got that brand into Sephora back then, and we got it into Nordstrom's Wow. But the current the current mission, I would say, is a a little more noble in the fact that we're Yeah.
Really making a difference to the world, which is what I personally want to do with my life and that we're improving. Everyone that we're making products for, we're improving their lives. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a big deal, not just to add to their lives, but to literally improve. Right?
Obviously, the, makeup or hair care, you get to You get to make them look great and and smell good, that type of a thing, but you actually get to add to the benefit of their body, which is really what you're talking about. Right. Exactly. That's incredible.
I think that there's probably a lot of people that would love to have that type of mission statement, but maybe they're in a business where it doesn't allow them to connect to, you know, a big problem like saving the world from cancer or, you know, something like Chaz.
But what would you say to the entrepreneur who's listening right now who, you know, maybe they build decks or maybe they do marketing for for clients, how well, like, how do they connect that to something so big, like, what you've done? You think you think about your impact. So whether you're building decks, what's the impact? Who are you building decks for?
What's the outcome of these decks that you're building going to do, is it gonna cause your clients to achieve these big deals that's gonna end up making them more successful? Like, if it go to the impact 1st and then build that into your mission and don't make your mission so defined. You don't want it to defined because as you grow and you're gonna build a successful company, you need this mission a little bit broad so that the strategies you undertake can fall into your mission.
And your and your mission is sort of your guiding light too because it tells you strategy is not just what you're going to do, but it's also what you are not going to do. Yeah. So for example, like, you know, who makes the lighters, they make razor blades. They they knew they were really big on molding plastic and metal together. So they're gonna play in that field. They're not gonna go out and start making furniture. For example.
Right. So or, like, IKEA is not gonna go out and start making high end furniture. They know they play really well in the the low end furniture. It aligns to their mission. So like us, with our mission to improve the lives, we're not gonna do anything in conventional cosmetics. We are never gonna make a product that is going to have these chemical ingredients in it just because we wanna compete with the big guys on the mass market. That's that's not aligned to with our mission.
We're not going to do it. So strategy is also knowing what not to do. So when you when you form your mission, your mission defines your strategy. So the mission is critically important, and you can have a mission no matter what you're doing. Whether it's building decks, just look at the end result that you're doing, and it helps. It it becomes this guiding light from you and your company and and all your stakeholders. Yeah. You're a 100% right.
Have, client of mine who builds huge water features, you know, a couple $100,000 water features. And a recent conversation a couple months back around, you know, coming recession and discretionary income and how maybe a 200,000 water feature isn't necessarily higher on the priority list. And the conversation turned to the impact, which is Chaz client isn't necessarily thinking $200,000 for a water feature. They're thinking peace.
Or they're thinking I have something where I need to be able to host people or whatever that other thing, that other impact is, is why they still get the water feature or the deck or you know, the the healthy, the products for their face, skin, and hair. Right. And they're improving lives. They're doing water features, which is improving the happiness Yeah. Of the world. Yep. So true. Okay. Well, let's go let's go into your story a little bit. You kinda gave us a little bit.
Your computer programmer, your building websites, but Give us a little bit more of that story. How did you how did you get into making this type of not only product, but just like a 30th ranked big business? Yeah. So starting out in my my backstory a little bit was making the the shampoo and conditioner, and I met my Current business partners. I have 2 business partners. So Susie is 1 and her brother James is the other one. And Susie was also doing her own brand out of her dorm room.
We were attending Berkeley. And we decided to that we're gonna make these clean cosmetics and and change lives, right, and improve everyone's lives. And then we went out and and we tried to train the contract labs because that's what you did in beauty is you work with a contract lab and and there's various contract labs. They tend to be family run across the the US for the most part, and they didn't wanna do it. Didn't wanna make cosmetics our ways. They said, okay.
We'll do it, but you're gonna have to pay extra for it and have huge minimums and acute minimum order quantities to do it. And it was just this barrier we couldn't overcome. Yeah. And and so it dawned on me. Like, we can just make the cosmetics at home. We know what we're doing. We know how to combine the ingredients. We've done all the research, all the study. We weren't formally trained as chemists, although chemistry is is something I aligned to. My parents are chemistry majors.
I did well in chemistry and and understood it very well, but it's not like we were formally trained in, you know, how to make cosmetics. And my business partner, Susie, was the the same. But we did know what we were doing, and we knew how to make skin care. And so we made skin care in our home. We live together in Napa, California, and we just made 21 skincare products.
And then we started selling them to retail doors back then in 2004, and we got one big customer, which gave us a break initially. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, you you just gave us, like, a very fast forwarded version of of a lot of success. And so I appreciate this, the the overcoming, right, of having this huge bear entry. I think most people would just, you know, give up quit. It's too big. I can't handle it, or it's just not meant to be whatever their thoughts are. But you didn't.
What were you and Susie thinking in that moment where you were just like, no. Let let's just do it ourselves. Obviously, it was just another thought for you. But was there any gumption there of like, no. We we have to do this. Like, we can't let the let can't let them beat us. You know, anything like that? So so being an entrepreneur is doing something with total disregard to your resources. That's kinda what entrepreneurship is.
You you carry less about what you have, or if you have enough to do it, you just do it. And so we knew, okay, I don't have enough money. I can pay these labs to do these products. That's not gonna work, but I'm still gonna do it. So I'm gonna figure out a way. So we go to our local co op where they sell bulk organic products they're selling. It was Rainbow Co op in San Francisco, and they saw all these bulk ingredients.
And we started buying all the bulk ingredients, which is great for skincare because skincare is made out of, you know, we made our skincare out of food products. And they were selling all the raw organic food products. And we go and we combine it back and and we buy some oils, we go up to Davis, California, Northern California, and at buy the oils out from a local farmer, and we blended together and make this incredible, incredible skin care. So we did it.
Total disregard to we didn't have money but we made it work anyways. Yeah. No. You're a 100% right. I love the way that you that you said it's such a total disregard to your resources. And when you disregard what you have or the box that you're supposed to be in, then your mind now has freedom to be able to solve the problem or go to another place of creativity to be able to figure those things out. Is was that was that, you know, just kinda inside you guys?
Or was Chaz, like, a moment in time where you had, like, you drew upon a class that you learned this in? What what, how did you know Chaz to do this? Yeah. I I I don't think it was a class. I think it was inside. And and the other thing I think about thinking back to that time is you know, we had very limited money, but we didn't care about losing it all. Like, we could care less. We just plowed it all into the company without even thinking about it.
It's it's kinda you totally disregard the fact that you can fail and lose it all. It's like Doesn't matter. I'm not gonna fail. I just devote 100% of my energy into this and 100% of my resources into this. Yeah. I believe it that much. Yeah. There's a depth there of belief or conviction, maybe, or blindness Right? I and and, really, I think that might be it. You're blind to it. Beginning. Right? Like, you just gotta, I mean, what what is there to lose? What would you say?
Cause, obviously, you can't hold on to the just the negligent willy nilly throw it all in, go for it all the time forever. Does the balance balance out at some point? Is that a revenue marker? Is that a conversation that you had? How do you how do you maybe even it out eventually where you're not you know, all in all the time, or or are you? I I think you are at different levels. I think you do go through it. I it's a little bit of a roller coaster.
So, yes, you're in and then your business starts making money for you. And then you feel more comfortable and you feel more balanced and and you're able to take out from your business, but if then if you take out too much from your business, it's not gonna grow. And then your business needs even more, especially if it's fast growing, it just continuously needs more and more resources. And you just continually take a the next level of risk every time you hit another area of growth.
Yeah. Yeah. What would you say to the entrepreneur who's listening right now who, you know, is nervous about Chaz. Like, the this lifestyle of risk. That's really what you've described. I know it to be true also, but I've I have found for me personally that that's where the high now comes for me is that even though things are, like, settled and I already know that I'm, you know, been successful, I'm going continue to be 6 out.
Like, once you know and you know how to do it, like, it kinda like you just are there, but I still I just get the high from, like, going all in on myself, on my teams on my businesses. But what do you say to the guy who's listening right now or the gal who's like, I don't know about that type of a lock. So that sounds kinda crazy. If you think about it and think about the most successful entrepreneurs out there, they've taken a lot of risks it's about how you manage that risk.
It's not about reducing the risk because the the risk will not reduce. It's about learning the techniques to manage it. So example, I do a lot of mindfulness. I find that mindfulness allows me to handle a lot of stress and not really affect me because because I can't control the things around me so much, but I can control my response to it and my the way I internalize it and my mindset to it. And so I focus on growing myself so that I can remain calm Yeah. When everything around me is turbulent.
Yeah. And that's that is where you should be as an on if if you're cut out to be an entrepreneur and you want to be an entrepreneur, that's where you need to be. Is about changing yourself. So when I see a turbulence, you can still be the rock and be the calm. Yeah. It's so good. What practically have you done to be able to get there to be the rock the call? I would say it's a lot of personal growth and continuous education.
You have to continue to Sharpen the saw as Stephen Covia said, read, like, everyone I know that's that's entrepreneur. I myself included. We read like Chaz, and we take continuing education. I just did a program at Harvard Business School And alumni program to become alumni from their owner president management program, which was really, really helpful You joined networks. I joined it's at the young president's organization Y PO network, which is those connections and the continued learning.
Helps you, and you gain another skill as you go. You keep gaining your skills and and elevating up. Yeah. Yeah. It's never ending game when you really think about it. It's just like, you said, just you just go to the next level up and up and up, and sometimes it's another person or a class or a resource or an experience, you know, that takes you to the next level.
Sometimes that's the best way, especially for us entrepreneurs to to learn, we can read the book, but then to go actually put it into practice, maybe maybe get a little dirty with it. For us to actually figure out how to how to go to the next level. Would you agree with that? I would entirely agree with that. And especially it's it's the experience of your failures. That you learn more from. You learn more from your failures than your successes.
Because successes, you you just if you were successful 100% of the time, you wouldn't really grow. Because you wouldn't really feel the need to grow. But when you hit these road the these failures and these stumbling blocks along the way, it forces you to want to do better and you grow from that.
Yeah. I was listening to something from Steve Harvey this morning when I was working out, and he was talking about basically this these examples, these moments in time where we have to kinda push through. He calls it dirt. Right? Like, nothing that's ever grown into something beautiful didn't pop through the dirt. You know? And and That's right.
You gotta have dirt for nutrients, and you gotta have the for the learning and the experience, all the things that you just said is exactly what Steve was saying this morning as well. So I think it fits right in. I'm gonna use this to parlay right into your experience Chaz far as good and bad decisions, I wanna know of a good choice that you've made in this business. Super practical. You do it over and over again. What can we learn from you?
The good the good choice, I can tell you bad choices all all day long. But the good choice I did was I would say The number one thing you have to be in business to succeed, and and I do a little bit of, angel investing and mentoring. To other entrepreneurs. And so I've seen this in other entrepreneurs where it hasn't worked as the tenacity and the persistence. You have to not give up. That's like a kind of a trait that is a must have as an entrepreneur is never give up.
Your persistence and your tenacity will lead to success because you're gonna have times when you feel like you've made mistakes and you've lost it all, but you continue and there's actually a way to solve everything. Yeah. What what is that moment or what was one of those moments for you where you thought you had lost it all and you pressed on anyway? I can give a recent one with with COVID, for example, you know, we had retail doors. We had 16 of them.
And we also had fair amount of B2B Business. So selling to other brick and mortar retailers and distributors around the Wolfe. And when COVID hit, it's like there's no more traffic to your retail doors. There's no more traffic to the retail doors of the businesses you're selling to. You can't ship so easily around the world to your distributors.
And so it's, like, all of a sudden, we went from where we've been profitable for decades or, you know, almost do what we haven't been around for decades, but for over a decade, Almost too. Almost almost almost almost to go negative. And and we're self funded. We never went out and got funding. And so it's like there's only so much money that you can get around. And so that was really, really tough. I would say that was the toughest time in my career to get through.
And, you know, we're still coming out the other end of it. And the most important thing Chaz the most important trait that helped us get through that is just the tenacity, just staying in there and knowing that we are going to find our way out of this. We're gonna find the right people that are going to help us. We're gonna find the right strategies that are gonna take us through this.
Yeah. Yeah. I you said earlier something that it aligns with what I think about persistence is you had already made a decision to win.
And and you'd said it a little differently a few minutes ago, but, basically, if you've already known ahead of time before COVID, before insert whatever struggle, If you if you already made the decision, then I'm going to figure it out regardless of whatever resources I have, to your point, then Chaz stick to itiveness along with the creativeness that your brain gets forced into in that moment because you literally shoved it into a non box and you
gotta figure this out, it forces you to figure it out. And so and you did. You're still alive. Here you are. The company didn't die. You didn't die. Like, here we are. You know? And we're actually stronger from it because we we changed around our strategies from that. So we realized what we weren't good at. And what we were good at. And we knew we've been doing fulfillment for a company ever since the beginning, you know, with their own warehouse and shipping out packages and things like Chaz.
And Sure. We're really bad at it. We're really bad. Like, we would take weeks to fulfill orders. Our customers would be upset. We would our warehouse was not efficient, and we would be very, you know, probably take 2 to 3 times as long to ship out a package in terms of the cost of labor as a professional. And we just I never put time into it. I put my time into the marketing side. I put my time into the product side.
I didn't put my time into the operations, and I never could find someone that great to oversee the operations that was really good at it. And so we made the strategic decision. Let's partner let's let's offload this and partner with a 3pl. Get that off, and the 3pl can handle the entire operation. So we we made the strategy change to get out of what we're not good at it.
And then we also made the strategy change Chaz, look, we we need to be back into manufacturing because through our story, we didn't do contract labs. We made stuff ourselves, but over the years, we went out of manufacturing. And that was a big mistake in terms of mistakes. Probably one of our biggest mistakes as a company. But because of this Wolfe COVID thing, it accelerated us bringing back the manufacturing into under our roof. And that's been a a good thing.
So and we've cut expenses like crazy because we needed to to manage our cash and and manage our finances. And so we're now a much leaner, stronger, robust company. Yeah. More focused as well. Yeah. I love I love all of those results that you were able to get out of that. I wanna just, you know, obviously point out to the listener that those were good decisions that you made. Through those moments of, like, oh, I don't know if we're gonna survive.
And and it's those moments that then forced you to think differently that then led to those good decisions. I wanna I wanna flip the coin here to the bad decision. Do you are you gonna go with the manufacturing and getting away from it, or was there something else that came to your mind as far as just a terrible, did not work out at all? So so what was interesting with the bad decision of manufacturing, so we we did the manufacturing.
We Chaz we grew and moved warehouse warehouse, we'd always stick to manufacturing with us. And then we realized Chaz, you know what? All these We always talked to the PE guys, the private equity, and to the venture capital, and a lot of them told us that we should get out of manufacturing. And it made us think, are we are we doing the right thing by being in manufacturing? Right. And it was a a little bit of a headache the manufacturing in that, it was tough to scale.
And we also had Susie's brother, James, my partner. He also was sometimes injuring himself in manufacturing, which is added to reasons to get out of manufacturing. Like, he dropped things on his toes or he spilled hot water on himself. But if things of that, if he climbed up the pallet racks and which you should never do and then tell the staff he can't do, but he did it, and he fell. So it's like all all this stuff was happening to to manufacturing.
So we made the decision Let's stop manufacturing and let's use contract. Let's follow the advice of these private equity folks telling us to get out of it. They know what they're talking about is what we thought And so we did that. And what ended up happening is these contract labs, they're not as good on the innovation. So we lost our innovation edge.
We actually train them how to do a lot of the innovation in the the queen space, which then you notice there's this I don't in in my industry, there's this rise of clean beauty brands. You you have hundreds of them rising up. They're all using contract labs that we moved to that we trained on how to how to preserve, how to emulsify all all the challenging things around the beauty that we trained on, they were doing. And so that was the big mistake as we lost our innovation edge.
And then they deprioritized us because we're not You know, we've we've done well and grown to a certain size, but we're not the biggest brand out there. There's bigger brands. And so we were deprioritized in there. Factory schedules. And especially through COVID, they took forever to supply us or, you know, we we're talking like we would issue a PO to them, and it wouldn't ship for a year.
Which just destroys destroys your your business because your customers, especially in beauty, they're fickle. If they can't get the product they want, they're going to a competitor. Oh, yeah. And so that really hurt our business. So the the worst decision we made as a company was getting out of manufacturing, which is now we have our renewed energy, renewed effort, building it back. And we will become the biggest clean beauty manufacturer in the world. That's what I aim for us to do.
And, again, it's about that mission improving the lives of people. So not only are we manufacturing for ourselves, but we're also manufacturing for other brands as well. So not just 100% pure. And we're also incubating new brands along with that. So Susie, she thinks of all the ideas. We have these new concepts that we're bringing to the market. Around. So I'll give you just a teaser flower pigments we've been playing with to put flower because we put fruit pigments into makeup.
That's only 100% pure. Now we've been playing with flower pigments, not just for the makeup, but also there's a lot of beneficial exotic ingredients of flowers. Chaz are good for the skin, and we're putting that into skin care. So we're able to bring these new brands to market and plug them into our platform of manufacturing. And we've also done really well in China as well. It's it's quite incredible is that the China business is up 200% year over year for us.
Wow. And and I I formed a subsidiary in China to manage that. So I feel like instead of just being a single brand, you always and this is kinda for every entrepreneur out there, you wanna see about how you can eventually structure your business into a platform that you can grow. If you really wanna truly grow into a a big business. You wanna see how you can build a platform that you can plug other businesses down the line into.
And I feel like that's what we're doing with the we have the manufacturing, and then we have the distribution whether it's through China or through our B2B network. And we also have the digital marketing expertise. So we can pretty much plug brands into this platform and make them from this level into much more successful.
Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible, especially since you've been able to take some of those moments were, in essence, what you described with the manufacturing, it was you you'd given away so much control that it just enabled you to not be nimble. And so I I think that there's some reasons that an entrepreneur should let go of control. Right?
When when we hire somebody, we we let go of control, but you've made a great point of there's certain angles or certain maybe sections of the business that maybe you always need to have control over so that innovation doesn't die. Especially if that's a core value, especially if that's, like, part of your industry, where you're, like, leading the industry, you probably shouldn't give that away. What were you gonna say?
There's a there's another one related right related to what you're saying is that one of the things I did. So You always think to hire people, right, as you grow, hire hire people to do things and delegate. Yeah. Delegate and and elevate is the common phrase. But what I did do is I hire people. So when you get to certain sizes of business, sometimes your greatest strength Well, not sometimes. I would say nearly every time. Your greatest strength becomes your greatest weakness.
Sure. And what I mean by that is what I ended up doing is hired for my strength. And I hired people into my marketing, and I gave up controller. And marketing is is my strength. Personally. That's what I am really passionate about. That's what I'm good at on especially on the digital side of things. Yeah. And I I brought in a a team of really a players. And I had too many a players that just butt heads, but they cut me out because they felt like they know what they're doing.
We don't need Rick. What do we need him for? Correct. Yeah. And, yeah, what do we need him for? He's he's, you know, he's he's washed up. He's he's had his days. He doesn't know what's going on in the beauty industry, and he's a guy. You know, in beauty industry is predominantly for women. So he you know, they thought they knew better and didn't solicit help or didn't want help. And I and to effect, I hired them to do that. And that was the purpose. Like, they were supposed to do that.
That's what they were put in place to. But the thing is when you're really strong at something, you're probably and you've been successful at it. You're probably better than most of the people that you can hire to put into that place. Right. So it's it's better to hire for your weaknesses first. Eventually, you will have to hire for your strength, and you're gonna have to figure that out. Yep. But it would have been better if I focused on, say, operations.
And I brought in people to do operations because that's not where I'm I am not strong on operations, and and I haven't had the right people in the operations to make that a strength of ours, because you can actually build a a competitive company by having really strong operations. Oh, yeah. But I didn't do Chaz, and I hired for my strength.
So your greatest strength could become your weakness, and I did it, unfortunately, earlier than was necessary by focusing on the who not the the who not the how hot bringing in the people for marketing. I just brought in the people for the the ops. Yeah. Yeah. So good. What what today, Rick? Do you follow if anything, a process, maybe a 4 step plan or whatever, but around making decisions. Something comes to your desk today. You've obviously kinda made it through the ups and the downs?
You've been successful. How do you operate in the decision making today? So this is this is really, really important. A great question. Decision making, you need to be able to make decisions with 70% of the the information. Good. You will not. Why 70% get because otherwise, you'll take too long. If you try to get all the information or take, you know, try to get to 99%, so you make the right decision, you're not gonna move fast. I think about it like this.
Like, when you think about real estate and brokers or people buying and selling companies, people buying and selling real estate, How do they make money? It's the number of deals. It's not the amount of money on each deal. So the same thing with decision making. If you are right, 60% of the time, you're gonna grow. But if you're making decisions, one after the next, after the next, after the next, and you're still right. 60% of the time, you're gonna grow faster. So Right.
You it's about the speed of decision making. It's not about being right 100 percent of the time. What where you want to master is getting that 60% right with a limited amount of information. That's what you need to focus on, not on trying to get 100% of the information. Yeah. You know, it's so interesting. I I mean, obviously, I've heard speed as your friend, speed as the new currency, like, all of these things. Right?
But as you were saying Chaz, What it made me think about is there are a lot of times, usually in the fall, I'll go elk hunting. My dad and I go out somewhere west and we're bow hunters and we're hunting for elk. And so in the summer, I'm shooting my bow, trying to really just dial it in, make sure that I'm confident I'll hold it back for, you know, minutes and minutes just to make sure my back is strong and Just all the things Chaz way you're in. You're in the moment. You're good.
Like, you know, you don't wanna destroy that one individual moment. Right? And so I I liken that to the decision moment that you're talking about. And all these preparations that you can do ahead of time. But in the moment, sometimes you don't have this clear shot and the and there's all this time to prepare and and be able to breathe all the way in and all the way out. Like, it's just not perfect like that most times.
And so a lot of times in my practice is I pull up, find my site, and let it go. Like, It's not perfect. It probably is not gonna be, like, as long as I'm just there, and that's how I'll practice a lot of times is what you're saying. Can I be pretty close? Most of the time with only split second decision, like pull it up, aimed, fire, right? And and not taking my time and not breathing and not making sure that everything's perfect in the air and and this, that, or the other.
Because in those moments, it's if you can if you can maximize that because it's gonna happen over and over and over again. If you can maximize those moments, what you're saying is that you win. Would you like to add anything to that? Yeah. And and, also, it gets a little complex when you're managing with you're making decisions with other people or with teams.
And if you're the CEO, the founder, and you're making the final decision, One of the best practices I find is that you will do a lot of influence, whether you you think about it or not, and you're gonna sway people you never wanna speak first. You always wanna speak last. So you get out from all your people. They're allowed to talk their opinions and how they feel and how they would decide.
And then at the end, you make your decision, but make it clear to everyone that they may not agree with your decision, but they need to support it. At the end, and they can't come back afterwards. Once the decision is made, it's made. You had your chance to speak beforehand. You can't have held something back. During that discussion and then tell me after the meeting walking down the hall Chaz you had this other thought. That's like, no. Not allowed.
So decisions need to be you make them final and you speak last. Yeah. That's so good. The speaking last piece is very difficult, but I agree with you. And, also, too, I love what you said there because if you set the expectation of, like, a decision's been made, we're not gonna come back on it, then what that does is it firms up the game. The, you know, the mission that you've already described several minutes ago. It's like, man, no, no. This is where we're going.
Here's the decision that we've made. Boom. Like, we pulled the trigger. Like, it's done. Like, we can't go back, and that's a culture. That's a thing. Like, where we we all came together, Rick made the decision, and now now we gotta go, you know, eat our cake. And that's a that's a stick to itiveness. That's a persistence thing, which you've already discussed with us. How did you go about building that Chaz far as, like, the culture, the expectation, finding those people that agreed with that?
Like, give us some insights there. I would say that's one of the more difficult things is finding the right people. And the other Good thing about that with COVID is that everyone re remote in COVID, and it made me realize, you know, I wanna build this world class high performing workforce.
And now that everyone's remote and we've gone remote, for the most part, there are a few people that that come into the office, myself included, But we can now our talent pool has just increased dramatically, and we're based in Silicon Valley. So our talent pool was very, very small. We were competing tech companies for talent, which is not where you wanna be competing for talent, especially as a a beauty company. Yeah. And yeah.
And so So now with this this greater pool for talent, it becomes a little bit easier. It is a little bit I I have not mastered the side of it in terms of getting the right people, but I have learned a few things, and one is setting the expectations up front. Is really important with everyone. Because that way, at least you weed out the people who don't want that kind of high performance, high demanding work because we're building a high performance team, which means that you gotta work hard.
If you wanna work with us. If you wanna be with us on this journey, it's it's it's not an easy job. It means hard work. A players like to work with a players. If we bring on board b players, the c players, our a players are gonna leave. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Little little different angle, but I've even I've even taken that approach with gather the King's mastermind group is that not just letting any entrepreneur, it's not just for any entrepreneur.
Because what I have found, especially with entrepreneurs, is where a players or at least that there's there are ones that have been successful. And what they wanna do is rub shoulders with other people who can challenge them so that they can still yet get better. And there's a place and a time for giving back. That's what you and I are doing right now.
We get to I mean, there's 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of entrepreneurs who are starting and or in their 1st couple of years, and they're gonna benefit greatly from this conversation. And that's what they should be doing. They should be listening to podcasts and reading books and and taking people to lunch and stuff like that. But for high performers, it is in it is imperative to get around other high a players what you just said. Otherwise, their potential isn't maximized.
And that's that that goes to the same for the team. If you can build a team within your organization of 8 players. Those 8 players, they'll challenge each other and and something greater comes out of that than either one of them could have done by themselves. Right. And and I wanna say, Chesette, but you you touched on the teams. I would say Chaz you're you're natural grown Chaz you're growing, you're gonna be hiring staff or maybe you're already hiring staff.
The building a team is kind of a critical piece to being successful, but I would say from my perspective, the most important person to have on that team is the team leader and really focusing your energy on that team leader. That team leader is your most critical hire. You can get the best team leader concern mediocre people into great people. Oh, yeah. But your team leader has to be great. Your team leader has to be that a person. Yeah. 100%. Love it. Alright.
Let's go to speed round real quick here. My first question is about KPI. What's the most important KPI or what's the one that you would choose to track over and over if you could only pick 1? This is a really good question. I love KPIs, and I'm actually there's one KPI. I wanna say I'm anti KPI right now Okay. That I wanna lead with because I know a lot of other digital marketers, they, like, live and breathe by this KPI and It's Roez.
I do not believe in I'm Nancy Roez at the moment, and I tell every single agency, every single partner about this, and they're still so shocked because they're always trying to win your business by saying, oh, we have, you know, we can get you 4 Chaz. We can get you 8 roas. We Chaz get you, you know, so it's not Chaz k. Just to eliminate one. But I would say the the most important KPI for the business as a Wolfe. This is a really challenging question because I have it.
I have it for different pieces of the business. I don't know trees you plant because we plant a tree with every order. So that's a good KPI. That's cool. More trees you plant, then then the more orders you have, and the business is successful. So it might be Chaz for the business as a whole, like, the number of trees we plant. For example. But I think all ultimately our top KPI that I use as a company is the Net Promoter Score. The APOS. Yeah. Very good.
And and I I not able to apply this across the board. I can apply it on our website and apply it in our retail doors. It's a little more difficult through channels like Amazon and and your B2B. But this is the KPI it go to because this shows me how well am I delivering on my mission to my customers. Am I really improving their lives? Are they feeling it? Are there things I'm doing that's not that I need to to change?
So I really love the NPS because you hear from your front lines direct coming back. Yeah. Do you guys do that through surveys, through reordering tactics? I tell us just just submit there. Yeah. We we just use an app for now. We're using stamped. At the moment through Shopify to measure our NPS score, and that's been working pretty fairly well. And so customers it's a very quick question. How likely are you to refer you know, your your product or service.
So, like, 100% pure to a friend, and they rank it from 0 to 10 And depending on how they rank, you end up with a score around Chaz. And then they can write, like, a sentence or 2 feedback, which I read every single one of those. And it really helps adjust our my decision making. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Referrals, obviously, are the lifeblood, and and every business can understand Whether they have a net net promoter score or not, it's are you getting referrals? Yeah. That's the easy way to say it.
What book would you recommend, Rick, for a business owner trying to grow? You know, there's I'll recommend a book, but, also, I wanna recommend because I touched on teams, there's a case study, a Harvard Business reviews case study project oxygen, I recommend reading this case study. I I read it when I was at Harvard. It was a Google spent $20,000,000. On this case study, and this is where they found out the benefit of team managers and how important the team leaders are to a team.
So I recommend that case study. It's called project oxygen, or you can probably Google it and and find some material around it. And then books, a related book actually is John Duer is the name and his measure what matters is the book. K. And it's how he created the OKR system, which he brought to Google when they were 30 employees. Wow. And they and Google used the OKR system and objective key result what OKR stands for.
And now a lot of companies use this to help set your goals and you set these aspirational goals. That's the difference. With the OKR system and with, like, your regular KPIs is your OKRs are very aspirational. Yeah. So it makes you 10 x yourself, and it gives your staff and your teams a 10 x themselves. When you're thinking about a 10 x goal and say you only achieve a portion to that goal at the end of the day, but still a lot more than if you set your are a lot lower with a regular goal.
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. There's there's some limiting beliefs around not wanting to disappoint yourself with, without setting those really, really big targets. I love it. What do you think about intentionally networking or masterminding with other entrepreneurs? Necessary thing. Absolutely necessary. And you should always get yourself a mentor. The mentor is is giving back So be a mentor, get a mentor, coaches. I've worked with a coach.
I'm in the middle of not working with a coach right now, but, usually, I have a a business or personal coach to help you along that journey and part of of networks. I'm a member of, you know, young president's organization YPO. So whether it's EO, YPO, or there's other organizations to join in your industry. Yep. Highly highly recommend because it's the strength of your network is I I would say is entirely aligns with the strength of your business growth.
So the stronger you get your network, more successful you're gonna become. So really focus on building your network. Huge. Huge. Okay. I got one last question here for you, Rick. You ready? Yes. If you could whisper in the younger Rick's ear, what would you say? Wow. That's deep. Chaz is a really deep question. If I could whisper, tell me something that would change that could potentially change my whole course of future. What would that be? I would I would say this. I I know what I would say.
Trust yourself. Believe in yourself. And the reason I would say this is because confidence is a very, very important skill or or belief to have in order to achieve success. You have to have confidence in yourself with confidence. You can achieve anything, but you need that confidence.
So And there are times there are times in your journey where your confidence because of the mistakes you make, like, when COVID happened and all the retail stores I spent money building and and put a ton of energy in started, you know, going the opposite direction. It's like it's just wipes away all that confidence. You're like, Wolfe, I I was really bad. I made some really bad mistakes. Right. And it's hard to get back that confidence, but you can get it back.
But if you could maintain that confidence your whole time, you can achieve even greater levels of success. Yeah. So good. You have been extremely valuable here today, not only to our listeners, but to me, I just really appreciate everything that you've given. How can the listener find you, Rick? Whether they obviously, please drop website. How can they shop from you?
I wanna know Chaz, but maybe some different, unique things that you can promote there, but also how can they find you as an individual? Maybe they wanna reach out and pick your brain. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Chaz. They can go to 100 and then spell out percent. And then pure100percentpure.com. So that's our our biggest brand, our website, the brand I founded in 2004. Love it. And, yep, 100 percent pure.com, 100 percent pure.com. And then if to connect with me, LinkedIn is really the best.
You can look me up, Rick Caustic, or I put my formal first name, Richard Caustic, on LinkedIn, and please drop me a note and connect with me and Usually, I do respond. I take some time to, you know, I don't go through every day on my LinkedIn, but I'll go through every other week and and try to get back to everyone. Yeah. Really, really appreciate that opportunity. We'll put the website. Obviously, your LinkedIn link Chaz well in the show notes.
But, yeah, I I just think that's, yeah, especially with just the the effort that you've gone through of of not only leading an industry, I think it'd be worth the listener checking out what you've put together Chaz well as reaching out to you. So again, selfishly, thank you for the time. I thank you on behalf of the listeners as Wolfe. We wish you absolutely enough blessing to your business, your your your partners, all of your clients. We really, really appreciate you being here. Thank you.
Thank you, Jess. Appreciate it. Thank you for listening to Gathering the Kings today. I hope that you were able to pull out a few nuggets to go apply into your business right away. More importantly, though, I hope that you're realizing that it takes more to be successful than just being by yourself doing it all on your own, carrying the weight all by yourself.
What I have realized, not only in my own journey from multiple businesses and multiple different streets and now interviewing literally over 2 or 300. Other very successful 7, 8, and 9 figure business owners is Chaz It's tough to do it alone. And so gathering the Kings literally exists to bring together successful entrepreneurs. In fact, we are putting together 1 1000 kings, specifically who are grateful, but not done.
We're intentionally assembling kings who fight tooth and nail for their business, family, and communities, and here's what we believe Chaz in the pursuit of excellence in those areas, that it ignites within us the responsibility to govern power and forge a lasting legacy. So if that relates and and resonates with you, and you know that you need people around you, sharp, qualified other very successful business owners. I want you to go to gatheringthekings.com.
Want you to take a look at what we're doing and see if it makes sense for you to be part of our pursuit. To 1000 kings. Talk soon.