Revenue Growth is Downstream of Operational Excellence | QRE199

is downstream of operational excellence. And in this time, it's still a very interesting time as we're recording this, we are in November of 2021, over like 19 months into the pandemic, there are supply chain issues, there's a lot happening in the world, things that are definitely affecting wills company and might be affecting you as well. So we're going to talk about all of those things, and how you can still continue

to grow your company in this interesting time. So we'll just wanna say hello, and welcome to quantum revenue expansion. Thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to hang out for a little bit, hear all about your business and inspire our listeners. Before we do that a couple of things. If you haven't yet go to Ursula inc.co. We have quantum revenue expansion, the masterclass where I break down three areas for you to grow your business number one, how to

create an exponential quantum revenue container. Another word for that is just like to x or 10x, or sales, where do you want to go next, we also talk about how to uplevel your pricing your packages and your marketing, which has been a huge conversation at the CEO table the last few months and our clients really talking about what it takes to, you know, increase pricing increase, you know what they know their worth, so they can get to that next level, but also really honoring

their clients and customers at the highest point. And then finally, we talked about how to collapse time to reach your quantum revenue goals even faster. And there's a few ways to do that. And you definitely want to listen in to find out. So go to Ursula ink.co. And I mean, it's so easy, just go to the you guys know this, like go to the homepage, it's sitting right there, you'll find it and you can get that course. Also, if you want to come out and hang with us on Zoom. We're all

hanging out these days. And really focus on to x and your revenue, you can come to the 2x intensive. If you're interested, just go to Ursula inc.co. Forward slash applies and dispute your details, and my team will get you all the stuff about the 2x intensive when it's coming up next, and how you can come and play. Alright, with that. It's my pleasure to introduce you to wil Nizza, who I've just gotten to know because I'm on his team reached out to us to be on quantum revenue

expansion, I'm super picky. Well, like I have is like, we're researching. Yeah, I want to know about what you're up to. And we haven't had anyone on the show who is in the space of health foods I think is really interesting. Will is the founder and CEO of IQ bar, a Boston based brain and body nutrition company, after studying psychology as an undergrad at Harvard will became fascinated with the human brain and how it functions. And we're super interested in that as well here.

Then, in his mid 20s, he experienced chronic failings with his own brain, including daily headaches that he traced back to his high carb diet. By limiting staples like bread and pasta from his regimen, he staged an astounding cognitive recovery, which I'm sure he's going to tell us about so. So Bill, let's, let's start there. And that's a pretty interesting problem that you had to solve for yourself, which led you to launch this company. So tell us your story, if you would.

Sure. Sure. So I did not want to know what I wanted to do at all in college. But I got really, really interested in psychology and neuroscience. And I wanted to do something in those fields professionally. But I was also obsessed with startups in business. That was, you know, in the early 20, teens, and just when startups were becoming, you know, quote, unquote, cool or cooler. And so I didn't really know how to like, meld those two things together. And effectively, I couldn't figure

out a way to do that. So I took a job in software, selling and marketing software right out of college, and was working really long hours, and just started feeling terrible, terribly, physically. And a lot of it was due to my diet. I soon learned, you know, also sleeping exercise, but a huge chunk was diet. And so I became obsessed with with diet and not really diet, insofar as I was trying to lose weight, or like get buff or

whatever. While while a lot of people focus on diet, I wasn't exclusively interested in it, due to the way it made me think about both positively or negatively in that case,

negatively. I read a couple books that this one book called Green brain was the one that like totally blew my mind which effectively, David Perlmutter is saying, if you eat a high carb diet over 10s of years stuff just starts going wrong, you know you on on the high end, you might just think slower and have more headaches and have a more inflamed brain and on the on the

worst end you might get at neurodegenerative disease. So I became obsessed with this idea that a brain food like why is no one creating a quote unquote ready to eat brain food that someone can buy off a store shelf? And so yeah, I started tinkering in my, my kitchen at nights and on weekends. And that was what, what kicked it all off. Got it? Excellent. And so and when was that, how long ago was that?

I really started doing that tinkering. In 2016 2017. The we launched the culmination of that was launching a crowdfunding campaign in December, December 17, to Jan 18. So that was and then we didn't fulfill our first order it really when the company began was when we fulfill their first order in mid 2018. Have

it? So you've had the business for not for very long for a few years, and then the pandemic arrived, which I'm guessing has either in some ways, really helped your business, as we're at home ordering food, or, you know, really looking at improving ourselves in this interesting time that we're in. So tell us about that. So what's happened the last few years in terms of the business growth? And how has the pandemic impacted your company?

Yeah, sure. I mean, it's, like I, the way I phrase it is like, there's a spectrum of ways companies got hit by the pandemic, there's like the worst situation, which is like a restaurant, right. And then there's the best situation, which is like, zoom, or really any, like, tech company or company that centers on you being in your living room on a

computer. And then there's everything in between. And so I'd say we're in between, I mean, there's, there are certain not great dynamics, like for example, bar sales in brick and mortar stores really stagnated. People went towards, you know, more bulk items and different categories. But ecommerce, conversely, like exploded because everyone's ordering everything online, and everyone's not going to

restaurants, and everyone's just buying packaged food. So it was a mixed bag, but on net net, it was it was a positive for us. Yeah. And on the front end, before we jumped on you, you hinted at sort of supply chain situation, is that, how's that affecting you? I mean, that's honestly the biggest impact, certainly a very negative impact on really anyone that makes any thing, anything

tangible. You know, obviously, it's in the news every day about like, microchips being so short that we can't buy cars and I mean, it's affected everything we we buy something like 43 inputs into our all of our skews. And so all it takes is one of those inputs to fail the supply chain for it to fail, and the whole thing blows up. And so, you know, one small anecdote is like, we imported rappers, and this was in May, and our rappers were sitting at a rail yard in Chicago since late May,

and we just caught him last week. So if you know of rappers you can't rap product, obviously. And so it's just created like constant fires like that, that you just have to come up with creative solutions to so what was your creative solution before the rapper showed up? Or did you have I, you know, found someone else make wrappers basically, but it's like that the tricky thing about my world is everything has a long lead

time. So and especially now, because you're getting it's kind of a double whammy, you have supply chains are all busted, because the ports are all busted. And, and then you have a labor crisis, right? So like, nobody can find labor right now. Also, I'm sure listeners have heard that in the news, but or experienced it personally. But so it's like, you're getting hit by both of those forces. And unfortunately, there's no end in

sight. So it's just like, you know, you can fix a problem. But then there's like a four week lead time for that problem actually, to be fixed. So it's like, oh, we don't have wrappers like scramble, and do all these things to make this other vendor make it and then sit on your hands for four weeks because this is what it is. Yeah, well, I feel your pain on that. So how, I mean, it sounds like the company has still been able to grow, you've gotten into

some amazing Retail, you want to talk about that? How you how you've expanded in that way? Sure. Yeah. I mean, we were born on ecommerce. And we're still most of our business is still ecommerce, but we're definitely an omni channel business. So we, you know, so in retailers like WalMart Kroger, Rite Aid Wegmans, and others sprouts market. So we have a pretty big footprint across across the country in a brick and mortar context. But again, most of our

businesses still is still ecommerce. So it's almost like running two different companies, there's competing in a totally different p&l, as you know, brick and mortar revenue comes in chunks, whereas ecommerce is like a more reliable, like trickle that you can increase. It really is, like two different businesses, but to truly scale, and have both of them be synergistic with the other. You know, we found it to be helpful to be omni channel.

Yeah, got it. Got Well, congratulations on all of those those retailers. And the I hear you on yeah, having a steady stream of income from your online part of your business. So obviously, we're talking about revenue growth being downstream of operational excellence, how does that show up in your company? It's a, it's a, it's a pretty simple way. If you, if you it's simple, I guess at a high level and complex when you get into

the details. So simply put, if you don't make things and have things, you can't sell things, and it's been very hard to make things and, and get people to send things to dovetail with my earlier comments. And so just being like, excellent. The, you could have a wider margin for error and operations and supply chain excellence two years ago, then you can today, I guess, is a succinct way of saying it. You need to be truly excellent at micro pivoting, operationally speaking on a weekly or even

daily basis, just to make the things you need to make. Yeah. And so from the outside in, you're like, Well, why can't you just just make more of something? And it's like, well, if I showed you the like, the the tree, the supply chain tree that culminated and that thing and a package at the end, and how every branch of that tree is like, fraught with risk right

now. You don't you'd get it. And so we've just had to have, you know, a really excellent people in ops and supply chain, and just be like, on it like, like, better planning better organization. Buying stuff earlier, making more sub buying more inventory. Having buffers, so it's just being on top of all of that is the only way to continue, you know, growing revenue in this time. Yeah, you. I think you hinted at, I think you said an operational manager

and Ops Manager, team, right. I mean, there's the supplies. But then there's also the people that have to lead this and make it happen. And we're in what some people call the Great resignation. And then you mentioned that as well. Like, it's tough time to find stuff time to find team find great people. So how are you leading in this time? How are you inspiring people to stay? To want to be in what's probably a really challenging time inside of your business?

Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting topic. It's like the, I think we've come full circle from like, the, you know, ping pong table and, you know, nap pod era. And we're now in the like, you know, remote work, like people just care about different stuff. And, and, and at its core, it seems like the themes in the great Brexit resignation is people want a couple things they want. Many of them want to be remote. Like they like being remote. They want to live in Boise, Idaho or whatever,

instead of like Manhattan. And that that's a big one, obviously, but probably even bigger is like fulfillment. I mean, it seems most people are just kind of like a buzzword. But you know, people want to feel like they're progressing their career knowledge, base fulfillment, happiness. They

just don't want to dread going to work on Monday. And so for me, like I've never found that you, you make someone not dread going to work by like, you know, silly perks, but honestly, like, I think it has to be woven into the mission of what you're doing like air inherent to the mission of what you're doing. And I think part of that is like hiring people who inherently are wanting to do that and are interested in it. So like, if I run a health food company, like, you probably want to hire people

who care about health food, you know, at its core, right? Like your odds of that person caring about business Ops is higher, if that is true, but also like, give people responsibility and let them run with things. And because it's like, you know, we're a small business, we can't if someone's not inherently interested in what are what we're doing, yeah, it's really hard to just like ticky tacky, add incentives here and there and to keep them around like, so I think a lot of that is just

like good hiring. But, yeah, I think you nailed it when you talk about mission I. So one thing I'm hearing over and over again, is from our clients and our colleagues is if if people don't buy into your mission, they're not going to stay like it's, we're in a time of, like, people want to know that you're up to something. And that's important mission, that you actually care about what you're

up to, so that they can be part of that. And if they think you don't care, they're, they're probably gone, which is an in like, it's a it's a massive shift, because I think people are way more confident right now than ever before that they can find the next opportunity, whatever that might be for them. So let's shift gears a little bit, talking about money. What, like, when you, you had the mission for the company, you wanted to give people brain food, easy access to bring food

in it showed up in the IQ bar? So how has the revenue growth or just money played into you growing this company? Like, did you have clear goals when you said like, I'm gonna, you know, we're gonna hit our first six figures, seven figures, whatever. How's that challenge for you? I wish I had a more elegant response to that. I had no idea. I had no response. At the early outset, certainly I've no idea because it's just an idea. And you're

like it, you don't even know if the idea is validated. Right? So we did. And you just you get better at predicting stuff as you get more data points. So you know, with the crowdfunding campaign, we sold between Kickstarter and Indiegogo, about $90,000 worth of product and service. Okay. You know, that's like almost six figures. We did that a couple months ago. Okay, we could, if we really executed, we could be like a seven figure

a year business, like pretty quickly. And, and then, you know, once we in our first full year, which was 2019, we did just over 2 million in revenue, and right, okay. 2 million in revenue, here's our footprint, we've only exploited this percentage of the market. You know, we're resonating in these areas, like how much bigger can we be in those areas like, and effectively, it's that but also critically on the cash front, it's like, we live in a, I operate in a cash intensive

business and inventory intensive business. So you know, bit, you have to bake in like, your cash on hand, all of all of those desires and projections and whatnot. And so it's, it's the coupling of like, what could we do? And then like, what do we have the cash to do? And that's become more and more and more and more important, because, again, in a tough supply chain context, you're buying more stuff earlier. And so you're outlaying more cash earlier, and every production run we do is

the biggest one we've ever done. And so, and you're not living in, we're not a jewelry company, right? We don't have 90% margins. So if you're in like a 3040 50% margin game, and you're, you're buying tons and tons of tons of inventory, and every inventory buys the biggest you've ever done. Yeah, you start needing to get really creative in terms of financing.

So, so yeah, so I mean, our rough goal is to double every year, top line, and so are quit and you know, that's partially arbitrary, partially based on just what we've been able to do. And, and so the question again, then becomes how do you do that? And more specifically, how do you finance that growth? Yeah, that's a great question. I'd love to know the answer to that, because we have listeners and some of our clients who are

in the same boat right now. I mean, is it a combination of working with your working with your banks, working with Angel investors working with? Cool, what's worked for you? I mean, so at the outset, it's it's certainly investors so you know, we we've we raised money from angel investors, and I would look The closest you can get to like bootstrapping, if that's even a real thing, the better. And so what's like,

right adjacent to bootstrapping, it's angel investing. And so Okay, find people who have money, you can write 1020 $30,000 checks, that's like phase one of the business and then scale until you get enough revenue. Where I mean, honestly, I would say, raise from angels as, as, take that as far as you can and down your company's lifecycle. Eventually, though, your, at least in my type of business, you're going to need,

call it 234 $5 million. But my sort of thinking has always been raised as little as possible to get us to the next milestone because you're obviously your valuation step change, you want to keep going up. And so each time you raise money, I'm gonna raise the cheapest money quote unquote, possible. But eventually, you get to a certain scale such that you can start getting more creative with with financing and non dilutive ways.

So there's a whole boom of non dilutive financing companies happening right now there's like clear coat, which is formerly known as clearbank, wave flyer. I mean, I get an email from one of them every day, right? It's like this booming market people trying to give money to people like me, but you have to get a certain scale to where they'll give you the money, and they'll give you enough enough money. And then so it's a combination of like, ret, that's generally termed revenue based financing.

So basically, they take a cut of your revenue on a weekly or monthly basis, and you pay down that principal of cash that they gave you. And then there's more traditional stuff like, you know, Small Business Administration loans, SBA loans, a bank line of credit. Those are all really tough to get as a if you're a company, that's if you go to Bank of America, and you say, hey, I want a $2 million line of credit. They'll say, Great, show me too profitable tax returns. And of course, he

said, Why don't have that? And they said, well, great, take a hike. And so it's very hard to get traditional lending. But you can, if you're smart about it, you can cobble together a number of different other funding sources. Yeah. Cool. Thank you, that was really helpful I'm sure for for a lot

of our listeners. So coming back to money. Um, when you look back at the trajectory of the growth of your business, did you hit Did you hit some income ceilings where you kind of plateaued for a while, or looking back, like any tips that you have on how to move through a plateau or an income ceiling? You know, we haven't really hit income ceiling, I mean, certainly you can hit, I wouldn't even call it a ceiling, because that I think there's still a lot of room to go, but

you can sort of start hitting a ceiling in a channel. But there's, there's a zillion ways to grow your top line, right? So one way is, okay, I'm gonna make a one one form factor thing. So maybe I'm RX bar, and I'm just going to go all in on bars. And I'm going to go all in on grocery and so I'm going to sell the whole foods and Kroger and yada, yada, yada, right? And you're gonna hit a ceiling there, you're gonna saturate

that vertical. But there's 50 other verticals, right. And so, now you've saturated grocery go to big box, Walmart and Target and Costco. Okay, we we did that. Okay, let's go to independence, like 10s of 1000s of independence, right? So, you know, in my experience, you know, what, you can saturate certain channels or come close to saturating or even not even, like coming close, saturate your growth just slows, right? If you want to keep a certain growth rate, you need to supplement

that in some way. So, there's really two ways to do that. Go into new verticals, or introduce new form factors, or that's how I think of things you might say, just introduce a new product type and attack that same vertical, right? Or you can do both at the same time, right? So for us, it's, it's, it's actually we are kind of doing both at the same time. So we started in bars right now we're moving into hydration stick packs. And so you can go back to the well, let's say the well is

Amazon, that's your vertical you're talking about. We'll just run back the same playbook with a new form factor and a new offering. Of course, it has to be coherent and your umbrella of products or services or whatever has to be coherent and make sense together. But if it's non cannibalizing, for example, you never drink a hydration drink instead of a protein bar. It's it's, it's all it's additive. So if it's not Whereas you might eat a bag of chips instead of running All right, so that's

partially at least partially cannibalized. So our sort of thinking is introduce new non cannibalizing foreign factors and run back the same strategy in the same channels. And you can go pretty damn pretty damn far by doing that. Yeah, thanks a lot of sentience. So what? So, in the next two years, how many products do you want to release, so you have the bar you have now it's hydration, what comes next, any. Um, so we're trying to be like a brain and body platform platform

is the buzzword in that context. So again, we want to create things that are non cannibalizing, they are ship friendly, they're not cold, change the shelf stable. They are long shelf life, minimum of one year shelf life. So we have a whole checklist of things. And so a third example might be for instance, instant coffee, right? So you never eat a bar instead of drinking coffee, and you never drink a hydration next, instead of drink of coffee. And so the goal is how do you attack

different parts of a person's day and saturate their day? So when people wake up, they drink coffee. And then when they need a snack, let's say they eat a bar. And when they go for their afternoon run, they need a hydration next, right? So how do you kind of wedge yourself in to their whole day? And so and then there's like sleep, right? So like, so many people now, like have a sleep strategies that will take melatonin until they take bedtime tea? Or that they'll do something to prepare

for, for sleep? So that's a whole other category we're interested in. Gotcha. Yeah. Got it makes sense. And I'm asking, you know, for our listeners to really think about, you know, how they expand because I think people can get Superstock really quickly. And I love what you said, the platform like, what's the platform? So for you the overall platform, it's really the overall health of someone and following them throughout their entire days. That's a great way to say it. All right.

So final say we have CEOs from all over, right all over the world, and in many different stages of business, and some have been listening for a long time, what's your best piece of advice for them in this? I would say interesting time, we're still in my best piece of advice for CEOs, I mean, I get it's a little bit trite. And it's a little bit over simplified, but be product obsessed, like everything. We're talking about revenue being downstream of offs, everything is downstream

of the products. So the I'm obsessed with this new concept of product lead growth, which is like a company like Slack, right? You use Slack, and then tell your friend, you're like, Hey, are you using this new thing? Slack, it makes communicating at work so much easier, or Calendly? Send them a Calendly. And they're like, Well, that was really easy. I'm going to start using, like, the product is so good that it's inherently viral. And people inherently want to promote it

themselves. So I live in a world of the standard world of customer acquisition cost versus lifetime value, the cheapest way to acquire customers, is to keep them and have them like the thing you sold them and talk about the thing you sold them. And so if you're looking at places to invest time and money, it's like, almost always product product product is like is where my mind goes because everything is downstream of that. Yeah, that makes so much sense. A really, yeah, product centric,

really focusing on on where it's gonna go next. I mean, it sounds like you know, you have a brilliant, no pun intended, you're a brilliant IQ bar. And it's, I can't wait to see what happens for you in terms of expansion. I just made the as I in terms of other podcasts, I think that would love to have you. So just where can we get it? So and I think it's something special for listeners if they want to get an IQ bar and try it out. Totally, totally. So our website is eat IQ bar.com ea T

IQ var calm. And so yeah, we made quantum 25 is a discount code that that listeners can use to get 25% off. And we're also on Amazon, if you prefer to shop on Amazon, if you're near a Walmart or Kroger or sprouts are Rite Aid pop in there. But the best part is definitely our website and quantum 25 be a discount for you. Cool, we'll put that in the show notes. So go to eat, eat IQ bar.com

Quantum 25 to get 25% off. Awesome. Well, thanks for hanging out with us and sharing your wisdom, your knowledge and we wish you an incredible rest of 2021 into 2022 and beyond. And we'll look for the bar out there. So thanks for being here. Likewise, thanks for having me.

And to our listeners. There's everywhere we appreciate you thanks for hanging out if you have a guest that you'd like me to interview send them our way at Ursula Ursula inc.co and or if you have topics you'd like me to talk about alright everybody that's it for this week make this your most epic month yet bye guys