entrepreneurship

Cricket Protein

Cricket Protein Bars: The Next Big Thing in Protein Bars?

In the world of protein bars, and manufacturers are coming up with new ideas to cater to the growing market for premium, healthy snacks. Beef protein bars, cricket-based protein bars, insect protein, and cricket flour protein bars – are all emerging trends that signal how dynamic this segment is becoming.

Talk-Commerce Ken Shenkman

The Real Kid in the Bulk Candy Store with Ken Shenkman

Have you ever felt like a kid in the candy store? Imagine if that was your day job! This week we interview Ken Shenkman, who has been running his family business since 1992 and is on BigCommerce.

Nestled in sunny South Florida, The Bulk Candy Store sees its staff as family and its customers as close friends. Bulk Candy Store has been helping celebrate memorable events with sweets and snacks since 1992. Every day is a celebration, and sharing those moments with the people we cherish is priceless. Whether you are ringing in the New Year or just gathering to make merry, the Bulk Candy Store has all of the sweet treats you need to make the special occasions of your life exceptional.

After all, Candy is Happy

@bulkcandystore

Perfect Peanut Butter Cup ??#bulkcandystore #candyishappy #colossalpeanutbuttercup #delicious #giantpeanutbuttercup #fyp #madetootder #foryoupage

? original sound – BulkCandyStore
Talk Commerce Reynaldo Santana

Help a Billion People with Reynaldo Santana

Do you want to have an impact on the world and do something to better it? Reynaldo Santana helps us understand the complicated maze of the Non-Profit Google Adword program and how he helps non-profits to better themselves through these online tools.

Reynaldo is a former tech executive with 10+ years of experience working from corporate to small-medium businesses, to non-profits and start-ups. Managing a budget of 30MM and teams worldwide. Reynaldo is a serial entrepreneur, investor, speaker, philanthropist, and author on a mission to impact 1 Billion lives by using what he has learned along his journey.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/reynaldoasantana/
https://www.impactannex.org/

Transcript

Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce today I have for Reynaldo Santana. He is an entrepreneur and the founder of Impact Annex. Reynaldo, go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you do in your day-to-day life and maybe one of your passions. 

Thank you so much, Brent, for having me here today and everyone for listening today.

Happy to so who is Reynaldo Santana? I am still one who was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts I’m a serial entrepreneur. Investor, I’m an author. I’m a motivational speaker for young people. I am second generation here in the U S my parents came from the Dominican Republic.

So are we going to that I do is new and the first one in my family is pretty cool. It’s like a journey or an adventure on everything that I do in life. So it’s pretty awesome. But aside from that my background 12 years working in the tech fields I used to live in Mexico, San Francisco, California.

I did some time in Florida and Columbia, Venezuela. So I’ve been everywhere as well. One thing that I also like to do and to share with everyone is that I’ve been playing the trumpet since the age of seven. So I’m a musician as a hobby and also. So I do love music a lot, and I love to travel, like to eat food.

You can consider me as a chubby guy. And you see me in the street, not that big, I’m a chubby guy, but if you read, come to Massachusetts, hit me up, happy to grab some sort of food or 

drink. All right. Yeah. Trumpet. I played trumpet in junior high and I still have my trumpet.

I was thinking about putting up on the wall behind me and I’ve played piano all my life. So two things had common already. The Minnesota twins have a large following in the Dominican Republic for their baseball players. And I think we have what towns for the wolves that is from there.

His family’s from Dominican Republic anyways. So true. I’ve been there a couple times. Done some work there anyways. So let’s get talking about Impact Annex. What is it, what do you do? 

 Within these past 12 years, I’ve had the opportunity to be a business owner myself and work for a few startups started my owner startup as well, worked for corporate small medium businesses.

So had a chance to really understand the different types of pain points that a different size or organization can have and understand how sales and marketing works as well. And actually wrote a book on 2016, it’s on Amazon, on catching up to millennials because technology doesn’t wait for anyone.

It keeps evolving over and over. And we have to keep adapting as business owners. That’s not easy, especially if you’re a different generation. So things are moving very rapidly. So in that book, I it’s explaining. The history of marketing sales and how that’s changed into this thing called inbound marketing which, people today are now creating a lot more content to be found and to build that trustworthiness with the consumers, because we can agree that consumers have also changed the way that they buy today.

There’s a lot of due diligence in the process now of buying a product or service beforehand. And people like to now go onto, Google or Yahoo or something to look up the person’s name or the company’s name, and look at reviews that there’s different types of checklists that we all do now naturally, before you buy something.

The idea of Impact Annex came about. It’s time that we normally understand that this is where things are going, but it’s also a shift in mindset. I went to business school, I’ve been a business owner. I worked in different businesses and it’s really the same thing where it’s pitch your product, pitch, your idea pitch sell push.

And then it becomes a knowing at some points and people would like to be pushed. And so I’m on a mission to impact 1 billion people out there. And with the message of you should give before you receive. And I’m sure some of us have heard that before from, our grandfather or grandmother or charger committee members overall.

And it’s true. If you get. First before you receive great things, come out of that. And that’s what impact is all about. It’s about giving free receiving, and I showed that mindset shift and I use different tools to help people thrive and be a thought leader and stand out. So going straight to the point, what is Impact Annex?

Is basically we in an organization. That helps organizations create a philanthropic arm to their business or to the organization. Now, does that mean basically let’s take a for-profit organization, for example. I would come speak to the owner and be like, Hey, what do you care about? What kind of causes that you really that’s close to you?

It can be the red cross. It can be, saving animals, saving children, you name it. What’s that special thing that’s close to your heart. And typically they’ll tell me what that is. And if they don’t know what that is, I can tell them, what have you ever thought about giving back to community by just teaching people?

or what you do for your for-profit. So rather than pitching and selling your service and products, why not teach people about your products and services and how you help people and what are the pain points that you’re trying to solve and become look and be like, huh? That’s a different angle.

What is, and so once we come down to, all right, so this is what we’re going to do. This is the cause that you’re going to focus on. I file and register a nonprofit. On their behalf, it can be in the U S or it can be in Canada. And once we have a nonprofit set up and once we have the. Targeted or, all set with agreed upon.

I tend to focus on a particular grant that many people don’t know about Brent, and that is that there’s the Google nonprofit program grant and Google provides nonprofits with $120,000 with Google ads. Every single year for a lifetime, which is remarkable. Number two, I found out that Google only works with one partner.

In this to validate nonprofits and their contexts when they’re a global organization. And if you don’t do that application well or correctly, you can get denied and you can no longer apply to Google which is unfortunate. And then number three is Google does, is they don’t provide good support on this.

I Their website is nice and shiny with testimonials and everything else. They tell the steps on how to do this, but it’s harder than you think it is. And all they have to offer is heavy documentation. I don’t know why, but that’s what it is. And we all know that this many people have lost many people out there who are not technical to understand these documentations.

So that’s where we come in as well. You can do it yourself or you can have us help you do this whole process. We have a hybrid model, which is a done for you. And you do it yourself as well. So we teach you there’s a video series and you can submit information to us. We can take a look at it and we’ll give it back to you to submit.

And you have weekly support from us and support is live on Facebook. And also we give you best practices that do’s and don’ts so they won’t interrupt your grants. And also how to scale up and optimize your ads. It can be found on Google and on the front page. Now for a for-profit you may be asking, oh, thanks.

So how does that benefit me? I By doing that, okay. I have a nonprofit now, what we’re going to as grants. The several things you can do you can test ads. $10,000 per month to test ads is enough money to make you dangerous. What does that mean, basically? You can test different markets, different age groups, races languages.

countries, nationwide different states. You name it. You can test different things out and whatever works. Take that and optimize and skill up right now. How do you make those, both those non-profit for-profit work together, right? I’m sure that’s one of the things you guys are thinking about right now, it’s basically when you have your nonprofit.

So for profit, for example, is Joe’s plumbing, right? We create this academy called Joe’s academy for plumbers and what Joe’s gonna do. On his nonprofit, he’s going to create courses. It can be webinars presentations, just teaching people about plumbing, overall plumbing.

One-on-one. And what’s great about it is that when people find you online on a nonprofit, they’re going to one have access to your content to learn for free. And in exchange, you’re going to have a. Some sort of contact form or some sort of a form that says, give me your first name, last name, email, and we’ll give you access to our content.

Great. As you grow that mailing list you can follow up and be like, Hey Brent. So I saw that you downloaded my my workshop on plumbing 1 0 1. I hope you loved it. If you need any information, let me know. Or if you’re interested in a partnership or a addition to help, here’s my website, Joe plumbing.com.

Happy to support. Great right. Ciao. And what happens is, I We go on YouTube. We go to school, you name it wherever we get educated naturally would tend to have a respect for that person. That’s teaching us something. We see them as my meastro, or professor or someone that’s just of high authority.

That’s teaching us and we’re learning from them. And somehow like to partner up with them where we trust them. And that’s what’s happening in the backend is that you’re building your brands. You’re building your trustworthiness. You’re doing good will you’re doing great for your community. You becoming a thought leader in your space, you stick out from your competitor

and people naturally want to work with you because you have that. Non-profit where you giving first. So that’s really the strategy behind it. Is your for-profit does this, your nonprofit does this and they both support each other. Now that’s just for profit, for nonprofits that are existing, you’re already halfway.

Which is we just help you apply for the grants and help you understand Google ads and how to optimize it so you can promote your mission, help fundraising and basically get out there worldwide. So that’s what we do at Impact Annex. 

I’m part of entrepreneurs organization. It’s a global network of entrepreneurs. There’s chapters in every city. There’s one in Boston. There’s one here in Minneapolis. We are using this grant. It is a non, it is five, I don’t know, five or something. Whatever’s and as a pure non-profit, there is no there’s no for-profit arm of EO.

It is effective on getting our goal is to get membership in our own local chapter. So I think what I hear you saying is that you provide the help for somebody that’s either already registered. Backing up, you would provide help. If somebody wants to create a nonprofit to helping them navigate some of those waters and creating it as that correct?

Yeah, we do all the fun administration on your behalf, in the U S or in Canada. Okay. 

Get you all set up and running. Perfect. I think the exciting part is, and a lot of people don’t know about this Google grant, this nonprofit grant for ads is that once you become that, that nonprofit you are eligible to apply for the grant and start.

Using the Google ad network for that. And I can say here we rarely ever even use up our $10,000 a month. It’s a lot of ads to run for for entrepreneurs for trying to get people to join an entrepreneurs organization. But I think you’re also right. It does give them an opportunity for people to test some of these things.

Even as a nonprofit to learn to navigate how Google works. I did do that Joe’s plumbing thing. And I went through all those, and then my wife said, no, just I’m hiring a plumber because there was water everywhere. I never, it never worked for me, but I know a lot of people are going to be able to do the DIY plumbing thing.

So maybe walk us through how you would take an existing nonprofit and help them with the Google part of it, or just getting them on to the ad network. 

Basically I actually had a workshop that we conducted three weeks ago for no 40 non-profits. It was great because I got to really understand what are the common pain points for these 40 nonprofits and a large majority of it was technical skills.

They were, non-profits already up and running and again, they also didn’t know about this Google nonprofit program even existed. Not only that, we walked through the steps and how to get this Google grant. And like I mentioned earlier, one of the things that’s getting through tech soup and once you get to tech soup, they give you this token that allows you to apply for this for the Google grant.

Now what some people could also miss out. Tech soup, they partner up with a lot of other large organizations, similar to Google, like Microsoft as well. And I’m on a tech suit website. They actually have a page for partners where you can look up all the partners that they work with, including Google.

And with this token that they give you only for 60 days to apply, you can use this token, to not only apply for Google, but all these other organizations, somebody give you free computers, they give you discounts and support and all sort of supplies that can be helpful for your nonprofit organization. We were short showcasing them that page of partners.

So they take advantage of that opportunities as well to support them. And then number two, it was understanding how Google non-profit program works overall because you’d be surprised how many people get the grant. And then two months later their account gets suspended or canceled because they didn’t know how to use it properly.

Like I mentioned, Google, they provide heavy documentation, but then to give you all the answers, they don’t give you a best practices and do’s, and don’ts that much. So we teach them not to enter a debit or credit card on the backend because that will interrupt the. We also show them the website policy that Google expects before they give you the grants.

Google has their expectations, making sure that it’s mobile friendly, making sure there’s no commercial activity or language on the website and a few other points there. That one has to go along that line. So we teach them to make, to make sure you go through that policy very well. And also we start teaching about.

Google ads can be very complicated for some folks, if you’re not really tech savvy. So we, create these videos to show them step-by-step how to use it. What each certain things mean, buttons, wordings what are keywords, so help them with the, define their keywords and also how to.

Use pixels to to track everything. Because if you know how to use a pixels and conversions, stuff like that, you’re able to cut track on all on your other social media platforms, how things work and attract the right people. Not just only on. So we do share best practices, so they don’t have to go through the headaches and they can get fast results less than 90 days and how to optimize their their ads.

Number four, we like to set up automation. We tend to use Zapier to do a automation things to make things easier for people. It can mean, Lee comes in, goes to your CRM and then it sets up a booking on Calendly. So all these automation things to make them much more efficient because sometimes if we don’t know about automation, we tend to hire more people and they can do those sort of roles.

Now there’s software that can allow us to scale up and do these sort of things. So we’d have to. Fund raise more money to find an additional marketing person. We like to save people money safe. People’s in terms of. And help them scale up and get to their goals a lot faster.

So that’s what we do for an existing nonprofit. 

I know that one thing in your bio, you said that you help serve underserved communities. You help with underserved communities. Maybe tell us about how you’re helping in that. And maybe why those underserved communities don’t have the kind of access that.

You’re a fortune 500 company that wants to do a non-profit would have, 

yeah. Happy to do that. So actually have a nonprofit here in the U S and a it’s called E S G housing Inc. Stands for environmental social governance. And our mission is pretty simple as to provide access to affordable housing

for low-income families and seniors. Now why is that important to me? Because I grew up in the projects. You could say, that’s the word we use it’s projects and I’m in Lawrence, Massachusetts. And I remember not having a lot of access to resources or education. I it was just me my family I, all I did was just, live there play game with the kids, really nothing else. I didn’t see any sort of, a lot of programs. Maybe I was too young. I don’t know. But what I do remember is, as I grown all these years and, diving into real estate and I’m still around these communities. And I have friends who live in these communities and they still give me their feedback and how things work.

People feel like they are, that the government is not working for them. And they show me around, so I created this this nonprofit, not because I’m also. But I’ve been in their shoes. I have friends who are in these projects. I have people who can’t find apartments I have on people who yes, they can find apartments, but also the too expensive.

And within my experience I’ve learned a lot about technology. I learned a lot about robotics 3d printing. And what I’m hoping to do with this nonprofit is to build a lot of affordable homes with a lot of green technologies and materials. That includes plastics instead of concrete and, create homes

under three months under six months, these are, that are very it’s going to change the game. I call it, the future of technology or future of construction. But it’s basically being able to build homes in a faster pace. Building homes that are safe building homes that have resources that needs access to education, access to programs nationwide.

So I’m gonna pause it, creating different partnerships to make that possible. So I’m serving those communities that are distressed and underserved, just how I grew up. Cause I know how it feels and I think today in America, there’s still a lot of opportunities, a lot of fems, other need, and a lot of communities that are still distressed.

And for those folks that are not in real estate these are called are call qualified opportunity zones, which are zones that need to be developed that the town or city they incentivize you to build schools shopping places, affordable homes, et cetera. And it also incentivizes the investors as well.

So overall that’s how I’m serving, serve communities. I grew up in and in other states is by creating affordable housing with these green technologies. 

That’s great. Yeah. And I think if anybody has traveled to other parts of the world and I’ll point out Venezuela as particular, that there are areas in south America where there’s different levels of economy and emergence.

I traveled to Bolivia quite a bit, and I know that their economy is completely different than Mexico or even Dominican Republic. So the closer you get to the U S things get a little bit better, but I think we as Americans we get notified or you don’t understand what the rest of the world lives and how they live and how lucky we are.

And then how many resources we have to help our fellow brothers and sisters to lift up and and move up. So I applaud you in that. 

Thank you Brent, that’s one thing that I am very appreciative of is I’ve been able to live in the Dominican Republic, live in Mexico, travel often to Columbia been in Venezuela.

And I’ve learned that there’s more to life than what we think and the different perspective that I’ve been through. And I seen, and I understand what hard work is. And I’m thankful that I grew up in, in my environment with my family, pretty humble. My wife is from Colombia from a third world and I’m humbled and blessed that I’ve had these experiences because it has made me who I am today.

Using Google Yahoo, just promoting things online. Practicing inbound marketing as well. So I think that a lot of potential to do good and to impact many people out there in many businesses. 

Kept me humble for sure. And blessed to have what I have today and being, raised here as an American, but it has opened up my perspective on the opportunities and where the need is and where we can provide help. ESG Housing Inc and Impact Annex. It’s just the beginning. I’m planting my seeds here in America to boot case studies to create some sort of long-term game here.

But my long-term goal is to expand to these countries that I visited, because I’ve seen that, they’re still countries out there that still do business face to face. They use radio ads, newspaper ads, they do WhatsApp promotions right on his communication apps. And. They’re all transforming into the digital world as well.

So they’re all beginning to, create online websites that creating inbound marketing techniques offers, right? They’re transforming this digital age and all this it’s going to be helpful for them, especially the Impact Annex $10,000 here for us is about 30, 40 million pesos in Colombia

and that can make a big impact for any business down there to be found on Google. Just think about, back when we got internet and we started having AOL and Google, anyone who knew the. Dot com era and was able to be on a first page of anything or just have a page. I You’re a thriving, I you’re ahead of the curve.

So that opportunity still occurs for other countries. And we’re about to provide that opportunity with this Google ad grants. So the hopes in the long-term goal is to expand to other countries and create more JV opportunities. And on the ESG housing, Don’t get me wrong. I already have people in Peru who want have 500 single homes to be built with these 3d printer machines.

So there’s the demand is growing there’s education. That’s still happening evolving. But I’d love to see how we can do more international work as we get. I’m trying to get my feet wet here in the us first, but the vision, the long-term goal, the feature, it’s going to be a beautiful thing. We’re gonna help a lot of people.

And I think achieving a goal of impacting 1 billion lives is a reality, and I can’t do it alone. I can only do it with everyone who has similar vision, who feels that energy through this podcast. And hopefully that we can connect at, in this podcast to make that dream into reality. 

And that’s great. So we have a couple of minutes left, so maybe tell, help people understand how they could get ahold of you.

What are the right people that that you’d like to talk to. And and 

yeah. Happy, thanks so much, Brent. For those listening, if you have an interest to learn more about Impact Annex if anyone has to look you up on Google, then you’re a great fit for us because this grant is for anyone that’s a, that can be found on Google.

So that can be a for-profit or non-profit, we’re happy to help you out. Just visit our website at www.ImpactAnnex.org that’s spelled ANNEX and browse around and any contact form you, you find there will lead up to me. We’ll have a half hour conversation. Just learn more about your current situation and and for those folks that are interested in learning more about ESG housing, Inc.

We have a website www dot ESG, housing.org, and we’re looking to, of course, any donners like the fund lights donate, happy to have you part of the family. And in terms of partners we’re looking for partnerships for developers, landlords former mayors or governors anyone that’s involved in QLZ which has qualified opportunity zones and any volunteers or potential community members like to join our team.

That’ll be phenomenal because then we can scale up very rapidly. We’d love to have people in different states because your, your town and city of situation more than I do. And we’re looking to scale up that way, where you can be an ambassador for ESG house Inc for your committee.

And you tell us, what’s happening what’s needs and let’s start building and helping your community and friends and family. Cause that’s what really it comes down to is making a win-win for everyone. Keep growing together. So that’s my my message to everyone today. And I, again, I appreciate Brent and everyone for listening today and let’s build up America together.

 I’ll put all the, I’ll put the links in the show notes so people can find those grade Reynoldo at the end of every podcast, I give you an opportunity to do a shameless plug go ahead and plug whatever you’d like to. 

Sure. I thank you so much, Brent, for the opportunity.

I guess my plug is Come to support ESG housing, Inc. I think that’s a big priority right now for many people is to find affordable homes. We’re all seeing prices are jacking up everywhere and it’s hurting. I had a friend last night, came over saying my budget is only $1,600. I can’t find a place I have to move up at the 14th, and it really hurts me that I really.

If I had, a few buildings, but dude, I’ll plug into this unit. Don’t worry about it. I’ll cover the first two months. Give yourself, on your feet, happy to help you out, bro. No worry about And that’s the organization that, or the community I’m trying to build here is.

Let us be your plan B or your plan A regardless we have your back. Which one thing I forgot to mention Brent, is we’re looking to within this model is to create an emergency fund so that every building that we create for families they’re all going to work interconnected. So all that cash.

Goes among all these buildings. So that let’s say the epidemic will happen again. Basically, and he can’t pay rent. We’ll take money from that fund to pay your rents until you’re back on your feet. That also includes providing little to free internet in terms of it can be a low cost or it can be free internet, but we’re looking to pay people’s bills when it comes to internet, because we want might not be the issue here.

We want you to have access to these resources and There is 

right. 

So it’s I think people make it over complicated. I think many people sometimes it can be ego. It can be just about money, but I’m trying to take away all those roadblocks and just really help people leave. Both all the way and start doing start executing.

Because I think we have a power to do great things here if we put our minds to it. And if you work together, so that’s my plug a little bit long, but basically supporting us at ESG housing. There you 

go. No, that’s fantastic. Thank you so much for being here. And again, I’ll put all the links in the show notes.

Reynoldo Santana the. Yeah, Gusto. Great. Have a great afternoon. 

Thank you.

Talk-Commerce Taren Gesell

A Better App for Coaching with Taren Gesell

Business owners and entrepreneurs are known for their energy. They focus on their ideas but frequently, that energy is sedentary. Brent interviewed Taren Gesell or better known as Triathlon Taren. Taren went from an Ironman and Youtube sensation to a tech startup with an exciting and disruptive app called MoTTIV. This virtual coaching app helps athletes focus on what they need to focus on while still giving them the flexibility to live their busy lives. Taren is through the beta version and is into his first round of funding. There is a lot to learn and much to unpack in their episode.

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. This is the activity edition, and I have Taren Gesell Taren go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you do in your day-to-day life and maybe one of your passions. 

Taren: Thanks for having me here, Brent. Thing that people would best know me for. If they look me up online would be this YouTube channel that I started about seven years ago called triathlon Taren.

Taren: And I started a YouTube channel while I was an investment advisor as my day job, because I just wanted something on the side that was fulfilling and creative. And I thought that if I really knocked it out of the park, maybe I could get some free energy bars at some point in my life. It ended up growing to being now the second largest triathlon YouTube channel in the world, the largest triathlon podcast in the world, we’ve published four books.

Taren: We have expanded into the main thing that we focus on now where I’m the CEO of a. Called the motive training app that helps regular people get to their endurance races. So whether they want to train for triathlons or running races or cycling events, or do Athlons, we have an app that now is hopefully as good as a one-on-one coach, but as cheap as doing it yourself, which has never existed in this world.

Taren: And we want to make getting to those exciting finish lines that endurance sports really are. A little bit more accessible in the world. 

Brent: That’s great. Thank you. And I will admit that I found you because I’m a triathlete. I’m a a very poor triathlete I’m free, very poor swimmer. I’m an avid runner.

Brent: And I’m an okay. Biker. I think I saw one of your videos. we did our first to half Ironman last year as a family, my daughter, my wife and I. It was one of the best experiences I had absolutely so much fun and I’ve run a lot of marathons. It took me longer, believe it, or not than a marathon.

Brent: But I had so much fun in the race and even the swim part, I had such a great time. That’s how we found each other. One of the things that, that really stuck out was the fact that you’ve pivoted from. This role of being a coach or what you were doing with your YouTube channel into this app that you’ve built.

Brent: Maybe tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So 

Taren: I recognized that life on YouTube is a little fleeting. You get about 15 minutes of fame and there comes a point where your channel maybe just starts to feel a little stale. Maybe in my case, I’ve said a lot of the same things for seven years. I’m also getting older and a lot of YouTubers find that.

Taren: Their channel lifespan is finite. So I recognize that was happening about four years ago, just in general in the YouTube space. And I didn’t want to go back to having a real job. I wanted to still stay in this industry and think about what could I do that would be lasting as a career, as a business and what was needed in the world.

Taren: And I saw one of the things that people need the most help with is coaching and advice to get to their finish lines. But what I saw was the two options that are out there for people that want to get advice on how to train for an endurance event is either a $200 a month one-on-one coach or a free template training plan.

Taren: Both options suck for most people because the average person doesn’t want to spend two to $3,000 a year or more on a hobby just for coaching, let alone all the biking equipment and the wetsuit, and it just gets to be too expensive. So most people don’t use one-on-one coaching and then template training plans are not motivating.

Taren: They’re not relevant to the user. They’re not customizable. And what happens if you have two races in a row and you’ve got a marathon and a triathlon and the training overlaps, what do you do with those template training plans? And nobody’s ever looked at solving this problem. So we launched a Kickstarter, but three and a half years ago to see if people were interested in something like this app.

Taren: And I sold the Kickstarter campaign, literally just off of a Google spreadsheet that I mocked up to prototype my way into showing what an app could possibly do. And now three and a half years later, we’re finally scaling up. We’re raising our first significant round of investment. And I think that we can build something that

Taren: is comparable to what Duolingo did for language learning. That’s what we want to do for endurance training. We want to make it something that isn’t a real niche sport. We want to make it something that everyone can access because it’s easier to get solid training and more cost-effective to get solid training, which it hasn’t ever been.

Taren: So that’s what we’re working on right now. That’s the future of the business of my YouTube channel. And I’m really just trying to make sure that I prove my mother wrong and continue to play for a living. And the app was the way that, that I could continue to do that while having a good effect in the endurance community.

Brent: I love that story. I know myself personally, I do have a running coach who helps me and holds me accountable. And I do see though that where you can get stuck in a rut, even with a coach. What are some of the pain points that your app has been able to overcome in bridging the gap between a training peaks, 80/20 plan and a one-on-one coach.

Brent: And I’ll say to, mine’s just a running coach and I know that there’s a lot more involved than a triathlon coach. 

Taren: That is actually a perfect example of one of the biggest problems. Most users of our app. And frankly, most endurance athletes are like you, they want to bounce between marathons or half marathons and triathlons.

Taren: And the fact of the matter is that most one-on-one coaches are single sport coaches they’re run coaches or triathlon coaches or cycling coaches, and they don’t go across all disciplines. So that’s an issue that we have to solve with our. We partnered with some of the best run cycling, triathlon duathlon, swim, run coaches in the world and created algorithms to make the plans that each of those great coaches put together coordinate with each other.

Taren: So that was one problem that we had to solve a second one is that there are a lot of really great one-on-one coaches out there, but there’s also a lot of really terrible one-on-one coaches out there who charge $200 a month and essentially make a template training plan. And the story that a lot of people resonate with is they might go to their one-on-one coach, wake up in the morning and go, Hey, Carl, I feel really bad.

Taren: What should I do today? And Carl, the coach goes this is part of training, continue on. And he’d go I really feel bad. There are going to be low moments in training, continue on, and really what’s happening is the coach doesn’t know what’s going on in your body. And the coach doesn’t want to go through readjusting your plan every single time you have a ache or a nigle or feel a little bit tired, what we can do with technology.

Taren: And now the data that is being collected by things like the Whoop band and the Aura Ring. We can adjust training every single day. If users drink a bottle of wine, we can make their workout the very next morning, easier for them. If they’re trending down and not keeping up with the train and feeling sore, we can detect that and actually get training that is better than a lot of one-on-one coaches and doing the things that really good one-on-one coaches do.

Taren: The ones that will charge three, five, $1,500, but we’re doing it in a way that we can charge 14 to 20 bucks a month. So there were a couple of major problems that we had to solve. And those two are the primary ones that weren’t really being serviced, even by most one-on-one coaches with the current service model.

Brent: I just I’m pretty sure my wife now is signed up for your app because she does drink a bottle of wine with me every night. And that’s probably why she’s getting up in the morning, thinking that she can take it easy and I’m joking. Cause she’s probably going to listen to this. I think from experience, I can say I did go through the coaching training last year with RRCA, the Roadrunners club of America.

Brent: And that was one of the warnings that they give coaches. I know also that coaches either haven’t been through that training can fall into that rut of not listening and especially right now with online and not even actually seeing anybody in person, you end up with somebody that’s in a different city that doesn’t connect with you or never has connected with you.

Brent: From what I’m hearing is that there’s some technology behind that says listening to your body and is there a certain amount of technology that the user has to have to be able to. W like you’d have to have I have a stride pod and I have a power pedals. I’ve all the dumb things that somebody with enough money can buy that doesn’t ever use all that data.

Brent: But what I’m hearing you saying is that some of those things are of value and they add that value and then you can get back and like my Garmin account is a great example. I can go and see what my power was or my FTP was in my bike ride. I have no idea how to use any of that stuff I should because I’m a coach.

Brent: But I don’t know how to use that for myself. So not to get into a bunch of technical details on an e-commerce podcast, but it’s very interesting on how it’s almost like in AI, like in artificial intelligence, helping the users to know, and then the system is learning as it goes for each one.

Taren: That’s a big issue that you’re talking about with the entire industry that we’re collecting heart rate data, we’re collecting power data. We’re collecting HRV data now, resting heart rate data, all of these things and the Garmins, the Whoop, the auras of the world. They all basically just collect the data and then tell you all here’s what it is, but nobody really is interpreting it and saying, here’s what you should be doing. Whoop is a great example. I liked the whoop band, but they say here’s your readiness score. And if your readiness score is in the tank. Great. Okay. What are you doing? Does that mean that you change your workout?

Taren: When does it mean? Like how in the tank does it need to be to change your workout? So that’s what we’re able to do is pair a lot of that data with what you actually should be doing as an endurance athlete on the day. And that’s a big piece that’s been. 

Brent: I want to pivot a little bit of just, the, maybe our listeners our business owners who are sitting in there at their desk.

Brent: Maybe talk about you. If you’re not already really into doing some fitness things. The importance of doing something other than just typing on your computer. Do you ever ever get stuck in not going and doing some exercise? Are you a type of person who has to get out and do something in addition to doing your day to day business work?

Brent: No. 

Taren: I came from a very unfit upbringing and a very, even add a few more varies, unfit early twenties in my life. Lot of drinking, I was quite overweight, about 215 pounds. And I got rid of a little bit of weight in my mid twenties by going into the gym and throwing some weights around and eating chicken breast and bland rice, the things that young kids do when they think that they’re bodybuilders.

Taren: But there were a couple of things about it that were never quite right. And I think are very meaningful to the average person, whether they’re a business owner or really just anyone who wants a little bit more from life, that feeling that you talked about when you stepped up to a start line of a triathlon being different than stepping up to the start of a race, I think

Taren: running races, really fulfilling that feeling of little bit of fear of not knowing if you’re going to be able to accomplish the task ahead of you being a triathlon or a long running race or a marathon swim or something like that. (A), it gives you a lot of structure and motivation to be healthy. And (B) it gives you a lot of fulfillment.

Taren: When you complete that task, it’s like selling a business or achieving a huge milestone in the business. It’s going through a process of seeing what you are capable of doing. And being able to do it and astounding yourself. And in my case, it made me more confident. It allowed me to start this business.

Taren: It allowed me to have the confidence to put myself out there on YouTube and put my thoughts out there in the world. So it’s less to me about, alright. Do you age? Because so many people talk about that, but I think the unsung hero in endurance sports. Is the confidence and fulfillment and structure that you get from that little bit of fear of knowing that you have to step up to the start line of a race and not know if you’re going to be able to finish it.

Taren: And frankly, the things that are going on inside your head at the start of the race, are am I going to come out of this alive? Yes, the answer is for sure, you will but it’s exciting. And we don’t really get that excitement in this day and age anywhere we can get it in endurance sports. 

Brent: Yeah. And maybe not so much excitement from a marathon.

Brent: Although if you’re in a the excitement going into a triathlon because you, even if like I’m from Minnesota, so Northern Minnesota, there’s some races and in the summer, those lakes. Dark sometimes and it’s gets, it gets imposing when you’re going across a white cap to lake and you’d have to go out a mile and come back or something.

Brent: So the structure that you said is what I really want to key in on, because I think most entrepreneurs or business owners have to have some kind of structure or they just wing it. And the ones that wing it are unbelievably lucky to make it. And when they do make it, they have to put some structure into it.

Brent: So I think that by doing some of these things to get fit, and let’s just say, all you want to do as a couch to 5k. That structure you’re putting into place. And that goal you’re setting to get there is going to be (a) fulfilling and then the fulfilling the next piece of that fulfillment is that most likely you’re going to be a little bit more fit at the end of that goal.

Taren: And you’re going to change how you feel about yourself. I use the example that I’ve just recently come across, while we’re doing fundraising as opposed to going the traditional venture capital route. We are going to individuals. And we could talk about another time about why we’re doing that, but I’m looking for individuals who are endurance athletes and could write a decent sized check. And I started thinking, how do I actually go about finding these people? I say, can I just search for them? So in quotes, I have triathlete in quotes and then LinkedIn, and then president in quotes. And sure enough, the amount of people that have triathlete or ultra runner or ultra marathoner in their LinkedIn bio is enormous.

Taren: That doesn’t happen with golf. Maybe with CrossFit, but there are very few things in this world that become a part of who you are and that people want to celebrate and display to the world in the same way that endurance sports gets displayed an advertised. And I think that’s because it is such an impactful thing in people’s lives.

Taren: So yes, again, all of the good health is great, but the confidence, the fulfillment, the structure of having a reason to be healthy it’s all so powerful. And I want more people to be able to experience that sort of power of changing and improving one’s life. 

Brent: I think that fear part is another one that’s always a fear in a good way. The fear of trying something new and the fear of failing and even the acceptance of, Hey I’m going to go out and do this swim, let’s just say, you’re going to sign up for a 5k swim. And if I don’t make it, there’s going to be a boat there to pick me up.

Brent: If the weather gets big and I know there’s a swim, like the Point to LaPoint is one I want to do it’s from Madeleine island to to wherever across Lake Superior, two miles, and last year they had three foot waves. So a lot of people had to dropout, but just the idea of doing it and stepping in and making that extra effort to put yourself out of what your comfort zone is.

Brent: I think makes you a better entrepreneur because in your entrepreneurial life, in order to grow, you can’t be stagnant and always doing the same thing. And I believe there’s such a tie-in from being active in your physical life to being active in your mental life, to being active in your business life.

Brent: They all tie together and I think you’re right. And I’m going to say something that would probably get a lot of people upset. I don’t like CrossFit. I don’t see the big point in CrossFit. You’re standing in a place. And then you might do a hundred yard run. I run past a CrossFit gym and I see them sprint out and they come back and they sprint back and maybe I’ll run five miles down the trail and come back and they’re still sprinting out and whatever.

Brent: But the the idea of that identity and then the idea of of being able to put yourself into somewhere that you’re uncomfortable. And maybe the, one of the differences too, from the gym to an ultra race is that you’re putting yourself into somewhere uncomfortable for a really long time.

Brent: So your half Ironman is more like three hours. Mine is more like six, but that’s, you’re still out on the course a long time. 

Taren: But 

Brent: close, you could be. Who’s the guy that just got the world record. He did his full Ironman in less than seven hours. Yeah. 

Taren: Yeah. Blumenfeld they’re in 7:21 crazy.

Brent: Only the Norwegian can do such things. Exactly so I can see the tie in, I’m a big proponent of keeping people active and my business life has been around having some balance between that. So maybe if you could bring us back to your app, then you’ve transitioned from your YouTube into this app, and now you’re trying to raise capital, that’s where you’re at in your business. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about, are you in a beta? where are you on your app now? 

Taren: So we launched three years ago, a little bit over three years ago and it was in beta for about a year and a half. The beta was public, and because I was still doing the YouTube channel and have this nice big audience.

Taren: We were always able to drive a certain amount of users to it, enough users that we could start getting data and collecting user feedback on where we needed to go with the app. And then a year and a half ago, we rebrand. We rebuilt the entire app, a completely new architecture, completely new programming language so that we could scale the app because we had grabbed enough, got enough data from our users to have an actual business thesis of what would scale up, what are users looking for? Things as simple as like you mentioned AI, we started doing a lot of market testing of what do athletes think when they hear that their plans are generated by machine learning or artificial intelligence.

Taren: It’s actually a detriment. So learning things like that is important that isn’t to say that we won’t use AI. It just means that we don’t lead with it and our marketing. So learning all the things like that, about what increases engagement, what is a good price to come in at? What is a way to make people feel that the app is working and that they actually develop confidence so that by the time they get to the race,

Taren: they’re confident that they’re going to be able to get across that finish line. So we’ve been gathering all of that for three years and we bootstrapped all, but us small little friends and family round that we raised at the beginning of last year, but now it’s time to start unrolling some of the features that we think are fairly groundbreaking in the industry, and we don’t want to do those

Taren: slowly, we don’t want to do those in a bootstrap fashion and basically announced to the world what the playbook is. We want to be able to come out, grab market share, because we’ve probably got about a 24 to 36 month window before competitors catch onto what we’re doing. And we want to use that to aggressively launch the feature set that we want to create and capture market share quickly.

Taren: So that’s where we’re at right now. 

Brent: Are you seeing a community as an important part of the experience from the user? And I say it from, I used to use an app called the daily mile. It was something that was super popular 10 years ago. They just really put no money into their app and it just ended up fizzling out.

Brent: But the best part of that is that it created a community. And it was more about how your posts look. And I do remember my wife complaining like, oh, you’re going to go do your post about your run, because it was a social thing. And because you had people actually cared about what you’re doing, it turned into less 

Brent: Facebook, Hey, look at the marathon I did to here’s the marathon I did, or here’s my run and here’s the struggles I had, or here’s the exciting part about what I had. And it was a commonality in that community that you don’t get on Strava. Strava, you can give somebody a kudos or you say, Hey, great run but for whatever reason, there’s a piece that you miss in the social part of it. That’s between coaching and between support and it’s about your own people or your group of people that are supporting you in your activity.

Taren: So it’s interesting that you say that we launched on day one with a social media feed. And my core belief was that training for yourself and solely for yourself, wasn’t as fulfilling as training for yourself but with other people, that human element is something that is so hardwired into us, whether it is seeing success in other people and being motivated by it,

Taren: or achieving success in yourself and getting those kudos or the accolades from achieving something that you never achieved before, is really important. And I look at an app like Zwift, so people don’t know Zwift is a training app where you hook your bike up to a smart trainer. And the smart trainer communicates with the app and you cycle inside this virtual world alongside other people now had Zwift launched and you biked around this virtual world by yourself.

Taren: It would be marginally better than staring at a wall or watching Netflix while you’re on your bike. But not immensely better, but the experience that Zwift launched with was you cycle inside this virtual world. And so is everyone else. So when people pass you, you have an encouragement to go a little bit faster and you can enter a race and there’s people all around you.

Taren: You get ride ons from everyone that is riding around you. There are achievements and badges that you can go and collect. The other people get to see how far along you’ve come. And then all of a sudden it’s immensely better than just training by yourself, staring at a wall. So our competitors and where the industry of online endurance training has gone is really just creating that virtual world where people are training by themselves.

Taren: The problem that they’re all trying to solve is how do we automate training? I can tell you we’ve already solved, automated training. And it isn’t enough to change people’s habits. So our entire scale up thesis is we’ve already automated training. We’ve figured out all of that logic and that programming language to be able to make that happen.

Taren: But how do we actually make it such that all of the users have this community experience? They get some of those good things from CrossFit or from a in-person training club. That sense of community is really what keeps people around and keeps people very motivated to continue to come back. So it is the entire thesis of our business, that community aspect of it, without that we’ve just got empty training that people are doing solo and suffering by themselves.

Brent: How. So just I apologize. I should have used the app before I came to the interview. I apologize for that. How I’m not if you’ve sparked my interest. I’ll give you an example, right? So I’ve been injured and I haven’t been running for about a week. And so I’ve switched to biking.

Brent: And so my coach has a running coach. So now she’s given me some biking workouts that I actually, I find quite fun. But because I’m on and I’m on Rouvi, which is just like Zwift, but you get to play. Can I get the bike in Hawaii all the time now? So w what happens to me is. I see that person, then I’m like, I can bike as hard as that person.

Brent: And then I, my easy days, I find myself biking way harder than I should. So if I get I’ve told I bike between a hundred and 150 Watts or whatever, I’m at 200 or 250 or some stupid number that, and I’m no that, I know these are very small numbers for you, but That I’m overdoing myself. And then, I don’t get a lot of feedback after that.

Brent: So would the, would like your app would give you an opportunity to say, Hey, ease back or 

Taren: yeah, our app will give people not any sort of strict guidance where people will be. Say penalized for not following the app to the letter. I think that people need enjoyment. They need to be able to have some free play time, essentially where they can go.

Taren: And if a workout says 60 minutes, but they’re feeling great and want to go for 90 cool where we will start giving people guidance is when they start going off the training plan too many times, be it in the intensity or in the duration or in what they’re actually doing in the workout. We will have indications of you might be less likely to reach your goal. So we will give that guidance of being able to do that. And it will not necessarily motivate people to only follow the plan, which I don’t really believe is reasonable. It’ll give people motivation and guidance to maybe not just fall too far outside the rails.

Taren: And have a bad race day. As long as they’re keeping a hard ride, hard, an easy ride, relatively easy most of the time, strength days are still strength. Days. Rest days are still rest days. People are going to still reach their goals. And we want to give that latitude while we’re giving the a hundred percent guidance, but give them the ability to

Taren: make smart choices make adult choices. If you want to go and turn a 60 minute easy ride into a 60 minute easy ride with 15 minutes, really hard at the end, we’ll tell you if that is becoming detrimental. 

Brent: Yeah. So at the macro level, rather than trying to micromanage the individual workouts, it sounds like what you’re saying, which is, I think that’s a great approach to how you’re doing that.

Brent: And as we tied this back to business, Often entrepreneurs tend to get stuck in the details of a thing and they can’t see the bigger picture. So as we bring this full circle, tying it back into a business standpoint, or even in your app standpoint, if you were to focus on some small bits of code and you’re missing that picture of community or something like that, you’re missing the big picture.

Brent: You’re going to miss out on what your goal is going to be. 

Taren: Yeah, exactly. Whether it is training or what we’re building say with our analytics dashboard. I like what you’re talking about, that we’re looking at large, big indicators of the health of an individual or the health of your business, as opposed to fussing about all of the very, very small minute details.

Taren: I think the small minute details are things that you do need to work on. We’re obsessing right now about the time that it takes people to get through our signup flow. But the reason that we started looking at that was because we started looking at larger numbers, is our churn too large for our.

Taren: For the amount of people that we’re bringing in. And if the answer is yes. Okay. Where are the leaky buckets? Yeah, as opposed to getting stuck in the weeds of every single detail, just focusing on the big picture numbers, which then led us and me in fitness and in business to starting to narrow down what weeds we look at after looking at the big picture.

Brent: Not to keep harping on it, but that idea of having those metrics in place and measuring it and remeasuring it and testing it. It’s exactly the same across both business and exercising and training for an event. If you don’t measure something you’ve done, you’re not going to know if you’ve achieved that goal.

Brent: That’s obvious in a running race, but in business sometimes. And I’ll take marketing as an example. A lot of times people just think marketing is marketing and I going to put some social media posts up and I’m going to do a post on LinkedIn and that’s my marketing and whatever happens there.

Brent: I’ll spend $5,000 on Google ads and we’ll see what happens. I don’t know. And then they don’t look and see how well they performed. So I think to tile this back even the idea of looking back at your your workouts to see how well you performed, it’s always good to to have a measurement or a commonality in that measurement.

Brent: The motivation is like the Google analytics. Could I say of of the running triathlete world and that those analytics are telling you certain things about your fitness and your training. That’s bold step. 

Taren: Maybe I thought about it that way, but as you were saying, that one thing that came to mind was a big thing that we believe in with our method of endurance training is taking care of the entire body, looking at

Taren: every system, as important as all of other, the other systems that isn’t the case with most sports that people do, whether it’s CrossFit and focusing basically entirely on strength and explosive power or yoga focusing exclusively on nothing but being flexible or running and cycling, focusing on being aerobically fit, most sports tend to leave out the rest of every other system.

Taren: What we like to do is look at the digestive system, the musculoskeletal system with strength, training, the heart and the lungs, the cardiovascular system with the aerobic training. And how do we get a training app and a training philosophy to address all of those together because they all do need to work together.

Taren: If you don’t have a healthy heart and lungs, but you’re super strong. Hey, you might be able to run really fast to the end of the block, but you’re not going to be able to run any further than that. Vice versa for people who are really aerobically fit, but not very strong. I look at marketing as exactly the same thing that it’s not enough just to buy some Google ads.

Taren: You have to buy Google ads and then retarget people on Facebook. You have to not just have Google ads, but then you also have to have content. So content marketing, when people come to your website, if they don’t sign up. If people end up maybe signing up for the app, then you have to start thinking about how good is the onboarding flow that the entire system of marketing and of business has to be looked at as a whole, in the same way

Taren: that the body has to be looked at as an entire system. And if you’re just focusing on one thing, I don’t think you’re really going to get great results in fitness or business. It’s got to be looked at as this entire cohesive system. 

Brent: That’s great. Yeah. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Brent: So we have a couple minutes left. At the end of the podcast, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug, but anything you’d like to plug today and go ahead and plug whatever you like. 

Taren: The app would be the biggest thing. And I’m not saying that endurance sports is the key to everyone’s happiness, but if people feel a bit of a sense of unfulfillment and want to challenge themselves physically, I can’t think of a better place to do it,

Taren: but in endurance sports, because it is so fulfilling. It’s so rewarding. When you have a well-designed endurance sports training plan it does address your heart health, your lung health, your strength health, your mental health, your emotional health your digestive health. All of those things should be addressed in a really well designed training plan.

Taren: And when you cross that finish line, you’re going to be really happy that you challenged yourself. So I think we have one of the best offerings of any endurance sports app in the world right now. And it’s only getting better. This is the year that we’ve been building up towards over the last three years.

Taren: So I’m really excited for everyone that’s on the app. And if people sign up over the next couple of months, they’re going to see a lot of things that start getting rolled out with all of our features over this year. 

Brent: Yeah. And I would just add on that. Now as races start opening up and the world starts getting back to normal, this is a great time to train for a race, to sign up for a race, to do a race and apps like yours, help people to track and build those habits that then turn into

Brent: something that is part of your lifestyle. And I think there’s always a joke about, how do you know if somebody is a marathon runner? They’ll tell you. How many marathons, how do you know how many they’ll tell you? So you just, like you said, in the LinkedIn example, it’s part of their persona.

Brent: I’ll have to look at my LinkedIn. I don’t know if I say I definitely my Twitter. I tell you how many marathons I’ve run. I’ve run five majors. I only have one left, which is Tokyo 2023. They’ll tell you what those are. This is a great way to get into those habits and build healthy habits.

Brent: My dad is 83. He ran until he was 75. She still tracks his miles walking. He’s his goal is 700 miles a year walking this still. It. It is well documented that being active is better than being sedative and as much as much fun at it as is sitting on the couch, watching Netflix, drinking beer, and eating Cheetos it is equally as fun and free in some people’s minds, either, biking for 56 miles or 112 miles, and then running a marathon.

Brent: And by the way, before, I’m starting that I’m going to swim for a two miles. Yeah. A little warmup. So you know that there’s an equal amount of like in both of those, for the type of people. Some of those behaviors are learned behaviors and you don’t have to do a marathon. You can do 5ks. And there’s an incredibly amount of fulfillment in doing a sprint triathlon.

Brent: And my whole family is into sprint triathlons and it’s now turned into a family thing that we do together. I’m just going to go back to having that place to track those habits is so important because you know how well you’ve done.

Taren: Then having a community of other people who are also going towards similar goals, the community is very important that without a community around you, to support you, things are going to be really hard without a community around you to celebrate your wins. Things are also going to be really hard, the community aspect of things, sharing in other people’s successes and other people sharing in yours, it makes it so much more fulfilling that’s when you start getting the people that have triathlete in their LinkedIn bio, because it becomes part of their identity.

Taren: And it’s not to say they can’t ever have beers or pizza or Cheetos or whatever it is, but you can offset that a little bit by doing something for 60 minutes in the morning, challenge yourself and feel really good for the rest of the day and really proud of what you did every single day and string a few days like that together

Taren: and you’re going to be able to step up to a start line that you never expected you to be able to do. 

Brent: Terran Gesell. I thank you so much for being here today. I will put the links to your app in the show notes so people can go there and sign up. And I look forward to someday participating in a race with you, maybe the half Ironman in Kona.

Brent: Yeah, what’s ed life is 

Taren: getting back to normal. We gotta start thinking about that again. This is awesome. 

Brent: Absolutely. 

Taren: Thank you Brent. 

Brent: You’re welcome.

Talk Commerce Tim Williams

Coaching and the Entrepreneurs’ Journey with Tim Williams

Youth don’t stop playing sports because they lose a game, they stop because they have a bad experience while playing. We interview Tim Williams about his journey as an entrepreneur, his company, and his approach to youth sport.

Tim is the Founder and CEO at T.WILL Sports, a dynamic sports company that delivers a variety of youth, recreational, and competitive sports services. He focuses on youth sports and takes pride in the ability to educate through sports and the experiences that come with sports.

Tim is also a motivational Speaker at T.WILL Sports with a goal to help parents and coaches to inspire greatness within youth.

T.WILL Sports focuses on youth sports and takes pride in the ability to educate through sports and the experiences that come with sports. 

Talk-Commerce Kison Patel

Navigating Mergers and Acquisitions with Kison Patel

With so much technological disruption, it is important to stay relevant and I can think of no better way than merging, acquiring, or being acquired. However, these transactions fail because critical deal processes such as diligence and integration, are being poorly conducted without proven success techniques.

We interview Kison Patel, CEO, and Founder of M&A Science. As a former M&A advisor, he has seen these challenges first hand and set out to develop tools and techniques that address industry failings and enable M&A practitioners to drive growth and maximize value.

Transcript

All right. Welcome to this episode of talk commerce. Today we have Keyson Patel Keyson is the CEO and founder of M and a science. Keyson tells us a little bit about what you do from a day-to-day standpoint and maybe one of your passions in life. Hey, thanks, Brent pleasure. To have this conversation with.

W as CEO of MNA science, we run a business. That’s pretty much all things. I’m an a, we provide education, training, resources, frameworks, and also software products to help manage them in a process and make it smooth as you can. It tends to be complicated when you have hundreds, if not thousands of people that are going through one of the largest magnitudes of change management that can possibly happen in the business.

And trying to do that without having them get pissed off and quit their job.

Yeah. And I, in our green room, we did, we talked a little bit about, some of the, some of what I’ve gone through with selling a company and then integrating and still being on board with the leadership. So maybe we could talk about a little bit about what does it mean to merge and what does it mean to acquire, and is it really a difference anymore?

I don’t think there’s such thing. I think there was a thing and there’s some type of a financial vehicle around it. But today now, because I then have the day one management team takes control of the other management team. So it’s essentially is an acquisition one way, how you look at it or another, I feel like the merger part is more of the PR placement, trying to make it cute and friendly to the public.

But Publix wise, they know what M and a is. And I think everybody at this point has this. That it’s a change of control. Yeah. And I think if you think from an accountability standpoint there has to be somebody who is accountable and suddenly you can’t have two parties that are accountable.

You have to have at one at ultimately there has to be one at the end. So when you’re bringing on somebody or you’re talking to somebody about a mergers and acquisition or an acquisition, do you come down through a bullet point list of here. Here’s the things you should be worrying about and here’s there, here’s the things you should be upfront about.

And maybe you could walk there from a high level standpoint, walk us through that process. You can look at it from either side, the buy side or the sell side is probably one of the big dividers of this whole conversation. Then from there you can get a much better sense of what you need to focus on to make things.

I think a lot of the big things, when you think about the buy side is preparation to take a company presented for sale and actually transact on it because it starts off really simple. You need some basic high-level information, but as you go through the process, it intensifies and becomes more complex.

There’s more information that gets reviewed. That’s going to be requested back and forth, more clarification. More people involved, spending time doing their diligence, trying to understand the business what’s represented and make sure it’s accurate. The more you can prepare for that upfront, the best position you’ll be.

That’s one of the most critical things that sometimes gets overlooked and then the rest of the process will be even more taxing as it already will be. I think that’s, if you can work with them like an advisor to do some of that prep work is ideal. I think being creative about it, a lot of people just run into the local investment bank.

You could actually find folks in the industry that’s done that. Maybe there’s like a CFO person that has been involved with a couple M and A’s and the industry. And if you’re going to identify that person, bringing them in as a contract so something sort to help prepare the business, but find that advisor that could really do it.

I think the other part is when you look at how you want to sell a business, right? Do you want to play the long game or do you want to play the short game? Do you have this urgency timeframe? And if you had a really tight team timeframe, say less than six. You probably want to engage investment bank and run more of an auction process so they can go out and run through their network of folks.

They know, and folks they don’t know and reach out to the whole universe of buyers via private equity, family offices, high net worth individuals and institutions corporates, and then be able to go through the funnel and to get this interest down to some options for you to consider. That’s a good way to do it, and it’s tends to lead to the highest price, but sometimes it doesn’t lead to the best buyer or suitor to take that company to the next greater place of growth that person or buyer could potentially be warned off from that whole auction process.

If you win an auction process, you’re not really sure. A lot of the smart savvy buyers, aren’t going to participate in a highly competitive auction process. So if you go back to, if you didn’t have, they’re going to see, and you’re going to play the long-term exit six or six months or greater, then that’s when you want to get to know the buyer’s universe and take your time.

You as CEO of the company and start understanding where corporates are. They have a corporate development function that’s in charge of their MNA activity. Who’s in charge of that. They have a head of corporate development. That’s your job is to be out in the market and knowing the potential acquisition targets and companies like yours.

So you should be on that person’s radar at least have the introduction meeting. So you know, of each other and there’s nothing wrong. I think it’s good to have that conversation. Some of those organisms, same organizations are likely to be really good partners for you. So think about your space, who are those likely acquirers of your business?

Make those introductions build those relationships. It’s just better terms when you have a good relationship with that company that you’re likely to get acquired by. You can know each other, know the cultures of the different organization really spend the time and the consideration on all these things that could go right.

Go wrong. When you’re in this auction process, your timeline’s compressed, especially in this market right now. It’s so crazy. They’re not even getting an exclusive. You have to just be competitive all the way until close that throws all this consideration and smart thinking out the window and you’re buying rationally that’s where I, there’s a lot of value in terms, if you want to put if you want to make sure the transition goes well, that you’re making sure the business goes to the right.

A culture that will fit well together for there to be growth for all the people that took that ride with you to create the value and get the business to where it is today. So I think one, one question I guess I’d have for you would be, I know there’s a difference between the larger deals and the smaller deals.

I’m assuming. The more information that you have not information. The more processes that you have developed in advance is going to help both buyer and seller and from a buyer standpoint how from a buyer standpoint it’s easy to see the processes from the seller standpoint. It’s not as always, it’s not always as easy to learn about the buyers processes until after the fact.

So the question is how much should you insist on as a seller, seeing some of those buyers process. You should. I think the way things are evolving, the buyers are getting more savvy to it and we’ll throw the term around reverse diligence. How do you get the company you’re acquiring to better understand your organization and what the different business look clot looks like, where they would fit in had that understanding.

So they’ll be better prepared for that transition when. That’s that’s essentially the reason you want to do it is because you’re going to work better together on the, all the post-close activities, all the integration work. And if that goes well, people are happier and they’re going to stick around and they’re going to achieve goals and create values for the business.

I think it’s part of a bigger piece of creating this process. That’s connected together. With a vision with the vision, what the end state’s gonna look like when we’re going to buy your organization and what are we planning to do? How do we see it coming together? What’s our go to market going to look like?

In fact, we should be able to sit down and outline a go to market together to get as good sense of. This is where, what it’s going to, what’s the, what the customer experience is going to look like are we are combining the sales teams together. Are they going to be selling? We’re both, I’m going to be selling one giant portfolio of products.

Are we going to let you guys run independent? And when we just sell yours this whole separate product line, what’s that go to market, gonna look like what’s that strategy. And if we can outline that, I think the other critical component is the values of each organization to understand that. Leader to leader and be able to identify that with the company culture, to understand the real people, the leadership, how they operate and manage the respective teams, because there’s things that we can acknowledge are nice commonalities and then some unique differences.

But then there could be some stark differences that we could identify some potential conflicts. If you operate on a pure top-down strategy. And we’re very much about. Managed company, that’s going to create some frictions. We can just integrate our organizations together. You, we need to think of this throughly, how it’s going to actually work, because if we don’t figure that out, then maybe this deal isn’t going to make sense to do.

I would say that. And then the other piece around that is thinking. This vision right. Of what you’re trying to achieve in the end state and building into pillars of value drivers and being able to align teams around those value drivers, is think of them as, okay. Ours they’re defined and all the tasks that need to be executed can roll up to these OKR because the big problem that you lose sight of all the potential values when people.

Lose that end state goal of what they’re trying to achieve. And they don’t know where they fit in and what they’re doing. So the better you can align that by using these OKR hours and prioritizing and creating teams around those OKR, specifically to deliver on them. That’s where that critical part of being able to execute the integration activities, because you’re not buying a company and an operating it, and it’s going to make money for.

You need to buy it with a model that lays out potential synergies. You can capture through cost, energies, cutting costs, where you can economies of scale and whatnot. And then the increasing revenue, are we going to start cross selling the products? What are we going to do to generate the additional revenue?

Is that going to bridge our technology roadmap so we can get to market faster than. So I think having those OKR is what helps keeps those teams, that big picture alignment there, because when you lose that big picture alignment, you lose, everybody loses their focus, it’s in the wrong direction.

But I think those are the big pillars to think on the expand off of having that target company understand you are the new buyer should. So I think in this, on the sellers regard, That is something that you want to know. It’s part of it. And I think the seller, a lot of times have that disadvantage because there’s not a frequent, reoccurring thing, that theme that they do most time, it’s a one-time life event.

So how do you develop that comment that’s where you get, depending on some of the advisors, but the challenge with advisors is you basically pay them to a close, so they don’t have a lot of post-close considerations. They’re not sitting there analyzing that end state and the go to market and helping to calculate the probability that going on, the cultural fit, these sort of things, all the postmark marriage activity that you’re going to have to commit to for the rest of your life.

They’re not, they’re helping you to analyze that and look at it. They think of everything for you up until that day, they get their shoes. Yeah. I That’s you bring up a really good point. So in your role as a, as an, as a advisor, would you stay on with that? So if you’re helping the buyer to navigate this.

Would you stay on with the buyer until some end point? And I think back on we, we both talked a little bit about entrepreneur’s organization or, and there’s also a thing called EOS entrepreneurs operating system, where there’s an implementer that comes in and they help implement some process for you or an entire process.

That role is usually hung onto for two years after that’s been implemented. Hey, do you do that? Or, and B, is that something that, that you see buyers that will need that post-transaction now that you brought a really good point out? This is where our business has been evolving. When we started with software with a basic software diligence management tool, and we got to understand the problem of diligence on management really well.

And the nice Nashville adjacency was integration manager. So we developed a competency around integration management, catered, iterated, a lot of the software functionality. And then we did the front end pipeline piece. Then we had this full, comprehensive lifecycle management solution. So we’ll work with corporations and digitizing that lifecycle manager.

A lot of times they’re just using Excel across the board and stuff’s pretty scattered out there using maybe a data room, like an old school data room. It’s funny. Cause it was back I think, but 15 years, 20 years ago, they would come to your office and scan all your documents and put them on servers. And that was the virtual day.

Do your own business for you? They charge a lot. They used to charge like a dollar 25, something like that per page. You got thousands of pages that need to get scanned in front of the web. They made quite a bit. What’s interesting is today they still use that same per page billing. But there was nothing being scanned or nobody going to the office or nothing.

Are we doing the office in general right now? But they still charge. They’re still charging and maybe not as much it’s in the cents per page, but I think it’s interesting because it’s still playing that model of here’s a company, a lot of data. And then next thing they’re spending a million dollars a year plus for this high security data.

That’s how inefficient this was. It’s that. And then your process flow is all done in Excel. We built around that. I think it was probably six years ago, a friend of mine and marketing was like, Hey man, you should do a podcast. We started getting into that with a mission of enabling MNA practitioners to be able to share their lessons learned.

And the idea was because that was the problem we saw. We kept working with these companies and they all had a different way of thinking and looking at them. But there’s industry itself is lacking standardization, best practices. The real science as very started this theme of MNA science to the podcast was eMoney science.

As we kept learning, we started documenting all these things that we’ve learned, and we took transcripts of these podcasts. And I think it’s the date we have over 350 published blogs. You build a community around it. We have these practitioners that show up to our events. They started an online school.

They’ll get, take horses, get badges certifications. And it’s all of this pursuit of getting good, optimizing M and a getting really good at it. Looking at our industry as this practice. And that, yeah, there’s a swarm of bankers out there, and most of them are out in their self-serve serving regards, but to be an actual practitioner and sharpening your skills in all these areas that really are what generate value in a deal.

And they’re not models. They’re not always math formulas. It’s a critical part of. But when we look at the actual doing the diligence through executing integration, that’s real people, skills, that’s real leadership skills. It’s more about managing change than anything else. So I want to put Magento out there as a Guinea pig on, on success.

And failure specifically, Magento was purchased by eBay in 2011. They had a different vision and I’m of course I’m speculating because I wasn’t part of. Their team at the time. But I was a partner with them and I’ve, I found firsthand on how they dealt, how E-bay dealt with with the users and how eBay dealt with employees and then how they dealt with partners.

So that’s my perspective on it. And I know that after two years eBay came back, did a reset and said, Hey. We actually care about our users. We care about our community and we care about our partners. Do you see that happening a lot in this space where, Hey they’ve taken a little bit of time realize that they need to make some changes and then they go ahead and make those changes.

Please don’t have a choice nowadays because things are moving pretty quick. And if they see what’s working, like when Adobe ran that Magento product, they had a much better ecosystem to support a product like. Where they can foster growth and they immediately saw the value, which is why they pay the high amount for them, for it forum.

E-bay. It’s interesting that you say that too, because just recently there was an open letter that was written by the Magento community to say to adult. You have to change something or you will lose the majority of your community open source customers. And the message, the problem was there was some transparency and messaging.

It turns out, we don’t know everything yet, but it turns out that Adobe was on the same page, but they didn’t have that messaging in place for that open source side of the community in terms of Magento or Adobe. The M the open source probably is 95% of the install base. And the CA in the commercial version is 5%.

And again, I don’t know if these numbers are accurate, but it’s a big proportion that are on open source. So there’s a lot of open source users that are skewing the sort of usability or communication channels that Adobe has that. So it Adobe then has now come back and said, Hey, we do care about you.

We are going to support you and, helping to convince the community in general or the users in general that we are behind this vision of open source software, as well as the commercial version of it. And here’s how we’re going to do it. It just took them a while to get there. Crux of managing change.

The gap year was the communication that the intentions were good and there were there. But as part of doing this acquisition, the comp plan didn’t cover that part. That there’s this suspect sus or subset of people that they didn’t get the right messaging to, to have them clarification about what was happening, why and how it was.

And in your process, do you go and help them identify those gaps or there’s a whole comm department from that corporate development, the leaders should be helping to shape that and they should continuously iterate on it throughout the project. We don’t work with companies directly on it. There’s a whole bunch of consultants that specialize in that alone, but in our academy, we’ll cover offerings.

Teach people, the basics around stuff like that. I guess some of my points here, or at least my, what I’m trying to illustrate too, is that it’s it it, no matter what size the deal is and no matter how mature the company is, it seems like there’s always going to be issues that come out of it.

And I think to your point, the sooner they can manage that. The more successful, they will be in that acquisition and then transition into whatever’s next for that particular business. That’s the hardest part. If you can get good at that’s your whole competency of M and a, if you create change for the greater good that you had this vision of how you’re going to make value from purchasing the company, they’re able to execute and deliver it.

That’s it. That’s the whole M and A’s all about that. That part is the part that makes it the most challenging is to be able to do that. If you can understand that part, it’ll allow you to make that part of your success by managing that change, knowing how to align people around priorities and have them achieve and change, achieve goals, but then not have to the big, typical problems like attrition, Cain shows back.

You’ll get frustrated. They leave. All the headhunters around are after them, after deals announced. So there’s, especially in this market, they managing that change. It’s it allows you to really bring things together in a nice way that happens quickly communicates well. So people are in the know, they don’t feel all this fear and certainty if they have a job or not, or, and it just, I think a lot of it, you just gotta be real clear and transparent because people can take the bad news.

They just can’t take notes. As you can keep communicating it saying, Hey, we are going to let some people go. That’s the whole point of this deal. Like we’re going to save some. And then we’re going to use other resources to make the company overall much better, provide better value to our customers, but we’re going to create a lot of other new jobs and these other areas, the good far outweighs the bad obviously there’s opportunities for those people that you know, are going to get affected and if they can transition to it.

But that’s the thing. If you can get really good at managing change, that’s your whole competency around invest a good M and a. Acquire businesses and have them continue to grow and be healthy. It’s really hard to do so many people screw it up. So many corporations we see just seeing them sometimes just murder some of these companies, especially these little startups start integrating them, caused them to turn in.

So it was follow every little large corporation process. That’s not what they signed up for. Yeah. And again, we’re having a little bit of a technical problems with Riverside, but okay. So I just been riffing. No, you’re doing great. And I hear you the whole time. I just I’ve tried to do that’s good.

Absolutely. All right, so just, let’s just wrap it up here with attrition. I know that I heard you say attrition and I wanted to talk about like when Adobe purchased Magento, they, everybody stayed on. I think part of it was, they just moved people into different roles. So part of that change management has to be, and I heard you say communication quite a bit.

It sounds like communication and transparency as much transparency as you can get with each of the employees is a key factor in that. Yeah. The way it’s difficult. Cause you can’t sit down with people one-on-one like, ideally. And the change is going to be hard regardless. Everybody’s gonna have challenges with it.

Plus just the projects, your scope of work. It’s just a lot of change. And if you don’t feel you’re up to speed and what’s going on, I that’s, the, what we’ve seen is the hardest part to really manage it. When we look at a lot of the clients that we work with, it’s not like the technology or stuff like that.

It’s really, they bought a company that need people to do stuff and have everybody really motivated and do it. That’s really hard. Yeah. So setting those expectations and helping everybody’s aligned with the new vision of the leadership is the key to success from the anti attrition.

They call it anti attrition is as you’re trying to bring people and keep people on. Yeah. Cause that’s the thing it’s like the gravity is the attrition. You really just naturally going to, especially like the, seen this. It’s hard to keep them when we’ve seen it happen a lot where it just does the innovation.

You have to keep people that leave. And then it’s over. We see one of the big IOT companies. All right. Let’s just back on Google for a bit, like their nest acquisition that turned off to be a big disappointment. They came out with. Great products to start the business, built it up, got acquired at a great valuation.

I remember it was two or 3 billion, but they didn’t keep cranking out products. A lot of their leadership team left and it happens a lot, assessed as I one example like that’s why it just happens a lot. It’s a big, hard thing to do. And having all that organization upfront. I think in the very beginning, you, you said having all the planning in place, especially from the buyer’s standpoint is important, but the seller having they’re having some kind of a transition plan is just as important.

It should be something that’s joint that’s working together. And then I think at the end of the day, people tend to forget about the customer for maybe both of you, both sides of the table, working together with. Things aligned around the customer’s perspective might be the way to really do it.

Yeah. I’m with you there align around the customer. Look, how are we going to do this? We’re just going to, if we create value, it’s all through customer experience. We can just bill out. Are we going to actually make customer experience better and compelling, and really think that through from the time you start working together and at that, in that journey, understand each other’s cultures, the value.

And then you’ll get a good sense. Hey, this would be good partnership that’s happening or leading in like a partnership of us working together to achieve this. And then it could be a really good net positive things. When two organizations come together for the greater good, a lot of value gets created.

We see it happen a lot by companies. If things go rive pretty quick and that’s it, a lot of value gets dot gong. I wrote down the company doesn’t grow to the next big thing that everybody wanted them to. It’s just things fall apart. And yeah, and I’m assuming, Adobe still has a vision that that they’re sharing again with everybody and they are going on to the new, great things and I’m crossing my fingers, that it will continue to be a success.

Are they doing? They’re doing pretty good. We’ve got a great confidency. I know one of our MNA science alums just joined their M and a team. What to see? I depends on their con department, how friendly they are loading people and it gets some airtime on a podcast, but we will find out soon enough. Keyson we have used a lot of time up here and unfortunately we use it up in, in technical difficulties.

So we might have to do this again in the future. We should do this again in the future. I’m going to rephrase that. So as we kind of wrap things up here I always give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to. Go ahead and plug something today. A very, we can talk a lot about mergers and acquisitions.

If anybody’s interested in learning more about mergers and acquisitions, it’s hons of content on M a science.com. Yeah, anybody interested? We have a diversity scholarship program to promote diversity in industry to give a couple of years on the academy program. So it was a great opportunity. Expose people that have not familiar with M and A’s or career path to understand, learn about it.

It’s an interesting world that we often associate with just the bankers and we’re working in the boiler room operations, but there’s so many other roles that involve some of the things that are more important. What we’ve been talking about. And how do you align people around these goals to make things happen and manage this large magnitude of change?

That’s it? Yeah, that’s such a great point too, because people are what makes your company run and making sure those people are happy people, happy employees make happy customers. Thanks again for bearing with me today on our, on the podcast and some technical problems, but I appreciate you being here and I hope you have a wonderful.

My pleasure. You too, Brett. Thank you. Thank you.

Shannon Lohr

Where was your shirt made?

Are your clothes made where you live? Where does the cloth come from? Shannon Lohr and I dive into some of the sustainability questions that you should ask when starting a clothing business. As the founder and CEO of Factory45, Shannon has worked with Idea-stage entrepreneurs to launch clothing companies that are ethically and sustainably made across the globe.

Shannon got her start in 2010 when she co-founded {r}evolution apparel, a sustainable clothing company for female travelers and minimalists that was featured in The New York Times, Forbes.com, and Yahoo! News.

To date, Shannon has worked with over 150 entrepreneurs in the sustainable fashion space, many of whom have launched some of the most transparent supply chains in the fashion industry. https://factory45.co/ Shannon has worked as a consultant for crowdfunding projects that have surpassed their goal amounts by as much as 300% and has worked closely with startup apparel companies from all over the world to create ethically-made products with a focus on environmentally-friendly materials and transparent supply chains. Shannon is a strong advocate for increasing supply chain transparency through sourcing, localization, and storytelling. She’s been named a thought leader for the future of fashion by Ecouterre and Triple Pundit, and she frequently writes about conscious consumerism and the intersection of fashion and environmentalism.

Ivonne Rohner

CoachTech Summit | Augmented Reality and Virtual Coaching with Ivonne Rohner

This week we interview Ivonne Rohner with CoachTech Summit. We talk about all things Augmented Reality and how AR can help entrepreneurs in their growth through Virtual Coaching. Learn how you can blend Virtual Reality and coaching and we talk about the XR BootCamp which is one of the well-known virtual boot camps for Virtual Reality.

Using Augmented Reality and Virtual Coaching, Ivonne helps leaders get the most out of the available technology and shape an empathetic virtual atmosphere where people can deliver their best because they feel seen. She works with corporate incubator teams/rocket labs and startups or to create structure and employee engagement in corporations and mid-size companies.

Maureen Mwangi

Branding your Business with Maureen Mwangi

This week we interview Maureen Mwangi, CEO of Starward Consulting who has over 10 years of experience building, growing, and scaling some of America’s biggest brands.

In a world where all the “expert” growth strategies seem catered to the service industry, it can feel impossible to figure out what it takes to turn your product brand into a market leader.

But as a brand growth strategist who’s worked with many of those big brands, Maureen Mwangi knows first-hand that they didn’t get where they are today through trial and error or piecing together fragmented strategies. She uses the data that companies already possess to develop a growth strategy

Jeff Campbell Courtney Taylor | Ecommerce Banking

Jeff Campbell – Courtney Taylor | Ecommerce Banking

This week we interview Courtney Taylor and Jeff Campbell with Fidelity Bank. Courtney tells us how she is the matchmaker of the banking business. We learn how peer groups will help every entrepreneur succeed in their business. We talk about how important it is that your banker knows your business and you as a business owner are not just a number. We talk about trends in the banking industry that relate to commerce. We dive into a lot of great subjects that business owners should know and do with their bank.

Talk Commerce
Talk Commerce

menu

Episodes

About

Blog

Contact

Listen

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Google Play

YouTube

© Copyright Content Basis LLC 2021-2024

Privacy Policy | Terms Of Service