Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. I usually talk about tech startups. I usually talk about intangible things like software.
Today we’re going to talk about an off-line business, about something you can actually feel, taste. And joining me to do that is Todd Ehrlich. He was a Navy SEAL who was in such pain while training one day that he wished somebody would create an anti-inflammatory drink that actually tasted good and was better for you then energy drinks like Gatorade. As a runner myself, I can’t taste, I can’t drink, Gatorade. It’s not for real athletes. It’s not for real workouts. I get it. Since no one else created the drink that he wanted, Todd decided he was going to create it himself. About 10 years later, he launched the drink called Kill Cliff. That is also the name of the company.
Since then, the company has expanded. They have protein bars. They have cold-brew coffee, and they have apparel, and they have nice movement on social media. I invited him here to talk about how he did it and see how big the company got, to see what he’s up to since then.
And paying me to do all this, I’m really grateful to them for doing it, is my sponsor, Justworks. You know how HR is kind of a pain in the butt? It’s something that hasn’t been updated in years, decades even. The software is a mess. The things that they do for you are just not enough. What you want is a company that just works. I urge you to go to Justworks.com/Mixergy. Sign up. They’ll take care of your payroll, your benefits. They’ll take care of everything you need to make sure your team is happy and productive and paid. I’ll tell you more about them later. First, I’ve got to welcome Todd. Todd, good to have you.
Todd: Hi, Andrew.
Andrew: Where are you at, Todd? Where are you right now, recording this?
Todd: I’m in a Delta Sky Club in Orlando, Florida.
Andrew: Do you want to flip the camera around, we can take a look?
Todd: Sure.
Andrew: And hopefully we won’t lose the connection. Ah, yeah, sweet set up. Wowee.
Todd: Yeah.
Andrew: Does that mean that you are flying first class?
Todd: I fly like once or twice a week, so I get . . . but yeah. So I’ve got a lot of points.
Andrew: So you are flying first class? Wait. Are you paying with points or paying with dollars?
Todd: I paid for the ticket with dollars, but I got upgraded.
Andrew: I see.
Todd: [inaudible 00:02:28]
Andrew: It’s a long way away from being . . . Sorry?
Todd: I have membership to their club because of my status.
Andrew: Got you. So it is a long way away from being a Navy SEAL. What do you think the Navy SEALs who was in such pain that he wished somebody would create liquid Motrin, what do you think that old you would have said about where you are today?
Todd: It would’ve been a different . . . I don’t think that guy had ever seen the inside of an airport lounge, so . . . There’s one of the people.
Andrew: Yeah. You know what I admire about you, you’re not even putting earphones in. There’s like so much space. Let everyone else put earphones in if they don’t want to hear you or don’t want to hear me.
Todd: Right. I tried to get as far away as I could. Yeah, it’s a long journey to get here, I guess, but I definitely love where I am now. And part of the whole Navy SEAL thing is, with Kill Cliff in particular, is creating a sustainable giving platform for the Navy SEAL Foundation. That’s kind of our main goal as a company is to do that. So I guess those things are connected in a way, which is kind of interesting. I don’t think I would’ve ever thought I was going to do that, but with everything that’s happened in the world, I felt a need to do it.
Andrew: Do you remember one of those grueling training sessions where you wished that somebody would create this “liquid Motrin,” as you said?
Todd: Yeah, of course.
Andrew: Take me to one of them. I’ll never actually go through a Navy SEAL training, but I’d like to live vicariously through you through this one answer. Give me an example of one tough workout that made you into a better man.
Todd: Oh, wow. They’re all really tough, and it’s really a mind game at the end of the day. There’s Hell Week, of course, which everybody’s kind of seeing now, but they’re all incredibly difficult. I think one of the really interesting things wouldn’t actually be a physical training, but the room inspections were incredibly hard. Like, you couldn’t pass. And you’d spend all night cleaning, right? So it’s one of those things where you’re mentally strong enough to keep it together even though people were messing with you, and that’s the training.
Andrew: So you stay all night. You clean your room. You get an inspection in the morning. They say, “This isn’t good enough.” Where’s the mental anguish there? That sounds like what my mom did when I was growing up.
Todd: Well, you end up going and hitting the surf and all that stuff, and you’re running back and forth. It’s just that these guys are mostly really high achievers, and when you get a disappointment and you think it’s good enough, it’s really hard sometimes to deal with that. You’ve got to learn how to process that “failure,” if you will.
Q: should I see. When you say “hit the surf,” you mean you were working out, training on the surf?
Todd: No. So basically, sorry. We had a room inspection, and almost everybody would fail, and they would send you to hit the surf. So you’d run down the beach fully-clothed in your dress uniform, not dress uniform, but nice uniform, and they would basically tell you to jump in the surf, and then you’d roll around and get wet and sandy, and then you come back to your clean room, and you’re dripping wet, and it was just brutal. You know?
Andrew: No I don’t. I feel like I’m not fully feeling it. Take me to the pain. And I know you say that we’ve all seen it. I don’t even own a TV. Unless it’s like a podcast, I’m not listening to it.
Todd: Yeah. Well, every Navy SEAL is writing a book these days, so you can get it in the library.
Andrew: Give me yours, one especially tough example.
Todd: Yeah. I think for me, during Hell Week was really hard. Starts on Sunday kind of evening, and it lasts until Friday afternoon at about 2 p.m. You get very little sleep, like in the low single digits of hours over the course of a week. And for me, I ended up in the smallest boat crew. So I’m not that tall, and I ended up with guys who were even shorter than me. And that both is just heavy, and when you’re the tallest guy, it was really hard. And I think too, there’s this one episode that’s on Thursday night, like in the middle of the night. I think it starts about midnight, and it’s called Around the World, and you paddle your little boat from the bay side of Coronado Island all the way around to the ocean side.
Guys were like hallucinating, and they were really tired and everything, but there’s this one portion where you have to jump up over a jetty and climate, bring your boat out of the water and go over it and get back in the water. And I found that whole thing to be really tough, just at that point of exhaustion where you’re just beyond . . . And some guys can’t even operate it. They’re just lying there. They can’t even do anything anymore. You know, just finding the energy in yourself to kind of keep going and get there. That was really tough, and I was really struggling with it. And my crew had come in last in everything. The whole week we were miserable. I think we came in like first or second on that, but it was really hard for me, though. I couldn’t explain how difficult it was.
Andrew: So how do you mentally allow yourself to get past that and to overcome the sleep deprivation, the exhaustion and the putdowns that might come at the end of all that?
Todd: They’ve been trying to figure out what makes these guys tick for a long time, and there’s just an inner drive to succeed that some people have and some people don’t. And that really separates kind of the proverbial “men from the boys” that week. I think that for me, personally, I kind of break it into pieces, like okay, I’m going to do it . . . like, I’m going to make it from point A to point B, point B could be lunch, and then from point A to point C. And that’s kind of how I run life.
Andrew: Let’s see. Point A to point B, and then B to C, but you’re not thinking all the way down to the Z, because that would be what?
Todd: That would be a soul-crushing experiment.
Andrew: I see.
Todd: Because if you’re just like, hey, this suffering is not going to end anytime soon, and you grasp that, then it’s really hard. And even in business I find like I’ve just got to focus on the moment and what I’m working on right then to get it to the next level.
Andrew: Oh. That’s interesting advice. You know what? I would’ve thought that the opposite is what you need to think about, which is like . . . I’ll give you a smaller example. Obviously, this is not nearly as big as what you did, but I was swimming a lot this summer, and I’d want to do a mile swim, and some days my head just wasn’t in it. And to get myself back in, I would think about how good I would feel after I finished the mile, how much better my body would look if had to do this every single day. And I was projecting into the future. Do you think that going shorter, like, well, just get through another five laps, is that better?
Todd: Yeah. It depends. Right? Like, I think you’ve always got to begin with the end in mind. Another example would be, you know, I used to just tell myself, when I was really cold, I would just tell myself, “I’m really warm,” and I would be like, “I’m really strong.” Apparently the “good-looking” thing hasn’t worked yet. I can tell it’s not working. But basically I would tell myself those things, and it worked. I would literally not be cold anymore. So if I thought about how cold I was, it would be not great, but I guess the point is just thinking that I was strong helped me get through it. Thinking about it right there in the moment really helped for me.
Andrew: In your body doesn’t reject it, doesn’t say, “Oh. Come on. You’re lying. Look at the temperature. Look at” . . . No. You eventually accept this lie as truth, and it makes you warmer?
Todd: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew: Wow.
Todd: Yeah, you believe you’re warm. Yeah.
Andrew: All right. So you have this need. For 10 years you didn’t do anything about it, and then something got you to say, “It’s time.” What was that thing?
Todd: It’s funny. For 10 years, a big part of that was I was working for a guy that was my mentor in business, a very wealthy, brilliant guy. So I didn’t even have a minute to think about anything else, but with this, I got sick of myself procrastinating. I knew I needed to do it the whole time, and I just was like, “I’m just procrastinating. I need to do this. It needs to be done.”
Andrew: Why do you feel like you needed to do it?
Todd: Because I saw a giant space between two categories of products, and I was like, “Someone needs to fill that space.” The other thing, what really drove me, like the underlying force that kept this thing alive in kind of the dark start up days, was what I would call “this need to get back to that community.” So I wanted to create a sustainable giving platform, and this is it. Right? So Kill Cliff is that platform. So I was like, “Okay, I can create a cool company. There’s this need that I have. And since I figured it out when I was in that community, it just makes sense to use it to give back.”
Andrew: What’s the need, you were saying, between pillar products? What are the two products?
Todd: The alternative beverage space has where you have energy drinks on one side, and then you have sports drinks on the other.
Andrew: “Energy drinks” meaning stuff like Red Bull and Monster and then sports drinks, the Gatorade and whatever Coca-Cola’s version of that is.
Todd: Yeah. Yeah. Powerade.
Andrew: Powerade. Yeah. Right.
Todd: Yeah. So those two things are out there. And they both actually have a couple of interesting, valuable attributes, but overall, there’s a big gap, and if you filled that space . . .
Andrew: So I see the two different spaces. What’s in between those two?
Todd: I felt that there was something that needed . . . so when you go in the workout pain cave, or whatever, you know, where you’re hurting, that cool-off period where it just doesn’t take and you don’t feel better, I was like, “It would be cool if there was a beverage that just made you feel like you were back to normal again,” and that’s what I wanted to create. That’s what people, like when we interview people like, “Why do you drink Kill Cliff?” are like, “It just makes me feel normal again.”
Andrew: Good name. I looked so much online. I can’t figure out what Kill Cliff means and where it came from.
Todd: Yeah. Yep. It’s kind of an inside joke. The story is I needed a name, and I took this Kill Cliff name, and I slapped it on the drink. I knew that people have been using that term, that people were somehow connected to it. It made them go, “What is Kill Cliff?” Do you know what I mean? I wanted to spring a question or cause people to question what it was.
Andrew: When you were using it before it was a product name, how were you using it? What context?
Todd: I kind of don’t want to tell the story, because it’s such a mystery. Everybody wants to know.
Andrew: Go for it.
Todd: I don’t want to.
Andrew: Why not?
Todd: I don’t know. Can we come back to that?
Andrew: Well, here’s the thing, I’m looking at your site, and so much of it is just such a weird mystery. Like, I’m on an early version of your site, and it says, “Why Kill Cliff? Kill Cliff was created by a former U.S. Navy SEAL.” Right there, it’s . . . which Navy SEAL? Why not the person’s name? Why isn’t your name on there, Todd?
Todd: Yeah. You know, it’s funny. My SEAL career is super-short, and out of the thousands of guys who become SEALs, I would be at the back of the bus of quality of SEALs and everything else, like the least-qualified seal their it’s. Right? So it’s not about the Todd Show. Right? I’m not trying to boost myself. I think that’s part of it. I’m not real good at self-promoting.
Andrew: But the Navy SEAL part is promoted all over the place, and there are photos of you. I just did a Google Image Search of you, with you in the Kill Cliff shirt. It’s all over the place.
Todd: Well, it is now, I guess. I think back then I was just . . . you know, one of the points with the brand was to be kind of enigmatic, keep people guessing a little bit, like a Navy SEAL would. The brand itself has what I call “uber-SEAL personality,” which is basically the guy who’s just super-great at being a seal, and everybody likes him. It’s kind of like a little bit of a mystery, and that’s kind of the brand image itself.
Andrew: Okay.
Todd: I mean, we’ve got 750,000 social media followers, so it’s working, I guess.
Andrew: I see that. You guys are good at social media. All right. So you had this idea. It was time to actually make it. You’ve never made an energy drink before or a recovery drink . . .
Todd: Recovery.
Andrew: . . . or any other kind of drink, right?
Todd: Right. Right.
Andrew: So how do you go about creating this thing and making it work?
Todd: Well, it’s funny, I started calling companies called “flavor companies” to help me formulated, and nobody would respond. Like literally, I didn’t get one phone call back, one email, nothing. So finally I took an industry magazine, and I was reading it, and I found another guy who had started a company, and I invited him to lunch. I said, “I need you to tell me everything you know. I need your insurance agency. I need your flavor company, everything you know.” He gave me everything, and I started it that way.
Andrew: Okay, and this guy just helped you out with nothing, and then once you called up his contacts, they were willing to take your call?
Todd: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. And when you have this kind of idea, can you just go to a flavor company and say, “Here’s what I need you to make. I’ll see you on Monday”?
Todd: No. What I’ve found is there’s a company out there that can help you formulate it, and they’ve got so many relationships with these guys, they can basically pull that all together for you.
So that was one of his contacts, and I called them. They were great. They really helped me out.
Andrew: Okay. So they created it for you. How much input do you have on it?
Todd: Well, I came up with the formula itself, like what I wanted in it, the way I wanted it to taste and everything. Then they went to solve that.
Andrew: I see.
Todd: It had things in it that didn’t taste very good, so we took those out. And there were about 10 versions of it before there was something what I would even call “palatable.”
Andrew: It was what?
Todd: What’s that? “Was palatable,” that you could even drink.
Andrew: I got it. You wanted it to be palatable.
Todd: Yeah. The first nine versions were horrible, and then the final one was great.
Andrew: As we’re talking, I’m looking online to see if I could figure out where this name came from. I still like doing research even after the interview. “Where did the name come from?” asks a website FPS Nation. “The way I heard it was went Todd was trying to name the drink, he couldn’t think of a name, and he didn’t want to name it anything to do with the military. One day while he was walking down the street trying to think of a name, someone yelled, “Kill Cliff at him because he was wearing a Kill Cliff T-shirt, and that’s how the drink got its name.”
Todd: That’s true. Yeah.
Andrew: Is there such a thing as a Kill Cliff T-shirt?
Todd: Yeah. Yeah. Yep.
Andrew: And this is before . . . What is a Kill Cliff T-shirt?
Todd: It’s a shirt that says “Kill Cliff” on it.
Andrew: And why would you have shirt that says “Kill Cliff”? Who’s Cliff?
Todd: It was my roommate.
Andrew: Got it. I see. So you just got a T-, that’s pretty funny, actually, that you would get a T-shirt that just says “Kill Cliff” about your roommate. Got it.
Todd: Yeah.
Andrew: It has nothing to do with Cliff, the Cliff bar?
Todd: No, not at all. No.
Andrew: Did you have any sense at the time that that might be an issue, that people might think that you guys are competing with Cliff bar and . . .
Todd: Yeah. No. I really didn’t. Although, they just sued me, so that was nice.
Andrew: I saw, in July, and not even for a product that had the name Cliff in it.
Todd: Right. I know.
Andrew: Right. It was the KC Bar that you have.
Todd: Right. Right. Pretty funny.
Andrew: And I was looking at the logos. To me they don’t look alike, and I’m trying to stir things up in this interview, and I can’t see that the two logos look alike. I’m looking at them right now.
Todd: Yeah, they don’t. They don’t.
Andrew: All right. So they make this for you. What does it cost to take your idea and have somebody present you with the drink that’s actually palatable and lives up here vision of it?
Todd: I think at that stage I was probably in the $25,000 range.
Andrew: Wow. Where did you get 25,000 bucks?
Todd: 25?
Andrew: Yeah. You said 25,000 or 2500?
Todd: 25,000.
Andrew: 25,000. Where do you get 25,000 bucks?
Todd: Well, I was running another company. I was the founder of it, and I’d done okay financially just your hard work.
Andrew: What was the other company?
Todd: It was a company that settled mortgage transactions through a software platform.
Andrew: I see.
Todd: I had been working hard a long time, and I had savings. I just used my savings to kind of get it going.
Andrew: Okay. All right. So you get this thing, it’s fully palatable, 25,000 bucks in. It’s time for you to sell it, and where do you sell it?
Todd: Oh. So the next step, you’ve got to do a production run, and that costs about $100,000.
Andrew: Yeah, of course. Right. You have to actually make this thing. All right.
Todd: Yeah. Oh. And then the financial crisis happened. So I couldn’t raise . . . the guys lined up to give me the money, it all fell apart. Everything fell apart. Basically, what ended up happening next was some time went by, and I was like, “Okay. I’m procrastinating again. I’m letting excuses get to me.” I remember having this thought. I was like, I’m going to ask every single person that I talk to for $150,000 until I get . . . So literally, like my mom would call and I’d go, “Mom, I need $150,000.” She be like, “You’re ridiculous.” And finally I asked a guy. Just by doing that I got an interview. I met with the former CEO of Coca-Cola by just asking people like that. So I was going to have a meeting with him about him investing, and he actually gave me a term sheet. And when I was on the way to meet him, I met another guy that I did some work with, and the guys like, “Why are you going to meet the CEO of Coca-Cola?” I was like, “Well, because I’m asking him for $150,000. I’d like you to give me $150,000 too.” He’s like, “Okay. Cool.” So he gave me the $150,000 with better terms than the CEO would.
Andrew: Oh, wow. Just by going around and asking people, “Hey. Do you have $150,000?”
Todd: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew: Impressive.
Todd: I was determined. I was not going to stop until somebody gave it to me.
Andrew: Do you remember the person who backed out because of the financial crisis in the late 2000s, like 2008 or so?
Todd: Yeah. There were three of them.
Andrew: Are you proud now that you’ve done so well that they might be regretting missing out?
Todd: Yeah. We all have jobs to do, and I think they were protecting themselves at the time, and maybe they did me a favor by things maybe taking a little bit more time, right? But at the end of the day . . . I almost feel kind of bad. They could’ve been a part of it, and they weren’t, but it was interesting. It was an exercise in tenacity at the end of the day.
Andrew: And you hit it. You got your money. Now it’s time to actually manufacture. How was that to do?
Todd: It went pretty smoothly. I think we had one skew, like just tasty, the original product. It went really smooth. I think our first month we sold 25 or 50 cases or something like that.
Andrew: You know what? Actually, before we get into the “how,” let me do a sponsorship message, and then we’ll get into the “how.”
Todd: Sure. Okay.
Andrew: The sponsor is Justworks. Here’s the deal. You know when it’s time for you to hire people that it could be a little bit tough. It could be a little tough because if you have to be in charge of the benefits, if you have to be in charge of payroll, if you have to be in charge of everything that goes into making sure that your people are paid properly and taking good care of, frankly, if you’re an entrepreneur, something’s not going to work out, because you have too many distractions, and we don’t have the head to deal with this. So you hire one of those big companies, right? You do like your friends do. The problem is, before you hire one of your friends’ companies, go look at the software they use every day. Go ask them about their experience using one of those companies, and my bet is, I’m willing to bet you that your friends will tell you that software stinks but you have to deal with it because these guys are an ancient industry. They’ll tell you that there are problems with it but you just have to accept it because that’s the way life is. I’m here to tell you, you don’t have to accept it. Many startups today are now using Justworks.
Justworks is just like its name says. It just works. And they focus on companies that are modern like ours, and they’re a new company. And when I say that, my hunch is you guys are a little bit nervous. You don’t want a new company handling your payroll. Well, let me give you reassurance. Look at the people who are backing these guys. Justworks is a New York City company, funded by Bain Capital Ventures, and these guys don’t just fund any old lemonade stand on the corner. Bain Capital Ventures, Thrive Capital and Index Ventures, we’re talking about really heavy hitters. And there’s a reason why if you go to Justworks.com/Mixergy, I’m going to go do it right now, “Justworks.com/Mixergy,” you’ll see that companies that you know and respect like Casper, Trello, so many others, are using Justworks to handle their payroll and benefits.
And there’s one other thing they actually emailed me that I keep wanting to include but I keep forgetting. Where is that? Oh. Here we go. They’re better than their competitors because they negotiate directly with healthcare carriers and other partners to get their users significant savings. So it’s more than just the stuff that I keep telling you about, how the interaction is fantastic. It’s also that they get you better healthcare rates. I urge you to check out Justworks.com/Mixergy. You will thank me for it. Your friends who you introduced to them will thank you for it. It’s a great company, and if you’ve never heard of them before, never considered them before for handling your payroll and your employees, you should.
I mentioned Casper. We’ve been hearing so much about them, the mattress company. One of the reasons they signed up was that they felt that they wanted to give their new employees a good on-boarding experience, show them how great the company is from day one, so they fight for that greatness every single day that they work for your company. Justworks.com/Mixergy.
All right. So now we’re getting into promotion mode. You said you sold, what, 25,000 cases?
Todd: No, 25.
Andrew: Oh. Twenty-five cases. Okay. How did you sell your first 25?
Todd: Well, I didn’t, actually. Another guy did. He sold them for me. The guy just kind of appeared and it was like, “Hey. I want to help you sell this stuff.”
Andrew: Why?
Todd: Why did he help?
Andrew: Yeah. Why did some guy . . . who is this guy who would come out of the blue and say, “I want to sell it”?
Todd: He’s a friend, and I had been talking about it for a long time. And the guy loved the brand and just thought it would be an awesome place to kind of work.
Andrew: Did you hire him?
Todd: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew: Oh. You did. Okay. So he just told you he like the product, and you said “Great. I’m going to hire you.” It’s not like he volunteered and said, “I’m going to go out and sell for you.”
Todd: He worked for like six months or nine months without a paycheck, actually.
Andrew: Really?
Todd: Yeah.
Andrew: What do you say that convinces somebody that this is such a worthwhile mission that they should sign up?
Todd: It’s a great question. I think there’s a relationship, and there’s trust and everything, and people feel like if I say I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it. Right? So I think I had established . . . you know, I also joke about it too. I’m like, “You’ve got to be willing to work for free.” But basically, the goal is it really to get people to work for free, but I think in this situation, he wanted some sweat equity, and that’s how he got it.
Andrew: I see. He didn’t just want to be an employee somewhere. He said, “This energy drink” . . . well, you don’t call it an “energy drink,” do you?
Todd: “Recovery drink.”
Andrew: Recovery drink. He said, “This recovery drink could be huge. I want a piece of it, and I’m willing to work for it”?
Todd: Yeah, exactly.
Andrew: What’s the vision that you sold?
Todd: I think it was kind of obvious to him. I think he thought what I did, that there was this big space, and that the energy drinks and sports drinks were outdated, and there needed to be something new and something fresh. And he thought the Navy SEAL aspect of it was really cool and kind of a different thing. It’s really having people get excited about supporting the military. It’s not a hard thing to do. And my goal has always been for us to be the biggest donor to the SEAL Foundation, and we had a purpose. I think that purpose is a cohesive force with the team. Right? And that draws people . . .
Andrew: Aren’t you also selling the vision of the financial success, that one day you could be this rich because of it?
Todd: Yeah. I think a little bit. I mean, I think we talked about how these things grow. One of the things, I worked in a family office, and I learned that, hey, certain industries have different types of multiples they put on businesses, and the business, the multiples and the consumer products space are very high because of scalability. So this is a very highly-scalable business. So he understood that. I didn’t have to teach him. He just kind of got it.
Andrew: I see. How did he sell his first 25 cases?
Todd: Door to door.
Andrew: Literally?
Todd: Yeah, literally went to . . . I mean, business doors, like went to the gyms and bars and sold it into them. It was kind of funny. It was kind of interesting. I was still working at my other job, actually, and he was out selling.
Andrew: All right. Twenty-five cases is not going to make you into a huge success. How did you get the next batch of sales?
Todd: Every which way possible. I kind of call it “recon by fire.” We tried everything. I mean, everything.
Andrew: Which one are the dopey things that you tried but you have to try it?
Todd: We just took a thousand no’s, right? We ended up getting a distributor, locally, in Atlanta. That was really helpful. And then we just talked to everybody about the product and what we were doing, and I think that that . . . you know, just people would be like, “Oh. I know this person and this person.” Then that led to, a few months later, kind of our first break into CrossFit. And ironically, the very first, the guy who invested, he owned the gym, and in that gym they had CrossFit. And that group of people went to a CrossFit competition. There was a guy there who was kind of well-known in the space, and he looked at the product and said, “What is this?” He drank it, and he called us and said, “Hey. I want to meet with you guys,” and that was the little tipping point with CrossFit, where this guy recognized it would do well with CrossFitters. And now we’re selling thousands of CrossFit gyms, and we have a sales force that that’s just what they do.
Andrew: That just talks to CrossFit gyms?
Todd: Right. Right. So it’s interesting, even though we’re not a tech company, over half of our revenue comes from online sales.
Andrew: When did you get into online sales?
Todd: Day one.
Andrew: Day one. Right away. This is something that I really like about you guys. You do subscriptions on your online sales.
Todd: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: I can’t buy individual cans, but I could buy a four pack, right, or an eight pack?
Todd: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: And I’m encouraged to buy it on subscription so it keeps coming in.
Todd: Right.
Andrew: Is that as helpful as I imagine it is?
Todd: Yes.
Andrew: It is?
Todd: Yeah, we do a lot of subscription business. People kind of get addicted to the product, which is nice for us. I think it’s easy for them to hit the subscription and keep it going.
Andrew: I get it. I think there’s something about food and drinks related to workouts. You just find the one you like whose ingredients you trust and that gets you what you want, and you just stick with it, and you won’t try another.
Todd: Right.
Andrew: It seems like it, anyway. Here’s what I saw when I was looking up articles about you guys in the past and looking at your old website. There was a period there where, I guess, in the trying-everything phase where you were really working on encouraging people to try it as a mix without alcohol.
Todd: Yep. Yep. Yep.
Andrew: What was that about?
Todd: Well, it’s funny, it turns out that the market was showing us that, so we sold it into some bars, and people were drinking it with alcohol and saying, “I don’t get a hangover with this when I mix it with vodka or whatever.” So it was where a big part of our revenue was coming from, these bars that were buying it. Like, there’s a bar in Atlanta that was selling over 100 cases a month just as mixers. So it was kind of funny, and it was basically this kind of “hangover preventer,” if you will. And I was like, “I never want to market our product like that, but if people are into it, that’s cool.” You know?
Andrew: Were you concerned that it would take away your credibility as the recovery drink created by a former Navy SEAL that’s really a bar drink?
Todd: No, I wasn’t worried about that. But what was interesting about it, it still sells and bars very well, but what was interesting about it is that it was something the market defined. We didn’t set out with like, “Hey. We’re going to be this cocktail mixer that makes people feel better.” It’s just the market created itself, and that was kind of the magic. Right?
Andrew: I like your old “Frequently Asked Questions.” I just found a screenshot of it. “I heard that if I mix Kill Cliff with alcohol I won’t get a hangover, is this true?” “Well, we don’t think Kill Cliff can prevent all the effects of overconsumption of alcohol, but we do think it could be effective in this way. If it is, it’s a bonus. If not, it’s still darn good.” Here’s another weird thing about your “Frequently Asked Questions . . . here, like I wonder where this came from. I know I shouldn’t be laughing at this, but I just don’t see how it fits in. How many questions are you getting like this one? “I know a SEAL who was killed while working as a contractor. Will you help his family?” “To us, they’re all the same as active-duty warriors. If we have the money, we will. As we grow, we put a specific program in place for these warriors.” We’re getting that many emails from people who were contractors who were getting hurt and needed another Navy SEAL to help them?
Todd: Yeah. We get charity requests every day, many charity requests. So there was a lot of that happening back in the day. It’s not on there anymore, but at the time it just seemed like to put up there. I don’t know.
Andrew: Okay. Yeah. There was another line in here about, I guess you are being asked, “How do I become a Navy SEAL?” and you said, “We’re not here to help you, and frankly you won’t” . . . Oh. Here we go. “Call the SEAL mentor in your area. We’re not Navy SEAL recruiters, and you probably won’t make it. So just give up.”
Todd: Me being a smartass.
Andrew: I see. You ended up raising money at some point from Sherbrooke Capital. This came afterwards, right?
Todd: Mm-hmm. Right.
Andrew: These are the guys who invest in all the stuff that I see in the specialty supermarkets, it feels like, the IZZE drink, right? They do the Halfpops popcorn that I’m now seeing. Where are these guys? This came after how much traction?
Todd: Our first year we did about $244,000. The second year, $800,000. Then they came in when we were at about $3 million in revenue for the year.
Andrew: So how do you get to that level? What’s the next step? So it’s you in the beginning and your first employee just trying everything. Maybe this will work and bars, and maybe not. Maybe it’ll work at the local gym, maybe not. Maybe it’ll work at the local supermarket or specialty store, maybe, maybe not. Then you hit it with online, and you hit it with, what is it called, CrossFit boxes, right?
Todd: Yeah. Right.
Andrew: What do you do to expand on those two?
Todd: Well, then we went into specialty retail, which is like GNC and Vitamin Shop, and we did very well there. We actually set some retail records at GNC in our category. And so basically choosing retailers to pick up the product, or I should say “begging” retailers to pick up the product. So we did it, and that kind of work, but the CrossFit thing really . . . you know, I’m very grateful for CrossFit. That movement really made us, and they kind of were “the cavalry,” if you will. It’s a pretty amazing story in and of itself. And those guys wanted something to drink when they were done working out, and they started ordering the product. Then they saw that we were genuine, credible and all that stuff. So it’s just really good fit, and that was a big, big part of the growth, with the CrossFit space.
Andrew: What can you do to encourage that? If you’re someone that sees that this cult community is picking up on your drink, how do you encourage it without feeling like you’re shoving it down their throats and ruining the experience for them, which is what I would do?
Todd: Which is great with us. So what’s really interesting is we were kind of outsiders, and they took us in. And a lot of people try to be CrossFit-specific companies, and it’s too tacky, right? Like, they’re trying too hard. So they just accepted us. We just made a good name for ourselves in the community, and they continued to the customers, and it’s been a great, great . . .
Andrew: What did you do to do right by them, to stay in touch with them?
Todd: We just had social media. It’s a very social media-driven community, and we’re in there and doing things and donating to the Navy SEAL Foundation and doing things like that, sponsoring what are called “Hero Workouts” or “Hero WADs [SP],” and doing all that stuff. They just saw that it was real.
Andrew: What’s a Hero WAD? Hero Work out Day?
Todd: It’s a workout named after a passed-away military member.
Andrew: I see, and how do you sponsor that?
Todd: Well, sometimes they’ll make it an event at a gym and say, “Hey. We’re going to do Murph, which is Murph, the Lone Survivor Story, part of that. And basically we’ll provide product, or we’ll have people show up, or we’ll send an athlete, one of our sponsored athletes, kind of like celebrities in the space, we’ll send them to the workout.
Andrew: I see, to just one gym?
Todd: Well, it could be one gym. It could be a bunch of gyms coming together for an event or something like that.
Andrew: I see. I had no idea. What about sponsorship? I see that right from the start you guys wanted to sponsor athletes.
Todd: Yep. It’s been a learning experience. In the beginning, one thing we did that didn’t work at all was we sponsored some MMA fighters, which was a horrible . . . like did not work at all.
Andrew: Why not? I remember I had Dan Caldwell on here from TapouT, the workout gear. He just went all in on MMA, and it did fantastic for him.
Todd: Yeah. No. I think for some folks it’s great. For us, at the time, we were a little too early. We didn’t know what we were doing. The thing about that, it doesn’t promote consumption like CrossFit does. So just watching two guys beat the heck out of each other doesn’t make you really that thirsty, right?
Andrew: Oh, yeah.
Todd: Well, a workout does. So we’re getting people at the gym actually trying it. So I guess I’m not saying it couldn’t work, but we couldn’t make it work at the time.
Andrew: So what did work for you with sponsoring athletes?
Todd: Athletes? Well, here’s a great example. We have an athlete named Paige Alms, and she’s a surfer, and we really went after her. We really tried to sponsor as many females as we could. We think that female athletes are just underappreciated in general, and we want to kind of support their careers and everything. So we sponsored this woman, Paige Alms. And in January, this here, a good example would be like a [inaudible 00:39:48]. She had always part-time jobs, and she’s a big wave surfer. I was like, “Just quit all those jobs. We’re going to pay you just to surf,” and about a month or two later, she ended up barreling Jaws, and she was nominated for SB, and she was the first woman to ever barrel Jaws, which is the North Shore of Oahu, I guess. So anyway, it’s a big deal. So we started figuring out how to do that stuff and get better at it. But we invest in those athletes.
Andrew: Does she have enough followers, and they’re enough aware of your connection to her that they start buying the drink?
Todd: Yeah. It’s interesting, but all these folks are kind of like what I call “force multipliers,” right? So we might have 750,000 people we can get a message out to, but our athletes, I think, have about 10 million. So they can push it out. So when we started getting more into sponsoring, our weekly impressions on social media went up to 25 million or something like that.
Andrew: Oh. So it’s not so much that people are standing on the sidelines or out on a beach watching her surf and then seeing some label that says that she’s associated with Kill Cliff and then going in signing up. It’s that she has a following online, and she promotes you to her following, and they then start to follow you and eventually buy?
Todd: Right. Right. We’re just creating affiliations. So it takes a lot of work, and we’re still not perfect at it, but will get a lot better over time. And I think that, generally speaking, just supporting athletes from a what’s-good-for-the-athlete point of view is pretty cool. We’ve got some really neat stuff coming out soon.
Andrew: I see already you guys on Instagram have 122,000 followers. I see on Twitter 116,000 followers. You guys are active on Pinterest, on Facebook. I didn’t look to see how many followers are there, but what are you doing to build up your following?
Todd: A lot of creative content, like user-generated and stuff we generate, just putting it out there. The more you kind of generate, the more you get. There’s a fine line between giving too much and too little, but we’re cognizant of kind of always writing the front of that, trying to create as much as we can to create as much attention as we can.
Andrew: See, some of it is videos of your athletes at events. Some of it is inspirational quotes. Some of it are just photos of people doing interesting things with your T-shirts on, right?
Todd: Right.
Andrew: What is the strategy? What’s worked best for you?
Todd: Just social media in general has been fantastic.
Andrew: Just being a part of it?
Todd: Yeah. I think that’s made our company. If it wasn’t for social media and having this quirky name, Kill Cliff, like where people are, “What is that?” I don’t know that we would have been a successful in launching something into an incredibly challenging category, but social media has really been kind of what I call “the backbone of the growth.”
Andrew: I’m trying to see what the strategy is, because I’ve been on social media. I don’t have as many followers as you do. I’d like to learn some of what you guys did to get there. I think it’s too easy to brush it off and say, “All those quote-type posts.” Like here’s one, just to give people a sense of it. “I walk around like everything is fine, but deep inside my shoe, my sock is sliding off.” “But deep inside my shoe, my sock is sliding off.” I did read that exactly right. But I get it. People think that’s funny. They share it. That stuff other people have done. What are you guys doing that’s different that I should be picking up on that maybe I can’t see from looking on the outside? I see a bunch of people posing with your T-shirts on or posing with your cans.
Todd: Yeah. Well, I think the number-one thing that people say to me and other folks in the company is, “I love what you stand for,” and I think we stand for something. We have a purpose, and people want to be associated with that purpose. And they think the brand is cool, and we do fun stuff. We’re going to continue too. I mean, it’s just one of those things where people are just interested in the brand, and it’s in-your-face, and it’s something that’s just interesting. It’s different. I was told by some working guys I broke every single rule in marketing and somehow followed them all at the same time. So I don’t know really what that means other than it seems to have resonated with people, and it’s working.
Andrew: But you’re an analytical person. You know what’s working about it. What would you, stepping back, look at it and say, “This is what I’m proud of. It’s working because of . . . “?
Todd: It’s because I let people do what they wanted to do. I didn’t try to manage them very much. I tried to let them just kind of try a bunch of things, and then we kind of AB tested our way to success. Right? Like, we said, “We did those two things, and that didn’t work. We’ll never do that again,” and then we found something that somebody did like, and then just kind of continuously, I call it “incremental process improvement.” We just, each week, sharpening this spear a little bit more, getting a little bit better every single week and like, “Okay. Is it working, yes or no? It’s not. Stop doing it, and start doing more of that,” and letting people fail. We’ve had so many things we haven’t done right, and allowing them to just make mistakes and not get in trouble for it. They’re not in fear of their job if they lose $1000 or something like that. Like, “It’s okay. You can make a mistake.” So I think letting the people be creative and letting the team run the company and me not lording over them allowed it to kind of find its way.
Andrew: Give me an example of that. You actually told April when she was asking you what your biggest challenge was and what other entrepreneurs need to learn, you said it’s letting go and hiring the right people, and I’m looking at my notes here for how you said it, but I guess you said it now even better than you set it in the pre-interview. Can you give me an example so I can see how this plays out in your company? I want to learn from that.
Todd: A great example is I’ve got to folks on my team who are not able to be hired by anybody else. They don’t have the prerequisite education and everything else like that, but I saw something in them that I was like, “There’s potential with these two people,” and I let them be who they were, and I didn’t try to put them in a box and make them do what I wanted them to do. I just let them be successful.
Andrew: What did they end up doing?
Todd: Well, one guy is, he’s a salesman, but he’s also kind of this uber-connector, just makes all these things happen for the company, and he’s really amazing at it. He’s also the guy that started our social media and got really going like where it was big, like really successful. And I just let him do a lot of stuff, and I literally had to dial him back because he was like [inaudible 00:47:02] crazy. But the other guy, he’s actually that first employee, and I saw something in him that I think other people wouldn’t have seen. And I let him do things he needed to do to kind of help the company. He runs all our athletes now, and he does a fantastic job.
Andrew: [inaudible 00:47:28] starting out when every dollar is important, not even thinking of social media and not being willing to pay this one person to do social media because it can’t prove itself fast enough? And you’re saying you just decided, “You know what? We’re going to keep paying his salary, and I’m going to let him go with this and see what happens”?
Todd: Right.
Andrew: Did you set up a metric or some kind of indication of success to know whether what he was doing was working or not?
Todd: Well, two things were going up at the same time. One, sales were going up, online sales were going up, and CrossFit sales were going up, and so that was a good indicator. The top line is always a decent metric. Then the second thing was our followers were going up, and our engagement was up. So what’s really interesting about our social media is that when I take a basket of companies, what I would call “emerging beverage companies” that are, some of them, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, yeah, we might have a little bit, 100,000 more followers than one of the guys doing $100 million in revenue, that would be a win in and of itself, but our engagement is 5 to 15 times higher than these other folks, and it’s because we’re talking to our customers constantly. So that’s what this guy did. He was like, “We have to be talking to these folks.” So sometimes I would be on there talking to customers all the time. Just kind of engaging with the people that buy your product is critical, and I saw that there was a demand from those folks who wanted to engage with us, and we engaged back.
Andrew: It looks like one of the things that also works for you guys online is online coupons, right?
Todd: Yeah. I think those have worked pretty well. We had what I would call “off-the-charts success” with coupons at a retail level. So we’ve had redemptions that are much higher than other folks that have posted online coupons.
Andrew: Meaning, there’s certain sites that do nothing but aggregate coupons. You’ve posted your coupons to them, and that did well for you? No, something else.
Todd: Like, we put a coupon on social media or something like that, like “Go buy this at this world-famous retailer,” and people downloaded the coupons and went and bought it and it had huge redemption levels. So I guess the point is it really worked to drive trial at . . .
Andrew: Retail.
Todd: . . . these coupons.
Andrew: I mean, I was even seeing online stuff. Like you guys are part of Ebates. I see Offers.com did something with you. Swagbucks is something that you guys are using. Swagbucks, for the transcribers who want to get it right. All right. Pepperjam Network, that’s an affiliate program. How effective have affiliate programs been for you?
Todd: They all add up. So it’s all driving a little bit here and there. I think the thing that’s really working great is content marketing, now, to be honest. That’s probably the thing that’s driving . . . you know, we’re having credible authors write things for us, and we’re posting online, and that’s driving a lot of interest in the brand. That’s really been a successful strategy for us.
Andrew: You’re doing a couple of other things right now. You are a serial entrepreneur, but why aren’t you at Kill Cliff anymore?
Todd: The Board of Directors told me they wanted someone else to take the company forward, that, “Hey, thanks. You’ve done a great job here, but, basically, it’s time for you to move on.” I think I stayed a little too long. I believe in the first thousand days is when all the good stuff that I can do is, that’s it, and I’ve been there over 1000 days, so I needed to move on.
Andrew: What do you mean? What were you missing that they needed?
Todd: Well, I’m not what I would call the best . . . like, I’m creative, right? I’m more kind of into the, hey, the marketing and stuff like that, and not so much into the like, hey, let’s dial in this production run so it’s perfect. That’s not what I really want to be doing, and it’s not the highest and best use of my time. So I think there are folks that are professional managers. Like the company, we’re like 103 on the Inc. 500 list, and we did over $2 million in revenue last month, and that’s not for me anymore. Right? That’s at the board thought, and I support them. You know?
Andrew: You still own shares of the business?
Todd: Yeah, I’m the largest shareholder.
Andrew: Were you the one . . . Chris, or [inaudible 00:51:49] now is in charge?
Todd: He’s one of the guys in charge, yeah.
Andrew: I see. Who is the new leader? He’s the president, apparently.
Todd: Yeah. Chris is a former seal. He’s an incredible guy. He graduated like sixth in his class at the Naval Academy. He’s brilliant. He’s a CrossFitter. He learns things faster than anyone I’ve ever met my life, and he completely understands the mission and what we’re doing. So he’s a great person to be running the show right now.
Andrew: All right. The other two things are BAM Worldwide and TriServe. What are they?
Todd: TriServe is a . . . after the mortgage meltdown, I created what I call “a new way of running appraisal management” in the mortgage space. So I started with a couple different things where I just wanted to pay the appraisers faster, because they were the ones who were traditionally getting screwed in this space.
Andrew: Really?
Todd: So we [inaudible 00:52:45] every two weeks, then they’ll be so happy with us. They’ll be our sales force. So I started up the company. Another guy said, “Hey, listen. You’re not going to be able to get paid for like six months. Will you do it?” and he was like, “Yeah,” and I think he went like nine months too without a paycheck, but now top-10 biggest companies that do that in-country, or something like that, close to that. It’s not today, it will be tomorrow. And basically grew it from nothing. It’s all kind of . . .
Andrew: It’s an appraiser company, home appraisers?
Todd: Yeah. Residential mortgage appraisal management. So a bank comes to us, and then we run all their appraisals for them, because they’re not allowed to talk to the appraisers anymore.
Andrew: I see, and you get the appraiser. You send them out there with the right software. You pay the appraiser and make sure that they don’t get screwed?
Todd: Right.
Andrew: And you get paid by the bank?
Todd: Yes, or the homeowner.
Andrew: Or the homeowner. Wow, and you guys are now one of the, you said, if not the number-one, maybe number-two. What size revenue do you need to do to be number-one or number-two?
Todd: No. We’re probably like the 10th largest in the country, or something like that.
Andrew: Oh. What’s the monthly revenue now?
Todd: It’s well over a million dollars.
Andrew: A month?
Todd: Yes.
Andrew: Whoa, and I guess the gross margins are probably like 20% in that business?
Todd: A little bit higher.
Andrew: Wowee. Impressive. You should be fine first class. How soon before you get your own jet?
Todd: I don’t know. I don’t know. It would be funny. It would be funny.
Andrew: This is the company that you were starting on the side, while you were doing Kill Cliff, right?
Todd: Yes.
Andrew: Two thousand and nine is when you launched it. Kill Cliff started in 2007.
Todd: Well, technically Kill Cliff didn’t really start until 2011. I was working on it in 2007 and then launched it January, 2011. This I started on the side of my other job, and then that went for, you know. Yeah. I don’t know.
Andrew: So simultaneously, if we can’t really pinpoint an exact time for one or the other, but here’s the other thing I see about this. Again, no photo of you, no mention of Todd on TriServe’s website. Why not?
Todd: I don’t know. I’m just really not a great self-promoter, that’s all.
Andrew: You know how I just put like in the About page, “Andrew Warner is the founder, and I’ll be the face of the company”?
Todd: Yeah. No. You’re my new business partner. I’ve been told I need to be better at self-promotion, but I just haven’t.
Andrew: How did you end up doing this interview?
Todd: I don’t know.
Andrew: Right? It’s kind of weird. Alex, a guy who used to book for us, put you on the calendar. I forget how. I think what might’ve happened was he was going up and down the Inc. 500 list looking for entrepreneurs, and you were one of the people who was on there, and this was like something he tried, maybe, two years ago, maybe put you into our system. No, four months ago, so not that far. I guess. I don’t know.
Todd: I don’t think that could’ve been it, because the Inc. 500 list came out in August.
Andrew: Right. Yeah, I can’t tell. And then what about BAM Worldwide?
Todd: I started that in 2011. I think it was September. Basically, it’s a software platform that lends money to transportation brokers and carriers, so truckers. The problem is, shippers, when they ship a truck load of product, they don’t want to pay for 30 to 60 days, but truckers need money that day or that week. So brokers turn into little banks, and they can’t make it work. So they get squeezed out of business a lot of the times, and they can’t get traditional bank lines. In fact, a lot of trucking companies, the guys can’t even get a gas card. The guy who owns a trucking company can’t get a gas card. So I was like, “Well, there’s got to be a better way where there can be a little bit less friction in this process.” So we figured out how to create a security that would allow us to lend money to these under-bank people at a decent, affordable rate that was protected through the software, basically. So it’s kind of interesting, but our goal is to help the small guys grow.
So one of our little, small guys, he was doing $6 million in revenue. He was a freight broker, and he got on the system, I think last August, and now he’s doing about $15 million this year now, so he more than doubled in 12 months. Then he’s got a line of sight to $40 million in revenue next year. So when you unfetter the working capital of these guys, they can just grow really quickly. That’s what we do.
Andrew: Where do you get your ideas for businesses? I would never have thought of that business. I would never have thought of the appraisal business and at the same time the recovery drink business.
Todd: It’s kind of funny. I watched your Y Combinator interview, which I thought was great, and I think it’s kind of like somebody gives me an idea, and I kind of turn it over a few times, and then I’m like, “Okay. This is how we can make it work, and this is how we can solve the problem,” and then I just start working on it.
Andrew: Who gives you the idea? Where does that come from?
Todd: That one came from an investment banker. He was like, “There’s this problem. There’s this A-quality credit, and these guys are treated like payday loan guys, and someone should be able to give them a better solution so they can grow their businesses, because banks won’t lend to them,” and I was like, “Okay. Well, what’s the biggest risk?” “The biggest risk is you lend these guys money and they don’t pay their carriers.” So I was, “Okay. If we can pay their carriers for them, then that’ll solve a big problem.”
Andrew: You know, I just realized, I asked about TriServe, was it more than 20% gross revenues? I meant to say “net revenues.” That’s why I was so blown away when it was more than 20%.
Todd: Oh, no, no.
Andrew: So net is like roughly 15%, 20% in that business, isn’t it?
Todd: No, it would be less than that.
Andrew: Less than that. Okay.
Todd: Yeah. Yeah. So it would be like, call it 13%.
Andrew: Okay. Solid, man. Here’s a final question. It actually comes from someone in my audience who’s been asking me to ask this question, and I’m sorry, Tristan, I haven’t gotten around to it. His name is Tristan [inaudible 00:50:48] Rice. Tristan, I’m sorry. I’m probably mispronouncing your last name, but your question is a good one. He says, “Would it be okay, Andrew, if you started asking people about their daily rituals and routines?” Like, what do they do when they first wake up? What does an average day look like for them? Maybe it’s mostly emails or meetings, but it’s still helpful to understand what they’re doing, so what’s your daily routine like?”
Todd: I try to get a workout in, in the morning, in my house, and if I have time, if I’m not going anywhere, I make the family breakfast.
Andrew: The first thing in the morning, you wake up and you work out. What time is that?
Todd: Five-thirty, 6:00.
Andrew: Five-thirty, 6:00, all right. That’s decent. You get up and you work out for how long?
Todd: Thirty minutes to 45 minutes.
Andrew: Do you do a WAD?
Todd: Yeah.
Andrew: You do? You actually go through the work out. So does that mean you print it out and you do it at home?
Todd: No, I make up my own. I just do.
Andrew: You make up your own. Okay.
Todd: Yeah. But it’s like a workout of the day, and I know what I’m going to do. Then I kind of . . .
Andrew: Make your family breakfast. I’m sorry.
Todd: Yeah, I do breakfast, but the other thing I do is, actually, kind of review my goals, and I email them to myself. Sometimes I read them; sometimes I don’t, but it’s just a reminder, like, “Hey. You have goals. You have things you have to do, and you kind of have to do it.” So I’ve got a goal, and it’s a little wacky one, but I want to make 100 people a million dollars. If I make 100 people a million dollars, I don’t know what I did, but I’m going to do good. Right? So basically, I got a bunch of them done already. So now I’ve got to [inaudible 01:00:18] . . .
Andrew: What’s one that you’re especially proud of having done?
Todd: What’s that?
Andrew: What’s one you’re especially proud of having done?
Todd: Like my goals?
Andrew: Yeah.
Todd: You know, I think the business goals make me happy, that I’ve succeeded in having these companies going. Those all started out as little goals and grew and grew and grew, right?
Andrew: So that gets emailed to you on a daily basis, and as you’re going through your email, you see your goals, and you might read them, you might not, but if you read them, you’re reminded of what you’re trying to do, like make 100 people a million dollars?
Todd: I just see the email in my inbox. I know what’s on that list, right?
Andrew: That’s an interesting routine. What else do you do? What’s next?
Todd: I put my head down and go to work and just try to get as much stuff as I can done. Then another thing, I just read a lot. I read a lot. So I try to squeeze in reading, like nonfiction stuff, as much as I can.
Andrew: What’s a good book that you’ve read recently?
Todd: Give and Take, also Mindset. Those are both great. Give and Take is great.
Andrew: Mindset is the name of the book?
Todd: Yeah.
Andrew: What did you like about it? I’ve got that on my reading was.
Todd: It’s by a woman named Carol Dweck. It’s basically about how people’s mindsets basically guide who they are and whether they’re winners, losers, that kind of stuff. But also, the most important line in book was like great leaders, they don’t judge; they teach. So I was blown away by that. I was like, “Yeah. I’ve been judging people my whole life. I need to just start trying to teach people and let’s open their [inaudible 01:02:02] and not judge them.” And that’s been really beneficial for me since I read the book. I just had an epiphany like, “I’ve got stop judging everything.” You know?
Andrew: Well, I’m glad I asked. I’m glad we got that from Tristan. Thanks for doing this interview. You’ve now gone through a full Mixergy interview. What do you think of my process? How can I improve?
Todd: I think it’s great. I love what you’re doing. I’m honored to be here. I don’t know what you can do to improve. I have to sleep on that and think about it a little.
Andrew: What you think of the fact that I kept pushing and pushing until I figured out the Kill Cliff story? Do you feel like I just ruined the surprise of what it meant?
Todd: No. I thought it was kind of cool, actually. I thought, it’s one of those things. Like, you can find the answer to anything you want if you look hard enough, right? You’re tenacious, so I appreciate that.
Andrew: What about you leaving the company? I wasn’t sure how you’d feel about that. We’re still in the interview here, by the way. Kill Cliff.
Todd: Oh, yeah. It’s okay. It’s like a wind in my sails. I’ve got a lot of work to do, and I’m good with it. Like I said, I’ve stayed past a thousand days, and I think I need to go do other things and push other things farther.
Andrew: Well, I’m really glad to have had you on here. I didn’t know much, I didn’t know anything about you, frankly, before the interview started. I said, “Is this a fraud? Does he even work at the company? I don’t see him on the website,” and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I did my research, and I felt that, yes, everything that you told our producer was true, that you really were a Navy SEAL. I was he worried about that, since I couldn’t find anything about who you were. And I saw the SEAL Foundation. I felt good. And now that I’ve had you on, I feel like you should do a lot more public speaking. I think you’re a solid person with interesting experiences . . .
Todd: Thanks.
Andrew: . . . and you’re not public anywhere. So you’re the kind of guess I like to introduce my audience to. No one in my audience, I believe, has heard of you, and they’re all happy to have heard your story.
Todd: That’s awesome. Well, thanks. Hey. I’d love to do more. I guess I’ve just been so focused on the stuff I’ve been doing, I didn’t really think . . . I’m not good at self-promotion. You know? So I’ve got to figure that out. I need some coaching there.
Andrew: All right. Well, this is a good first start.
Todd: Thanks a lot. We did have fun. All right.
Andrew: Thanks so much for doing this. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. If you like this interview, please subscribe to it in whatever podcast player you like, and let’s thank my sponsor, which is Justworks. This is HR software and HR solutions that just friggin work. They’ll take care of everything for you.
Todd, thank you so much. Everyone check out KillCliff.com.
Todd: Thanks.
