Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses.
And a few weeks ago, I was up in–I guess it’s called Marin County, whatever that area up above the Golden Gate Bridge is called. That’s where I was to see some of my friends. They brought out some lunch with salad and all kinds of food and one thing that stood out for me was this avocado oil, which I never heard of before. I’ve heard of canola oil. I’ve heard of olive oil. Mark, you might be laughing at me for not even knowing this thing existed. But I freaking love avocados, and I was really lit by the whole idea of avocado oil.
And then soon after that, I got an email from someone named Anna. She said, “Hey, Andrew, I just want to say thanks for continually inspiring my marketing career. I’m the Marketing Director at Primal Kitchen.” And the name sounded familiar. “I’m writing as a total fan girl and I’m sure you get these emails all the time.” I could say never enough, but I really appreciate it, Anna. So I went and I Googled Primal Kitchen and I said, “That’s the one. That’s the thing I was served at that lunch.” I couldn’t believe it.
So I emailed her back a big fan email and we just got to talking about the company behind it. She said, “Do you want to have the founder on?” I said, “Absolutely. I’d love to have the founder on.” So that’s what we’ve got right now. Mark Sisson is the founder of Primal Kitchen. They make way more than just that avocado oil. They make a lot of great tasting food that helps you live an awesome and healthy life.
We’re going to talk about how he built up this company starting with a blog that was really popular in the health community years ago and then where he got the idea for these products and how he built up. He’s also the author of multiple books, including “The Primal Blueprint.” We’ll talk about all that and so much more.
My two sponsors are first, the company that will help you do your books. It’s called Bench. Second, the company that will help you hire a great developer and more. It’s called Toptal. I’ll tell you more about those later. Mark, good to have you on here.
Mark: Thanks for having me, Andrew.
Andrew: How long have you been doing this, Primal Kitchen?
Mark: Okay. Primal Kitchen I’ve been doing for about three years, but I’ve been an entrepreneur for 30 years, well, I tell my kids I’ve been an entrepreneur for 52 years now.
Andrew: I would say. I’ve heard about what you did. You did what I did, by the way, as a kid. I used to, every time it snowed and there was a snow day, all my friends would go play videogames. Maybe your friends wanted to go do stuff like that like watch TV. What did you do instead?
Mark: First of all, we didn’t have videogames when I was 12. We barely had TV, Andrew. So, early on, I got a sense of the value of money and the power that your own labor could imbue you with. So a snow day, I looked at it as an opportunity. I wouldn’t want to stay home. I’d want to go out and start working at shoveling driveways and walkways and things like that. I remember one day in like 1966, I made $80, which in those days was like $1,000, right?
Andrew: Yeah.
Mark: I thought, “Wow, this is pretty powerful stuff.” So, from that point on, I just started working. I tell my kids today I’ve been working for over 50 years. I’ve been working 40 hours a week for over 50 years because I started mowing lawns at the age of 12, 40 hours a week in the summertime and then that segued into a painting business that I developed when I was still in high school that I used to put myself through college. In fact, one summer, my painting business, I made more money than my dad did that year.
Andrew: Wow.
Mark: Yeah.
Andrew: When you shoveled snow, did you knock on doors, offer a price, negotiate a little bit and then go do the work for that price? Is that the way it worked?
Mark: Yeah. And it was–in retrospect it was easy–but it was the first sort of sales pitch that I had to take on.
Andrew: For me too because if I didn’t charge enough, the whole time I shoveled snow, I’d realize I was a sucker. I didn’t ask enough. I have to have the guts to ask for more. If I asked for too much and walked away, then I’d have the whole thing that, “Maybe I’m making a mistake.” And you’d really be in your head a lot out there thinking about it.
Mark: Yeah. To be truthful, the town I grew up–I grew up in a small fishing village in Maine. So my contemporaries, my peers and the kids that were around me, they also were doing this sort of thing too. So there was a little bit of competition. You kind of had to price yourself according to what was worth your time but also so that you didn’t overcharge and then lose a job to the competition.
Andrew: So you do so much more than avocado oil, as I said. Mayo is fan-freaking-tastic, delicious, lots of different options. You do salad dressing. You do health bars. What kind of revenue are you pulling in three years into this business? What’s the annual revenue in 2016?
Mark: So, to take a step back, I started three years ago, but we launched our first product February of 2015. So, in 2015, with just one SKU, that original mayo, we did $1.6 million, which was pretty phenomenal for a startup company with one SKU and we didn’t have the distribution that a large company would have. We were starting from scratch. 2016, we just finished, we did $13 million this year in 2016. So we’re quite proud of growth thus far and of course looking forward to continue rapid growth.
Andrew: When you started blogging, you just setup–from what I could tell, it was an old WordPress website at MarksDailyApple.com?
Mark: Yeah.
Andrew: What was your vision for it? I’m looking here on this computer at some of your old articles. I see it. It’s everything from how email addiction is an issue to what we should be eating. What was your vision at the time for what the website was going to be?
Mark: At the time I was scrambling because I’d started a supplement company about 20 years ago and I grew that company on the strength of my appearances on television. I did not quite infomercially stuff, but I would find these little cable channels I could appear on as an expert. I would sponsor the show. I would talk about health and fitness and diet and exercise and a little bit of medicine. Then oh by the way, I also sell these supplements. And my company grew very quickly as a result of those appearances.
But after about seven years–this is around early 2000s, 2003, 2004, to be precise–with the internet coming on stronger, with the fact that there were now 400, 500 cable channels on television, this notion that you could stand out among the crowd on TV just sort of went away. So, as a last-ditch effort, 2005 I produced my own television show, produced 52 half-hour episodes of a TV interview talk format. I had guests on. I had a cohost. I produced it. I starred in.
It was very well done. I have a lot of friends in the TV business who loved the show. They just said, “You don’t have any stars on it, so you’re not going to be able to syndicate or anything.” I aired it on Travel Channel. I paid for time on Travel Channel thinking that I could self-liquidate, that I could use the time that I bought to sell products in the commercial breaks on the show. I blew through about $1 million in five months doing that and thought, “This isn’t going to work. This is going to take me down pretty quickly.”
So I thought, “Well, I’ll start a blog,” because I’m pretty good at creating content. I know that with the internet and where it is now that you don’t have to pay for distribution. You’re distributed in hundreds of millions of homes, but there are three million channels, so you don’t have people coming to you.
Nevertheless, I thought within a year I’d have 100,000 subscribers, 100,000 viewers a day and it would be great and I could build back the audience that I’d have on television. Andrew, it didn’t turn out that way. After a year, I had 1,000 a day. It was a huge amount of work that I undertook and I had no idea. I was sort of naïve going into it. Now, ultimately the next year I had 3,000 a day and now it’s up to 1.5 million to 2 million uniques a month. But it was a long–
Andrew: I’m curious about how you got it to that level. But before we even get to how you got it to that level, I remember my dad had a manufacturing company. He used to manufacture women’s clothing. Then he built it up and he had these salespeople and it just became this big thing. Then he at one point had to start over. He had to go and walk door to door to stores and say, “Here’s what I can produce. Can I manufacture this and bring it into your store?” And it felt to me like a comedown.
Did it feel like that to you? You were on television. You were the guy being interviewed, the guy pulling all the strings, paying for the interview and now you’re a blogger like every kid. That feel at all like a comedown?
Mark: It was a huge comedown. I was depressed to the extent that I get to depressed for two years or three years.
Andrew: While you were doing it?
Mark: Yeah, while I was doing it because as I was writing these blog posts–I made a commitment to write every day, hence the name Mark’s Daily Apple. I looked at it as this–I wanted to write every day for a year and at the end of a year, I would have said everything there was to say about health and fitness and I could walk away and I’d have built up this huge evergreen audience. It was like slogging through.
As I say, I didn’t get the viewership that I thought I’d get, that I anticipated. We tried some of the techniques, StumbleUpon, some other paid visitation, but for the most part, it was going out and having interactions with other bloggers and influencers that–
Andrew: Like what? Talk about what some of those things that worked for you were. When you say going out and talking, what was that like?
Mark: Well, I didn’t go out. But the subject matter started to become more centered around a paleo lifestyle. I’ve always been fascinated by evolution. I’ve always been interested in health and fitness. I’ve always been interested in human performance. So I saw the blog, Mark’s Daily Apple, as an opportunity to espouse my ideas and beliefs that I was quite certain of and I’d been espousing for decades already. It’s easy for me to write about these things.
But the community didn’t really exist. I helped build a community. The interest in paleo was just beginning and the whole idea of ancestral health and eating like a caveman, it was a novel concept in 2006. So, I would find all the other people who were blogging in that arena and we’d sort of get together and share posts and cross-link and do all the things that are now sort of de riguer if you’re trying to start a blog. It’s kind of marketing 101.
It was through these relationships that I developed that my team and I developed–by then I had a couple of people working with me on this on this project, on this team–that we were able to expand our readership, if you will.
Andrew: Can you be a little more specific about what you did to get those early readers, to partner up with other people? Do you remember what some of those techniques were?
Mark: Literally call them up on the phone, email them, “Hey, we’re writing about the same thing. I’m thinking about doing a book. I’d like to keep you in the loop. Can I use some of your information in my book? I’d be happy to cite you as a reference.” We were doing a food–every Saturday I’d call in people who were doing recipes and share links that way.
Andrew: I see. You had like a list of Mark’s friends on your website, which linked out to other people.
Mark: Absolutely.
Andrew: You did also link out–I’m looking at old screenshots of it and old news articles. You did also have something called Primal Nutrition at the time that you would link out to from the top. What was Primal Nutrition?
Mark: So Primal Nutrition was my ecom site, my commerce site. So, I didn’t sell anything on Mark’s Daily Apple, the blog. It’s an important point, Andrew. In the supplement business, it’s very important that you keep content separate from an offer to purchase a product. There are pretty strict regulations about that.
Andrew: I didn’t know it.
Mark: I tried to maintain Mark’s Daily Apple as a clean, third-party objective reporting site and then I was my own advertiser, just as I was on that failed TV show. I was my own advertiser. So, I didn’t take paid advertising on Mark’s Daily Apple ever. I would link to either books that I’d written, the supplements, the business I already had, the supplement business or events that I was putting on or things like that.
Andrew: And at that point you were still in the supplement business, right? You were selling powders and things like that.
Mark: Yeah.
Andrew: Why did you stop that?
Mark: I didn’t stop it. I still do that.
Andrew: So, if I go to–right, I guess if I go to Primal Nutrition, I still am linked up to a fully working site.
Mark: No. So things have changed. We sort of rebranded over the years. As my book, “The Primal Blueprint,” came out and that became my brand, “The Primal Blueprint,” we created a site, PrimalBlueprint.com which became the commerce site and that’s where you can buy all of our products. This is part of the story where the turns and twists and doors close and others open.
As I was writing about all of these amazing lifestyles that had to do with regaining health and fitness by exercising appropriately and getting the right amount of sleep and the right amount of sun, much of it had to do with food. So I was telling people how to access a quarter of a cow by cowpooling grass-fed meat or how to make your own bone broth or how to render lard, all these sort of DIY minimalist lifestyle things. Yet over here, I’m selling the world’s highest potency full spectrum multivitamin, multi-mineral antioxidant.
There was a little bit of a disconnect there. I still have a lot of business, but I started to think–and by now hundreds of other bloggers are creating this huge community of millions of people who are interested in clean food who I’m telling them how to make mayonnaise or how to make a clean salad dressing that doesn’t have nasty industrial seed oils in it. Why doesn’t some company make these things?
That was kind of the light bulb about three years ago, “Okay, I know how to do that. I can make these things. I can make a mayonnaise that you can buy off the shelf. I can make bottled salad dressing that would blow away any other dressing in terms of its nutrient profile and what got called out on the supplement panel.” So, that’s really the impetus for starting primal kitchen, the food company.
Andrew: I see. And in the early days of blogging, do you have a sense of how much money the blog was making from supplements?
Mark: For the first two years, it was making zero. In fact, it was a hobby that cost me $100,000 a year.
Andrew: Really?
Mark: Yeah.
Andrew: You had two kids or three?
Mark: I had a wife and two kids.
Andrew: Two kids.
Mark: Yeah. Now, my supplement business was still doing okay because a lot of my customers were on what I call autoship. They were on a 30-day autoship cycle. The products that I made, if I do say so myself, are the best in the world in their category. So, when people would get on autoship, I didn’t lose people at a rate that other companies might lose them, the attrition of the autoship of the subscription program wasn’t as high as it was with other companies.
However, because I wasn’t bringing new customers in to replace those that were leaving, my business was slowly, slowly dwindling. I was still making a nice living, but it was a little bit like, “Okay, I’m not going to get to my retirement plan this way on a downward slope.” So that’s when I had to kind of think about what is it that I’m writing about in the lifestyle and the market that I’m creating myself that I’m not addressing. It was the food.
Andrew: So I get the idea. You’re telling people, “Here’s how to make homemade mayonnaise that actually is healthy and good for you.” Then you say, “How many people are actually going to make mayonnaise? I don’t even want to make mayonnaise,” I think you told our producer. You said, “I’d rather just have someone make it for me if it’s possible.” I get that. What I’m curious about then is how do you go about making mayonnaise? What do you do to do that? You can’t go to Alibaba and buy it from China.
Mark: No. You start with ingredients that are available in health food stores. In my case, it’s just let’s go back to my kitchen. Let’s whip up what we think would be an ideal combination of the best possible ingredients. So, the original mayonnaise, Primal Kitchen Mayo, is avocado oil, it’s like 72% avocado oil by weight. Now, why avocado oil? It’s the healthiest of all the oil. You cannot go wrong with avocado oil. The more avocado oil you put on anything, the healthier that thing becomes. It’s not like you have to use it sparingly. We start with avocado oil, eggs from organic cage-free hens, organic vinegar from non-GMO beets.
Andrew: So you’re actually going to Whole Foods buying this stuff, bringing it to your kitchen and starting to mix it up?
Mark: And whipping it up, yeah. So we make a mayonnaise. It tastes great, fits all the profile. The next step is I hire a food scientist by the hour. So I don’t have anybody on staff.
Andrew: This is kind of a weird question, but where do you hire a food scientist?
Mark: You know, there are lots of directories and resources in the food industry. So thousands of people are listed and you just go through and pick them.
Andrew: I see. You’re just looking for them the way that I might look for a developer if I had to code up a new site.
Mark: Same thing.
Andrew: So you hire a food scientist and you say, “I’ve whipped this up in my kitchen. It tastes great. It has all the ingredients that I stand by. Now what’s his job or her job?”
Mark: Can we scale it? Can it be made to scale when you put it through the manufacturing equipment where you’ve got to make tens of thousands of pounds at a time? Does this little recipe batch that I was going to make a pint or whatever–you don’t make much more than a pint of mayonnaise because it doesn’t even last that long in the refrigerator when you make it at home. So we had to look at the microbial properties, the shelf life, the taste variables over time.
So, from that working with food scientist, the next step is you find a co-packer, a manufacturer who can make it and specializes in the product you’re trying to make. You give them the specs that you have laid out with your food scientist in this case, then they make a batch in a large enough amount that they know that it will run in huge quantities. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, you go back to the–you literally go back to the kitchen and say, “What do we need to do?” You go back to the R&D part of your manufacturing and say, “Where can we tweak this thing?”
Andrew: And did you find somebody in–you’re in California like me–did you find somebody local to you to manufacture it?
Mark: Yes, I did.
Andrew: You did? You just go in. Did that first batch work out okay?
Mark: Oddly enough, the first batch worked out great. That got us in trouble. So the first batch, what’s interesting is when I went to–I thought we were going to launch this company with like five different SKUs. I thought we were going to have a mayonnaise, a ketchup, a couple of salad dressings. I thought they were all going to come together at the same time.
But as we noted early on, the first thing we could make to scale was the mayonnaise and we didn’t have anything else behind it close enough. We said, “Let’s just try the mayonnaise out on the marketplace, see what the response is, see what kind of traction we get.” So, I went to the co-packer and said, “What’s the least amount we can make because I don’t want this to be on my warehouse shelf a year from now and spoil?” They said, “We can make 12,000 jars.” All right, 12,000 jars, whatever.
So we launched it the first week in February of 2015. We sold out in 10 days. So I knew we were onto something there.
Andrew: Did you have a sense that mayonnaise was a hot seller or something people wanted because of the way your blog posts about it were getting reactions?
Mark: I had a sense of that, but I had no idea that it was literally the Holy Grail of clean eating. People who otherwise want to eat clean have avoided mayonnaise for decades because the canola, soybean, the corn oil, the artificial flavors, all the nasty stuff that traditional manufacturers of big food put into mayo.
So when we came up with this clean mayo, all of a sudden people who have stayed away from chicken salad, tuna salad, potato salad, egg salad because they couldn’t buy a mayo that worked for them and they didn’t want to make their own mayo now could use our product to start to include a lot more variety in their diets.
When you eat clean, that’s one of the things that you really have to be very cognizant of. You’ve eliminated so many foods that you used to eat that you’re left with some awesome foods, but what makes the difference is what you put on them–the sauces, the dressings, the toppings, how you prepare them. That’s really what gives you the variety.
So, to be able to start to introduce products that gave people an opportunity to add flavor and taste and variety to their meal in addition to endowing that meal with greater nutrient density was sort of the perfect kind of thing for us.
Andrew: I see. All right. In a moment I’m going to come back and ask about the rest of the story. I also saw you shift on camera and I want to ask you about why you’re shifting and what you’re doing there. We talked about what’s going on below the camera.
Mark: I’m so excited. That’s why.
Andrew: First, I’ve got to tell people about a company called Toptal. You mentioned you had this idea, you went and you hired a food scientist. I was kind of–for some reason to me that was a surprise move, but of course, you could hire an expert and the internet makes all these experts available to us, but I never think about it. That made me realize that one of my companies, one of my sponsors is called Toptal and we don’t think about all the great uses for a company like Toptal. What they do is they connect you with the top three percent of talent out there.
I had this guest on, Clark Benson, a few days ago. Clark raised, according to Crunchbase, $5.1 million. He’s great at growing traffic for his website, Ranker. He was horrible at putting together all the investor slides, all the investor spreadsheets they needed. He just said, “I’m the CEO. I’ve got to pound away at the spreadsheet. It’s my responsibility. I have to do it.”
What he didn’t realize is he can go to Toptal, hire somebody who’s an MBA who’s been doing this for some of the major companies and is now freelancing, just hire that person and say, “Here’s what I want the spreadsheet to look like. You go do it.”
That’s why Toptal is paying me to let everyone out there know that Toptal has top three percent of talent out there for things like finance now. If you want somebody to help you with your spreadsheets, help organization your company, help you think through who you should hire, they’ve got that. They’ve had, since the very beginning, the top three percent of developers and they’re known for that.
So, if you need to hire a developer full-time, part-time, the best of the best is on the Toptal network. They screen then. They really work like mad to make sure they get the perfect people. And if you need a designer too, you can go to Toptal and hire them. I’ve hired developers from them. These guys are some of the best of the best, people who could and in some cases have worked for companies like Google and Facebook, etc., but they don’t want to be stuck in an office working at Google or Facebook, etc. They want to work from wherever.
So Toptal makes sure they find the best of the best, they recruit them and now they make them available to you. If you’re looking to hire somebody, I urge you to go check out Toptal. One of the first things they’ll do is they’ll get on a phone with you. They’ll ask you about your needs, how your company works, what your culture is. And then they’ll suggest one, maybe two people who are perfect for you. If you’re not happy, you don’t have to work with them. If you are, you can often start within a day.
If you want to get started with Toptal, don’t do what most people do. Don’t go to Toptal.com. Go to the special URL where they’re giving Mixergy listeners a special offer. Toptal was created by a Mixergy fan, came out to my first Mixergy event. So, he’s giving us a special offer he’s giving nobody else. Mixergy listeners are going to get 80 hours of Toptal developer credit when they pay for their first 80 hours and that’s in addition to a no-risk trial period of up to two weeks. Google doesn’t get to take a trial period on their people. You do if you hire from Toptal. Go check out Toptal.com/Mixergy.
You were shifting, Mark. What are you sitting on over there or what are you doing?
Mark: I work at a standup desk and have for 10 years. I have a pebble mat under my feet. I’m barefoot most of the time, so I stand on a pebble mat when I’m standing.
Andrew: That’s like a mat made out of pebbles?
Mark: Yeah, it’s a mat made out of pebbles anywhere from an inch and a half to three inches. They’re all glued together. You can buy them on Amazon. What can’t you buy on Amazon? I’ve got a leaning post. So it’s a seat made by Focal Upright Furniture that I just am able to–I don’t sit on it, I lean against it. It’s on a post that sticks into a platform that I stand on. So I can lean back. So I’m taking 90% of the weight off my feet when I want to, but I’m not sitting. My hips are completely open as if I were standing.
Andrew: I’ve never heard of that.
Mark: I can shift around a little bit. It’s changed my life. People at my office, my employees have those. They love them. They also have tred-desks so they can walk at their upright desks if they want to on a treadmill.
Andrew: You are really into health. Part of my fear was that we were going to deep into the science of health. I’ve seen you do it actually because I was preparing for this interview and I can’t follow it. That’s why I want to stick with business. But I’m amazed by your body. I don’t think I’ve seen one guy shirtless nearly as often as I’ve seen you. You still have ripped abs?
Mark: Oh yeah, more than ever. I’m going to be 64 in July. That’s the thing. It’s mostly diet. I’ve had abs my whole life, but if you cover them with a layer of fat, you can’t see them.
Andrew: Isn’t also that you were active for so much of your life?
Mark: Sure.
Andrew: Didn’t you write a book on biathlons?
Mark: Yeah. Back in the day, I wrote a book on training for–before they even changed the name of the sport to duathlon, I wrote the first book on biathlons. I was a triathlete in the early ’80s, the dinosaur days of triathlon. Because a lot of us didn’t like to swim that much, they created a new sport called biathlon, which was run, bike, run. They got rid of the swim and you ran twice. So, I wrote a book on that.
I wrote the Runner’s World triathlon training book in 1982, one of the first books on training for triathlons. My life before this was as an elite endurance athlete. So, yeah, I’ve done the work. But I’ve been coasting for 30 years. I don’t train that much anymore.
Andrew: If you do the work early on and establish a base, do you get a little bit of a free pass later on in life where you don’t have to work out as much?
Mark: You don’t get a free pass, but you get a huge leg up on everybody, yeah. If you do the work–
Andrew: I wish I’d done that in high school and college. You actually trained for the Olympics, didn’t you?
Mark: I was a marathoner first in the ’70s and finished fifth in the US National Championships in 1980 and qualified for the Olympic trials for the 1980 US marathon trials. That was the year the US didn’t send a team because of the boycott, but water under the bridge. I was a marathoner first, then a triathlete, then I was an inline skater for a while. So I’ve always sort of had this endurance jones that I had to address. However, having said that, I haven’t run a mile–ran 100 miles a week for seven years. I haven’t run a mile in 15 years.
Andrew: How do you give up on that? Why not?
Mark: Once you’re over it, you’re over it. When I left Maine to come to sunnier climates, I never want to be cold again. So, when I gave up–
Andrew: But what about the runner’s high? I sometimes will get sick. I’m a runner. If I can’t run for two weeks, I start to get grouchy and I start to get depressed. Do you miss that?
Mark: Not anymore, no. It took five years to get over it because it’s a very real thing. The runner’s high is not a good thing. The runner’s high is your body in a survival mode creating endorphins to keep you going through adversity. If you chase that every day the way you chase a heroin high or something, it’s not that different from being addicted to substances. It’s as if you’re creating your own endogenous substances, which isn’t to say that you’re doing a bad thing, Andrew. Running is great.
But I get my high other ways. So, I play now. I spent 25 years as an endurance athlete where I never had fun, really. I could train hard and I could feel good about myself and I could have these accomplishments, but I could never truly say in 200 endurance contests and the gun went off when I crossed the finish line, “Wow, this is fun.” Now I’m looking for ways to have fun. I play ultimate Frisbee in a group every week. It’s the most fun I have all week. I go for standup paddle sessions for an hour, hour and a half.
Andrew: By yourself?
Mark: Mostly by myself. It’s very meditative. But I’m hanging out with dolphins and I never think, “When’s it going to be over?” It’s like, “Oh crap, I’ve got to get back for a meeting.” I’m having so much fun doing it. I snowboard. I do fun things now. So, I can’t get into that headspace where I can put on shoes and go out and run for a mile or 10 and have any sort of a sense of gratification anymore. In fact, I’ve tried it a couple times, like I get about 200 yards down the road and I go, “What am I thinking?”
Andrew: That’s the way it used to be when I started running. I’d go for a few blocks and go, “Today’s not a good day for running. Let’s go home.” So what I’m wondering then is why you gave that–well, how about if I phrase this question this way–I read an old Guardian article about you from 2001 about how you were working with the International Olympic Committee, responsible for doping controls. That was your responsibility.
They said, “Look, there’s a conflict here. You’re selling supplements and at the same time, you’re watching out to make sure people aren’t doping.” Essentially you had to pick one of the other and essentially you said, “Sayonara, goodbye IOC. I’m going to go and sell my nutritional supplements.” Why did you move in that direction instead of sticking with the IOC and what you did before?
Mark: Damn that Google. You can find everything.
Andrew: Right?
Mark: So, for 14 years, I was the Anti-Doping Commissioner of the sport of triathlon. I was the Secretary General of the ICU, the International Triathlon Union. So, that was after I left competition, I was a part of the administrative aspect of the sport, helped get it into the Olympic Games in 2000. I’m very proud of all the accomplishments we had there.
But again, I had a family. I had a wife and two kids. These were voluntary positions that I got elected to and at some point, I was being groomed to be President of the overall federation and I wasn’t ready. In those days, I thought I’ve got to have $20 million in my bank account to spend the rest of my life traveling around the world for free meeting with heads of Olympic committees and head of national Olympic committees and federations.
So I wasn’t ready for it yet. I just had to make that decision that that part of my life is over. I’m really going to focus now on how I can change the world. At that point, it was changing the world by providing supplements that athletes could take to improve their performance without endangering them or risking expulsion for having used a performance enhancing drug.
Andrew: All right. So we talked about the mayo. You came out with it. You launched it on Mark’s Daily Apple. At the time, you told our producer you had 1.5 million unique visitors a month, which is phenomenal. You sold out the first batch even though you were worried you might end up having it in your garage and it was time to grow. What was next, growing more sales of this product or coming up with the next product?
Mark: So, for the first six or eight months we were growing sales of this product. Now, we were simultaneously working on development of new products, but because that is a one year window at best from inception of the idea to the execution and final delivery of it, we had things in the innovation pipeline, but we wanted to really focus on selling the mayonnaise. So we wanted more points of distribution.
So once we had proven the concept by selling direct on my site and also at the same time I was an early investor in ThriveMarket.com. So, I knew the founders of Thrive Market and we arranged for them to by my exclusive seller of mayonnaise online. I had no one else, so sure you can be my exclusive. They used this new innovation product that they were the only ones who could sell it as a means of getting new membership.
So it was a very synergistic relationship where I would sell them product. They would use my product as premiums for themselves to get new memberships, but also they would give those same premiums to their influencers and provided a lot of influencers to our driving membership in sort of a two-level, multi-level operation there. So Thrive went very well.
This is the key–because I had been building a brand for 10 years before I launched this product, there were a lot of people in the health space who knew my name, who knew what I do, who read my books. So, we were very fortunate to have Whole Foods market have buyers that new Mark Sisson, knew “The Primal Blueprint” and basically said, “Whatever you guys are doing, we love it. We’re going to take it.”
Andrew: I see.
Mark: Pretty much sight unseen. We were able to open in the Rocky Mountain region of Whole Foods with 33 stores and we crushed it. We outsold every mayonnaise including their own.
Andrew: What did you do to outsell every other mayonnaise? Did you buy up your own stuff the way some other mayonnaise companies have done?
Mark: Don’t get me started on that. No. It was just having local–well, we had local brand ambassadors. We did promotions. One time in Boulder we had an end cap of like 300 jars of mayonnaise stacked on it. You can’t not see that as you walk by. Then if you understand Boulder in particularly is a very paleo-centric, paleo-friendly marketplace, we had a lot of people go, “Wow, this is great. I’m going to try that.”
Because the product is so good, we have a lot of repeat buyers. So, we not only were able to sell to more and more individuals as those individuals came on as customers, they were buying regularly. Our sales improved substantially pretty much right out of the block.
Andrew: What’s a local brand ambassador for you? What was that program like?
Mark: So that’s pretty cool. We have these people who are in local areas who raise their hand basically and say, “I’d like to be a brand ambassador. I’d like to work for your part-time. I’d like to do demonstrations. I’d like to go to the health food store and I’d like to setup a stand and for three hours I want to help sample your product. So we’ll go in,” so, these brand ambassadors go in and they take responsibility–
Andrew: For free they do this?
Mark: No. We have to pay them.
Andrew: You pay them. Okay.
Mark: Yeah. Some of them might do it for free. We pay them. Now, this year our brand ambassador program is one of our more robust marketing efforts. I think by the end of the year, we’ll have 80 paid brand ambassadors and a director inside the company who organizes all of the different events that they’ll attend and appear at.
Andrew: So, I might go to my local supermarket and there’s somebody there giving me a sample.
Mark: Yes. Correct. And typically the sample, one of the things we’re doing is we cobrand. So, we’ve got partners who also make very healthy food. Maybe a Safe Catch tuna fish, which is one of our good friends, will mix up a bowl of tuna and hand out samples on a gluten-free cracker. So, now you’ve got the mayonnaise, safe tuna and a gluten-free cracker. So, you get a sense of the mayonnaise, but you’re also–
Andrew: Ah. . . And you know how it fits into your life. I got it. I see. You also mentioned Thrive Market. I don’t know much about Thrive Market. What is it?
Mark: Thrive Market is basically Costco meets Whole Foods online. So, you pay to become a member.
Andrew: $60 a year.
Mark: $60 a year, $59 a year and for that, you are able to access–I think they’re up to $4,200 or $4,300 products now, most of which you can get at health food stores in the quantities that you would get them in health food stores, not giant Costco quantities, but close to wholesale prices. So, you place your order online, if the order is more than $49, it’s free shipping, it’s there the next day.
So, it was originally designed to serve what we call food deserts, areas of the country where there is no health food store nearby and they’re sort of resigned to shopping at some big box store, whatever. Now they can take advantage of this. The company has grown tremendously in the last–it only launched in 2014. It’s huge now.
Andrew: You know what? It occurred to me as I was researching you that you’re a guy who started out teaching. I guess you were doing it throughout. But you also were in ecommerce. I’m wondering why you didn’t do what other bloggers of the day did, which is go into creating courses, creating trainings, creating stuff like that. Why go through the whole hassle–and we’ll get to some of the hassle–of creating products of sometimes they don’t go right, sometimes they do, of sourcing ingredients. Why do that?
Mark: Well, first of all, I do trainings. We have a Primal Health Coach program.
Andrew: Why not stick with that instead of doing the other stuff? Why physical products?
Mark: Why not do them all is what I say.
Andrew: I see.
Mark: So I spent the better part of 10 years creating this brand. The brand has created pockets of demand. So we have a coaching program, PrimalHealthCoach.com. We train people to do what I used to do, which is to coach people in how to lose weight, how to get off their medications, how to live an awesome life.
I couldn’t not do that. I have all the material. I have the resources. I have the personnel to develop a course like that. It’s a very robust course. It’s an online learning experience. We’ve put thousands of people through it already. That’s one–by the way, one of the end results of that is that when you become a Primal Health Coach, you’re better positioned to be a brand ambassador if you want to earn some money doing that.
Andrew: I see.
Mark: We’re creating this very synergistic community of people who know about Primal, who are living it and who want to use it as a way of expanding their own career. So we do the training. Products has always been my specialty. My love has been creating products. Going back to my 12 and 13 and 14-year old days, my sister and I would make Christmas wreathes to sell at Christmas time. I would carve animals with a little saw and sell them on the street corner.
I was always a product guy from the beginning. So, to me, having products is still that tangible thing you could pick up and go, “Wow, this is something I did. It came out of my brain. It’s serving a need. People are loving it.” That’s love for me.
Andrew: I get that. There’s nothing like seeing something that you’ve created, especially in a world where everything is so digital that touching Instagram and touching Snapchat happens through the same piece of glass and the same experience, essentially.
Mark: Yeah.
Andrew: How do you manage your company? How do you do that and still have time to slack line as I see you doing online here on Instagram? What is the structure of the company? Who’s running it day to day? How do you organize it so it all works without you being there in every piece of it all the time?
Mark: So I have a publishing branch and I have a guy who runs publishing for me. I don’t have to spend much time there. I have a partner in Primal Kitchen. She was my marketing consultant for a year and then she was spectacular. So I brought her on full-time and she owns a piece of that company.
The supplement company kind of runs itself. I’d like it not to do that. I’d like to actually prove that over the next couple years. So we just hired another digital marketing specialist. But in each of these areas, I look at my role as a thought leader, guru, cheerleader and I manage assets. That’s what I do. I manage people and money.
Andrew: What’s your process for doing that? I talked to Will Schroter, the guy who owns Zirtual and a bunch of other products. He just manages by numbers. Every morning, he wants a specific set of numbers form everybody in the company so he has an understanding of how the company works. What’s your process?
Mark: I’m much more qualitative. I’m not a quant guy that way. I probably should be. I’m also very aware of where things are in terms of how much money is in the bank and how much sales we did.
Andrew: So, how does the qualitative information funnel itself over to you?
Mark: Meetings. I spend time on the phone with my managers on a regular basis.
Andrew: I see. Every week scheduled on the phone, is that how it works?
Mark: Not scheduled so much. Food is now the main focus of what we’re doing because it’s growing so rapidly, it requires more attention from me. But on the food side, we have four scheduled meetings on the phone a week, some of which take two hours. Those are more quantitative meetings, but on the qualitative side, the marketing, we’re throwing ideas about what kind of marketing pieces to do here or how we might craft an Infusionsoft funnel. I’m in on all of it.
Andrew: You’re in on that level too?
Mark: Oh yeah. Look, I’m up here. I know what I want the effect to be, but I hire people who know how to do that and who are good at doing that and who want to do that. I don’t want to do that.
Andrew: Who does your books?
Mark: Pardon me?
Andrew: Who does your bookkeeping?
Mark: Well, now I have two full-time accountants. But until literally two years ago, I had a once a week part-time accountant. Until we got in the food business, my business was all credit card. There were no receivables at all. Once we started being in the food business, we’re in 5,000 stores now, so we have a lot of receivables. Not all the stores have receivables, we have distributors.
But there are a lot of different moving pieces here. So my head accountant, who is also an MBA and getting her CPA is brilliant. She’s wonderful, a godsend for me. Then we just hired another person to take some of the workload off of her so she could do higher level stuff.
Andrew: So I asked partially because that’s my second sponsor and I want to tell people about Bench. But also because for me, that was a huge hire. I never think of bookkeeping as something I need to hire because I’m good at it. I love looking at numbers. In many ways, it’s easier for me than dealing with people and sales material and all that because numbers are straightforward. You know when there’s a right answer and you know when you failed.
I remember at my previous company, hiring a full-time bookkeeper changed everything. I now knew all my numbers instantly and there were no screw-ups. At this company, at Mixergy, I outsourced it. I think there are people out there who have messy books and they think they can clear it up at the end of the year or they think they can clear it up twice a year. I don’t know what their system is.
What they’re doing is they’re really making the problem bigger and bigger and bigger and worse and worse. Yeah, they can do what you did, which is hire an outside part-time bookkeeper. I have a hard time with that. Partially for me the hard time is every time I’ve looked for an outside bookkeeper, there was always an issue, like maybe they would need vacation at a certain time when it wasn’t right for me or maybe they were close to retirement, which is why they were so good and had so many people who raved about them, then I’d have to go and find another one.
So all these issues. I really like online companies to do it. Partially, I’m talking about it because that’s my sponsor and partially because I really believe strongly in it. For anyone who’s out there who has bookkeeping issues or bookkeeping needs, check out a company called Bench. Do you know them by the way, Mark?
Mark: I don’t. I’ve heard of them, but I’m with you. I just want to add–went through nine part-time bookkeepers over an eight-year period for the very reasons you mentioned.
Andrew: Yeah. I would talk to my accountant–I have accountants that I’ve had for over 10 years. They’d say, “Look, here’s a person who left here. Now they’re setting up a bookkeeping operation.” Great. Then they end up saying, “I don’t want to be a bookkeeper. I like being in accounting. Bookkeeping is a little too small for me.”
So it does take a long time to find the right company. What I like about Bench is they have tons of real bookkeepers, real CPAs, people who are going to do the books. But before those people even get to the numbers, they have software that will suck in the data from Infusionsoft, which you happen to use or Stripe, which I happen to use, or PayPal or checks or everything else.
They’ll put it all into one system. They’ll have the software categorize it and organize it. Then once the chores are done, real human beings will go through the books and make sure the books are in order. That way you know month to month where you’re going, what are you doing, how’s the business.
You get to see it the way that if you play videogames, you like to see it–I know you don’t play videogames. I can’t imagine you have time for it. But anyone who does play videogames, you know. You see points. I tried Mario Run. I had to delete it from my phone because I kept going after these freaking coins because I see every coin gets me more points. So, I want to get more points and now I’m doing backflips to get coins over here. The green coins, which are actually called black coins give me more points. That’s the thing. We struggle for points because that’s what we are. We’re humans. It’s one of our motivations.
Well, the thing about having books that are kept in order on a regular basis is you get to see your points. You get to see where you’re wasting money. You get to see where you’re making money. You get to see what levers you need to pull to grow your business. Really, if you’re listening to me and you haven’t checked them out, I really urge you to check out Bench.co because they’re offering something to Mixergy listeners that they’re not offering to anyone else.
Not only are they offering us a big discount, they’re also giving us a trial period. The only reason they’re offering us a trial period is because someone in my audience said, “Hey, Andrew, you tell us that Bench is giving Mixergy listeners the lowest prices, but I found it even lower somewhere else.” So I contacted them. Bench said, “Sorry, we were testing something. To make it up to everyone at Mixergy, we’re going to offer a 20% discount and a free trial period.”
So go check them out. The only place you can get that is Bench.co/Mixergy. They save money by not getting the M in their URL–Bench.co/Mixergy.
It really is tough to hire. How’d you learn how to hire people?
Mark: I haven’t yet. I haven’t learned how to do it yet. I’ve hired 700 people in my entrepreneurial career. I can point to maybe four of them that were exceptional hires. I cannot stress enough–I know you’ll hear this. I know you don’t like clichés on your show, Andrew. But hiring is the absolute key to a successful business. It takes time. You can’t gloss it over.
So one of the things we do right now is we use temp firms a lot. We’ll try somebody for 90 days or six months. That’s how we get a chance to try someone out and see if they fit the corporate culture and the DNA and see if there’s a–
Andrew: Temp firms?
Mark: Yeah.
Andrew: I was just thinking about temp firms. I thought they were not doing so well anymore because of companies like Toptal that you get to hire online. But you’re still bringing in people from temp firms I’m guessing because you want them in your office, right?
Mark: Yeah. Having said that, I have 50 people that I write checks to every month now and only 14 of them work in my warehouse, which is my main operation. So, in production, for instance, we only do temps because we can get a sense that it doesn’t cost that much to pay the overage for the temp and to get a sense of where they are and who they are and bring them on over time. Our latest accounting hire has to be on site. It doesn’t have to be, I can rethink that, but for right now, I want them on. He was a temp and we’re going to transition him to full time. So we still go through reams of bios and resumes through the temp agencies but they sort of do that for us.
I’ve done a lot of stuff with Craigslist and I’ve done a lot of stuff with other aggregators of bios and resumes and want ads and things. So it’s a mishmash. Sometimes I get a referral. The president and my minority partner at Primal Kitchen Foods, she was a marketing officer at a company that was a sponsor of one of my events and that’s where I met her. She showed up at my event, brought the drinks they were sponsoring the event with. She wanted to meet me. She read the book.
We had a nice chat that evening. My wife and I had left our car somewhere. So she gave us a ride home. We caught up. The next thing you know, she leaves that company and says, “I’m up for grabs as a marketing consultant.” I paid her for a year as a marketing consultant. She was so awesome, I knew when I brought her on as a partner I knew exactly what I was getting by then. So it was a perfect smooth transition.
Andrew: I see. If you’re onboarding so many people because you’re trying them, you’re trying them the way you want people to try your mayo at a store, you must have a good onboarding process to help get them productive fast because they may not last that long, right?
Mark: Correct. That’s the other thing you don’t want to have happen is you don’t want to invest all that time finding them and training them and then find out it wasn’t a good match.
Andrew: So what is your process to get them on board fast and to figure out of they’re not a good fit?
Mark: So, right now, the most strategic layer for us right now is this brand ambassador level. So we’re going to be hiring 50 new brand ambassadors to get us to 80 by the end of the year. I have my head brand ambassador is a phenomenal young lady who has done this for a long time. She’s wonderful on the phone. She’s wonderful in person.
I leave that up to her. I basically say, “You have to find. . .” this is my main charge to every employee I get, “Your number one job is to find and train your replacement. That’s the only way you’re going to move up.” It’s not the only way, but it’s a major way that you’ll move up.
So, to have a brand ambassador say, “I’ve got to find somebody who’s at least as good as I am so they can take over my position and I can move up to the next level.” That’s the way hiring should be as opposed to people tend to think, “I can’t hire on someone who’s as good as me because I’ll lose my job and they they’ll hire someone less than them,” and it’s a downward spiral.
I try to create this upward thing where you are not in danger of losing your job. If you can find someone to replace your job, you have succeeded wildly in my expectations and we’re going to find something else at a higher level for you.
Andrew: I talked earlier about how there are problems when you’re making stuff, especially food because it’s hard to source. You had an issue with mayo. You couldn’t find the right avocado oil. Can you talk about that?
Mark: Yeah. We started the story earlier. But after our first batch, which was wildly successful, then we made another batch. That was wildly successful and we sold out of that. Now we started getting purchase orders from other companies. About four months in, we got bad news from our manufacturer one day that we couldn’t make mayonnaise. “What do you mean we couldn’t make mayonnaise?” Well, we went through a 7,000 pound batch and we had to throw it away because it wouldn’t emulsify.
So we started to learn that there are very specific tolerances because avocados come from Haas and Fuerte and all the different varieties of avocado oil. We learned that we had to start sending from every container that we bought samples to test and make sure the profile the fat profile was exactly right so that it would emulsify. So, for two batches in a row, we couldn’t make mayonnaise.
We had all these purchase orders that were accumulating, that were due soon. Because we were small, we couldn’t say, “Okay, let’s try next week.” We had to wait three and a half weeks to get on the line again, on the production line. We were a small player among all these other larger companies where we’re having product made. So we almost went out of business before we even started. That created a unique situation for us, which is we buy feedstock. We buy avocado oil in advance of our manufacturer needing it and we keep several months on hand.
Andrew: What does it mean that it’s feedstock?
Mark: It’s material used to make mayonnaise. So it’s raw material versus just bottling it for oil and selling it. It’s used to make another product.
Andrew: I see.
Mark: It’s called feedstock. Normally a manufacturer, co-packer would say, “We’ll just buy it as we need it. We’ll charge you a little bit of an upcharge. We’ll buy it just in time. We’ll manage our inventory that way.” But if they can’t get it and we lose our time on the line and it’s a couple of weeks or months until we can make it again, then we go out of business.
So managing inventory in the food business becomes a very critical part of your strategy and there’s a lot of thought that goes into it. Every week we have a two and a half-hour meeting on demand planning and production and where purchase orders are sitting for buying and selling and making and whatever. So, we’ve had to become a commodities trader, if you will, in the avocado oil business.
So we now have forward purchasing contracts 12 months into the future. We keep several months on hand that we wouldn’t otherwise need to have but for the fact that there’s a scarcity of avocado oil. Of course that, if you’re in any kind of manufacturing business. You know that inventory equals cash. That’s cash that’s tied up in inventory you could be using to do other things. It creates a little bit of a unique spin on what we do.
Andrew: I loved taking business classes at NYU. I was an undergrad in business. The one class that I couldn’t deal with was the one that dealt with inventory management. It was called Operations Management. It’s really insane. It’s really hard. How did you figure this out? Did you hire someone?
Mark: Yeah. So a lot of my company is what I would say is virtual. I have full-time employees in Canada, in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Northern California. The guy who runs Mark’s Daily Apple, my site, has lived in Sydney for four years. So, I do have a fairly virtual company.
So my CFO, who’s now been with me for two years, is a former CFO of a large company. He’s a whiz. He loves doing the things that I hate doing, these demand planning and this forecasting and all this stuff there that you talked about with ops management, inventory forecasting and stuff like that, which is so critical to most businesses and yet most consumers have no idea about how that really drives a lot of businesses.
So he works for me part-time as a consultant. It’s perfect for both of us because he likes to ride his bike. So he doesn’t want to be working 80 hours a week full-time in a company anymore. He wants to work when he wants to work and then play when he wants to play. So it’s kind of a perfect synergy here. It worked well for both of us that I can’t afford what he would charge me full-time right now. He’d rather be doing it on a project by project, hour by hour basis. That’s kind of how we do that. He handles a lot of that stuff. That’s been a godsend for me because I would be in a quagmire if it were not for that.
Andrew: It’s a really, really tough thing. If you get it wrong, even if people love your product, you’re in trouble. You lose money.
Mark: Yeah.
Andrew: Are you guys profitable now on the food business?
Mark: Yes. We were profitable from day one on the food business, yeah.
Andrew: Wow.
Mark: That’s because I’m still the kid who’s got a pocket full of $80 from shoveling snow and I’m not going to blow it.
Andrew: How many hours do you work now?
Mark: Well, so, right now I work 40 hours a week. I don’t work more than 40 hours a week. I probably work less than 40 hours a week. I’m going to go to the gym after this and do my workout.
Andrew: You’re still ripped?
Mark: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Andrew: Right now, if I asked you to lift your shirt, would you be as ripped as you are in these–can you pull the camera down? Let’s see. Good god.
Mark: You see that?
Andrew: Yeah.
Mark: There’s some cerates over there. Yeah.
Andrew: One of my big regrets in life that I can never get to that level. I’ve hired coaches, trainers, the whole thing. That is phenomenal, at 63?
Mark: Yeah. It’s what I do. People have things they do well. I just happen to do fitness and health really well. I learned early on the secrets and they’re no longer secret for me. I don’t have to work at it. It just happens.
Andrew: Not only that, you’re also writing books. I told you, I guess I didn’t realize I was even reading one of your books, I just found a PDF from 20 years ago. It turned out to the be the book I mentioned earlier. You’re writing books. You’re running these companies. You’re exercising. That’s a phenomenal life.
Mark: It’s a great life. And I have a good support staff. I have a beautiful wife. We’ve been married for 27 years. We’re still hot for each other, which is important. I’ve got two great kids. My daughter is 25, soon to be 26. My son is 23. They will be owning and operating one of my restaurant franchises. We didn’t talk about that.
Andrew: I saw that, Culver City, I think?
Mark: Yeah, Culver City. We’re opening Primal Kitchen Restaurants. We’ve got one being built in South Bend right now and another in Portland, Oregon. So, again, these are all very synergistic opportunities to take the lifestyle that I’ve been espousing and the brand, Primal, and put it out there.
I want to change people’s lives. That’s really my reason for doing all this. I originally said my mission was to allow 10 million people to understand how their body works and to take back their health. I’ve added a zero to that number now. So now it’s 100 million people that I want to affect that way. That’s really the ultimate end goal of this is to change how we alter our health through the choices we make.
Andrew: How do you measure that, the 100,000 people? How do you measure it so you know you’re getting close to it?
Mark: 100 million.
Andrew: 100 million, excuse me. That’s a hard thing to wrap my head around. How do you measure that you’re getting close to that?
Mark: Part of it is if you look at book sales, in my publishing company, we’ve sold over a million books. If you look at the unique visitors on Mark’s Daily Apple, I get a sense of how many people who are aware of the product that we’ve created. So now everybody who read my books or read my blog uses Primal Kitchen Mayo, but there are a lot of people who buy the mayo who have never heard of my blog or my books. So we’re constantly trying to attract new audiences with either products or services or books or whatever that still work together in a lifestyle that allows people to live an awesome life.
Andrew: I don’t get off on watching people’s lifestyles on Instagram and on their blogs and everything else, but for some reason I’m very captivated by yours. As we’re talking now, I’m scrolling through your Instagram feed. I like seeing what you’re up to. I like that on that slack line that you’re doing on Instagram, I must have looked too carefully because I see that one of your toes has a band-aid on it. In my mind, I was thinking, “If I had a band-aid on my toe, I don’t know that I would slack line. I would take that day off.” But I like that you just keep at it.
It’s an honor to have you on here. Anyone who wants to try out your mayo–we didn’t get into all the other products that you’ve got. You’ve got the vinaigrette, you’ve got the honey mustard and Greek salad dressing, so many other things. They’re on Amazon. They’re on Amazon, available for Amazon Prime shipping, which is actually a really nice benefit. And of course your website is Mark’s Daily Apple. Anything else I missed?
Mark: Yeah, the ecom site, you can go to PrimalKitchen.com and find out about the products if you want to read about everything that’s in them and you can purchase them there, you can purchase them at PrimalBlueprint.com, a lot of opportunities. You can get to all of them from Mark’s Daily Apple.
Andrew: Cool. And the two sponsors, of course, that I mentioned are the company that will help you hire your next great developer, designer, finance person, etc. They’re available at Toptal, top as in top of the mountain, tal as in talent, Toptal.com/Mixergy. And if you need a bookkeeping service, a whole operation of people and software that will get your books done right, go check out Bench.co/Mixergy. Thanks, Mark.
Mark: Thank you, Andrew.
Andrew: Cool. Thank you, Anna, for setting this up. Bye, everyone.
