Resilience, Risks, and Roasting a Coffee Empire to 3,000 Walmarts With Luke Schneider

Luke Schneider is the Founder and CEO of Fire Dept. Coffee, a certified veteran-owned coffee company. Fire Dept. Coffee gives back to and supports injured firefighters and has been named to the Inc. 5000 list three years in a row. Luke is also a retired firefighter, paramedic, and US Navy veteran. In 2023, he received the Leadership award for Citizenship from the Specialty Food Association.

[2:16] The mission behind Fire Dept. Coffee (FDC)

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:16] The mission behind Fire Dept. Coffee (FDC)
[8:32] Luke Schneider describes the trademark lawsuit his company faced in its early days
[12:19] How FDC received its first publicity
[20:29] Earning shelf space in thousands of Walmart stores
[24:56] Tactics for building a brand community
[30:57] The importance of investing in engaging content creation
[36:21] Social selling tips and tricks
[39:30] FDC’s product differentiation process and subscription offers
[46:05] How to build and invest in your team
[58:54] Why Luke is referred to as Mr. Clean
[1:03:26] Luke’s experience learning from renowned entrepreneurs

In this episode…

In a business environment dominated by duplicate products, brands must employ creative measures to stand out and capture consumers’ attention. This requires more than having a widespread presence on popular social media apps. How did a community-focused coffee brand gain recognition in thousands of Walmart locations?

Former firefighter and US Navy veteran Luke Schneider credits his coffee company’s growth to a robust community presence and a resonant mission. He emphasizes building a local community to convey your mission and cultivate a brand identity. For a broader reach, you can communicate your message on various social media platforms by targeting audiences who align with your mission to differentiate your products in the market. Luke maintains that a motivated team and influential culture can promote your community efforts and amplify your mission.

In today’s episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Luke Schneider, the Founder and CEO of Fire Dept. Coffee (FDC), about building a robust community and team to scale. Luke discusses social selling, FDC’s subscription offers, and how the company received its first publicity and navigated a trademark lawsuit.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"The more you work and move things forward, the more likely you are to overcome any obstacle."
"The resiliency you build by facing challenges is key to future success."
"In a highly motivated and strong team culture, individuals take the initiative to lift each other up."
"Trends come and go, but building a community is what keeps a company around for the long term."
"Sometimes the greatest strengths we have are also our weaknesses; learning that is part of growth."

Action Steps

Embrace continuous learning and adaptation: Luke Schneider highlighted the importance of staying up-to-date in a fast-moving industry, particularly in e-commerce and advertising. By committing to continuous learning, you can navigate industry changes and seize new opportunities, ensuring long-term growth and sustainability.
Build a strong, resilient team: Luke emphasized the necessity of having a team that shares your mission and supports each other, especially during challenging times. A cohesive team can help overcome obstacles, drive innovation, and maintain momentum, making it crucial to invest in team-building and foster a positive company culture.
Leverage community: Building and engaging with a community can significantly enhance brand loyalty and awareness. By creating meaningful connections with your audience, you can establish a dedicated customer base that supports your mission and contributes to your business' success.
Invest in innovative product differentiation: Luke's success with spirit-infused coffee illustrates the importance of standing out in the market. By focusing on unique product offerings and consistently innovating, you can attract new customers and retain existing ones, positioning your brand as a leader in your industry.
Utilize diverse marketing strategies: Luke's approach to using content that engages rather than just sells and exploring platforms like TikTok for social selling shows the value of diversifying marketing efforts. Employing a mix of promotional, educational, and entertaining content can enhance customer interaction and brand visibility, ultimately driving sales and growth.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:16

Hey everyone, I'm William Harris. I'm the Founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce, help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Joining me today is Luke Schneider. Luke is the founder and CEO of Fire Department Coffee, which is a veteran certified business. FDC is a true pioneer in spirit infused coffee in 2023 he received the Leadership Award for citizenship from the Specialty Food Association FDC, has been on the Inc 500 3 years in a row, and they have a mission to give back and support firefighters, which I think is really cool, Luke. I'm excited to have you on the show.

Luke Schneider 0:51

Thanks for having me, William.

William Harris 0:53

Yeah, I was thinking about how we knew each other, how we first met, and I couldn't remember, but I'm pretty sure it was just LinkedIn. I think I posted something on LinkedIn, and you're like, hey, I kind of like what you're saying. And we chatted about approaches to advertising. Does that sound about right to you? Yeah,

Luke Schneider 1:08

yeah, that sounds right. And I love your LinkedIn post and content as well. And likewise. And you're always staying up on on the What's New and happening. And so it's a it's a fast moving, dynamic landscape, and so you do a good job at keeping up with everything. Yeah,

William Harris 1:28

likewise, thanks. It does change fast in our environment, doesn't it? Oh, well, I'm excited to chat with you today. There's a lot of really fun growth stuff and things that you've gone through to be able to grow FTC to where it is today. Before I do dig into that stuff, I do want to announce our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that ipo'd recently. You can learn more on our website@Elumynt.com which is spelled E, l, u, m, y, N, t.com, that said all of the good stuff. I want to start with just this is it's obvious. It's somewhat obvious in the name, but what is Fire Department Coffee and why did you start it in the first place?

Luke Schneider 2:16

So we're a high quality coffee company that gives back and supports sick and injured firefighters. And we started online. And I started online because that was what worked best with my schedule. So working 24 on 48 off, when I was a firefighter, I met my wife, she was a barista, so I fell in love with the craft. I was already in love with coffee because of the functional aspect of keeping us alert and captured during long shifts. But, you know, fell in love with the craft of coffee. My wife and I said, why don't we start roasting and we'll sell at farmers markets and we'll do tasting events and and share, share that craft with our friends and family. And so we started doing that. We rented out a 800 square foot space in a strip mall, purchased a five kilo roaster, and our plan was to sell at farmers markets and do these tasting events, and I did a Fire Department blend. And out of everything we did, everybody loved that. So I told my wife I wanted to start a brand and company around that and call it Fire Department Coffee and serve our communities and be able to give back with it. And she didn't love the idea at first, but she supported me all along the way, and I started a Shopify store, just because that was, that was what made sense with my schedule. I remember you telling me

William Harris 3:44

this was like a scratch paper business. It's not like you ended this saying, like, I'm going to be an entrepreneur and I'm going to start this 20, $50 million business. Like, you're just like, hey, like, here's this idea.

Luke Schneider 3:54

Exactly. Yeah, it was it. I there was a community that I was plugged in with, which was the the firefighter community. I, you know, when we did these tasting events, I noticed a lot of firefighters were would come. Firefighters drink a lot of coffee. We needed better coffee at the fire stations, and so it just seemed like that would be a good, good start for us. But, yeah, I did, didn't have a business plan, or much of one, and and learned a lot along the way as everything kind of snowballed from there,

William Harris 4:30

I worked at night shift for years in the hospital. And there were times where I don't know if, I don't know if there was a difference to the sludge that was made. There was, like, what we called it ICU coffee, which was just, it was sludge, and it was just meant to pack as much caffeine as you possibly could and so you could kind of stay awake. You know? Was this something where, when you started making this, where the firefighters like, oh, okay, look, getting a little bougie over here. Or were they pretty much like, yeah, no, we needed this, yeah.

Luke Schneider 4:57

But firefighters love to give each other a hard time. I, you know, no matter who you are, I remember one of the first tastings I had, like, I forget what you call those hats. But like, when it was like a, it was just a, I forget what they're called, but I had this hat on. Somebody came in right away and said, you know, unless you take that hat off, you know, like these, yeah, they poke fun at you no matter what. And then you always have, you always have people that, you know, the naysayers that say this is a dumb idea, or this is not going to be successful, and, and, but you know, majority of, majority of the firefighters were very supportive and, and that was really, we got a lot of support and initial traction from firefighters and fire departments and selling wholesale five pound bags to fire departments. Actually, they started as six pound bags when we first started doing them. But yeah, it started supplying fire departments with coffee, and firefighters were a large part of our original customer base. Yeah, no, that's

William Harris 6:01

good. Becoming an entrepreneur, you talked about naysayers. There's a lot of obstacles to building and starting and running a business. What are some of the things that stand out in your mind as things that you're like, boy, this sucks. I don't know if we're gonna get through this or like, this is, this is just tough,

Luke Schneider 6:23

yeah. So one of the interesting things was, like, early on, I never, I never had this thought of like, we'll never get through this. And I, I think that's like, I don't know what, what you would call that, if that's like, a, yeah, probably, ignorance is probably the word for that. But it was just like, I never, I never thought that if we continue to work and move things forward, that things wouldn't, you know, overcome any obstacle. And I wonder if some of that is from, you know, the military background, and then the fire service is like you You never know what you're what's coming your way, or what what your next call is going to be, but you always work through it. And you one of the things I learned very quickly, and I think also the the fire service and the military background helped me with this, is that I wasn't going to be able to do it without a team, and that there was a lot of things that I wasn't able to do or are not good at, and I needed a team to help me build it. And then the the other thing that I would say, what was just absolutely clueless about, was cash and capital. And I think that's something that you know every business growing business, especially fast growing businesses learn very quickly that you have to have a good capital plan, and every strategy has to have a financial, you know, piece of that, because it it takes money and people to execute on a strategy. And and people cost money too. So, like we, we got creative early on, and we did some sweat equity and stuff like that with some some of the early firefighters that that joined the team.

William Harris 8:12

That’s cool, if I remember correctly. You guys ran into a situation early on, and this is probably one of those moments where you're, you know, just racking your brain trying to figure out, but it was like an issue with the city of Chicago or something, right? And maybe you can't talk too much about it. Maybe I'm even spilling more beans than I should. But what happened with this? Yeah, that

Luke Schneider 8:32

part's public. I can speak on any of the public beasts because it's public knowledge that we did have a trademark lawsuit from the city of Chicago, and I won't get into the to the details of that, but you know, we were able to work it out and and which actually, I think was a blessing for us, because we we rebranded our logo, which I actually like more now. We did have, we did have a registered trademark on our our logo prior to the lawsuit. So just one, wow, put that out there. That's wild. We did have a registered trademark. So learned a lot about IP in that process. And as as a business, you know that is very our brand is, is, I would say, a big asset. It's, it's, it's our identity, it's who we are and and so protecting that intellectual property and that brand IP is, is in is important for for any company, but especially ours. And, yeah, so we but anyways, it was, it all worked out. We were able to sell through our inventory, and we, we actually got some publicity from that. So I remember hearing we had actually worked with a PR person at the time, and I first. One of the first people I called was that PR person said, like, Hey, I don't think or they said, I they're not going to get this. They're not going to sorry. Let me back up. We, we heard about it through a media outlet contacting us, and said, Would you like to comment on this lawsuit from this from the city of Chicago, and I said, well, first off, I didn't say anything, because I didn't know there was a lawsuit. And then I looked it up and and then, sure enough, was able to to find out that there there was a lawsuit. And contacted our our legal contacted the PR, and the PR person we were working with, and they said they wouldn't put anything out without getting our side of the story. So you should be good for a day or two. And so we were kind of gathering all the information. And the next day, I think it was on, there was so many outlets, but it went national. It was national news. Chicago Tribune, I believe picked it up New York Times, I believe Seattle Times, so multiple large media outlets picked up the story about the city of Chicago suing fire permit, coffee and but it was a great, a great learning exercise for us more than an exercise. It was, it was, it was a little stressful at times, but worked through it, and I've made us stronger. And I think we the the the outcome of, you know, rebranding and everything was actually good for us. Yeah,

William Harris 11:35

and pardon the phrase here, but it's like, as a business owner, there are sometimes you're just gonna feel he got kicked in the nuts. But to your point, to your point, the thing that's really nice, I should say the beans, right? The coffee beans here. But to your point, it worked out to benefit in some ways, where it's like you got publicity that you wouldn't have otherwise gotten you, you ended up with a logo that you ended up liking better. And so I love the resilience that you had through that you grow through this. And then there's other roadblocks. There's other hurdles that come up that kind of push against some of this growth and success. And I remember you telling me about the time when you were, like, sleeping in between boxes, like in the warehouse or whatever, like, what was going on there.

Luke Schneider 12:19

Yeah. So we, I think it was USA to you. You at no was, was a USA Today or Good Morning America, or one, I apologize, whatever media outlet it was. I can't, I can't remember exactly, but it was one of these large media outlets that covered us, and they highlighted our product, and we, we were not aware that that was gonna have was great thing that happened to us. But we just our orders, you know, shot up, and they kept shooting up. And I think you know, for us at the time, because we were fairly new, we were still in that 800 square foot strip mall on a on a 20 kilo roaster. And I think the like, within the the first day, we had like 20,000 Wow, in orders from that day. And that, that was a lot for us at the time, and was, and so in the in the orders, and it was, there was, like a few thing chain of events. And I felt like there was just a lot going on at the time where we were getting a lot of exposure, a lot of media coverage, and that was helping, you know, drive some awareness and trial and and purchases on our on our storefront, on our Shopify store. And we just, we just were roasting around the clock. And we have that that space. We maxed our space, and we just kept growing so we it was like it never stopped from there and and we got to a point where we were literally roasting 24/7, for three months straight. And I was recruiting other firefighters. I was bringing in friends and family. I was teaching people to roast, and we were roasting continuously. So it was, you put a some beans in the top of the roaster, you drop the beans that are done roasting, and then you close that and then drop the beans right in the roaster. And it was a manual process. And the bagging, you know, we had a vibratory fill machine, and we would just, you know, from the roaster straight to the machine, straight over to the boxing. And we were just boxing and packing orders. And so roasting, packaging and shipping orders pretty much around the clock. The roasting was around the clock for three months straight. And so we ran out of space and capacity, and we needed capital to to grow. We needed a bigger space. And I another thing I learned in business was like, you always want to do the right thing, but sometimes you also need to know where you stand. So like I we were. Renting that space. And I told the landlord. I said, Hey, we're we need a larger building. I just want you to know like we're looking so that you can start planning, you know, for potential renters. And he said he was going to double the rent right away and doubling the rent. And because what I where I messed up there, here, I'm trying to do the right thing and give him a notice, like as much heads up as I possibly can, is what I was thinking. We were, our lease was, it was, I can't remember if it was a multi year, if it was like a yearly lease, but once that is that that period is up, you then go to a month to month. So we were on a month to month, and I didn't realize that he could just cancel the lease on us at any time. And so he said, You're either going to pay double and sign another year lease, or I'm getting, you know, somebody else in there right away. And I said, you know, I would kind of try to talk through that. And said, Well, you know, I was trying to give you a heads up so you can plan for I didn't think you were going to, like, kick us out right away if we don't sign the lease for another year and double in at double the rate. I said, we it's not going to work. We can't sign the lease, because this is not enough space for us. And so anyways, we ended up finding a building. It was a very, it was a very, what's the the building was in rough shape. Was very rough shape, and and it was pretty much like an abandoned building that was the roof was starting to fall. I had a lot of WoW, and, and, but I got it at a at a really good price. And I also found, like, larger equipment at like, two larger roasters, and I got a really good deal on those. So I, like, I scored this building that needed a ton of work. And then I scored some good equipment, larger roasting equipment, and and then I also, shortly after that, we found a a bigger grinder too. And there's so many stories, but like it just, I'll finish this one off. We we got the roaster, and then started working on the building, fixing the building up, and getting that going. And when I purchased, went to purchase the equipment, the guy there asked me, how are you going to get this out of here? And it was, there was so many things. I was literally drinking from the fire hose. It like the I were just like the for the last two years, I would say, now we plan, we have budgets, stuff like that. But for the first five years of the business, it was literally drinking from a fire hose non stop, like figuring one thing out to another is like, and then I said, I don't, I don't know, you know, and then, and then there was an engineer that was there at the time, and he's like, Well, I can, I can help you. You know, I'm, I'm not doing anything right now. So he came and helped us install this equipment. Once we had the bill, he actually helped us with some of the building stuff and, you know, the HVAC and stuff like that that we needed to put in. And he never left after that, because we've never stopped growing, and he still works with us today. And this was years ago. This was, I don't even know how many years ago now, maybe four years ago or so. But yeah, he never left because we just always had, had growing and adding on things. And now we have, we're vertically integrated with our roasting. We have our own we do our own sure printing, and we have 50,000 square feet of facilities here in Rockford, Illinois.

William Harris 18:54

That's amazing. The thing that I liked about like, each one of those obstacles were basically the catalyst to whatever needed to happen anyways, right? And so it's like, okay, you were trying to do the right thing. You needed to grow. But then, as a result of of giving this, you know, this problem now comes up, but that ends up being the thing that helps you find the right space that you needed to at the right price, and then the gear, it's really fun, the way things work out, where it's like you oftentimes the things that we need to change and help us grow are the very things that we're not willing to face. And then once we face them, that's when growth happens.

Luke Schneider 19:31

You're so right. I think there's, there's so much there, and, and, and sometimes you just don't know what's on the other side until you get till you get it on the other side. And it's not ideal, you know, to be running into all these different obstacles every day or week and have a new challenges to be working through them. But I think the resiliency is is a key thing to being able to work through those challenges. And. I think if you do work through the challenges, naturally, you get better at preventing you it makes you uncomfortable, and you people don't like to be uncomfortable, so we try to avoid it in the future, right?

William Harris 20:14

But that resiliency has led to some really good wins for you as well. I understand that you are now sold in 1000s of different Walmart stores.

Luke Schneider 20:23

That's correct. Yeah, yep. Tell

William Harris 20:25

me the story about, like, how did this happen? Yeah. So

Luke Schneider 20:29

Walmart was our number one retailer that we wanted to to win and or earn, I should say, and they, they are the the place where they're the retailer. Well, they're a fortune, one company, largest retailer, and and they, they have this initiative to invest in American jobs. And so they're investing. They've already invested billions. But over the next, I think it's, I believe it's 10 years they're investing $350 billion in us, made, manufactured, grown or assembled products. And so we, we had our eyes set on Walmart, because they, that's where people spend the most on coffee, and they, it's a number one place people shop coffee, and number one place where people purchase the most for coffee at home. And so we heard about this opportunity. We there was an invite to go, pitch to go to this opportunity, which is called open call. And there was a, it was in Chicago, there was invite. We have a fire truck that we deployed to disasters, and we also take it to like marketing activations. We brought our fire truck down there, served coffee at a Walmart near Chicago, and then pitched our story. And what was really cool is I met one of the Walmart directors there, Senior Director at Walmart, Mark Espinosa, and he spent so much time with me, like learning about our brand, hearing our story, our mission, even walked the store with me. And so it was an incredible opportunity to to get it, to be able to share our story. And then we got invited to go pitch at open call. And then when we pitched, we ended up not meeting with the merchant. We ended up meeting with a Senior Vice President and the Vice President, and Jason Patton was there with me, our Senior Vice President and part owner. We were there and we presented. And what was really cool is they they said when they went into that meeting, they were thinking that they might give us a few 100 stores, but they said, once they heard about, once they learn more about our capabilities and our story and our mission and and our plan to promote it, they said that this, this is much bigger than that. And they said this is at least 2000 stores. They ended up rolling us out with seven SKUs nationally, in 2300 stores. And then shortly after that, this was actually few months back, like, I think it was June, we hit the shelves. And since then, now we they've expanded us into 3000 stores. Nice. So we're, we're growing with them. And then we came back this year in October to to be there to support other companies pitching an open call in 2024 and we ended up getting the golden ticket to to expand into Walmart Canada. So we're going wow international now into Walmart.

William Harris 23:40

That's amazing. If I remember correctly, you said that his title was the VP of breakfast, right? Is that like the official title, the VP of breakfast that you met with?

Luke Schneider 23:52

Yeah, I don't know. So it was like senior vice president of all of grocery, her name melody, and then the VP of pantry. So,

William Harris 24:03

so I wrote it down wrong then, which I was like, every

Luke Schneider 24:07

was pretty much breakfast. It's like, your cereal, your you know, pantry is everything you'd keep in the pantry, coffee, tea.

William Harris 24:14

I just liked that. I was like, the VP of breakfast is, ooh, I want to be the VP of lunch. You also one of the things that I love about Fire Department Coffee, that I think you guys do so much better than a lot of other DTC brands. Well, it I should say like this is one of the things that DDC brands do well, but you guys are doing an exceptional job. Is you have amazing content. And it is not just content for the sole purpose of trying to sell the coffee. You guys just actually have entertaining content. Um, and a lot of this has come from firefighter Fenton, if I remember correctly. Like, how did you guys get connected with him? Like, how did this happen? Yeah,

Luke Schneider 24:56

firefighter Fenton is a is a part of our team. And sure. He's in a lot of that content. It's really Jason Patton Fire Department Chronicles, who leads, oh, sure, like a sister brand of ours. But it's, it's when, when Jason and I so he's, he's our senior vice president, also part owner. When we met, he's in, he's still an active firefighter in Florida. But when we met, it was always like, we're going to, we're going to join forces, and we're always going to be focused on the same goals. So that way, you know, rising tides, raises all ships, and we're, we're focused on the same goals, same mission, and he leads that team and and what's really cool, in my opinion, about about the content is everybody that's in the content is actually active, or, I should say, majority of the time, everybody that's in the content are all active firefighters. And you're absolutely right. It's, it really is hard to connect the organic reach of the content creation to direct sales, really hard to to to do that. But what we believe is it is really top of funnel and brand awareness, which helps with customer acquisition, which helps with loyalty, and multiple aspects, you know, of of, of just growing the brand, but the Yeah, but thank you for for saying that. And yeah, the that we have across all of our social media channels, 17, over 17 million followers, amazing.

William Harris 26:36

Um, that leads me really good into tactics, which some of the things that you guys have done to help grow when I was asking you, what is the biggest tactic that you think has helped support this, you said it was building a community. What does that look like? Building a community? What does it mean?

Luke Schneider 26:54

Yeah, so I think it's multiple parts to building a community, because your community. And we have multiple communities. The way we see it is, we have our local community, which you always want to be strong, you know, locally and for because people are going to support the communities that are closest to them. So if your local community, they want to support you because you're a local company, the firefighter community, because they want to support their their fellow firefighters. And first responder community, they want to support their fellow first responders. The veteran community, often people want to support their fellow their fellow veterans. And so it's all very similar. And then you have your coffee community. So every, every community that we're a part of or connected to, because we are a coffee company that a brand that is a veteran owned, firefighter founded and veteran founded, and a lot of our team is active or retired firefighters. So I would say our main brand identity is That is who we are. We're firefighters. We're run by firefighters. That's our our core of our brand, and we want to share that message and build the brand awareness with who we are, what we do, like why does it matter? Why is our coffee different than all the other coffee companies out there? And so we do that largely through social media, building community on social media, building that online presence which drives traffic to our site. We communicate our message through, you know, some of those tactics through, through our our funnel, which is email, SMS, social media activations. So you know, even even event activations, there's so many moving parts to it. But to some sum it up, our community is, you know, in different areas, whether it be social media or here at our team is part of our community. So yeah, just being active in that community, I truly believe that is what separates us, and that separates a lot of brands that have built community around them, because if it's all about product, if it's all about innovation, trends are going to come and go. Trends are going to you can't chase trends, you know? Because trends move so fast nowadays, especially with Tiktok and everything like, things move super fast, and it's, it's hard to keep up with them. So if you're, if you're constantly chasing trends, you're going to be hearing gone tomorrow, you know? So it's like having that community and having a foundation on what your company is built on, I think, is really what's going to keep companies around for the long term. Yeah,

William Harris 29:48

you talked about one of the ways that you're engaging the community is through social media. And so you can correct me if I'm wrong here, and please do one of the best ways to do that is. Creating content, I kind of hinted at this that's not just promotional and selling. Now it still needs to have a job of doing that. But you, you, if I remember correctly, you guys really had content that just seemed engaging and and maybe it helped promote a little bit, but it was really just meant to engage that community that you were trying to engage, and that is so hard for a lot of brands to do, I would say that I even see a lot of brands that struggle to actually spend money and time to create good content that will actually sell, let alone create good content that maybe goes beyond selling and engaging the community. How do you get around justifying the ROI or being able to prove out that this is worth the time, this is worth the money. Let's say in the early days, you know, it is now, but in the early days, how did you get to the point where you say this makes sense? Let's spend some money. Let's spend some time on this, even though it might not have the highest row as Yeah, you

Luke Schneider 30:57

know, you're absolutely right. And everything you said, I 100% agree with, and it's really difficult and, and it's like, it's kind of similar to, or potentially similar to, like, how I never thought that, you know, we there would be anything that would crush us as a company, which now I realize that that could have, potentially have not been the case, but so maybe, maybe naive, you know, to some of of that, but I just felt, I just knew, like we just knew, you know, and we knew that if we wanted to get our product out there, we had to get the message out there, and we had to engage, because it's truly, Is there isn't a lot of we don't sell products in our content, like most of our content. Now, that's a there's a different strategy for that, and that's, that's what you do, you know, you know, with performance marketing, paid paid advertising, like that's absolutely the place for that. On social media, for content, the more we try to sell, the less engagement we get. And so you, in my opinion, this, in people could probably agree or disagree with this if they want, but in my opinion, you have to separate them, because if you focus on selling on on your social media for your organic content, or your content, excuse me, you're going to quickly be down, down graded by the algorithms. Because you gotta, you gotta see what works and what doesn't, and test new things, different different styles of filming, transitions, you know, different things. Because if you try to make it about selling your product, you're not going to achieve either you're not going to most likely, maybe I'm wrong, and there's, there's, there's exceptions to that. So I should never put anything into a box. But in my opinion, most of the time you're going to you're going to not be successful in selling the product or driving awareness, because people generally shut off when they're when they're being sold something, unless it's the right time, you know, and that's where really good advertisers can can dial that in to getting the right the right message at the right time, and try to get a conversion at that point. But you gotta, you gotta build the awareness first. And I think that's a challenge for a lot of companies, because it's hard to get past that. How, why are we going to invest in this when we can't see a direct return on our investment

William Harris 33:34

100% Yeah, well, well said. Speaking of other types of investments that are maybe, maybe you can see a little bit of a return on this, but it's still difficult. Some of the in person things that you guys do. So, like you said, you have in person activations. What are those like? And how do you justify those as a business? Because they might not be like, again, you might not say, Hey, we got a 4x ROAs today on our in person. Like, how do you go about doing those? What's the thought? How do you evaluate them? Yeah,

Luke Schneider 34:02

that's a great question. And we scaled back a lot of our sponsorship money, I should say, because, like, we're very specific on our sponsorship. We like to any market we want to grow in, and and I will say content creation, like social media, you know, whatever, wherever it is, we're, we're the official Coffee of the National Hot Rod Association. So that gives us a platform where we can sell, you know, we get, we get media placement that they they we get for that, for that sponsorship, but everything that, that we do, we look at as if we're going to invest in this market or this, this, this sponsorship opportunity, how are we going to turn that into a revenue stream? How are we going to make money off of it? And. So there is, it's kind of like, the way we look at our marketing is it needs to at least eventually, or we need to see the we need to see it ahead of us in the short term, or that we're going to get a return on investment by building an engine around it. So it's like, kind of like building a team, or building something that we're, that team makes, generates its own revenue some way. And so we're, we're, right now, we're working on building out our events, slash Tiktok team. And so we're, you know, social selling is becoming massive right now, and I think that there is going to be a lot of that is, is the future of a lot of selling and and from what I've heard, too, in other countries, it's already a lot of mate. In some countries, it's majority of the selling already,

William Harris 35:56

like China, yeah, crushing it on that. Yeah, 100% um, let's talk about social selling. Then a little bit. What are some of the things that you when you see the future of because we've talked about some of the things you've done in the past, and there's actually some other things I want to do when you're thinking to the future of growth. Um, what are some of the tips or tricks that you would recommend to brands that are trying to do a good job from a social selling perspective, I

Luke Schneider 36:21

would definitely look at Tiktok. Yeah, Tiktok is moving in a big way. And I think, you know, some I've heard compared to the early days of of Amazon. So I've heard, you know, different, and I think it's totally different type of marketplace, and it's a totally different and it may serve a different purpose, but it is definitely new, and is definitely growing very fast. And those are the things where it's easy as business owners to get distracted by all of the opportunities, oh, this marketplace or this marketplace, and everything, everything you can do. Yeah, it's like, in the earlier days, I had this mindset of like, well, if it can make us money, let's do it. Well, you know, you time is money, and the more you if you're dedicating resources, which is you people, you know that's also money. So really looking at the data, looking at where, where you're seeing a return, but sometimes you just gotta place your bets, and where do I want to invest? And for me, I just see it as like it might take time to build. It might take time to to to get the algorithms going, to get the to get the momentum to be able to start scaling it, get an efficiency with different things that you're doing, building out new processes within your company. But Tiktok is one of those areas where I'm going to place my bet because I see it's, I don't want to be the company. I don't want to be the the Coffee Company, getting in when 10 other coffee companies have already now the biggest brands on Tiktok. I want to get in now when it's still early and we can be the number one brand, coffee brand on Tiktok. So that's, that's how I'm looking at different opportunities. There's some opportunities where it's like, yeah, let's test, let's let's get our feet wet a little bit. And there's other opportunities where it's like, Let's go all in. Yeah,

William Harris 38:35

I am with you on Tiktok. Love what that platform is doing. Tiktok shop is, let's say, clunky to get set up and whatever. But once you get through all the mess, it can be very, very good for those who are listening and want to go a little bit deeper on some of the Tiktok, especially live selling on Tiktok. I am going to reference another episode here with Dayne Hepner, one of the number one, I think number one, food and beverage live seller on Tiktok right now. So definitely go reference that, that podcast that go deeper into that, Luke, one of the things that I remember when we were talking about like the catalysts for growth and what has allowed you guys to grow outside of community is product differentiation. You've done a very good job of just, it's not just like light roast and dark roast. Tell me a little bit more about like, what your thought process was in why you differentiated, and where you went with that.

Luke Schneider 39:30

Yeah. So we we we are, we're. We love our craft. So we are. We started out as, you know, I got into coffee because I love coffee. I love the craft. So that's part of it is like, even though we have a team that does quality assurance, quality control, roasting and and we have a director of coffee now, and so I'll still, I'll still be a part of, you know, product development and stuff like. And the direction that we want to go. But I always love the craft of coffee and, and that's kind of, you know, as you grow as a business, you you start to there's stages of entrepreneurs and the Craftsman was probably how I started and, and as you grow, you kind of get away from some of that, and you let other people do the craft that that you started in, in love so dearly. But we always want to be innovating. We always want to be bringing new roast. We want to be watching consumer behaviors. We want to see, hey, why is this? You know, national cafe, why? Why are there sales dropping? Why is there an increase at at home purchasing, you know? And there's explanation and, and, and you can pinpoint a lot of that stuff. But when you see where the where the market's moving, and the consumer, how the consumer behaviors, trends move, because, I mean, COVID did a lot for it did a lot of different things, and changed consumer behaviors in major ways to where, and probably from your experience to the advertising changed in so many different ways, pre COVID, during COVID, post COVID, and now there's, like, this residual like it's even continuing to change. It feels like the consumer behaviors has been changing rapidly over the last five years, and so trying to see why it's doing, what it's doing, and where it's going. So that way, we're not chasing trends. We're getting ahead of the trends, and that's what we try to do, is stay innovative, stay close to what our category is doing. And how do we stay ahead of the trends?

William Harris 41:51

Yeah, and you guys were ahead. If I don't know if you were the first, but I think you were the first, but spirit infused coffees, you guys basically built that, though, like, I don't know if anybody else built it out as well as you guys did.

Luke Schneider 42:04

Thank you. Yeah, appreciate that. We, yeah, we have a proprietary process we created back in 2016 and we infused the spirits into the coffee before roasting, and the alcohol roast out so it's non alcoholic, but we can get, we can create some really unique flavor profiles with that that's all natural, that's not artificially flavored. It doesn't come with some of the off flavors that that, you know, some of these barrel condition coffees have where it's like, charred or kind of funky, you know, we want it to be, we want it to be a good experience. So I think ultimately, that's number one, creating a good experience across the board. When it comes to the customer, we want to make sure from purchasing the product, visually, looking at the product, to tasting the product, to repurchasing the product, we want to make sure it's always a great experience across the board and and in the product needs to be consistent, especially with coffee. So the spirit infuse process that we have allows us to create a very consistent process, and we want to continue to elevate the consumer experience in taste. Yeah,

William Harris 43:18

I love that. Going beyond taste. What are the other product expansions that I really appreciate? It's maybe not a product as much as like an offering in let's say others are doing this, but it's subscription, but that ends up becoming a pretty big part of the company. Tell me a little bit more about like, the subscription coffee and how, how that impacts the overall business,

Luke Schneider 43:40

yeah, so it keeps the lights on because you have, you have revenue that you can, you can count on, you know, for the most part, it's, you know, you can, you give a lot of, and I shouldn't say it keeps the lights on. We got, we're, you know, we're, but in the earlier days it was, it was helping, you know, you've got this consistent revenue. Our our subscriptions on our e-commerce, our Shopify business, is about 50% of our of our revenue. So it's huge. It's, it is and, and it's, you know, and you pull a lot of data from that, you can see, you can see where the customer's going, or where they how they come in, where they're going from, that you those are some of your most loyal customers. So they're they're ones that you are probably purchasing merchandise and wearing our shirts and and stuff like that. So it's a really important. All customers are important, but those are our are really, really loyal customers if they're signing up for a subscription. And so, yeah, subscriptions has been an important part of our growth, especially starting as a as a direct to consumer company from the beginning.

William Harris 44:53

Yeah, you know, it allows you to invest differently in those customers as well. You can look at the LTV differently, and I. I know we did a lot of work with this too, and we separate out the LTV of a non subscription buyer versus a subscription buyer. It allows us to look at the different CAC goal for subscription buyer versus a non subscription buyer. Like you said, I think you know, there's opportunities to upsell people who've purchased one time, to get them into a subscription. So there's so many different ways that you can use subscriptions to make your product more sticky, and I think that again, overall, increasing the LTV allows you to be more aggressive on the acquisition side. Yeah,

Luke Schneider 45:30

I agree. Yeah.

William Harris 45:32

I want to talk a little bit about some of the philosophy and science that you have because you've brought up team a number of times. But when I talk to brands who are getting stuck, and there are always these different plateaus that happen to every brand, and we all, we all reach them, one of the things that I've heard from, from many people, but you especially, is you need a team. And you call this out, like, literally within the first five minutes of this episode too. When you talk about being able to grow in the importance of team, tell me a little bit. Little bit more about that. Yeah, you're really

Luke Schneider 46:05

only as strong as your team in a company, unless you're like a company that you have a service or do something different. And in the business that we're in, we need a team and and to scale things, you need a team. So it's, it's critical. It's critical to our company. And, you know, it's really important that we take care of our team and and you want, you, you, you want to build a culture. And this, I think, is really important for us, but we want to build a culture where it's not, it's never, it's, this is not my job. It's it should always be. How do I help my team, even if I'm on the roasting team, if we need to have somebody, have have somebody help print shirts, they we want them to be able to be willing to go print shirts if we need to, you know, to help out that team. So it should be like, How can I help my team? And that's the, that's the mentality that we want to drive. And when you put, when you put mission to that, and then you give your team a mission, now you and clear goals and expectation. So clear goals, expectation, transparency, accountability, these are all critical for a team to grow and thrive. But when you put that mission in front of the team and you say, Here's your mission, here's your here's the goals, here's what we need to achieve together, and you reward the team together, you know, and the more that we're, the more efficient and productive we are, the more we can grow profit, which allows us to invest in our team more, the more that we can cross train and build different skills within our our team, the more that we can, you know, invest in our team, and everybody has different talents. So we want to be able to share to those talents. We want to bring those talents out in our team. So that way we're we're not hiding our talents. We should be sharing our talents. And in a in a strong team culture, I feel like the team will will feel comfortable to bring those talents out and share those talents that they have with the team, because they're invested in the team, and they, they want the even if it's not their direct team, they want the entire team to be successful. And so really couldn't do it without the team. You know, we need we. We couldn't do it without our customers support. We couldn't do it without our team. And it's just, it's, it's vital to to our company, as well as I would imagine almost any company.

William Harris 48:49

Yeah, there's a couple of things you called out there that I really want to touch on from a team ship perspective. One of those is that, like the the team, you create the right culture, and the team will find where there are weak spots and help correct them. And I think you were the one who told me that, and I really loved it when you said that, because it's so true. If you have the right players on your team, they want to make sure that everybody levels up. They don't want anybody that's, you know, not behind there. And this, this is going to hit especially well, because you're in Chicago. Like, one of the people that I think about this all the time when it comes to like being the team player, is Dennis Rodman. And maybe this has played out right, like, we've heard this story a million times before, but nobody cared about Dennis Rodman until basically, he's like, I need you to get every rebound that is your job is to just be an absolute maniac and get every rebound. And he did, and he was absolutely insane at getting rebounds, and all of a sudden people cared about Dennis Rodman. He continued to help the bulls overall as a team win multiple championships. And I just love that illustration. But it's like, what's your role in this? Okay, you might not be the top scorer, but what is the thing that you can do, like you said, better than anybody else, then go, be that person,

Luke Schneider 50:07

absolutely and a highly motivated team. So anybody who's if you have any weak links, which you know, especially with growing companies, if you got a quite a few employees you're gonna there's gonna be some people that are not as engaged, but in a highly motivated, strong team, the team will actually weed out any of the people that aren't carrying their weight. Because when you have drive that culture where, or the company, you know, has this culture where we're a highly motivated, high performing team, they don't want to be dragged down by somebody who's not carrying their weight, and everybody needs to carry their weight. And it's that that starts from the top. Is like, there should be nobody in this company that says that's not my job, or I'm not willing to do that, and and we should never be willing to, or willing or, or even asking anybody to do anything that we're not willing to do. So in Yeah, in a highly motivated team, the team will that, the team will work out any of the of the problems with any of the team members, and that's really cool when you see that starting to happen, which I'm sure you've experienced that as well. But it's a cool thing to see.

William Harris 51:31

It is, it's very cool when all of a sudden, I can remember when that started to shift for us as a team, and you could say, oh, the team has its own culture now, and and you hear that in paper, right? And you read the books about it, but it's like, when this team starts to shift, and it's like, okay, you've established ideally, the right things from the get go, right as a as a founder, you've set up your mission, vision, values, and so, like, those things are, those are the non negotiables. These are the things that you have to have, and then you hire according to those things, you're going to make some mistakes. And to your point, though, if you've got enough of the right people in there, that self corrects pretty, pretty well, yeah, um, how did you learn about team? Is there a book, or is there a mentor, like, how did you develop your sense of team building? Because you've done a great job with this so far.

Luke Schneider 52:26

Thank you. I appreciate that. I would say mainly, probably my experience from the military and the fire service and the fire service, you know, my job, and I would, I would think that more so in the fire service for me and and, and, and, you know, I wasn't a combat veteran, but I would imagine that combat people in the military on combat teams. You know, where people's lives are in the lot on the line. You're going to, you're going to, you know, have a highly motivated team. And, and in the fire service, you know, you're you're going, you're responding to all kinds of calls emergencies where you know people are dying and and you're relying on your team to to do that, to work together, to get that person you know stable, you know this as a as a nurse, but nurses too, I would say, like you got, you gotta know who, who's on shift with you that day, because you know what, what you're working with at a fire. You know, if you've got things that are happening in in split seconds, and you've gotta, you've gotta count on your team so everybody has their role on a team. And it's, it's, it's really, you know, that's something that that is taught heavily in the fire service of you know, you, you, you won't be, I'm drawing a blank on the word, but not freelance, and I forget what, what the word I'm looking for, but you know your role, and you're doing that job, and you're doing it good because your team is counting on you, and you don't want to let your team down number one. So I just, I think it's, it's a lot of the experience, especially from the fire service, where your your team is, you know, that's, that's what you got, that you're dealing with in in some pretty tough situations, and that you're going to work through together.

William Harris 54:32

Yeah, you call it the nursing and I'll go there for a minute there too, because one of the tools that we used a lot, that I absolutely loved, which we borrowed from the military, was SBAR, s, B, A, R. It was a type of communication that really strips a lot of like ambiguity and whatever from it, but it's stands for Situation, background, assessment, recommendation. And I think that the thing that I like about that is when you can. Approach that with even with your clients, or you could approach that with anybody. Just let's remove some of the the emotion out of this. Not that emotion is bad. Let's remove that for a second, because it can kind of get in the way of what's the situation. Okay, got it. And I used to always say it's like, imagine, even with my team, imagine that you've got to wake a heart surgeon up in the middle of the night, 2am and you've got to get this, you know, a point across, because they got to get heart surgery again in the morning. So you got to get your point across in a very succinct way. And so it's like, what's the situation? Your patient is bleeding out right now? Okay, I'm awake. Give me the background. You know, who, what patient was this? What happened? Well, here's the name. They had a cabbage times three yesterday. Okay, yep, got the background like, what's, what's the assessment? Okay, well, here's what I'm noticing. This, this, this, and this, okay? And what do you recommend? This is what I'm recommending. I need this medication. I need this I need got it done. It's just a very good, streamlined way of communicating things. And I think that, like you said, having the right motivated people, you still need the right way of communicating those ideas to them in an effective way as well. Absolutely, because

Luke Schneider 56:09

communication is the the number one thing to fail, almost in anything in a team or totally it's they always say, what's the first thing to fail? It's always communication. And almost anything you know, relationships, communication is key, and the more that we can communicate what our expectations are, what the plan is. I mean, you can't plan for everything, but building out processes that help you stay consistent with and improve those processes. You know this is having good clear goals and good communication and expectations, I think so it's not just like have a highly motivated team that really cares about the mission. The team needs to know exactly what you need to accomplish. And what are those, what are those key performance indicators that you need to achieve to be successful, and what, what do we call success in this in this team, or in whatever the job is that we're doing? How do we measure that success? And so, yeah, so there's a lot more to it than just having a highly motivated team, because we're not going to have a highly motivated team, if the team doesn't know what their goals and expectations are, because they're going to feel like, Am I doing a good job? Am I not doing a good job? Like, how am I being measured right now? Because nobody wants to have that uncertainty. It's just not a good feeling 100%

William Harris 57:39

and again, having the right team, having a highly motivated team, they will keep you accountable to making sure that you've identified those goals. I know that my team is very good about that. It's like we need to reestablish You're right. We do, and I'm a little late on that. Thank you for reminding me absolutely they want that,

Luke Schneider 57:56

absolutely you want that, absolutely, because would you rather them not say anything and then not not feel like they can speak up, and then you you just potentially could lose a good team member within the next month because they're looking for another job, because they don't feel like they're playing, or they don't know what their part in the team is. And so it's so much and and probably a lot of it, you can bring back to communication somehow,

William Harris 58:22

100% yes, this is, this is fun, getting to know you as a person as well. One of the things that I like to talk about is, who is Luke Schneider, right in like, what are the things that make you who you are? This one's a little bit more lighthearted than we'll get into the other stuff. And I hope that I can say this, I didn't clear this with you. You don't just look like Mr. Clean. You are Mr. Clean. I am. Yes, why? Why are you Mr. Clean?

Luke Schneider 58:54

My face is turning red now i i have a cleaning pro addiction or obsession or whatever. So like, one thing that I am known for is wiping things constantly. I'll always be wiping the surfaces that I'm working on, or my computer or whatever it might be, but looking for dust. We We have really clean facilities and but I we pride ourselves on that. And that's something that, you know, that has we have really clean facilities, and we have really high expectations on cleanliness. But everybody know, but we walk, people walk through and they visit our facilities, and they say, Wow, I could have, I feel like I could have eaten off that floor. And, we, you know, and we want that. We're a food company. We want to, we want to have good, clean facilities. But I also feel that, like when you're if, if things are obviously dirty on the outside, what is it that you can't see that's also a mess? So that's the way I look at it. Is like. If we're not clean on the outside, or, you know, the things are dirty, like, it doesn't look like things are getting wiped down or dusty and dirty. It's like, okay, where? Where's all the other messes that we can't see? Yeah,

William Harris 1:00:16

very well worded. Were you always this way? Is this like a childhood thing, or is this something to develop?

Luke Schneider 1:00:22

I think so. I remember when I was a kid, my parents would talk about this, and I remember doing it. I'd clean it. When I'd clean my room, I would take everything out, you know, get rid of stuff I don't need, and then I put everything back. And then I had these, these like figures that, like, stack little statues that I had that were like nights and stuff. And I would, I would like, position them, and then I would look, look at it be like, that's not right. I'd move it a little bit more. I could spend 30 minutes, or probably hours, just like, readjusting things and changing things.

William Harris 1:00:59

We had different childhoods. I think when I was young, I'm not even sure if I knew where both of my shoes were, and I'd show up to school sometimes with one shoe on, but I was definitely the other way I was. I can remember taking cars apart, like RC cars on the bus, and I'm in kindergarten, right? And it's like, I'm riding the bus, and I can remember taking them apart, using the motors and engines to build things, and it's like, I couldn't be bothered to find where my other shoe is. It's like, I'm invested in what I'm doing right now.

Luke Schneider 1:01:24

That's funny. So you like to break things or fix or you like to fix things more, fixing things or invent, like, I

William Harris 1:01:32

like coming up with a new solution. It's like, well, of course, the motor can move the wheels. What else can this motor do? Right?

Luke Schneider 1:01:38

That's cool. Yeah. Ever since I'd known you, you, you've always, you've always been like, analytical, like technical, like, I remember seeing emails from you, and it was like, it was so articulate, I'll be like, I'm not even gonna read all that. Like, skimming through it's like, there's too much in for information overload. Like you, you're just very I mean, I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that in a good, a good way, like you're very articulate, and you will take your time and like detail and and I'm sure that's that's great for you, for for your industry, because the the details, I mean, details matter and everything. But when you're spending a lot of money for you said, you know, early on in your intro that, you know, one of the companies recently sold for $800 million when you're when you're moving that kind of I'm sure that their ad spend was massive when you're moving those kinds of dollars. The finest details could be costly mistakes. So,

William Harris 1:02:43

yeah, yeah, it absolutely matters. And you're completely right. I say there's a majority people don't like reading my emails. This is going back to childhood as well. My teachers would say, I don't know if they'd say it like this, but you know, plionism is my friend, which is, I will use way too many words, but that's my thing. One of the things that I wanted to talk about with you then too, is I love talking about like mentors and people that you are able to meet and connect with. And you mentioned that you got the chance to meet with Joe slawick, created FONA, and you know how he's helped shape some of your beliefs and values and kind of is one of your business advisors tell me about, like, the meeting him and what he's been able to help teach

Luke Schneider 1:03:26

you, yeah. So I've been, I've been fortunate to to meet some very successful entrepreneurs and business owners. I'm not a a big like celebrity person, so like, my celebrities would be like meeting somebody like Joe and and learning from him and, and, you know, just getting to know someone like that and, and it's, it's been a blessing for me. I've got to to know him, and he's been able to coach me and mentor me and teach me. And, you know, I'm one of I'm learning things about myself, my strengths and my weaknesses. And, you know, sometimes you need to hear it from somebody, my wife always tells me, but, but sometimes you need to hear it from someone else and and you know, in for me, you know, hearing it from a guy that I respect greatly as a as a business owner and an entrepreneur, and has done it for for years, and was successful with the with the he had a they had a very successful company, and they ended up selling that company To McCormick and but a very sex successful businessman, and when he tells me things about myself, he's often and I feel like spot on and I'm learning about myself. And he said, you know, the A lot of times our greatest strengths are also our weaknesses. And I think. That's very true for me. It's, it's, you know, I I'm very strong minded and strong willed, so that's probably been a strength for me when it comes to resiliency or working through problems. But also I need to be able to to to listen, and I need to be able to, I have a very, you know, strong will, and I can make decisions quickly, and I could stand behind my decisions and feel very confident with my decisions. But maybe because of that, I should take, you know, he did credit me this. He said, like, you make good decisions, but, but some people need to sleep on their decisions. 24 hours. Maybe you need to sleep on a you know, 7048, or 72 hours, you know. And so I respect, I respect that. He also said, like he was doing some coaching with me. And he's like, and by the way, you're not very coachable. I want to be coachable, you know, I, but I want to, I, and I want to be open to to what people have to say. And I feel that I am, but I'm getting better at it, you know? I feel like, I feel like, as, if we want to grow as entrepreneurs and and business owners, we have to, we have to learn about ourselves too, and knowing things about myself and how I communicate, or, you know, sometimes I could be a little impatient and I want to skip through the chapters. You can't skip through the chapters. You know. You gotta work through each chapter one by one and take it a day at a time, a lot of times. So just I feel like business has taught me so much about myself. And, you know, I feel like it's made me a better it's making me, I should say, a better person. In

William Harris 1:06:55

fairness, I think a lot of entrepreneurs struggle to be coachable, at least in the early days, and I think it's almost a necessity in I've been thinking about this for the first time right now. So it's not like I've thought about this at a time, but the thing that I like about what you said is, I'm also, I've been told in my younger years that I was not very coachable either, in at least in business. And I think when you think about this. You called out before. There's a lot of people that are naysayers about what you're about to do. And if you're too coachable, you're probably going to listen to everybody who said, Yeah, this is not going to work. You like, yeah, you're probably right. You almost have to have this, like, bull headed naivety that you just say, I'm going to do it anyway, and then you can get it up and running. And then you do have to shift into that coachable mentality. Because I do see founders who struggle to become coachable later on, and they become the very worst enemy of their business, too. And so I think there is that transition.

Luke Schneider 1:07:51

I agree with you. I think, I think it's, uh, it's, it's a it's, I have had to, because you get, you get to a point to where this is beyond, like, okay, you can work through this broke and I, or I need to fix this, or I need to get this building, and think these things could be serious problems at the time. But you get into, as the business grows, you get into some complexities that are, are, you know, very strategic, and that, like, there's, you're dealing with smart people, or if you're, if you're doing business, you know, business deals, or whatever it is, but you're, you're dealing with, the bigger the company grows, most likely, the smarter the people you're Going to start working with and coming in contact with, and just have to, we have to learn and grow too as as entrepreneurs, or I'll or the company will outgrow me, and there might be a time where the company outgrows me, and and I need to be ready for that, you know, but and I you so there is, there is going to be a time, potentially, where I hit my my limitations. So it's very interesting to to think about that stuff. But I try to take it a day at a time and be open. Is in but you're absolutely right. If you're too, if you're too persuasive, or or not persuasive, but influenced by other people's, you know, influence, you could easily just do what everybody says and and then you're, then you're not doing anything, because you're, everybody's going to have an opinion, yeah, and so

William Harris 1:09:44

your most cherished possession in your office is the opinion there of your daughter, number one, dad, the picture you have that in your office right now today, I know what you did when we did before. Yeah, I

Luke Schneider 1:09:56

told you, that's my biggest flex. I. Sit across from our chief operations officer, and I put it right in front of my desk. I said, Hey, I'll show you if you if you want, I got it. Yeah, okay, what's it?

William Harris 1:10:13

Here's the elevator music while we go, do, do, do, do, especially for the people that are on audio. Yeah, that's awesome. How old was she then, and how old is she now?

Luke Schneider 1:10:26

What this was actually this year, okay, this, this was my youngest daughter, Ella, and she's currently 11.

William Harris 1:10:35

That's so cool. That's that is a flex.

Luke Schneider 1:10:38

I like that, yeah, yeah. So

William Harris 1:10:42

we've talked a lot about the business, and you know, ways that you're intentionally trying to build up the business, obviously you're intentionally trying to become more coachable. Are there things in your personal life that you're also trying to be intentional about improving?

Luke Schneider 1:10:56

Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, routine. I want to, I want to get on a better routine. It's, it's hard sometimes when you, when you travel a lot, I mean, there's always things you can do. And I'm sure there's a lot of tips out there on on how to get a routine. Even when you're, you're traveling a lot, but, but it's, you know, it's, it's easy to I'm not the best at it, you know, like in and I work, I work a lot, and I'm not complaining about that. I, you know, I'm it's, it's an honor for me to do what I do, and I've been very blessed, and God's opened up a lot of doors for us. And I feel like I tell people this all the time, I couldn't have planned it if I wanted to. I've just been very blessed. And lot of a lot of things in the company and in this business have happened at the at the right time and and sometimes it's the right people at the right time. Some people it's the wrong sometimes it's the wrong people at the the right time. But you learn so much and and it really couldn't have planted it if I wanted to, but I, I have, you know, been it's hard. The One of the challenges I've, I've always had from the beginning of starting the business, is because I didn't really know what what I was getting myself into when I started, but it as it snowballed. You know, my personality is like, let's just keep pushing it forward, keep growing it and keep driving it and moving, moving the business alongside the team. But my family has had, has, you know, not, not as much time with me, and there's then that's a reality of it. And you know, they are understanding. My wife has been very understanding and supportive. And, you know, she, she homeschools our kids and also teaches art and but, but our kids go to like a hybrid schooling program, where they're they go to school, like in person, two to three days a week, and then the rest of it's home. And it's been great, and seeing them grow and just, but she, she holds down the home front, you know, because I work a lot, and that's just, I think a reality of it is, is it's high, it's, it's, it's a thing. It's high, high effort with low return. Early on in the business, as the business grows, you start to see it's changing. It's, it's evolving. You're in, we're in a stage where, you know it's high effort and but you can see it growing, and you can see it continuing to grow, and, and, you know, there's there. It's very rewarding, but yeah, anyways, that just work life balance. Balance has been a challenge for me. Unfortunately, I've been very blessed to have a very supportive wife and and blessed for that. Yeah,

William Harris 1:14:05

it's, it's hard. And I'd say that, you know, you're saying again, things that I feel like every entrepreneur I've ever talked to says same struggles. It's, it's difficult. I even wrote an article about working 100 hours a week on Fast Company, and so my wife is right there with you. And you know, I would say, tough on the marriage, like you said in the beginning days, especially when there's there's no return, it's like, is this for anything? Like, is is there an end to this? And you know, kudos to you, though, for for being able to recognize that and work towards that. And in the fact that that is at the forefront of your mind when I ask a question like that is a really good thing, so then it's just continuing to work towards it, right?

Luke Schneider 1:14:47

Yeah, I agree. Thank you. I appreciate that.

William Harris 1:14:50

Luke, speaking of time, then I'll let you get back to all of the many wonderful things you have to do. It's been so wonderful talking to you, learning. From you, if people wanted to work with you, or, you know, follow along with your story and things like that. What's the best way for them to

Luke Schneider 1:15:08

do that? That? Yeah, they can. They can find us online. Just search Fire Department Coffee, check us out on social media if you want to get in touch with me. LinkedIn is pretty good. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So yeah, just find me there and appreciate everybody following our journey. And thank you, William for bringing me on here and and getting to hang out with you and and it's always a pleasure to talk to you, and love hearing all your thoughts and and wisdom that you share with with your audience. So I appreciate, appreciate you having me, and thanks everybody for for all your support. And if you listen to the podcast, we appreciate you listening. Yeah,

William Harris 1:15:50

thanks, man. I really appreciate that. And everybody for tuning in. Thank you. And I hope you guys have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:15:57

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, we'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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