The $100M CPG Playbook: Pivots, Failures, and the Secrets To Winning With Will Nitze

Will Nitze is the Founder and CEO of IQBAR, a leading nutrition company offering keto, vegan, and paleo protein bars and supplements. Under his leadership, IQBAR has expanded to over 10,000 retail locations. Will also co-hosts Eating Glass, a podcast that features startup founders.

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

[1:46] Why Will Nitze started IQBAR
[6:41] How IQBAR evolved its product offerings and expanded its target market
[14:27] Will shares how he solved a major manufacturing issue with a large retailer
[22:10] The advantages of reengineering supply chain systems
[28:27] Supply chain excellence as a key differentiator in the CPG space
[37:44] Positioning IQBAR as a value brand instead of a premium brand
[42:18] The importance of an omnichannel strategy for scaling a CPG business
[50:54] Challenges of transitioning from DTC to retail
[54:41] How Will manages his business with a lean team
[58:12] Why controlling your psychology is key to long-term performance
[1:10:28] The influence of Will’s childhood obsessions on his business approach
[1:18:16] Will talks about living in an elderly Russian couple’s basement

In this episode…

Building a CPG brand is challenging, especially when navigating product pivots, supply chain disruptions, and transitioning from e-commerce to retail. Many entrepreneurs struggle to maintain their brand vision while evolving to meet market demands. How can founders scale their business while maintaining profitability and operational excellence?

CPG brand builder Will Nitze leveraged customer feedback to shift from a niche product focus to a broader value-driven brand, making strategic pivots to expand his company’s total addressable market. When scaling a CPG brand, entrepreneurs must differentiate their supply chain practices, leverage omnichannel distribution, and transition from DTC-only to retail locations. Developing partnerships with major retailers requires testing and iterating products and selecting partners that align with your target audience.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Will Nitze, Founder and CEO of IQBAR, about creating a $100 million CPG brand. Will discusses the importance of evolving product positioning, optimizing supply chain operations, and scaling through an omnichannel strategy. He also dives into overcoming manufacturing challenges, maintaining a lean team, and controlling your psychology for continuous results.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

“You have to be willing to tweak your original mission and listen to the marketplace to evolve.”
“Profitability is that moment when you finally exhale — because you’re no longer on life support.”
“Retail success isn’t just about getting on shelves; it’s about defending your spot and optimizing constantly.”
“Creativity in supply chain management is one of the biggest differentiators between winning and losing in CPG.”
“Entrepreneurs’ greatest enemy is often themselves; learning to control your own psychology is the entire game.”

Action Steps

Leverage customer feedback for product evolution: Pay close attention to recurring customer requests and complaints to identify opportunities for improvement. This ensures your product remains relevant and competitive while expanding your total addressable market.
Test small before scaling into retail: Start with select retailers and monitor sales velocity, customer feedback, and operational challenges before committing to mass distribution. This minimizes risk and increases the likelihood of long-term success in brick-and-mortar stores.
Own your supply chain to improve profitability: Transition from a turnkey manufacturing model to sourcing raw materials and controlling production. A well-optimized supply chain can significantly improve gross margins and overall business sustainability.
Refine your omnichannel strategy for growth: Use DTC sales data to identify top-selling SKUs, target demographics, and effective messaging before expanding into retail. A well-executed omnichannel approach ensures consistent branding and maximized revenue across all sales channels.
Develop a bias for action and rapid iteration: When faced with challenges, quickly test solutions instead of waiting for the perfect answer. Speed and adaptability are key differentiators in successfully scaling a CPG business.

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 0:15

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 to help you scale your from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Joining me today is will Nitze. Will is the founder and CEO at IQBAR, which is the leading and fastest growing brain and body nutrition platform in the US. IQBAR products are now sold in over 10,000 locations and all major e-commerce platforms. We're going to be talking today about the $100 million CPG playbook pivots failures and the secrets to winning. Will, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to have you here. There wasn't an intro I was thinking about, Wait, where did we first meet? And I think it was just through x enjoyed engaging with your content, and kind of started talking through DMS and stuff like that, and just kind of went from there.

Will Nitze 1:07

Yeah, as as most great meetings, meetings occur, right?

William Harris 1:12

I've met a lot of great friends just through social media interaction. Well, I'm excited to dig in before we do, I want to announce our sponsor real quick. 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 ipoed. You can learn more on our website@Elumynt.com which is spelled E, l, u, m, y, N, t.com that said on to the good stuff. Will, why did you start IQBAR?

Will Nitze 1:46

Oh, man, there's a lot there. So yeah, it was a confluence of four or five different forces. I would say. Number one, I didn't love my job. I worked in software sales and marketing out of college, and I was selling B to B SAS operations and supply chain software to oil and gas companies. So I was in Boston, but I was flying to Houston on a weekly basis, and didn't really love software, didn't really love oil and gas. And so that was helpful in terms of, like me not wanting to do that for 3040, years. And so that was one piece. And then I always kind of wanted to do my own thing. Wanted to be my own boss. Wanted to create my own product, but I didn't have a technical background, and so that severely limited the things I could make. And I just, I love physical products too. So I thought, Okay, I'm gonna make something and but I wanted to also make it, like, literally, in my apartment, I didn't have, you know, R and D lab or a machine shop or something where I could, like, fabricate, you know, a new widget, you know, set of headphones or whatever. And so that kind of left food and Bev and I read a book called Mission in a bottle by the guy, guy who started Honest Tea, his name Seth Goldman, and he co founded it with his Yale Business School professor. This guy, Barry nail buff. And I just like saw myself in him. He went to Harvard undergrad. I went to Harvard undergrad. He was a government major. I was a government major. He worked in consulting and didn't really like it, and, you know, I didn't really love my career thus far. So I was like, Okay, I want to be this guy. And I even emailed him, and he answered, and I drove up to New Hampshire, and we met and had dinner. And that even, like, further entrenched this idea that I want to be in food and beverage. And then I just started cycling through ideas and to dovetail in, you know, why? Why brain and body food? I was fascinated as an undergrad with neuroscience and psychology. I was a gov major, but I was a psych neuroscience minor, and that was really my true passion. And so not only did I want to make a food and Bev thing, I wanted to dovetail that in somehow, sure, and ultimately, where I landed was brain food. And so I thought, Okay, I'll be the first brain food on the market. And there's no data that people wanted that or needed that, so it was a total leap of faith. But yeah, those, those are all the the impetuses

William Harris 4:22

you wanted it. And I think that's the key, right? Sometimes, I think when we're thinking about, well, what's this big idea? Um, doing market research is good. It's important. But sometimes, just you as a founder, there's a thing that you want, that you want to see in there. Uh, apparently there's a nerdy side of you. This is what you're studying. And you're like, Yeah, I want to dig into this. And then you, you couple that with pain. I think that's kind of like the key that I like that you brought up here. It's like, there's some sort of a pain that you say, like, this has to change. I don't want to continue doing what I'm still doing. I have to figure this out. So what is it I'm going to figure out, okay, this is something I like, great. Let's, let's start there.

Will Nitze 5:01

Yeah, you need, you need more than one thing. I think you need four or five things to do, to do any big take, any big leap. Doesn't matter if it's like marrying someone or starting a company or moving to another country, or whatever you need, like four or five forces. And I always tell people that some people will want to start a company in college or right out of college. And I mean, certainly there are case studies where that's worked. But I generally tell people like, go get a job. Understand what it's like to have a boss and a boss's boss and have to sit through meetings and, you know, be in a corporate environment, and just like, really deeply understand what, what the alternative to entrepreneurship is, because that's such a powerful juxtaposition and a powerful motivator. At least it was for me. And by the way, you learn like, oh, you know, this is how a company should operate. This is how what a corporate hierarchy looks like. You build all the foundational skills, Excel, PowerPoint, blah, blah, blah, so, but yeah, I would say if I, like, loved my job, if I was super passionate about my job, there's no chance I'm starting action

William Harris 6:17

bar. Yep, you pivoted a little bit into this, right? The product pivoted a little bit where it started off as just this idea of brain food, and not that you've gone away from that, but it's moved into, you know, like a low sugar plant protein bar. What was the moment when you realized we need to shift a little bit about what we're doing?

Will Nitze 6:41

Well, I think, for starters, the beauty of starting a company, a consumable company on line, is you get feedback, and you get it quickly, and you get it, you know, people will really tell you what they think. And so once you hear something 1020, 30 times, it's like, oh, okay, that's probably a thing that we should pay attention to. And it could be taste related, price point related, esthetic related, blah, blah, blah. And so we launched with brain food. That was the original idea. And we just kept getting feedback of, hey, why isn't there protein in here? Or, can you add protein and blah, blah, blah and, and by the way, that this has also happened in other vectors, fiber, like I said, price point. But let's just focus on the protein piece. We basically looked at the product set, and we're like, okay, the original idea was brain food. But do we lose anything from evolving it to be brain and body food? So is it just like additive, and does it detract from the original mission? And the answer is yes. And so we did it, and that was a giant unlock for us, because it just it massively increased the total addressable market. And we've done that same exercise many, many, many times, and over time, as we've gotten more mass market, you know, now we're sold in Costco, WalMart, Target, etc, you have to, just like, swallow your ego. You have to be willing to tweak original missions and listen to the marketplace, mm hmm, and evolve into a product set that will work in all of those, you know, retailers or, you know, whether they be brick and mortar or online, if you want to build a giant company, like, if you don't, and you want to build a $5 million a year company, and it's spinning off a couple 100k in EBITDA, like, great. Like, do do that? But for me, the goal was always, how do I build a giant company?

William Harris 8:40

Yeah, and I think that's the interesting, I don't know. Line there is between something that is still very niche, that serves the purpose of what you want to do, but something that still has mass appeal. And you do end up having to kind of blend the two a little bit in figuring out which feedback do you listen to and which feedback you ignore. I had Matt van swal on here over at wise cameras, and that's one of the things we talked a lot about, was how to know which feedback to listen to and which to ignore. I don't necessarily want to spend a ton of time there, but how do you know, for you, on your brand, where you draw the line on listening and feedback and becoming just food, and it's no longer brain and body, it's just it's just food. Obviously, broader appeal, but now you've lost some of that, and it can become muddy, right? The overall approach.

Will Nitze 9:32

There's a leap of faith component to it. There are just certain elements where you can just look at data, and they're just far more asked for than complained about. Like, higher protein is far more asked for than complained about, right? So it's just, there's just not that many people who are will be mad that you have 12 grams of protein versus, let's say, six grams of protein. And. You can make a data based determination on that there's not many people who will be mad that there's two grams more of fiber. There's not going to be people who are mad that it's a little bit more like delectable and delicious, and you have more flavor appeal on the on the front of the pack, like, so it's not rocket science, but you do have to, I mean, you do have to do that exercise of start with, who's this going to piss off? And that's for everything that's like, product related, messaging related, etc, who is this going to piss off, and how and am I willing to piss those people off? But I really do like all the tweaks we've made. Very rarely has it pissed someone off. Frankly, it's it's the opposite. Someone's pissed off, and then us making a change appeases that person. But there is no, there's no question that you do hit a ceiling to where you making an incremental change, or listening to someone's feedback and doing something about it degrades like truck, or you have attrition of customers over here by doing that. So it's either a net neutral or a net negative, and that will come, there will come, come a point where you'll get complaints and it's just like, sorry, maybe we're not for you sure, but that ceiling is pretty high, and I think it's a lot higher than people realize. And I think one of the challenges with people in consumer goods is they'll stop when it's pretty good, and then they'll want to nerd out on AD conversion rate and website conversion rate, and, you know, marketing efficiency ratio and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, not realizing that if they kept pushing that product to be 5% better and another 5% better, all of those other downstream metrics would improve, sure, but I think it's just because it's really, really, really tough, honestly, like, it's easier to nerd out on those things than it is to, like, bang your head against the wall on how to make your product five times 5% better. But, yeah, that's it makes your life easier. It's

William Harris 12:10

algorithmic, right? And so I think people like that, like, so I just pull this lever here, but it's very hard to say, like, I'm gonna pull this lever and make my product 5% better. Like, you said, like, that takes a lot more higher level thinking to be able to do

Will Nitze 12:23

that. And usually, usually, the founder is not super, super technical in their realm, right? So I wasn't a food scientist, so I totally taught myself Food Science and obsessed over it. I made the products in my own kitchen, but then at some point you hit a ceiling, um, at some point, you like, I actually need to pull in a food scientist, or multiple food scientists, and, you know, but then I'm there's a informational asymmetry, and so I might Actually not know if I can make it 5% better, right? And so you have to, like, pull in all these other advisory resources, who, by the way, can be bad and can point you in the wrong direction and can veer you off course. But if you find the right ones, they'll tell you, yeah, this can be 5% better. Here's how. So yeah,

William Harris 13:23

you became a gastronomer and then hired better astronomers, just throwing out fun words. A

Will Nitze 13:30

lot of people, by the way, have don't even do what I did, right? They'll just totally outsource it. So they'll say, I'm just a guy. I'm a poly sci major. I want to make a fill in the blank cookie, and they just go hire someone to do all the R and D, and it's a total black box to them. That's like, it's super, super common, and it's the, in my opinion, like, the worst thing you can do, because you just don't know, you don't know how to audit what that person did. You'll never know if they can make it 5% better, etc, etc.

William Harris 14:00

I think you also lose a bit of the passion. Like, it's hard to be passionate. Hard to be passionate about something that you don't even understand yourself. As a founder, I kind of think, anyways, you want to be somewhat involved in it totally, um, you. I love talking about challenges and obstacles. And one of the obstacles that you ran into, you told me about, was a manufacturing snafu that took place with one of your largest customers as you're starting to grow, what happened? How did you guys overcome that?

Will Nitze 14:27

Yeah, and by the way, like anyone who makes anything physical, probably has 10 stories of something that blew up on the manufacturing floor. This is one of one of more than 10, probably, but sure, once you're bigger, you can withstand them better. But this moment happened when we were pretty young and didn't have the cash to withstand it, and it was very touch and go. So we, against my now better judgment, we signed a deal with CVS, the pharmacy, and that was actually, funnily enough, our first brick and. Order customer. And people don't really go into CVS to buy health food, but they were offering us think it was 3000 doors, and which is just an insane number of hours. We were in zero doors up until that point, and it was going to be multiple, hundreds of 1000s of units, and we had, to date, only produced like, 30,000 units. So it was like, Whoa, that we're this is going to totally transform the business. If we do it, we can't say no, but let's, like, try and figure out a way to make this work. And so, you know, it's big moment for the for the company, and we actually shifted our CO Packer from the West Coast to the East Coast, just in order to be able to make this many units. And we all as a team, tiny team. There's, I think, four of us at the time. We piled into a car and we drove to upstate New York, where the CO Packer was, and they start manufacturing at like 5am because they go all day. And so we all got up, and it was like pitch black out. We pile into the car, and we get there at 445 and, you know, shake hands with the guy who's managing the line and and let's go. Let's do it. We're making the CVS run, and we're filming, and we were going to get all this creative content that we could share on socials and blah, blah, blah, yep. So the bars coming up, the bars mix. They come down the line. They're sliced, they're they're guillotine, they go into the, what's called the flow wrapper, which, which, you know, wraps the bar, and they look great. I mean, the packaging looks great. The wrappers, the the cartons, they're getting packed out, and we're just high fiving. It's like a total epic moment, right? You're like, wow, we're a real company now. And then the guy just taps that the line. Guy just taps me on the shoulder and says, we got a problem. I was like, Oh no. And my just like, heart sunk. And he's like, the rappers aren't sealing. Was like, What do you mean? The rappers aren't sealing? You assume the, again, this is like these things where you assume any, every rapper would seal. Why would a rapper not seal? Sure. And this is when you realize you how, like, your surface area of risk is so, so, so big when you have this many inputs going into anything, because it's like the 30 inputs into the bar, but then also the packaging, and then it's getting on a truck, and it can't fall off the truck, and blah, blah, blah, but so he says the wrappers aren't stealing and it just so happened that actually the rapper vendor was there because he was planning on high fiving us on how great his wrappers were. And I turned him and I was like, Dude, what's wrong with the wrappers? Anyway? The next half hour is just like hellish. We're trying to make the wrappers seal properly. And long story short, they didn't. And so we stopped the line throughout like 1000s of pounds of dough, of product, and I'm just and of course, the team's there, right? And so we had just been high fiving, and now everyone was totally despondent. And I was like, Oh my God. Like, this is gonna take us under because we couldn't afford to throw out that product. And then, like, even worse, we got to deliver to CVS, like, in like two weeks. And so I'm like, how, how can I saw this, and then I just, like, snapped into action mode, and I just started dialing, packaging, you know, wrapper vendors, just dialing, dialing, dialing, dialing, I need, I need wrappers in a week. Can you do it? No, okay, call the next guy. I need rappers in a week. Can you do it? No. Finally, someone says, I think I can do it for you. And and they did. And so they they made all the wrappers. They got them there. The next week, I drove back, produced on the line. Everything went well. Got them to CVS. I think it was like a 35 $40,000 hit. But we were huge. We were back.

William Harris 19:03

So you said, in your now better judgment, you maybe would have done something differently. But like looking back on this, you know, how could you plan for this? There's a, there's a book that I like over here, psychology of money, Morgan Housel, and he talks about how you can't, you could plan for every contingency except for the one that you can't plan for. It's like you could plan for everything, but there's always something that you're not thinking about, and that might be the thing that gets you. I mean, what better judgment could you have had in this situation?

Will Nitze 19:34

Well, I mean, there's, there's, there's like, the manufacturing of the product, and then there's the go to market. There's the work, you know, working with CBS. We don't sell on CBS anymore, but we just learned, even besides all this, we delivered to them. And then we subsequently realized, oh, wait, maybe we shouldn't be selling a product that expires in a channel where you're moving, like, point two, five bars. Per per SKU, per store, per week, and you're also in, like, the back corner in this really random set. I mean, we just learned a lot about just retailer selection sure, as well as branding, as well as, I mean, they also didn't pay us for six months. We learned a lot about payment terms. And so I just wouldn't have done that go to market if I did it over again. But no, I mean on the manufacturing piece. Look, there's things I could say of, yeah, I could have had more professionals on the floor, or I could have vetted the wrapper company better, or but honestly, that was never going to happen. I mean, there's just no way to avoid, avoid this kind of stuff. Even if I was a second or third time entrepreneur, I still think this stuff happens here and there. It just, it just does. And like I said, that's one of 10 examples I should give you, and I've gotten a lot better, and this shit still happens, so it never fully goes away.

William Harris 21:04

Yeah, yeah, that's fair. And to a point your resiliency as an entrepreneur, to be able to say, Okay, well, I'm gonna dial the phone right now. Here we go. Let's get this, you know, sorted out and taken care of you. It reminds me of, you know, typical coach I played basketball. That's my sport. But it's like, okay, you missed the shot. Get back on D, right? It's like, that's literally the thing you have to do to get back on defense right now. It's like, what are you gonna do about it? Cry about it. It's

Will Nitze 21:29

like, keep playing basketball. And also everyone's staring at you, like, you gotta do something. It's good. Like being socially humiliated is a pretty powerful motivator. I would say, yeah, that's fair.

William Harris 21:42

You also talked about how you re engineered your entire supply chain during COVID, and how that might have been a setback in some ways, but it ended up saying, I hesitate to use blessing in disguise, because I don't think anybody can say that COVID is a blessing, but let's just say, like the forcing function of having to force your to re engineer your supply chain ended up being a net positive for the business. Take me through this a little bit.

Will Nitze 22:10

Yeah, so the way like food and Bev works is usually with a contract manufacturer. Most people do what's called turnkey, which means that the CO Packer buys all of the inputs, and then they manufacture the thing, and then they sell the thing to you for a price. So in our case, they would sell a bar to us, and that's generally seen as favorable because for cash flow reasons, right? So I they outlay all the cash to buy all the inputs, and I don't have to, and they do it earlier, and then it's just less administrative work, right? So it's a lot of work to order stuff and blah, blah, blah. There's a bunch of reasons why that's kind of the standard. And we were doing that when COVID hit. You couldn't get anything. You can get cardboard, like stuff you assume you can get you couldn't get. And so we got into these binds where it's like, we can't make product. And if you can't make product, you're dead as a product company, sure. So out of, out of just sheer survival, uh, instincts, where, like, when, when our CO Packer said, Hey, by the way, we can't make the product because we can't get X, Y, Z, input. Y, Z input. We just said, Stop like we're taking over our supply chain. Remove. We have to move away from turnkey, and we're going to own all of our inputs. And then, sure enough, we could solve every problem that came up. It was really terrible and hard and stressful, but again, it's like the wrapper thing. Just start dialing and, oh, you can't get that thing. Well, I bet you can. I bet if you called the general manager at that supplier and you complained enough, or you made some, some sort of concession, or you agreed to pay more, I bet you could get that thing. But like Janet in you know, admin at the CO packer is never going to take those 10 steps. I will, because I'm way more desperate so and that happens so many I can't tell you how many times that happened where I had to, like, solve that micro problem to get the input to make the product the blessing in disguise. Piece is, what we learned, is we can be way more cost efficient when we control our own supply chain. It's again, cash flow inefficient. It's not great for cash flow, and cash flow is very important in consumer goods. But just from a gross margin and EBITDA standpoint, we can have a much better gross margin and a much better EBIT depth. And so if we can withstand the cash flow swings via fundraising, really and just getting paid on time and all that, then we're going to have a better business fundamentals entity here. And so then we never, never, never turn back and still. This day we we manage this, like fairly complex and big supply chain. I mean, we're buying millions of pounds of nuts and sure, you know, fiber and things like that. Like this is not a small operation, the supply chain operation, but it made its way stronger and made the business better. I love that. Looking back

William Harris 25:29

over the last couple years, what's been one of the things that you'd say your biggest success that you felt like, where you're like, maybe this is that moment where you're like, I feel like, we've I can breathe because I said entrepreneur can feel like, you can't breathe a lot, but there's like, this moment you're like, I feel good now

Will Nitze 25:46

profitability. I mean, it's just so it's that binary switch is flipped and, oh, we're profitable. Like, ah, exhale, you know, because you're, you're, you are a on life support, and you are artificially alive. You really should be dead, but you're artificially alive because someone has an IV into you and is pumping VC dollars into your angel dollars or whatever, and that's just not a good feeling. Yeah, we've become a custom. I think entrepreneurs have become accustomed to, beyond that, life support, and sometimes you you forget, oh, like, I should probably be trying to be of default alive here for me. I don't know if it affected me more than other entrepreneurs, but I was, like desperate to get to profitability, because I hate, I hate losing money, and I hate stress, and I was just always stressed. So this just happened this past year. We flipped to profitability, like, meaningfully flipped. It was like, 15 plus percent EBITDA swing and and I can't tell you how great that feels, because you're like, first of all, you don't have to fundraise. And fundraising is absolutely a second time job, and not a fun one at that. I mean, you're, you're begging you your hat out, and you're, you're begging

William Harris 27:06

and panhandler. Yeah, exactly. And I, and I hate

Will Nitze 27:09

begging So, and I just don't want more cooks in the kitchen, you know, like, I don't want a bigger board of directors. I don't, I don't want to answer to more people, like, I didn't get in this to do that, and I don't want to delude myself more and our employees more. So that was really, really big. And the question of like, well, how do you make that happen? Is pretty simple. It's volume. We just, we are playing a volume game such that you have to be producing, call it, you know, $30 million of net revenue, or maybe it's earlier, maybe it's 20, maybe it's 25 but somewhere in that neighborhood, in order to flip meaningfully profitable and be default alive, and we just scaled into that, that sweet spot. And now it's just like, how do we run the score up. How do we expand everything? You

William Harris 28:03

took this exactly where I wanted to go because there was something you said that I really liked on LinkedIn. You said supply chain, creativity, slash excellence, is now one of the single most important determinants of who wins and loses in CPG, most people don't associate supply chain with creativity. Can you? Can you break that down for me? How are you creating auto supply chain? Well,

Will Nitze 28:27

first of all, things people think are commodities aren't really commodities. There's very few things that are pure commodities, sure. So like not almonds, right? So one piece, one, almond butter could be wildly different from another almond butter. You think, oh, they're just, they're both almond butter commodity, right? Like, not at all. And so there's creativity just within each ingredient. How do I find the literal best almond butter in the world? So that that's a quality thing, right? Then there's price. And so you're always juggling those two things, always quality price, and how do I get the highest quality for the lowest price? Because those two things are often at loggerheads, but not always, not always. Then there's like geography. I mean, there's so many vectors to get creative on. There's geography. You can source peanuts from Georgia, or you can source peanuts from South America. You can source fiber from domestically or abroad. You know, there's just, there's geographical creativity, there's quality creativity. And then, by the way, like when you get into the manufacturing piece, there's so many permutations of ways you can create something. It sounds basic, but it really isn't, from storing ingredients to how do I blend them to, what order do I blend them in to when I'm blending them? Is it 30 seconds, or is it 35 Seconds, or is it 50 seconds? Those make meaningful changes in products. So there's almost infinite ways to paint the canvas of creating a supply chain, warehousing all your inputs, turning your inputs into finished goods. And by the way, that's not the end. Then it's like, how do I store and fulfill? There's infinite permutations of ways you can fulfill. You can fulfill via to a bi coastal setup, where you have facility on the East Coast and the West Coast, and that helps you get packages to consumers one day quicker, or it can be centralized in the Midwest. And so maybe you lose a day there, but you get the benefit of volume being in one spot. You can use a third party, a three PL, or you can use a one PL. You can create your own warehouse and hire your own warehouse guys and fulfill yourself like there's so many ways to slice and dice it all the way from sourcing that one almond all the way down to that bar shows up on someone's door step, and it's, it's, it is artistry, but people don't think about it like that. Think about it of oh, there might, must just be a right way to do it. And there's, there's not, there's many right ways to do it, but you gotta be damn good. And again, it's like the product. How do I improve my supply chain 5% sure? You know each quarter.

William Harris 31:22

I not a chef, but I have seen that there's a difference between mixing the ingredients that you mentioned, where it's like, if you cream the maybe making chocolate chip cookies, it's like, if you cream the butter and eggs before, or if you do it later, and it's like, it makes a difference in how the cookie turns out. And it's like, it doesn't, I don't know it's very scientific, and I appreciate that. But let's pull this back to my field and my field of advertising. It's very easy for me to run AB tests to say this setup is better, or this channel is better, or whatever that is. How do you evaluate let's just even say you know if you're going to end up having distribution in BI coastal or Midwest? How do you evaluate which one of those is better, because you're going to get like, I don't know, modeled data. Can you AB test things like this, or in any of these things along the supply chain? How do you decide this is the right way for us to do it?

Will Nitze 32:14

It's a very unsexy answer. Trial and error. Sure. Trial and error is the best startup strategy, still in 2025 in my opinion. So it's very painful. It's a very painful strategy. It's nicer to just say this is the way to do it, and I'm going to do it, but like, basically, we're just working from it's kind of like the Toyota manufacturing philosophy. We just try and take out bottle necks one by one. What's the worst bottleneck? Let me take that out. I mean, let me take out the second worst. Bum, bum, bum bum. And so, for example, like, let's just take fulfillment. We had three PLS, and it was a disaster, because the way they price. First of all, people don't talk enough about this. Three pills are perversely incentivized relative to the brands they service, because, let's say they're marking up postage, right? So they're actually incentivized for you to pay the most for postage, because a markup of a bigger number is a bigger number, which is crazy, right? You think, oh, you're my fulfillment partner. You should want me to pay, like, keep costs down. No, that they're incent vis for you to pay more. Then there's just the black box nature. Hey, we here. You owe us 30 grand. Well, what's the itemization of that? Uh, I guess I can get you that. Like, here it is, up. Can you go more granular, and then you look at it and you're like, This is a total black box, and I don't have the time to go line by line, and they know I don't have the time to go line by line. And so sure, it's just, it's a fulfillment is an area where brands get chronically overcharged. You don't have the time to spot check and audit stuff, and it's just sort of like a cost of doing business, and that's in the trial and error realm. I would say error, error, error like, that's not good, because especially for E comm heavy brands, fulfillment, is a giant percentage of your sales. You know, you're paying whatever $10 in postage for $40 item like that is a huge chunk of that, of that retail price. So if I could get that 10 to eight like that's such lower hanging fruit than me trying to get my almond pricing down. So it's just there's so much elasticity in in fulfillment, and people don't do it because it's really painful. They don't say that.

William Harris 34:47

The counter to that is, it's hard to do it well too, right? Like, so maybe you lower it. If you do it yourself, you lower the price a little bit, but you screw up 25% more than the three. Pl was, like, that's also not good. Totally.

Will Nitze 34:58

Well, here. Here's the other thing, too. You're, every time you INSOURCE a major function, more or less, you're creating another startup. So now I'm a fulfillment startup. I have a it's as if I'm running a bar company and a fulfillment company when I in when we decide to create our own warehouse, which we did, and that's just really daunting. I don't, I don't think a lot of people want to do that. Quite frankly, they're like, I'll just take the gross margin hit, because I don't want to do that. It sounds really painful. And there's this general, like, when I first started IQBAR, a lot of people were like, just become a sales and marketing company. You want to outsource everything else and do what you do best, which is sales and marketing. And I, at the time, I thought that was good advice. I think it's terrible advice now, because no you need to be an OP an ops company as well as sales and marketing company, you know, as well as a great customer support company, blah, blah, blah. And if you look at the companies that die are died and or are dying now, they're companies that didn't focus enough on ops and supply chain. Mostly you really, sometimes you'll you'll see a company going and you're like, Whoa. That's weird. Their products so good. I love their product. That's so sad. And they probably even had product market fit. And they probably did have a great product. They didn't focus on ops and gross margin and supply chain and unit economics. And so it's like nothing else matters if you don't get that right. And it used to be the case that you could still sell your company, you could scale, you could be losing millions of dollars, and you really could be a sales and marketing company, because all that was going to get handled by the acquire. And that's just Sure. The inverse of that is true today. All that matters is profit today, even on the Exit Multiple side, totally your multiples are on EBITDA. They are no longer on sales. That is not a thing anymore. So you should feel really, really, really incentivized to be twisting dials all the way upstream to your again, almond sourcing or fiber sourcing or whatever. Yeah, it's a really good point.

William Harris 37:17

Um, you have framed IQBAR as a value player. You talked about that even earlier today. I saw you tweet asking brands, who's distributing in Dollar General. I don't know if you're serious, if you're joking, but this is counter to the premium brand strategy. What's that I said? I was dead serious. Okay, so this is kind of the brand, the premium brand strategy, that a lot of people focus on. Why? Why Why did you take this approach?

Will Nitze 37:44

So when you go on X or LinkedIn or whatever, and you see people coming out with new products, it's always premium, right? They're always like, this, is this really cool new ketchup, and we use heirloom tomatoes from Italy and blah, blah, blah, because it's just not cool or sexy or attractive to say, Hey, I'm going to make this, like, really affordable ketchup, and I'm going to save you, like, two bucks on, uh, when you grocery shop for for condiments, then that's not, not many people Wake up, and that's their mission in life, right? So it's just more fun to be premium because it's because it's premium, and also there's the thought of, oh, that's higher margin. Premium equals higher margin. And that's just not true. And basically what I learned, because I all by the way, also thought that when I started out and our first pack routine was super premium, and we're and, you know, we thought many times, what if, could we up charge for this and that? And what I learned is, like I said earlier, this is a volume game, and this is category specific, right? So if I was selling handbags, I would be saying something totally different. But you have to look at your categories. You have to ask yourself the question of, how do I get to profitability? And in, let's say, bars, the answer is, volume. It's not charged more, it's sell more units. It's more of a unit game than it is a retail price game. And how do you get more scale? How do you move more volume, you have to be a volume a value play, meaning you have to price. And that's not like to say you have to be cheap. It's just relative to the value you deliver, you have to be cheap and and so what we learned is it's we can get to profitability way quicker by being really sharp on price point, jacking up volume and then squee and then squeezing our cost structure down based on volume, then we can by charging whatever 20% more.

William Harris 39:54

Can that happen right at the beginning, though, let's say that you're only you know you're. No, no, right? I was gonna say it was like, That only works. There's like, there's a flipping point where you can do that, probably, right?

Will Nitze 40:05

Yeah. I mean, so, so, so that comes down to, like, product market fit, right? So you have to end fundraising. Those are the two things. So sure, no, you can't do that because you won't have volume. Enter fundraising, and then Product Market Fit means a ton of people want your thing, if it's priced right, yeah. And so you may even lose money per ever for every unit you're selling. But if there's a path to at that price point with that product market fit, sell to a zillion people, and you can very clearly connect those dots, then then do that and raise money. I mean, we lost a million dollars in year one, or maybe it was one and a half, and then one and a half million in year two, and a million in year three, and but, but we lost over a million dollars for five years, and then we made $8 million in year six. Like, that's kind of wild, right? And so you might say, in like, year two, Damn your unit economics are so busted. Well, yeah, they are. But I know how to fix it. It's volume.

William Harris 41:09

You just yeah, you have to, you have to run the race long enough to get to the point where you can flip that. But you have that at least in your mind. As far as this is where we're getting to,

Will Nitze 41:19

yeah. And this also comes back to, like, the bootstrapping thing, and which is a whole other kind of interesting topic, I just firmly believe you can't really bootstrap a CPG brand because, to your point, you can't have volume out the gate, unless you're selling perfume or whatever, where it's like 99% margin, sure, in food and Bev, Your margin out the gate is going to be terrible. We're talking 1015, 20% gross margin. You need a path to 50 to 60 and maybe even higher, but it's you're not gonna I mean, it's gonna be years till you get there. Makes sense.

William Harris 41:59

Um, let's talk omnichannel strategy for a minute. You started off DTC, then you moved to Amazon. Now you've got brick and mortar. One of the things you said was, how you start is not how you end. Why is omnichannel crucial for scaling a brand?

Will Nitze 42:18

Well, for starters, I mean, just again, think about your category. So I sell a grocery item. Where does everyone buy grocery items? Grocery stores brick and mortar. Over nine out of $10 spent on grocery items are spent in a physical store. So that's where all the volume is. So you might think, Oh, well, let's start there, right? Like, let's just start where the volume is and slightly counter intuitive. No, actually, you should start with that $1 out of 10 area. Why? Because that's still really big when you multiply it across three, 50 million people or whatever. And then there's all these other ancillary benefits. You can spin up an e-commerce site and listings really quickly. You can iterate really quickly. You can test value propositions and branding really quickly. There's like 50 benefits of building it, starting online, but But you have to be able to get to brick and mortar second brands that build only online. There's a moment there where you could build a pretty big business, grocery item business, let's say online, and exit it. That is no longer a thing for a variety of reasons. Acquirers want to see that you work both online and offline and even within offline, in five or six different channels. Offline, it's not enough to say, Oh, we have a good Amazon business and we're good in the drug channel. It's like, No, you have to be good in the drug channel and the conventional grocery channel and the natural grocery channel and Walmart and Target and blah, blah, blah. So you're just gonna have to, if your goal is to exit, you're just gonna have to prove it out in an omni channel fashion. But forget exiting for now, just to right size, your your economics, you're gonna have to get to omni channel. So there's just no way we could be as profitable as we are if we weren't in omni channel again, because it allows you scale and volume. You're always working backwards from volume and see. So for the for I mean, still, even last year, we were more than half our revenue was e-commerce, but the brick and mortar side is, like, vastly outgrowing. The growth rate of that business is way, way higher, and this year it'll flip and will actually be majority a brick and mortar business. Awesome. So it's just variety of reasons. Yeah,

William Harris 44:44

let's say that you're starting off. You mentioned, it's still better to start off online, which, by the way, I agree with you. The numbers you give for grocery stores, I think, to your point, make even more sense there. But if we just look at the general percent that. E comm makes up of total retail sales. I think it sits right around 17% like, that's outside of grocery. That's just all of it, right? Yeah, throw in grocery. It's even it's, I'm sure it's even less of a percent that E comm makes up of total retail sales. So it makes sense. But so let's say you go down this path of building the business online first. How do you know when it's the right time for you to begin switching, versus like, No, you're you're not there yet. Focus on doing a better job here online before you make that switch into brick and mortar.

Will Nitze 45:30

Trial and error. Okay, so same answer I would give to most of your questions you don't is, like, the short of it, you don't know. I think you can make a bunch of educated guesses, right? Because there's all these analogs of your product. Like, we're not so arrogant that we don't think that there are substitutes out there. There are there are substitutes. And so let's just go look at those substitutes. How are they performing on shelf? What price point are they coming in out? What are value propositions? Are they really Hamming up? We know they've iterated many times. Let's just, let's enjoy the benefits of them, A, B, C, D, testing on shelf. And so you can make a bunch of educated guesses of, okay, I think we would do well here. And then also with e-commerce, you have a bunch of data. Okay, our target demo is women. Who are, you know, 30 to 55 and have six figures in household income, and we do really well in California, Texas and New York, great like that. That helps you zero in on retailers where you're pretty damn confident you're going to succeed. So but it is trial and error. After that point, you will have to make a leap of faith. And then retailers are are, I think, more flexible than you might imagine in terms of, you know, you might not do great out the gate, like with WalMart. We actually launched in Walmart much earlier than most people would tell us that we should, because the old, like playbook is Go Natural, then conventional, then big box, which is like Walmart target, and then Club, Costco, Sam's Club, BJs. But we went into Walmart way earlier, and our velocities, which is like the key metric, units per ski, per store per week, were like, okay. You know, there weren't great. They were okay. And to their credit, they stuck with us, and we did a number of things to make those velocities better. We sharpen the price point so we got a five handle on the price point for a four count, and that was like a huge game changer. And we rebranded, and that was a huge game changer. We swapped out low performing SKUs and swapped in higher performing SKUs. That was a game changer, right? So to their credit, retailers will allow you some you know, as long as you're clearly taking actions to improve that key metric of velocity, it's not like a death sentence that you're not doing great right out the gate, but you gotta chart a path to do great. So, yeah, there's a little bit of leap of faith. And then collect data. Took anything? Collect data, make the next best educated guess. Collect more data. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, yeah,

William Harris 48:19

I talk about this often, with this idea of doctors. A lot of times you go to the doctor with some symptoms, and the doctor's gonna say, Great, in their mind, they're saying 80% of the time that you have these symptoms, you have X, Y, Z thing. Here's the medicine for that. Take the medicine. If it works. I was right. It doesn't come back and see me like then you're in the other 20% and I think, to your point, one of the best diagnostics that you can do for anything is to just simply take the medicine and see if it works.

Will Nitze 48:48

Yeah, so long as it doesn't kill you. Like, I have this thing of, like, how do I know whether to take an action? Well, will it kill you? If you're wrong? If the answer is no, do it like, do it if it's reversible, just do it now. There's like a gray area there, right? So sure if we went, launched in Walmart, and yeah, it might not kill us, but it would severely hamstring us, and it would burn 300k in cash. And okay, but for most things it, most things won't kill you. So just having a bias for action and be ready to collect data and act quickly when things don't go as planned, because they never go as but like, the only guarantee is that it won't go to plan. It's just to what degree. And so just be ready to like, iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate. I love it. I

William Harris 49:41

have a bias to action. What other challenges come with this shift when you begin shifting from DTC into retail? I'm going to start with one that I know on my side, but I want you to tell me the ones that I don't know, the one that I know on my side, from an advertising perspective, is sometimes people will set up separate PLS, for the two. So. Sides of the business, which makes sense in a lot of ways, but from an advertising perspective, it can get a little bit muddy, especially when you think of a lot of the awareness driven advertising that you're doing on meta, on YouTube, on Tiktok influencers. They're also driving retail sales as well. One of the ways that we get around that on our side is we like to run geo holdouts around that. So somebody just got into Target, we're going to say, great. We want to run ads intentionally in these areas that you're in target and not in these other areas of target. So we can see what is the what is the velocity that you have in the stores that are receiving ads versus the velocity to the stores that are not receiving ads. We can then attribute that back some ways to what we're doing on advertising. We have a better understanding of how this is working holistically. That's the one area that I know. What are some of the other issues that run it? You run into when you start switching from just D to

Will Nitze 50:54

C? I mean, there's so many, right? There's every retailer has its own logistical requirements, so you ship direct to some and you ship to a district, to others via a distributor. Some will charge you slotting, which is just like, hey, you're going to pay us X amount of dollars just to be in our store. Others won't. So each you really do have to have a P and L for each retailer. So that's challenging. You know, they all have different category manager schedules. So some of them re review the category every three months. Some of them do it every three years. And by the way, once you're on the shelf, you have to defend yourself space. So each, if you're on the shelf, each each new category review could be risky, or you could get more facing I could have four SKUs, and maybe I can expand that to seven SKUs. So you're just having to manage that. And then there's different promotional schedules. So some retailers are eDLP, everyday, low price. The price you are right now is the always the price. Others are high, low meaning you're promoting. So you're 229 right now, but in a month, we're gonna do two for four, right? So we're doing a promotion, and usually we are eating all that cost, by the way, but so you have to have a separate promotion calendar for each retailer. So it's, it's again, it's like, it's like the many startups within a startup concept. Oh, now I have, if I have a warehouse, now I have a logistic startup in addition to a bar startup. Each retailer is almost its own startup, and you have to manage that P and L almost separately, and it has to pencil out, and you have to promote different thing, and blah, blah, blah, so, and you, you gave a good one, by the way, attribution gets trickier, and there's also just so many other places to put dollars. There's now retail media. I mean, there's like, physical newspapers, the Costco, I forget what it's called the Costco newspaper, like, we invested a bunch of money in that. We have a QR code on the ad, and so we can get some attribution via that, but much of it we will not get, and that's okay. So, yeah, attribution gets, gets trickier. But then now when, like, another big thing is right now is retailers, online presences are getting bigger and bigger, and your percentage of sales with a retailer, you know, the E comm side of that is gaining share. So Walmart com, you know, Kroger Comm, target.com, these are becoming big platforms in their own right, absolutely, all of which have different advertising systems. So now you have to manage buying certain, you know, search terms on target, COMM And amazon.com, and Walmart com, you know, and Thrive Market COMM And again, startups within a startup. So it just compounds very quickly.

William Harris 54:00

So speaking of startups, within a startup, there's a lot that you're keeping track of. And if I was going to guess how many employees you had, I think most people would guess closer to 80 versus eight, or whatever it is that you told me that you have, you guys are running on a very lean team. Why? And I'll say too. Just a few weeks ago, I had Curtis mat school on here over at Portland leather goods. They're also doing over 100 million and he's taking the complete opposite approach. He's trying to bring as much of it in house as he possibly can with the idea of just creating this massive moat that's almost impossible for anybody else to duplicate. How are you running on such a lean team?

Will Nitze 54:41

And why? Yeah? I mean, totally, this is a different strokes thing, right? There's definitely multiple ways to skin this cat. I would say you have to know, like, if hiring is a core competency of yours and you have, let's say, a really long term view, you. Want to own this thing and give it to your kid then then it you should in source, for sure, if you're like us and I have, you know, no ego about this, like we are hiring isn't our strong suit. We have a killer team, but we've also had people who have been worked out, and it's just very, very challenging. I find hiring to be one of the, if not the hardest thing about startups. You know, it's a lot easier than hiring is working with a third party. Why? Because you can onboard them quicker. You can off board them quicker. You can ask, first of all, you can be more honest and blunt, like, I need this, like I need it by this date. Please do it like, I'm paying you this many dollars a month to do this. Like, this has to happen. You just, you can't talk to employees that way. So it's, it's just like better in every way, with a caveat of it might be more expensive and they might not care as much, but you can like I think when you really bake it out, you're not paying more because you got to bake in hiring and firing people. Maybe they're not happy in the role. Maybe you have to move them around when you bake all of that in, I believe the hub and smoke bottle meaning having a small core team and many third parties around you is cheaper, and it is true, they won't care as much, but I think their competence level being higher more than makes up for that. That's not always competent. Sometimes it's just they have more data points. If they're an agency they work with, they see so many more brands. Every case you encounter, they've seen it 10 times more than an internal person could have, sure. And so I think that more than compensates. And by the way, if it doesn't work out, you can fire them and hire a new agency, and, and that's not fun. That sucks, and it's painful and but it's a lot less painful than doing that with an employee. And then you find these third parties who become more or less like your team, yeah. And so like our Amazon agency we've been working with for three years now, they're absolute killers, and they know exactly how we want stuff, when we want it, how we like to communicate. And so like, for me, it's like a pretty close analog to them, literally being on our team. So it's just preference. Honestly, we are also remote, right? So that's a big thing too. We used to be in person. COVID happened. We went remote and we stayed remote, and I didn't know that that would work. It just kind of had to work, because it just did, and it has worked. And there's many bad things about that, but I would say, you know, the hub and spoke model just works well for being remote. If we had like, 50 people, I think we'd want to have a centralized office, and we'd all want to be there with eight people. You can still run it pretty damn well remote.

William Harris 58:06

Yeah, like I said, it's impressive. I would expect you to be closer to that 50 person mark. It's wild to think that you could run it with as few people as you are, which gets into some of the psychology. There's some interesting things that you said that I want to chat about as well, their philosophy and stuff you said, controlling your own psychology is the entire game. What do you mean by that?

Will Nitze 58:32

I mean entrepreneurs are their own greatest enemy. Sure, in my experience, because entrepreneurs are kind of erratic people, by their very nature, otherwise, like, they're also, like, arrogant and a bit narcissistic, usually, right? Because why are you the person to do this thing? Check, you know, like, it's irrational to think you're the person to do this thing in an efficient market, in a free market, that thing's probably been tried 100 times and it didn't work. So why are you special? So you have to be a little bit arrogant and a little bit narcissistic and a little bit of a cowboy, right? And those are all like everything's good and bad in different ways, but they're good in the sense that it allows you to take that leap and create something from nothing and get from zero to one, those same attributes are, ironically, the things that will kill you and kill your company. Yeah, so you actually like what helped you get from zero to one is now probably your biggest threat psychologically speaking, which is like kind of crazy, because you have to totally reorient your own psychology and move you're still going to be on offense, but you have to play more defense over time and defense against yourself, right, too, right? So, and like, there's so many ways this manifest. One very common one is shiny object syndrome. Because we're entrepreneurial, we're. Always trying to do offshoots, and maybe I could do this, maybe I could do that, and could sell into this retailer. And as we all know, focus in general is the way you win, and that focus is antithetical to the way an entrepreneur's brain works. This is why. I mean, this is all basic stuff, but like this is why entrepreneurs are not great CEOs much of the time in a scaled up business. For me, I never, I would never want to hand over like my baby to someone else. And so for me, it's like I gotta, I just have to force myself into that different psychological space, and I have to force myself to avoid shiny object syndrome, and I have to force myself to be more okay with the boring aspects of running a company. But it's like it's a daily struggle. Like talking to any entrepreneur who's skilled up from a tiny business to like, a big business man, you have to, like, totally reorient your psychology? Yeah,

William Harris 1:01:01

one of the ways, if I could presuppose that you're doing this, is through reading good books. I saw that you were reading traction, and you quoted by Gino Wickman, then you quoted him, saying, you know, vision without traction is merely hallucinations. It's another quote that I love as well from that book. Typically, people are reading that book when they're in the 1 million to $5 million stage. You guys are beyond that. So why are you either reading this for the first time now, or like, revisiting this? Like, what made you say? Like, I need to read this book.

Will Nitze 1:01:34

I like books, but generally speaking, I I've always found personal experience and first party data to just be way better, because it's way more contextual. There's like that classic thing a business books are. It's like 500 pages and it could have been an article, and I generally think that's true, but, but even worse than that, it's arguably dangerous in some ways, because it's giving you principles that are not applicable to your specific context. They might be helpful in thinking it through, but it's not. And by the way, this goes true. This is true for like an advisory board and investors and people want to sound smart and be helpful, and so they'll give you so much advice, and you'll read so much advice. And the reality is, experience, first hand, experience is way better than all of it. So I would say, why didn't I read that book until now? I would say, I have a bias towards first party data and experience. I didn't know this out the gate. It took me realizing, oh, that person I thought was going to give me, like, the best advice ever, like they actually really don't know what they're talking about, or they do, but their knowledge was relevant 10 years ago, and it's not relevant in, let's say, an E comm first world or an E comm first go to market strategy. It's not that helpful that they have this epic brick and mortar experience, because I need to solve an E comm problem right now. So I found first party data, personal experience. And then here's another one, horizontal mentorship. Everyone focuses on vertical mentorship. Horizontal is way better, infinitely better, because these are people who are literally living it as you're living it. And so it's timely. The advice you would get, or experiences you would get are, are like, super relevant. And so the combination of those two things is really what has guided us. All of that said you will hit ceilings in certain ways. And one of the ceilings I've hit, and it is just like, how do you structure standard operating procedures your team? Like, how do you button up, for lack of a better term, once you're doing nine figures in revenue, because you can't get away with stuff you used to be able to get away with, and now you have, you're getting more corporate, and that just is what it is. And so you just have to think through architecture of a business differently. And so anyways, just a lot of people rave about traction, and I like the idea of an operating system. Like, that's just a really attractive thing to me of, oh, like, if I'm ever not sure what's the operating system say to do. It's like believing in a higher power or whatever, but in a business context, it's like, what's the operating system say? And so we'll see. We may implement it. We may not, but I am in an interesting moment where I'm having to think through, how do I button up?

William Harris 1:04:42

I love it. Like I said, read the book. We implemented it at our agency, and it was a game changer in our specific world. As you can imagine, not CPG, we're an agency. We're definitely a people oriented business. Having an operating system makes a lot of sense. It makes a big difference. Process is just paramount. What we're doing, but I'll say that I've talked to a lot of other e-commerce founders as well, so people are listening. There's a really good episode that I did with Dan or with Chris Carey, Dan's brother, but Chris Carey was on this show from Ma performance, and they were stuck at this ten million mark, and the thing that really helped them scale out of that was implementing the right processes. And actually they implemented EOS traction stop for everybody. And there are other operating systems out there. But I would say that if you're in a spot as an e-commerce business where you're stuck two years, three years in a row, this might be the thing that is in your way to your point. It's like the thing that got you here. Can't get you where you want to go. Definitely revisit that book or something. But I want to say, How did you find these horizontal mentors? Because I think that's a I like that phrase. I haven't heard that phrase before. You know, outside of x, where are you finding this group of people that you feel are really going to challenge you and give you good advice?

Will Nitze 1:06:01

Yeah. So I started writing daily on LinkedIn, and then at a later juncture on x, and there are just these sort of, like digital water cooler areas where high performers will aggregate. Social media is is really helpful in that regard, because, like the people who are approximate to you, you, you, you know down the road from you, are not the right person. That person might be in Oklahoma City, so right by default, you're going to have to reach them digitally somehow. There are organizations to YPO and things like that, but I'm not in them, and don't really necessarily want to be in them. And so I found LinkedIn to be extremely helpful. And it's not like I put up a I need help sign, it's actually I the way I sort of networked into these horizontal mentorship relationships is I just started putting out my learnings, like, get it's the whole principle in marketing of just like, Give 10 times and then ask one time or whatever, just start giving. And I had all these also, it's kind of cathartic. I had all these learnings pent up over years and years, and I was like, What do I do with all these things clanking around in my brain? And it was cathartic to just share the learnings digitally on LinkedIn. I'm sure this works for X too. And then what you find is people just start paying attention if they're if it's good. And you just then you get on a phone call with someone who says, Yeah, I experienced that same thing. Here's how I solved it. And it's just like reps. It's like anything. If you do it daily for 365, times a year, like that's so many reps, you're just gonna come in contact with people who can help you in basically anything. So that's how I've done it. And then, by the way, once you talk to those people, they can connect you with someone. It's like the web proliferates, sure, but I think I have this, so I did a post on this as well. Like, I think a good way to do it is cast a wide net and then shrink your net. So you want to start really wide, talk to everyone once, not literally everyone, but let's say, talk to 100 people and then get all those data points, and then shrink down to five people. So now it's like I talk, I have like five people. I have someone who I just respect the most on topic a, I pick up the phone and I call him whenever I'm thinking through topic a, but I wouldn't have been able to find that person if I hadn't cast at a really wide net. First.

William Harris 1:08:43

Makes a lot of sense. Harley Finkelstein was on this episode, and he talked about that even to where it's like, topic a could be, Let's even say, outside of business. So it's like, well, who's the person that you absolutely respect for, you know, marriage, who's the person you absolutely respect for raising kids, who's that person you absolutely expect for attribution, right? But, like, it can be these other things. Or it's like, okay, this is the person I respect for that. Because, you know, the people who you might respect for marriage, they in your normal circle, they might not have the same situation. So it's like, well, who's that person who is also a founder of a big brand that's also maintained a good marriage, because that's the part that I'm struggling with, or that's where I'm, you know, needing help, and they might have some different perspective to to add to that,

Will Nitze 1:09:30

yeah, you can reduce your error rate vastly by making a couple well placed phone calls. Yeah? Like, once you have that network, never just dive into anything, make that call or send that slack or whatever, collect a few data points. It's like, I can't tell you how many millions we've saved, how much heartache we've saved by just pinging someone who did it six months prior.

William Harris 1:09:55

It's like, that show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, right? It's like, I'd like to like the phone a friend. I mean. You should, though, right? We should phone a friend more often. I want to get into a little bit of who is Will Nitze, so I understand as a child you were, you found yourself thematically to be obsessed with things over time. How do you think that these, let's say, childhood obsessions, have led to the success that you see today?

Will Nitze 1:10:28

Yeah. I mean, I think it's hard to know what how other people's brains work, but I've definitely always been obsessed with something, and so for a while it was soccer, and I wanted to be the best at soccer, and so, like, my Mount Everest was winning the New Jersey State cup inside. Wow, so did you you're saying you did? Yeah, we did. I did. That's awesome with my travel soccer team. But that was like, I mean, again, it was like, climbing Everest. It was like, that was the coolest possible thing in my brain that I could ever do. And then I did it. And I played chess as well growing up. And so winning the New Jersey State Chess Championship was like that new Everest. And then I did it, yeah. And so there's always like, a new Everest for me, but there has to be an Everest, like there can't ever be a point where there's not this thing that I can get obsessed with and chase some lofty goal with. But I have bounced that thing has changed, and a bounce from thing to thing to thing to thing. And I it's funny, like thinking back to when I was a kid, because in the 90s and early 2000s the the really cool thing is, was to be a rich Wall Street guy who wears like a suit and makes a ton of money and sure, and so early on, I was like, that's gonna be me, and I'm gonna be really rich and wear cool suits and drive a cool car and have a big house and and then everyone realized I was super lame, or at least, like that sort of caricatured version of success is super is not as cool as it used to be. And then tech became really cool. And then I was like, Oh, I'm going to be a tech guy, and I'm going to start this big tech company. And so I was always in a forward looking context, thinking about something professionally I would get obsessed with. But then that changed over and over and over again, until I got to, like, late in my college career, and I I I found myself in a weird position, because I was really obsessed with psychology and neuroscience, but I didn't really know what to do with that professionally, and it didn't map to these other things I used to thought was, think was cool, and so I was, like, totally lost for the first time in my life. Um, I was obsessed with something, and I didn't know what to do with it. There was no Everest I could attach to that thing, sure. And so yeah, then I worked in software, and I was like, this is fine, but I was just tapping my foot the whole time. I was like, I can't get obsessed with this thing, like, and there's no Everest here. So again, and we talked about it at the beginning of the episode, via these five different forces, I like life pivoted into that thing being a food and beverage company. And by the way, it could have been a drink, you know, it could have been a cookie. It could have been like, I'm not married to a form factor, like, I don't care about bars per se. Like, more than anything else, it was just this is a vector that I can channel obsession into, and then, like, there's this Everest over here that I can then take that obsession and build towards. And so I became, like, un lost. But again, it all goes back to obsession. So when I'm Whenever someone's like, I want to be really successful. Like, what, what, what? How do I get there? And I always just said, find a game you can play that where you're just going to be obsessed. That's so much more important than going into, like, a hot field or, like, don't go into AI because it's cool. Can you get obsessed with AI? Well, if, if, yes, go do that, but, but if it's just because it's a hot field, definitely don't do that. It could be literally anything. And if you can get obsessed with anything, you can monetize that

William Harris 1:14:32

I love, that you went from soccer to chess to, you know, food and beverage and following these obsessions. Do the obsessions ever get in the way of, let's just say, normal life? And the reason I ask this is because I have certain obsessions, and sometimes those obsessions are not they're not helpful. There could be a math problem that I might want to solve that's, you know, very complex. And you know, my My desire is to maybe lock. Myself in a room for a week and solve this problem. But that's not helpful to the business. It's not helpful with my marriage or, you know, being a dad or things like that. And so if these are things that you run into, how do you balance being obsessed with the business and still having to be a normal human being to somewhat of a normal, you know,

Will Nitze 1:15:23

I think your significant other. I mean, this is not a novel concept. A lot of people say that the most important decision you ever make is your significant other. I think that's right. So I think that's a really big piece of it. You need a counterbalance to yourself. If you're an extreme person who gets obsessed with stuff, you need someone to be like, Stop doing that. Doing that. Like, need to go to dinner. You know what I mean? Because if I didn't have that, I wouldn't stop doing it. I literally can't help myself. So that's and you almost want to create. Like, there's another this is another thread of a lot of people say freedom is the end goal. Like, it's not money, it's freedom. And I actually completely disagree. I think there are ranges of freedom you want. I want to be able to go to a restaurant and not look at the menu prices, but you actually want to create or add to your life constraints strategically. One of those is a significant other. It's going to mean that you can't spend all day and all night focus on that one thing, because she's going to get pissed off and leave you or get pissed at you or whatever like but it's you need to instant. You need to add that constraint into your life. So I think significant other is is like a massive one. And by the way, that could, friends, could, could be that person for you, a mentor, a board even a board member. So that's kind of how I think about it.

William Harris 1:16:54

I love it. It's interesting to think of constraints as being the thing that provide freedom. But we ended up putting up their very busy traffic where we live here. And so we ended up putting up this farm rail fence. It's, it's not going to keep anything significant out, right? It's this split rail fence we had like a young kids at the time, and our youngest was, I think, two or so around the time that we put this up. And what's interesting about this, though, is it opened up the yard so much more by having that it almost felt even though that's a it's a constraint. You can't go past the fence now as a two year old, but now you could go all the way up to the fence, whereas before, you almost felt like you couldn't because of how busy the traffic was. And so what was interesting is it didn't make the yard feel smaller. It felt bigger. It felt more more freedom as a result of this constraint that was strategically placed.

Will Nitze 1:17:40

And you can take that theme through other stuff we've talked about, right? EOS is a constraint, yeah, when you have an operating system, you can't go beyond the operating system, it's going to break it. So you're instituting a constraint. So that theme is kind of plays itself out in a bunch of different places. That's brilliant. This

William Harris 1:18:03

is completely unrelated to anything business, but it's a good story, and I want to hear it, because I haven't heard the full story. You lived with an old Russian couple in their basement. Tell me more about this.

Will Nitze 1:18:16

Yeah. So I was broke more or less. I mean, I I wasn't making a ton of money out of college, and I was living in Boston, it's an expensive city, and I decided I wanted to start this company. And I thought, okay, like, how do I get my cost of living to zero, or as close to zero as possible? And so I did a couple different things actually, then these are kind of two different stories, both of which are half decent stories. The first one is, I half quit my job, so I walked into my boss's office and I said, What if I work half the hours and you pay me half the number of dollars? And he he said, Yes to his credit. And I did that nice year. The second thing is, I looked at just like my personal P and L and rent was massive. And I was like, How do I wipe that out? And so I my, my next thought was, I don't have any I didn't have any family who lived in Boston, and so I couldn't move home, and I had a girlfriend who had a job there, and so constraint again, sure if I didn't have her, I'd probably fly to Seattle and live with my parents in Seattle, and I would have started the company. And started the company in Seattle, but I did have that girlfriend, and so I thought, Who do I know? Who knows someone or has parents in Boston? And it turned out a guy I was, like, not great friends with, to be honest with, I was kind of acquaintances with his parents. Lived in Brookline. Brookline mass, which is, like, right outside of Boston, that was the best I could come up with. And so I call up the guy, and I was like, Hey, man, this is super awkward and random. I'm trying to start this company. I'm trying to get my personal burn to zero. I know your parents live in Brookline. Do you think they would be cool? Me living with them for like, a year, let's say. And he was like, That is a wild question. Again, we weren't really great friends. He's like, but here's my mom's number. Like, give her a buzz and good luck. So I did. I called his mom. I was like, Hey, you don't know me. I never met her. You don't know me, but I'm Will, and I know your son and and blah, blah, blah. And she said, it's not a no, but it's definitely kind of a weird request. Why don't you come by for dinner and we'll have dinner, you and me and my husband. And so I went over to their house, I had dinner. They're like the nicest people ever. They don't they not. They don't speak broken English, but English was not their first language. They emigrated from Russia, so it was a little bit of a language barrier there, which was kind of awkward, but, but we moved past it. And yeah, at the end of the dinner, they said we'd be happy for you to live with us. So I lived with them for a year. That's wild.

William Harris 1:21:10

That's guts to just ask, Hey, you don't know me. Can I live with you? Spouse? Right? That's pretty good. Will it's been a lot of fun talking to you. I've loved getting to know you a little bit more. I've loved learning from you. You've shared a lot of deep insights. If people wanted to follow you or work with you in some way, what's the best way for them to get in touch or stay in touch?

Will Nitze 1:21:37

Yeah. I mean, if you want to listen to my hair brain thoughts on LinkedIn. Check me out there. Just Will Nitze Nitze and I post on X occasionally too. Iqbar.com is our website. We're on Amazon as well. Thrive Market a variety of Ecomm platforms, and then we're in a ton of doors. So you can find us on our or the closest location to you, on our store locator on our site, but we're in every Costco, soon to be, every target. We're in most Walmarts, so we're probably near you, but I'll give us a try.

William Harris 1:22:16

You're probably also in Russian couples basement as well. I hope so well again. Thank you for coming, taking the time out to share your knowledge and your wisdom with us. Thanks for having me. Thanks to everyone for listening. Hope you have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:22:32

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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