E44: Learn the Secrets of Building a Successful Consumer Goods Brand with Will Nitze, Founder and CEO of IQBAR

Jim: Remote Start Nation, in this episode, we are gonna be talking with one entrepreneur on how he has grown his consumer packaged goods brand from nothing to eight figures by doing more with less. I'm Jim Doyon, your host, and on today's episode, I'm honored to be talking with Will Nitze founder and CEO of IQBAR, who's on a mission to empower doers with superior brain and body nutrition. Will and I are gonna be diving into fundraising, being operationally and capitally efficient, and doing more with less. We're also gonna dig into successful approaches that have worked for, and could work for you, the Remote Start Nation as they relate to product development, product line strategy, go-to-market strategy and e-commerce, Will welcome to the Remote Start Nation.

Will: Thanks for having me.

Jim: Absolutely. Thanks for joining us. I'm excited to have you. You know, introduce yourselves, Remote Start Nation, tell us a little bit more about you and IQBAR.

Will: Sure, yeah. My name's Will Nitze. I live in Boston, Mass. I'm the founder and CEO at IQBAR where I started the company in my apartment in Boston, well, really what then kicked things off was a Kickstarter that I did in January of 2018, but we fulfilled our first order in mid 2018, so, four and a half years old, or at least in the marketplace. I mean, what do we sell? We sell, we're a brain and body nutrition company, so our flagship line is plant protein bars, IQ bars. And then we just rolled out IQ mix, which is a Hydra zero sugar hydration mix. And we're rolling out IQ Joe, which will be, an instant coffee brand, in a couple months. So we're basically, we're building a platform of products that'll hit throughout multiple occasions of any given consumer's that.

Jim: Awesome. What gave you the idea to start IQBAR?

Will: It was a bunch of things, it was a confluence of a bunch of things. So I got really into nutrition, this was in like 2016 and I mostly, cause I felt terrible every day and I had a terrible diet and so just by necessity I was like, I gotta fix this somehow. And concurrently, Paleo was getting really big and clean foods and whole food movement and whole 30 and people are just getting more health conscious, generally speaking. And so I got really into Paleo and then after that I got really into Keto, so that was one thing I was super into nutrition, just for personal reasons, and then I always wanted to do my own thing and I wanted to own tip to tail the everything, like the creation of the thing, whether it be a product or a tech widget or whatever, all the way down to market being able to market it, sell it, etcetera. And I'm not a programmer, not an engineer so, wasn't gonna do, didn't wanna be a non-technical founder of a technical company, and so that leaves like services and products and yeah, I wanted to do products cause I like tangible products. I've always loved consumer goods. And then I read a couple books, there was one called Mission in a Bottle by the guys who started Honest Tea, if you're familiar with that brand, and that got me really fired up about food and beverage, and then I read another book called Grain Brain, a guy named David Perlmutter. And that got me fired up about this concept of brain nutrition and brain food and what we eat impacts what happens to our brain in the short and long. So anyway, all of those things kinda like collided and I was like, I'm gonna start a brain food company, and then just iterating and iterating and iterating to get to a starting point.

Jim: And what was the, did you know right from the start, like as you developed this brand, did you know you wanna launch it on Kickstarter or was that just like you kind of looked at all the different options and decided that was the best for you?

Will: I wasn't really sure how to start, you know, there's a bunch of ways you can start, you can like start selling to your neighbors and then start selling to the local corner store and just sort of like grow your concentric circle of places you sell to and after a couple years you're big. I wasn't really interested in that, I was like, I want to test this big, and either I fail big or I succeed big, and at the same time, I had no money, so Kickstarter's kind of a way to like do that if you have, even if you have no money, it's a great way to prove a concept at scale is another way of putting that. So, did a Kickstarter on a shoestring budget, filmed the video in my old office, I asked my old boss if I could come in on a Saturday and film it, and my friends acted in it and then, you know, we just did a bunch, hacks, quote unquote, gray area hacks to make it succeed, like I was like blasting out emails to my undergraduate alumni listservs and I did a bunch of crazy stuff to make it work. But anyway, it was great, you know, we use that as, I think there's a common misconception that, you know, do a Kickstarter. Now you have the money to really start the business, and maybe that's the case if you're in a super high margin product but you know, for someone like us, you make enough mistakes and your margin's low enough at the outset that really the point of Kickstarter is to prove the concept and then end get sales, and then you can go take that to potential investors and raise money at a decently good valuation ‘cause you have this thing, you're like, Hey, I just sold the 2000 people, I already have $90,000 in sales, here's why we're worth X. And so I think it's mostly effective for that versus just showing up to a investor or the PowerPoint deck and they have nothing to go off of, cause you, haven't sold much.

Jim: That's a great way to start, especially like you said, without a lot of capital and to proof of concept. So, you started there, you got going, did you right away go and try to get funding or did you fulfill orders with the money that you made and then kind of continue to grow from there?

Will: We fulfilled orders with the money we made, and then like right after so I had just to get off the ground, I put some savings I had into it, not a ton of money. And then I had raised like 30 grand from a couple angel investors I got randomly connected into, and that just helped me, you know, upfront legal fees, getting websites stood up, buying 10 grand worth of ads and things like that for Kickstarter, like, there's a whole series of things that, I needed money for, and so I raised like that tiny amount, and then I went back to those same people right after the Kickstarter crushed it. He was like, you know how I said I was gonna do that thing? Well, we did it and then they wrote much bigger checks, that was a lot, I wasn't even necessarily like gaming it out like that, like it just worked out like that, and then in retrospect, I'm like, yeah, that was actually pretty a good way to do it. Get them in the door with a small, 10K for these, these particular people is nothing, it's like pocket change. And prove it, and then now you go back to those same people, so yeah, that worked really well, and we raised, I think it was something like 600K, and then that gave us the money to like place some big minimum order quantity production runs, hire a couple people, get off the races.

Jim: So from there, like, you know, this episode's about doing more with less, and so you started to get fundraising right away, you were successful on Kickstarter, you went back to the initial investors, got more money, where'd it go from there as far as fundraising and you know, doing more with the little that you had?

Will: Yeah, no, totally, I mean, so many brands, ‘cause we wanted to grow really fast like we wanted our goal was to be a multimillion dollar company in revenue in our first calendar year 2019, very, very hard to do and very hard to do with not a ton of cash, and 600K may seem like a lot, it's really not in consumer goods. And so we had to stretch that really far, and by the way, you're making mistakes that cost a lot of money. So, from the get go, I just knew we would have to have a really, really lean team and so it was only me for a while. And then like mid 2018, I hired one person and then it was a two person show for a while, and then it was a three person show for a while, I mean, fast forward to 2023, we only have six office employees and we're grown like immeasurably since. So, that's always been the whole, last thing is like, I think start with SGA and a sales general and administrative, basically salaries. Have a small team and outsource where you can, I think a lot of people will, you know, just hire, get to like 10. I mean, good rule of thumb, I'm not the one who came up with this or anything, but it's kind of a common one in startups, don't raise someone unless that incremental hire can generate an incremental million in revenue. If they can't, don't hire that person, you're not ready to hire that person. For us, it's actually closer to 2 million, like we don't wanna hire a new person unless we can generate an incremental 2 million in revenue. So anyway that's just kind of a rule of thumb but even with that, it's an expensive game we're playing, you know, we're in ultra-competitive categories. We started online, we're now omnichannel, we're in about 8,000 locations, but online is still the majority of our business, and online is expensive and in many ways it's pay to play, and so you gotta be really careful about your ad spend as a proportion of revenue, and so it's a tough, CPG is a really tough space, to be capitally efficient, but I think we've been done a done a pretty decent job at it.

Jim: I love the fact that with, you know, six staff, you've been able to grow to when you go to hire someone new and you look at, all right, this person needs to generate or have the effect of 2 million to that one person, are you bringing in people for more sales operation roles or is the, do you have things going with, you know, e-commerce and these other channels where it's more about supporting the growth that that's already growing?

Will: I think it's just like where, what's bottlenecking our growth could be anything, so upfront it was like, I need to divide sales and marketing and operations and supply chain, that's like step one, ‘cause I was doing all of it, so you do that here and it's like, cool, okay. Now within sales and marketing, I need to have someone who's just focused on the website in Amazon and then like managing even a third party Amazon agency and then I need someone else who's focused on like creative, like what's our brand look and we need to create ad assets and yada, yada, yada, it's another person, and then I need like a head of sales, like I need someone who's like knocking on doors and trying to get us in a brick occasion well, that's another person, and then so you're just sort of like, how do I cover all my bases with one person who like owns that thing? And then some people will go, 10 sales people, right? There's like a West coast rep and then the Midwest rep and the southeast rep, for us, it's like we have one salesperson, that's it, the whole country. And we just focus on like the 80-20 analysis, like what's 20% that will drive 80% of your revenue, focus on those, versus we want someone going up and down the street, knocking on every door, getting into every bodega, like that's not our model. It's really just looking towards like, what is hindering growth? Like do we have a gap in our team that because of that gap we're leaving again 2 million or more on the table? If so, go hire someone for that, and it's not always hire someone, it could be go find a third party for that, like we actually start with, can we hire a third party? Because you can hire and fire third parties easily, not that you want to, right, you wanna like, it's painful and annoying and expensive and all that, but like, it's just, you can find them, they're already up the curve and you can fire them easily and that's just like the terms you have to think of in my experience with startups. And so, we start there and it's like, eh, actually you really gotta in-house this, but then you go higher for that.

Jim: And at what point do you know in your business, like, okay, I'm ready to go raise more capital, I need to, we've hit a point where I need to go back to investors and look to raise more, when you run outta money?

Will: No, yeah, I mean, you concurrence some basic numbers, right? What's your burn rate? How much are you losing every month? You know, of course you have to track an inventory very closely in this game, ‘cause what's in your bank account isn't necessarily how many assets you have on hand. But cashflow management is just so important, but yeah, know how much dollars you burn each month and how much runway does that give you and give yourself x amount of months to raise money. I would think you wanna give yourself six months maybe more in this environment, but like we just closed on a fundraising round and we started having conversations in May and we closed on December 28. So we thought we would close in end of August, we closed December 28th, so it's just, yeah, I mean, it's a grind to raise capital today.

Jim: Well, congrats on the raise there, that's exciting, it took a while, but that's exciting. So let's get into strategy a little bit on, you know, let's look at your product and look at product development and the strategy behind the different product lines, you said you're launching a new line you've got multiple lines now where you started with just the bar and now you're expanding. Let's talk a little bit more about development and strategy there.

Will: Sure, yeah. I mean, it's a super interesting topic, it's super challenging, sku strategy product line strategy, like there's, generally speaking, two paths you can go, if you're a company you can go with one form factor. So let's say the RX bar model, like you're a bar company and new skews will be like a peanut butter, chocolate and a lemon blueberry, whatever. But that's how you're expanding, and then you're taking those and you're going narrow and deep like you're taking those skews and you're going into Kroger and Costco, the BJ's, you're trying to blanket the US with that skew. The second path is build more of a platform, so, which is what we're doing, and most people do A by the way, we're doing B, which is okay, we're a brain and body nutrition company, and that sort of value proposition works and I would argue even demands that you play in a couple categories. So, like what is relevant to brain and body nutrition throughout the day? You know, hydration, so we expanded from bars into zero sugar hydration mix, it's called IQ Mix, super relevant to like, especially if you are working out depleting electrolytes, but also in our product we include the special form of magnesium that's good for your brain, and so just very on brand and relevant, and then we're moving into coffee in instant coffee with IQ Joe, which, magnesium and Lions Main and coffee, so it's like a enhanced, the coffee plus, of course super relevant to the brain, and first thing most people drink when they wake up, turns their rain on. We're covering satiation, a.k.a snacking Caffeination, a.k.a coffee and hydration, a.k.a electrolyte mixes, so that's a risky move, right? At the learn new form factors, it's a new manufacturer, it's a new market, it's a new consumer, different price points, different margin profiles, it's a different game. So you create a lot of headaches for yourself, but also the headaches are also the opportunities. Now, you open yourself up to, some people don't eat bars, but they do drink hydration mixes. Some people don't drink coffee, but they do eat bars, you know, so it's, you expand your addressable market and you can upsell the same person. So some people they eat bars and they drink coffee, like, you wanna add a IQ Joe to your IQBAR order? Great. You know, so you have cool upselling opportunities there.

Jim: So when you're D to C, I see how that works, how does that work when you're in some of these big stores and you have a product that's doing great, you've got the IQBARs in there and you're like, Hey, we're coming out with a new coffee product, we want you to stock, are they quick to look at that because your product has done so well, or are they hesitant because again, you're, instead of going, you know, in that straight narrow, you're kind of going up broad?

Will: For us, again, there's a million ways you can slice this, we have a small team and so we decided we're gonna go into these other categories, but the incremental categories, hydration and coffee, we're only gonna do online for now, we'll, and whereas bars, were omnichannel, we're in 8,000 doors, but also we're on Amazon and also we're on our website, all that. For the mix, and the Joe only online and that just saves a lot of bandwidth, you know, it's a totally different category if you're, let's say you're Costco, right? It's a totally different buyer for hydration than there is for bars, than there is for coffee, and so, it just adds a ton to then be like, okay, and by the way, the packaging is totally different, so we optimize packaging for e-commerce, but then we also wanna sell in brick and mortar stores, it's totally different package. So now you complicate operations quite a bit, so we'll get there, like, we'll get to a place where we wanna be omnichannel for all of our product lines, but I think V1 of that progression is, you know, bars of the flagship product line, again, companies called IQBAR, but IQ Mix and IQ Joe, you know, I think we can build multimillion dollar, plays in those areas just online to start.

Jim: And have you started to already, like when you have a product that's doing well, like IQBAR on, let's just say, with e-commerce, how are you introducing these other products, to the consumer?

Will: I mean, you know, we can upsell, let's say someone puts bars in their shopping cart. We'll try and upsell them to mix, you know, Atimix or 999, it's really helpful to have low price point trial packs. So, you know, you can try for no incremental cost other than the product, like free shipping and at a really low price point, you can get eight servings for 999, that's a pretty low risk way to try something. We do some, on an ad hoc basis, we'll do some mass sampling initiatives, like we're partnering with one brand that sends out subs 30,000 subscription boxes and we're gonna put two of our hydration packs in each of them so brand partnership we're doing awesome, so like mass sampling can be effective there. I mean, they also stand alone, right? So again, sometimes people just are typing in zero sugar hydration into Amazon, they don't necessarily need to know that we sell bars as well. Like maybe they're just looking for hydration and that's fine, she don't necessarily need a synergy between the two, but on all our packaging, you know, we will make it clear that we, Hey, by the way, we also sell, this, and this, oh, cool, you know, let me check that out. So sometimes it's up an upsell, sometimes it lives in silos.

Jim: Cool, thank you for sharing that. If there's one thing on product development, whether it's someone coming out with a new product that's for the end consumer, if there's one piece of advice that you can give on product development or strategy, maybe even to add to what they already have, what would that be?

Will: Oh man, there's so many things. I mean, number one, make sure your costs make sense, like you can make the best product ever, if your gross margin is not, you don't have a path to 50 plus percent gross margin, it's gonna be really tough out there, so that's one, and arguably the most important one. Let's say you can get, you have a path to that. I would say number two is don't fight consumer behavior, of course, exceptions to but people like what they like so don't over innovate, like take something, like if you look at the products that do the best, they look at what's working on a mass scale but is bad for like one reason, maybe it's like too high in sugar or it's too high in like use like collar power, so frozen pizza in the grocery store, people buy that, like hot cakes, right? But it's not healthy, so this company called Cauli Power comes around and they say, well, we blend it in, it's not just like wheat dough and it's not super high carb, like actually now, like 50% of the crust is made with cauliflower flour or whatever it is, so it's like a little healthier, they like tweak 10% of it, but it's still like a good pizza, it tastes like a pizza, yada, yada, those products crush. So formulation wise, I wouldn't try and I think it's dangerous to like totally upend something, because people like what they like and changing consumer behavior is, can be done, but it's insanely expensive, so don't do it unless you have 30 million lying around in like 10 years to like really shift. Now, there are exceptions to that, but generally speaking, that's what I would say. So, like for us with bars, like sell a chocolate sea salt, sell a peanut butter chocolate chip, like sell people what they want, in our category, people want chocolate, they want peanut butter, you can come out with a goji berry, pinacolada and like 10 people and whatever, you know, want that but you're not gonna be able to sell that at Kroger. So, meet people where they are, I guess is a more succinct way of saying that, and then find a good two more things, I would say (A) become an expert in the food science piece, not like a true expert, but like, get proficient, understand how your thing you're creating, and this is just for bud and bad if, electronics, like, get up the curve on that, if it's whatever, like become a expert in it, and if you can make the product yourself at the highest level, do it yourself, but at the very least, if you can't find a really, really good partner and be like beyond their ass about it, like be giving feedback intensely and regularly, don't be passive, like the worst thing you can do is be like, Hey, I want a better for you muffin or whatever, like, can you just go do this? Like you're a food scientist, or you know, you did this for Betty Crocker or whatever, and then just trust that that'll work, terrible idea. You actually have to get like pretty proficient and you're like, here's what I'm thinking, what do you think? Well, we could do this, maybe, but that would cost too much, and cause you're, by the way, in the background, tabulating like, how much is this gonna cost? And that person's just thinking like, you know, how do I make a good tasting muffin? So it's like there has to be a dance between those two things, or you just do all of it and then now it's all in your head, the cost of all of it, the food times of all of it, is this gonna last a year on a shelf like. So one of the two has to happen, but don't be the person who's like, Hey, I have this concept, let me go find some expert over there, I'm like, go, just do this thing, maybe one in a thousand times that works out and the other 999 don't.

Jim: That's good advice, thank you for all of those. So we talked a little bit about like the different products. So now, we have our product, we've developed another product, what have you seen, we talked a little bit about how you are launching your new brands on e-commerce and not going to the retail stores with them yet. What are you doing for market strategy when you're launching a new product? What is it that you've seen has done the best as far as you know? Advice you can give the Remote Start Nation.

Will: Just who runs our online business, would answer this better than I would, but I mean, there are things everyone does that are good, right? Like build an email list, like have email flows, get people excited about the launch, you know, even before you do that, ask people, Hey, what do you want? Like, do you want a banana bread skew, or do you want a white chocolate peppermint skew? Like that's always good to do upfront, and then like a bunch of, you know, community is thrown around and it's kind of overplayed, I would say, but like, to the extent you can, like for example, have a post-purchase survey and like if we were to have another flavor, what would you want? Like, is not a bad play, but yeah, I mean like the standard stuff around get the people who already buy your stuff, excited about it, this is also table safe, make it coherent with everything else you sell, like you don't wanna sell something that there's no way that if you have a keto protein bar, your hydration and then your hydration next has 10 grams of sugar, like, that's not gonna be coherent. So like, make it super coherent with what people who buy from you are already buying, that's more of just like a product strategy one. You know, get your ads, get ads set up, start advertising around it, if you can get, that's cool, we've never been successful with like getting PR to pick up new product launches, you know, use social media, like one of the things we're trying to delve deeper into his organic social media content, we were talking about this up front, like I do that personally, but things like TikTok and like short form video, I think is like a cool new frontier for us that we can drive more eyeballs to things like a product launch on.

Jim: And would it be sending product out to influencers and seating influencers?

Will: Totally, yeah. Seating influencers would helpful, we're doing a big like podcast ad rollout for the first, well we did it before a couple years ago, but much on a much bigger scale.

Jim: That's awesome. Something I saw that I think could relate to your product as well as, you know, other, I'll bring it more generic, but I belong to Strava, is an app that records your mountain bike rides and snowboarding and all of this stuff and, you know, they have contests where brands will come in and sponsor, and so for a brand to know exactly who their demographic is, right? Like understand who your avatar is, understand the community that they're hanging out in, and then, as you said earlier, like, you have to know your cost, you have to know your profit otherwise you can't do this, but I belonged it a contest that was geared around how many miles you do or whatever it was, and if you hit a certain amount of miles in this month, they would send you a free sample of their product and like I thought that was such a smart strategy for go to market because they knew exactly who their target market was. It was me riding my bike needing to, you know, hydrate and I was using product already, so when I got that sample and was able to taste it, and it tasted good and did everything else, and I was so excited that they gave this to me for free because I was part of this community, and this event, this contest that went on, I was like, dang, I'm gonna keep buying this from them. So, I think doing things like that as well are a great mix to market strategy that if you get those first three things done, like understand your community where they are, not just who your demographic is, but you know where they're at, whether that's a different app or partner like you had suggested as well, like looking at those things I think could, could add a lot.

So, Remote Start Nation, think of that, you know, as long as what Will's talked about as well, you know, really think first of where your community is, where they're hanging out, who you can partner with, and then what you can give to them to try and get them into your product without having to try to sell it to them.

Will: Yeah, that's actually better answer than I gave, that's something, ‘cause maybe it's in the back of my mind, but yeah, like ask that question, where are my consumers spending time, like in real life, online, like etcetera. If your consumer is, and maybe it's not online, like maybe it's a Midwestern mom who shops at target, or maybe she goes online, but she only goes on Facebook or something like, that's a useful starting point. And then like the Strava thing is another channel like partnerships, it was kinda like what I was saying, like with that other brand, they're a brand that sells to a very similar consumer to us, but we have different products. So, it's like non-competitive, but like it's targeted, we know that person who buys that type of product is also the kind of person who would buy our type of product. And so it's highly targeted and so, every sample will have like 10x the hit rate, you know? Then if we just send it to random people.

Jim: Yeah, I'm a big fan of partnerships and really understanding who your demographic is, and I think one of the most important things, and I don't hit on it enough in this show, but you brought it up and it kind of fits with what we're talking about. But you know, before you can do a lot of this strategy, this go-to-market strategy, you really have to know your cost, and if you don't know your costs, like you have a big chance of going big and doing well and then bearing yourself because you don't have the funds to be able to support the campaign you just threw out there.

Will: Yeah, I mean that's like maybe the single most important thing, like gross margin is you live and die by gross margin, especially now, I mean, there used to be a model where, you could raise a ton of money and lose a ton of money and just still grow and then sell the brand, those days are kind of over for the most part, you need to be a financially sound startup to be acquirable, let alone be in existence, you know, not many people will, are willing to artificially keep you on life support for too long, so yeah, cost management both on like the labor side, you know that again, I started with low SG&A that's a form of cost management, but that's fixed more or less, and then on your variable cost, like cost of goods, what's your toing rate, which is the labor that goes into creating one unit, are you managing that the best? Do you have the best manufacturing partners? Fulfillment is a massive one like so many people get killed on fulfillment, so we've really had to like twist the dials on that, both parcel fulfillment, like putting it in a box, shipping it to someone's doorstep, as well as what's called LTL and FTL fulfilment, less than a truckload, full truckload fulfillment or freight, we're twisting the dolls further on that, like how do we optimize? And ‘cause at the end of the year you look at your P and l statement, like logistics and fulfillment is just massive, like 15 to 20% of your total expenses.

Jim: Yeah, expenses on logistics are insane. We ship t-shirts and promotional products all country and it's like every year we look at it, what can we do to cut costs in that area? It's a big one. So, Will our times come into an end here but before we go, I have one more question, but I also want to really make sure the Remote Start Nation knows where to find you, can you let them know the best place to find not only your product, but yourself if they wanna reach out?

Will: Yeah. We're at eatiqbar.com, and our bars and our hydration mixes are there, we're on Amazon and walmart.com, if you on our website, there's a store locator, so if you put in your address, you should be able to find us. I personally am pretty active on LinkedIn, you can follow me on LinkedIn,I think those are the big one.

Jim: And with that said, Remote Start Nation, that's how I found Will and reached out because I was following him on LinkedIn and he does an incredible job, you want to know about business and even more behind the scenes stuff as we talked to today. Follow Will on LinkedIn, you won't be disappointed. Will one last question for you, what's the biggest takeaway you can give to the Remote Start Nation, maybe that we didn't hit on today, but you wanna make sure that they think about as they're growing their brand and trying to get to that next level?

Will: It's maybe an unconventional answer, I would say, I'm not the first person to say this, but it's an unglamorous lifestyle and I think be really, I think long and hard about whether you can withstand the lifestyle, whether you want the lifestyle, what sacrifices you're willing to make to do the lifestyle, financial and otherwise. And then like, do you wanna do this thing for five to 10 years? ‘Cause that's what you're signing up for. So will there be a fire in your belly to make this work for five to 10 years, that's a long time, but that's how long it takes to build a brand. And in year two, three, you don't wanna be losing steam. And another thing too is like what you're gonna be doing is not like I read a post about this one, you know, let's say you're really into yoga and so you started yoga pants business, and in your thinking as well, I love yoga, like I'll just and it's yoga pants, like this is my passion. And then you find out that 99% of the time nothing you do is relating to yoga pants, it's like getting on the phone ‘cause the factory like stitched the yoga pants backwards and then it's figuring out how to make payroll, and it's business, it's not so much, it's way, way more business than it is yoga, even though you're selling yoga hands. So make sure you love business specifically, type that flavor of business, and you're willing to do it for five to 10 years otherwise, it's gonna be not fun.

Jim: That's such a good piece of advice. I always, anytime someone comes to me and asks about starting a business, my first thing is you really need to understand your why and what you're passionate about because as you know, there's so many things that are difficult and to go back and say, okay, this is why I am doing this, and it can't just be like you said something that, oh, I love yoga. I'm gonna start a yoga brand, it doesn't work that way.

Will: Yeah, and like also, what do you wanna do with your life? Like if you're like, yeah, I wanna have a kid in a year. Well, maybe don't, I mean, maybe do, maybe don't, that's all you, but it's like factor that in big time, factor everything in.

Jim: Awesome. Well, Remote Start Nation, thank you for joining Will and I on this as we help you to start a business, grow your brand, and connect with your community. Remember, leave a comment, subscribe and share this episode with your community who you think would learn from what you heard today.

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