[00:00:00] Speaker A: Oh, my God. We're gonna go broke. What do we do?
[00:00:02] Speaker B: Sat down with a piece of paper and designed my own.
[00:00:05] Speaker C: We like it. We go from there. We take a risk.
[00:00:07] Speaker D: I'm Richard Gerhardt.
[00:00:08] Speaker E: And I'm Elizabeth Gerhart. You just heard some snippets from our show. It was a great one. Stay tuned to hear tips about how you can start your business.
[00:00:18] Speaker F: Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given it heart. Now get it in gear. It's passage to profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:00:29] Speaker D: I'm Richard Gerhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:37] Speaker E: And I'm Elizabeth Gerhart. Not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law. And I have my own startups and podcasts.
[00:00:43] Speaker D: Are you one of the two in five Americans wanting to start your own business or already a business owner? Stay tuned. This show is about starting and growing your business. Welcome to passage to the road to entrepreneurship, where we learn why and how ordinary people, just like you, started and grew their businesses. And we also talk about the intellectual property that helps protect your innovations. We have a special treat for you. It's Justin Cook, who's the co founder of Empire Flippers and Web street.
[00:01:12] Speaker E: And then we have two marvelous presenters. We have Mike Chesney from Tecton Tectonlife.com with a multifunctional beverage. And if you go on his website and look at what this thing does, a multifunctional beverage. Yes. And then we have Natalie Noel with Noelle family Distillery. It's noelledistillery.com. It's a local distillery in Louisiana. It has quite the story and it makes a great range of products.
[00:01:38] Speaker D: Awesome. But before we get to our guests, it's time for your exciting new business journey. And two in five Americans, imagine that, want to start their own business and so should you. Start your own business journey. Is it important to think about the problem or need my business will solve? And how do I address this need? So we're going to go to our guests today and we're going to ask them, what is the problem that you're trying to solve and how does your business solve it? So welcome to the show, Justin. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the problem that your business is meant to solve and how you solve it.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: Our business, Empire flippers, was built to solve the problem of helping online entrepreneurs be able to exit their business. Everyone starts a business. They start, you know, on affiliate side or, you know, an e commerce, selling shoes or ceiling fans, but they don't know how to sell. They don't know where to take the business to sell. And so we solve that problem by providing them an end to end solution to exit your business or to sell your business online. And then the other problem is Web street. We started a spinoff company because there are a lot of people that wanted to buy or invest in a business but didn't know how to run one. I mean, you buy this, you know, Internet company, and you're like, how do I run it? So we wanted to make an investable solution for people to be able to invest in these businesses without actually having to run them. So we paired them up with people that are experienced, with potential investors that want returns. And so that's how Webstreet got started.
[00:03:01] Speaker D: That's great. So we appreciate that information. We'll hear more from you later in the show. Our next guest, Mike Chesney. Tell us about the problem that your business was trying to solve and how you solved it.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: What we do and the problem that we started with was everybody. Every human being needs energy. Everybody needs energy. And that's the need state that we looked at. And what most people do now is they go out and they look for that quick fix, which is caffeine and Sugar, you know, an energy drink. These really reputable brands that are out there, but they're not healthy. They're not good for you. So the need that we saw is for a healthy energy drink and one for grownups. Healthy energy drink for adults. Energy drinks are not for people in my age category. People that are 35 to 80, they're. They're for 18 to 35 year olds, 34 year olds.
[00:03:53] Speaker D: You may think you're a little bit older, but you look really young to us. Welcome to the show. Natalie, tell us, what is the problem you're trying to solve, and how does your business solve it?
[00:04:02] Speaker C: Well, I didn't really think about that with this one. I just know that we wanted to be in the business of creating fantastic spirits. Of course, we're a distillery. We make rum, tequila, and vodka. We're in Louisiana. We have very. We have access to sugar cane. So that's where we make our rum from, tequila. I'm a tequila girl, so I said, let's see if we can be the only Louisiana distillery to make authentic tequila. And so we did that. I mean, I like to think about us in terms of maybe, like, some of our other local distilleries. The problem I think we solved was just being more fun bringing a personality to the local landscape. Everyone was so serious and moody with their branding. And if you look at our brand compared to everyone else's, we're ready for a party. I mean, we're ready for a good time. So I'm all about flavor and fun, and I think that's what sets us apart.
[00:04:52] Speaker E: Looking at your website made me want to have a party.
[00:04:55] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it's about the moments that matter with the people that matter. It's still fun to come together and create really delicious spirits or cocktails and.
[00:05:03] Speaker D: See where the night goes for your business. Elizabeth, what was the problem, and what is the solution?
[00:05:09] Speaker E: So we're in our podcast studio right now in our building in summit, New Jersey, but it's not really set up for other people's consumption or use. So we're. We're remodeling it and we're actually doing it ourselves. Richard is replacing ceiling tiles and. And I'm helping. And so, anyway, the problem that I saw was we had space that we weren't using. But the bigger problem was I kept meeting people that want to tell their story. They want to start a podcast because people need to tell their stories and they didn't know how. And then a lot of people need coaching. So that's in there, too.
[00:05:41] Speaker D: Sounds great. So, for Gearhart Law, we're intellectual property attorneys, and we focus on protecting our clients ideas through patents, trademarks, and copyrights. That gives them a little bit of a competitive edge, that gives them a tool to work with out there in the marketplace. The problem is, how do you protect your ideas in order to let your business flourish and the products and services develop? And the solution is to. To rely, at least in part, on the legal system to give you that kind of protection. That's what we do.
[00:06:14] Speaker E: Very well said.
[00:06:15] Speaker D: Well, thank you. And so now it is time for our featured guest, Justin Cook, co founder of Empire Flippers and Web street. So, Justin, tell us a little bit more about empire flippers.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: My business partner and I were working mid level managers in the US and an SEO company where they do backlinks and stuff for local companies. So if you're a plumber and you want to get seen on Google, they would help you do that. We had a real need to, like, hire people cheaply. And so we had a previous connection in the Philippines. We said, look, why don't we hire some people in the Philippines? So we started this remote hiring process of hiring seven, eight people in the Philippines to the point where we said, look, we need to go over there and kind of see what's going on. So my business partner, my future business partner, I fly out to the Philippines, and we go to this girl's house, and we realized she's got, like, six other people working in her. Like, you know, second room, third room, they're like, plastic tables with, like, air conditioned and plastic chairs. And we're like, oh, my God, we're running a sweatshop. Like, what are we, like, literally running a sweatshop out of the Philippines? We're like, we need to fix this. So we, like, set up an office. We convince our bosses to let us start this company so we can move to the Philippines. We move there, and we set up our first company. We have an office. We're now in the Philippines. We're totally remote entrepreneurs. And we start building a company, and, you know, within six months, our previous employer starts cutting our finances. So they cut to half and then another half. And so we're like, oh, my God, we're gonna go broke in the Philippines. This is not a place to be broke. We looked up online, and there's. You can create these little niche websites. So I'll give you an example. Cemeterypric.net, one of our sites, another one was like, catconstipation.org dot, right? Just little niche topics. I didn't even know this, but cat constipation is a real problem.
[00:07:58] Speaker E: You should come on my cat podcast. I have a podcast for cats with Danielle Woolley. You should come on that and talk about cats.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: It's a real issue, apparently. I didn't know. I'm not a cat. I'm a dog guy, right? So we find these little niche topics, and we started just building content around it. All these niche subjects that people search for. Well, Google has a program called AdSense, right? And so you create the content, and you put the adsense blocks on your website, and you just put it. It's a little bit of code. You snip in there. And then Google will automatically deliver advertisers that's relevant to either the topic or the individual user that goes there. So they may see something about, like, a cemetery if it's on the cremation prices, or they may see, like, the last ceiling fan they search for on Amazon. So it helps, you know, earn revenue, and then they pay you money for those. And so we built these sites, started making money. We realized people want to buy these sites. They're like little assets, right? So you have a little site making $100 a month. It's only $100 a month. But someone's willing to pay 2000, 2000, $503,000 for this hundred dollar a month website. And so we realized that these are profitable assets that are sellable. So we started creating them in batches, right? A dozen a week, start creating them. It takes about three months to percolate and then we would sell them. And so we became these guys. The Adsense flippers was our original name.
[00:09:12] Speaker D: So how did you figure out what topics would be good candidates for this kind of business?
[00:09:18] Speaker A: So that's really important. The first couple of niches we selected were interesting topics we could write content about but weren't well searched, right? So there wasn't a ton of people searching Google for the key term. So I put it in, I was like, oh, this is a cool niche and it gets like 70 searches a month, but you generally wanted 2000 to 3000 searches per month on the keyword or better. And if there's that much interest then you're going to get some traffic. If you can get ranked. There were keyword research tools out there to help you. They would tell you exactly how many searches keyword would get per month and then kind of the difficulty based on the sites that are there on how hard it is to get ranked and we choose ones with a low to moderate search volume and a moderate to low difficulty.
[00:10:00] Speaker E: So you took that business model and you expanded it to look for, actively look for people that want to sell their tech companies. Is that what you did?
[00:10:08] Speaker A: Yeah. So we talked about how we built this very publicly and that wasn't a public thing at the time. We said, here's our exact process. Step one, step two, step three. A lot of people would charge you for that information and we were like, we'll just give it away for free. And that got us attention, which is valuable, but it also got a lot of other people building these sites as well. So they would do their own approach and figure out ways to build them up. And they asked to sell with us because we had an audience now people wanting to buy these little sites and we said, no way, we're not having you sell with us because that's how we make our money is building these sites and selling them. Eventually we smarted onto the idea that, oh my God, we can make a lot more money having everyone bring us their sites. I'm not admit to being not the smartest entrepreneur and most of the good ideas come from customers beating my head in with it, do you know what I mean? Like I don't listen to them and I ignore them, and I have ego. And then they're like, no, dummy, here's how I want to send you money. And I'm like, oh, okay. Like, eventually we're like, okay, we can make money at this. Okay. So we. We let other people sell their sites to our audience, and that's when it really started to blow up. And we went from, you know, a couple of guys in the Philippines scratching out some little websites to now we sold over just over $490 million worth of websites and online businesses.
[00:11:25] Speaker D: Wow, that's amazing. So who are the buyers for these websites?
[00:11:29] Speaker A: Initially, we start off with very small sites. We've gotten to the point where we're selling much larger businesses. SaaS Software as a service company is a large e commerce Amazon FBA businesses. But initially, the small little sites, the cat conspicuation type sites, were just online aspiring entrepreneurs wanting to know, is this Internet money real? You know what I mean? Like, like, can you really make money 100, 200, $300 a month with these little websites? I want to buy it and see before I get into it. All right, so they buy a site from us and their earnings were starting to hit their account. They paid three $4,000 for $100 a month earner, and they started to get the earnings and they're like, oh, maybe, you know, the Internet money is real. Maybe it's not just all fake, right? Maybe this is something I can do. So it was people just aspirational at first. Later on, a whole nother group got into it like private equity and all the bigger buyers. But initially it was just kind of like wannabe entrepreneurs testing the waters.
[00:12:22] Speaker E: That's really interesting. So how exactly does the Google Adsense part of that work with online businesses?
[00:12:28] Speaker A: There's lots of different monetizations. Google AdSense is one, they call it display advertising, and Google AdSense is one version of display advertising. So if you have your website, whether it's, you know, WordPress or however you set up a site, there's lots of different places you can go and you write the content. You can put a snippet of code in the middle of the content, above the content, below the content, and that will create an ad block. And you see those. Sometimes you're annoyed by them when you're search serve on the web, but you get an ad block and ideally it's gonna be very relevant to the content you have or relevant to the person viewing the content. So I said before, like, if it's about cat constipation, it'll be like cat products and treats and toys or it might be something that I searched for yesterday, right. I searched for a new lawnmower. I'll see, like, cat toys and then like, a lawnmower. Because Google knows at all, basically. And they know that I want a lawnmower, right? Yeah.
[00:13:23] Speaker E: They know stuff about you that you've never even told them that you never even thought you.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: It's creepy. It's getting creepy, right.
[00:13:30] Speaker E: It is.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: I would say display ads are kind of the lowest form of monetization for websites. So typically, if you're building a website for yourself or your own business, you're way better off advertising your own products or services than other people's. Display ads is a particular business model where you're just creating the content to put ads up. But if you're building a website for a business, putting ads on there and getting, you know, $80 a month, trickling in or something isn't worth it. Only the site is really popular where you make a lot of money, which can happen. But for a business website, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
[00:14:03] Speaker D: So for entrepreneurs who are just starting out and they're in the process of building a website now, or they're thinking about a website, do you have any advice to offer them so that they get the most traction possible?
[00:14:16] Speaker A: It depends on what kind of website they're building. Right. So, and what kind of business they're building. So if they're building a site just for display ads, just to put content up, to make money with that, I mean, following our process, there's other people, like niche pursuits.com, comma, empirefilters.com. You can go to any of those sites and it'll explain that. But if you're building a service business or something, you're going to build it differently, right? You're going to want to get attention. You want to draw attraction through, like social media and shorts and reels and all that stuff. But I was, like, held back because it's been so long since I've personally built a website. So I can struggle with your listeners right now or think about building a site. They're like, where do I go? What kind of content do I get? How do I set up the thing to, like, collect the emails? And what kind of, like, CRM do I use in the background? How do I. Ugh. Right. That's just not my thing. That sounds frightening and miserable. Makes me not want to do a podcast. I don't even want to do it now. Right? And my mastermind was like, look, you don't need any of that to put a podcast out. You need a YouTube account. You need some, like, silly logo, and you need content. Like, you don't need the other stuff, man. Just put it out. Get the content out.
[00:15:21] Speaker D: So, Justin, what was it like working during the pandemic? You had this business. You spent a lot of time growing it during the pandemic, what was that all about?
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Well, first off, I'll say that our company is completely remote. So as of 2011, just about a year after starting, we went completely remote. We were forced to, because business was bad enough, we had to shut down our office in the Philippines. We. Everyone had to go work from home. And it was depressing because I felt like, oh, my God, we're not a real company anymore. We don't have an office, right? It turned out to be fantastic because we were remote before any of this pandemic stuff started. So everyone on our team, we've got Americans living in Prague, Medellin. We got a british guy living in Manila. So we've got people all over the world. And this is pre pandemic. So 2019, that was our setup. We were in great shape, I guess, for a worldwide shutdown in that we were all living and working remotely already. Now, the weird thing is, is that with everyone kind of shut down, there was a huge focus on online business. So our business boomed.
[00:16:22] Speaker D: You guys did do a fair amount of bootstrapping on your business, right?
[00:16:26] Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm an advocate of bootstrapping, if at all possible, right. And what bootstrapping means is just using your own funds, using your own kind of chutzpah, using your own blood, sweat, and tears to build your business. And what this does is it teaches you to be lean and mean. Right. You don't have other people's money. Right. To be able to. Oh, I'm gonna put together a big marketing budget. I'm gonna set up my scishow's account on my Hong Kong bank accounts. And, like, so many people get caught up on the kind of, like, stuff around, though. What's my legal requirement or whatever, where you just need to hustle? You need to get out there and start, like, talking to customers and see if they're willing to pay you money for your product, and if not, fix it. And the best way to do that is bootstrapping. Now, not everyone, not every company can be bootstrapped, because there are some companies where there's a run up that is so intense that there's no way you can compete without other people's money. AI is a really good example of that right now. Right? Like, there's no, I can't just like, you know, sit in our townhouse in the Philippines and kind of bang out the work on my AI company. It's very, very difficult to do because of the money and the compute required to build, like a large AI model. So not every model is built for bootstrapping, but I highly recommend it, particularly if it's your first round or your first shot at entrepreneurship. Do it with the blood, sweat and tears. You're going to run it lean.
[00:17:43] Speaker D: Justin Cook, co founder of Empire Flippers. You're listening to passage to profit with Richard and Elizabeth Bear Hart. We'll be back right after this commercial. And stay tuned. We have secrets of the entrepreneurial mind coming up later in the show. Don't want to miss that.
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[00:20:03] Speaker E: Our special guest, Justin Cook. We've just had a fascinating discussion with Justin, and we're going to keep it going now. So there was a question from somebody else. Do you deal with any businesses that have physical inventory?
[00:20:14] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a number of different types of businesses that carry physical inventory. DTC businesses. It's called direct to consumer. Whether you're selling e commerce product through your website, Amazon, FBA, or fulfillment by Amazon, which you have, you know, a physical product where you hold inventory with Amazon and, you know, hybrids of those, right? So, yes, we sell those businesses regularly. What we don't sell, kind of like the limit on what we'll sell is any property that requires, requires a local physical requirement to be there. So our buyers are worldwide. Right. So I might have a buyer for your business in Tulsa. The buyer might be in Hong Kong. Buyer might be in San Francisco. So them flying to Louisiana, for example, just an example. To, like, run the business is probably a no go for most buyers. So it really doesn't work with our model. So our models just requires them to be able to live and work anywhere. So in many cases, they ship the inventory to a third party. That third party does fulfillment. Any business like that, we can absolutely sell. The misconceptions my business partner and I both had early in our entrepreneurial career is that, you know, when we shut down our office in the Philippines, I just felt like a loser because in my view, in my head, I was like, you need an office. You need desks, an address, and that's really important to be a real company. Otherwise, what are you, like, it's. You're not a real business?
[00:21:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: I mean, I think getting over our own thoughts on what we thought a real business was, was a good learning experience for us.
[00:21:37] Speaker E: I hadn't realized for a long time that there are some companies that survived solely on investor funds for years and years and years. I always thought a successful business was more revenue than expenses, but that's not really true, right? I don't know. How long have some of these companies been going where they're just living off investors?
[00:21:54] Speaker A: Well, that was cute in like 20 19, 20, 20, 20 21. Right. With the run up and all the money floating around, when it comes to harder times, that's when those companies go away. They don't do quite as well because investors pucker up and they're like, I'm not putting money in businesses that don't have an interest in delivering a profit. The goal of the business should be to drive revenue and eventually get margins that deliver a profit to you or your investors.
[00:22:21] Speaker E: I'd heard that, like, Angie's list, didn't make a profit for a long time, but you wouldn't touch a company now that didn't have some sort of profit.
[00:22:28] Speaker A: I mean, that's true. So it's a requirement to sell on empire flippers. We're going to do it as a multiple of profit or sellers, discretionary earnings, SDA. So basically, if a business is doing, you know, let's say, 100,000 a year in profit, if you have recurring revenue that improves your multiple less clients, no recurring, that's going to lower your multiple. So somewhere between, let's say, two to six times your annual net profit is what you're going to sell for. So if you have no profit, you're just not sellable to like most of the investors on our platform and people that are looking to buy online businesses.
[00:22:58] Speaker D: Justin Cook, co founder of Empire Flippers. Where can people reach you, Justin, if they want to sell a business or contact you for some other reason?
[00:23:07] Speaker A: Empireflippers.com is our brokerage account. If you want to find out more about the investing side, which we're going to talk about, but you can go to Web Street Co. And you can figure out how to invest in successful operators that are buying businesses like we talked about.
[00:23:19] Speaker D: Well, thank you very much for that. It's been amazing. And now it is time for IP in the news. Tattoos and LeBron James. So how can you go wrong with tattoos and LeBron James? Well, it turns out that a tattoo artist, Jimmy Hayden, put a tattoo on LeBron James arm that Jimmy Hayden designed.
[00:23:40] Speaker E: And then LeBron James, his likeness was made into a character on a video game, and they copied the tattoo into this character on the video game. And the guy that created it said, hey, I should get paid for that.
[00:23:50] Speaker D: But of course, the court disagreed, and it went before a jury in Ohio. They decided that the tattoo artist, Jimmy Hayden, gave LeBron James an implied license when he did the tattoo, and LeBron James paid for it, and therefore, he had no claim against the gaming company for using his tattoo on the likeness.
[00:24:11] Speaker E: Of LeBron James because the artist did design it. So it was a unique artwork created by this artist, but he put it on LeBron James. So who does it belong to?
[00:24:20] Speaker D: Under normal copyright law, the creator of the work owns the copyright. And unless there is an agreement between the creator and the user, the copyright stays with the creator. So in this case, in my opinion, it probably should have stayed with Jimmy Hayden, unless LeBron James and Hayden had, like, some sort of deal. But I'd like to ask our amazing guests what they think about this situation. Natalie, what are your thoughts here?
[00:24:46] Speaker C: Well, I mean, best to just not get a tattoo, you know, that's where I am at.
I'm pretty okay with the ruling.
[00:24:53] Speaker D: So, Justin, what's your take here?
[00:24:55] Speaker A: They're similar to Mike Tyson, right? So, like, Mike Tyson had a big tattoo on his face, and it was in the movie hangover. Do you remember this? Are you guys familiar with the story? So he had the tattoo, and I don't get the story exactly. I think they had to go back in the movie and remove, digitally remove the tattoo is something they did in the hangover movie to get rid of his likeness. So with AI, this is gonna be more of an issue. It sounds like kind of a silly issue. Like, it's very specific to, like, a celebrity and a. A video game. Who cares? But, you know, the more we have digital likenesses of people, I think the more this issue might come up.
[00:25:27] Speaker D: Mike.
[00:25:27] Speaker B: My question for you, Richard, is what's the prior case law for this?
[00:25:32] Speaker D: Case law on this is mixed. In some cases, the courts have found for the artist. In other cases, they haven't. There's still some ambiguity. Copyright is always really fact specific. So, I mean, you can just imagine the Ohio jury kind of liking LeBron James, right? And just like, well, going to find for him no matter what.
[00:25:50] Speaker E: Doesn't sound like the tattoo artists really have a lot of rights in this.
[00:25:53] Speaker D: The moral of the story is, before you get a tattoo, call your intellectual property lawyer and you're listening to passage to profit. And stay tuned. We have Mike Chesney and Natalie Noel coming up. And also secrets of the entrepreneur mind.
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[00:27:55] Speaker F: 808 244596. 808 244596. 808 244596. That's 808 244596. Passage to profit continues with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:28:13] Speaker D: Now it's time for us to hear from Elizabeth and her project. So what's up with you?
[00:28:19] Speaker E: A few things going on. I was working on Blue Streak directory. It was a b two b business directory. I'm reframing that a little bit. I still have it. I got the trademark allowed through the trademark office. So I'm like, I'm going to hold on to this. In the meantime, as I said, richard and I are remodeling the podcast studio. It's going to be really cool. So we're going to have a video studio and an audio studio. It's called Gear Media Studios in summit, New Jersey. And to Justin's earlier point, I am just doing a super deep dive into the podcasting space. We're going to conferences. I started a meetup with Stacey Sherman. Once a month it meets in our law firm building in Summit, New Jersey. But we also get people from Zoom. And this last one, we got over 250 people registered through Zoom. They won't all come, but doing the hybrid is a really good way to do these kind of meetups. Now and at the end of June, Richard and I are both going to be presenting on panels for podcasting at the empowered podcasting conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. And that is, Mark Ronick is putting that on. And I also have another podcast called the Jersey podcast cat podcast that I do with Danielle Woolley. I'm doing some different things with that, too. So I'm kind of looking at how you can help your podcast by having it on YouTube? And are there things you could do on YouTube that will help you get downloads on Spotify? It's like what the crossover is between YouTube and the podcasting platforms. When I started asking people if they wanted to rent a studio, a lot of people were like, well, sure, I would love to run a podcasting studio, but I don't know how to start a podcast. Can you help me? So a coaching business was born. So we're going to have a soup to nuts studio where you can come in and leave with a finished product. And then if you want marketing help with that, we can either help you with that or refer you to somebody who's a specialist in the podcast marketing space, which is a different space than traditional marketing. The whole podcast thing is a lot like other digital marketing tools, but just a little bit different. So I'm really learning the ins and outs. So enough about me. I want to hear about tectonlife.com for Mike Chesney. It's a multifunction beverage, and I just want to hear all about it because it sounds like it's really cool. So tell us, Mike, quick background on.
[00:30:25] Speaker B: Me and how this all got started. I'm a soldier. That's my background. Joined the military right out of high school, 17 years old, went into the army. I was an army ranger, special forces, and that's what I did. So I spent 25 years in the army. And being in the military set you up for how to do the most with the least. So that geared me up to be an entrepreneur, figuring out how to solve problems with what you have in hand, do the best with what you got. After I retired from the military in 2010, did a couple of businesses, spinning my wheels in spots where I really wasn't going to make any traction. But while I was there, ended up learning a lot about needs and things that people wanted and needed, and found out that the government, the US government, was looking for a nutritional supplement for soldiers, soldier sailors, airmen, marines and coast guardmen, men and women that provided additional physical and cognitive performance. And they wanted something that was going to improve that by 30%. Well, I read about it.
[00:31:24] Speaker D: Your job was to make people 30% smarter and 30% stronger.
[00:31:28] Speaker B: No, that was what the government asked.
[00:31:30] Speaker D: Oh, okay.
[00:31:31] Speaker B: So I cold called the lady who won the contract and created this substance and spent three years working with her at Oxford University in England and tried to market the product that she had created. It's an incredible nutritional supplement. The problem is, it just didn't work for what we need in the US. It's built for elite athletes, and it just has some inherent problems. Mainly, you can only take two servings of it a day, so it doesn't work for people who need it four, five, six times a day if they want, for energy. So I ended up coming back, starting from scratch, sat down with a piece of paper and designed my own. Sounds really crazy for a kid who is from the Louisiana public education system. Graduated from college the week after I turned 40. Did get my graduate degree from LSU. But it's crazy how these journeys turn out, because you never would think, how does somebody who was an army airborne ranger turn out to be a biochemist? Which is what it turned out. I created what the human body makes when you're starving or when you're on a low carb or a ketogenic diet. So your liver produces energy. It does it by burning fat. Really great way to do it. Well, I created one that you can make outside of your body, and that's what we use as an ingredient in our current offering, which is a ready to drink beverage that comes out. We can buy it now on Amazon or through our own website. The secret ingredient that we have in our product is the exact same molecular structure as the ketones that your liver produces. So we just created it outside your body so that now you can consume it. And that way you get a lot of the same benefits that you would have if you were on a low carb diet. So this is not a replacement for a low carb diet. Don't take it that way. What this is is just another form of energy, and it's clean, and it's the most efficient energy that a human can have.
[00:33:18] Speaker E: What kind of feedback are you getting from people on this?
[00:33:20] Speaker B: We're having some incredible feedback from everyone, from everybody that has this people of my age group that are very active. They play golf, they play tennis, and they used to play, you know, one round of golf when they'd go out, or golf one day and tennis the next day, because they just didn't have enough energy to do it every day. Well, now that they're using our Tecton beverage, they're able to play around a golf in the morning and then play around to tennis in the afternoon because they have that extra energy. And they don't have any of the side effects, like their muscles aren't burning because they don't have a lactic acid buildup. Or there's several other benefits that come from this. And people could go to our website, tectonlife.com, and just read about all the other benefits that come from it.
[00:34:01] Speaker E: Justin Cook, do you have a question or comment?
[00:34:03] Speaker A: Wouldn't it be good to, like, get, like, a third party kind of test of that? Because anecdotally is cool. Like, there's good stories for sure, but, like, wouldn't it be good to, like to test it out? I think it would help your sales significantly.
[00:34:13] Speaker B: We've done those, there's clinical tests done on similar products, but our particular one, we've done clinical research, thoroughly tested it to see whether or not this works. To increase cognition, to blunt the effects of glucose, to raise and lower the hormones that affect hunger and appetite, raised and lower inflammation markers. So there's lots of clinical testing that we've done. Now, again, we're not going to put those claims on our label. We're not going to put those until we get to a certain point. You know, at some point, we will make this a dietary supplement. We've already applied for our new dietary ingredient. We are certified through the FDA, generally recognized as safe process. We've gone through all that regulatory process. We've done all of our toxicology and all of the necessary regulatory testing for this substance, and we've come out very, very well on what you will get. Better effects with this particular product is if you are on a low carb diet, like I intermittent fast, I'll have my meal at 06:00 in the evening. I won't eat again until maybe noon or 01:00 the next afternoon. For me, it works perfect. If I drink one at 10:00 in the morning, and that helps me stretch my fast out a little longer, and it keeps my appetite down. So it works very well for me, and I get a little better benefit from it. I feel the effects of it a little more viscerally than somebody who got up and ate a really big breakfast and then drank one of these, they may not feel that really clear focus that you feel when you have this drink, if you just had a full meal. But it has no caffeine in it, has no sugar, no carbohydrates, nothing that's unnatural, completely healthy beverage. No carbs, no sugar, nothing out of the ordinary in here. Good for you. It's healthy. It's all natural. Even the ketone that we have in ours is made through a natural process. It's not a chemical process. It's made naturally. So it comes from raw materials, from sugar cane, sugar beets. That's where it starts from. And then we make it through an enzyme process. So all natural. So you got a natural product, natural ingredients, and you have no caffeine, no sugar.
[00:36:12] Speaker E: So who is your biggest market segment right now? Who's buying the most of this?
[00:36:16] Speaker B: People that are my age, they're buying this so that they feel healthier and they live longer. One of the other things that this does is it helps with your memory. It helps you remember things just a little bit better. It helps you focus. And that's the thing that people get. One of the biggest complaints that I get about this is, hey, I don't feel like I do when I drink. A red bull or a monster said, well, no, there's no caffeine in this, so you're not going to get that jolt, but you're not going to crash as well. You don't get a crash from this. You just get that nice even glide from this. So it makes you focus. It gives you that feeling of clarity. And if anybody's ever done a low carb diet, you know exactly what I'm speaking of. The next product that we're going to put out is going to be a little smaller. Can we serve a twelve ounce can now we're going to go to an eight ounce or 8.4 ounce, actually can. And we're going to put a little bit of caffeine in it because people want it. I mean, people want caffeine. I drink coffee every morning, everybody. I mean, I used to drink coffee all day, but I'm in my late fifties now. I can't drink coffee all day or I won't sleep at night. So we're going to put a little bit of caffeine and we're going to see how our customer base reacts to that. I think they're going to react very well to it.
[00:37:23] Speaker E: The name of your product is Tecton.
[00:37:25] Speaker B: Tecton. Like the tectonic plates of the earth.
[00:37:28] Speaker E: Tecton life.com. The passage to profit show with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. Our special guest, Justin Cook. I was going to say, if you have all this energy and you need something to calm you down, Natalie has just the thing. So we're going to move on to Natalie Noel now with Noelle family Distillery. It's noelledistillery.com. She's a local distillery in Louisiana Donaldson Louisiana, and has just a fascinating story and like, some really great products. So, Natalie, tell us all about it.
[00:37:55] Speaker C: I started Noel family distillery with my dad, and I also have my sister in the business. My aunt is the one who slaps the labels on it. So we're really a family business, but we are looking to grow our brand as far and wide as we possibly can. I always joke, if you're going to start a spirits business, you want to do it in Louisiana. We know how to have a good time, and we do have that reputation. And I think we're all about flavor and fun. And so you'll notice with our lineup being a craft small distillery, you don't usually see such a wide range of products, but I was aware that everyone has a different palette and they like different things. So we have rum, tequila and vodka, and then we have two styles of each of those spirits. And tequila is a super unique offering. We are the only Louisiana distillery that makes authentic tequila, which means it's made in Mexico. It's 100% agave. And that only took a couple of years to.
[00:38:46] Speaker E: That was patient. I can't wait a couple of years.
[00:38:49] Speaker C: I'm your girl. This business took us six years from the idea until we were in the market.
[00:38:54] Speaker E: Wow.
[00:38:55] Speaker D: So what inspired you to get into the business?
[00:38:58] Speaker C: So I'm an entrepreneur. I have a few other products companies. I started my own marketing digital marketing agency in 2012. So I'm a marketer at heart and I appreciate really great products. And my dad, he's a bootlegger, and he had built his own still in the backyard, and so he was making rum. I mean, Louisiana, we are surrounded by sugar cane, and that's the raw material you need for rum. So he built his own still and he's. This was about seven or eight years ago, and we started to taste it and we were like, wait a minute. This is really great, you know, should we do this? So we started having conversations about it, and I was very adamant I would not do it unless we had another spirit group. I was like, dad, we're going to have a different product along with the rum. We can't be a rum only business. So that was our strategic approach to the product offering. In the spirits business, you can't sell directly to the consumer in most cases, so you have to go through a distributor. So we took some time and we ended up signing this long term deal with southern Glazer, which is one of the largest distributors in the country. And so we utilize their sales team of 80 plus reps to run around Louisiana and, you know, help tell our story. But then the things that are in our control turns out people like to laugh. And so I do my best to come up with these funny little concepts that help us to stand out on social and people relate feeling happy when they watch our content, to feeling happy when they drink our spirits because it's a product that tastes really delicious and it's something that I would want personally. And so I think that's helped us. It's a very challenging spot. I mean, we're competing against the Tito's of the world or the Casamigos and all grey goose who have 30 million a year to spend on marketing. And we're just a startup. So I think we do the best that we can and we have realistic expectations, trying to keep our costs down and just be as creative as possible, because I do think we have that as the upper hand. I mean, those guys are bigger. They can't move as quickly to the trends in terms of creative or platforms or those kinds of things. And so we try to take advantage of that. And I think my marketing background helps. We definitely, we've definitely experienced a lot of people changing their behaviors. A lot of the local distillers have changed their behaviors in terms of their marketing approaches.
[00:41:10] Speaker A: In the last here, your site's fun. Like, it clearly has your personality. It has, like, your family's personality. Like a quirk to it. That's kind of cool.
[00:41:19] Speaker C: I'm actually okay if we just create a business that is in Louisiana and we're the go to for the local vodka or the local realm, why the hell are we not the go to for local tequila? I mean, we're the only one.
[00:41:31] Speaker A: We're the buy Louisiana. Get a local grown. This is where your people, the investment.
[00:41:36] Speaker C: Goes back into the community. I mean, think about my merch vendor. He loves me. He's here in Baton Rouge. So, like, we just feed the economy, right?
[00:41:42] Speaker E: If you kept it kind of local to Louisiana, it could be a destination experience.
[00:41:48] Speaker C: Yeah, that's true.
[00:41:49] Speaker E: You could have your distillery. Like, you could show him your dad's still in the backyard.
[00:41:53] Speaker C: That's the first thing they see on the tour is his still that he made.
[00:41:56] Speaker E: Right. So maybe if you connected and coordinated with some of these tour groups in Louisiana.
[00:42:02] Speaker C: We do, we do the best that we can to interact with our local tourism. We're getting more parties, we're getting more tours. Our distillery is in Donaldsonville, so that's a little bit outside of Baton Rouge. So it, I mean, it's a smaller town, but they're actually filming a movie there. So that's cool. That's happening right now. So, I mean, it's got some charm. We also partnered with LSU. We're the official tequila of LSU Athletics. So we, you know, we tried to associate our brand with a very established brand. We do have some local influencers that we've partnered with. I'm kind of up in the air about influencers for driving sales. I think it does drive awareness to the restaurants that we're in. And so I like to create content with them, and I think that's important. I take their approach when I go to a restaurant that I'm here to help market your business and to market our spirits within your business. We created a podcast or videocast ourselves called Crafted Connections. And so I go behind the bar. I interviewed the bartender, let them talk about their restaurant, the food there, the flavors. How do they like to make cocktails? That's another approach.
[00:43:02] Speaker A: Rising tide lifts all boats, too, right? So if you're promoting them, you're top of mind when it comes around, they're like, oh, I love that girl. She's great.
[00:43:09] Speaker E: I think that's really smart for marketing, brand development and brand loyalty and getting your ambassadors out there, right?
[00:43:16] Speaker C: I think also, like, it's community marketing. It is fun to attach ourselves and add value to the people that sell our products.
[00:43:23] Speaker E: So you have pure liquors and then you have mixes. So what's your most popular?
[00:43:28] Speaker C: Right now, the pickle vodka is our number one seller. And then our reposado tequila.
[00:43:33] Speaker E: To try that pickle vodka, that sounds pretty good.
[00:43:36] Speaker C: Yeah, it's really fun. It's easy to drink. You could drink it straight or drink it in bloody Mary or martini. I was obsessed with pickles after having a few kids. So I was like, loving martinis. I didn't love olives. I was like, why the hell is there no pickle martini? And then the idea for the tequila was, you know, I know there's a lot of celebrities making tequilas, but I was thinking, why not try? So we ended up with a female owned distillery down in Mexico. And they been fantastic to work with us to create a flavor profile that I liked. I also call myself the master of flavor. So if we like it, we go from there. We take a risk.
[00:44:08] Speaker E: Natalie Noel with Noelle family Distillery. It's noelledistillery.com.
[00:44:13] Speaker C: We can ship throughout the country if your state allows us to come in. And it's shop dot noelledistillery.com.
[00:44:19] Speaker E: If anybody listening to this is going to Louisiana, stop by and tour the site.
[00:44:24] Speaker C: We'll make you feel like home.
[00:44:25] Speaker E: The passage to profit show with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart, our special guest Justin book. And we will be right back.
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[00:45:33] Speaker D: Alicia Morrissey is our programming director at passage to profit and she's also a fantastic jazz vocalist. You can scroll to the bottom of the passagetoprofitshow.com website and check out her album.
[00:45:47] Speaker E: Now it is time for secrets of the entrepreneurial mind. So, Justin, what is a secret that you can share with our listeners that has helped you in your journey?
[00:45:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I mentioned it earlier. You know, you have a lot of, like head trash or I had a lot of head trash about entrepreneurship and what's required to be successful. And I think there's a lot of paths we feel like we're forced to follow. So, like, you know, like Mike mentioned earlier, he's a veteran. I'm a veteran, right. And, you know, when I got out of the navy, I thought there was a path I would just be kind of forced to take. I need to go get a job. I need to finish school. Like, there's a path to take. And that was just head trash. What I realized is you can actually forge your own path, right. By being an entrepreneur. You can go out there and say, look, I'm going to build the life I want to lead. I'm going to put myself in a position where I can take advantage of things and direct myself rather than kind of like blowing like a feather in the wind, right. I can actually forge my own path. And that was a secret that it took me till my thirties, really, to understand. I wish I would have got up my twenties. And when I run into these young entrepreneurs today that understand that, I'm like, wow, they are hungry. They are going to crush it 20 years from now. They're going to be future leaders. So, yeah, I just think understanding you can forge your own path. You're not stuck following a script or a path that's laid out for you by society. You can make it your own.
[00:47:00] Speaker E: That is huge. And I wish I had known that a lot younger, too. I mean, I think it's easier with some of the tools today. Like you have upwork and you have fiverr, so you can do gig economy jobs on there and grow business from there. I mean, I know a lot of people use it as an interest to their regular business, and it helps them get clients, but, yeah, that's huge. Mike Chesney from Techton tectonlife.com. Mike, what is your secret that you can share?
[00:47:24] Speaker B: Well, I think the biggest thing for young entrepreneurs is pick your partners wisely because you think you know the people that you're going into business with. You never know until you get down in the trenches with the people that you're working with, especially when you're bootstrapping a business. You never really know the character of somebody until you get down to where you're down to your last hundred dollars in the bank account and you're still trying to make payroll. So pick your partners wisely and make sure you know exactly who they are before you get into business with them. And that would be my advice to new entrepreneurs.
[00:47:56] Speaker E: I think that is excellent advice. Natalie. Noelle with Noellefamily distillery. It's noelledistillery.com. So, Natalie, what is your secret?
[00:48:05] Speaker C: Well, my secret is mindset, and I've already started coaching my daughter on this and my son. I'm like, life is hard, hard, and you need to be okay with that. And I think when you're in business, it's like being a quarterback. You can't get too high. You can't get too low. And one of my biggest things is celebrating the small wins. So I'm running around the hall if we got a great email or if we sold 150 products in one couple of days. I just try to have a positive mindset and make sure I'm always focused on that and I don't get too low or don't get too high.
[00:48:36] Speaker E: Yeah, that's really great advice, because entrepreneurs can go really low.
[00:48:40] Speaker C: My business partner can go pretty low, so it's good for her that I stay pretty happy. You know, you just gotta roll with the punches because they are coming.
[00:48:49] Speaker A: It's good to balance each other out, too. I feel that way sometimes. My business partner will get kind of negative or whatever, and then I'll get positive or he'll get positive. And, you know, when I'm negative, he'll kind of, like, balance you out. So you have to have that kind of understanding. And again, it goes back to what Mike said. Be a good partner. Someone's trustworthy, that has character. They're gonna, you know, they're not going anywhere. Yeah, exactly.
[00:49:09] Speaker E: People may have the best of intentions, but it doesn't always work out that way. And then mine was, I have a business coach, and she was actually on the show a while back. Sonia Satra. But she keeps telling me, you know, you know a lot, and you can't assume that everybody that you're talking to knows everything that you know, because you've been an entrepreneur and in the entrepreneurial world for so long, and things that are just like second nature because you had to do them, not because you wanted to learn them or do them necessarily, but you were forced to. Other people don't know, so don't think, oh, they're being this way, and it's not cool.
[00:49:39] Speaker C: It's.
[00:49:39] Speaker E: They're being that way because they don't know what, you know.
[00:49:41] Speaker C: That makes total sense to me. And I take for granted. And I think, like, if I just share that idea, that's just a common idea and it's not unique. And then I realize, like, whoa. Okay.
[00:49:50] Speaker A: And the other. The other problem, you ever get the other guys who try to talk above, they try to use a lot of jargon, and they try. And because they want to be smart, they got so much ego in it.
[00:50:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:00] Speaker A: And they're not speaking to their customers. Right. Their customers are like, can you just explain to me what my problem is and how you solve it? And they're like, look at how smart I am. Right. Yeah, that's not helpful.
[00:50:10] Speaker E: So, Richard actually has a couple of partners in the law firm, and it's funny because they really complement each other well. They do.
[00:50:17] Speaker D: They're amazing.
[00:50:18] Speaker E: So, Richard does everything. He does everything. And then they each do kind of, like, half of what he does, so it's good.
[00:50:24] Speaker C: Well, like, my dad. I mean, this is his first entrepreneurial journey. But you talked about it, Justin. Some days you're down. So, like, in our six year journey, some days I would be, like, totally in the tank, and then he would be like, know, we just got to get in the game. Because I'm a former athlete. I played college basketball. So any kind of sports analogy, he was throwing at me, and I was like, okay, you're right. Let's just stay in the game. And then some days, he would call me, and he was like, what the hell do we do? I just took all y'all spunny like this is terrible. I'm so sorry. I was like, no, don't worry about it. And then. Then we. Our mascot is a Louisiana tree frog. So we would see a little tree frog, you know, just kind of stuck on a window, and then we'd say, oh, yes, it's a sign.
[00:51:06] Speaker A: When you're starting off, and start off. Any sign is a good sign. You're begging for signs.
[00:51:11] Speaker C: Definitely. I definitely ignore every red flag. There is no, no red flag, because that is just an opportunity for me to punch through it, for sure.
[00:51:19] Speaker E: I think the other thing, starting off that you don't realize that we did not realize, and we were in corporate because we're both corporate refugees. You have to learn marketing. You don't have to be a specialist, an expert, but you have to learn marketing to some level if you're going to be an entrepreneur and own a company.
[00:51:34] Speaker C: I'm always amazed at, my undergrad is marketing, and then I have an MBA. But I'm always amazed at folks that will start a business and they think marketing, that's optional.
What are you doing? Don't do it. Stay employed.
[00:51:49] Speaker D: Well, it's time for us to sign off. Passage to profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 31 markets across the United States. Thank you to the P two P team, our producer, Noah Fleischman, and our program coordinators, Alicia Morrissey and Rishikat Busari. Look for our podcast tomorrow, anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X, and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gerhart Law is here for your patent, trademark, and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] dot.com and contact us for a free consultation. Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.
