#1262 Mike Beckham | This Man Built $1B+ Business Selling Water Bottles

Mike Beckham is the founder & CEO of Simple Modern, a global producer of premium drinkware & lifestyle products. In this conversation, we talk about entering markets with high competition, how to sell an established product, strategy differentiation, core principle of achieving excellence, why you should always be generous, challenges of American manufacturing, and how to scale between a player & coach. ======================= Trust and Will has simplified the process of creating and managing your will or trust online. They leverage a data-driven, design-first approach and amazing customer support to help you protect your legacy from the comfort of your home starting at just $159. Sign up today for 10% off using ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://trustandwill.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Auradine, a leader in web infrastructure solutions including blockchain, AI, and privacy, has unveiled the world's first 4nm Bitcoin mining systems, featuring breakthrough EnergyTune™ technology, setting new standards in performance and energy efficiency. The Teraflux™ product line from Auradine offers best-in-class performance, efficiency, and total cost of ownership (TCO), positioning it as the optimal choice for Bitcoin mining needs. With EnergyTune™, a patent-pending technology, Auradine's Teraflux™ systems enable rapid demand response and optimal energy usage, fostering a symbiotic relationship with electrical grids, and contributing to sustainable energy practices. Designed and manufactured in the US, Auradine's Teraflux™ product line not only ensures cutting-edge technology but also mitigates supply chain risks and provides increased supply chain resiliency. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.auradine.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information the Teraflux bitcoin mining systems. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. The following conversation is with Mike Beckham, the founder and CEO of Simple Modern. Simple Modern sells tons of tumblers and drinkware that you've probably seen people carrying around. The business does nine figures in revenue, and Mike has a very unique approach, where they actually donate 10% of profits every single year,

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  and they describe themselves as mission-driven and values-based. When we go ahead and we take a look at this conversation, we covered everything from entering markets with high competition, how you can actually sell an established product, where competition comes with demand, strategy differentiation, a core principle of achieving excellence, why you should always be generous, how the company is structured, the challenges of American manufacturing. And one of my favorite parts was when we talked about how you have to scale between a player, a player-coach, and a coach in all three roles in order to build a successful, large company. Mike has been there and done that. He's built a number of very large businesses, and so it was great to have him on to talk about all the tactics and techniques that he's perfected over the years.

• 1:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Here is my conversation with Mike Beckham.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:59Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:28Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:11Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:40Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys, bang, bang, I've got Mike here with me. Mike, I thought a great place to start is almost every single investor that you talk to will tell you, hey, don't go compete with people. Go do something that's different. Go do something that is kind of this white space. You have a very different view. The business that you've built literally went, there was incumbents with a lot of cash. There was high competition and you've been very successful, you know, 100 plus million dollars of revenue. Why did you choose to go take on competition rather than do what most people do, which is run away from competition?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Well, let's start here, like 99.9% of successful businesses that have ever been started are in an established field with an established product where you're just, you're tweaking the value proposition or you're tweaking the delivery method, or there's some kind of differentiated, you know, way of communicating with the customer, but it's not a totally new product. I mean, even things that we tend to view as innovative like Netflix. I mean, are movies new? Netflix put movies and DVDs in the mail and then they started streaming them. And so there was nothing even particularly innovative about the core product. It was just the delivery mechanism that was really innovative. And that's basically my point is that there are the handful of companies which it's truly like, wow, this is a step change.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  We've never seen anything like this, but they're really rare. And that if you don't like competition, you're probably not going to like entrepreneurship. That's just the reality. Like you have to like the idea of competing both externally and internally with yourself to be successful. And so instead, people, you know, I teach at OU, at the University of Oklahoma, the Entrepreneur in Residence, and I have every semester, I talk to different groups of students that are working on business plans. And it's funny how often they spend so much time trying to come up with this unique and bespoke idea, when instead they should just look at markets that have lots of volume and tons of customers and say, hey, how can we do this differently or better? I like Keith Rabois' kind of idea that, hey,

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Just go look for a place where there's a low net promoter score. There's lots of customers with a low net promoter score and just do it better. So when we started Simple Modern, one of the things that it felt like is like, man, we're just trying. We have to try so hard to get anybody to notice us, to get any kind of traction. But once you start to get the scale, what you realize is the world will constantly be in a deficit for really excellently run companies, constantly. As competitive as water bottles are, the world still needs more competence in making water bottles. There's billions of people. And so take that and whatever industry you're talking about, the same thing is true. So instead of being worried about, hey, am I going to have to compete with others?

• 7:23Speaker 02

  If you say, how can I do something that serves customers where I know there are customers who want it? And I can do it at an excellent level, then there is going to be market for you. And there's going to be an opportunity to build something significant.

• 7:35Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about that operational excellence, right? You're basically saying, look, it doesn't matter what the product is. If you can operate in this very effective way, you can go and you can compete. How do you know whether you are an excellent operator? Is it just you've done it long enough and you kind of see the feedback loop of market success? And you're like, okay, cool. I could go into a different industry and I've got that operational kind of muscle. Or were there things that maybe you saw before you actually had the market feedback? Where you're like, I think I can be operationally excellent. And so that gave you the confidence to go and try this.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's, it's kind of a combination and I'll talk about it sequentially. Becoming an excellent operator, I think, starts with you develop this internal mindset of I am constantly pushing myself to be able to do more than I could do yesterday. You know, for me, that actually started with, I became awesome at Excel and I became an awesome analyst. That was actually the first kind of rock in the foundation and, and gradually I added other rocks. So it started with me, I mean, there are a lot of late nights. Like I think I would make this point, becoming excellent at anything like it is a numbers game. It is an hours game. Like I'd like to think I'm a pretty smart guy, but a lot of it is hours that I've put in. And you talk to some of the smartest people in business.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  I mean, Patrick Collison, I've heard him say this, like, hey, maybe, maybe somebody smarter than me could have made Stripe without a lot of hours, but I couldn't, you know, it just took a lot of hours. And you talk to even the brightest minds in entrepreneurship, they'll say the same thing. You got to put in the hours first. One of the things that I run into a lot, and I get it because I'm one of these guys, is people that are really talented in their twenties or their early thirties. And they're like, it is my time and I'm, you know, I'm going to go and I'm going to conquer the world. And, and often they get a little bit over their skis. They want to do it before they've put in the hours to really be excellent. And so it's like, yeah, you've got a huge IQ and yeah, you've got all the potential in the world, but you've got to mine that out through hours of cultivating those abilities.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  And then I think what the market does is the market helps you to get an idea of where you really are. Right? Partially the market tells you, hey, here's, do you have product market fit or not? But it also gives you an idea of like, hey, to compete at the very highest levels, here's what it takes and, and do you really stack up against that? And I think if you can do the combination of those two things, if you can spend the hours and really develop yourself, pushing yourself, finding what your best is. And then occasionally you're poking your head up and you're saying, hey, how does that, how's that compare with the landscape? Then you'll start to get a feel for when you're really ready to be an excellent operator. One more piece of advice here that I think is helpful.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  The more people you compete with, the higher the bar, right? Like if you want to play professional basketball, you're competing against tens of millions of people that maybe aspire to that. And so the bar is exceptionally high, 400 spots, exceptionally high bar. If you want to be the best seller of, you know, tree wraps that prevent your trees from being damaged by a weed eater, then like, okay, now you're, you're competing against a few hundred people maybe, or like a much smaller subset. My point is if you start with a niche opportunity and say, hey, I want to compete at the highest level in this niche where I have less competition, the bar is going to be lower.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  And so I love the idea of develop and hone your skills in an area where there's not as broad a competition. I mean, like, we're not running away from competition, but we're also not psychotic, right? Like, we want to find a place where we have a chance to win. And then when you demonstrate the ability to win and be excellent at that level, then you can start saying, okay, I, I want a bigger market. I want more competition. So for, in, in my career, the very first thing I did was a venture I did with my brother. It was an auction website. And did really well, did over a billion dollars in revenue in about seven years. But it was fairly contextualized, the people we were competing against. And after having that experience and some success there, I started to feel emboldened

• 11:40Speaker 02

  and having the confidence of I can go into something as big and as competitive as hydration, where there are literally hundreds of companies and there's high commoditization. And this really is going to come down to how well can you operate a company? But I developed that confidence through the hours and through the experience of being in a more contextualized environment where there was maybe less competition.

• 12:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you just say that your first company did a billion dollars in revenue in the first seven years?

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so first company we started, we founded it October 2009, November, right around Thanksgiving of November 2010, we had our first million dollar revenue day. I was 30, I was the oldest person associated with the company. I wasn't even full time. This was supposed to be like a side gig. It really was like probably the closest thing to like the social network where it was just like a bunch of kids. We didn't even know what we had, you know, how ridiculous what was happening was. And man, learned a ton. I mean, it was like an MBA on crack, you know, just, and, and this is really the, the nature of learning is like immersing yourself in an environment where you can just kind

• 12:48Speaker 02

  of fire hose in and learn through iteration and fail and very quickly get another shot at things. There's also why I love e-commerce. I mean, the, the responsive nature of e-commerce is amazing. If you, you know, 50 years ago, if you said, hey, what would happen if we changed the price of this product by $5? It's like, well, okay, let's go talk to the buyer. Let's, let's put in the paperwork. Three months from now it'll go live. Six months from now, maybe we know. With e-commerce, you can, you can make that change live in five minutes. And in an hour, you can have an idea of how it's impacting customer behavior. And so it just really tightens these feedback loops where you can learn much more quickly. And if you're somebody who really does have a kind of a growth mindset, it's, it's an

• 13:32Speaker 02

  incredible context to, to grow and develop.

• 13:35Anthony Pompliano?

  What were you all selling on the auction website?

• 13:37Speaker 02

  So it was, it was, it's come to be called a penny auction website, but the idea was like the price started low and it went up a cent every time people bid. And when the timer runs out, you know, whoever was the last person to bid and you paid for your bids. It was like, it was an interesting model. I, one of the things that was interesting is when we started it, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about, hey, do I don't want to do this? Do I want to be doing this six years from now? Because I thought, oh, it'll be like a little side project. And then it became something much bigger, really quickly, where we, we had a pretty significant business on our hands. And we had to on the fly, learn all these things like, okay, how do you scale up from like our original office? It was like big enough for five people and we had an entire game room with like a big screen TV.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  And we thought, oh, we'll just, we'll work and then we'll, we'll be able to watch football and you know, whatever. Like that lasted about three weeks, you know, and then all of a sudden we had like 20 people crammed in that space and we were busting at the seams. And so we just had to learn out of necessity, you know, to kind of keep up with what the business was doing. It, it actually reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about product market fit. That when, when you don't have product market fit, it's kind of like you're trying to push your product out to the market, trying to get people to notice. You're trying to initiate the action. And then when you get product market fit, it's like the market pulls the product out of you. That all of a sudden you're trying to keep up with what the market wants as opposed to trying to convince the market that it wants what you have.

• 15:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that makes complete sense. When you decided to do simple modern, obviously you had this emboldened kind of confidence, right? You, you figured, hey, look, I can go and compete in this really kind of what many people I think thought was commoditized. But you have some unique thoughts about using a differentiated strategy. So it's like, go where the demand is, but use a differentiated strategy. How did you think through, okay, if we're going to go do water bottles, this is going to be the different strategy. Or like, how did you decide what that spin was going to be that you thought would actually give you the wedge into the market?

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Well, one of the things that I think is the most significant if you're going to build a business is to think about moats, the idea of moats. This is a Warren Buffett term. So you think about a castle, castle has a moat around it. The point of the moat is to keep people that you don't want in the castle out of the castle. And in the same way, when you're building a business, you have to be thinking about, okay, my business is like a castle. And that the moment that other smart and entrepreneurial people see what I've built, if I'm successful, they're going to want to storm the castle. And if I don't have some kind of a moat, then they're going to be able to, and everything I built is just going to get torn right back down. So if you start from a thought process of, even in the early days, how am I going to be able to defend this? Because there's no

• 16:15Speaker 02

  point in building it if I can't defend it. It really helps you to develop some of the thought processes and the strategies that you're going to need later on. So from day one, I was asking the question of like, just like you said, like, hey, this is a super commoditized industry. If I'm just selling black water bottles, like, there's no way, how do I hang on to market share? Even if I am able to gain it, how do I hang on to that? So we found a few different, I'd say facets that we've really latched on to. I'll name, I'll name just three or four here. One, that any business owner can apply this to any business is culture. No one can compete with your culture, right? You get to own that. And that is a huge differentiator when it comes to attracting talent, the excellence

• 17:00Speaker 02

  things get done with, retaining people, all these things are dependent on your culture. And so one of the reasons why I really beat the culture drum is because it's one thing that if you do it well, it doesn't matter what happens anywhere else in the world, you can be excellent. So culture was one, one was licensing. So licensing is coming into, you know, semi-exclusive agreements with people that own IP in order to be able to put their IP on things. It's a very difficult industry to break into. You have to kind of convince them that you have the ability to bring value to the table, even though you've never done it before, and you need IP to do it. And so it's kind of a chicken or the egg thing. But if you can get in, then you can gradually build a pretty big portfolio.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  And at this point, we're licensed with, you know, all of the biggest players, the Disney's and the NFL's of the world. Jerry Jones actually played a role in us getting licensed with the NFL. So there were some really, you know, key breaks we got along the way. But if you can get in there, then it's well, hey, literally you have the contractual right that no one else has to be able to sell this product in this particular place. I think distribution can be a form of moat. It is not, it depends on the distribution. For example, like the Amazon marketplace is distribution, but it's not heavily moted. People are constantly coming in. You're constantly having to deal with competition. In other places with Walmarts and Targets of the world, there are buyers and so there are gatekeepers.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  And usually when there are gatekeepers of some sort, whether that's, you know, governmental or

• 18:34Speaker 02

  or legal or just people that are in charge of kind of stewarding something, that that can be moted in some ways. And there's a way to kind of protect yourself against other people coming in. So, and then finally, one of ours is more of like how the companies approach things is that we're going to be fast. We're going to be built to be agile because that's one of the ways that you prevent disruption. That anytime somebody does something that is interesting, that challenges you, you have the muscles and the agility to be able to respond quickly enough that they can't disrupt you. And so, and there's probably more, but those are a few that we identified early on in a fairly, you know, in our category, there's not a lot of IP, there's not a lot of patents. There's not a lot of vacuum insulation, which is kind of the cornerstone.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  It was in patent and it is out of patent. So everybody's got the same, the same materials. And to me, that's what makes it so fun is I am really competing just on merit with a whole bunch of other people all over the world. And, you know, this is a point that I like to make is that one of the great things about being an entrepreneur today is it's easier than ever before to start a business. You have so many more tools. I mean, things like your podcast, there's just so many resources where you can literally go and listen to the best people in the world. You can spin up a Shopify site in 30 minutes and be selling. But the inverse of that is also true. There's so many more competitors that are in the game now.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  You know, there are people in India, for example, that, hey, 40 years ago, they were out of the game. If they couldn't get a visa to the United States, they're out of the game. But today they're in the game and so you're just competing against so many more people. So there's so many more tools at your disposal, but there's also so many more competitors. Take the time, be deliberate, figure out what are the ways that you're going to be able to carve out and protect your space.

• 20:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when you think about your specific business and product, it's not like you're shipping software where you can just constantly iterate. And it's, you know, it's hard. You gotta have the right product, you gotta go find your customers, you gotta do distribution, you gotta do sales. And you gotta kind of do the blocking and tackling, but at the end of the day, you don't have a physical product. You guys do have a physical product and I've seen you comment publicly about American manufacturing specifically and some of the challenges there. As you were getting started, how much of it was like, let's go find the demand and then we'll figure out how to make the product versus like, hey, we gotta have a warehouse full of products in order to be able to sell these things. Once we go and find the demand. And so how did you think about, you know, kind of market and finding customers versus actually having the product ready to go?

• 21:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And making sure that that was the type of product and the quality of the product that you actually would want to sell to people?

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is a great question. I think you always start with sell-through. So what, from my point of view, when you launch a product and that could be a totally new product or that could be like, hey, this new ornamentation or this new color. It's an asymmetric bet. If it doesn't work, then hey, your total loss or your total risk is however much you have an inventory. But your total potential gain is manifold, you know, that like it could be 100x that, 1,000x that. So we're constantly taking wax at the pinata. Every time we launch something new, there's a chance that it's going to really resonate with customers. And we're going to have, you know, the ability to have 100 bag or 1,000 bag on our hands. So you launch things constantly and early on, what that means is you don't worry about making it.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  I do think the idea of outsourcing the making of things early on for most businesses makes sense. Because you don't even know where your product market fit is and you just need to take a lot of wax to the pinata in small quantities really quick. So that's what we did at first is a lot of buy them 500 or 250 of something, throwing it out there, seeing what happens. And then doubling down, tripling down on the winners. As we've started to get to scale, now it's making sense for us to really get into the game of making things. And as we're getting into the game of making things, another benefit is it actually can make us faster in some situations. So for example, hey, there's this new color that just went viral on TikTok in the world of whatever a year ago.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  I would have to say, okay, well, hey, this is, this is viral. Let's order it from China. It'll take 30 or 45 days. Then we'll bring it over on a ship, you know, maybe in two or three months, we have this live. Where we're going to be is where a new color goes viral and we can pop up the next day on social media or the next week on social media and say, hey, you know, we're in stock. And because we have the ability to create things here domestically. So I do think there's some additional kind of demand capture and some agility that you can get from it. One other benefit of domestic manufacturing is kind of you, you alluded to this, the inventory piece, and we can dive into it if you want to. But the inventory piece of running a consumer brand is a lot of the complexity.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  It was so counterintuitive to me, but you can bankrupt yourself through bad inventory decisions way quicker than you can grow sales. And if you look at a lot of consumer brands that have gone bust, it's not actually through lack of sales. It's that they're growing and they have a lot of sales and they blow themselves up with inventory. Because you spend money a lot quicker with inventory than you get it back through sales. So anyway, the inventory management piece of it, I think is, is significant. And if you were at all involved in selling inventory through, let's call it 2020 through 2022. The supply chain was an absolute disaster in, in a number of ways. And there were, we, we had some ships, just to give some perspective, we had some product that we would order in China.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  And it would get on a ship and usually that ship would take 30 days to get to the United States. Some of them were taking two. Hundred days and it's not that they were taking 200 days to get across the ocean. They get across the ocean in 25 days and then they would just, they would just go in circles. And right outside of Long Beach because they couldn't come into the port and our ports were so congested. So we learned a lot during that period about how you can get a ton of your capital soaked up in just inventory that's sitting on a ship or on a dock somewhere. And obviously that blows you up if, if you're a business. The closer you're making your inventory to where you are, the more that you can manage your inventory and the more nimble you can be and the more you can take advantage of trends.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  That's been a lot of the motivation for us of getting into manufacturing. But I'll also say this, it's freaking hard and it's expensive and you have to take the long view and I totally see why. I totally see why as America, we just kind of abandoned it because it is hard and it's so much easier for some consultant to come in and say, hey, outsource this to China and you're going to be able to show immediate savings to shareholders or whatever. But we'd also learned during COVID, if you don't make anything here, that's really problematic. You know, there are certain political environments where that would be really problematic. There's certain geo, you know, just global events like COVID where that's really problematic. And so we made the decision a few years ago, hey, we're going to do this even though it's hard, even though

• 25:32Speaker 02

  we're going to have to lay out a few million dollars and we won't see that return immediately. Uh, and what's been fun is watching our team gradually level up in their understanding of how to be really, you know, like we talked about, like, how do you become an excellent operator? Well, how do you become an excellent manufacturer? There's no cheating the hours. You can go out and spend millions of dollars, but you can't cheat the hours. So this is, it's such a simple example, but I saw it literally today. I went by our manufacturing facility. And so we're making plastic water bottles and we screen print on them, but occasionally the screen printer gets messed up and something gets blurred. And so usually what would happen is you throw the whole bottle away, right? Well, they learned if you catch it and then you just apply some rubbing alcohol, the screen right before it goes through this UV light and gets cured,

• 26:17Speaker 02

  screen print comes right off, bottle's reusable. And so all of a sudden, we cut our defect rate by, you know, whatever, from 1% to 0.25% just because they learned, hey, there's, there's actually a really easy way to address this. But like, how do you learn that? Just reps, man. You just got to get in the reps. And so we're about a year into making things. We'll make about a million units domestically this year out of the 14 million or so that we sell globally. But we, we have some pretty big plans for continuing to grow our capabilities over the years to come.

• 26:48Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the aspects that I think if you're a textbook entrepreneur, meaning that you just read about it in textbooks or blog posts, you don't really understand how important it is. But once you start running a business, you start thinking a lot about cash conversion cycles. And one of the things that you were highlighting is, you know, these boats that were sitting outside of the ports for, you know, 100, 150, almost 200 days. Same thing with some of the manufacturing, right? You've had to make investments and you won't see that money come back to you for quite a while. How do you think about the investment decisions or inventory management and kind of cash conversion? Specifically when, you know, the ship's sitting out in the port, that's more of a short-term thing, right? You're like, hey, I need to get this and get this sold and get my cash back.

• 27:30Anthony Pompliano?

  The investment in the manufacturing is much more of a longer time horizon. And so you're almost, you know, having to make decisions on different time horizons. But at the end of the day, do I have the cash to pay for the things I need? Is really the ultimate, you know, thing you're solving for. And so how have you kind of maybe informed yourself in making the short-term versus long-term decisions? And, and do you maybe look at them differently on a different axis than just, you know, time horizon?

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So when you're early on, Anthony, you have got to be turning that cash and you've got to be growing your capital base. We were bootstrapped. So put $200,000 of my money into the company and we've grown that into a company that's doing almost 200 million in annual sales. But to do that today, we might at any given point in time have $20 million in inventory. And so our capital base had to grow by whatever, like 100x. So you've got a part of the reason why the turns matter is because you're every time you turn that capital, hopefully you're earning a return and you're growing your capital base. And if you're trying to get to be a big company, you got to get that capital base pretty big.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  And for the bootstrapped, you know, people for the people who are not going and raising venture capital, which is the vast majority of businesses, you want to be turning that capital as quickly as possible to be growing your base. As time goes on and you get more profitable in your capital base, you know, you get you become bankable and your capital base is in a good shape. You really start to think about, okay, how are the ways that I can invest this money that also creates strategic advantages? And so that's when the timelines become less important to me. Like the types of things that typically create moats and long-term advantages, they typically require a significant amount of money and the timelines are longer. And because the very reason that they create the moat is because other people aren't willing

• 29:23Speaker 02

  to do them because they're lower return and they're longer timelines. So I am a big believer that if you can take the longest view in the room, it pays off big time. But that's something you have to earn through being successful in the early stages where you have enough cash and you have enough margin that you're able to do that, to start saying yes to some investments that can pay off two years from now, four years from now, seven years from now. This is especially true if you're competing against corporations because corporations obviously have a lot more capital than you and they can take on these longer term projects. The only advantage you have against a corporation is that they have to be really myopic about performance, right? They've got to hit quarterly numbers.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  They've got investors that are really judging their, you know, their report card is in months, not years, not decades. And so being this is an advantage from my point of view of being privately held company is that I'm able to say, hey, we can get into manufacturing and that does not have to be a huge driver of growth or profitability for two, three, five years. If I think that it sets us up over the next 10 or 20 years in a superior place, then it can be a really great place to reinvest cash flow.

• 30:36Anthony Pompliano?

  That makes a ton of sense. As you've built this business, you obviously had the foundation of the first business to kind of stand on. And it sounds like you were doing well as a business, but you also recognize there's a lot of things I don't know. And you kind of had to try by fire. You had to pick up those skills. Today, I've seen you talk about this idea of in order to scale as a leader and scale your business, you really got to excel in three different roles, right? Kind of the player, the player coach, and then the coach. Talk a little bit just about, you know, what exactly does that mean? And then how have you actually implemented this as you've built the business to almost $200 million in sales?

• 31:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'll start by prefacing it and saying, this is actually the reason why many people who start companies eventually cycle out of companies. Or when you hear serial entrepreneur, what we're really talking about is people who find that they like one of these roles, but they don't like the other roles. So this, what I'm about to describe is the life cycle of a leader that you have to have if you want to grow something from starting all the way into significant scale. In our case, we're talking about nine figures. So the first thing that everybody needs to hear is, I don't care if you've got an MBA, I don't care how smart you are, I don't care how much money you have. Stage one should be player. You should be on the field, you should be getting reps. If there are going to be touchdowns, then you need to be throwing them or running the

• 31:56Speaker 02

  ball. Like, this is how it has to work. So in the earliest days of Simple Modern, I'm literally going on every sales call. I'm also like, literally, I'm the one setting up our Amazon advertising campaigns, you know, like, we're the ones staying up late at night and talking with the factory about nuances of lid design. Like, there was one lid that we made, it was a straw lid, and nobody had really made a great straw lid up until that point, from our point of view. And we could not quite get it right in terms of the flow rate. And I bet I drank out of 10,000 lids in one summer, trying to get this thing right. But this is the kind of thing that you do. You're incredibly tactical, tactical, and you're incredibly more of a generalist in your, in your focus. So you

• 32:41Speaker 02

  need to be able to wear 15, 20 different hats. And you're not going to be great at many of the things you're doing. But because you're having to do so much of the executing, and you're doing it across a bunch of different areas, you get this very, I would say, diverse education pretty quickly. And when you talk about just growing as an operator, like, man, that's the way to grow as an operator. And as a piece of advice to anybody listening to this, If you're saying, "Hey, I want to start a business," the number one way that you can prepare yourself, go and look for a small privately-held, fast-growing company and just get in the door. Just get in the door. It doesn't even matter what they hire you to do. You can scrub toilets if that's how you get in the door,

• 33:23Speaker 02

  because what happens at small, fast-growing companies is there's always a frontier. There's always this expansion that's going on, and there's always more than can be handled by the team. And if you get in there and you start being willing to take on new things and saying, "Hey, nobody's doing this. Can I do this?" Then you're going to hear "yes" a bunch, and you're going to get all this opportunity to learn in a bunch of different areas and build that skillset. And you're also going to be able to watch some entrepreneurs that are having success do it. And in general, we're memetic. Like, I love Twitter. I love all the resources out there, but I don't think they're nearly as helpful as watching. We learn through watching and imitating people that are doing things well. So when you've got an opportunity to do that... So the first stage is like player.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  They're usually like, it's you. It's you and a co-founder. It's a small team, and you're wearing a lot of hats, and you're doing a lot of things to try and find initial product-market fit and get this thing going. If you have success, then we're going to go to what I call the player-coach phase, which is you've got to start to hire. You've got to start to grow the team, partially because there's too much to get done. It doesn't matter how effective you are. Like, there's too much to accomplish for you to do it all yourself, and you are probably getting to the edge of like burnout. Like, a lot of times, this is what happens with people that have founded companies, is they get to the point where it's like, "Man, I've got to have some help. I've been going hard for two years, for three years, whatever."

• 34:48Speaker 02

  So you hire some people, but you now enter a phase where the new people you've hired, they don't know how to do anything, right? They've got to be taught, and who's going to teach them? You're going to be the one that teaches them. And while you're teaching them, the trains still have to run. Things still have to happen, and so how's that going to happen? Well, you're going to have to continue to do that as well. So the analogy here as a player-coach is you are simultaneously, you're having to perform on the field while, as you're doing it, coach the people that are hopefully... Someday going to take these things over. And so like, if you think about a defense in football, this is like the linebacker who he has his responsibilities, but he's also lining people up. He's yelling at the safety that he, you know, he needs to be closer to the hash.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  You know, he's calling out the audible based on what the offense is doing. And this is what it's like when you're a player coach. The main tension when you're a player coach is that you constantly feel like, man, if I just had some time to think, if I just had a little bit of space, I would be so much more effective. And, and that's really common. And the number one pitfall of this phase is a tendency to not actually coach is to continue to be a player. And it makes sense. Like what got you here was that you were a great player. And if you allow that to cloud your thinking, you'll continue to just press that button. When what the team needs from you is it needs multiplication and it needs coaching.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  And so here's a, here's a way that this will look. Hey, you know, Sally, I need you to, to do this and this on, on Amazon's advertising for me. And then you look in four hours later and you're like, hey, Sally, I just saw that I didn't get done. And she's like, yeah, you know, I was, I didn't really understand how this worked. And you're like, you know what? I'll just do it. Don't worry about it. I'll do it. The don't worry about it, I'll do it is a fatal phrase in this period. Because what it shows is that you're, you're reverting back into player instead of leaning into coaching. The other like reason why people will do this is that, listen, the new team members you bring on, no matter how smart they are, they're not going to be as good at you right off the bat. You have to make this intentional decision of like,

• 36:57Speaker 02

  I am willing to take a step back in performance to take three steps forward tomorrow. Right? That I could do this at an A minus level. My new hire might be at a C plus level today, but I'm willing to take that step back in order that a year from now, they can do it at an A minus level and my focus can be somewhere else. And so I, during this phase, I use, I use this like simple kind of thought process. The first, you do things, you have people watch and then you talk about it afterwards. Then you have, you do things, but you allow people to help you while you're doing it. You talk about it afterwards. Then you have them do it. And you are there sitting like literally by their side and available to help as they have questions.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  And then you talk about it afterwards and then they do it. Where you're available to be consulted if they run into roadblocks or whatever and you talk about it. And then there's a point by the fifth stage, they're on, they're ready to now do that with somebody else and they're ready potentially to become a player coach. And then the final phrase, like phase, I guess we'll say of this analogy is you're a coach, which means you're no longer on the field and it really is all about leading people at this point. And again, this works against your tendency because you've been a player for so long and for so long, the organization has succeeded because of you. I'll give a

• 38:21Speaker 02

  really good example of this. I learned that I was pretty good at sales and I loved being in mass retail sales conversations. I mean, these are, these are conversations where you can land 10, 20, 30 million dollar deals, very high pressure and, and I loved it. And for years I ran these. And in the last year, I've made the decision to totally extract myself from those. I've coached someone else who is a real leader in his own right and he has people that he is coaching and I totally bowed out. And I got a call about two months ago, right after one of their presentations where they had just crushed it. And Kelly, who had led the presentation and she's now like two layers down from me.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  She's, she's telling the story and I said, I am sad I wasn't there and I am so proud that I wasn't there and that you did it. Because that's what coaching is all about. It's when, because you've done a really good job of pouring into other people and, and developing other people, you don't have to be there and they can operate with excellence in your absence. And there's a part of you that'll be sad about it, but it's also fantastic because now your organization can scale. The, the biggest threat in, to the coach stage is that I remember when I, it's ironic, I went into the coach stage right around when COVID and kind of work from home was happening. And I would have these days where I'm on meeting after meeting after meeting.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  And I get off the last meeting, my wife says, how'd your day go? And I would say, man, I don't know. You know, I talked a lot and I tried to help people, but I didn't, I don't, I didn't accomplish anything. Like, there was nothing that got crossed off of a to-do list. And this is what a lot of leaders struggle with initially is that we define ourselves by what we crossed off the to-do list and what we did. Being a coach is about developing and not doing. And so you have to make that mental transition in order to be effective at that. Or again, you start thinking, you know, I need to be doing some stuff. I need to be accomplishing some stuff. And then you get in other people's business and you're micromanaging and it's kind of a mess. So anyway, that model's been really helpful for me.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  And I've shared it on social media and I hear constantly from people how helpful it is to them. Because this is really a universal thing that organizations go through as they scale.

• 40:40Anthony Pompliano?

  When you are making the transitions between these three different kind of roles, right? Between player, player coach, and then coach, when do you know to make them?

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. I mean, I think that you, aspirationally, you always want to be thinking towards the next one. Of like, what would it take? If I'm a player coach, where do my people need to get for me to abstract to coach? Because that's good leadership. Good leadership is when I can go up the next level and they can let, when everybody levels up. Right? And so I, I think that if you're being proactive, you can identify early, okay, I'm coaching this person to be outstanding with our logistics and our logistics scheduling. And here's where I feel like they'd need to be for, for that to be possible, for me to really abstract and for them to begin coaching others.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  And I'm going to build towards that and I'm going to cast vision for them of getting to that place. But there's also like, organizationally, you, you will just feel it. Like, in our organization, when I was still in the player coach role, What I started to really hear from people is, hey, sometimes our one on ones are getting pushed because you're in a spreadsheet and, or you know, I need that one on one time. So it's a good example. Like I came, I came to the conclusion that there was a negative correlation to how much time I was spending on my laptop, to how good of a leader I was being and how much I was driving the organization. Cause if I was on the laptop, I was doing tactical, I was doing player stuff. And the organization needed me to be a coach and that's usually the laptops closed and I'm talking to people.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  So some, this is also why it's so important to build organizations with feedback. Because the people around you on your team, they will help you to be able to pick up on, hey, it's time for me to grow. And, and here's what makes it so tough, Anthony. What makes it so tough is that everybody wants to be good at their job. Right? So you start a company and you're like, I've got to be a great player for this thing to work. And you finally kind of claw your way there. And right when you get there, okay, it's time for you to be something totally different that you don't know how to be very good. And, and just when you get to be a pretty good player coach, okay, now it's time for you to transition. And now you, you get to be a mediocre, you know, coach.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  And so that's another reason why we can kind of fight against it is that we just want to feel like we're good at things. But this is the nature of leadership. When you're doing leadership well, you're constantly feeling like you're being pushed outside of your comfort zone. When you're surrounded by people and you have a healthy organizational culture, they'll help reflect that to you. And, and if you kind of have a bias to, uh, when it comes to your own like thought process to say, hey, I'm going to tend to want to go towards comfort. I'm going to want to tend to stay where I'm, you know, with things that I know how to do. Uh, how do I continue to push myself? That helps as well.

• 43:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Another aspect of the business that I think is unique and, and I'm guessing has a lot of uh, kind of input to your success is, um, you described yourselves as mission driven and values based. Uh, you give at least 10% of every year profits, uh, to communities around the world. Uh, you say that your mission statement is We exist to give generously. And then you describe the core value of generosity at the heart of everything you do, from how you treat the employees, partners, vendors and customers, to affordable prices, warranties and replacement policies. Then on top of that, you also give a million dollars worth of bottles and a number of other what most people would

• 44:19Anthony Pompliano?

  consider philanthropic style, you know, kind of efforts. This is a for-profit capitalistic business that is very focused, you know, you're talking about long-term profit generation of investing in American manufacturing so that you can move quicker. Where is the value being driven from? Or why is the mission driven and kind of values-based, you know, a kind of focus of the company so important to you as the founder?

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. I'll give you three or four reasons here because I think this is really a great question. And we're a little bit of an avatar of a hybrid almost that I think is going to become more and more common. Just as context for everybody listening, I spent the first 10 years of my life in the nonprofit world. I raised my salary. And so it's not shocking maybe that I would create a company that had a different ethos. Simple Modern is, I would say, a little bit experimental, but as you said, very capitalistic, our EBITDA is in the, you know, tens of millions of dollars. Like, we are here to drive a profitable company. First reason is, the company having a mission where I feel like I'm really impacting the world in a positive way, keeps me and other senior leaders engaged for a very long period of time. We can do this for our career. If you

• 45:27Speaker 02

  look at what drives successful organizations, compounding is a huge part of that. And being able to have the same team together, we basically, our senior leadership team has been together now for eight years. And if you go through it, and you start asking people like about their future plans, what you would hear is, I think almost all of them would say, hey, I plan on spending my entire career here. And that is a massive competitive advantage. So when you have something, when you really can draw a straight line from the work you're doing every day, to saying, hey, at 80, I'm going to be able to look back and say, I feel good about my contribution to the world. You know, not just that we made a great business and we impacted employees, but also that I impacted a lot of other people's lives, you know, through the giving and the different things

• 46:08Speaker 02

  that we did, that I'm going to feel great about that. So that's, that's kept me kind of motivated. The second thing is, when it comes to recruiting, you need to have a differentiated pitch, you know, like, let's go back to the idea that we talked about when it comes to markets. For you to be successful in a market that's commoditized and competitive, you need to have differentiation. Most companies don't have any differentiation in their value proposition to a potential employee. Right? It's just like, well, here's our 401k and we make, you know, 3% more than this other job. And it's like, we turn people into mercenaries. Quality of life is way more complex than how much income and benefits, you know, monetary benefits that we derive from something. There's a lot of research on this.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  It actually like feeling like we're, how much we feel like we're learning, feeling empowered, how much we like our coworkers, whether or not we believe that we're creating something meaningful with our time. Like all of these things really add to quality of life. And I'm a big believer in that the alpha is in creating a company and a culture where you drive the highest quality of life. If you drive the highest quality of life, you're going to get the best people want to work with you. And if you have the best people wanting to work for you, then you're going to have a very profitable company. It's, it's actually not a very complicated game. So we were very intentional at thinking about, how do we create holistically the best quality of life? And obviously part of that is being able to say to people, yeah, like, you know what? When you go toe to toe with Walmart over those five cents and it's kind of draining,

• 47:36Speaker 02

  but you, you know, you get that concession, that means that's $70,000 that can go to, you know, clean drinking water. Right? Now you're not going to meet those people, but that's a whole bunch of people that now don't have to hike, you know, seven miles to get clean drinking water every day because you did your job with excellence in a negotiation with Walmart. And Walmart's actually a great example because that, this is how they would train buyers. They would teach buyers that anytime you're in a negotiation, we want you to picture the millions of customers you serve. And even if you're only saving one cent, you're putting one cent back in millions and millions of people's bank accounts by doing your job with excellence. So we're, we're able to recruit, I think, exceptional talent.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  I, I would say that we've probably built a team that is, uh, could run a multi-billion dollar company and we're running a company that's, you know, at a couple hundred million in revenue. And that's obviously a, a massive advantage. Another thing that I would say is that I think with the internet and transparency and just social, uh, changes.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  If you go and you you sit on a college campus, you talk to entrepreneurial students, you talk to the most talented students, this matters to them. It matters more to the generation coming up than any other generation. They really care about, hey, what is the impact of the work that I'm doing? So if it's a pretty important piece of recruiting today, it's only going to grow over the next five or 10 years. We're doing, we're building a consumer brand in, like you said, a commoditized space. So when it's funny to me that, you know, like here's one of our bottles. We've got, you know, our little SM logo on it. It is amazing to me that that same bottle, because it has those little squiggles,

• 49:24Speaker 02

  is worth four times a bottle that Walmart brings in from China. Right? But that's how we work, right? We like branding matters to us because branding tells stories about what we believe in and about what we belong to and the way that we think the world should be. And so if you're going to build a great brand, you better be able to tell a story about what you stand for and the way the world should look. And I think that that's kind of, just to close it all off, I just believe that that's what the world needs. And that's where it's going to go is you're going to have companies take an even higher sense of responsibility for the world around them. That, yeah, it is about driving profit, but it is also about creating the type of world

• 50:06Speaker 02

  that we all want to live in and that hopefully the work we're doing, Simple Modern is a small part of that.

• 50:13Anthony Pompliano?

  It's interesting to hear you kind of describe it in the way that you did, because most companies, they don't say it as explicitly, but they all do the same thing. Right? If you go inside of these organizations with the large tech organizations, whether you go to, you know, large industrial companies and kind of everything in between, at some point, there has to be something other than just pure profit that is kind of holding the team together. And sometimes it's an internal thing. Sometimes it is an external impact thing. You know, each company is different. The DNA is different, the types of people. But also, um, my guess is that by being so open and upfront about kind of the values and the mission and this idea of impact, uh, it attracts the right people. And it also may be

• 50:57Anthony Pompliano?

  repelling the wrong people, right? People who don't, you know, get attracted to that. They're not going to apply to work at your business.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And, and listen, this is one of my, my things for all the talk that we've had about diversity and diversity creates better teams. The, the best teams have no diversity in core values. Like, that's the whole point. What, what makes it a great team is that there isn't diversity among the core values. So like, we have a core value of excellence. We don't want you on our team if you don't care about excellence, right? It's not for you. We don't want diversity in that area. We have a core value of generosity. If you don't like generosity, then you're really not going to like the fact that you probably earn less because we give some of that money away. You're, you're not, we aren't for you. And this is part of building a strong team and a strong culture is that you're able to really clearly broadcast to the world, hey, we're not

• 51:48Speaker 02

  for everybody. But if you really care about these things, we might just be exactly what you're looking for. And as a result, we've been able to create a very cohesive team around that. And I, I think that's, as you're saying, like, that's a cornerstone of effective, effective teams and strong culture.

• 52:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it makes, uh, makes complete sense. My last question for you is, uh, your daily schedule. You, you now have transitioned into kind of coach. What does that look like on a day-to-day basis? What do you do kind of before you start, you know, quote-unquote, working? What are you doing during work? And then what are you doing after, uh, you get done with kind of your, your, um, you know, more core work, uh, of the day?

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, I get up, take my son to school. During the work week, I, I basically engage in two different types of activities. I engage in one-on-one, kind of coaching with the core leadership of the company. And even though that time is one-on-one, there's not leverage in terms of, there's a lot of people, there's incredibly high leverage in terms of who and the level of thought that's going into that. And then most of my other time, Is spent in high leverage activities, whether that's things that I post in social media or that's speaking to larger groups. So I really am trying to figure out, hey, how do I get the

• 53:06Speaker 02

  most leverage out of my time? When you invest in the right people that can multiply themselves, it is pretty profound, the number of people that you can impact and the amount of influence that you can have. And I think I've worried about 100 employees and I really see that now that I see people that have been in the company for a year and I'll hear them say a phrase that they've heard from the person that leads them, who heard from the person that leads them, who heard it from me, you know, a couple of years ago. So I'm very passionate about those two things. I think the social media involvement and the speaking is I'm also, you know, like, I'm pretty evangelistic about these ideas that we're talking about, about building businesses

• 53:47Speaker 02

  and about the way that you can do it that can be impactful to the country and the world. And I think there it's mainly about trying to think about about leverage. I'm an external processor too. So for me, it's actually really helpful to talk through. I don't have a lot of just sit in a room and think time because my best thinking actually happens when I have somebody else like you to bounce ideas off of and get some kind of dynamic response. And then one other thing that's, I guess, one other thing about my workday that's true. I have, we built a gym in the office and it's been awesome. So some of my one on ones, just different things, I'll take people down there and I will work out as we talk. And so

• 54:30Speaker 02

  I've been able to incorporate physical fitness into my, my kind of work schedule, which has been really helpful. It helps make sure it happens. And then I'm pretty protective, actually of nights. I don't work crazy hours. I mean, there were weeks I probably put in 50, 60 hours, but most weeks are more normative because I made a fundamental decision that I am going to, I want to be a better father and husband than I am CEO. And I think that probably the critiques of hustle culture that you see on Twitter, the best critiques aren't about, hey, it's evil to work a certain number of hours. I don't think that at all. I mean, I've had weeks where I laid it all out, as I'm sure

• 55:14Speaker 02

  many of the people listening to this have. But the critique that I think is valid is if you sell out relationships, if you sell out the things that really do matter in life, then why? You know, what's the point? What's the point in building a big company if you don't have anybody to enjoy it with? And if you haven't invested in the people that you care about the most? So my kids are nine and 12, and those years are fleeting, and I'm not going to miss those just because I'm running a big company. And could we maybe grow a little bit faster if I funnel all that time in the company? Sure, but I don't care, you know? And a lot of this goes back to when you win the game, what's the point?

• 55:56Speaker 02

  What were you trying to win? And for me, I'm not trying to amass the biggest amount of dollars in a bank account. You know, I'm really trying to make the most impact. And just like I was talking about leverage earlier, the number one area of leverage I have is in my family. Like, hopefully, my biggest impact is going to be in the lives of my kids and my wife and my close friends.

• 56:19Anthony Pompliano?

  That makes a ton of sense, Mike. Where can we send people to find you on the internet if they want to follow along? I know you've been posting a bunch of content. I've learned a lot from it, and I'm sure other people would as well. Where should we send them?

• 56:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, my Twitter, at Mike Beckham SM, and I think LinkedIn, I think I have the same handle. You can catch my stuff there. I'm also going to be releasing a 14-part podcast series about the building of Simple Modern and what we learned along the way. And we really get into a lot of the, you know, everything from the tactics to some of the questions you asked about, hey, how did we do it a little bit differently because we have this unique mission? And then finally, I'm a part of the Operators Podcast, which, if you're in the e-commerce world, I'm with three other guys that are running nine-figure brands, and it's really great for learning more about the e-commerce world.

• 57:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you guys do a fantastic job with that. I've listened to a couple of episodes and I'm like, man, I can't believe they're telling all the secrets on here. So I highly suggest people go check that out as well. All right, Mike, I appreciate it very much. I learned a ton. I know other people will as well, and we'll definitely do it again in the future.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me, Anthony, and thanks for what you're doing with your platform.