Billy Grady — full transcript

Man, how are you? Nice to meet you.

Yeah. Likewise, likewise. I'm in Santa Monica, California. How about you?

Good vibes for sure.

That's good. Too busy sleeping lava. You're too busy swinging combo to worried about background. It's a good thing to have.

A good point. That's a really great point.

Great. Love Chica. Are you from there originally?

Chicago's great city. I spent some good time there. I went to Miami of Ohio, so I got to know a lot of Chicago folks. Because everyone from all the Chicago suburbs seem to go to Miami of Ohio. So.

I love it. Yeah, it's a real treat whenever I talk to someone from Chicago like yourself because I can say my aim of Ohio and you don't give me the thousand yard stare of like, wait, Miami, Ohio, what do you mean? You mean Florida? You mean Ohio?

State? What are you talking about?

Shockingly, you're going to find this funny, but San Diego, California is where I grew up. But.

I actually, I was born and lived in Cleveland until I was like five or six. So that's where my dad's from. And so I had a bunch of cousins and aunts and uncles that went to my higho. And so I had always heard of it and grew up knowing it. And then I went out and visited it when I was like looking for different schools. They had a great business school and just like, I visited the campus. And once I got to Oxford, I was like, this is the spot for me. So I was one of the few San Diegans that went to Miami. There was like, I think there was two of us in the whole freshman class.

You got IU.

Nice. Super good.

That's awesome. And so you're in Chicago now and how's the heat right now? Is there you going to heat wave? Are you good?

For sure? For sure. Well, cool.

I. Know. I know. We got, we got pretty lucky out here. It's not too shabby. It was a bit of an adjustment and a shock when I went to Miami because I was like, you know, I came from San Diego and so I was like, oh, I need to like check the weather and I need to like winter is a thing out here. My first pair of Tim's boots. So I was ready to rock.

That's it. That's it. I'm a huge fan of kava. I can't wait to try kava haven because I have been a big fan. I don't drink alcohol anymore. And so it's like naturally just a great alternative. And I totally see the need that you guys are fitting in the market. So I can't wait to go try some and let you know how I like it.

Thank you. Yeah. And the flavor profile is pretty good, I imagine, based on seeing some of your velocity in stores.

Yeah, that's been my gripe with most of these kappas is they taste god awful.

There's a, there's a halvin between like I want to, I don't want it to be like, oh, this tastes like fruit punch, right? You don't want that, but like you also don't want it to be like, oh, I can't even drag, I can't even enjoy drinking this at all. So there's that sweet and sweet spot in between, I feel like.

It. I'm definitely going to take you up on that because I'm getting ready this week to head out to our family as a lake house in western New York and we're going out for three, four weeks out on the lake vibes. And my dad is also recovering alcoholic and so he's not like super stringent. Like he'll have an edible every now and then kind of thing, but doesn't do alcohol anymore. And so I'm really curious because how he might like this because, you know, there is an effect that happens.

Oh yeah. Where you. At it?

Cool.

No, we're going to be in like 45 minutes outside of Erie, Pennsylvania, an hour and a half from Buffalo, a lake called Lake Chautauqua. It's like, it's kind of like right in that little corner like the far southwestern corner.

For, yeah, three, four weeks, which is always good to get the leg vibes in.

Yeah, thanks man. Well dude, listen, I'm super pumped to chat. Thanks for making the time and for submitting in that awesome application that you put in as well. I'll give you like a little bit of background on myself and on Mark. Have you connected with Mark before in the past or no?

Okay. Great. And you've, have you been like on his newsletter or like somehow you got an email or what was the context for you getting this?

And here we are amazing. That's super great. I love, I always love people that have like gone through and like watched the video too because like if you watch the video, you get a really clear sense of Mark's vibe as well and like what, what he's talking about and if that resonates, it's a really good sign. But yeah, I love it. So basically, I'll give you just kind of quick overview on what we're working on. And then I want to hear from you a little bit more about where you're at with your brand, even though you put some good stuff in the application and then I'll just ask a few questions. That way I can get an idea if I think you'd be a good fit for this incubator that we're, that we're getting off the ground. If I do think it makes sense, I'll go through all the details of what that looks like and then we can take the conversation from there. How does that sound for you?

Great. Awesome. So I've been working with Mark for a bit over a year now. I've been a founder, a multi founder founder myself. I've recently had an ice bath company I started back in right out of covid. And kind of hit the market fast at the right time. And exploded up to 20 million in revenue and two and a half years. And like working with all these cool athletes and brands and influencers and it was epic. And then we crashed hard. And so after the business went under, which for a variety of different reasons, mostly manufacturing. But after the business went under, I kind of started getting back to some of my own coaching and consulting stuff that I was doing previously. I was a head of operations at a online education and coaching company and so it helped scale that business. And so I crossed paths with Mark as he was launching his book and entrepreneurs guide to freedom and wanting to start to kind of get into this next arc of his career, which is really supporting founders in these ways. And, you know, he sits at a very interesting POV. Mark does with his experience of building Zico from scratch, you know, from the garage to the full arc of selling that to Coca-Cola for $200 million. Then like the unique perspective of buying it back from coke as part of ground force capital starting around force capital and working with a bunch of different founders. And the seat as a institutional investor. And so he sees and has the, you know, his perspective on what it takes to be on the founder side and also like what institutional capital is looking for because he talks to founders all days and, you know, writes 20 to $50 million checks for founders and for their brands. And so he's got like a real clear idea of like what these patterns are and what the things that hold people back is from his experience and from his observed experience and all the people he's worked with. So he's like, he's been wanting to do something like this. And so him and I partnered up because with my experience in the educational space, I was able to help him kind of like create some of these tools around this and help him package all of what he's doing to be in a way where he can actually impact the founders if he's so, so deeply cares about. So that's what got out the context. That's who you're talking to right now and why we're excited. We're finally putting this all together into an incubator that we're launching next month. And we did like a v1 of this in the fall and it was tremendous 10 out of 10 across the board. And now we're getting ready to officially launch this. So that's the context there. I will flip it to you now. And if you can just kind of give me the give me like a couple minute high level overview on what you've been working on, understand with your, with your life partner, also co-founder in this. I want to hear kind of the story to where we're at right now and then I'll pepper you with a few questions.

That you can do. I don't know if it felt like that.

Question. Sorry to interrupt a quick question. Just out of curiosity. Were you guys, you were actually selling the product and just saying like there's going to be a lead time? Was it a pre-launch? Like what were you doing?

Love it. That's great to know that that works. I was curious how someone would do that for like an actual consumer product.

Go.

Love it.

Nice. Smart.

Congrats on the piece of business you built. It's pretty incredible. A few questions. What's your D2C versus retail split right now? Just out of curiosity.

Yeah, for sure. Especially with the type of products you have. And then are you guys selling on Amazon too? Or.

Overall business great? And these are just because I do some other stuff from growth marketing. So I'm just more curious. But are you on TikTok shop too?

That's incredible. Love it. And what I'm seeing too is like a lot of TikTok, TikTok shop these days transfers over to Amazon too where it's like people see it on TikTok shop and then just go to Amazon to purchase it.

Yeah, cool. I love it. And then you, I think I remember you said something like you guys looked at EOS or you tried implementing EOS across your organization. Like tell me a little bit more about like the kind of managerial side of things from you as a founder. Are you CEO? Is Graciella?

Yep makes sense. And what would you say from your seat as you know as a leader in the organization and as a CEO? Like what do you what would you say your biggest bottleneck is personally?

Yeah for sure that that sounds pretty spot on too and I know at the stage and kind of revenue size and team size that you're at. I know that that's something Mark focuses a lot on and kind of sees as a big pattern is like is the founder this whole this is the whole arc of transformation and what the stinky bit is which we'll talk about later. But like it's how do you transition from being the founder like a scrappy founder to a backable CEO like a strategic CEO because those are two different things and kind of the paradox almost is or the irony is that like you need to become that CEO that backbone CEO to like usher the organization to the next level, especially to like you know for like a series a for example to be able to attract that institutional capital and that backing. Like getting out of the weeds and into that higher level strategy planning execution and bringing your team up along with you is like the biggest unlock that allows that to happen. From from what from what we.

Tell me a little bit more about like. So you've got your team dialed in. You've got some of the fractional and some of the full time people as well. Like what does. Your soft circling a series a do you have timeline on that right now?

That makes sense and where do you feel like the current business starts to break if growth keeps accelerating? Like what becomes a limiting factor towards your growth based on the way that you're running things right now if anything at all that you film.

Some notes here. Okay and for you personally because I know this kind of as you guys have grown what's like what's your relationship with the business been? Is it like energizing still feeling amazing with it? Are you working like a shit ton of hours like what's the what's your kind of personal relationship as it's been evolving with the with the Joel capacity has been shifting with this?

Yeah.

Totally get that man I relate to that so much I know that experience well like addicted to the Shopify notifications it's like Shopify like my dashboards are telling me how to feel.

I know and what would you rather be experiencing?

Yeah makes sense. Cool and then last question I have for you for right now is like what's your what's your what's your kind of strategic vision for for Cobb Haven? Are you are you looking to like build to sell like is that idea like what's your best case scenario over the next. I don't know say three to five years.

Cool love it. Sweet and then if you like kind of you get a sense of Mark's vibe from watching that video like if you could like wave a magic wand and let's say like let's say it makes sense and we bite you into the incubator and you work with mark for 90 days like what would like what would success look like for you like what would that change look like for you and Grace both like in your business in like let's say you weigh magic wand 90 days and you solve the things you want to solve like is that like you know not having your worth your self worth attached to the business and the business is succeeding as a result of that is that having more clarity on series a strategy like if you have any insight on what that might look like would be helpful.

Yeah.

Makes sense. Cool. Love. It. Sweet man well listen I feel very clear after this conversation from just taking my notes over here I feel super clear this is marking 100% healthy with this and this is exactly what he's designed this this incubator to do and so I'd love to just I can share my screen real quickly and just kind of walk you through a little bit more about what looks like. Cool and and I will preface by saying as well that to the extent that grace would be interested and want to participate in this too we often do love to have co-founders in together kind of on their own tracks but but together so another point for conversation that we can we can have but I'm just going to kind of scan through this quick I'm not going to go through the whole thing this page is available and I'll send it to you an email recap at the end too but basically. What we kind of talk about this is it's not this is not a course this is not a mastermind this isn't just like a series of videos this is like a true like learning lab is how we call it and it's built around super practical digestible implementation and like super clear actions to take that you can see the RI in your business right away like Mark does everything ROI based this is his nature of being being an institutional fund manager and founder so it's like everything is around like what is the least amount of time for these busy founders who work at 12 hours a day to be able to like implement these things that can level them up free up their time their brain space and implement the right tools to help bring lead themselves and lead their team around them so that's kind of the way it works it's like helping you build this personal kind of operating system and foundation and then from that place what allows you to share that and spread that to the team so everybody comes up together it starts with yourself and then all those other tools coming from that place so the way that just kind of this journey and kind of the arc of what what happens during this time is so like before there's this kind of foundation pre-work we're going to be launching this in August so we're just kind of we're filling out the last several spots for this cohort and the cohort itself is going to be 10 people. Max in that range that's going to be probably end up being like eight to 10 kind of people that are all founders of different types of businesses mostly it's food and bev rent out might be all food and bad that are confirmed but because obviously markets is food you know expertise in his background. So there's this group cohort so we're going to all start on the same date and before the cohort starts there's this onboarding assessment so it's like complete assessment of your strengths blind spots your leadership style your habits business personal objectives and this becomes the baseline for everything that follows and it kind of provides this 360 report that you're able to share with your team as well so we build a foundation of like like what how to best work with Billy based on like communication styles based on your personality assessment all those different things and then you do a one hour strategy session with mark where you review the assessment and define exactly what success looks like over the 90 days and beyond and get like super clear on that. Because again everything we want to track for this is ROI based and then you have direct access open so this is like really Mark is in it with you focused on you specifically and your business so you have a WhatsApp channel direct with mark throughout this process as well to have his mentorship and advise an advisory within your business. And then in August the actual group container starts which is 12 weeks and every single week there's one concept one tool and one shift so this is anchored with a weekly live session with the small cohort where Mark will go over. A you know we'll go over a concept and then on that call as well they'll be Q&A and stuff like that. But then we have this whole system built out that's like a personalized dashboard for you that is AI driven as well so everything builds on itself and becomes a really valuable tool. So it helps you build this backable CEO operating system which is like practical tools that you fill in and allow you to implement your business like you're saying like okay cool this is how I'm going to now approach this one on one that I have with my head of ops tomorrow or my VP of marketing that's coming up next week or this is how I'm gonna I'm gonna now approach this difficult conversation I have to have with this team member that's like a step up or step out type of conversation so that's like really the bread and butter of what these tools are for and what Mark does with this. And then weekly implementation as you go through that and then you have bi-weekly coaching setup as well so every other week you have 30 minutes on the calendar with mark as a baseline for like check ins and real time feedback and coaching and then you have the ability to schedule more calls if you need most people you know need to especially as busy founders bi-weekly is a nice cadence but that's kind of the cadence throughout. And then at the end you do another one hour strategy session where you review the results with mark and helps you keep working through things and then operates operating system stays yours to keep and then there's opportunities to keep working with mark down the road and after that ends in various ways depending on what makes sense. So it's kind of this this incubator is kind of the best word for it because it's this cocoon if you will that you're supported from all these different tools and all these different angles and also the founder community ends up becoming one of the most special things because you're learning from people. There's always someone that's like a little bit further along than you and there's always someone a little bit behind you and so because of that you're able to constantly learn and share and like when you're sharing what's working for you and you're processing your things in real time and you're learning from other people it becomes so valuable for transformation. So there's like it's over 17 hours live with mark during the program. And then the best thing here that I always like to highlight is that. There is an ROI guarantee on this. So as I mentioned as you probably imagine at this point in Mark's career he's he he's doing this because he genuinely wants to impact people and give back to the founder community and help people succeed. And so like he's not just able to make a quick buck. So he puts an ROI guarantee on everything so it's an investment. Mark treats it like one. So you define exactly what success looks like. And then if it's revenue generated deals close enterprise value created time reclaimed etc etc your leadership capacity expanded. We get really clear on defining what those are objectively. And then after going through the program if you fully participate implement the work and don't achieve at least a 5x ROI. Mark will either continue working with you until you do or he'll refund your investment in full, which is your call. So that's what this comes with. So it really is no it really is no risk. So I'll pause there because I know I just threw a ton your way and and see what what thoughts or questions you have for me.

Yeah great question it's a 90 it'll be a 90 minute session and it'll be mark sharing certain experiences and teaching on certain principles. So like he's identified these patterns and principles that the best founders, the most backable founders have and what he learned himself. And so like each week is focused on one of those patterns and principles. And then so it'll be him like, I don't know for let's say 30 minutes to 45 minutes will be him like teaching on this topic. And then it'll be Q&A and then each each and then each topic will come with a specific tool for how you can make it. Practical for yourself and then like an action item for how to integrate it. So that's kind of the arc of that. It is like what naturally ends up happening in this especially because of a tight group is that like it becomes like you know almost like a ypo form of sorts where it's like we are all shared in confidentiality within that and like people go as deep as they want to go. So it's like up to you for as deep as you want to go and sharing whatever you want to share. Largely what ends up happening is the group goes very deep and that ends up becoming one of the most powerful parts of all of this. But I don't know if that helps with a little bit more clarity there.

I've got an investment. Is there any other questions around like structure or whatnot before I go into the investment?

Absolutely it's not it's not ground force incubator where there's any guarantee of any type of you know investment obviously but this is also a big reason why market started this and why we have really stringent evaluation metrics for who we invite into the program and you know you check every single one of those boxes both as the founder that I'm talking with here but also your business as well because ideally in the best case scenario is that like through these 90 days Mark's able to help you make these shifts to where it becomes like you know and depending on where you're at and you know what. The deal scope is you know obviously a lot bigger than just a few of these things but it's like he wants this to be a pipeline foreground force deals because if he builds a working relationship with these founders already and gets in and involved in the business becomes a lot easier and he sees the potential in the trajectory and gets to know them in their business like it becomes a lot easier for him to confidently make these investments. So we do like we absolutely do view this as like a like a feeder kind of funnel, if you will, to ground force and have not necessarily not not everybody might be wanting to raise a substitutional capital. They might already have done some or it might not be fit for ground force but like mark has a great role decks of other institutional capital that you know you can make intros and stuff like that. So it does that that is part of the design here. But like legally and for all intents and purposes it's not a ground force feeder and there's no obviously guarantee or anything like that.

Cool so yeah in terms of investment like I mentioned all that is included the one-on-one time with mark the group stuff that the tools the kind of the dashboard that you get and that's something you keep as well and like just within Mark's time that he's spending a ton on we price that to be as cheap as it can be for him to make it worth his while and then also to make sure that we have the brands invested into it. So the full ticket for the entire 12 week program is 12k and that includes everything we went over, we break it up into three payments, three monthly payments of 4k for cash flow because most brands ever brand needs to or should be mindful of cash flow. So that's that's how that whole thing works. If there was an interest as well for your co-founder to go through it, we do offer like a, you know, a really great co-founder deal where it's like your co-founder goes through for just an additional 3k. So it ends up being 15k for people to go through the whole thing. So ends up being 5k per month for three months of like top tier executive coaching for both you and your co-founder, which is a steal when it comes all said and done for just executive coaching in general. Not to mention all the practical tools and marks actual POV as a founder and investor. So that's the full scope.

Cool. I like it. So yeah, what are your thoughts? Does it sound like some of you guys might be interested in what are you thinking?

Yep.

Sure.

Totally. I love it. I would also love to connect you with mark for conversation if you're open to that.

Because he always likes to, he trusts me in making the invitation and the offer to everyone, but he always likes to like, you know, have a 30 minute sync with the founder to like, you know, bob out and like understand a bit more of context. So it might be helpful for you as well in assessing might be something helpful for you. I can send over an email with what we kind of recap we went over and this linked as well. And then might be something that's valuable for Grace to hop on that call with Mark 2. That way you guys can both meet him because I'm sure she's going to be involved in the decision making if not the program as well. Would that be something that would you be down for?

Okay, sweet. Yeah, so let's do that. I will send over an email right now. You can kind of do your own research and digging sitting with it all. And then in the email, I'll see you see mark on the email on his, his EA. That way you guys can find some time in the next week or so to sync up and connect. And by that time you might have some more questions about the program or some ROI thoughts around that too. And he part of this work too is him helping you shape what that is of like how can we define ROI and some of the stuff that's like, that can be a little bit subjective. Like how can we get objective about defining ROI, especially as it relates to like some of your series a goals? I think would be very interesting. But I'll go ahead and get that email out this afternoon and we can get you on. I think for what it's worth, I think you would be a stellar, stellar fit for the, for the program and you guys would get a get a lot out of it.

Thank you. I'm also going to send the ground force capital address because I know Mark's partner Caroline, she literally ironically were having this conversation. I was with her on Thursday for her and mark both on a meeting on the project we're working on. And she came into the meeting as like a four o'clock meeting. She came in with like a wine glass full of kava, like some kava brand and she like spit it out. She was like, oh, that was horrible. So she's a kava fan. She like spit out the kava that she was drinking. So I would love to send some to her as well.

All right Billy, so great to connect man and keep up the great work and I will talk to you soon.

Of course. Take care. You too. Cheers.