life is short, don't sell your soul

Summary

I almost started a supplement company in 2017. the spreadsheet said yes. my gut said no. here’s the story, and why I think personal standards are the most important asset you have as a founder.

1. vertical scale is more of the same. horizontal scale is adding new products or services to grow on a different axis. supplements were horizontal scale for Garage Gym Athlete, and the margins are absurd. you don’t even need a good product. you just need a trusted brand.

2. I was already making my own recovery supplement. dosed at the scientifically-backed amounts, taking it daily, believed in it. pitched two manufacturers to white-label it.

3. both came back the same way. love the product, love your audience, but the ingredients you want are too expensive at the right dose. cut the dose. compete on price. people probably take too much anyway, so a smaller dose is safer. that was the pitch.

4. that was the moment. I was already being asked to compromise on day one. and if it worked, I’d have to add whey protein I didn’t believe in, then electrolytes I didn’t formulate myself, then the next thing. slowly eating away at the standards, slowly trading the soul for scale.

5. you get one reputation. people watch you. customers, partners, even your team. if you start launching things you don’t truly believe in, they notice. they may not say it. they know.

it’s okay to leave money on the table to keep your standards. some compromises buy you a bigger company and a smaller person. don’t make that trade. and if figuring out your real standards sounds like a lot of work, try harder.

Transcript

vertical vs horizontal scale

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Welcome to the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and today I’m talking about why you should never sell your soul. All right, maybe not so serious, but here’s the deal. I want to talk about the time I almost started a supplement company, why I didn’t, and why you shouldn’t sell your soul when you are trying to scale your company.

All right, so let’s go back a little story time here. Garage Gym Athlete officially started 2015, something around 2014, 2015, depends on when you start like experimental programming and all that stuff. Anyway, we were scaling pretty well. And then as we were scaling and things were working, there’s always a hard part.

But then once it really started to go, I was like, okay, what else can I do to scale? Like, I don’t know if I can just get more athletes into my training every year for the rest of my life. So I started to think of what we call horizontal scale. So vertical scale is where you’re just doing more of the same thing, bigger.

Horizontal scale is when you are trying to add different products or services to your existing business. So you can still scale financially, but it’s through other products and services, right? So I started to think of horizontal scale options. And I could do nutritional programs, macros for people, merchandise like hats and shirts.

And we were doing some of those things, but where the real profit margins are in the fitness industry, if you haven’t realized at this point, is supplements. So supplements, they’re the highest margin product in reality, especially once you get to anything that’s capsules or powders. Some powders, depends on what it is.

Proteins aren’t necessarily as profitable, but anyway, a huge profit margin in there. And you don’t actually even need an effective product. You just need a good brand behind the product. So if people trust me and Garage Gym Athlete, they will buy my protein. That’s just how it works. Like that’s just how it works.

the recovery supplement

And I know that, like I know that. And I feel this incredible responsibility of one, what I recommend and don’t recommend to people. As someone who has an audience of people who actually listen to them, fairly popular podcasts, those kinds of things. I’m always paying attention to that stuff. But I really thought about starting a supplement company back in 2017 for one reason, and that’s because I was making my own supplement.

I was buying wholesale all these little tiny baggies. I had all these bags all over my house and I was making this recovery supplement based off of scientific research that said, hey, this is an effective recovery supplement. And I was actually making it myself and taking it every single day post-workout.

Now if you want to get into the formulation, maybe I’ll save that for a different podcast. But this is more just the business side of it. So I was making this supplement, really believed in it, I felt like it was helping. And then I was like, you know what? Maybe I will launch this to Garage Gym Athlete.

I didn’t know if I really wanted to get in the supplement industry, but I was like, for this I’m already taking and I think other people should take it too and I think it’s really helpful. So I pitched it to a few different companies who make supplements and help brands, add supplement lines. And it just wasn’t, it wasn’t feasible.

What I wanted to put in there, like the amounts, the scientific backed amounts of what I would need in these recovery amounts, and they were fairly more expensive like ingredients, it was just going to be too expensive. It was going to be cost prohibitive for most. I would have been eaten alive on the market because there would be another person who was selling a recovery supplement that is just way cheaper than mine.

Like I just wouldn’t have made it. I could have told you it was higher quality and everything, but people still typically just going to go with cheaper. So anyway, I was like, this is not going to work. Like it’s too expensive. But then the supplement manufacturers, hey, we think it’s a great product and you’ve got a great audience.

So I think we should still pursue it. I think we should just cut it down a little bit. And they tried to justify it of, yeah, these might be like the scientific backed amounts that you should have in here, but what if people take it twice a day or what if they take it too much and you do have the really potent ingredients in there and then there becomes a problem from them taking too much or something like that.

cut the dose to hit the price

And so their pitch was to, let’s get cost down, let’s cut it. Let’s cut it down to basically what I felt was going to be ineffective. Didn’t take me long to think, come back with, no, I’m not doing it. Because I just didn’t like how the relationship was started and this happened with two different companies.

They were just telling me what, they were telling me basically what would work and this is like what people probably don’t realize behind the supplement industry scenes. I’ve worked with a lot of people who own supplement companies and like masterminds and networking groups and stuff and some people are good, but for the most part, I’ve only had a bad experience with people who own supplement companies.

And so my moral to that story is I was just getting into it and I was already being asked to cut my standards and I wasn’t going to do it. Now I could have just said, hey, no, we’re going to go with a more expensive product, just launch it, let’s do it. But I was just like, I don’t see where this is going long term.

Because at the same time, what would have happened is say I launched this recovery product and it did well, I can’t stop there. I had this like proprietary blend, which I jokingly say proprietary blend, but I had this blend that I thought was really effective and I wanted to put in the scientific backed amounts and I wanted this recovery supplement.

But then if I wanted to keep scaling from there, let’s say that did well, I’m going to have to add a whey protein. What do I care about whey protein? If you’re a supplement company, you just have to have a whey protein. You just have to. You can’t not have a whey protein. But am I going to believe in the whey protein that’s being sourced from God knows where that I don’t believe in, but I have to add it to my product line because we have to have a whey protein.

And then it’s like, oh, electrolytes are getting really big. I better have an electrolyte supplement. And so now I have an electrolyte supplement, but maybe it’s not exactly what I wanted. Maybe the formulation is not perfect, or maybe the ingredients aren’t sourced exactly how I would prefer. This is competitive.

And you see where we’re going. That’s what I started to project in my mind is I either have to sell an expensive recovery supplement and I just sell this one thing, or I go down the slippery slope where I’m just slowly eating away at my soul and who I am and my standards. Now I’m not saying every single person who runs a supplement company is a bad person.

the slippery slope

They’ve all done the same thing. But I bet there’s a hint of it. I didn’t really want to launch that product, but we launched it anyway just because trying to keep up. Got to keep scaling. You got to keep scaling. Got to keep growing. So you got to launch new things. And so I just didn’t want to go down that road at all.

I didn’t think it was going to be healthy for me. It would’ve been great for the company, but it wouldn’t have been healthy for me because at the end of the day, even if they’re just small, tiny sacrifices in my personal standards, I would know it. Nobody else would know it. I could justify even the recovery supplement that the supplement manufacturer wanted to put out there.

It would’ve been fine. It would’ve been healthy. It may have even still been a little bit helpful. I could justify it. But when you have to start justifying things, I don’t think you’re in a position to be running a really high-impact business. I want to help people, and I also don’t want to sell my soul in the process.

I don’t want to sell my soul when I scale. I don’t want to start offering things I don’t truly believe in. I’m not 100% behind. If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no. Those are the things I want to be a part of and the things that I want to scale. I don’t want to start selling my soul and making any compromises in my personal standards because at the end of the day, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and you really truly you get one reputation.

You only get one reputation. People know it. Even if you only have an online business or online businesses like me, your reputation is still everything. People will continue to work with you. Even if I launch a new company, people might come do that new thing because they’re like, hey, I know you. I’ve worked with you in the past.

I know you’ll deliver. I know you’ll put out a good product. If they start seeing this weird scaling thing and it’s just getting messy and you’re starting to do things that you probably are compromising on your own ethics and integrity, people see that too and they know it because they hear you, they see you, they communicate with you, and they know that you might be doing something that you don’t even truly want to do.

you only get one reputation

That’s what I often, that’s what I see happening in the industry is we all need to scale, right? This is what you need to think about in your company. We all want to scale our business. You can do that vertically by doing more of the same or you can do that horizontally by adding additional things.

You’re going to get tapped out at some point. You can’t scale forever. If you could scale forever, you’d be bigger than Amazon. We can’t all scale forever. You have to decide, am I going to decide at some point this is good enough or am I going to focus on something else, a new project, but never ever compromise your personal standards.

I’m talking about your own personal standards, not some, oh, this would hold up in court, some sort of like baseline ethics. I’m talking about your personal standards. My personal standards are incredibly high, so I would never want someone else to ingest something that I didn’t truly believe in, and so I would never go down that route.

Now start thinking about that in your business. Are you doing things just to maintain scale or is it something you truly believe in? Because I think it’s okay to say no to money sometimes if you are going to be able to go to bed at night and be happy with yourself because if you hate yourself at the end of the day, but you’re doing well, what’s the point?

What’s the point of any of this? So don’t sell your soul. Find out what your standards are. It might take a day for you to sit around and think, hey, what are my standards, what do I stand for, what will I do, what won’t I do, and have those personal standards. It will take a full day of thinking through that, but think through it and never compromise.

If you’re like, ah, man, I don’t have a full day to think about what my standards are and what my ethics are, what my integrity should be, like, oh, okay, it’s a lot of work. I get it. I think you should just try a little bit harder.