Transcript: Russell Breuer on UnKibble, Momentum, and Grit

Good morning and welcome back to the Late Start Show. We are here today with Mr. Russell Brewer, University School Class of 1998 graduate and a founder and CEO of Spot and Tango, a fresh pet food company that's been making waves in the pet health world. How are you doing today Mr.

Brewer? Fantastic, thanks for having me on. 1998 feels like yesterday. Well thanks for joining us and we always start at the beginning in our episodes and kind of talk about that journey to university school. So we're going to start there.

What was kind of your childhood like? Where'd you grow up? Sure. I grew up in Shaker Heights, went to Fernway Public School and then transferred to university school in fifth grade, so lower campus.

And then went all the way through, obviously, to the upper school, Hunting Valley. Lived on Shelburne Road, Grenway first, then Shelburne Road, which is a striking distance from lower campus, which was nice. And then the family moved out to Aurora. So a bit of a commute, 30, 40 minutes way back when.

But yeah, no, lots of family and friends still live in and around the Cleveland area. So I'm back with decent frequency. You know, kind of thinking back to your time at U.S., were there any teachers or classes that had a big impact on you? And do you still remember some of those classes or teachers?

Yes. You know, I thought you'd ask me this question. So I had to like jog my memory this morning. Roger Yeh-Dede, who passed recently, was a big fan favorite, languages, and spent a number of years going abroad, trips to France, Spain, Italy.

I remember those spring break trips very fondly. Signor Pla, of course. The list goes on and on. There's some folks that are still there, Mrs.

Morgan, of course, and a few others. But no, I think very fondly of my university school days and still very much in touch. I think I mentioned to you kind of in the warm-up show, we had an event at Spott & Tango headquarters just before the break from the holiday. We had about 70 alumni in the New York City area came to the office and shared a bit of the story of kind of how I built this with Tom Berry, who was an early investor in the company, and of course, an alumni of the University of New York personal school as well.

So the community beyond senior year is strong. There's good depth and breadth of bench. Yeah, that's awesome. And what about outside the classroom?

Like those sports clubs or other activities that obviously US emphasizes? What were some of those spaces for you? So I played soccer. I played tennis.

I was editor-in-chief of the Maybian. So I spent a lot of time, you know, Saturdays and Sundays kind of assembling photos and copy and kind of bringing memories to life. in a published edition. So that was kind of a notable achievement. But yeah, on the athletic field, I was always very involved, you know, from middle school throughout.

I think that was really important generally that at US, everyone's really encouraged to participate. Kind of, I would say, regardless of ability, there's opportunities for everyone in multiple sports. I wasn't like the greatest tennis player, but I got some reps, you know, and really enjoyed myself. So really, again, think very highly of those days.

You know, it might be hard to just pinpoint one, But do you have a favorite memory or maybe just a funny story from your U.S. days? Maybe something that still to this day you can kind of smile when you think about it? Gosh, that is a great question. Honestly, I think it was probably the Maybian experience.

It was a small group of folks, obviously all volunteer. You know, the job was kind of after hours, before school, after school, weekends. and really gave me an opportunity to interact with both students, my peers, and also the faculty. And, you know, I remember in those days we were given, you know, a proper budget. It was kind of a $25,000 or $30,000 budget to put forth to actually publishing, which is material.

Those are our meaningful dollars and was trusted to kind of lead the ship. And so I think really fondly of that. And we have obviously a copy at home, which kind of validates that actually to my young children that dad actually did some things. Yes, I would say that that was probably one experience that stood out most.

And then looking back, in what ways did you really prepare you for the experience, whether in college, business or just life in general? Are there any skills that you kind of took from high school and U.S. that you kind of find yourself even using today? Yeah, honestly, work ethic one, but first principles problem solving, I think, really stands far and above. Regardless of the issue, and we can talk about some of the challenges of building a company from the ground up and from zero to one to larger.

First principles problem solving is really breaking down a problem into its individual components and then assessing how to address each of those components to come up with a solution. and the university school really taught structured thinking. In my day to day, I face new challenges every day. There's things we talk about internally, which is like net new, right? I'm like, okay, I've never faced that challenge before, whether either an individual or a circumstance.

And it's like, okay, how do we, what is the structure and way to approach a solution? I think that's some of the framework that US taught for sure that I certainly employed in college and then afterwards as well. And after U.S., you went down to Atlanta to study at Emory for college. And there you studied international studies in Spanish.

Yes. So what drew you to those subjects? And maybe how have they been useful in ways you might not have expected at the time? Yes.

So I would say always an interest in business. The Spanish language. My father was born in Caracas in Venezuela. My grandfather was a diplomat.

So I've always had a Spanish influence. I wanted to carry that those language studies from fifth grade all the way through high school, hence the reference to Yadid and Senor Pla, and then through major in Spanish, but also supplemented that with international studies, which is within the political science realm, always had an itch to do something overseas. And I thought by having language and then some of the political science background as well, that that would be an enabling factor, which ultimately led to a career in management consulting. I did transfer overseas and worked in London for eight years in management consulting and then private equity.

So that was a means to an end. But it was a broad kind of liberal arts degree. I don't think there was a vision on day one of freshman year of like, I wanted to be an investment banker or a lawyer or an accountant or an astronaut. I was like, I'm drawn to business and international. one so i chose those two those two curriculums as as a means to actually achieving that that destination you know after kai emory and after college and business school you started your career in consulting as you said private we we spent about 14 years in that world was that always the plan from the beginning or did you kind of find your way slowly into those industries and how did that early career really get started do you remember that kind of first job yes yes honestly friends had kind of mentioned the like management consulting or consulting world, you know, while at college as being a great place to cut your teeth and learn about business.

And I'd argue for a lot of college graduates or either MBAs as well. A lot of people go into consulting, right? So you work with its strategy, you work with large corporates, Fortune 50 companies. And again, it's all first principles problem solving, either it's research driven primary or secondary.

It's understanding what the problem is for the client and then figuring out ways to solve that either through Excel models or desktop research or otherwise. That for me was a training ground of how to learn more about the real world. And I started doing that in Washington, D.C. And of course, Kaiser Associates was the firm.

They transferred me to London, which was meant to be kind of a 12-month stint and it turned into eight years. I ended up pledging my allegiance to the queen, getting a passport. You know, for a Cleveland kid living in London, it was a playground, right? You know, taking the Eurostar to Belgium or Paris on weekends or ski trips.

You know, in those days, it was like all easy jet and Ryanair, you know, 20-year-old flights, hit the slopes. It was an incredible experience. Of course, eventually, my career evolved into finance because I was more interested in kind of how to capitalize companies and the financial world, which again, a lot of these skills informed my entrepreneurial journey. And kind of to reference the international studies in Spanish, I was able to apply my Spanish skills.

I did a lot of work in Madrid, in Spain, did a lot of work in Mexico. So I used Spanish on the job and that was a gateway, a door to getting those jobs and those projects within the consulting world. So, but again, the impetus for that and like the introduction was networking, right? So, you know, folks at college, hey, this is a cool career, if you're interested in that, like, give it a try, I know some folks.

And so networking was really important to provide some of those opportunities. And you obviously did make that move after the successful 14 year career to and made the big leap to big leap to entrepreneurship. What was that spark that kind of piqued your interest so much that you decided to leave that stability and start something of your own Yeah so so you know consulting taught me like how the world I been fascinated with things this is like my own personal journey I love factories and I like supply chains Like my brain, it just gravitates towards like, you can make a product, you can ship it to like a third party warehouse, that warehouse can ship it to a customer. And there's like 18 wheelers and trucks and pallets and big equipment and automation.

I've just always been fascinated by that type of work. And so my consulting days, I worked on projects, gosh, with companies like Procter & Gamble and Lockheed Martin, you know, Nortel, Verizon, like the let's go BP overseas. So I saw that world and I always had an itch to be in what we refer to as being an operator. And I'm sure you guys are the same.

Everyone has good ideas. There's always a good mousetrap and, you know, over a coffee or you're hanging out with your friends the weekend. you know the post-it note of like or even just like in the cards like oh hey it would be cool to build fill the blank right this app or this idea or like what if or like there should be a better way of doing x i was always the guy with my friends to to show up the next day having thought through the idea a bit more so i felt this urge to do something more and so um that was always kind of embedded in my psychology and then when i moved back to i was transferred to new york actually I met Tom Berry used to work for Tom Berry at Zephyr Management he's an early investor in the company of course U.S. alumni board member as well and so I was kind of reintroduced to New York in the U.S. and then eventually found my way into the pet food industry my wife was cooking fresh human grade meals for her mini golden doodle Jack this is you know 10 odd years ago we're mission-driven people big believers that health and wellness is a right not a luxury So this very kind of homegrown idea in a studio apartment in New York City, which is totally cliche, of course, turned into this thing. And it was like nights and weekends. And, you know, we developed these recipes that were developed with veterinary nutritionists to balance for dogs dietary requirements.

And so we kind of bootstrapped, built a website all on the side. So in those days, I was doing the private equity thing. my wife was working at a bullish bracket bank, side hustling, right? I was the guy in a suit going to an incubator kitchen in Queens and cooking dog food. My friends were like, okay, whatever you do, don't do that, okay?

There's like a million other things, like stick with your day job. But I felt this urge. And then ultimately, we felt and saw velocity as in like sales. The neighbors told their friends, friends sold friends, and all of a sudden, this demand emerge for these products.

And there was an inkling of like, hey, we have something here. Let's tease this out and let's really evolve this into a full flush business. And I'm sure there were. Can you tell us about some of those early hiccups or maybe funny mishaps in the beginning, like some of those kind of oops moments that- How long did it have?

How long did it have? I could see weeks. So there's an expression like fail fast, fail often. So this is, you know, studio apartment.

I had to get my food handler's license to figure out how to cook this stuff. So taking a step back, what is Spontango? We are, it's all fresh human grade ingredients. So anything you'd feed your family and your friends, we give it to the dogs.

There's a nutritional pre-mix, which is added to each of the meals, which makes it nutritionally adequate for a dog's dietary needs. But again, it's ground beef, ground turkey, green beans, brown rice, like all this stuff, like literally go to Heinz, buy it off the shelf. That's what goes into the dog's diet, okay? The early days, you know, I mentioned like incubator kitchen.

It was like food handlers license. It's administered in 23 different languages in New York City. Most people in the restaurant trade need a food handlers license. It teaches you how to like cook product.

You know, you don't store raw meat over finished products. Temperature danger zone, how to cook. I don't want to cook. So I can assure you there were many days I call this like the dark times of like working the graveyard shift right from like 8 p.m. until 4 o'clock in the morning with three or four guys from the Bronx, like I take my tie and suit off and put on like an apron and a hairnet and cook product.

And then we'd have bike messengers show up the next day and deliver that product to customers throughout the five boroughs, Manhattan, Brooklyn, etc. So many mishaps, late deliveries, you know, we would ship boxes, they would fail, the boxes would break we'd run out of product um i i'd go to a butcher on ditmars avenue in queens and the early days it was like i'd buy 20 pounds of beef turkey and lamb at a time and all of a sudden i started buying like 100 pounds each 500 pounds each the guy's like what are you what are you doing he was selling most the lamb to the greek community right for eastern i was buying it feeding it to dogs that was out of my mind um so they were very early mornings and late nights Gosh, a P&L in those days was like the furthest thing from my mind. It was all about getting product market fit. Like can I create something and can I meet demand?

Is there interest in those products? And that took a lot of sweat equity. And in those days, I had kind of one or two kids and two kids turned into three. The dog was living in Midtown Manhattan.

So there was like a lot on the plate. It was all inside, right? So this was not a full-time thing. It was nights and weekends.

It got to a point, of course, where Molly said, this is either like, I'll do it full-time, you do it full-time, or like, it's over. Like, we can't do it all. And so that was kind of April of 2018 when I decided, okay, let's do this full-time. But there are war stories until the end of time.

I can assure you in the entrepreneurial world, things break literally every day, even now, right? I'll get a message and it's like, oh, a truck broke down in the desert. There's a quarter of a million dollars worth of fresh frozen product. Truck's out of gas.

There's no tow trucks. What do you do? It's like the MacGyver moment. And you're like, okay, first principles.

Okay. First principles. How do we like, let's assess like the issue. Then let's walk through the steps to, to resolution.

So, um, and I could talk for hours about the scar tissue. I build it every day. With your dogs, whether that's check or Sully, right? How have you kind of really made sure that this product is just the best for any type of dog?

And how have you really made sure that like, it is so healthy for these like kind of animals? Yeah. Yeah. So, so firstly it's personalized, right?

So what does personalization mean? So in our, on our website, we ask a number of questions about your dog, your dog's weight, activity level, and lifestyle. And that informs the number of calories your dog needs per day and per meal, right? So why are calories important?

Calorie informs weight. There's a serious problem that people refer to it as like the pet health epidemic. One in three dogs is overweight. There are 90 million dogs in the U S it's a lot of dogs.

And the reason for that is in the back of most pet food labels, though we are range. If your dog weighs between, I'm making this up 20 to 40 pounds, feed one to three scoops a day. That's a huge caloric band. I may feed Woofie one scoop in the day and he maybe gets two at night because he's been a good dog, but that doesn't do Woofie any benefits to his waistline.

And so part of what we're doing is like dialing in calories and a personalized offering. That's one. And then second is all of our meals exclude things like artificial additives, synthetics, food, colognes, perfumes, things you probably read about in the pet food industry. Historically, the industry is a highly processed diet, high extrusion, high heat, high temperature, and that's not good.

It leads to things like allergies, dander, other pet health afflictions. And so our mission was to address that by offering a complete holistic health solution with whole ingredients. I mean, to be analogous, it's like, how would you you feel you get McDonald's every day, right? Like not great.

So we're really trying to offer what's called affordable health and wellness, dial it in through a personalized solution. And that's worked well, not only for our dogs, but our customers as well. I'm just thinking about my dog who, you know, we still give her the kibble that's, and she, every day she'll go up, she'll kind of push it around because obviously same thing she eats every day. And I think like if she had this fresh food, how much more life would we see in her?

Like, how much more energetic would she be? Have you seen like any stories of dogs that have shifted and been just more full of life? Thousands, thousands and thousands of stories of dogs who either lost weight, boost in energy, have appetite is a big one, believe it or not. A lot of dogs actually are picky eaters and they kind of push the food around.

They're not interested. That's big one um better skin and coat health reduced dander dander um reduction of kind of teary eyes so we've seen it across the gammon we obviously are in touch with our customers in real time since we're direct to consumer right so we get all first part party data which is the beauty of our model is our customers tell us like what do they want what's going well like what's not going well so we have food we have supplements we offer treats we launched a new product called pup gum recently which we can talk about um which is a fun launch um which is in the dental care category the customers because they're in touch with us on email sms chat voice i talk to customers every day we learn so much from their experience beyond even just the product quality or format the delivery experience you know is that extra dps late the internet experience the website etc so there there so much that we we learned either from their dogs experience and and how they benefit from the diet or the customer experience which informs how we take action internally to meet those needs You know I kind of curious about your company name You know, Spontango is a great name for just kind of this dog company. What is the story behind it? And like, was it like, sir, in a moment that happened, was the name of other dogs?

How do you come up with the brand name? It's a good question. So I want to say Spot is a dog, Tango is a cat or a Spontango or no. really no story story the the truth is the name of the company is brewer premium pet food company that was the original name it's still kind of the holding company brewer's my surname b-r-e-u-e-r the challenge with that is it's hard to pronounce brewer breuer and it's very difficult to spell is the u a u or a w now if you google search brewer in new york city marcel breuer the artist pops up okay in the e-commerce game if a customer can't spell the name of the company that's bad for business they'll never get to your website or they'll be fed a google ad from some some other entity and so we decided kind of in february of 2019 to rebrand and spots and tango actually was my um i was kind of a formal co-founder once we decided to kind of scale full-time i built a founding team my co-founder's father came up with the name spots and tango and the reason is it's it's simple to spell to remember and it's ownable right so when you search any name like if you're doing a search for a company or otherwise you want to own the first page search results right if there are other brands competing for those clicks either through an ad or organic search that's bad for business like they're competing for clicks spot and tango like no one owns spot and tango it's all us so we're on you know first 25 pages that's that's just our real estate and so there there were both branding reasons to kind of rebrand, to change the name for memorability's sake, and then also strategic reasons from the e-commerce perspective. And you guys are obviously a pet food brand that focuses on quality, and in an industry that's super competitive, how do you keep that mission kind of front and center while also, you guys are obviously a business, and so how do you, I guess, question is how do you keep that quality center while also trying to compete in a super competitive industry?

Yeah, so a couple of answers. One is scales unlock margin wins for sure, right? Two, the Unkibble story was, is really kind of, they, we call it the kind of catching a tiger by the toe. We were kind of fresh frozen in the early days.

So the original recipes, it's like a lean cuisine for dogs, right? It's a cooked format, it's flash frozen, and then shipped direct to consumer with insulation, dry ice, et cetera. One, the challenge with that, and we still have those recipes today, they're wildly successful, but the challenge with that is cold chain costs money. It's expensive and two, it's inconvenient.

So when you're kind of where your consumer hat, you have to defrost, you have to store the meals in your freezer. And if you're a New York City customer, you've got a very small constrained space and you're basically choosing between a spot in Tango and your own food, like that's a challenge. Two, it's inconvenient. You have to defrost and serve, it's quite messy.

So we incorporated that customer feedback to my earlier point and decided to launch what's now called Unkibble. And Unkibble is a product, we extract all of the water. We use freeze dryers, the freeze dryers about the size of a shipping container, they're very large. Take out the water, which makes the product shelf stable.

If it's shelf stable, you don't need cold chains, we cut costs. So we're 30 to 40% less expensive than anybody else in the market offering these types of ingredients, still delivered direct to consumer, still delivered personalized and still using the same ingredients. So we became very price competitive to answer your question more directly in terms of like that keeping quality, but competing. We were competing on price.

And then the big game change for us, we launched in April, 2020 on Kibble. We were a five man team. It was like in the midst of COVID. We all had COVID.

We were all fully remote. You know, we had a few dollars on the balance sheet. Okay, this is like the early, we call it the science experiment days of like, you know, a strong wind the company may blow over. We launched on Kibble and we, I'll never forget, we were debating whether to order a 70 or $80,000 purchase order, which is material, it's a lot of money.

And we would last kind of three or four months. We sold out in three days. And we issued a second purchase order for half a million. We didn't even have half a million dollars.

And it was like, okay, how do we figure this out? How do we like, how do we scale this product category? It started this journey over the next two or three years of outsourcing to, at our peak, six other co-manufacturers across the country that were making Unkibble. So imagine six factories in places like Texas, New York, Utah, California, Oregon.

Then you have to connect all the dots with trucks, freight, and then you have to connect all the dots with warehouses to get to the end of consumer via FedEx or EPS. So our supply chain became unbelievably complicated and difficult to manage. And long story short, we then decided to in the source. We built a factory in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

We in-sourced all of the production and then unlocked significant margin wins for the business. So again, enabling to be price competitive because we weaned off third parties which charge price premium. We call it tolling, but price premium for our products. And then the third point is economies of scale.

So once we kind of hit high velocity in terms of growth and growing the business from kind of six figures to nine figures over a five year period, now the purchase orders for raw ingredients like meat or turkey or ingredients or fresh vegetables, et cetera, is very large. And so the price comes down, your cost of goods sold goes down. But again, that's five years of story in kind of a minute. So it takes a while to get there, but those have been some of the enabling factors of how we've been able to compete.

Cullen Rochefoucahy, Ph.D.: As a leader, what kind of company culture have you tried to build at Spontango? What do you want your team to kind of feel about the work environment and its mission and kind of just learn from the company? That's an awesome question. I'm the culture keeper and the founding team is that we have to incentivize very high performing.

So a lot of the folks we hire at the company, we call them MBBs, McKinsey, Bain, BCG. They're usually high pedigree academics, consulting background, not that that's the only background you need. We do hire a lot from the consulting world because they teach first principles in particular in the business setting. We do all sorts of things to kind of maintain culture.

Firstly, we're in our office headquarters three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Allentown seven days a week, so productions doesn't stop. We do things like all hands meetings once a month. We bring in guest speakers. We do lunch and learns.

We're big on education. So when someone brings a new product or technology to the table, they talk about it internally, though, like an hour-long session. We're big on continuing education. So whether the accounting team wants to kind of level scale up, we sponsor that as a company.

So we want to provide an environment where people want to come to the office. Um, and we're also adapting in real time. I think it's been, it's been a challenge for a lot of companies, kind of post COVID of like, well, are you remote? Are you full time in five days?

Are you hybrid? Like what is, what is the balance? I think we've kind of been able to thread the needle of, of the work life balance of we respect people's personal time. They're also working, right?

So we pay them money. So, okay, you gotta be in the office, but we ask that people are kind of plugged in when they're obviously at home. And so we've kind of found the balance. It's still a challenge, admittedly.

And it's something we're very proactive about because we want to really ensure that we have high retention of hire. Hiring takes a while. We've made mistakes along the way and hired the wrong people, but we've done a much better job now at hiring the right people and then retaining that talent, which is really, because again, this is not just a me story. There's a whole team, ops, marketing, finance, supply chain, creative, data, engineering, all in-source, all of those that contribute to the collective success of the company.

And so ensuring those folks stay motivated is really, really important to the success of the business. And obviously entrepreneurship is a roller coaster. I'm sure you've had those moments where you're like, wow, I made it. And then kind of those where it's like, should I really be doing this?

But how do you kind of stay in the middle of that roller coaster and kind of try to keep, you know, things in perspective and not get too high or too low. Yeah, that's a very, because you're asking great questions. That's also really insightful. Entrepreneurship can be really emotional because there are highs and lows, right?

There can be the reward of selling a product really quickly. And you're like, yeah, great. Like revenue's up. And then you're like, well, wait a minute, I have to operationalize and make the widget.

How the heck am I going to do that? I need equipment. I need people. I need to figure that out.

So it's like one success becomes a problem, right? And so in the early days, it was very difficult for sure when you're a three or four person team. And again, like quit job, income goes to zero, raise a little bit of capital from family and friends. Everyone's looking to you to ensure you're doing the right things and making the right choices.

I'd say like physical activity is healthy. So I work out. I have three kids and a dog and obviously family and my wife, family at home. And so that's a great counterbalance for me.

But I say like staying healthy is really important And then it the people you surround yourself with right Where every challenge that we face we face together And that really therapeutic I think oftentimes founders sit in these ivory towers and think they have to come up with all the answers and that's just not the reality. If you have, you know, good advisors, good colleagues on the management team, you problem solve together. And I think the kind of final comment I would make is openness, right where being open to admitting that maybe you're experiencing you know a challenge or having a question we do that constantly it's like i ask a lot of dumb questions because sometimes i'm probing at whether if someone has someone done their homework correctly so i'm like i'm gut checking or i actually don't know so that's part of like the learning journey right so so those are some of the tactics that i that i've employed over time you know what's been the most rewarding part of building Spontango for you personally? What kind of gives you the greatest satisfaction, whether it's seeing the positive impact on dog's health, building something of your own, providing jobs, or just something else?

Honestly, the customer testimonials are awesome. We get a lot of email and SMS from pet parents who are honestly often are in tears. My dog wouldn't eat or my dog had X, Y, or Z affliction. We've tried a dozen different brands to address the deflections and like spot and tiger really works.

Thank you. And so there's that just amazing connection with the consumer. And obviously now we've kind of scaled the company. That's it.

One is obviously the kind of consumer experience. Two, customer experience. Two is what we've built as a team. I mean, there's a lot of physicality to what we do.

I mean, there's a 70,000 square foot factory with 150 people, you know, in Allentown. So you see those, you kind of walk the halls and amongst equipment, you're like, you think back like, wow, not too long ago, we were in a WeWork in Manhattan with a whiteboard dreaming, you know, and those things have now kind of manifested and come to life. And we're still, I always say we have a lot of wood to chop. So we're still going, but I'd say those have been kind of two particular highlights.

And your company obviously serves dog owners, but also the dogs and those dogs are animals that can teach us a lot. I know my dog has certainly taught me a lot. What have you learned the most from dogs and just, you know, serving them? yeah i mean dogs are very loyal creatures um and i'd say like we have dogs in the office we're a dog friendly office so it's like an amazing um to like well working in pets fun right um um they always say babies beasts are good industries to be in and beauty right because there's like a highly emotive reality that's why you know people like to like who doesn't want to click a like on a picture of a puppy or a baby or you know this is like the world we live in so that's been really fun um and obviously interacting with dogs and then i would say commercially speaking um we are a subscription model so you can't order our products once you subscribe and the beauty of a subscription model not like meal kits but for dogs dogs need consistency of diet and consistency of protein if you switch your diet like beef on a monday turkey on a tuesday that can be a disaster on the persian rug nobody wants that so consistency is good if there's high palatability i.e if a dog likes the product there's high repeat purchase and high retention so we've seen a correlation between those those two metrics um which is again kind of commercially speaking very good for the business model and what advice would you kind of give to young people that maybe current student current us students like us are aspiring entrepreneurs that might want to start their own business someday, but might be scared to take that first step? Yeah.

Another good question. In my experience, the consulting and finance background really prepared me for some of the basic requirements of the job, like raising capital or building a P&L or a balance sheet or a cash flow statement or what a supply chain is. So I learning those things on the job I think would have been difficult because we were moving so quickly and you don't have the luxury of time you've got to move fast so I'd say you know for folks that are interested like getting even not I admittedly 14 years is a lot I mean I started the company when I was 35 38 when I went full-time but 35 kind of the bootstrap days the dark days as I alluded to um which I think was late honestly um a lot of folks I think you get like two or three years of some real world experience um then you can kind of go start something i'd say that one two younger better you know but by the time i started the company i'd had kids already got a mortgage dog all the things that just creates more that's more response balance sheet responsibility the younger you are with some real world experience you can take greater risk and it's okay if the if the house of cards blows over you can do another one do another one I was kind of later stage in life where I probably had less opportunity to fail. It's kind of like, okay, kind of need to make this work.

So I'd say those are two things in particular that I would recommend. You know, you have recent releases such as the Pet Gum. Where do you kind of think in five or 10 years into the future, what do you really envision for Spontango? And what do you want to see the company achieve long-term?

And maybe where do you even see yourself in five to 10 years? Yeah, so, you know, a lot of road ahead. And so we continue to scale. The business is growing 50%, 50% year over year.

We're profitable. We're nine figures. So it's still growing at a very, very high clip. And that's due to the size of the category.

There's 90 million dogs in the US and we have 25 basis points in the market. We built a nine figure brand. So you think about that in terms of the ceiling. There is no ceiling.

And this is, by the way, it's not like there's no winner takes all with the pet food category. There can be a lot of folks that can be successful, but we want to keep growing the core business. One, two, we launched Pup Gum, which is a new dental care offering. It's doing very, very well.

That's actually outside of this botanical ecosystem as a separate brand and also offered to existing customers. Going international, which is happening March 1st, we're going to Canada. We're launching, quote unquote, overseas, if that counts. And I think brick and mortar is on the roadmap as well. you know, selling on shelf in national retail, I think is a huge opportunity for the business as well.

So thinking through Omnichannel. So five years from now, honestly, I'm going to be here. Like, you know, I'm a number of years in, but it's such an exciting opportunity yet. And I still, I'm energized.

I think the question behind the question oftentimes people ask is like, are you still, or as management team, generally speaking, still energized by running the company? and do you want to get out of bed every day and problem solve? And the answer is yes. So we can talk again in five years, and I will still be doing the same thing. And speaking of that big picture, for you personally, what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind, whether that's through Spot and Tango or through your life and family in general?

What do you hope people will remember you for? Giving back and sharing my experiences. and that teaching element, I think, is really important. Because again, I try to tell a version of entrepreneurship, which is real, there's not BS, because it's hard. It's really hard.

And so I hope that my shared experience can help others learn and adapt and help them get involved. I think entrepreneurship is awesome. And so enabling people to take those risks and help think through those opportunities would be something that's really important to me. You know, now, you know, finally, one of the questions that we ask all of our guests, and it's one of my favorite questions personally, is what is your why?

With everything you do, building this company, improving pets' lives, leading your team, what is the core driving force that gets you up in the morning and keeps you going day after day? Grit. I just, again, Cleveland kid, Midwest, I think it's in the water. I'm sure you guys are very similar, just like very hardworking and the work ethic that we talked about earlier.

And again, kind of this dream of being an operator and building something. We are still building. So that to me is kind of the driving force. And again, I think it's I'm learning every day.

I'm not static in terms of like my brain developing and ingesting new content. and making mistakes and learning from them. I find that to be very rewarding. And ultimately, I hope that benefits my kids. So we talk about around the dinner table, where the apple come from, where the lean cuisine come from.

Okay, well, how's the farmer doing? And I'm trying to, again, share those experiences so people can understand a bit more how the world works. Well, Mr. Burr, it's been great having you on the show.

Thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights and experiences and stories with us to our listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in. and we'll hope you'll join us next Wednesday, as always, for another episode of The Late Start Show. Thank you, Mr. Brewer.

Thanks, Charlie. Thanks, Jack. Appreciate it.