Ben Tietje is the Co-founder and CEO of Earthley Wellness, a company dedicated to changing the healthcare landscape through natural and alternative health products, services, and information. With a mission to educate and empower families toward natural health, Earthley Wellness has made significant impacts, reaching over 217,000 families in 2023 alone. Before founding Earthley Wellness with his wife, Kate, Ben spent a decade managing enterprise IT at Cardinal Health and four years as a store manager at CompUSA. Under his leadership, Earthley has achieved rapid growth, recording a 105% CAGR from 2017 to 2023 and projecting further growth. The company has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in America, securing spots on the Inc. 5000 and Central Ohio Fast 50 lists multiple times.
In a world where natural health solutions are often overshadowed by pharmaceutical giants, how has one entrepreneur managed not only to navigate but also significantly disrupt this space?
According to Ben Tietje, a pioneering force in the natural wellness industry and the CEO of Earthley Wellness, the secret lies in a combination of unwavering dedication, innovative business strategies, and a deep commitment to providing personalized health solutions. Ben shares how Earthley’s journey from a small blog to a $21 million enterprise in just seven years was fueled by a mission to empower individuals with natural and alternative health products. By focusing on quality, affordability, and education, Earthley has cultivated a loyal community and demonstrated that health care can be both effective and accessible without reliance on conventional medicine.
In this episode of America Open for Business, Cameron Heffernan talks with Ben Tietje, Co-founder and CEO of Earthley Wellness, about transforming the health and wellness industry. They discuss Earthley’s growth, the importance of aligning business operations with core values, and Ben’s vision for a future where natural health solutions are the first choice, not the alternative. This insightful conversation sheds light on the power of innovation, persistence, and genuine customer engagement in creating a successful and impactful business.
This episode is brought to you by Your B2B Marketing. Are you a mid-market B2B company facing challenges articulating your value proposition to customers? Without a well-defined strategy, allocating marketing funds may not yield optimal results. Your B2B Marketing, a team of experts specializing in devising and implementing plans, helps entrepreneurs and leaders understand what makes them invaluable to customers and puts that front and center in their messaging for scalable growth.
Discover how strategic marketing and communication approaches can drive your expansion by visiting www.yourb2bmarketing.co or contacting us at info@yourb2bmarketing.co.
Narrator: 0:03
Welcome to America, open for business, where we talk with high growth entrepreneurs and leaders who have found success in one of the world’s most important markets.
Cameron: 0:14
Hello, I’m Cameron Heffernan and I am host of America open for business, where I talk with high growth entrepreneurs and leaders who have found success in one of the world’s most important markets. This episode in our Founders and Owners series is brought to you by your B2B marketing, a truly global marketing agency. Many mid-market B2B companies face challenges in clearly defining their value proposition and articulating it to customers, so we help founders and leaders understand what makes their products and services invaluable to customers and help put them front and center with that message. Discover how we can drive your expansion by visiting yourB2Bmarketingco. That’sco notcom and past guests of the show include Brian Smith, the founder of the UG brand, the famous Sheepskin Boots from Australia, and author of Birth of a Brand, about his personal journey to the creation of what became a billion-dollar consumer footwear brand, and today on the show.
Cameron: 1:17
I’m very pleased and proud to welcome another person who has a lot about growing and expanding a business, ben Tietje. And before I introduce Ben, I’m going to mention that he is the co-founder and CEO of Earthly Wellness, a direct-to-consumer manufacturer in the natural health and wellness space. Before Ben started Earthly with his wife, kate, who is the CMO and head of R&D for Earthly. Ben spent 10 years as an enterprise IT manager at Cardinal Health and four years as a store manager at CompUSA, so Ben’s site is Earthlycom. That’s E-A-R-T-H-L-E-Ycom, and welcome to the program, ben Tietje.
Cameron: 2:05
Thanks, cameron, thanks so much Thanks for joining us today. So I want to jump right in and ask what problem are you looking to solve? What does Earthly? You know how does Earthly help people?
Ben: 2:19
Yeah, so kind of the genesis of the company is that I have six kids and when my oldest was very small she had a lot of health and developmental issues. She was getting skin rashes and food allergies and developmental delays, she wasn’t speaking and things like that. And at the time I did what everybody, every loving parent does you go to the doctor, you talk to the specialist, you give her the medication, you do everything that you’re supposed to do and none of it made any difference. And in our desperation we turned to natural alternative health after we had exhausted everything else. And, lo and behold, it solved all of her problems. And then it solved all of my problems and then my wife’s problems and then got my mom off of hypothyroid medication for the first time in 20 years. And the rest is history. And it went very quickly from being just this random thing that I was trying to solve to what is now my life’s calling, which is trying to bring similar transformations into the lives of as many people as I can.
Cameron: 3:28
Wow, and that has been a seven year journey along that path.
Ben: 3:35
Yeah, so we first started having issues with my daughter 15 years ago and for the first eight years we were running primarily a blog where we were just kind of talking about what we were doing, and this obviously predates, you know, instagram and YouTube influencers and things like that. So blogging was kind of the way that you did that 15 years ago and then over that prevailing eight year period, we got 500,000 regular readers to the blog, and so it was in December of 2015 that we tried to make it kind of full time, where we first tried to make it into a business, tried to generate an income from it.
Ben: 4:14
And so 2016 kind of marks that point where we were both full time in the business and we were legitimately trying to run it.
Cameron: 4:22
Okay. So if you go back to that, even to that period, you’re now at a company that’s doing over $21 million in sales annually. That’s an incredible achievement, direct to consumer. How did you go from that, from you know a blog, to what you’re at now with these numbers? How many people are working for your company?
Ben: 4:42
Yeah, so we have 135 employees. I should mention at this point that we were not only a direct to consumer, but we also manufacture, ship, do our own marketing, our own IT. Everything that we do is in-house and the primary reason for that is to keep our costs as low as possible while still keeping the quality very high. A traditional brand that you might get off of a store shelf maybe 5% of the price that you pay is the actual raw materials in that product.
Ben: 5:14
And 95% is superfluous administrative costs or various third parties that are being paid on that transaction. So I think one of the main reasons why we’ve grown the way that we have is because we’re simultaneously the highest quality brand on the market but also one of the most affordable, because we do everything in-house, so our pricing is 50% better than the majority of our closest competitors. But in addition to that, we also are at this apex point where not only is there a market shift toward these kind of products so there’s a natural growth in these industries but we are also, I should say, my wife. My wife is very skilled at marketing and building connections and relationships with people on a personal level, but 200,000 people at the same time, and that interaction and that making them feel like they’re part of the family has really cemented people around our brand in a way that I think is not typical for most brands.
Cameron: 6:21
How would you describe your brand loyalty that you’ve got have achieved?
Ben: 6:25
Yeah, I mean it is incredibly high. I mean there’s a lot of different ways that you could measure this. One of the ways that we kind of track internally is the number of people who complain about products that are temporarily out of stock. Because if you think about it, if you go to the store shelf and you’re trying to get a conventional OTC medication whether it’s Pep, the Bismol or Nyquil or Adbill or something like that if they don’t have it, you just grab the one right next to it, probably without even a thought.
Ben: 6:59
Maybe you’re willing to drive to another store to see if they have your favorite brand, but it’s about the limit of what you’re willing to do, if you’re willing to tell the brand over and over again. I really need this. When is it going to be back in stock? I’m going to wait for your product rather than going to somebody else. Those are all indicators that we have a very strong level of loyalty. And then, beyond that, we have 16,000 affiliates who earn a commission every time they refer a sale. And of those 16,000, probably 14,000 of them are not professional influencers. There’s just regular people who are like I talk about this so much to my friends and family, or it’s made such a difference in my life that I just can’t help but talk about it, and then they want to be part of that program.
Cameron: 7:52
So that’s kind of like that long tail approach. You’ve got a whole lot of people that are feel passionate about your product and what you offer, that they’re willing to be champions and ambassadors to others.
Ben: 8:03
Absolutely, and I think that’s something that’s achievable for virtually any brand. It’s just most brands don’t always put in the time and the effort that it takes to build those kind of relationships. So like, for example, 90% of our marketing is just producing free content and giving it away. Only 10% of it is selling. We call that oh, by the way, marketing, the idea being that somebody is coming to consume this content or this information, or we’re trying to solve a problem for them, and once they realize they have a problem or they want to make a change in their life oh, by the way, this is something that we sell. It’s a very tangential kind of sales process. So 90% of the social media posts and the YouTube content all that kind of stuff barely even mentions the products. It just talks about healthcare.
Ben: 8:56
In addition to that, we have a live chat system on our website that runs from 8am to 10pm, seven days a week. We have email. We personally respond to every single social media post that we get across all platforms, which is about five to 600,000 comments per month. And when I say respond, I don’t mean you know, somebody says we love your products and we go thanks and just give them a thumbs up is we take the time to say you know, what did you like about it? Is there other problems that you’re having that maybe you didn’t get an answer for? Was there a product of ours that you tried that didn’t work? Maybe we can recommend something else and we’ll give people a full refund, no questions asked on the original thing. It’s all about building this relationship where people feel like we genuinely care about them, and it’s easy to say those things, but it’s very hard to build a culture, especially a large culture, where you have dozens of employees who are all conveying that same level of passion and care on an individual customer basis.
Cameron: 10:03
How have you done that? How have you achieved that over this time?
Ben: 10:09
A lot of hard work. Yeah, you know it’s. I think it started with my wife and I doing it directly. Right, it started with she was doing social media, she was doing the marketing and I was doing the customer service, and so most of the interaction for the first couple of years was just us directly, and then, as it transitioned to employees, we hire based on passion first and on skill second. There’s a famous Dave Ramsey quote that you can’t motivate a donkey to win the Kentucky Derby. It’s not going to happen. You have to find a thoroughbred horse who wants to win and just simply doesn’t have the skills to win.
Ben: 10:52
You can’t take a donkey that knows all of everything there is to know about racing and somehow motivate them to win. They’re just physically not capable of winning that kind of race, and it’s a bit of a humorous example, but I think far too often we as employers look at people and we’re primarily caring about their skills.
Ben: 11:11
Yeah, which you can teach skills. You can’t teach passion. I can teach anybody to, you know, to check our knowledge base and answer basic questions or understand our product hierarchy and what can be used for what things, but it’s very, very difficult to find somebody who is like I would do this job for free because I love talking about these things so much and I’m deeply invested in what you’re doing.
Cameron: 11:39
How are you when you go through the interviewing or hiring process? How do you integrate that into it?
Ben: 11:44
Do you feel that the people who really are already behind this mission or who you’re seeking, so you know, there’s a lot of roundabout ways that you can get to those sorts of things. One of the things that we typically would ask is just tell me about your health journey, and you’ll find that people really like talking about themselves. And so you know, whatever the, whatever the industry that you’re in, I mean, you know, say you’re hiring somebody from marketing. You know, ask them what their favorite brands are and why you give them an opportunity to show their level of passion. And if you’re in marketing and there’s not a brand that you admire and that you love and you’re like I really love what this brand does, Like it’s really resonates with me, If they’re not passionate about something personally, they’re definitely not going to be passionate about it A client once you bring them in and then just, you know, apply that to whatever the job is.
Ben: 12:41
I used to work in IT and I would always ask people to tell me about like a fun project that they were working on, right, and if the person wasn’t messing around with technology in their personal life, like, oh, I hacked my DVR and put a larger hard drive in it because I wanted to record more stuff in it, like I didn’t fundamentally care what it was I was looking for, do you love this stuff enough that you’re doing it in your personal life? Or are you doing it only because you thought that this was a good vocation where you could make a lot of money, and you just happen to be good at it? But as soon as five o’clock rolls around, you’re gone?
Cameron: 13:17
Yeah, or as soon as the next hire paying opportunity comes along, you’re gone. I’ve often said to my teams in the past you can’t teach care, you can’t teach passion. You can teach skills and you can kind of pull out some interests of people and enhance them, but you can’t fundamentally change what people are going to be passionate and caring about.
Ben: 13:40
Yeah, and so it starts with the passion. Then obviously they have to have some base level of skill, and then it’s giving them an enormous amount of support and encouragement, guidance and then rewarding them as they’re successful.
Ben: 13:56
And so we very regularly give raises to our employees who are exceeding our internal metrics, and I want to make sure that not only do these people. Are they passionate about what they’re doing, but they’re passionate about being here too, and they feel like they’re valued and rewarded far beyond what they would be in any other place and how do you guys work with or teach or express the values of the company with the team?
Ben: 14:27
Yeah, so the values are pretty baked into our everyday processes. So we have team huddles with virtually every team every day, usually five, 10 minute kind of things, and we have a cadence to those. So once a week you’re talking about one of our values, which we have six of those. One of the days you’re talking about a customer story. So for us it’s very important that we remain connected with the customer.
Ben: 14:59
You’re not just making widgets, you’re not just shipping boxes. You are shipping life transformation to somebody and you need to be thinking of it through that lens. And so talking about a customer story of some huge thing that’s happened in their life and how grateful they are because of that is a very important thing. So whatever kind of culture you’re trying to bake into it, you have to bake that in to an everyday process. They say that you have to figure what the number is I think it’s 37 times or something that you have to hear a brand before you remember it, and so that’s a lot of repetition that you have to hit. And just because somebody works for you doesn’t mean that they’re just inherently going to hear these things right. You have to be communicating it over and over and over again, and my metric for how I decide if I’ve said it enough is when I hear other people saying the same things that I’ve said to them. We call those benisms.
Ben: 16:01
I have a lot of little phrases and stories and different things that I say, like perfection is not an achievable standard, was something that I say all the time, and the idea being that none of us are perfect, myself included and so you should never belittle an employee because they made a mistake, because everybody makes mistakes. What you should be communicating is it’s okay that you made this mistake. It’s important that we understand why you made the mistake so that we can correct this thing and then hopefully prevent it from happening, and it’s important that you learn from it.
Ben: 16:38
And if you’re repeating the same mistake over and over again, then that’s a problem. But simply making a mistake is not a problem. And so, as you’re trying to convey this cultural stuff, once you hear others repeating those phrases or repeating your values on a fairly regular basis, then you know that you kind of reached that point. But then I’ll go even one step beyond that, which is that you have to continue to work at that.
Ben: 17:06
It’s like there’s no winning at business, there’s no winning at marriage. You can’t just invest a certain amount of time into your relationship and now you’re just good, so from now on I can just coast. It’s a constant thing that you have to reinforce, and so if you really want this kind of culture, you have to treat it as if it’s something that you need to do every day.
Cameron: 17:29
Yeah, the best, most successful professional athletes. Yes, they were physically gifted and had those skills, but they’re also the first into the gym and the last out, and the hardest workers, in addition to that, to keep up and also stay a step ahead.
Ben: 17:44
Exactly Like I love the John Daly story, the famous golfer who has the longest drive in the PGA. And somebody asked him you know, how do you get those long drives? And he said well, I go to the driving range and I hit balls until my hands bleed. And then I start counting and I hit another thousand after that. You know just the level of pushing himself far beyond his physical limits to develop and build that particular skill that he wanted to be great at.
Cameron: 18:12
Yeah, and the example you gave a little while ago about you know, just take the pharmacy, the drugstore, you go, and I often go right to the bottom shelf and pick the generic. But that’s the exact opposite of what you’re talking about, where your customers are willing to wait until there’s a you know the supply is there, or to make the extra effort to go and buy the product from you versus another alternative.
Ben: 18:40
And that’s not universal, but that is, you know, what we’re striving to have happen.
Cameron: 18:46
Okay, and do you feel that you get love? You have a lot of repeat customers over the years.
Ben: 18:52
Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have a very high repeat order rate, and so, as a brand, we kind of focus on two primary metrics about that. So number one is we’re looking to have a very healthy percentage of new customers, um, especially when we run, uh, you know, sales or promotions or things that are driven around, uh, new customer acquisition, but we’re also looking to both increase the average number of orders and the average size of orders for existing customers. So, uh, this is probably not true of every brand, but but for us, we have 125 unique products. So, and and many of these are things that if you’re not buying it from us, you’re definitely buying it from somewhere, right? If you’re not buying our laundry detergent, you’re not washing your clothes with a rock in a creek, right, you’re using something. Right.
Ben: 19:47
Uh, and, and so you know we our average customer is is typically buying around $200 worth of stuff from us a year, but if they were buying everything that they would need for a family of four, it’s probably about two to 3000 a year. Um, and so you know, we’re looking to, slowly, over time, be increasing, um, the amount that we’re uh, of orders that we’re getting from existing customers, because that cements that they’re having a good, um, a good experience with the products that they’re using. Yeah.
Ben: 20:16
But also that the, the new customer growth is coming, because they’re also telling other people about it. Um word of mouth, you know, for virtually every business is going to be your primary driver, and it certainly is for us.
Cameron: 20:29
That high number of affiliates really speaks to that and that’s important part of your growth strategy, I assume right.
Ben: 20:36
Yeah, absolutely so. Affiliates represent about 30-ish percent of our total business.
Cameron: 20:42
Yeah, and I remember I had on the podcast previously Brian Smith and he was talking about how the growth of the UG brand happened over time. Of course that was in the 70s, early 80s, before all this stuff. But a lot of that was people who got to know him personally and he would go surfing and he would open up his van literally and sell the boots out of the van and people got to know him and he started having the boots on the feet of surfers. You know I would call them today influencers the approach. So a lot of these are just modern spins on ideas that we’ve had in marketing sales for a long time. But making it I suppose one of the things that he kept saying is it has to be authentic to the brand. One of the challenges they had was people saying, well, look at the people in your ads, I wouldn’t see them surfing. They’re not real. So that authenticity has to always be there.
Ben: 21:34
Absolutely, absolutely. And I mean you. It doesn’t fundamentally matter what your mission is or what your authenticity is. It just matters that you are clearly communicating that to people and that you’re staying true to whatever that value is. So you know, there are plenty of businesses that have causes that I personally don’t care about, but I still will shop with them because I appreciate that they are trying to solve that problem. Right.
Ben: 22:10
You know there’s far too much that needs to be fixed in the world that we can’t all take on everything. So you don’t have to feel like you have this enormous mission of you know, I’m going to solve world hunger, I’m going to solve world peace or something like that. You can. You can take something very small and just say I’m trying to make a difference in this area, and I think you’ll find that people get really, really passionate about things. There’s a friend of mine who runs a brand where he sells content about how to become an emu farmer. Wow.
Ben: 22:45
So I want you to think about the niche that he’s trying to hit with this. So people who don’t know anything about emu farming but want to become emu farmers. And it’s like if you’re trying to think of a more niche service, you could not possibly get more niche than that. But if you look at it globally, of everybody who speaks English, I think it’s something like 2.1 or 2.2 billion people. Every year he finds about 5,000 people who will pay for his course which is like $1,000.
Ben: 23:15
Right, so he’s a $500,000 business or, I’m sorry, $5 million business selling this and it’s like, but he is being very true to the niche that he’s trying to hit and he is ensuring that he is meeting every conceivable need that that specific niche has. Wow. So you know, obviously my target is much larger than that, but we part of that building a relationship with customers is that you get a really tight feedback loop about exactly what is happening and how people are perceiving what you’re doing. It’s very difficult if you’re selling your products to a retailer and you have no connection to the end consumer or say you’re in a service-based business. Your clients may not always even tell you Right.
Ben: 24:04
They may be secretly unhappy behind the scenes for a year and then just leave and never tell you the reasons why. So if you’re not giving them opportunities and you’re not really trying to dig that out of them of like, how are you really connecting, what can I do better? And you’ve built a relationship of trust that they feel like they can tell you those things and you’re not going to have the opportunity to build that relationship with that customer. It’s all kind of connected together.
Cameron: 24:39
Do you guys do a lot of user-generated content for your marketing?
Ben: 24:45
Almost none. We have talked about it a lot and we have done it somewhat, but it’s hard to find other people who are going to convey the same mission values that we convey, and, even though it’s more expensive and takes more time to do it directly, it’s also more concise, it’s less diluted, there’s more consistency across what we’re doing, but it is something that we will probably do more over time, because it does make a difference. You don’t buy from people that you know or, I’m sorry, you buy from people that you know. You buy from brands that you trust, and building that trust is very difficult and it’s much easier to piggyback on the trust of somebody else. You trust this influencer, or this influencer trust Ipsopacto. You trust us also, and so that can be a very strong growth trajectory for a brand. We personally don’t use it a lot, but a lot of our competitors do those kind of things.
Cameron: 25:55
What has been most effective for you. The whole company started with a blog, arguably a very big, fast-growing, successful blog. So is SEOs the important part of what you do?
Ben: 26:07
So the interesting thing about that is we launched our first earthly branded product, the first product that we manufactured in August of 2016. And in December of 2016, google, bing, facebook, instagram and Pinterest jointly made a change to how search engine rankings work. And specifically what it was is, if you were in the healthcare sector and you were not a licensed medical professional, they downranked your content. So it didn’t matter whether it was inaccurate or not. It was basically the assumption is, if you’re not a doctor and you’re in health-related content, you get downranked automatically. So between August and December of 2016, our blog traffic went down 90% and it has never come from that level.
Ben: 26:58
So the blog only really served as a couple of months of kind of giving birth to this thing and then effectively died giving birth to earthly and then everything beyond that. Everything from January 17 onward has been as if we were a new brand that we were building on scratch.
Cameron: 27:18
Okay, okay. So when you look at digital marketing tactics, what have you found particularly effective?
Ben: 27:24
Yeah. So we obviously do all the basic stuff that everybody does right. We do dynamic retargeting, we do new customer acquisition, we do both text and photo and video ads, we’re on Facebook and Bing and Instagram and Google and all that kind of stuff. What’s interesting is, the things that work the best are not always the things that you would expect. I think with marketing, a lot of people don’t have the risk appetite to try different things and run them at a loss for long enough to see whether it makes a difference or not. So just to give you an example, we had a situation I want to say it was about two years ago where a customer left us a negative review on Google, and the review had absolutely nothing to do with any of our products. It was somebody who just hated some of the values that the brand stands on. So it was very obvious from reading it that this person was not a real customer.
Ben: 28:33
And they also made a lot of spelling mistakes and it was kind of poorly written and it was funny. And when we got it, we all were just kind of laughing at this review. And somebody got the idea well, why don’t we put that in an ad? Why don’t we just kind of lean into hey, some people don’t like what we do, Some people are just mad about the type of products that we have. Let’s just lean into it and say you know what, if you don’t like it, that’s fine, you do you, and we’re just keeping being true to who we are. That was one of our highest ROI ads for that year.
Cameron: 29:12
No kidding.
Ben: 29:14
And I think it’s something that most brands would not ever consider doing something like that Wow.
Ben: 29:20
But the counter example to that is there were also 20 other things that we tried that just had a horrible ROI Right, and so I’ve made it very clear to the people that do the marketing for us that I want them to have the freedom to try things. So don’t put enormous amounts of money behind it, but put enough money behind it that you can really tell whether it’s working or not. And, if it is, you know work on refining and improving and growing that. And so now, after eight years of doing that, we have a fairly large rotation of like ad styles or copy styles that we know work and we’re continually refreshing it so that people aren’t just seeing the same ads over and over again. But we’ve we’ve found all these styles that kind of worked for us. And from talking to other business owners, I think it’s different for every brand. It depends on you know who you are, what your values are, what your mission is, what your customers are expecting from you. It depends on are you a serious brand? Are you a snarky brand?
Cameron: 30:23
Yeah.
Ben: 30:24
If you’re a snarky, how snarky do you want to be Right, and so you. You have to kind of find your own voice and be willing to take those risks to find what works for you.
Cameron: 30:35
How would you describe your brand personality?
Ben: 30:38
Little bit snarky. Okay, we are. We are kind of like we are. We are a know it all who’s a little bit snarky and very confident in who we are. Okay, we have our mission. In fact, we do something that most brands don’t do. We put our strategy, our mission and our vision for the brand on our website. We tell our competitors what our goals are as a business, because you’ll find that your competitor cares a lot less about you than your customers care about you, and you will get far more mileage out of telling your thousand or 10,000 or 100,000 customers who you’re trying to be, rather than saying I’m going to hide everything that I’m doing because I don’t want my competitor to find out about it.
Ben: 31:34
I think it’s especially for people who are in the technology space. They’re very familiar with what’s known as the Osborn Effect, so very famously coined by the Osborn Computer Company, who made the first portable computer, which weighed 60 pounds, who wasn’t exactly portable. But they announced a new model and it immediately killed their existing model and they went out of business before they were able to bring the new model to market, simply because they killed their own brand. So I think there’s a lot of brands who saw that and the lesson that they took away from that is don’t tell people what’s coming, don’t tell people what’s ready. Your competitors might steal it, they may not place an order, but in my experience, far more often people are not being honest about what they want from your brand. Like Henry Ford said, if you had asked people in 1900 what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse that eats less.
Cameron: 32:34
Right.
Ben: 32:35
They didn’t see the value of a horse. Steve Jobs said people didn’t see the value of a phone until they saw it. Yeah.
Ben: 32:42
If you’re honest and open about this is what we’re trying to build. This is not just about today. This is about this future state, people get really bought into that vision of like, yeah, I want that, I want to see that happen and I’m willing to invest in you to help make that happen. Like, the number of people who go on Kickstarter or Start Engine and like fund brands directly is huge and what they’re looking for is they’re looking for somebody who really cares about a problem that they care about and is genuinely trying to solve. Something Doesn’t even have to be big, but just they’re trying to solve something that isn’t being solved and they want to support those brands. So I encourage people to be far more honest about and open about what you’re trying to do and and not be afraid that other people might misinterpret it or steal those ideas.
Cameron: 33:37
I often think companies, particularly in the B2B arena where you’re, where you’re not making a product, you’re generating services of some type Do too much, too concerned about competitors stealing our stuff. You know, like I understand, you want to lead generation and do a nice study or white paper, put it behind a form. I get the point of that, but I also feel like too many things that are hard to get, to make it difficult for people to find you, to understand your value, and that if a competitor really wants to dig in and find something from you, they’re going to find a way to do it.
Ben: 34:15
Yeah, absolutely. I mean like speaking specifically about service space or business, business to business type of companies. If you don’t have a product on your website you have, or, I’m sorry, if you don’t have your pricing on your website it is probably 10 times less likely that I’m going to do business with you, because I don’t want to go through all of the hassle of trying to figure out what the price is and then getting caught in your sales funnel where you’re going to bug me for the next two years when I just I’m simply looking for an order of magnitude kind of a thing. Right, are you in the ballpark of what I feel like I can afford for this service? And if you’re not.
Ben: 34:55
I don’t want to waste your time and I don’t want to waste my time. And companies hide it because they’re like well, we have a complex pricing model or we don’t want our customers to know what it is, or those sorts of things. But, like you said, all your competitor has to do is just call you, pretend to be another company and you’re just going to tell them all that information anyway. So you’re hurting yourself far more by not saying that to your customers when you’re trying to hide it from your competitors, who will go through the effort to find it anyway 100% and I think that a lot of times companies they think we don’t want to give too much away, we want to be involved in that sales cycle, that sales process.
Cameron: 35:35
These days people are more savvy. By the time they’ve gotten to the point of actually wanting to engage with business development or sales, they’ve gone through a lot of steps already. They’ve gathered a lot of information and research, that there’s things they found online and the need to interact with a sales person is less than it was 10 years ago.
Ben: 35:54
Yeah, and I mean, even if you have a complex model, just simply give somebody a range and just say, hey, a typical service or a typical project in this arena might be in this ballpark, so that somebody has an idea of what they’re looking for.
Cameron: 36:10
I mean.
Ben: 36:10
I would want to like. The most recent business to business company I interfaced with was a web development shop and it’s like well, if I’m thinking it’s a $50,000 project and you’re thinking it’s a $100,000 project, that’s a pretty wide delta that we’re not going to agree on this. Yeah, and so you know, one of the first questions that I asked in the discovery call was for a ballpark estimate. So just so that I had an idea, are we on the same page and as soon as we are, great, now let’s have more detailed conversations than let’s really drill this into. What is the actual number that it needs to be versus? You’re so far out of whack that this is a complete waste of my time.
Cameron: 36:52
But I find interesting is that you had to present it to them, you had to ask. I like to say to my clients or prospects I suppose I want to have that conversation first to see if we’re wasting each other’s time Again. If it’s orders of magnitude apart, I can refer you to somebody who’s better suited for what you’re looking for. Or hey, we’re in the same ballpark here. Is this a $5,000 project or a $50,000 project? Or engage in whatever it might be? Having that conversation early on, I think a lot of companies are just afraid to talk about pricing. There’s this phobia of oh, I don’t want to go there and it’d be too pushy or whatever it might be. And are you really going to give value to embrace that fear or just jump in and go for it?
Ben: 37:33
Yeah, and I agree. I think it’s a mistake that a lot of people approach it from that perspective, because, whether they vocalize it or not, 100% of your clients want to know what it costs. It may not be the only thing that they want to know, like they’re obviously, you know. Is this going to be valuable to our organization? Is this going to bring about change? Is this going to have the desired effect that we want it to have? Those are all going to be in the mix. But the pricing is for sure, something that there’s no company that’s like. It doesn’t matter what this costs, we’re just going to do it. And so just be open and upfront about that kind of stuff and be open. That it’s an estimate. If it is Like, say, typical projects in this scope cost around this amount, so that people can say like, oh, I’m not ready for this.
Ben: 38:21
One of the companies that we have done marketing with for seven years. They first started calling me when we had, I think it was three or $4,000 a month in revenue and their starting package was $3,000 a month. And I’m like, well, I don’t have $3,000 a month. But you know what’s interesting is that person took the time to answer questions to help me. He called me once a quarter for a year and a half six phones I had with this guy and when we were at 12,000 in monthly sales and I was like this is a bit of a stretch, but I think we can make this work. We did that work and that same person is still involved in doing display ads and some marketing stuff for us six and a half years later.
Cameron: 39:11
Great. So he showed the persistence, but also an awareness of what was too much to be in tech, because otherwise he would have scared you off.
Ben: 39:17
Yeah, and it was. He cared about the brand too. He was a customer. He bought things after he found out about us. And he would.
Ben: 39:27
During those calls he would always say, hey, I saw you guys launched a new product and, like behind the scenes, it really didn’t take him that much time to do those things right. He could just simply look at our social media for the last couple of weeks, just pick some random thing that we announced and just mention it. And nowadays, with like AI powered tools, you can probably find a tool that gives you a lot of that information for you, but the way that the person perceives it is very different. I felt that that person was building a relationship with me, not simply trying to make a sale, and even though, as a brand, we could easily bring what this person does in house, I have a huge amount of trust and respect for this individual that we outsource it to, and we will continue to do it. Even as we grow to a 40, 50 million dollar brand, we’re still going to keep working with him because, he earned that trust.
Cameron: 40:20
And he’s along for the ride.
Ben: 40:21
And he’s along for the ride. And he’s also one of our top customers.
Cameron: 40:25
Oh, that’s great. That makes it even better. What do you see as your long term big, hairy, audacious goal?
Ben: 40:33
Yes. So the way that I describe that is. I say I want people to look at pharmaceutical drugs the way they look at a phone booth or a fax machine, where you, you understand what it is, you understand why people used to use it and what its purpose is, but you just cannot perceive of yourself as ever using it again. There there is. There is not been a time in the last ten years that you looked at a phone booth and thought I’m glad that phone booth is there because I may need that at some point. Right, you’ve completely moved on and really the idea is that Allopathic care what we know as Western medicine is very much Treating people as averages. It is not a personalized system and so, like if you look at a bottle of aspirin and it’ll say what’s an adult dose? Two capsules. Well, so if you’re a 90 pound, 80 year old woman, is two capsules the right dose? 400 pound 20 year old linebacker is to the appropriate dose?
Ben: 41:38
Obviously it’s not, and the thing that initially drew me into Eastern medicine like, like herbalism and and things like that is that it’s a very personalized healthcare. It treats every person like the unique person that they actually are, and so you, you typically get much better health outcomes at much Cheaper prices, with minimal to no side effects, because you’re not. You’re not like blanket treating everybody the same, and so my, my vision and our goal is a brand, is to help bring about that transformation, that that allopathy is still there by break a leg, I’m still going to the hospital, I’m still having it set and put in the cast, but for colds and sniffles and you know, 90% of your healthcare. I want to empower people to be able to take take ownership and do that themselves.
Cameron: 42:32
So for those listening on the podcast, you can’t see this, but on the on the YouTube, you get the treat of seeing that Ben has a back drop behind him of two rockets Going off. Why is that? Your, your virtual background?
Ben: 42:43
So those are not actually rockets taking off, those are rockets that are landing, and so, as a manufacturing company, especially one that is very Driven to be both mission oriented and to build a loyal following, the two companies that we try to emulate the most are Apple computer, primarily the Steve Jobs era Apple computer, so from say 1997, when he came back after they bought next through his death, and then the current SpaceX and Tesla under Elon Musk. Both of those brands, or I should say all three of those brands, brought about huge industry transformations. They were very innovative and they have enormously passionate fans and followers, and so that that’s something that I use, that backdrop, as a daily reminder to myself that For a hundred years, people thought landing a rocket was impossible, and it took SpaceX I believe it was 89 failures before they landed it for the first time.
Ben: 43:52
Wow and that backdrop is the first time they ever landed two of them at the same time. And, and it’s just a statement of, if you do the legwork, if you do the math and you say this is physically possible, it may be impossibly hard, but it is possible to do this. And then you just work with Consistent dedication and passionate for years to make that thing possible, that it can happen. And so, even though I have this, this huge vision for America, I believe that it is possible. It’s. It’s gonna take a lot of work from a lot of people, far beyond just what my company can do.
Ben: 44:31
But I believe it’s possible to bring about that transformation and I’m not gonna stop until I do fantastic.
Cameron: 44:37
Well, I have one last question for you before I ask that I want to direct people to your website, earthly le y com. And the last question is you know unquestionably it’s a successful venture you’ve done, going from zero to 21 million in seven years. How much of that success do you attribute to your expertise, dedication and hard work, and how much of it is just timing and good, old-fashioned and good luck?
Ben: 45:09
Um. So I think you know, in general, we we as entrepreneurs say a far larger portion of it is is Ourselves than it is luck, and so when you make statements, you really should Know the numbers and the facts behind them. I think the, for me, the reason why I believe the majority of our success is due to us and not outside factors is we, as a brand, have grown an average of 105 percent a year for eight years. The lowest year among those eight years was 55 percent and the highest was a hundred and forty percent. So they’re relatively consistent. Some years are better, some years are slower, depending on what’s going on, but there was no year where we were featured as Oprah’s favorite thing or we had this viral event that caused the brand to 3x, 5x, 10x in one year. It was.
Ben: 46:07
It was a lot of consistency to it, yeah and if you look at the industry that we’re in, so we’re in about six or seven different verticals, whether you’re talking about, you know, herbal supplements or personal care or home care or different things like that and they’re all growing at different rates but, like last year, as an example, the main verticals that were in shrink 2%, 20% hmm, and if you’re wondering why that is, it’s because post pandemic, there was a huge ramp up of people buying Supplements and over-the-counter things because there was no vaccine and the CDC was basically saying we don’t know what to do and so people just went and took, took control of it themselves.
Ben: 46:48
They’re like I don’t know if this is gonna work or not, but I’m just gonna do something.
Ben: 46:51
So, there was a pretty large ramp up in 2020 21 and 22 and then, as that has started to slow down and kind of normalize, there was actually a contraction last year of 2%. So we’re not growing 55% last year because the industry grew 55%. The industry shrank and we grew 55% anyway. Wow, and so you know, I, I attribute a lot of what we’re doing to To the, the culture, the mission, the values that we have. But beyond that, one thing that we haven’t talked about is simply Deciding that that’s what’s going to happen and then making it happen.
Ben: 47:32
No one has ever woken up and found themselves in the Super Bowl and Said why I wasn’t even trying and I just. I just found myself here, right. I’m in the NBA championship game. I don’t know how I got here right.
Ben: 47:47
We we look at these companies that are really successful and it’s easy for us to say, well, they were just in the right place at the right time. Yeah, it’s easy to look at Tesla and say, well, tesla’s just riding the EV wave Right. But that is completely inaccurate. Every EV brand, except for Tesla, has minuscule amounts of growth 10%, 20%, year-over-year, something like that with the singular exception of BYD, which is the largest EV brand in China, and Tesla is growing 50 or 60%.
Cameron: 48:18
Hmm right.
Ben: 48:19
The difference is because Tesla is doing different things. They have built a culture where our expectation is we’re going to grow 50%, so that’s baked into everything that we do is. This is what we’re doing when we hire people. In addition to asking them Do they believe in our mission, we also ask them if they like change.
Ben: 48:40
Hmm because we know every year we’re gonna grow 50 to 100% and if we don’t attract people who are excited by that, then they become boat anchors that pull the entire rest of the company down. We have built a culture around. We are growing rapidly and we are going to do what it takes to grow rapidly, never the expense of our mission, values, customers, but but that’s one of our primary goals nonetheless.
Cameron: 49:09
I think that you’re calling back to the very beginning of this conversation. You mentioned why you made the decisions you made for what I would consider vertical integration. You do the R&D, you do the production, you do the Operations all there. It’s not like you’re a storefront that’s selling other people’s products. That gives you the ability to then support that kind of growth was about those elements. You’d be to rely on other product providers, producers and partners absolutely, absolutely.
Ben: 49:37
And you know it was a very deliberate choice that we made for exactly the reasons that you said. Right, if Anybody that you outsource to is not going to have the same level of care that you do about your own business right. And so when we do outsource, we usually outsource it as a part of what we’re doing rather than a wholesale outsource right. So, like I talked about how we do, some of our marketing is outsourced, but it fits within the strategy of who we’re trying to be as a brand.
Ben: 50:10
We’re still being genuine and true to who we are as a brand. But we’re looking for expertise in particular areas like I don’t want to have to pay attention to Google’s latest update and and how it affects our ads. So we have a company that does ads. We have a company that does FTO, where we’re outsourcing those pieces parts, but the the overall strategy. While we’re getting their advice, certainly on what do you think we should do, we’re making sure that that advice is running through the lens of who are we trying to be when we grow up right.
Ben: 50:42
We’re. We’re creating the future, not just accidentally waking up some day and saying, well, I hope I grow this year. We’re. We’re building the company that we want to be really the power of intention absolutely.
Cameron: 50:56
Well, ben. Thank you so much for your time today and for catching up with us. This has been Ben teacher, the co-founder and CEO of earthly wellness, and I appreciate you joining us today on America open for business. Thanks so much.
Ben: 51:10
Thanks for having me.
Narrator: 51:16
Thanks for listening to the America open for business podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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