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">> And this is what I find is founders waste years trying to experiment where old problems are still um strong and still hold. >> Yeah. >> And this is what I the mistake several of the mistakes I made in my company was I should have spent all of my time experimenting on the new problems. >> Uhhuh. and should have hired people to tell me um how to navigate the old problems. >> Yeah. >> What what was your um I think one of the videos that made you go pretty viral was your story of >> BIES. We don't know what BIES is around the world. I think it's a US brand. >> Yeah. >> But this shows I think how you've always had an orientation to think slightly differently or in innovatively. >> Yeah. >> What happened with BIES? >> So this was during the time when I was running that business shipping products for other companies. Right. Bies is a gas station brand uh with only 50 locations. And from those 50 locations, they do billions of dollars of revenue. I say gas station, they're between 40,000 and 80,000 square feet. Wow. >> They're massive. They have an amazing brand, an amazing logo, and they just have a lot of trust from their customers. But these gas stations are like they're on the way out to these road trip destinations. They're out in the middle of nowhere. And so if you're if you live in Dallas and you're driving down to the beach, you're going to stop by Bies on the way there and on the way back, and you're probably going to spend hundreds of dollars, right? You're going to fill up the tank, then you're going to buy shirts and snacks and all that stuff. So, at the time we were running this e-commerce fulfillment business, we went to Buckies. I brought my cousin, my business partner, um, just to kind of show him the experience. And we were just having a conversation. I remember exactly where I was. I was like under this underpass, this huge under pass in DFW. We were driving home and I said, "Man, these guys must kill it online. They must sell so much stuff." Um, >> why? >> Because I knew that Disney sells like billions of dollars of t-shirts on their website, right? I read a stat recently. So, I kind of just took that data point, connected it to Bies, and said, "All right, Bies is a fraction of the size of Disney, but they have the same amount of brand loyalty. People love their shirts. You'll see their shirts all over the world, even though they only have 50 locations like in the Southeast, right?" And so we went to their website and there was no shop button. There was no place to buy their stuff and I was just like like all the light bulbs were going off at once, right? It was like, "Oh my gosh, okay, we need to reach out to them. Like we need to bring them online." I just had all these ideas and my cousin is is much more balanced than I am. He's like the the operator and I'm like the ADHD crazy guy, right? So his role is to like calm me down and he's very good at that. But I just couldn't be calmed down from this. I'm like, "No, no, no. We got to do something here. We're going to buy one of everything. We're going to hire a photographer to take pictures of it. We're going to launch our own BIES online store, and we're going to try to go viral." Like, it's viral or bust, right? If we don't go viral, then I'll just be eating these unhealthy snacks for the next 3 years of my life. And so, we did. We bought one of everything. Uh, it cost thousands of dollars. I brought all four of my kids. And, uh, we brought it back to our warehouse. We took pictures of it. We launched a website. Um, and I emailed all the reporters I could find. Uh, and one of them just loved the idea. He ran with it. And so he reached out to BIES for comment cuz they wouldn't respond to my cold emails. I wanted to launch this like with them in tandem, but who am I? They didn't care about me. And I don't blame them. And so he wrote this big article about me. Millions of people read it. All these other news outlets uh wrote about it. And we did hundreds of thousands of of dollars in our first 30 days organically from that. How did Bies feel about that? >> They wanted us to make some key changes to the website. They wanted us to like basically put disclaimers everywhere that said we are not Bies. We're not affiliated with Bies. They wanted us to change the name. It had the word beaver in the name. That's their mascot. They just they didn't want it to be confusing at all. So, we made all those changes and then we got like the unofficial thumbs up from them. They said, "We're not going to sign anything, but like you have our blessing. Um, have fun." And did that website make you a lot of money? >> Yeah, it still is. It's been 5 years. We still own it, 100% of it, and it's going great. >> And it's made you millions. >> Uh-huh. >> What can someone listening take from that in terms of applying that to their own life, finding opportunities like that out in the world, or is that just a oneandone? Is there only one opportunity like that? Okay. So, specific, I get asked that question a lot. How could someone do that with another brand? I don't know. If if there was another brand out there like that, I would be doing it, right? Trader Joe's is similar, but they're very ligious. Um I think that was kind of lightning in a bottle for that particular experiment as in launching an online brand for an in-person business. Okay. But people should not be disheartened hearing that because on a macro level like people should take their curious ideas very seriously. [snorts] They need to shorten the amount of time spent between having the idea and doing something about that idea >> because that will strengthen their bias for action muscle, right? We all have ideas, some of them good, some of them bad on a regular basis. We usually don't do anything about it. It's just a passing thought, right? Whether it's a business idea or a hard conversation I need to have with something, any idea, right? But the the the more we shrink the amount of time between doing something about that idea and having the idea that that idea, the more often we'll do that. And it becomes this self-perpetuating snowball that just compounds. And then before we know it, we'll get more ideas. We'll do more about those ideas. We'll be testing things. We'll be learning tools. We'll be experimenting. And we'll have a whole portfolio of businesses. Is there something in your mentality or perspective though where you walk into a Buckies and you even think about how you could do something whereas most people walk into a Bies and buy their stuff and leave? Like is there something foundational in the way that you're looking at the world? Yeah. But I don't think I'm any different. I think um I think a lot of people have ideas like that. Like you walk into a BIES and you see something about something that could be improved and people have these passing thoughts and they move on. I think that you become an expert at doing something about those ideas. When you do something about those ideas, you just you get better at at what you do, at what you test, >> cuz you've built up some kind of muscle, which means that you don't really care about it seems failure as much as the average person. And also in that particular case, >> the average person might think, well, I've got no experience in doing that. >> Mhm. No, no one has any experience in anything until they do it, right? Like every every expert started out as a beginner right? Sometimes though, people try this and they learn h doesn't give them energy. It's not for them. That's okay. Now, when they have ideas, they can know, all right, box checked. That's not really for me. That entrepreneurship thinks someone else needs to do that. And great, good. All the power to them. I just want people to answer that question for themselves. I hate seeing regret in people's faces. Like I have friends that want to start a business. They've always talked about it and I know they would be good at it and I know it just eats them up and they have really really good ideas objectively and I I just hate seeing them have that question for the rest of their lives. I just want them to to taste entrepreneurship. Is it for everybody though? You know,"