Best of: Turning a Failing Nut Shop into Nuts.com

Introduction:

This week, I’m replaying an oldie but goodie, an episode that Shawn Busse and I recorded with Jeff Braverman, who turned his family’s failing retail business into a thriving ecommerce business. I’m replaying this episode both because Jeff has a great story to share, with lots of takeaways, and because—well, actually, because I took a little time off last week. But listen to this: Jeff walked away from a career as an investment banker and went to work in the family’s nut store, the Newark Nut Company. “My dad and my uncle told me I was nuts,” says Jeff, but he made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. He would put the family’s snacks online—this was way back in the early dotcom days—and they wouldn’t have to pay him unless he actually sold some nuts. As it turned out, Jeff’s little internet play wound up unleashing explosive growth and consumed the business. And despite being a former investment banker, he managed to do that without taking any outside capital. Since we first published this episode Jeff has promoted himself from Chief Nut to Chair Nut.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Jeff Braverman is CEO of Nuts.com.

Shawn Busse is CEO of Kinesis.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Hello, everyone, welcome to the 21 Hats Podcast. I’m your host, Loren Feldman. Today, I’m here with Shawn Busse, CEO of Kinesis. And we’re doing another in our series of marketing workshops. As we explained, the last time we did this, the idea is to focus on one of the biggest pain points business owners have—but with the idea that there’s no magic bullet.

So today, I think we’re probably going to end up talking a lot about digital marketing. There’s a lot of jargon involved in this. Could you walk me through a couple of these? Let me start with one I just heard that I wasn’t familiar with. What’s CAC?

Shawn Busse:
CAC, it sounds terrible. It sounds like it might be a disease, but it’s really just customer acquisition cost: How much are you spending to get a customer? You’re also probably going to hear some terms like LTV—that’s lifetime value—so what is a customer worth, not only when they buy a product or service from you today, but what’s it worth over the lifetime that they’re with your company?

Loren Feldman:
Because if you’re thinking about how much you’re spending to get that customer, you want to know what you’re going to get back over —

Shawn Busse:
That’s right over the lifetime. You’re probably going to hear CPG, which is consumer packaged goods. So think about when you go into the grocery store, all the stuff on the shelves, those are CPG items. Our guest today has a lot of CPG stuff. And then the last one I think you’ll probably hear is DTC, and so that is direct-to-consumer, meaning rather than going through the grocery store to get your customers, a manufacturer actually sells straight to the consumer, usually through the internet. So direct to consumer has been kind of the rage for the last, I don’t know, five or 10 years or so.

Loren Feldman:
So again, the idea behind these conversations is that because there’s no magic-bullet marketing solution, we want to just try to workshop it and talk to business owners and entrepreneurs about the strategies they’ve tried, what’s worked and what hasn’t. Today, we’re going to talk to Jeff Braverman, who calls himself “chief nut” at a family-owned business called Nuts.com.

I’ve known him for more than 10 years now. We wrote about him when I was at The New York Times, when his business was much smaller. He’s got an amazing story of taking a business that his father and uncle were running—a little failing retail nut shop—turning this business into an internet juggernaut and doing that without taking any outside capital. Is there anything in particular you’re hoping to hear from Jeff today?

Shawn Busse:
I mean, it’s amazing, because he’s gone from what looks to be like maybe a four-person retail store to a maybe 500-person company, somewhere in that range, that’s doing everything from manufacturing to fulfillment to marketing. And so I want to hear about that journey, especially how to transition in a family-run business, because that’s often a super hard thing to do.

Loren Feldman:
All right. As usual, this episode is brought to you by our principal sponsor, the Great Game of Business. Let’s get started.

Welcome, Jeff. To start, could you give us a sense of how big a business Nuts.com is?

Jeff Braverman:
It’s certainly bigger than when we last spoke a few years ago. We’re well into the stratosphere. Let’s put it that way. I think when we first met, we were probably doing 30-something million dollars, or something like that. So we’re doing multiples of that now.

Loren Feldman:
How many employees do you have?

Jeff Braverman:
Probably about 500 or so.

Loren Feldman:
You have a wonderful story about how you actually got into the nut business. You went to school at Wharton, you got a job on Wall Street with an investment bank, then what happened?

Jeff Braverman:
I gave that about six months, seven months. I just decided I wanted to build something. I wanted to do something special and a little bit more socially redeeming. I grew up in a little nut store that my grandfather started in 1929. And I just had an idea. Because when I graduated—I was a freshman in college—I did start what became Nuts.com, but at the time was called Nutsonline.com.

So I left banking. My dad and my uncle, as you know, told me I was nuts. Literally, I am not kidding—because I was making more money than they were and doing great in my career. I just had a belief in myself. And you know, I’m an entrepreneur at heart, and the rest became history. We still had modest expectations, and we’ve blown through all of them.

Loren Feldman:
What year was this where you started Nutsonline.com?

Jeff Braverman:
It started in early 1999, and then I joined the business full-time in 2003.

Loren Feldman:
So that’s before the dotcom bubble burst, early days on the internet.

Jeff Braverman:
Very early. Not that many people were buying nuts online then. Orders were trickling in, a few orders here and there. And it was like the most exciting thing in the world to my four-person family business.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I remember in those early days, too, it was like there was so much hesitation about putting your credit card online. Just getting over that threshold was a big barrier back then.

Jeff Braverman:
One hundred percent. And even if you fast forward a bunch of years, it was still a barrier. We used to have all these assurances on the side. We would do A/B testing showing credit cards. Were credit cards accepted? And these Norton secure whatever stuff to try to mitigate and allay people’s fears. I don’t think those are as necessary these days.

Loren Feldman:
What was your basic idea for how you were going to find customers and how customers were going to find you when the internet was just getting started?

Jeff Braverman:
Yes, early on, it was hard. There wasn’t even a Google that you could pay. Maybe there was a Google, but you couldn’t pay them. AdWords didn’t exist. So I actually started out, for example—and I know he’s passed—but Tony Hsieh from Zappos had this company called LinkExchange. And he would put banners and share banners and pay commissions and stuff like that. That’s how I started driving people.

But then SEO also. Organic search was an easy thing those days, and you could manipulate and rank very high just by doing some very basic things on the page. Then there was a tool called GoTo, which became Overture, which then got bought by Yahoo. So these are like, pay-per-click. So yeah, I date myself here. And then obviously, the holy grail became Google.

Loren Feldman:
It’s like a history of the internet.

Jeff Braverman:
When I came into the business—and this was, like, February of 2003—I didn’t know that the internet was gonna be the end-all-be-all for our little store. I actually thought the opportunity was to sell to a supermarket who started buying from us. But after a few months, I just really wanted to lean into where we could differentiate ourselves, and I realized it was online, and then put together a strategy, rebuilt the website—there were technical hurdles— to allow us to really go after advertising online.

And we launched, of course. This stuff always takes longer than you expect. We launched on December 4th of that year. And I told the developer, who—I hired him when I was a sophomore in college, and he’s still with us today. But I said, “It’s Christmas time, let’s go.” We launched. And it was like the fire hose opened up, where volume just exploded, but we just didn’t have a strategy on how to advertise on Google. And what we realized really early on was: Budget? What budget? If there are returns, you just find the money and you spend it.

And also then—this is a big challenge for lots of people, especially these startups for the last couple of years, taxes were just nothing—we actually got to the point where we were grandfathered in with some platforms for bids for a penny. Eventually, they graduated those things to be 10 cents, or 25 cents, or whatever. But the only secret to our success—we already were ranking organically—was really understanding Google. There was a guy who wrote one of the first books on Google. And instead of me running the campaigns, I decided, let me hand it off to him. And for several hundred dollars a month—I remember, he didn’t know what his worth was—and it was just like completely off to the races.

Shawn Busse:
I remember that time. We were doing SEO back in 2005. It was B2B, but it still worked very similarly. If you created content and you just put a lot of content out there with the right keywords, you could really drive a lot of business. And there just wasn’t the competition. They were sort of like halcyon days. Such a great time, if you were ahead of everybody else.

Jeff Braverman:
Yeah, and then we used the tools. So when I came into the business—think of a little nut and dried-fruit candy store, 150 products or so. Today, we have thousands of products, but we leveraged the tools. Again, even before Google, we used another keyword tool, and it would tell us how many searches are there for this thing in a given month. We would take supplier catalogs, dump it into the tool, and just start scaling the offering. If X number of people are searching for this thing, God bless, let’s sell it and see how it goes. And it was a very simple strategy, but it worked.

Shawn Busse:
Just stepping back a minute, I run into a lot of second-generation business owners where the parents are still involved. And it sounds like you’ve faced kind of a common situation where there’s a status quo. There’s a way of working. It was boots on the ground, retail presence. And you had a vision and a transformation you wanted to bring about. How did you navigate your big ideas and change and all that, and also manage your relationship with your family?

Jeff Braverman:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And I think I was looking at a little bit of a special situation here, because I think, often, whether it’s a strong patriarch or matriarch, there’s someone strong who’s reluctant to cede control to the next generation. I’ve had a unique relationship with my dad, where in high school, I was investing his money and managing his money. So there was something a little bit different there. I did come home my freshman year of college. I put together a little business plan—my dad or my uncle had probably never had a business plan—to try something with the Internet.

They gave me a very small budget. It did cost me more than that. But they had a strong belief in me, and like I said, when I decided to come into the business, this was exciting. I’ll speak for my dad, he was just a creature of habit. When the store was actually struggling, so when there were no customers on a Saturday, he’d be nervous. And when it was right before Christmas and really busy, he’d be equally nervous. You know, a reluctance to change and kind of set in their ways. My grandfather was the exact same way. My dad told me that, when he came into the business, he wanted to put display cases in the store. This was old-school, you had to know what to ask when you came into the store. You couldn’t even see the product.

And it took my dad years. He finally cried to his mom, and finally, she said, “Sol, listen to him and give it a shot.” And they finally put in a display case, and then sales went up. So I think he probably forgot a little bit of that once I came into the business. But he was certainly more open-minded. And one thing that uniquely they did was they gave me the keys in a much more generous way than would normally happen.

And there were challenges. At some point, I said, “Hey, we need QuickBooks.” And I remember distinctly, it was about $299 at the time. And my dad said, “Let’s wait for business to be a little bit better.” And I just said, “No.” He just had no choice, because I just bought it.

You know, we were dead on Saturdays in a retail store. I put together the case and said, “Hey, we need to close. We’re actually not making any money on Saturdays.” And their response was, “Well, Poppy Sol would never let us close.” And they wanted to start with half a day. And sometimes I just dug in, and they didn’t have the fight in them. But then what happened was, things worked. So we had a business that was not a good business, was not making much money, and then we started growing, and it becomes super exciting. That’s when we turn on that website, again, the new version, December 4th, 2003. My dad actually said, “Shut it off.” Because it was too much business, and he was scared.

Loren Feldman:
Scared he couldn’t fulfill it?

Jeff Braverman:
Just nervous, yeah. And it’s like, “We got this.” Here’s an example: We had a wholesale customer. We had to have a wholesale business, because the retail store was just going down and down each year. And I just visited them and asked them questions, “So how can we help you?” They’re like, “Well, we really love packaging. Will you package for us? My dad and uncle said, “Nah, too much labor.” Because for them, they didn’t want to think about hiring people. And I showed them math, like, “Oh my gosh, we can make retail margins at wholesale volumes. Let’s go.” So I was the person who packed it, and just kind of dragged them along.

But then it starts getting faster, and we start hiring people, and it worked. We grew this business very quickly and profitably. And so I think that covers up a lot of stuff. But I think there was a deep love and respect that they had for me. I’m not saying that’s not in other places, but they were much more trusting. And then, to my dad’s credit, and all of his stubbornness in life—because he’s pretty dogmatic—he pledged that he wasn’t expecting to have a kid to come in the business—like he had to kind of go into the business—but if he did, he would have given them a lot more latitude.

So, very quickly, that retail store of ours got bulldozed in 2005. That was 50 percent of our business. Fortunately, we had the internet.

Loren Feldman:
That’s a symbolic moment.

Jeff Braverman:
Yeah, and I was there. That saved the day. And again, we grew 50 percent a year for 10 years, or whatever it was. We got paid before we paid our suppliers. It just was a model that worked.

Shawn Busse:
You were, what, in your 20s at that point, when you were sort of hustling hard?

Jeff Braverman:
Yeah, so I came in when I was 20. I started full-time when I was 23. And then, we get bulldozed, we move to a bigger facility. I was nervous that it was too big. Well, we took over the neighboring facility two years later. Then we had to move out again. And then we’ve scaled tremendously, and now we have offices all over the country. But yeah, we really hit our groove three or four years in. We were really hitting our groove and growing nicely.

Loren Feldman:
At what point did you start thinking that you had regrets about the name Nutsonline.com, and decide to go after Nuts.com?

Jeff Braverman:
Yeah, so never regrets. I had no money. I couldn’t even contemplate buying a domain that was already taken. Candidly, those were less appropriate sites at the time that you wouldn’t even want to be thinking about. So Nutsonline.com was actually my seventh choice, but the previous six were all taken at the time. But then in the back of my head, I had files from 2005, because then Domains by Proxy came out, and you didn’t know who the owners were of a website. But I have files from an old computer, which told me who the owner was. So I have that going back from 2005, of Nuts.com. So it’s always in the back of my head.

There were small instances, like in 2008, we made these tulle circles with Jordan almonds for the “Rachael Ray Show.” And I helped tie the damn bows, and at the very end, she says, “Well, I really want to thank”—we were Nutsonline.com—she says, “I really want to thank Nuts.com” for contributing these things. Like, oh my God. And Loren knows all these details. It’s a very long story, but I tried to buy it in 2008 and it turned out the majority of the type-in traffic was from a different country with a different search intent. So we passed, and the seller wasn’t really super interested in selling for the price we offered.

But then, come 2011, we kind of had the foresight for where the world was headed. You can see this today where Amazon’s done a very good job promoting Amazon. So we had a sense that the brand would become even more important. So, just one of these things, active negotiation at the end of 2011, I thought it was gonna fail. Fortunately, it worked out. And the rest is history.

Shawn Busse:
You said the brand would become very important. That’s one of those words that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And I would love for you to articulate what it means to you and how you think about brand.

Jeff Braverman:
Yeah. And to be clear, we’re in our infancy right now, even. To this day, we’re doing deep brand research: What is Nuts.com? What can it be? Can it scale? Can it transcend just the word “nuts”? So, I’m still not that smart, but we had a good business. We were doing tens of millions of dollars under Nutsonline.com. So I couldn’t complain—you know, far greater than my junior year of college when my goal was 10 orders a day. This is a much bigger scale than that. And I just saw basic stuff, just from a retention standpoint. It’s just easier. It’s four letters. It’s more memorable: Nuts.com versus Nutsonline.com.

You can imagine from a competitive threat standpoint, it’s just all around a better name. It gives it much greater weight and authority, when you think about it. So if someone’s looking at a search result, and they’re trying to buy a nut product, and it’s Nuts.com, it’s more weighty and has more trust than just Nutsonline.com.

But again, we were always trying to be personable. And when we rebranded, this wasn’t, “Hey, Jeff, just use your college friend anymore to do design work.” This is like, “Hey, let’s invest.” We’re spending a lot of money on this domain. Let’s go out and find some of the best in the business on the brand identity and the surrounding imagery and so on.

Loren Feldman:
Jeff, I believe it’s been reported, in part by places where I’ve been employed, how much you spent. Do you mind telling us again, how much you spent for Nuts.com?

Jeff Braverman:
Sure, because you can Google it. ChatGPT probably knows. It was never supposed to get out, but it got out: $700,000.

Shawn Busse:
And that’s 2011 dollars.

Jeff Braverman:
Correct.

Loren Feldman:
It wasn’t that long before that, that you were negotiating $299 for QuickBooks.

Jeff Braverman:
Yeah.

Loren Feldman:
How did writing that check feel? How big a risk was that for you, at the time?

Jeff Braverman:
Well, it wasn’t like I bet the house or anything like that, to be clear. We were already doing really well. Our profit could handle it. Let’s put it that way. So it wasn’t this massive financial gamble that was gonna make us insolvent. But I had conviction. I believed. I was trying to justify the math. And I was like, “Well, if you can improve your retention rate by 1 percent, then all this stuff.” It’s all BS, saying, “Well, what if you could hire employees better? Like, is it a better brand that resonates with people you go to hire?” And you could get a return if you just hire that one person.

So I just had a long-term conviction, and basically, there’s no math. I was like, “You know, what? If it pays off in 10 years…” I had confidence that it would do that. Obviously, Loren, as you know, our organic rankings tanked for the first couple of months, which made me panic, because Google had to figure that stuff out. And then they came roaring back. And I don’t remember the exact math I did back then, but I figured it paid back in about six months. So it ultimately worked out well.

Shawn Busse:
I’d love for you to talk about your journey of going from these early scrappy days, when you’re like, “I’ve got to like pinch every penny and be really cautious,” to a place where you’re like, “I’m going to take a flier on this thing.” And what are the right times to be thinking bigger like that?

Jeff Braverman:
Yeah, it’s a good question. Look, I think what’s been imbued in me from the day I was born was frugality. And it doesn’t stop, even now. We’ve scaled our payroll probably by 10x that in the last year or so, to give you some perspective. But there’s still just this high degree of frugality. And I would say, my dad was more penny-wise, pound-foolish. I’m trying to be penny-wise and pound-wise, and that’s how I’ve been. So that was like a big number. But again, it wasn’t bet the farm. And it wasn’t like it was worth zero. You know, it’s worth something. But it came down to gut.

Because, again, yes, I did math, but who the heck knows what would have happened? So I think it was, I just believed. I think the definition of an entrepreneur is someone who takes risks with limited information. [Laughter] And that’s what I did. But again, I was never going to create existential risks. I can’t remember what our profit was then. I don’t know what my frame of mind was then. But I think we were at the scale where we wouldn’t miss it. So that was certainly helpful.

Loren Feldman:
But that wasn’t the sum total of your investment at that point. I think you were starting to say before, when you were talking about brand, I think you made a decision that it wasn’t just buying the domain name, you’re going to invest in the brand. And I think you’re probably talking about some of the graphic design—

Jeff Braverman:
Correct. Correct. Which wasn’t cheap, but still orders of magnitude less. But yes, it took a lot of work, and you have to reprint all your assets. But those are still small compared to the $700,000. But I can tell you that we did lean in, didn’t go cheap on the brand agency. And some of the best feedback we got afterwards, the most consistent feedback was, “Oh my God, your boxes are absolutely incredible.” Because we went nuts on the boxes, right? We had fun with it.

We always had these cutesy cartoon characters, because I kind of built this business in my image. And I liked cartoon characters, and I wanted to make them be personable and have a connection with the customer. And lean in, we did. And look, this is a business where we still are working on a direct-response model. We’re not putting much money out there for branding, in terms of budget and so on. This is: We put in X and we get back Y. So that was a little bit more of a leap than a lot of the other stuff.

Shawn Busse:
So along those lines of taking risks—which is something I love to talk about, in terms of what makes a good decision—you took some other risks. So you’re over here tinkering with the online space. You’re really in this kind of A test/B test, inputs/outputs, very what I would call kind of “left-brain activity.” And then I was reading, you did this thing—you shipped a bunch of nuts to CBS. [Laughter] And you have this kind of history of these goofy, kind of ballsy moves that have no direct correlation to return on investment, and yet they made a difference in your business. Can you talk a little bit about whether it’s the “Jericho” thing, or other examples like that? I feel like it’s not an isolated incident, either.

Jeff Braverman:
Yeah, and you know what the Jericho example reminds me of? Sometimes I listen to the How I Built This podcast by Guy Raz, and he always asks, “How much of this was hard work and smarts and so on versus luck?” I’m not going to be smart enough to answer that well, but I think you have to be open to receiving the luck. And with the case of Jericho, this was a long time ago, 15 years ago or so. But long story short, the show was being canceled on CBS. And it’s a long story, but fans decided to send nuts in protest.

I had never seen the show. I see some orders come in. We have a fraud system. I was like, “Oh, it’s getting tripped up as fraud,” and start poking around, and just latched on to this thing. Again, mind you, it took me several weeks before even watching the show, because I finally did have to watch it. But like, I had never posted on a blog. We launched a blog. When you see fundraisers, it’s like a thermometer and you want the red to go up. We were saying, “Hey, let’s raise $4,000. That’s the campaign.” And 40,000 pounds later… We raised $20,000 for shirts and whatever, we donated all this money. We just wrapped our head around this thing for about three weeks. I didn’t sleep. You know, taking interviews at midnight, hopping in a truck and driving a truckload to CBS.

Loren Feldman:
Were those nuts paid for? Or were you just donating those nuts?

Jeff Braverman:
No, no, no. What we did was, people started buying a pound of something. And then shipping is expensive. What we did was we became a facilitator. We became the focal point of a campaign. Put in $25, put in $100. We’re going to give it to you at the wholesale price. And we’re going to ship this in bulk, 25 pound cases. Hell, we were freshly roasting. These were gorgeous peanuts. And then they realized they wanted to ship it to another executive in L.A. So I was like, “Unh unh, you guys. This ain’t leaving me.” So then I arranged for the company in L.A. to do the final delivery for us. So we were still the focal point of this campaign.

And what’s interesting is, they brought the show back. They flew me out for the full lineup party in L.A. And I’m in the season two DVD, which is kind of funny. And mind you, I wasn’t a fan. I thought these people were crazy at first. I had no idea what this was about. But then, ultimately, what happened was, we did an analysis to say, “Hey, what do we gain from these customers? It turned out, these people are rabid fans, but they didn’t turn out to be rabid customers.” There wasn’t a lot of lifetime value there. But when you have links from The New York Times, and all these other publications about this campaign…

What did we do? We took that Jericho page where we had pictures and this blog and like all this stuff going, we ended up just saying, “Okay, let’s put that page somewhere else. And let’s take that page and redirect it to our nuts page.” And then our rankings went up. So we did maneuver once this whole thing died down. But I think just being open and flexible, and being able to pounce when you have a sense there’s some opportunity. I didn’t expect it to be crazy like that.

Loren Feldman:
Did you have the help of a public relations firm through any of that? Or do you just wing it all yourself?

Jeff Braverman:
No, what we had was a couple of programmers, and then we had kind of a designer. No, I was like, to be honest, some guy was like, “Hey, we want to interview you.” I had no idea who he was. He was like a major person in this campaign. I had no idea. I would just get on the call. I was reluctant—like, I’m tired—I got on. And then that spawned, I was on K-Rock and all this other stuff happened. And suddenly, you go to the supermarket, and you saw me in the National Enquirer. It was like: Are you kidding me?

Shawn Busse:
This is such a cool story, from a lot of marketing concepts. You saw something in the data, which was, “Wow, why are these nuts getting delivered to CBS? What’s up with that?” And then you kind of scratched at that. And you learn more, and you learn more. And then pretty soon, you find that there’s like a community out there that’s really passionate about something. It’s not nuts, but somehow, you got tied into that. And then the ancillary benefits to that far outstripped the nuts that they ordered, or the passion that they had in the moment. It’s really about the long game there. What are some other examples that you can share of: “This is another kind of pillar of our marketing foundation that we developed over time”?

Jeff Braverman:
I’ll give you something that’s much more recent. So all these DTC businesses now, so many are struggling, but some of these things, everyone thought they were God during the first year of the pandemic. I would have all these CPG startups calling me, bragging about how great their acquisition strategy is on Facebook .

Shawn Busse:
They’re genius business people.

Jeff Braverman:
And I would interview people, too. And it’s like, “Well, what did you do? What did COVID do versus what did you do?” But we had a sense for what was happening with the pandemic before most people. We have a chocolate business, and it had some product in Singapore, believe it or not, some packaged product. And they had said, “Oh, thank you so much. This is helping us tremendously in our quarantine.” This is in February of 2020. And I was like, “What?!! I heard of Wuhan. What the heck? I never heard of a quarantine in Singapore.”

So we’re already moving. And then I remember—because I think it’s a leap year—February 29th, we sent out an email to customers, which was early, and we said, “Hey, something’s going on.” We were just like, “Guys, stock up. We’re gonna waive shipping. It’s free shipping, no minimum, just stock up. Something’s coming.” And then, the next three months, I lived in the plants. I’m in YPO, the Young Presidents Organization. And my peers were like, “Jeff, you’ve got this substantial business, much bigger than ours, and you’re the CEO. You need to stay home and protect yourself.” And I was like, “Unh, unh, that’s not the business I built. And I’m not gonna let my people assume risks I’m not willing to assume.”

So I literally was in the plant for the first three months, just picking and packing orders, because it was hard being in New Jersey. These were tough times. March and April, that was the epicenter in the United States. So, we struggled. We had 70-percent worker-call-out at our worst moment in time. We hired maybe a thousand temps over a matter of months, and so on. But then, we put on a night shift. It collapsed, because workers were too scared to be by the temps. And then, kind of the third week of April, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, I think, that was saying something like: The big boys—entertainment and hospitality and car manufacturers—were all pulling off of TV.

I’m picking orders in the warehouse, doing manual labor. And I called a guy I know. He’s very smart and connected. I said, “We need to get on TV.” Because while I was working, all my friends were home. Everyone was just watching TV. I’m sure you remember. The challenge was, all those people watching TV were also baking breads. And that means—we sell flour—we were selling truckloads of flour. We’re Nuts.com, but one of our bestsellers is a dried mango. People are buying all that stuff—beans and quinoa, grains, all that type of stuff. So I said, “We need to launch TV, and now.” And the first week of May, 2020, we launched TV.

So when I look at the growth of the business as a result of the pandemic, yeah, 50 percent was free. And I don’t say that lightly, because my team, we worked very hard just to keep up with the volume, and keep people healthy, and keep this thing running. Because we were probably five minutes from having to shut down the factory, because it was that hard to keep people there. But so like I would say 50 percent was, “Hey, market forces.” But the other 50 percent was we leaned in when everyone was terrified.

I don’t know if you remember, but it would take two to four weeks to get some stuff from Amazon, early on in the pandemic. We were still shipping 50 percent of our orders the same day. Yes, we had to restrict demand and do all this craziness because we didn’t have enough human beings. We manufacture this stuff. We’re not just buying something and then shipping it. We’re packaging 100 percent in-house. We’re roasting. We’re doing chocolates and so on. This is not a business you want to have. This is highly labor intensive, a huge number of SKUs, you have to keep people apart so they didn’t get sick. And a lot of stuff was hand-packed, because we have so many SKUs and they’re small runs. Not everything’s packed on a machine.

Yeah, not a great place to be. But we rose to the occasion and literally launched TV, which became a huge percentage of our budget. And we got the learnings in. So this opportunity presents itself. And you’ve just got to be open to it and see. Look, a week before I was having a nervous breakdown, literally a nervous breakdown. Because I was getting very tired, physically working so many hours in the plant and then trying to save the whole business at night. But then we had some hope, and then we stepped up. And that was a really opportune time, because for us, it’s about the buy on TV. And there was no better time, probably. I don’t know, right? I didn’t do this before, but the last 30 years to get in and get your learnings before CPM was normalized.

Shawn Busse:
Did you get help with the TV? At that point, you’re a bigger company. You probably had an agency that you’re working with on a regular basis. Or maybe you had an internal marketing team. Tell us a little bit about how you moved into a space you were totally unfamiliar with and managed to make it work.

Jeff Braverman:
I knew a guy, a smart marketer, externally. And again, literally, I called him from the warehouse floor, and I said, “I need to launch, and I need to launch now.” He’s like, “I have one company identified, an agency. They’ll do it all. They’ll do creative. They’ll do testing. They’ll do strategy, analytics, and so on, and the buy. Or we could go out with an RFP, but that’s gonna take time.” I said, “No, no, no, we don’t have time.”

This company said they’ll launch in 10 days, that type of thing. Then they get back and said, “Two weeks.” I said, “No, no, no. You promised 10 days.” And we then went to war internally, where before we had a kickoff, we prepared every possible asset, anything they could think of, so that we can hit the ground running.

I think we spoke with them on a Thursday. They wrote a script on Friday. And this is where, like, I didn’t know what I was doing. We didn’t know exactly what we were doing but I told my team, “Let’s be quiet. These are the experts. Yes, we think we have opinions and stuff, but, shut up. We’re going to launch Sunday.” I remember, I was sitting outside with friends, because you couldn’t be inside with people. I remember pulling away, because they already were showing me this cartoon thing they spun up super fast. And we were just commenting on minor things, and then launched a few days later. So this was really, really incredible, but no, we leveraged an agency. This is something that is very hard to ever be able to do in-house, even at massive scale.

Shawn Busse:
So was your instinct to go to TV so much as you felt like there were just fresh customers to be had here? Was it that the Google search thing, you were starting to kind of run out of runway, in terms of your cost per lead and cost per acquisition? Tell us more about your thinking there.

Jeff Braverman:
I’ve viewed Google—don’t let the Google people hear this—like a morphine drip for years now. You gotta just pay to play, and it’s like, “Is it incremental or not?” But at that point in time, Google was an unbelievable channel. It was an unbelievable channel for everyone. Because the audience just exploded. Conversion rates went through the roof.

So no, to me, it was just fundamentally like, “Holy crap, the world is our oyster. This is an opportunity to acquire so many more customers and then a supply and demand imbalance.” Everyone’s watching TV, and the advertisers are pulling off. So you have a buying opportunity. Not arbitrage, because we’re not selling. But you could buy on the cheap, and it was one of these things like, “Let’s go, let’s move super fast.” You know, I don’t love that buzzword, the MVP acronym, which I don’t know if that’s still a buzzword or not, but minimum viable product. But this is like, “Let’s go, let’s apologize later. Let’s break things. And let’s launch.”

But then it opened my eyes. It was like, “Okay, great: If Google’s really performing now, and TV is really performing, well why the hell isn’t Facebook performing?” I had a junior team at the time working on this stuff. And I didn’t know Facebook super well. We’ve been on Facebook forever, but I’m always skeptical of Facebook. Look, I’ve been on Facebook since probably you first could pay them in 2005. And I’ve seen them become opaque, and they don’t show you results. and they take credit for everything. And suddenly, with iOS 14.5, it becomes this wake-up call. But I was just listening to my team. And they’re like, “Well, here’s the ramp up. And here’s the CAC and LTV analysis,” and I was just like, “Bullshit. If Google’s working, and TV’s working, there’s gotta be something for Facebook.”

So then it didn’t last long, to be honest, but then we scaled the hell out of it after the summer. So we launched TV in May. I think in September, we went after Facebook aggressively and that was like massively performing. That lasted only so long. I think we started seeing reversion to the mean by February, and then that summer, Facebook died because of the Apple changes.

But to me, so much of my success in business—one thing is, I was the customer. So I always have the customer-first mindset, because I like eating the stuff. We have delicious stuff. And cute cartoon characters, great quality, freshness, quick delivery. We’ve got five distribution centers around the country, because I want stuff quickly. And I think the second thing is, it’s a lot of common sense, and you just connect the dots in places. So again, that example, TV is working. Google’s working. Everyone’s on Facebook, too, because they’ve got nothing to do. Like, you can be conservative. So if you don’t believe it fully, it’s very hard to figure out attribution. It’s only getting harder. But when we launched, it was like, the CACs, the acquisition costs, were just so low, it didn’t matter if it was right or not.

Shawn Busse:
You gave two examples there: one in which you said, “Hey, let’s just trust these professionals. You know, we’ve got to go.” And that was your TV experience, right? Then the other example you just gave was like, “I don’t trust what my team is telling me.” Maybe I’m simplifying it a little too much. But maybe you can help folks, from your own experience, how you think about decision making. And how do you think about trust and when to go with your gut and when to rely on experts?

Jeff Braverman:
I’ll answer this in a few ways. Recognize, I’m still learning and I’m still a novice. At some points, I said, “Hey, I should hire an executive team.” I was the highest paid manual laborer for far too long. Let’s put it that way. And I struggled. I said, “How should I reinvest in this business?” I struggled for years. I didn’t know, and I should have invested in people. The problem is, I didn’t know how, and I didn’t have enough confidence in myself in hiring the right people.

So I did go on a crusade and start hiring people. And the mistake I made was I certainly emphasized intelligence, because that was easier for me to measure. There’s a lot more to it than that. And I probably over-indexed there, but some stuff was much more theoretical than practical, and you need to be able to execute. But I think then I was much more of a trust, like, “Hey, I’m bringing on these very intelligent people: Go.” A few years later, I learned that you should really trust, but verify. That’s a newer principle.

And for me, now, it’s like, “Really try to spend a lot of time hiring great people. If you bring someone in that’s not good, fix it, and fix it quickly. But then empower them. But still, verify—and until people are ready.” Because sometimes it’s too much pressure. And like for me, I’ve got 20 plus years of deep institutional knowledge, where for years, I knew everything, literally everything. And that doesn’t scale.

The other thing I did is, I did hire an advisor. Because I would get informed advice from people, but that’s not enough. So I don’t have a board of directors yet. One day, I’ll figure that out, but I think a little over two years ago, I did bring on an advisor. And it just gave me a lot of confidence, because then when you go to make hiring decisions, there’s someone else in your corner who understands the business, not just at a superficial level. I was spending probably four hours a week with the advisor then. And even though I’ve done great in life, like I said, I’m still a novice at this. And there are some things I’m really good at, and some things I’m not. And that’s where I had someone to talk to.

And look, I mean, Young Presidents Organization, where you have your kind of board, it’s a little different. We meet once a month for four hours but they don’t know the intimate details and the ins and outs, and they’re learning, too. But that did help, where then I had someone who I could go to for advice and so on. So I made a big move. We were thinking about, “How do we map my path out? What do I like doing? And how do we get there?” And he had said, “Hey, in three years, you could focus on people, strategy, and then acquisitions.” All of which sound good to me. And I said, “Why three years?” And I saw someone dynamic along the way, and then we hired a president—well ahead of when we were planning to do it.

But I begin to have the structure in place, and it applies to help make these right decisions. I don’t know if that exactly answered it. But in my heart of hearts, I want to just delegate and that’s different. Most people are reluctant to cede control. I probably am too trusting of people. Hence that emphasis on being able to verify. But I think what we’re trying to do is: How do you create a culture environment where you give guidance from up top but let the team set their objectives? Let them feel empowered. Turn people loose.

Loren Feldman:
I think you mentioned that you are doing some kind of deep brand research. Can you tell us about that?

Jeff Braverman:
Yeah, this is an area where people had to twist my arm to do it, because I didn’t fully understand it, and it’s expensive. And I don’t see immediate returns. My brain doesn’t work like that. To become a billion-dollar business, can we do that as Nuts.com?

Loren Feldman:
That’s the goal?

Jeff Braverman:
It’s like, “Hey, how do we keep this going for 90 years?” is probably the real goal, and do great work with great people. For me, it’s less about endpoints, it’s more about the journey. But sure, you’ve got to put numbers up to inspire people. But let’s put a number up there like that. You know, there are a lot of people who just think that we sell nuts, when that’s a minority of our products. Through branding work, can we stick with Nuts.com or not? Can that take us where we want to go? We have a gifting business. We have a gifting business that’s substantial. Do we need to create a sister brand? We don’t know the exact structure that’s going to come out of this from a brand architecture standpoint, but do we need to elevate a brand there?

Now, we have a B2B business that’s just really healthy. We have a chocolate business that actually has a retail brand. How does this stuff all fit together? So we’re doing this extensive research project to try to understand, again, where we can go, and how do we get there? For me to try to move away, let’s say, from the name Nuts.com, I’m gonna need a lot of convincing evidence, because there is value there. And whether we like it or not, we have created a brand.

I was just on a trip. And many people came up to say, “Oh my God, I love Nuts.com.” Or, “It’s my little secret store” type of a thing. So there is stuff there that we now need to be able to articulate much better and architect this much better.

Loren Feldman:
It sounds like, as much as you’ve grown, you still see yourself as a little bit of a secret. So suggesting there’s a lot of room to grow.

Jeff Braverman:
These markets we serve are massive. That’s why when I think about what we need to do, it’s less about Amazon and the competition, because the mouths are there.

Loren Feldman:
Is Amazon your main competition? Is that how you think about it?

Jeff Braverman:
I mean, Amazon’s gonna be everyone’s. I hate to say it. Anyone who’s got significant parts of GDP is gonna be an Amazon competitor, unless they get broken up.

Loren Feldman:
Is there another business like yours, like Nuts.com, out there that fits the basic mold of what you’re doing?

Jeff Braverman:
I would say that a lot more of them are offline businesses versus online businesses. There are lots of smaller online businesses, but then again, we have a gifting business. There are many large gifting businesses that are bigger gifting businesses online. We operate on lots of different verticals. But I think at the end of the day, there’s a wallet share, and if people are gonna go buy stuff online, a lot of people are going to Amazon. So how do you get the people who want better? And I think that’s where we have to figure out how to lean in.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, that seems to me like the real opportunity. Amazon seems to be in a bit of a tailspin, in terms of quality and trust.

Jeff Braverman:
Correct. Food’s an intimate thing. We have this heritage, a real heritage. My grandfather started the store. Our suppliers, we’ve been doing business with our supplier for generations. Most other people can’t say that. And I think there’s an opportunity for us.

Look, in my mind, we’ve won, though it’s still early innings. I think customers and people want better. They want to have a relationship. They want to trust. We’re putting ice in our boxes as late as possible in the day so your stuff doesn’t melt. Your Medjool dates that are coming from Amazon that are stored in a 90-degree warehouse—we’re shipping them with ice.

Shawn Busse:
Well, I know we’re coming up on time here. And we like to end this with a question for every guest, and that is the idea of good habits. A lot of great marketing, which is what this show is about, is really about figuring out what are good habits and continuing to beat the drum. And I’m curious, what are your good habits that have served you well over the years, that have helped grow the business?

Jeff Braverman:
Yeah, and I think this relates more broadly than just marketing, but measure. Measure. Don’t just think, “It’s special if we spend lots of money.” Measure everything as best you can. And I know some stuff is harder. But for us, for me, it’s like, “What are the returns?” There’s always some math. Make sure there’s math. And have a plan. I think something that I’ve learned in the last couple of years—and this may not exactly answer your question—but there’s a saying, “Man plans, and God laughs.”

So for years, I just ran with it. I didn’t really plan, and suddenly COVID comes. You’re like, “Damn, I wish I had a plan.” And now we’re at a much bigger scale business where we have to put in a five-year plan. How can we justify scaling wages so much? Where are we going? So it’s like, no matter how smart you are, you’re only so smart. Have a plan. And then, measure. Measure against it.

Loren Feldman:
All right, this was great, Jeff. Thanks for sharing. All right, Shawn. Well, that was interesting. Now that he’s gone, any thoughts on how he built Nuts.com?

Shawn Busse:
Wow. I mean, that’s a fire hose. You know, I’m a reasonably good marketer here, but I think Jeff is next level.

Loren Feldman:
Yeah, it seems really clear that he really is his own chief marketing officer. He did talk about bringing in advisors. And it’s interesting how he chooses to use them and what he uses them for, but he really trusts his own instincts. And that’s obviously worked for him. He clearly has good instincts. What do you think of the way he’s mixed going with his gut, making big decisions, placing big bets, but also bringing in experts at certain points?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, gosh, I think we could have a whole show on this, decision making and risk-taking, and where to get help and when to trust your gut. I think the interesting lesson for Jeff here is how he’s using his advisor. If you listen carefully to the section about television, he didn’t ask an advisor, “Should I go into TV or not?” It was like his hunch, right? He was like, “I think this is an opportunity.” But what he did was he brought in a guy who knew TV really well to help him accelerate that hunch, and so like, within like 10 days, he’s capitalizing on this idea.

And I think that’s a really important thing to understand. If you’re a business owner: Am I hiring an advisor to bring new ideas because I need help innovating and creating new things? Am I hiring an advisor to help pull good ideas out of me, but I can’t quite get them without some help? Or am I hiring an advisor who’s really a subject matter expert, and is accelerating the idea I already have? And all three are totally legit ways to work with outside help.

Loren Feldman:
Which brings us back to the whole purpose of these conversations that we’ve talked about: The notion that there’s no one-size-fits-all, in terms of marketing strategy. There are all kinds of ways to do this, and what he’s done has worked for him. I would like to think that people could take pieces of this and maybe take some lessons that they might be able to apply. But, you know, not everybody has his instincts. It’s tricky.

All right. My thanks to Jeff Braverman, chief nut of Nuts.com, and to Shawn Busse, chief nut of Kinesis—and, of course to our sponsor, the Great Game of Business, which helps businesses implement open-book management and employee ownership. You can learn more at greatgame.com/21hats. Thanks, Shawn.