The Inventive Expert Episode #122 Circular Economy Misconceptions w/ Julia Goldstein
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
People often talk about something called the Circular Economy. This is about making things last longer and using resources wisely. Companies say they're part of it because they use recycled stuff or make things that can be recycled. But here's the catch: Just because something can be recycled doesn't mean it actually gets recycled and used again. In the Circular Economy, things should keep going round and round, not just once. So, some companies might not be as "circular" as they claim.
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Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
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The Inventive Journey Episode #555 Balancing Business Focus w/ Ben Anderson
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
I often advise individuals to allocate their time wisely across three critical areas: working in their business, working on their business, and investing. The need to secure basic necessities like shelter and food naturally compels them to work within their business to generate income. However, it's equally essential to set aside dedicated time on their calendars for working on their business and investing, as these activities are vital for long-term growth and financial stability.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Journey Episode #554 Entrepreneurial Support: A Must-Have w/ Shadi Atassi
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
Ensure you have a robust support network in place; this is absolutely crucial. Whether it's an advisory board, close friends and family, a coach, or a mentor, as I mentioned earlier, it's essential. The entrepreneurial journey can often be a solitary one, and the statistics show that entrepreneurs facing mental health challenges experience significantly higher rates of these challenges compared to those who are not in the entrepreneurial world. This underscores the difficulty of the entrepreneurial landscape and how isolating it can become. So, my advice is to proactively seek out and cultivate a support system around you.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Journey Episode #553 Beyond Profit: Finding Your North Star w/ Shadi Atassi
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
I would advise against solely pursuing financial gain. While it's clear that our primary goal in this venture is to run a successful business that generates profit, allowing us to compensate ourselves and foster financial growth, it's important not to be driven solely by money. When your sole motivation is monetary gain, you might constantly chase quick, opportunistic wins and find yourself eager to pivot frequently. Without a strong guiding principle, like our commitment to family values as our North Star, it becomes easy to be swayed by fleeting opportunities.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
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The Inventive Journey Episode #552 Don't Let Fear Hinder Your Dreams w/ Christopher Hadley
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
I would advise you not to let fear hold you back. Many individuals refrain from starting their own businesses simply because they're afraid. They fear that they may not be capable of succeeding, that it will demand too much time, or that it will be more demanding than they anticipate. I believe the primary issue for most people is that they have aspirations but are apprehensive about pursuing them. In my case, this opportunity didn't even originate from a dream; it simply landed in my lap. However, when faced with such an unexpected opportunity, one has a choice: to shrink back in fear, questioning whether they're up for the challenge, or to embrace it, recognizing the potential need for what they can offer. I believe many individuals hesitate, and as a result, their ideas sometimes become someone else's, as all great ideas eventually surface.
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Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
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a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Expert Episode #121 The Entrepreneur's Role: Assembling Success w/ Craig Wolfe
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
I believe the most significant misconception, and I hesitate to label it as belonging to any particular industry because I view myself as an entrepreneur, is the belief that substantial funding is an absolute requirement to achieve greatness. In reality, what truly matters are your skills and knowledge. If you can create something valuable, money will naturally follow. Regrettably, many individuals lose their motivation by fixating on pursuing financial gain when they should be concentrating on enhancing their skills and knowledge. By prioritizing personal growth over financial gains, success will inevitably come your way.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Growth Episode #5 Balancing Commitments and Self-Care w/ Richard Blank
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
I'm typically affected most by the actions of third parties, a consequence I willingly accepted when I signed up for this journey. The toll includes stress, late nights, and early mornings, but what truly concerns me is the disappointment from individuals I've invested in or relied upon who don't follow through. While I don't expect lifelong commitment, certain responsibilities are crucial. My current focus is on my own well-being, resilience, and the need to decompress. I make time for myself by working out in the mornings, washing my convertible on Sundays, and indulging in my passion for classic pinball machines. Most importantly, I've learned not to be too hard on myself.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
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The Inventive Growth Episode #4 Rediscovering My Why: Journey of Purpose & Family w/ Colby Tunick
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
I always make it a point to reflect on my purpose, and what's fascinating is that when we initially started the company, my sense of purpose wasn't particularly strong. About a year and a half ago, I decided to use a digital whiteboard with digital sticky notes to explore my why. I wrote down every conceivable idea that came to mind. However, when I revisited it two days later, I ended up deleting everything. I realized that the one reason I didn't include was the most crucial one, and it took me a considerable amount of time to contemplate it. Ultimately, why am I doing this? The answer lies in my commitment to my family. I am wholeheartedly dedicated to this endeavor. I possess an immense passion for the field we operate in and for the industries we assist. Each day, I am inspired and amazed by the unwavering dedication of our customers. Yet, when it all comes down to it, why do I persist? It's because I have that driving force, that deep-rooted why. And that why revolves around the most significant aspect of my life—my family.
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Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Journey Episode #551 A Shift in Perspective w/ Caleb Smith
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
Conduct thorough research and introspection. Ask yourself, "Why do I want to pursue this?" Many people venture into business solely for financial gain, which often leads to failure. The most successful entrepreneurs I've observed are those who are genuinely passionate about addressing a specific problem. They either invest in a franchise and actively manage it or identify a problem, develop a solution, and become the remedy. These individuals are driven by a deep passion for problem-solving. On the contrary, I've seen numerous businesses fail because their founders lacked genuine purpose. They jumped into entrepreneurship thinking it was an easy way to make money without giving adequate consideration to their venture.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Journey Episode #550 Startup Essentials: Vision & Mission w/ Jeff Maine
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
The most crucial advice for a new business owner is wholehearted immersion in every aspect of the enterprise, including taking on the role of a salesperson and actively participating in the startup process. This hands-on involvement should be coupled with a deep understanding of the business's operations and the development of a clear and enduring vision and mission statement. Regularly reviewing and refining this vision is vital, and our quarterly team meetings serve this purpose, ensuring not only that I as the owner have a clear direction but also that every team member is fully committed to our shared mission, reciting it daily to stay focused on our goals and purpose.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
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The Inventive Expert Episode #120 Skills and Knowledge for Success w/ Boris Krastev
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
I believe the most significant misconception, and I hesitate to label it as belonging to any particular industry because I view myself as an entrepreneur, is the belief that substantial funding is an absolute requirement to achieve greatness. In reality, what truly matters are your skills and knowledge. If you can create something valuable, money will naturally follow. Regrettably, many individuals lose their motivation by fixating on pursuing financial gain when they should be concentrating on enhancing their skills and knowledge. By prioritizing personal growth over financial gains, success will inevitably come your way.
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Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Journey Episode #549 Succeeding in the Startup Rollercoaster w/ Kenny Rose
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
Embracing the lean startup life means accepting the uncertainty that comes with entrepreneurship. While the initial excitement often revolves around the prospect of endless possibilities, it's essential to adopt a minimalist mindset, focusing on survival. Your business becomes your livelihood, and success demands unwavering commitment. Prepare for the rollercoaster of highs and lows, but maintain a balanced perspective to navigate the challenges without losing sight of your ultimate goals. Stay steady in your responses, knowing that resilience is the key to long-term success.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Founder Episode #6 Embracing Change: A Lesson in Perseverance w/ Jeff Heggie
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
At certain junctures, there was a prevailing mindset that did not entertain the notion of failure. There were moments when I was determined that failure was not an acceptable outcome. What I mean by this is that, when faced with adversity, instead of reevaluating our course, I redoubled my efforts. It's not necessarily a negative approach, but looking back, I should have recognized the signs and, in collaboration with my investors and partners, considered a different path. In retrospect, it would have likely been more beneficial for all parties involved if, during that challenging period, we had made the decision to conclude our current endeavor and start afresh.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
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The Inventive Journey Episode #547 Embracing Imperfection in Business w/ Chuck Leblo
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
You should possess at least a basic grasp of the business you're entering into, or consider hiring someone who does. It's possible to invest in a franchise without comprehensive knowledge, but it's crucial to have knowledgeable individuals on your team. However, even more crucial for business owners is understanding that perfection isn't a prerequisite. Striving for perfection can stifle entrepreneurial drive and hinder business progress. Sometimes, "good enough" is indeed good enough to kickstart a project or launch a business. Perfection isn't attainable, and I've personally grappled with this in my career, thinking every piece of software or website had to be flawless. Nothing will ever be flawless, but with time, you can always refine and improve it.
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Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
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a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Journey Episode #548 Embrace Opportunities: Pursue Your Dreams w/ Shivi Agarwal
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
I'll encourage them to give it a shot. There are essentially two possible outcomes for them. First, they might encounter failure, but it's through these setbacks that they'll gain valuable lessons. Second, they could achieve success, opening up limitless possibilities. Therefore, they shouldn't keep their ideas to themselves. This advice is something my father imparted to me: if you aspire to do something, don't hesitate to pursue it. This way, you'll always have the satisfaction of knowing you tried, without any regret. Whether you fail or succeed, remember, as I mentioned before, the sky is the limit.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Expert Episode #119 Navigating Growth in the Regenerative Movement w/ Joshua Prieto
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
Considering the regenerative movement and those transitioning it into a distinct industry, it's become a prominent vertical force, transcending mere movement status. Remarkably, nearly every sector can potentially integrate its principles. However, one of the most significant challenges within the regenerative movement and for entrepreneurs in this field is our tendency to become overly absorbed in our understanding. We often avoid acknowledging the challenges associated with larger enterprises, such as their creative and extractive processes. Paradoxically, we may be reluctant to witness substantial growth in our own businesses, preferring to remain at a certain level. In reality, this is precisely the arena where we should aspire to achieve the same expansive growth that is sought after in nearly every other industry.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
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The Inventive Journey Episode #546 Take the First Step w/ Andrew Denton
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
I have a lot of advice to offer, but if I had to condense it into one key point, it would be this: Take action. If you're thinking about starting a business or becoming an entrepreneur, it's easy to get stuck in a cycle of overthinking. We can spend hours reading and watching content on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, accumulating a lot of knowledge that doesn't really become useful because we haven't put it into practice. We might believe we understand it, but the truth is, we likely don't until we apply it. We find ourselves in a place where we want to take action and pursue our entrepreneurial goals, but we hesitate. So, if you're truly committed and this passion runs deep within you, you must take that initial step forward.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
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a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Founder Episode #5 Improving Financial Focus w/ Scott Markman
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
I want to get better at understanding and managing the financial side of our agency. Rather than just focusing on making money like a salesperson, I want to concentrate more on making a profit. I'm driven by ensuring we have enough money coming in and managing our finances effectively. When I look back, I realize I should have spent more time on the process and financial analysis that leads to profit. It's the most important part of what we do. While we've been successful in making money, I wish I had paid more attention to this aspect instead of just thinking about immediate sales and short-term cash flow.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Journey Episode #545 Guiding Business Principles' w/ Tavi Gallego
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
My business principles revolve around honesty, integrity, customer-centricity, and giving back through tithing. Honesty is paramount, including admitting mistakes and providing candid advice. Paying taxes diligently, avoiding ethical dilemmas, and prioritizing the customer's welfare are non-negotiable. In our insurance business, we referred customers to better deals when we couldn't offer the lowest rates, fostering trust. Avoid overcharging, offer assistance when possible, and don't fear admitting when you don't know, but commit to finding answers. These principles ensure both ethical business growth and a good night's sleep.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
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The Inventive Journey Episode #544 Finding Your Business 'Why' w/ Adam David Jones
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
Why start a business? Running one can be tough, and just making money isn't enough of a reason. You need a strong 'why' behind it. Sure, other jobs might pay better, but if you're not passionate about your business, think twice. Find a purpose that goes beyond money, whether it's your love for what you're doing or a personal story that drives you. Life's too short to chase cash without a meaningful reason, so make sure your business connects with your values and gives you fulfillment.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
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a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
The Inventive Expert Episode #118 Rethinking Franchise Sales Challenges w/ Mark Siebert
What This Episode Talks About:
How To Manage Business & Self
One of the industry's major myths is the perceived difficulty in selling franchises. While acknowledging the complexity of the process, it's important to recognize its methodical nature. By strategically investing resources and adopting a professional approach to lead management, coupled with a compelling product, a well-constructed franchise agreement, and a proven track record of franchisee success, a predictable and successful franchise sales outcome can be achieved.
Join Us!
Apply to be on the show! We accept entrepreneurs of all backgrounds.
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
ai generated transcription
a hundred thousand percent in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help now today we have another great guest on the podcast asim khan and uh sim um with there is a quick intro um him and his brother are immigrants originally from pakistan um his parents came to the u.s to uh for additional or to for additional opportunities um grew up uh grew up humbly or in his words poor or humbly and parents were two or three jobs growing up went to high school played sports and then went to college and went to the same schools his older brother did um got a finance or both of them got i think both him and his brother got finance degrees uh worked as investment bankers more fulfilled in the job or in the job so him and his brother i decided they wanted to uh or wanted to work together and do something else and so got into the health and wellness business and i started something with this brother so with that much as an introduction welcome on the podcast to sim hey devon thanks uh for having me on good to see you again and looking forward to this podcast hey i'm excited to have you on and have a good conversation so i just took a much longer journey condensed into the 30-second version so let's unpack that a bit and tell me a little bit about how you uh your journey got started uh with your uh migrating from pakistan yeah no i appreciate that i'm uh i'm honored to be a guest on your show so just a quick backdrop we are immigrants as you mentioned from pakistan uh moved to the states in 1984 uh suburbs of chicago we came here for the same reasons every other immigrant comes to this great country with this is the best land of opportunity out there and we've been thankful uh we came from humble background and uh you know have been able to become successful along the way so uh just work hard and uh went to school uh at marquette university um here in milwaukee we're headquartered out of here as well now so now you and just to kind of or back up a little bit so you guys came makes sense coming to the us looking for additional opportunities and then he also mentioned uh beforehand or but when we chatted a bit before the podcast um that you know you grew up humble beginnings your parents are working you know two or three jobs but it provided a bit of an opportunity so you went to high school and played sports but then as you were coming out of high school you both you and your brother went to college is that right correct so um yeah just backing up uh we we did go to high school together he was a year older than me and then i actually followed him to marquette university up here in milwaukee and uh he was doing accounting and finance so i figured i'd do accounting and finance so uh after college we uh then went on to do the wall street stuff uh he went and did investment banking at merrill lynch i actually went and did investment banking at merrill lynch and for a while we lived together in chicago then he moved out to san francisco i moved one real quick question before you get too far in just because i had a question maybe backing back up to college so maybe i'm oversimplifying it but it sounds like it was basically as simple as my brother went to college here i'm gonna go to college here my brother got this degree i'm gonna go get this degree as well and it wasn't as simple as hey i look up to my brother and whatever he's doing has got to be a good decision was a bit more in depth of that or i just you know it was interesting that you went to the same schools you got the same degrees what was the the motivation there yeah i don't know if you've seen that movie with uh drew carrick uh what's his name uh yes man yes man i'm blanking on his name but uh anyways i i actually started out at a different university in uh pittsburgh called carnegie mellon uh where i had a full scholarship for computer engineering and uh that's what i thought i was gonna be because uh when you're an immigrant from pakistan there's two expectations either you become a doctor or an engineer and i didn't like the medicine side of things i guess i wasn't good enough for that but i was really good at physics and math and engineering type of stuff and so i tried my shot at that but then quickly realized that i wasn't going to be a good fit so i took a semester off then i went to a community college for another semester and by that time my brother was a junior at marquette and i was uh going to be a sophomore so i didn't want to stay in a community college in the chicago suburbs so i figured why not just move up here so i do have a lot of respect for him i do think very highly of his decision making and so that definitely did play a part in uh to my decision to ultimately end up at marquette university and then i did accounting advice at least to the creditor a bit of the background you did say okay i am going to go to a different university i tried that so it wasn't simply just following in your shoe sets but after you try and tried that you're saying hey we're a lot more alike and i'm going to go down the path that he's enjoying because it looks like i'd enjoy that too is that about right right right i wanted to get into business and he was doing accounting and seemed very practical and mechanical in some ways uh you know just logical numbers i like numbers so that was the reason i went into accounting i've never actually used accounting in my career other than you know uh just from an observer saying i was never a cpa so okay so it makes sense so now okay now kind of continuing on with the story so now you both you and your brother you've got the finance degrees you're coming out of college and then how did you guys kind of decide where you were going to work or what the next step of your journey was right so you know part of coming over to the states was to get good jobs build a good career start families and finance careers have you know a lot of money associated with them and so investment banking was the big thing at the time still is today i'm guessing and uh it was more fun more interesting than going to be a public accountant not that there's anything wrong with public accountant my personality just wasn't suited for that neither was my brother so we tried our hand at investment banking worked incredibly long hours slept a lot of times under the desk you know at the office and a lot of face time as well uh you know putting together pitch books and then going to presentations etc so i did that for two years my brother did that for four years out in san francisco and then i went into the startup world myself uh in the uh early 2000s i i was involved in two software companies uh back to back neither of them worked out and that's why still working my ass off no i think that that makes sense and so and i think you know one of the things you'd hit on with uh i can't er with the job is that you went into investment banking and you know i hear that a lot from you know friends and other people that i know the industry which is a lot of hours long work high burn out hard you know job satisfaction super competitive and you're looking to say okay while it may pay well or maybe you know a good opportunity from the outside it's not what you necessarily want to do or it's not fulfilling and it's not what you're saying hey i don't want to do this forever and so as you guys because you're kind of coming to this realization saying okay not getting the fulfillment here it made you know all these long hours a lot you know their work days and you know it burnout and everything else is not what i want for long term and no i don't think anybody would or very few people would and so as you're trying to decide okay now you're hitting the the pause button so to speak on that so how did you get you and i think both you and your brother kind of had this at similar periods of time but how did you decide what you're going to do next or if you're not not going to work for the investment banking what you where you're going to focus on right so for myself i went from investment banking into the tech startup world for a couple years and then i went into private equity after that so prior to starting um zen with my brother i spent 15 years in an uh private equity firm it was a total of two billion under management i was one of the partners uh again i was not fulfilled my brother on the other hand did investment banking for most of his career and then he did have a stint starting a hedge fund out in denver and we ended up in wisconsin our wives are from here our family's here now and so that's how we boomerang back boomerang back into uh this nice community they say okay i'm gonna boomerang back and so now you you and your brother you went out did a few startups you tried a few different things you worked for you know or a little bit more of managing funds and kind of getting into a different area you know how did that you know bit bringing it full circle or kind of up to where you're at today and i think we talked a bit before something you wanted to do was get to do something in health and wellness and start a business there so how did you kind of make that transition or what prompted that and how did you kind of get into that area yeah no i think that's a great question so we had been talking about doing something together for about three to five years prior to actually getting into this fun venture i would say that for us to actually make the transition from making decent money to betting on ourselves at the end of the day that was based on an aha moment and uh we're very blessed we were traveling back to pakistan with our parents and our father he's 80 some years old he's a diabetic and as you may know diabetics from time to time get neuropathy which is severe inflammation and pain and extremities so hands feet joints etc and after a very long you know journey back home to visit family our father experienced a very severe episode of neuropathy while we were at our aunt's house it's his younger sister who we were staying with at the time and she did what a typical pakistani or an indian or a south asian in that part of the world would do which is to take turmeric and she ground it into a powder blended it with olive oil made a gritty kind of nasty disgusting looking paste it's in our language it's called hold the haldi and uh we actually used it extensively while we were playing sports to recover from injuries so it wasn't anything new it was just timing and uh by chance that that happened to our father and so after she applied the gritty pace to his foot where the inflammation and pain was uh within an hour his pain was completely gone and you know that was the aha moment that started this fun little journey uh they were in year five of and at that point we saw you know his pain go away using nature excuse me and my brother and i had been talking about getting together and doing business startup uh particularly focused on health and wellness and so we started researching turmeric so when we got back uh so this was december of 2016. we went full force into researching the science of turmeric and if i may briefly turmeric is uh about the length of a finger it's uh cousin of the ginger root there's over 300 different ingredients in the turmeric root itself potassium zinc iron etc but the main compound that's responsible for its anti-inflammatory power which makes it a superfood if you will is this little compound called curcumin and so all of the studies the medical and the academic research studies were pointing to this compound curcumin so we went full on into researching curcumin today there's close to 60 000 scientific and medical research studies globally on curcumin's anti-inflammatory and immunity boosting properties since covid started research has increased dramatically into covid's immunity boosting properties and so uh for the first seven eight months after we returned from pakistan our focus was exclusively on the science of turmeric one other important point curcumin is has low bioavailability which means it doesn't absorb as readily into your bloodstream so you could consume the equivalent of the turmeric roots that are in our beverage which is about 15 turmeric roots worth of health benefits and still not feel the impact because that curcumin is going through your system so we figured out a way to supercharge the absorption by taking the curcumin and combining it with the black pepper extract uh to make it absorbable into your system it actually increases absorption by two thousand percent i say okay you know there's merits to tumeric it has some you actual health and my brother have always wanted to get into this do a business together and explore that so now you know catching us up a bit toward today where's the business out of you guys started it are you doing this full-time is it a side hustle you're still building it or kind of where does that bring it out today or as you guys have wanted to explore that and get this up to speed kind of where's the business at sure so i'll step back just one more time uh so we knew turmeric was becoming popular it was a quote-unquote newer trendy ingredient in the west it's been uh trending for 5000 years in our part of the world we saw a bunch of other turmeric products out there we looked at those products and figured out that there isn't enough turmeric or enough uh binding agent to make it absorbable so most of what was turmeric out there in terms of food and beverage products was just a hodgepodge of you know marketing and we wanted to do the real thing so in terms of why we decided to get into this we didn't want to get into another uh crowded market like a kombucha or energy drink we we we went from a finance industry to the hardest thing that we could possibly imagine which is marketing to consumers uh you know and uh we wanted to do a white space we wanted to get into a white space where nobody was at and so there weren't at the time any curcumin infused you know food and beverage products there were supplements curcumin supplements have existed for decades but there was no non-gmo project verified curcumin infused beverage or drink mix powder or anything else and we said okay no one knows about this space but people are learning more and more about turmeric and this is where we're going to focus so in january of 2018 after doing all the research sourcing lab testing you know developing the brand and marketing strategy et cetera we launched we had our first sale i think that first uh you know 40 dollar bill or 220 220s that we got from our first sale in cash is sitting somewhere around our offices uh as a you know uh token to what we started and so today we're in over 6 000 retail stores where nationwide uh we have mass concentration on the east coast uh in the midwest and uh to some extent the south we're expanding westward we're in uh you know a good amount of the professional and collegiate sports programs whether it's football basketball hockey et cetera we work with a number of athletes where in all the u.s military bases globally in their commissaries we are actually a dietitian approved uh item food item in those commissaries by deca that's the agency that's responsible for those commentaries and then we have come out with a second product which is a powder version of our drinks uh it actually includes zinc in addition to the vitamin c vitamin d curcumin and pipe brine and it has electrolytes so there aren't any other products like what we have in the market today and we're looking to continuously expand distribution expand our direct to consumer business and then uh our goal is to launch one to two new products per year based on curcumin and pipeline sounds like an awesome you know uptick and i've been able to get into a lot of stores and hit it hard and find a lot of success so that's definitely exciting for you guys and so now as we've kind of reached the present point of your journey and kind of where you're at today always a great time to transition to the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it yeah i think uh i don't know if it was the worst business decision but in hindsight we would have done things differently it was to start out with a heavy product like a beverage each bottle weighs roughly a pound a case of uh you know our drinks weighs about 15 pounds and it's hard to build a direct to consumer business and then also all the costs associated with trucking logistics uh perhaps uh you know other types of things that may go awry it's more costly of a business than let's say a powder business or the future products that we'll come out with but what it does do is it provides a banner and retail so you have a bottle that's uh you know almost 10 inches tall or nine inches tall that's sitting on a cooler shelf and your logo is ever present your brand is ever present in retail so it's another call it a billboard uh advertising and so we look at it both as a marketing investment as well as a hopefully a profit center down the road oh definitely makes sense and uh you know it's a good lesson to learn and here it sounds like a a good mistake to learn from so now second question um if you're talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business would be the one piece of advice you give them yeah i would say like us this is uh also answering one of your earlier questions we're uh 100 000 in to this business there this is not a side hustle this is a full-time day and night even while we dream type of job uh that's what my dreams consist of today is uh dreaming about zen and so the one thing i would say to entrepreneurs who are looking to start a business if you believe in yourself go all in you know take the risk there there's no body better to bet on than yourselves uh if you're in the stock market you're investing in stocks those prices are going up and down you have zero control over those companies and what happens to your wealth if you believe in yourself go all in uh work your tail off and you know a lot of bad things are going to happen along the way a lot of mistakes are going to be made learn from those mistakes but uh you know just continue to work hard and keep moving the ball forward every day little incremental uh movements forward will definitely add up and eventually you'll get that hockey stick curve that everybody dreams about i and i like that and i think that there's you know i like i dreamt that it's not just hey you start a business and it's going to be a hockey stick out of the the shooter there is a lot of time sweat blood and tears and those type of things and it's also effort you know the that's why it's always interesting to hear the journey because everybody just see wants to see the hockey stick at the end they don't see hey we went through multiple or different paths we went into different jobs we had burnout we had things we weren't fulfilled took us a while to land on the idea even once we had the idea we had to get through to get into different stores we had to you know be able to figure out the market and whether you know what make the mistakes all that goes into the hopefully the hockey stick at the end but there's that whole journey before and so i think that having that desire to go all in but then also having the understanding even with all of that it's going to take a period of time it's definitely a great uh take away well as p as we wrap up but people want to reach out to you they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more yeah so um people can learn more about uh us at www.drink d-r-i-n-k zen z as in zebra why is in yellow and is in nancy.com or they could email us at marketing drinks in dot com or at revive like you revive and rejuvenate so r-e-v-i-v-e drinks in dot com and our rest of the contact information our phone number is on our website as well awesome well i definitely encourage people to check out the website uh check out the health benefits and then support a great business and with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you the listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you so let's go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things as listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because i want to make sure everyone finds out about all these awesome journeys and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with the chat thank you sim for coming on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin likewise nice meeting you
Miller IP Law is a firm that focuses on small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs/solopreneurs. We’re easy to use. We offer affordable pricing that’s transparent and flat-rate. We focus on the little guys who actually need our help. If you’d like an attorney on your team, simply schedule a Zoom call, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Miller IP Law is a group of attorney's, based out of Mountain Green, Utah, who are excited to help you build your business and further innovate market places and economies. Please consider looking at our services, billed at flat rate, and be sure to grab a free strategy session to meet with us!
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