85. Lessons from Tom Monaghan and Focusing on What You Have Power to Change with Rob Wynkoop

Brock Briggs  0:00 

Hello and welcome to the Scuttlebutt podcast. This podcast is an exploration of life and business from a veteran perspective. I'm your host, Brock Briggs and each week I bring you a conversation with a service member or vet at the top of their craft. Today, I'm speaking with Rob Wynkoop. After his time in the Marines, Rob went on to start the first franchise of Gyrene Burger, a delivery focused specialty burger chain started by Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza.

Rob shares what he learned from Tom and the economics of food delivery before Uber Eats existed. We also talked about government contracting, specifically service disabled veteran owned small businesses and why that niche isn't as profitable and easy as most people think it is. Lastly, we talked about worm buckets, a worm composting ecommerce company Rob started during COVID. You can find this episode as well as all other episodes, the video versions on YouTube, transcripts, and written content to keep learning at scuttlebuttpodcast.co. Please enjoy this episode with Rob Wynkoop.

Rob Wynkoop  1:18 

I've been going under some changes. My son just graduated high school a couple of days ago and now I have officially become old. And

Brock Briggs 

Isn’t that a qualifier of what makes you old?

Rob Wynkoop

I feel like it's got to be something like that. It's yeah, so I started to reflect. Recently, I've had some transitions in my life. My grandfather passed away just a couple of weeks ago. And it's just been a tough year as far as changes. And so I think it's caused me to start to maybe reevaluate a little bit about what I've accomplished in my life and when is enough and what is my goal and a lot of different things. And yeah, I think, lately, I've been approaching my day and approaching how I work. Thinking about that, like what is truly important in the grand scheme of things, maybe a little too deep for this morning, but

Brock Briggs  2:12 

No, it’s never not a good time to talk about that. I understand those existential type questions. And I feel like oftentimes we avoid them because they're painful and maybe scared that you're not acting in a way that is in accordance with what you're actually believing or what you believe to be true at that time. You said, you're questioning what you have, what kind of conclusions are you coming to? What are you saying, oh, maybe I want to change directions on life work?

Rob Wynkoop  2:42 

It's become more of an acceptance of what I have accomplished in both my business and career and how have I done it? I've done it with what I've had at my disposal. We don't all start the same race in the same place. And I think if I look at the different things in my life, I am starting to now feel gratitude and starting to understand, okay, this has been a life worth living and really focus my endeavors on what the next chapter looks like and what I want my life to look like.

Brock Briggs  3:18 

Have there been any particular accomplishments or big successes in life and or work that have led you to that conclusion? I hope that's where we all end up just like that acceptance phase. But are there anything about your history that stands out to you?

Rob Wynkoop  3:37 

Yeah, definitely. I've tried and failed a lot in business, probably more than I feel like more than the average person. I've been like a huge student of business, if you will, since I got bit by the business bug, probably almost 15 years ago or more. And as an adult, really, okay, this is what I want to do with my life kind of thing. And I've had so many different businesses and had minor successes and different things like that. And I've just never really had a major home run of anything.

And so sometimes you surround yourself with other real successful people and they're just like, oh, I'm doing 10 million, I'm doing 5 million or whatever. And you feel oh my gosh, like, why am I even in the room with these people? Like, I'm nothing and it's really tough sometimes when you compare yourself to other people and but then you can look at my case, I can look at the different things that I've done and feel really good about how they turned out even if they didn't turn out exactly how I wanted them to turn out. You know, as I went through the process, I got a lot out of it along the way. Hope I answered your question.

Brock Briggs  4:46 

It does directionally. You said that you got bit by the business bug 15 years ago or so. When that happened, was there some particular outcome that you were looking for? Was it time agency? Was it being a 100% owner of something? Was it like, were you looking for a massive exit and retire onto the end of the islands and sip pina coladas on the beach all the time?

Rob Wynkoop  5:15 

No, I think I was influenced by Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Workweek. So the idea of time, freedom and travel, I was in the military where I was very rigid, my time was structured. My travel, could travel at a moment's notice and stuff like that. I think I was looking for how to build my life, how I wanted it to be. And then as far as like becoming an entrepreneur or business, what made that really sound attractive to me, just, I grew up with it. My mom had tried some side hustles. I had an uncle that was actually pretty successful as an insurance broker. And then he had some other businesses that I'd worked in. And so I just thought, okay, this will be what I'll do. I want to be like him. And then that was really, I think, what got me started on it. But then I just started reading these different books and I just, I was all in.

Brock Briggs  6:14 

Were there any other books other than Four Hour Workweek? That's that one is an absolute classic. I sadly only read it for the first time a couple of years ago. And it's a little bit aspirational, I think and a little bit overboard in some ways. But reading that in the context of the early 2020s here and knowing that Tim was talking about like remote work back in the early 2000s was a really mind or frame breaking concept for me, but were there any other books that stood out to you as infectious in that way?

Rob Wynkoop  6:47 

Yeah, definitely a lot of the Robert Kiyosaki books. So I don't necessarily go with a lot of stuff that Robert says right now. But his early stuff, understanding what he calls the Cashflow Quadrant and different things about where money comes can be generated from and the different benefits of that. Those were really impactful books to me. There's one in there called, I think, Retire Rich, Retire Young or something like that. And that one was pretty impactful because early on, I would say, I was like, okay, I need to do something that involves me being an owner of my own business.

Brock Briggs  7:24 

I think that's a really important realization that I hope everybody has at some point.

Rob Wynkoop  7:31 

Yeah, Brock, you know what's interesting? And this is what I'm coming to now as I've gone 15 years of doing business. It's hard. It's really freaking hard. And I think one thing that a lot of people in business don't talk about is having a W2 job. And I'm pretty, I actually enjoy my W2 job. And so I think that's one of the things that as you go about trying to become an entrepreneur or building things, isn't a failure to work a W2 job. I think there was a time in my life that I would say, yeah, you're not all in you're not doing. You're not really an entrepreneur or whatever. If you can do that, how do you work for somebody else? But I think as time has evolved and things like remote work and job flexibility, I'll tell you, it's a lot easier to do the type of work that I do now from the position of a $17 billion revenue company than it was doing it from the position of a $100,000 revenue company.

It's not all terrible, but I think so in terms of work in a corporate job and so I think that's one of the things that as I get older and I've realized, like, okay, wow, I'm 40. Shoot, crap! How'd that happen? I look at this career that I've built in the corporate world. And then I have to say, ah, but you don't own five McDonald's franchises, like you thought you would at 40. But was that ever realistic for me at the time and you just because you think that something's realistic when you're 25 or 30. To have a single McDonald's franchise, you gotta have a million dollars in net worth. I didn't have that at the time. So obviously, only five of them but in my mind, it would be I can do this. I'm an entrepreneur. I’m gonna take nothing. And I'm going to make it whatever because we hear those hero stories.

And I've been especially susceptible to them because I've had these weird interactions where I've met some uber successful people, billionaires and things and turned out that they're actually just regular people when you really get down to it. Sometimes maybe they're a little focused, a little very hyper focused people, but yeah, we're all the same. We all put one pants leg on at a time, billionaire or not. But yeah, I'm just starting to have more gratitude for where I've done and the things that I've done and encourage other people to try. Really, I guess that's my end goal.

Brock Briggs  10:11 

There's such an important balance to strike there between the goal that you're after of like ownership over something, maybe it's a McDonald's franchise or maybe you have some kind of view about what you ought to be doing. But as you get further down the road, you need to accept that one, knowing actually how hard it is and knowing that you're actually cut out for it; two, developing and implementing the skills that you learned to actually make that thing successful. And then also, there's this other wildcard element of finding actually what you would like to do, where you could be five years down the road of trying to own a McDonald's franchise and find out that you absolutely hate it, which doesn't necessarily mean you won't be successful, but it's going to be a lot less enjoyable for you.

Rob Wynkoop  11:02 

Yeah, definitely.

Brock Briggs  11:05 

I think now might be a good time to you're talking about your career. Why don't you give me like a two to three minute high level view of what gets you here to where you are today?

Rob Wynkoop  11:17 

Yeah, sure. I hope I can cover it in three minutes because I've done like everything there is to do but yeah, joined the Marines when I was 17. I was a journalist in the Marines and a TV journalist. I was on AFN overseas in Japan. I was fortunate to be able to go back to college and I went to Vanderbilt and did ROTC and decided to go back in as an officer and was an IT officer in the Marines. So I did one tour in Afghanistan as IT officer and decided that I wanted to get out and start my own business.

So in doing that, I met the founder of Domino's Pizza. And he helped me get started as the kind of initial franchisee for a startup restaurant that he had. So I did that for a couple of years. I was worked directly with the founder of Domino's, that was awesome. But ultimately, it wasn't going to catch fire and race across the nation building franchises. So we wound that down and I went into business in cybersecurity and IT and started doing government contracting. And that's where I've been for the last, gosh, almost 10 years now. No, about eight years now that I've been doing government contracting in the cybersecurity and IT space.

Brock Briggs  12:44 

Okay. There's so much that we need to unpack there. You're very humble in your description of several of these things. So I’m gonna dig into these a little bit. We got to start with, is it Tom Monaghan?

Rob Wynkoop

Yeah, Monaghan. Tom Monaghan

Brock Briggs

Yeah. Okay, so we got to start with the Domino's came here. How did that relationship come to be? And I guess, talk me through the initial idea concept for this startup restaurant that he wanted to launch?

Rob Wynkoop  13:14 

Yeah, sure. This is weird. This is totally just crazy story. But this is what I love about my life. I was in the Marines. I was looking through the base paper out on a field op. And there was a small little box on the like a classified ad that said, Domino's founder seeks Marine for new business venture, Marine Officer for new business venture

Brock Briggs  13:41 

That could not have been more specific of a request that you hear like startups today. They're like, very vague. We don't know what we're going to do. This was like, it sounded very targeted.

Rob Wynkoop  13:52 

Yeah. And so I was like, shoot, I'll send in my resume. So I sent in my resume, I was still on active duty. But I was within like a year of deciding if I was gonna stay in or get out or whatever. I think I still had almost two years ago when we first started talking, but anyway and yeah, they were like, alright, we're gonna fly some dude out here to meet you. He was like a CEO or something like that. They flew him out to Camp Lejeune. And we hung out for a couple of days talking about this new concept called Gyrene burger, which they were saying is a hamburger delivery. Basically, it was like a cross between a Jimmy John's and a Five Guys so basically a Five Guys menu, simple burgers and fries, couple other things.

But it would be delivered to you within 15 minutes of your order basically. So it was just super fast burger and fries delivery. And this was at a time before Uber Eats and DoorDash whenever people were not delivering food at the amount that they were now. So this was 2012-2013 timeframe. But yeah, so incredible. I flew down to meet Tom Monaghan on my own dime. And he was just like, let's do this. And he gave me an autographed copy of his book, Pizza Tiger. So it’s a Tom brand Domino's for, I believe, more than 40 years and ended up selling it for a billion dollars in the early 2000s. And so he was a bonafide billionaire. At this point, he had been kind of out of the restaurant business for about 15 years and was itching to get back started.

And he had an idea of let's do these military themed franchise restaurant and let's recruit military officers to be the first franchisees. And so I thought that was really cool. Yeah, a unique like franchising model where, basically, he would become a direct partner with the franchisee and stake the money. So basically, you could get in for no money down. And that's one of the big reasons why I did it. I was like, wow, I'm going to be the only guy. I'm going to be working directly with this billionaire. And then I ain’t gonna put any money down on this thing, really. Okay, I'll do it.

Brock Briggs  16:18 

Yeah, that seems like a seemingly slam dunk. How could you say no to that?

Rob Wynkoop  16:24 

Yeah. But as it turned out, I don't wanna say it turned out to be a terrible idea. Because it was like a real turning point in my life. But it turned into a lot of pain. I ended up losing the business. I lost my house. I lost my wife. I lost a lot of stuff during that. So it wasn't all hamburgers and ice cream. Some of it was really difficult business lessons learned. But it made me such a great business person coming out of that, really to experience that and then by the grace of God, not go bankrupt and have just made me whole or whatever. And we just kind of went our separate ways. But then I was able to recover from it. But yeah, definitely have experienced some wild swings in oh crap. How are we going to make payroll to fill in while we're on top of the world? Everything's going to be great. So it's been an interesting ride. I wouldn't trade it for anything, but it's definitely probably taken a few years off for me with all the stress.

Brock Briggs  17:23 

Oh, I can't even imagine. So the unique idea going into this, was it the delivery idea? As you mentioned, this was pre food delivery of like way pre food delivery by always, was that like

Rob Wynkoop  17:43 

I was kind of like man, we really shouldn't be leaning into the technology here. But it was hard. My role as a franchisee, it was a weird situation. You had Mr. Monaghan, who had a lot of money and a ton of success and influence. But I'll be honest, his time was not 100% focused to my operation in Gyrene Burger. I was like the only franchisee. It was worth a few days of his time per week. But in the grand scheme of things of all the business ventures that he was already engaged in and he had a lot of philanthropic efforts going on. I don't really feel like it was ever like, okay, we're gonna put every dime every bit of focus on to this. So for me, that was like a good and bad thing, right? The good thing from my perspective was man, I can really like, go for it, right? The guy's kind of gonna let me run this thing how I see fit, which was he was really cool about that really. We did have kind of like a standard operating procedure, but I was developing it on the fly in a lot of ways.

So I have a lot of leeway and control, testing things that a typical franchisee would never have, if you weren't with an emerging brand. But the downside to it was we didn't have 100 million dollars of marketing and things to build the brand image or build the technology behind the scenes like GrubHub or some sort of dispatch system. We just didn't really have all that. And yeah, but it was a cool concept. We sold a crap ton of burgers. We just lost money on everyone we sold. And then that got to be problematic because everybody was like, oh, have you tried Gyrene burger? Have you tried Gyrene burger? It's so awesome. And so we grew super fast. And that's what I was saying about feeling like I was on top of the world. I felt oh my God, like this is great. We're like quickly, early on I was like, okay, we need to start looking at second stores. And that's an exciting feeling, right?

It's oh my god, we've done one store and now six months later we're looking at opening a new store and then within 18 months it was basically bankrupt. It's like that rocket ship. And then it's extreme. But yeah, that was pretty, pretty wild. The biggest thing there is, we didn't price it high enough, like we didn't really think that you could charge $16 to have somebody bring you a burger and fries are $20, like you do with UberEATS. We just didn't think that in 2013, people were really willing to spin that. So all in, we were delivering a burger and fries for 12 bucks or something like that it was maybe like $2 more than McDonald's or something. There just wasn't enough margin there to really make a run of it. They're just we were just, every time we grew, it was one of the hard things about delivery and especially delivery of hot food was every time that you grow, if you tried to add like maybe eight new orders per hour, you would need a whole nother employee or something like that to take all that food. So it's like you're scaling. So you have to scale your employees very tightly with the amount of revenue that you were taking in.

And there was just not a good way to make a gap on the margin of the employee labor, if that makes any sense. So it was just like, it was just like a hamster wheel. It just kept getting bigger and bigger because we just weren't charging enough for the product. Lesson learned. But at the time, there's a lot of competition. We have 20 restaurants on the same street. It's just there's so many things that go into, like why was it successful? Why was it not successful? But yeah, I learned a ton though. It's cutthroat, man. The restaurant business is like razor thin margins, labor pool is very varied. And it's temporary, sometimes transient employees, college students and stuff. So it's just, it's a challenging business to be in. But I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And I still have a little place in my heart for fast food. At the earlier, I mentioned McDonald's that's like my dream would be to like own one of those big multi unit franchises. But as I get older, though, I'm starting to realize that maybe I don't want to take on that.

Brock Briggs  22:22 

Was the concept, was it 100% delivery? There was no

Rob Wynkoop  22:26 

It was not, initially was. And then he let me modify it to have some dine in mostly because of the location that we found have 2000 square foot a dine in. But initially no, it was just straight delivery only. And in hindsight, he was probably right on that. It probably would have been best to continue the delivery only and the dine in was always a drag on our business. And I don't know that it really helped us all that much. We did 90% delivery. So we were paying a higher price per square foot to have this big dining room that 10% of the customers ate at. So yeah, in hindsight that maybe a delivery fee, higher prices are a lot of things. The other thing about it is we're selling burgers right the greasiest like most incredible burgers. And they were super premium, right? It was really great food wise, but like, I would start to feel guilty, Brock after I delivered to this same person's house like three days in a row.

I'd be like God, like this person is going to have a heart attack but keep eating this product every single day. And it's weird that you never think that you'd be like, it was like selling cigarettes to somebody or something I just felt. So the unhealthiness of the burger and fries business was part of the reason why it was limited in its success. I think obviously there's plenty of burger and fries businesses out there, but it's just there's only so many times you can order that in a week. And I think that it wasn't long after that Panera started delivery. And I was like that is a game changer. And I think it's been really successful for their business. When you're doing delivered food and you got a lot of offices that order and a lot of catering type things and burgers and fries were just not really made for catering like pizza or salads or some other type of product that's a little bit easier to cater. So it was just a few things in it that inherently made it more difficult and ultimately is why you haven't seen burger delivery successful on a large scale.

Brock Briggs  24:44 

But it's interesting too. I was going to ask a few minutes ago whether you saved looking at the prices of UberEATS and stuff today. And maybe thinking in hindsight that maybe had you charge more it could have been successful. But at the same time in the last 10 years since you did this, there have been a lot of large changes in just market dynamics of the acceptance of food delivery like that was so early on. You're fighting an uphill battle, like when you are telling people like, hey, we're going to deliver food to you

Rob Wynkoop  25:22 

And see this is the thing this is where a guy like Monaghan, he would have not his philosophy, which made a huge impact on my life. But turned out to be against market trends or maybe like a more old school way of thinking. Monaghan was really emphasized us having control of the delivery of the food. So when we talk about Uber Eats, you're talking about independent contractors that show up to your restaurant and receive the food from you, right? That was just Monaghan is not for that he doesn't want to give up that he's all about Domino's was all about the guy showing up in the crisp uniform with a clean shaven face and the girl in the ponytail or whatever, they just had this clean cut image at your front door. And they've put so much emphasis on that, that they grew to 9000 stores or whatever they had.

But so he was not one to just be like, okay, any independent contractor that wants to come do the last mile of my delivery go for it. He just would have never gone for that. He just no way he would have ever given up that level of control. That's what we ultimately I do think, yeah, maybe if we would have tried some of that stuff, we wouldn't have had some of the challenges that we did, like insurance was a major challenge for us. And we spent a lot of money on workers comp and stuff due to the delivery drivers getting in car accidents. So let’s say if they were all independent contractors, we wouldn't have had to deal with that. Maybe that line item in the P&L wouldn't have been so drastically negative. Yeah, you can go back and dissect it 100 different ways. I also didn't have any clue what I was doing Brock, that's the other thing. I was straight out of the Marines, I'd done. Nothing related to fast food marketing or anything really like that just kind of like out there winging it. And so it was an incredible experience, though. I highly suggest that if you get the chance to do a startup restaurant with the founder, Domino’s

Brock Briggs

If you ever get that chance

Rob Wynkoop

Anybody else ever gets that chance, take it.

Brock Briggs  27:33 

One thing that you said that was interesting to me is how focused he was on ownership of the experience. And it's interesting because to this day, Domino's is still gets a lot of flack from analysts and like the financial markets and whatnot and being critical of ownership of that, because they probably would make a lot more money if they would sub that out. But their ownership of it cannibalizes some of their own local stores with this fortressing strategy. And I know he hasn't been a part of the business for a long time. But they have continued to run with that and are a great example to this day of why that does work. But there are a lot of things that you got to account for that you highlighted there.

Rob Wynkoop  28:16 

Yeah, I took away so much from Tom and Tom was so successful at Domino's and even the culture that we had at Gyrene Burger is a very fun culture. And I think that was one thing that was really cool. And I think if you're able to recreate that in your own business, work doesn't have to suck all the time. And what I mean by that is we delivered burgers on mopeds for a portion of our day or electric bikes or whatever we had a couple of different ways that people could do that. That was fun, right? Like there were days of course, there were cold days and rainy days and stuff where maybe you didn't always feel so great. But there were those beautiful fall days or awesome spring summer days where you're zooming around on a moped go deliver food to somebody and then they hand you a $5 tip and you just you know zoom back on your moped right that is of jobs to have when you're in college that was a pretty freakin’ fun job.

And Tom was always infectious about having fun with what you would do and like we would do these competitions on who could make the fastest batch of fries and he just he was always about making competition among your employees even on the stupidest things and timing yourselves and but it did create an environment where people really felt good about one another and I think we ended up having employees that stayed a very long time from basically from the beginning to the end, almost two years, which for a burger and fries place you know fast food place paying basically minimum wage, that's hard to do. So we were doing some things in terms of that.

Brock Briggs  29:58 

Were there any other major takeaways that you took away from Tom and or the restaurant industry that kind of linger with you today and maybe impact what you do today in some way?

Rob Wynkoop  30:09 

Yeah, Tom is a very religious person. And I wasn't. I grew up religious or up in a religious household. But I'm not personally like super religious. But I think Tom really made an impact on me. He used to talk about this thing and I think this is what was so cool about having access to him is, he would, we would not just talk about burgers and fries and how to bring more customers or whatever. But he would actually talk about life and different things. And he would say that to be successful, you have to have three legs of the stool. And one was financial leg, like your business and your personal life has to be straight financially. Health, he was really big on physical fitness and he's like, into his 80s and challenging you to a push up contest. He is just really competitive and athletic. And so he would always talk about having physical health and then spiritual health.

So basically, without those three legs of the stool, he said you're gonna fall over. And so he was really adamant about living on this kind of three legged stool concept and evolved around your own personal spiritual life, your financial well being and then you're just your overall general health and what you eat and how you exercise and things like that really fascinating guy, but that's how he lives his life. And he's super diligent and super disciplined. And then he talks about that, from his time in the Marines. He got that discipline in boot camp and just never stopped. I've got to admit, I'm not that guy. And I feel guilty about it after seeing Tom do that. But according to him, like he was doing 100 push ups in boot camp and he kept waking up and doing 100 push ups till he's 80. And I believe it really does look great for his age, and it's still very active, even now. But yeah, I'm not getting up and doing push ups first thing when I wake up. I need to get that part of the stool rectified quickly.

Brock Briggs  32:20 

It is cool to see examples where the military instills a level of confidence or discipline, as you say in his example where it goes on to positively impact them for the rest of their lives. And then they continue to attribute that to the military. I think that's really interesting. And I am excited to talk to you for a variety of reasons but in one of our first conversations I was excited to hear because I didn't know this about him. That was a really cool fact to learn and I continue to be impressed by what veterans are able to do in the market.

Rob Wynkoop  33:00 

Yeah, there's been so many successful veterans and Tom Monaghan’s story is just incredible, like a legit orphan to billionaire it's just one of the most incredible rags to riches stories of our time and he's just a really incredible and that there's so many others folks that served in the military that have gone on to build just incredible brands. Lots of great examples out there for us to emulate.

Brock Briggs  33:26 

Yeah, most certainly. So you end up winding down Gyrene because it doesn't really work out not selling burgers for enough should have been charged in today's Uber Eats prices to stay in business. What ends you up going the complete opposite direction of a startup and the restaurant space and working your way more towards government contracting and IT?

Rob Wynkoop  33:54

Money! No, it just about circumstances, right? I kind of washed out of the restaurant business. I didn't leave bankrupt but I didn't really have much. Tom was talking itchy into Jersey Mike's over here if you want to get into Jersey Mike's but I was like super over leveraged. I had ended up lost my house and my relationship and just it was tough losing kind of lost everything if I'm honest with the ultimate failure of Gyrene burger. So yeah, I just was like had to go back to something that was fairly safe and comfortable.

And that was Cisco Networking IT, so that was something that I did when I was in Afghanistan and the Marines and I just knew that it was an in demand skill. I knew that it paid well and so I just kind of when I washed out of the restaurant business, it was like okay, I'm qualified to go work in fast food or be a manager of a fast food restaurant or I could try to get back going with this IT stuff that I was doing in the Marines and see if I can pick up another high paying job and I was able to do that I was able to pretty quickly get a job I was a project manager for Cisco Networking type stuff and then have built a career out of Cisco Networking and then ultimately leading into the government contracting space.

Brock Briggs  35:14 

What have been your large scale takeaways from that progression? Like where have you seen changes in the market or industry? And then why is like government contracting a good place to be? Or maybe, I guess, maybe even a bad place to be if you want to take the other side of the coin?

Rob Wynkoop  35:33 

Yeah, I can explain how I made the transition. So it started back at Gyrene burger. So I was part of the Tennessee Veterans Business Association. And one of my good friends had a government contracting business. And there were a lot of government contractors who lived around the Oak Ridge National Laboratories area, which is where we do a lot of our nuclear research and stuff like that in Tennessee. And so there were quite a few government contracting businesses there. And so when these business owners would come, they would come eat at my restaurant. They were trying to help me get some business so they would hold their meetings there. And so anyway, I saw my friend who was very similar to me in a lot of ways. He had grown a business in the janitorial services space to several million dollars a year.

I think at the time, it was like 4 or 5 million a year. I think he's out now I just recently had coffee with them. And I think they're doing about 15 million a year right now. But I was like, wow, that's a lot of money. For me, a struggling restaurateur who was bleeding 20,000 a month in losses from my restaurant, I was like, geez, I gotta do something. And so once I got doing the IT stuff, I was like, man, I think I could do this. I could do what he's doing for janitorial and groundskeeping. I could just do it with IT people. And I had also heard about the service disabled veteran owned small business designation and kind of the idea of diversity contracting. So for those that aren't familiar with it, basically the government has a certain amount of money that they devote for various projects.

And some of those projects can get designated with a diversity business, what's called a set aside and that means that only certain businesses that meet certain criteria can bid on this work. And in this case, it was only veteran owned businesses, service disabled veteran owned small businesses can bid on this work. As someone who was trying to start a business who was in IT, I thought, okay, this is going to be awesome. I'm going to go open this service, disabled IT business. And I'm going to get all this government contracting work, right? And my buddy who's doing janitorial services for $30 an hour, I'm going to be doing IT services for $150 an hour and I'm going to be rich, this is going to be awesome. Two years later, I have done a ton of work, a lot of effort, a lot of years of grinding, but lost probably 50-60,000 real dollars and was probably on the verge of bankruptcy, if I'd be honest with it at the time. It was just crucially, it was extremely hard to do.

And now where I'm at now more on the corporate side of things, I can easily see why. But yeah, I think that's the transition of how it came about seeing other people be successful and saying, okay, I can emulate that. And then go in and build my house the way I thought it needed to be built. But the truth is, it's really challenging to drive, especially IT contracts as a one man band kind of business. So I think that's the biggest takeaway there. So understanding what a small business is to the government, I think is really crucial. So that a small business size cap for my type of business in IT was 32 million. So that means a company can be doing 31 million a year in revenue and have like 149 people on staff and they're still considered a small business or a service disabled veteran, small business.

So when I'm Rob Wynkoop, cybersecurity expert, a one man company or a two man company, I've partnered with somebody that's better that could do XYZ, you're going up against somebody that's doing 31 million in revenue, right? Like how could anyone possibly fathom that they might, you serve that existing contractor right like it's just It's almost ludicrous now do people do it? Yes. And you'll hear business people that have been successful in government contracting, but I'll tell you, it is very hard. And it is. And that's because you're competing with people who already A, already very connected, 2 just have a lot more money than you and a lot more buying power and different things like that. They have better pricing with their manufacturers.

And there's just a whole host of reasons why the incumbent has an edge over the person who's just I'm hanging my shingle to do cybersecurity for the government. It turned out to be just a really terrible plan. I think I could have been successful with it. But I just didn't have enough money, like, maybe find a hand about $200,000 that I could have burned through, I think I probably could have got the ball rolling. But it's a very slow sales cycle, deal with the government, you'll talk to them about something and they'll go through multiple stages of bidding and things like that. And it can take a year, two years for a deal to go through. And so it's just if you don't have cash to burn during that time as a startup, it's just extremely difficult. But I kind of from there, I essentially ran out of money.

And I was like, crap, I'm out of money. I told my wife, I was like, I'm gonna need to do something. I'm gonna have to go back to work, get a W2 job and I was super, like, I don't know what I'm gonna do. And I flipped my LinkedIn to open a contract work. And that's where I met the current company that I'm at now. And about a year into six months or a year into it, they asked me to go full time with them. And so I ended up shutting down that IT business and then I worked full time as a W2 person. I started as a contractor, but then they hired me on w two there. And I oversee federal contracting for professional services. So installing, mainly Cisco type products, networking products, stuff like that for IT systems for the Department of Defense.

Brock Briggs  42:07 

I think it would be helpful to paint a picture of the government contracting space in general. With this designation of like the service disabled, veterans own small business, what types of contracts are available at all? And then you said, now in much larger role looking in hindsight, you're seeing why you maybe you weren't successful? And it's because you're competing against these other technically small but the $31 million companies. Are you just fishing in a completely different pond? And why is that competition still just as strong? Because theoretically, if it is a set aside, you have a better chance, I would guess, as a solo act even in that smaller pool that of solo act and looking at the entire budget.

Rob Wynkoop  43:01 

So the answer is yes. But it's a seeming right? So the answer of, are you just hunting in a different field or fishing in a different pond? Yes. So a lot of times with these procurements and I'm speaking mostly related to like IT and cybersecurity, although this applies to any type of government contracting. They'll put what they call a contract vehicle out and they'll say anybody that meets these requirements, it could be woman owned business or minority owned business or Native American owned business or service disabled any of those things, right? They will put it out on a public website and say, everyone send us your applications to be considered on this. And they might accept, let's say they accept 150 companies.

Now only those 150 companies can bid on the future work that gets awarded into that bucket, I guess you could say. So the government has all these contracts going out. And they appropriate funds to it. And these certain contract vehicles can only be bid on by the certain company. So you're correct, in that you've got a smaller field to hunt in. But if you're like Elmer Fudd out there and you're going up against essentially, Raytheon or something like that, it's hard to compete. It just really is, like I said because you've got those folks that have been in the business for 15 years with established relationships and large lines of credit. And you may be in the same pool but are you really competitive with them? Because the contracting officers, they know who's who and right and the pricing dictates and things like that.

So I think I'll go back you asked a question about what is government contracting or whatever, but basically, it's The government buys stuff, whatever it is, they buy products, they buy bullets, they buy rockets, they buy components for all those things. And they also buy labor, they buy temporary contract labor, where people will go and sit in an office and do a certain job function. They pay for upgrades of computer systems or alarm systems or fencing. There's not a thing that the government really doesn't buy. They buy everything. And it's all put out for bid publicly. And there's certain ways that they can advance those procurements. I can say I want this one to only go to women owned businesses. I want this one to only go to minority owned businesses. They can say, I want this one to be totally open, any company in America can bid on this one.

Brock Briggs  45:51 

Those are vehicle specific then so this one vehicle is only in unknown businesses. This other vehicle only service disabled, okay.

Rob Wynkoop  45:59 

Correct. Yep. And so for my case, right? When I had my business Patriot Technology, we went so far as to get on those contract vehicles, right? So we're trapped. So my like, the literal day to day of building this government con business was flying over to different conferences and stuff and you go in and it'll be like the VA and they'll say, oh, we've got this computer problem. And we're thinking about putting it out for bid. And that's how you get like the insider information that's needed to be successful, you like do all this backroom stuff, where you find out like, oh, they need this or whatnot. And you kind of jockey to be early into that, and have a chance to use your set aside to make sure the work goes directly to you without a competitive process.

So I know that's confusing. But instead of bidding against 100 other people or even 1000 other businesses, there's opportunities with some of these set asides, where you can just say, I have the service that you want. And they can do what's called a sole source where they give the small business the work directly without any competition or anything like that. Now, there's a lot of different rules and stuff to dictate when that happens. It doesn't happen. But that's what makes government contracting attractive is because you're talking about really large dollar amounts, in some cases, hundreds of millions, you're hundreds of 1000s of dollars in each project, which can, you can quickly build a several million dollar business in government contracting. But getting the first contract can take years.

Brock Briggs   47:46 

You mentioned that you're like flying to all these conferences and whatnot to get the inside track. How critical is that to being successful in there? Is it still you might be on the vehicle, but your network is still incredibly important to be considered for those things?

Rob Wynkoop  48:05 

Yeah, I mean, it. So in my case, it was such a heartbreaker because I really did a lot of work to network. And you do that by attending bigger conferences. And so the government,l there's a lot of gates that come to issuing a contract, right? So say the government wants to replace all their IT systems. There's going to be a time where they're going to invite the government contractors, the bidders to come on site and look at everything. What's the status of the wiring? Like how many was there? Like how was it cabled? All that stuff, right? And so in those bigger conferences and stuff, you can start to network with other people who may be larger than you and stuff like that. And you can start to build those relationships by attending bigger conferences and just attending government contracting conferences and things like that, so crucial to do that. But I think the hard part is all that stuff costs a lot of money, real money.

And so if you don't have money coming in, it's really difficult to be successful. In hindsight like I was saying, I think there are two ways to be successful as a new entrant in government contracting, maybe three ways. The first way is to buy your way in, that's very expensive. So buy your way in means purchase an existing government contractor. That's probably the first and best way but it's very expensive, millions of dollars. You're gonna have to go get an SBA loan, you're going to need hundreds of 1000s of dollars of your own money to get the loan to buy an existing government contractor. Now, the other way is to have a new novel idea invention service that nobody else does. Now that's probably the most expeditious path but you've got to be inventive, creative. You gotta have something than the government once and be the only person that's got it. That's the way that when you have no experience, no money, no anything. But you're like a software engineer that developed this program that they really want. They don't care. They'll still buy it even if you're a one man person.

So that's the other way to do it. So you can buy your way in. And you can have a novel invention or idea or software and they just buy it because they want it or just a long road to hoe, right? Just wait it out and just bid on all sorts of stuff until you start to get what's called past performance. So I think that's the big thing. A company needs to have federal past performance to be successful in government contracting. So when they look at the government saying I'm buying IT services, they want to see, okay, what other contracts has this company held in IT services and so when they go and look, and they see that there are no others. They're just gonna disqualify you or put you as one of the lower scoring ones. And then you won't win. So it's like a chicken and the egg thing, right? Like you get that first one, then you can on the second one, look at my past performance, I did that first one. But getting to the first one can sometimes take years and 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of dollars in grinding.

Brock Briggs  51:27 

I'd love to talk about each of those three ways, just like really briefly, maybe a quick share on each. And maybe we'll start with the one that you just mentioned, first of taking the long road, as you call it. Are you able to like, collectively sign a contract or like bid on work as like a subsidiary of another company?

Rob Wynkoop  51:53 

Yeah, that is what a lot of people are trying to do. And that was what my original goal was. And I think that's what most people's goals should be, right? So there's like larger government contractors, and they have a certain amount of small business stuff that they've got to transact through their larger contracts. In a lot of ways you can think of it as just like a fairness distribution system, it's government contracting. It's literally making sure that certain federal dollars go into certain buckets of macro economic categories and other things like that, right? That's basically what they're looking for. But you can't just be a check in the box. I think that's the biggest challenge is you actually have to know how to do the work with being procured, right? So it's easy to say, oh, I'm a service disabled veteran, like now I'm a service disabled cybersecurity person, right? But the truth is, you've got to not only fit the demographic requirements, but you've got to actually be able to perform the statement of work.

In the case of those sub contracting, sometimes it's really challenging to marry that up. And the company that I work for now, we deal a lot with small businesses. And we have a mismatch on where our needs are as a company from a subcontracting standpoint. So I could, if there was a small business out there that could do short term installations of IT equipment, I could probably throw them a lot of work. But I've not been able to find the small business that's really set up to be able to do that sort of thing. So most small businesses want to get on those type of what we call butts and seats contracts, which is 10 people staffed in this Fort Leonard Wood Education Center or something like that. And like, they go there and they work every day. And at the end of the month, your company invoices the government for them and you make a margin off of that.

But my company needs it for the short term. They need people that can fly to this base and work for five days and then fly to this base and work for five days. And if I don't have a partner that's really set up for that, we can't do business. So it's challenge on both sides more challenging than you think. There's a couple of businesses that I've been trying to work with from a, we’ll call it a prime side. So there's primes and subcontractors and government contracting. And so from the prime side, there's another couple of companies that I've been wanting to work with, but we just cannot find a project where it's just a fit for the both of us. So it can turn out to be more challenging than you think. And it's not as simple as just being like, oh, hey, Boeing, can I be a subcontractor to you? Like, most of the time, you are going into a bid with your team already. And like I said, these bids may take two or three years.

So if you're a new entrant to government contracting and your messaging primes and things like that saying, hey, I saw this opportunity. I want to be part of that. I know how to do cybersecurity or whatever it is contract construction or whatever, you're not a known commodity to them, you have no past experience with them. Second, they've already got somebody. They've already been working on this. So it's like how you going to come in and slide in under that person that they've already got there? You're probably not going to. So it really comes through pressing the flash at those conferences where you meet, like the prime small business liaison or something like that. And they say, okay, yeah, we'll give you a shot. And it's really, that's how those deals happen, really, just grinding your way through a lot of nose until somebody finally gives you a contract.

Brock Briggs  55:58 

And I think you mentioned this before. The long sales cycle, I'm sure is preventative from people just coming in recognizing that there's a gap, like you were saying, hey, we're in need of this. But it's really difficult to come in and just spin something up really quickly. And all of a sudden find all of the people that meet that criteria, especially if it's technical. And that meets your criteria because there's of the bid process. And you can't just roll in there and say, oh, well start up whatever they need. It's a duration game. And then you also need to be known for that one specific ability.

Rob Wynkoop  56:38 

Yeah, it's just a real, that's our challenge on both sides. You've got, there's different approaches like you can try to, so with IT, it was difficult to do things locally. Some people I will say constructions, if you're a person that's interested in construction, government contracting, a lot of stuff is really localized. And I think localized, you have a little bit better chance of influencing stuff. But a lot of IT and technical decision making weapon systems, things like that's all going to be very centralized at technology centers and stuff like that.

So if you're not able to influence that directly, then I mean that by getting in front of those people, seeing them at industry events, scheduling time to go meet with them, right? It can be very challenging. And in my case, my business was based in Nashville, Tennessee, right? There's not a really big government contracting hub, right? You'll see a lot of government contractors base themselves out in Northern Virginia. Because it's a lot easier to get around and press the flesh and do the things that you need to do without having to travel all the time. It's a very much a relationship driven experience and past performance driven type of environment. And so when you're going in as an upstart with no experience, it's a mountain to climb.

Brock Briggs  58:00 

That second option that you mentioned as a way to come into this space, coming up with a novel idea, how do you even if let's say that you are an inventive person or comes up with a new idea, how do you be a part of these vehicles? Because if it is something new, it's likely something that the government doesn't already have and isn't already asking for work on. So you're like

Rob Wynkoop  58:28 

Yeah, actually, they do have websites. So there's websites. So one of the coolest things about the American government is that we have these things called SBIR, Small Business Innovation and Research grants. And some companies that you're familiar with, some products like I think the Dyson vacuum or some of the original funding for the R&D there was provided for by the Government through these small business innovation and research grants. If you go to the SBIR website, there's definitely a lot of opportunities there where they'll publish every agency, right? It could be Indian and Indian Affairs, health service and it could be DoD, could be a Treasury or whatever.

And they'll say I need a software that does this or we're looking for ideas about AI and weapon systems or whatever. And so you can go there and you can basically say, hey, I've got an idea for AI and weapon systems or whatever it might be. And then you can get invited into these funding tranches to further your early development. So that's one area if you have an emerging technology or you're a technologist or somebody that's interested in building a better mousetrap is the Small Business Innovation and Research and then there's another one called ST, I don't know, have to look that one up. But anyway, there's two different sources of funding for research and development for early stage companies for novel ideas.

Brock Briggs  1:00:08 

And then that very first one that you mentioned, it's interesting, I wasn't expecting you to be so downbeat about the SBA path. I talked to a lot of vets that go through the entrepreneurship through acquisition buying a business. And that seems to be a relatively attractive way to buy yourself a job, scratch the entrepreneurship itch and then particularly in the government contracting space, maybe have a chance to utilize that designation to compete on contracts that maybe other people can't compete for. Why are you like, maybe not as optimistic on that as a path aside from the financial implications?

Rob Wynkoop  1:00:53 

Yeah, I think it's mostly a financial thing. I think it's tough to explain, right? So let's just think about a purchase price of a business. Like a million dollar revenue gov con business is it's nothing, I don't have one I would love to have one. Okay, so I don't mean to be negative for those that do. Okay, so I'm super envious. I wish I had a million dollar revenue, gov con business as a something that I privately owned. But in the grand scheme of things, a million dollar business could be seven employees, eight employees on staff.

So when you think of it in that terms, like what's an eight person company compared to the company I work for that got 5000-7000 people? That's a gov con, right? 5000 7000 people as gov con. If you're a gov con with six employees on staff, you're teetering on insolvency at any point in time, you're like, you got a million dollars coming in and you might be able to on good years net two or $300,000 or something envious for a ton of people. But there's a big risk variable there too, though, like government contract could end. You've committed to spin, what 1x 2x, you spent $800 million, you've put $200,000 down to the SBA. I'm not down about it. It's just challenging. Does everyone have two or $300,000 available? And if they do, are you prepared to risk all of that, for a six person gov con business that may have six years of track record? Do you know for a fact that 20 years from now, that's going to be a 50 person company and you really don't because gov con is about price. It's about set asides. It can be brutal.

Brock Briggs  1:02:52 

I think that for many of the reasons that you just stated and from a lot of the learnings of this conversation as a whole, people certainly should be thinking about applying some sort of discount to acquiring a business, if they're going to go that way. Just because it's a government contractor that shouldn't demand a premium, like some people may think it's more sensitive to hay, the owner has been doing it for 20 years. And he knows all these people and you don't. The sales cycle as you mentioned, that sounds like there's a lot of reasons why risks that may be not present in another form of business.

Rob Wynkoop  1:03:32 

Yeah and also, one thing that I've heard and I haven't actually started to make any offers on any government contracting small businesses or anything. But I've heard that if the business is an SDVOSB and has only SDVOSB customers, they can only sell to an SDVOSB. So rather than a premium, there's a pretty, like you said a pretty substantial discount there in that not just anybody can gobble them up. There's only a certain amount of buyers that can actually take that and do something with it. So in that case, the buyer is actually in a pretty good position. Now I do think that the seller, you know, they know what they've got, right? You want that cash flow. You want that ability to take that over because it's easy.

So they have an incentive, I guess, to charge accordingly as well. But yeah, that's ideally I think that's something that I would like to pursue. So I'm not down upon it's just when I sit here thinking, oh man, if I work really hard to save $200,000, it's something that I never thought I'd be able to do when I was 18 as a Marine. Do I want to take that and then go buy a four person GovCon for the chance to maybe make a million or something like that. I don't know. It's scary. 40 is scary.At 25 maybe it wouldn't be. Now that I'm trying to prepare for retirement and things like that, I'm starting to ask myself do I really want to take all my savings and wrap it up into a fragile gov con small business? So there's a heart part of me that wants to and then there's like the logic part of me that's a lot of risk there

Brock Briggs  1:05:17 

A large swing at the point that you're at in your career.

Rob Wynkoop  1:05:22 

It's hard. And that's something that as you were talking about what's on my mind today and that's something that I'm dealing with, right? Just graduated, kids just graduated high school. You like look at your the last 20 years, holy crap, how did that happen? Super pleased that how it's turned out. But it's been over in a blink of the eye. So you're like, crap, I hope I got a good 20 plus years in me still to go. So let's get at it. And let's make the best use of what time we've got.

Brock Briggs  1:05:50 

That’s what I'm talking about. I like that attitude. I think that's the right approach.

Rob Wynkoop  1:05:54 

Yeah, I think that's I take a lot of that from Monaghan and the Gyrene thing, that guy gets up every single day and he works hard and philanthropy and the other projects that he's doing. He's extremely focused. I was really pleased to have that. And I think we were talking a little bit about the military. I think the trait in the Marine Corps leadership trait of endurance is, I think, really applicable to entrepreneurs and business types. Because businesses have seasons. I've had seasons where I thought I was going to be the next hamburger mogul. And I was gonna be Ray Kroc and having burger spots all over the country.

And then within a year, I'm like, on the verge of breaking down because I've lost everything. Those wild swings, you've got to really be prepared. And I think having endurance to not give up on the low parts and keep building towards. In my case, I've been able to fall forward even when I wasn't successful with the government contracting. It led me to a knowledge base about government contracting to where I could then move into a corporate role and have insider knowledge or knowledge of a specific skill set that was valuable. And sometimes our business ideas or whatever our side hustles that we don't always turn out how we hope they will. But if you can learn something from it or take away something from it that you use later, I think that all happens for a reason. And that's where I'm at today and just trying to think about, okay, what is the next 20 years look like? And how do I go from here?

Brock Briggs  1:07:41 

I think that highlights the importance of, as you said, endurance, but staying in the game is more important than anything, like you need to not get wiped out and be able to continue sticking around. And sometimes that means you're not going to do what you're currently doing or even what you think you will be doing. You gotta adapt to changing in market environment, personal feelings, all of those things.

Rob Wynkoop  1:08:09 

Yeah. And I just bloom where you're planted. And I think that's the biggest thing about it is there's so many times in life where we think about man, if I can only just have this certain path, right? And I had a really big setback when I was in the military, where I was a journalist in the Marines. And then I went to Vanderbilt and I studied communication and I wanted to be a public affairs officer and the Marines and they didn't give it to me. They gave me IT and I was terrible at it. I went to the IT school. And I finished last in my class. And then here, fast forward 20 years later, I've got a really respectable IT career. I'm very knowledgeable about IT and the government and IT contracting within the government. And what? I was the last place students in my first military IT class. It doesn't affect you. So now I know a lot about IT. And I'm happy to go and talk with any of those peers from back then. I think I can probably carry on a pretty respectable technical conversation today. So just where you are today does not always determine where you're going to end up.

Brock Briggs   1:09:19 

That's really good. I like that. Speaking of not knowing where you're going to end up, we've got to talk about Worm Buckets before we close up today. Give me the rundown on how selling worm composters on the internet came to be?

Rob Wynkoop  1:09:37 

Ties in it into any of this, oh man. It was really just kinda like a little COVID project if I can be honest. So basically during COVID during the work from home lockdown and all that, my wife and I were really big into the garden and we still are very big into the garden. And I was looking for different ways to compost and I came across this So YouTube channel, this guy that was composting with worms, earthworms. They'll eat your food scraps, they'll eat your trash, they'll eat your meat junk mail, anything paper, anything organic, they'll eat and turn it into worm castings or worm poop, which is like a very potent, valuable compost mix. So anyway, I started getting into worms, started making my own compost with these worms. And one thing led to another and I was like, I'm gonna design a worm compost bin kit, like a beginner kit.

And that's what we did. And so my wife and I just put it out into the ether and started ordering prototypes from Alibaba and putting different things with this and mocking up instructions and whatever. And then yeah, so after about a year, we filed patent applications, trademarks and all that sort of stuff. We have the legit, should have had one here for the video. But yeah, we ended up building this product called the Worm Bucket. It's an indoor worm composter kit, very beginner focused kit and we sold over 1000 of them. She ended up quitting her full time job. So it's mostly her, she runs the business, my wife, Audrey and I guess I designed it if you will and then she helped me really do all the marketing. She's in charge of the Shopify site and Instagram and all that.

So she's really the marketing and day to day operations person. But yeah, we have a worm farm Amazon business that's operated out of our home. And that's allowed my wife to quit her corporate job. I still have my corporate job and government contracting. And so I think that's one of the takeaways there, right? It's like I spent my whole life feeling gosh, to own your own company is the ideal and to be a W-2 employee is like a bad thing. And then now I've gotten to a point where I kind of like what I do, right? I don't necessarily want to quit my jobs to sell worm farms. My wife is doing that. And she's really enjoying it. But I enjoy the gov con stuff. I enjoy working with small businesses. I enjoy IT. And I'm a nerd and that sort of stuff. I think it's interesting as I’m getting to a point where Worm Bucket is a real bonafide business now. I'm really happy that I can kind of relinquish that to my talented wife and let her run the business. And I can continue to do what I do in government contracting.

Brock Briggs  1:12:38 

You gotta play to your strengths. Like you said, you're just saying a few minutes ago, bloom where you're planted. And just because you're sticking with your W-2 if it's what you'd like to do, then so what? You have time to tinker on the side. And you also have a roof over your head, which some entrepreneurs do not. So

Rob Wynkoop  1:12:56 

Yeah, that's the thing at this moment in time from a profit perspective, the Worm Bucket is only doing about probably $2,500 a month profit. So that's not going to replace my day job by any means. And it has been good, though, that it's profitable. And we're very happy about that. And we're just trying to keep that business growing in a healthy and profitable way. I think that's one thing over all these strings of business failures, one of the biggest things is just overspending and not being tight. As I've gotten older, I've gotten tighter and as the tighter I've gotten the more financially profitable my businesses become.

Brock Briggs  1:13:38 

When you say tighter, I understand what you're getting at. But can you maybe unpack that a little bit more? And is it

Rob Wynkoop  1:13:44 

I used to just believe anything, right? Oh, you told me that this marketing consultancy you're gonna give me for $1,500 is gonna solve all my problems? Sure. Here's $1,500, go consult on my ads or whatever. Now I've just over so many years of observing and being part of this entrepreneurial process. Now I'm a little bit more hesitant to give away money to contractors or even to my own delusions. Oh, I'll give you an example. With Worm Bucket, there are times where we were like, oh, we'll just Google says we should triple the ad spend on the business. Talking over with the wife we say okay, let's do it. Triple ad spend triple the expenses, but didn't triple the sales, right?

Like it's just all of a sudden it went from profitable campaign to just absolute stinker. And it's crap. That wasn't the outcome that we were looking for. But instead of being able to, in the past, I would ride off. I would ride those out and be like, oh, it's investment in the brand and if I have a bad marketing campaigns or a week or two weeks or whatever, my bad marketing campaign and like we're losing money on the campaign, right? We're not If I'm paying $1 for an ad and I'm making 80 cents. There are times when your business will get in those sorts of ways. And you can delude yourself into saying, I'm building a brand. It's okay. It's only losing a little bit. I can kick in. And I can kick in $500 this month and cover all that bad ad spam. And that's no big deal.

But the truth is, that's how you do bad behaviors. And those bad behaviors snowball into bigger bad behaviors and you can find yourself. So Audrey, my wife has actually been a really positive driving force in my business because she's like an accountability partner on the financial side because I can easily convince myself that whatever marketing campaign or whatever is going to be worth whatever risk. And I think Audrey is there to help me really be realistic about it. And generally, that will mean that I instead of just throwing mud at the wall, whatever sticks. I'm a lot more methodical in the advertising dollars.

Brock Briggs  1:16:09 

As that or like her voice coming to you to rein you back in on that, has that changed how you spend your money? Or is it just overall spending less on stuff like that? It's oh, we're not going to do Facebook ads because those are this. Or is it changing the types of things that you're spending money on as well to drive growth?

Rob Wynkoop  1:16:31 

Yeah, it definitely has. We've killed off campaigns that we're not good. We've started to add money from others that are good. We've developed alternative campaigns like affiliate marketing and Audrey has done a great job recruiting like influencers and stuff like that and managing all that. So yeah, definitely impactful to have her as part of the team.

Brock Briggs  1:16:54 

I could see a business like that having a lot of user generated content and be probably I hate throwing around the word viral because I don't think that really means what a lot of people think it does. But in terms of like social channels, I could see that being like a big thing where you could incorporate the users of the product in helping advertise it simultaneously.

Rob Wynkoop  1:17:20

Yeah, we've been really fortunate, I guess, I would consider it we've gone viral twice in a small way, small level of virality. So when we launched in January or June of 2022, Audrey posted to Reddit, a picture of us with 1000 Worm Buckets in the garage. And that post got a million views. And so that was a huge day for us. We sold like 141 worm composters in one day, right out the gate just a huge day. And then we had another one where I did a time lapse of worms eating a watermelon. And over the course of two weeks, they completely consumed a big chunk of watermelon. And so that was pretty cool to do that time lapse and it got a million views. So I think yes, I'm striving for those hits. Because when they come they're awesome. And man, it would be really cool if we could pick up some views there. Because certainly you're right. It is a product that's generated a lot of user generated content.

And we've got a lot of that coming in. But we haven't cracked the nut on how to make that kind of go viral, if that makes sense. So we're getting a lot of people that are posting the product and I'm using it and the setup of it and they've got kids and they've got really engaging stories, but they themselves don't have a million followers. They have 100 followers or something. So it's like they show it, we repost it, it gets 500 or so views that we get routinely. But we've just never we've not gotten the hey, we get 50,000 views on every post we do. We wish that we did. And we post every day on multiple I say we. Audrey posts on multiple platforms every single day. And we just keep grinding on it and hoping that eventually we'll start getting 1000s of views per day, but we're definitely over a year into it. And even daily posting or twice daily posting, we're really not seeing the view count and stuff that we thought we would see.

Brock Briggs  1:19:28 

Content is a very difficult business. That is a fact. As we're sitting here talking about this, I was thinking about maybe you explored this route altogether. But I was wondering, you said that you've talked about influencers already. I'm wondering, do you know Kevin Espiritu?

Rob Wynkoop 

Yeah

Brock Briggs

I probably may butcher his last name. The epic gardening guy. He was what came to mind thinking about this and I was like, I wonder if you could send him one of those and see if he would, I don't know try it out or something like that. Then that would maybe be interesting.

Rob Wynkoop  1:20:02 

Yeah, Kevin's got an incredible business and he just raised around a funding for creator business. And that's just incredible, right? You start a media business around gardening. He started as a blog. Now he's been able to raise venture capital and cash out a little bit and take some money for himself, I imagine. And he just bought a seed company and he's got the epic gardening shop. Kevin is really, he's the leader among the gardening niche creators. And so I definitely love Kevin and would always welcome any sort of partnership with Kevin Espiritu. That's for sure.

Brock Briggs  1:20:37 

Turns out he's a listener to the show. So we'll pass that along.

Rob Wynkoop  1:20:40 

Okay, nice! Yeah, yeah.

Brock Briggs  1:20:43 

I highly doubt that. But Kevin, if you're listening seriously. Rob, this has been a really fun conversation. I appreciate your introspective views and learnings from yourself. I found myself several times, listening to what you're saying. And I was like, man, you're very aware of what you have gone through and like the meaning takeaways of that and I really appreciated that. Two final closing thoughts here. What can we, the listeners, do to be useful to you?

Rob Wynkoop  1:21:20 

Oh, wow, to be useful to me.

Brock Briggs

Yeah

Rob Wynkoop

I'm just gonna go wide here. And I'm gonna say compost. Okay, compost, any way you can is Audrey's and I's motto, but 50% of our food supply ends up in landfills and gets basically rots in plastic bags, where it becomes the harmful greenhouse gas known as methane. So anything that you can do to compost and try to divert that food waste out of your garbage can so that by either starting a worm composting bin like the worm bucket or by starting an outdoor compost or buying some other type of product that can help you compost. That would be how you can help me and help the greater world around us, just help compost your trash.

Brock Briggs  1:22:10 

It's unbelievable how much like the methane that produces. I think that it's actually more than ours is like the trash and like food.

Rob Wynkoop  1:22:18 

Yeah, definitely. And there are systems there that they're using to try to reclaim some of it for power and things like that. But at the end of the day, we're running out of room in our nation's landfills. And composting is an individual action that we can all do that says, I want to do something different. I want to take part in helping the environment.

Brock Briggs  1:22:43 

Fantastic. And the last thing, what could we take away that we could implement in our lives today that we can learn from you in this conversation?

Rob Wynkoop  1:22:53 

Yeah, I think we talked a lot about blooming where you're planted and then also maybe a little bit about being realistic of where you are in life and what you can do at that moment in time. I think that's something, right? I would say and I took this from Tim Ferriss, right? Shoot your shot, right? I got the dominant or the deal with the Domino's founder for Gyrene Burger because I took my own money and I flew down to Florida and I met the guy, right? Other things that have happened throughout my life have come from me just putting my ball in the air and trying it, doing it. And so I think that's the biggest thing is one, just start no matter what it is. And then two, if you have setbacks, don't let those be life defining setbacks, right? You gotta like crawl your way to the next level, whatever that means. Some rungs, we may jump from one link from one rung to the next. Others, we may have to fight tooth and nail to get to that next stage.

But I think it's up to us to recognize, you know, where am I at? What do I have the ability to change? And things that are outside of your control, you have to just kind of let go in them, right? Like, in my case, I struggle because in my mind, I want to be a Zuckerberg or any of these people, Sam Parr and some of these folks in the podcast world. I want to be like them. But the truth is, I'm not them. I was born a different life. I had different set of circumstances. I had different money. I had different opportunities. And I'm me and I've got to take what I've got. And I've got to figure out how to make it my own and not spend too much time focused on the envy of others and stuff like that. So that's what I would recommend. The takeaway from that is just run your own race and be proud of what you've accomplished and try not to spend too much time comparing yourself to others.

Brock Briggs  1:24:56 

That’s a very prudent advice. I definitely could implement a little bit of that in my own life as well. Rob, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

Rob Wynkoop 

All right. Thank you, Brock!