speaker-0: This is like where a lot of I think a companies might go wrong is trying to get people on subscription right off the bat. And we we literally don't. I'd rather you try our product first and then it if you love it, awesome. Now we'll get you on a subscription. I tell a lot of newer e commerce brands, it's like if your customer isn't looking forward to that subscription, you're doing it wrong. Like I don't want our customers like just being on a subscription just for the hell of it. Like I want them to like look forward to that package coming every month or every three months, whatever their cycle is. You know, it's not about just adding subscriptions. It's about adding quality subscriptions.
speaker-1: Welcome back to the Why Marketing Socks podcast. Today we are sitting down with Tony Casadrinos. Tony, how are you doing today?
speaker-0: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
speaker-1: Thank you for joining us. So for anybody who doesn't know the brand Casadrinos, please explain who you are, what you do, who you serve, what your products are, a little bit of background information.
speaker-0: Yeah, so we're a organic olive oil company. ⁓ it it's ⁓ my sister and and myself started it about almost about fifteen years ago now. most of our team is all entire family. Our ⁓ olive oil comes from family farms in southern Greece, about probably about an hour from Sparta. And we ⁓ we really focus on ⁓ quality first and foremost, but also getting the freshest olive oil possible to the customer. So we actually don't sell in stores at all. We bring it over from pretty much farm to table. We bring it over from our farms. We turn the olives into oil, bottle it and bring it to our fulfillment center, which is ⁓ in Las Vegas, and then get it right to customers' kitchens. and ⁓ you know, we really focus on customer service, high quality, very transparent. We ⁓ Test our olive oil for everything under the sun. ⁓ heavy metals, plastic, microplastics, and then all the olive oil things like acidity level and you know, pretty much everything that makes a good high quality oil, an oil. And yeah, it's pretty much it. You know, it's ⁓ we have a a team of there's ten of us spread out throughout the world. Las Vegas, Nashville, D C and Greece. And ⁓ Yeah, we're just growing it the the right way in our opinion.
speaker-1: your team still all family?
speaker-0: Not all. The few that are not are pretty much like adopted family though. Yeah. That's what it's Yeah, we we keep that family atmosphere, you know. Yeah. ⁓ so th there are my my my mother actually ⁓ who retired about ten years ago from her rest she was an entrepreneur as well. She owned restaurants her whole life. She retired to become a grandmother and now she runs our customer service. ⁓ and she's kinda like I guess like the matriarch of of our company. So she treats like all of the employees as her children, ⁓ to include some of our newer ones that are not family, but it's definitely like a family at atmosphere for sure. You know, and it no matter how big we grow, and we've kind of like intentionally not grown too big too fast, ⁓ trying to keep it as lean and small as possible while growing the company. ⁓ but really just keeping that family atmosphere. So
speaker-1: that. ⁓ I mean my team, nobody on my team is family, but we it feels like family. And when you don't have that, there's really if I the way I described it is like if you don't want to wake up in the morning and log on and talk to everybody on the team, like you don't have anything. Especially especially for like the long term. So I love that. ⁓ and I definitely can relate to that. Now how do
speaker-0: Exactly.
speaker-1: How did you actually before I ask you that, I believe you mentioned to me this all kind of started when you were in the military and you were you ha you were selling bottles of of this out of your trunk and then you realize like, hey, this is kind of this is a thing that people want to buy. Yeah. Give me a little background on that.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. Started just sharing it. Like it was I was sharing it with friends. So we've always had olive oil in our family for generations. ⁓ my father and uncle owned a little din they did the typical Greek immigrant thing and owned a Greek diner in upstate New York. ⁓ I was about halfway through my military career, probably about ten, probably about twelve years in at the time. And I had gone back home to upstate New York, where I'm from, and I brought back a case of olive oil with me. I don't even know why. I like I I wanted some for myself and I was gonna give some to my friends. Now they didn't really have a they didn't even have a brand. It it w they basically brought over a few pallets a year and would sell it to customers, not even as a business, just like, hey, this is our family olive oil. This comes from our village in Greece. And ⁓ so they didn't have it as a business really. I think my uncle was wholesaling it a little bit like to other restaurants and whatnot. But ⁓ so I brought this case back to Philly with me where I was station I was stationed down in Willow Grove and at the time I was ⁓ training at this CrossFit gym in Center City, Philly. And it's kinda like when the paleo movement was kind of up and coming at the time and ⁓ so everybody was like really into like healthy fats and foods. So I started sharing I just I remember actually the owner of the gym had a ⁓ a birthday party for her soon to be husband. And they had some really cheap olive oil on the table. So I brought and I was parked right outside. So I brought in a bottle and everybody like really loved it. So I just like gave out like ten bottles to my friends. And like within a few weeks, you know, just like word got around the gym, like, ⁓ you gotta try Tony's olive oil. And ⁓ everybody kept asking me for it. So I was like, well, I'm actually going back up to Rochester for Easter in a few weeks. So I brought back like three or four cases with me. And it just like snowballed to where I'm like literally selling it out of the trunk of my car. It's like, you know, not as a business. I'm just like, okay, here's I'm sharing our olive oil with everybody. And then ⁓ probably a few months later, I'm trying to remember the exact timeline 'cause it was like a long time ago, but I got stationed down in Texas. So I went from Philly, which I had a really close knit circle of ⁓ fitness friends that were really into healthy eating, and I get stationed down in Fort Worth, Texas, and all my friends from Philly are like, we need to get your oil. So I'm like, nah, I'm down in Texas. So I talked to my dad and my uncle, and I was like, Can you guys ship me a pallet of olive oil? And ⁓ they did. We managed out the logistics of it. I literally lugged a pallet of olive oil into my apartment at the time and created a one page website with a PayPal button. And it wasn't even I was just still wasn't thinking business. You know, I was like, okay, I'll sell it to my friends, type of thing, you know? So they would like PayPal me 20 or 25 bucks, whatever. And then I would take that bottle and ship it to them. I should have just shipped the palette to Philly. And like Yeah, no, I I I just thought of that now. I like, man, we're gonna logistically easier just to get it to Philly. But ⁓ yeah, so I did that, and then like I said, like
speaker-1: That's what you were gonna say.
speaker-0: A lot of the people that I was training with at the time were getting into paleo and that was kind of like up and coming. And I had some friends that were paleo style influencers. ⁓ so word and this is before like Facebook ads or anything. It was like Facebook used to be like friends and family and you'd connect, you know. So I'd post stuff on Facebook and then they started posting stuff on Facebook and like, ⁓ go to this website and buy fresh olive oil. And then after a few months it started like legit growing to where I was making a few hundred bucks a day. And I was like, ⁓ this maybe there's a little side I'm doing the math. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna make this much a year, you know. It's a nice little side hustle. And ⁓ yeah, just but obviously I was like limited on time. I mean I was like active duty in the Marine Corps. So I'm I'm like going to work at five thirty six every morning, getting home around the same time in the evening, five thirty or six. So I'd I'd get orders and I'd pack them up and then the next day I'd take them to the UPS store on my lunch break or something. So yeah, that got pretty ⁓ pretty tedious really quickly after a few weeks of doing that. I was like, man, sure. Cause packing orders, I mean if you get 10 orders, you gotta pack them after coming home. It's like, man, it's gonna take me a good hour and a half, two hours just to pack these up. And then I got to bring them down to my car. And then fast forward a few months, And we found out we were getting ⁓ our squadron that I was with at the time was getting deployed. So I'm like, well, I gotta shut this down because I'm gonna be gone for six months. And ⁓ I talked to my sister, Effie, who's now my business partner, ⁓ and was like, Hey, do you wanna do this business with me and see what we could do with it? ⁓ which was funny about that, like, so we grew up in the restaurant industry. My father and my mother owned a restaurant together, then they got divorced. My dad kept his restaurant, then my mom opened up another restaurant with my stepdad. And my mom like pushed us away from the restaurant industry. She's like, get out of here. You don't want to get stuck in this this world, you know? And then it we it came like full circle, like 10 years later, and we start opening a a food business together. But yeah, Effie said, yes, let's do it. So I brought, you know, I just made her like fifty-fifty partners. And at that time I was getting ready to leave the country for a while and she was pregnant with her first daughter and we decided to go into a fulfillment center. And she was living in Chicago at the time, so like we'll just go up into Chicago. And that's when it got a lot easier for me 'cause I wasn't had to pack orders, but I was able to focus on kind of growing it and selling olive oil instead of doing the manual labor part of things. And ⁓ Yeah, we've been growing ever since then. That's kinda where we're at. Where we left off like ten years ago.
speaker-1: That's awesome. what point was the like the switch where you considered it a side hustle? Like was there a certain dollar amount that you were making that you were like, this is now gonna be a full time thing?
speaker-0: No, well, it couldn't have been a full time thing. So, two part question or two part answer to that question. So when I r realized it was like a real thing, I actually went on a podcast, an impromptu last minute podcast. One of my friends, she had a paleo cookbook that it came out. They were doing a book signing to her down in Texas. So her and her podcast partner were staying with me because they had an event in Fort Worth the next day. And that evening we were cooking dinner and we were talking and eating and whatever. And they're like, ⁓ we got to record a podcast tonight. And it looked at me like, Tony, we're gonna do it on olive oil. I was like, Okay, I've never been on a podcast before. I don't know what this is, but let's do it. So we did it. And the next after it aired, we sold like I think it was right around thirty K in olive oil, which was a ton, you know, like at the time. And ⁓ you know, we had a few hundred orders come from that podcast. And that was one, it was like, okay, I can make some I can do really good with this. And then it was also like an aha moment. I was like, I just gotta do more of this. You know, like I need to go on more podcasts, you know, if we're gonna ⁓ but as far as it being like a full time thing, this is like the dilemma we were in for about seven years, is it wasn't able to be a full time thing because I was like a career active duty marine and I had already at the by this point put in twelve, thirteen years at the time. So I'm like, I still got another seven years before I retire. You know, because I'm gonna do, I'm gonna finish out my career. And Effie at the time was working, she had a really good job. ⁓ she was the assistant to the ⁓ head of investment banking with ⁓ JP Morgan at the time. So there was a lot of times over the next seven years that, you know, most companies you build. to scale and okay, how fast can we grow it type thing where we were pumping the brakes quite a few times ⁓ on the growth of our business because we didn't have the time to do it. And we really didn't want to outsource the growth of it to others. You know? So we just focused on building a healthy company so that with the intent that when I retired from the Marine Corps, I can go into it full time. Effie can leave her job and go into it full time. And that's what we did. ⁓ but so it allowed us the time to kind of like grow ⁓ probably in a smarter way than just like running a bunch of ads and getting as much orders as we can. Like we really focused on like we already had a really high quality product that was, you know, above and beyond what you're gonna be able to find in an in a grocery store in America. So we had that going for us right off the bat. ⁓ then we're like, you know, we really wanna focus on ⁓ customer experience, the actual You know, the actual just growing lo very loyal customers instead of just getting a sale, you know, and really dialing in ⁓ our email marketing, our SMS marketing, and just ⁓ just focusing on kind of things that matter as opposed to just focusing on sales.
speaker-1: Makes sense. Now when you say customer experience, what do you mean?
speaker-0: Just everything from when they first land on our website to making the purchase online to all the follow up emails and marketing and promotions that go on after that sale, ⁓ to our follow up emails and communications with them two months down the road to any time they contacted us for customer service. You know? So just that whole user experience of and what I always, you know, we we always talk about as a team is I mean there's millions of websites out there, but our website is our brick and mortar store. You know, that's like that's that's what we are. That's this is everything. And and I I always use the analogy with my mom because, you know, she she came up in the brick and mortar world before there was really internet at all, you know, and and ⁓ with her restaurant, I'm like, okay, so this is our restaurant and our customers that purchase our olive oil are like our customers that would come into your restaurant and prior to the internet, like how did a restaurant get really famous or popular? It was all word of mouth. So we really focus on making our customers our greatest salespeople and our instead of our Facebook ads, we want our customers to be our advertisers for us. You know? So we really focus on ⁓ nurturing that individual customer to be like our biggest cheerleaders for us. You know. And doing
speaker-1: If you're having somebody over for dinner, like they're gonna be talking about it, like as they're naked, or just like yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So do you do a lot of education around
speaker-0: We do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's kind of that's what sets ours apart from most, you know, outside of being like a really high quality product is really explaining how this process happens. Because it is a process. Like most people don't realize what goes into with any food products, most people don't really realize what goes into getting it to their kitchen table. But just like I mean, our like our olive oil literally comes from little remote villages in southern Greece, which ⁓ if anyone were to visit, it's like going back in time. I mean, like traffic down there's a a hundred goats crossing the road, you know, it's like is it's back in time in a lot of ways. ⁓ but you figure like one average ⁓ bottle of olive oil, it literally takes one tree will produce about eight of those. If that like six to eight bottles is what you get from one tree. Once a year. Once a year. Once a year. Once once a year. Okay. Wow. So this tree's growing olives all year round to to do one harvest. And all our olives are like hand picked too. So you gotta pick the t olives off the tree, you take ⁓ to the mill, turn them from olives into olive oil. That's about a two hour process. ⁓ then it gets bottled and then it gets palletized, crosses the Atlantic. gets to our fulfillment center and from there it's, you know, dispersed out. So it's like there's just like a lot of steps that go into just getting it here. But outside of that, we're like very ⁓ we communicate a lot to our customers about not just that process, but what happens during the whole ⁓ growth of the olive and what kind of separates like even our trees from like conventionally grown olive trees, which is the vast majority. ⁓ and The land, the soil, like what really sets it apart. ⁓ and then the whole like family aspect of it. You know, we're not some giant corporation that's just like running, just focusing on profits. You know, we're like actually ⁓ love our customers. We actually like talk to them all the time. Everyone on our team talks to our customers. You know, my mom the most, she's like on the phone all day long with our customers. to where she's become friends with a lot of ⁓ like all over the country or world. but yeah, we all we really ⁓ focus on customer service big time.
speaker-1: I love that. That's the most important aspect. Now, how often do you get feedback from the customers?
speaker-0: All like daily. Daily. Yeah. I mean I I I'm in our inbox. I mean, I don't respond to our emails all the like once in a while, but I I read a lot of them. I see ⁓ My I mean my mom, like, she she probably works more hours than anyone in our company. She's like she loves it though, which is awesome. But she's in our in her inbox like twelve hours a day, I swear. and then on on phone calls all day long with customers, you know. So if there's any issues, obviously that skips brought up to myself and Effie and we ⁓ we go from there with it. But yeah.
speaker-1: Now I have to ask, did you get your worth work ethic from your mother?
speaker-0: I'd say in my and it's funny you ask. We're actually filming a podcast tomorrow about things we learned from our parents and grandparents. ⁓ yeah. Cause so I mean everyone in our family or everyone in my immediate family is like entrepreneurs from grandparents to parents. And they like they came over here with nothing and, you know, built some pretty awesome businesses in their own right. But I think I learned a lot just from seeing them as a little kid. Like we're And we were grew up in the restaurant, like we were working at like six, seven years old, like chopping potatoes and whatever, peeling potatoes and ⁓ yeah, so I think just seeing them over the years growing up and then also in the military, like I definitely learned a lot of good stuff there over a few decades, you know.
speaker-1: The reason why I asked is is my mother's the most hardworking, mm, badass woman I've ever met in my life and that's like why I am who I am today. My father was too. ⁓ but I grew up like single mother, watched her work two jobs for twenty years and all that. So I just bad to ask 'cause I'm sure there's like some kind of
speaker-0: ⁓ yeah, I know for sure. I don't know how they did it. Like w I Yeah, when I was in I think it was a lot harder to make money back then than it is now. I mean, with with they didn't have the internet, you know, so it's like it was a lot more boots on the ground grunt work that they were doing, I think, back then than you know, how many people we can reach out and touch nowadays via SMS or email or ⁓ paid media.
speaker-1: Yeah, looking back, it's crazy.
speaker-0: ⁓ things were definitely different back then. And even when my mom and stepdad were my age, man, they were they had a they had a big fine dining Italian restaurant that it like sat like 150 upstairs, like two hundred downstairs, fifty people outside and a bar. That was back when there was like a smoking section and a non smoking section. But ⁓ they'd be open till like two in the morning every night. I was like, man. And I used to work there before I went to the military as a busser or server. And man, the hours they put in, they were working like a hundred hours a week. They were like living there. And that's I think that's why my mom pushed us away. She's like, get out of this shit, you know? But ⁓ yeah, that's it's it was it was in crazy times back then.
speaker-1: My ⁓ my mother's second job was being a waitress at restaurants for as long as I remember like growing up. That's why I figured seeing that as kind of similar. So she would leave at like six in the morning to go her to her job at a dentist office and then she'd come back and make us dinner. Then she would go to her waitress job and then she would come back midnight, one, two in the morning, she'd wake up and do it all over again. Seventy
speaker-0: Yeah. No, I mean it's it's an awesome skill set to learn. That's actually one one thing my mom ⁓ w would instilled in myself and Effie when we were teenagers was like, hey, learn how to wait tables because no matter what happens, you know, people are always gonna need to eat. So if you ever need to make extra cash or just, you know, in between jobs or whatever, you can always go wait tables in a restaurant. Which my sister actually did all through college and even when She got her first job in Chicago. She was working at this local restaurant right across the street from her house, which is actually a really fun restaurant to work at. Like her whole circle of friends worked there. She actually met her husband there. So, you know, it ⁓ it's it's something you can always take with you. And you actually, so a lot of the stuff we learned. serving tables at my mom's restaurant, we apply to this day on our w like it's the same thing. I was making that analogy earlier on the website, a really good server will do the things to get that average order value of the check as high as possible. You know? And we apply that stuff right now on our website. Like if you have a pre-purchase upsell, you know, there's your appetizer. And then you have your your main course is like whatever the main purchase is. And then your drinks or your dessert and all that is your post purchase upsells and down sells. You know, so a lot of the things that you do in real life, you know, it it all applies to the online world. It's just a different way of looking at it. So I remember the time to sell stuff. If you if if you're waiting tables the right way or running a restaurant the right way, you could totally apply that to online business. You know.
speaker-1: Absolutely. Absolutely. I remember when I was younger being told just to like go work like retail jobs, go be a a waiter, go do all these different things. And when you're younger you're like, Why would I do that? Like it's not gonna help me later in life. And then you realize like all those little skills build and build and build.
speaker-0: Anything in sales, yeah. Yeah, for sure.
speaker-1: Absolutely. So remind me, you can purchase the products online and in stores.
speaker-0: No, not in stores. Just online. Just online, on our website and Amazon. It's the only places we sell our brand on. We do sell to grocery stores, but with their own labels. ⁓ we sell to a lot of restaurants that they use in their kitchens or they'll sell the olive oil in their restaurants, but our brand we only sell on our website and Amazon because that allows us to control the quality of the product. Where if I were to sell it to any
speaker-1: Just online.
speaker-0: even a high end grocery store, once I sell my product to them, they can sell it in nine months from now, which generally happens because it goes to a distributor, then it goes to the distribution center for the that individual store, then it goes to the store shelves and it sits there for God knows how long. And time is not a good friend of olive oil. So you want to consume it as fast as possible. So there's a difference in in taste from an olive oil at six months old and two years old. ⁓ most people don't. And that that's like kind of why we educate our customers, you know, because it will taste noticeably different. So if you have a really fresh olive oil, it tastes different two years later, but when people are consuming it for like the positive properties with like the antioxidants and polyphenols, ⁓ those degrade over time as well.
speaker-1: So
speaker-0: So you want to actually have the freshest stuff possible.
speaker-1: Now what are the serving size that you sell?
speaker-0: We have all different sizes. We have little travel packets that are like a tablespoon. ⁓ and then we have four different glass bottle sizes from two hundred fifty milliliter, five hundred, one liter, and a one hundred. And then we have ⁓ a big can or a bag in a box that's three liters that we sell as well, which that's an entire tree. So to get that one can is an entire tree that you're buying for the year.
speaker-1: My mind goes crazy with all these different ideas whenever people are talking about this thing. So I got a couple ideas for you just to throw them out. One, ⁓ I think there's some kind of like calculator you could do on your website based off of that knowledge right there of like it actually doesn't take like you want to use it pretty quickly. So depending on the usage from the customer, if they use it daily, if they use it weekly, monthly, based off of that calculator, then it recommends the size of the product they should.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, and that's a good idea.
speaker-1: I even think like having some kind of animation of the tree in terms of like one tree equals this amount and then it just shows them that like where it actually comes from and like how much work it goes into. The other thing that I just keep running through my mind is a video that you could easily do of like starting at the tree in like your family's land.
speaker-0: And then
speaker-1: Somebody's kitchen. You know what I mean? The whole process.
speaker-0: Have you ever seen the movie Lord of War? Okay, so the opening scene of this movie
speaker-1: I don't think so.
speaker-0: Watch it later. It's a little violent at the end. But it it's a it's pretty much the the production of a bullet being made. And the whole life cycle of that bullet from being brass and lead and gunpowder, the entire process all the way to going into a combat zone, kind of like a military thing. But either way, we want we're gonna actually film a video that's the same thing, but for an olive. So it's but it's gonna be through the lens of the olive. So growing on a tree, getting picked, going into a burlap sack, going to the mill, going through the process of turning into oil and then getting palletized, getting on a ship, going to our warehouse, all the way to the kitchen counter. So we're gonna be filming that actually next fall. We already are in the process of storyboarding it all out and everything. But but it's gonna be from the view of the olive itself. You know, so
speaker-1: that. All right. A couple more questions here. ⁓ let's see. Actually No. We've kind of touched on a couple of those. What's been the most frustrating part about marketing for you?
speaker-0: Yeah. so we the most frustrating part I wouldn't even say it's frustrating for me per se, but there's so many ⁓ there's so much noise with like paid marketing, you know? And ⁓ yeah. And I've got a lot of friends that own agencies, you know, like that are running and we don't run we don't do paid media at all. ⁓ we we pay some influencers, but we don't do paid media When it comes to meta ads, ⁓ YouTube ads, like we're not doing it. And
speaker-1: You've never done it.
speaker-0: We have. the first time we did it was right during the first ⁓ it was during an election cycle. So it was a little interesting. It was a presidential election cycle. and even that at the end of the day, I mean, I know, you know, we've got low hanging fruit out there, but ⁓ I would much rather focus on what we know works and just keep multiplying that and I I think you get a much different customer when they're coming to you based on the influence of somebody that's tried your product or is endorsing it, whether it's a family member, a friend, an influencer you're following, a chef, whatever, than any ad we could ever run. You know, if your cousin is telling you like, hey, you gotta try a solid oil, that's like different than anything you've ever tried before. Or someone has people over for dinner, you know. So w yeah, we can run ads. We can run ads on YouTube, Meta, TikTok, I mean you name it. There's no shortage of places where you can put money to market your product. But and not that we're trying to be like cheap with it, 'cause we we definitely pay our affiliates out well. But it's more about just the quality of customer we're getting. In return.
speaker-1: The lifetime value is probably significantly higher.
speaker-0: Yeah, we we're we really ⁓ it's funny 'cause I mean we've been around over a decade now and I really don't I look at lifetime value in like decades at this point, not what are we gonna make this year or in the next three years. you can go through our like daily orders and Shopify and it's not uncommon to see somebody over a hundred orders deep with us. You know, for olive oil. It's just a it's just a food product, you know. But that's what we're really trying to to To grow is customers like that, that they try our stuff and they're like, I'm never going back to anything else. You know? And
speaker-1: Kind of going back to that family oriented brand where they feel a part of it and kind of going to a different brand would feel almost disrespectful.
speaker-0: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Especially when you meet ⁓ in real life. Like we've I mean, we're obviously limited with we're all spread out around the country and we're kind of limited on time on what kind of events we can do. But there's events I've done in the past like twelve years ago that I met somebody and talked to them for two minutes and they're still customers now, you know? So we still do try and do in person events because in my opinion those are the hands down, the best customers you're gonna get is people you actually meet in real life, talk to, and they try your product and then they're they're a customer for life. You know? So to me, I would rather put much more time and energy behind doing real life events or being on podcasts like we're doing right now and educating customers more like ⁓ I mean this is about marketing, but like I I do go on a lot of podcasts just talking about olive oil and food and Transparency and food, production, all that fun stuff. ⁓ so when you actually get to explain, hey, this is why it's different and somebody actually listens to it, I'd rather focus our time and energy on doing things like that. You know, or getting more and more affiliates and people that can promote it to do to so as opposed to just ads.
speaker-1: Now can we go in a little deeper on the affiliates? Because this is why I love talking to especially e commerce brands, because everybody does it differently. Like you don't run ads, but some people run spend six, seven figures of
speaker-0: They do. Some people live and die off ads a or a day. Yeah. A day. Or a day. Yeah. It's so definitely.
speaker-1: More so organic works for you pro like I would say the best. And then affiliates, like what degree and which where would you put that on the on the priority order?
speaker-0: Top. Yeah. I mean, well, outside of our c our own customers, when it comes to new customer acquisition, hands down our affiliates, like for sure. and Yeah, it's because that's new customer acquisition. You know, we can control what we have in our email list, our SMS list, and our buying customers. ⁓ and we market that's one other thing I want touch on ⁓ when it comes to marketing, because it is marketing. It ⁓ especially as companies grow and their email lists and SMS lists grow, is keeping sight of every single one of those email addresses is actually a human. You know, we kind of lose sight of that. So not only are they actual real humans, but paying customers is they're all very different. You know, so the one thing we really focus on big time and Efrosini, who's my cousin and our email and SMS manager, ⁓ is really segmenting those emails out based on their customer attribution. So, you know, you've got like for us, for example, and most e commerce brands are gonna be like this, you have your email list and SMS lists, like Okay, of all these people who have purchased, who've who's purchased and who has not purchased, those two different people are very different and how you should market to them. But a lot of people will just send out one email blast to everybody and call it a day. But we're talking to two very distinctly different kinds of people here. We have people who've tried our product and those who have not. So the people who have not tried our product are kind of like segment number one. And then you have your customers who've purchased one time. That might have been yesterday or a year ago. But those are two different people too. And they should be marketed too differently. Like someone who hasn't purchased in a long time is very different than someone who just got a bottle last month. Then you have your customers who've purchased more than once and are still regulars. ⁓ they should probably be marketed differently than the person who hasn't purchased or the person who's only purchased one time, you know? Then you have your subscribers, which for us, I mean, that's like 50% of our cust our of our revenue comes from subscriptions. So our subscribers, we want to market to them differently. We don't want to try and sell them olive oil. They're already buying olive oil. We want to like market, reinforce why they're buying the oil and also up sell them different products that they're not currently purchasing. So like try vinegars as well to your next order. ⁓ and then your multiple time customers who are still active, like trying to be get get them to become subscribers. You know, so just like inside of your own p network of people, ⁓ is really focusing on breaking them up into the different kinds of customers they are. And I feel like that's like the first thing every e com brand should do right away. If if they're not doing it, like is really break breaking up and segmenting out that those email and SMS lists. and marketing to them appropriately.
speaker-1: I see that done incorrectly all the time. Yeah. Where everybody, especially large e commerce brands, they're just focused on getting new customers and then they leave their existing customer base somewhat like behind. Yeah. As a second thought.
speaker-0: But it should be your first. Exactly. Yeah.
speaker-1: And that's also why I lit up when earlier in our conversation, ⁓ I asked you if you actually take feedback from customers. Most people miss that component of one, the whole customer experience, but then they're also marketing into that as well. Taking their feedback, understanding why they like the product, what they don't like, why they're purchasing it, how often they're purchasing it, what they're actually cooking it with, so then you could recommend that to other people. Like that's why I lit up because that I also see being done either not at all or incorrectly, where your customers are number one priority. If you're not talking to somebody who's actually using your product, how do you know how how to market after that or who to market to from there? Or going back to your point, marketing the people you are that are already fucking paying you.
speaker-0: Yep. No, definitely. Definitely. It's it's it it's ⁓ I mean how many times do you like purchase something online and like two days later you get an email like trying to sell you the same product you just bought two days ago? I'm like, you know, you gotta you gotta do this a little differently, guys. But so yeah, that so that's that's like what we can control within our network. And then when it comes to the whole affiliate thing, for us that's new customer acquisition. So instead of like worrying about, you know, acquiring our customers on meta or you know, any other platform. ⁓ I just would prefer to have an influencer talking and educating our customer or future potential customers about us and our brand and our product. And it's worked for us and now it's just ⁓ as we've been growing over the years, it's just for me expanding on that, growing that program and getting more and more of them. and also, I mean, there's a few different ways we go about it and do it and different kinds of influencers and affiliates that we have. ⁓ no, we recently started a podcast a few months ago. So we have a lot of our guests that come on are our affiliates as well, you know, the ones that have you know, lar pretty large followings or are interesting to talk to. and we utilize that platform as well to to get new affiliates. ⁓ so there's a lot of different things we do in the whole affiliate space, but ⁓ it's definitely like number one when it comes to new customer acquisition.
speaker-1: Makes sense to me. Now, how do you structure affiliates?
speaker-0: ⁓ as far as payments or as far as like who they are.
speaker-1: Well, I was gonna ask you that as well, 'cause it seemed like you were you're probably a little bit particular of who
speaker-0: Yeah. With the front? Yeah. So ⁓ when it comes to like the who, ⁓ we we know like our customer base, but at the end of the day, we also do have a product that anybody can use. You know, so it's so it's like ⁓ that being said, it's a lot easier to go to Walmart or Target and buy a cheap bottle of olive oil if you just need some olive oil. So we're not really going after your typical Walmart shopper. We're going after like somebody that cares about organic food, healthy food, what they're putting in their body. So we're gonna go after affiliates that promote such things. You know, so like and we do have it broken down into tiers or not tiers, but like different segments of people because we We're constantly going after specific influencers in specific segments. You know, so you might have like a medical profess like a lot of our affiliates are doctors. And th they're sending over like cardiologist. We have a bunch of cardiologists that are influencer style cardiologists that are sending their customers or their followers over to us to become customers because their customers care about heart health and want to eat foods that are heart healthy. Not just Cheerios. But you know, and then but you might also have like a travel influencer, you know? You might have some random travel influencer that's promoting our travel packets on a plane, you know? Or you might have like another the travel packets, yeah, they're single serving. They're they're under yeah, they're they're good.
speaker-1: them on a plate. I always forget what that that like limit is. Yeah.
speaker-0: I think it's like forty milliliters, ⁓ or sixty. I don't even know. Might even be a hundred. I don't know what the heck it is. ⁓ well, we use our travel packets. Those are that's it's a tablespoon. It's it's not much, but so ⁓ yeah. And then you could have I mean, athletes is another one, chefs is another one, cookbook auth authors is another one. Like mommy bloggers is another one. I mean, there's so many different segments of people. So it's like, okay, and it's something we do on the regular is just come up with these different segments of people and niches. I mean, you just go by diets like paleo, keto, vegan, vegetarian. I mean, just name them all across. And like, okay, let's find like 10 top vegan influencers. Let's make them affiliates, you know? Okay, let's go the polar opposite and find 10 keto ⁓ Or carnival, you know, is it's just like there's a million different segments and directions you can go in. ⁓ but we do definitely go after strategic influenc st we strategically go after certain influencers in these different ⁓ segments of of ⁓ not people or diets, but just like groups, you know. So yeah. I mean and there's really no limit to it. And that's why we try and do it.
speaker-1: No, makes total sense.
speaker-0: as a team because it's one thing if I'm sitting here trying to come up with ideas or just you and me, but if we get a group of like five or six of us coming up, okay, who can use olive oil in a way that's like creative? Like even like camping the camping world, right? Or hunters. Okay, you're probably cooking out in the field. Here's your little travel packets. Or a little mini bottles that we could promote to, you know? ⁓ it's almost or Yeah, or if you've got like ⁓ Like real estate agents. There's a good one. You know, we have a really awesome ⁓ gift box that we sell that has a bottle of olive oil and bottle of vinegar and a really sexy packaging. So it makes an awesome real estate ⁓ welcome gift when their clients get a new b ⁓ house. Yeah there's really no limit to it. So you just
speaker-1: isn't. There's everybody can use it.
speaker-0: Yeah. So it's ⁓ it's really kind of just ⁓ and then we have one team member. She literally just does outreach all day long every day. All day long. You know. She has a few other tasks, but when she's not doing that, she's doing outreach. She's awesome at it. And then I I personally do all the onboarding. So she'll kinda like get the ball rolling. as soon as they sign up to be an affiliate, I do like a a welcome onboarding with them. ⁓ and then go from there. But yeah, that's that's like definitely our our our number one source of customer acquisition.
speaker-1: So explain to me, because ever again, this is different for everybody I talk to, how do you structure in terms of paying these influencers?
speaker-0: I mean they get their set. ⁓ we do ⁓ flat rate ⁓ flat rate ⁓ rev share in most cases. ⁓ and then we just pay out once a month at the end of the month. And we do do I have a few select ones that we'll do a CPA on, so there'll be like a customer acquisition, you know, cost. and that is changes based on what landing page you're going to. We send a lot we send different web or different influencer traffic to different landing pages, depending if it's a or sometimes our homepage our our main home page. It all just depends on where the traffic's coming from and what their follower their average follower looks like. 'Cause we can like kind of play around with the the price points of the landing pages based on what the what their average order values are on their sales generally.
speaker-1: So it's mostly now do you send the products for free and then they basic they pretty much get a flat monthly fee to be the influencer for you?
speaker-0: No, the vast majority of them we will send them like a a welcome package, ⁓ with product to like shoot content with. We don't pay them a flat a fee at all. Like they're getting commissions off the sales they make.
speaker-1: Okay. I thought you said flat okay, cool. That makes sense.
speaker-0: Yeah, no, ⁓ the flat fee, the flat rate, I was saying we'll do a flat rate on sales they make. So they might get twenty-five dollars per conversion instead of like a percentage of said conversion. We do have some influencers that we pay a ⁓ a monthly retainer to ⁓ as well. Not that many because when it comes to that, it can go one of two ways in my opinion. Either the influencer is Not selling enough to justify the cost of them. So we'll just say $1,000 just to make it easy. If you're paying an influencer $1,000 a month to do, say, two posts and they only sell $500 worth of product, it's probably not worth it. If they sell $1,000 worth of product, okay, we're breaking even both of us. If they sell $3,000 of profit, okay, well, now I'm underpaying paying that influencer. You know what I mean? So it's like it's kind of a fine line. ⁓ I always like to like I I'd rather pay an influencer more than less just because it keeps them promoting more, you know?
speaker-1: It's like anything. If you're not incentivized to do it.
speaker-0: Exactly. So you but you still gotta weigh that, you know, obviously you still have to run a business and make a profit to grow. but ⁓ I really like the Rev share model because it I think it's the fairest for everybody. because if you if you're doing a flat rate Someone someone's getting shortchanged, whether it's the influencer or the business. Very rarely do you break even or plus or minus even like five to ten percent. It's it's usually from what I've seen, very swayed one way or the other. I mean, I I'll give you an example. I had one influencer, we were paying her a retainer, and she was selling above and beyond. Like I was like, if you were just making taking a rev share of this, you'd be making a lot more money. You know, like I I feel like I'm shortchanging you at this point. You know, so it all depends. There's some just stuff you gotta weigh case by case.
speaker-1: So you sell online only. You don't run ads. You do influencer marketing. A lot of your
speaker-0: We do sell in real life, it's just not our brand. Some grocery stores people have probably heard of carry our out.
speaker-1: For your brand you sell them. For my Yeah. ⁓ so I wanted to ask you in terms of like, do you do anything for organic? Like do you like do you care about SEO? Do you care about getting mentioned in Chat GPT Claude? Like d does the brand or does the business focus on anything like that?
speaker-0: I've read, yeah. We don't. Nope. And again, probably something we maybe should, but we don't. and that and that's one of the things, you know, ha having a small team and running it lean, I mean, you kinda have to pick and choose what you focus on. You know? I mean I I can list ⁓ probably twenty different things that we could and should be doing to grow in other areas, but one thing I learned a while, you know, you y a while ago. You can kind of stretch yourself thin if you try and go focusing on too many things at once. So it's like, okay, what do we know that works a hundred percent? Like no without a shadow of a doubt. And we're always open to trying new things and doing things differently. But you can only do so much of that, you know. So we really like try and really dial in and focus, even myself, you know, because we can get wearing multiple hats, you can go in a million different directions a lot of times. So it's like, what do we know that really, really works? Let's just do more and more and more of that and really perfect that. And then dabble in new stuff here and there with a small percentage of our time. You know? Like for us, the podcast was a new kind of side thing that ⁓ which is, you know, it's been doing awesome and actually doing way better than we thought it would. Not that we thought it'd be bad, but like the numbers are way better than we thought they would be. And You know, so doing something like that, that was like ki kind of for the quarter that we started it was like our little side thing that we did, you know. So next quarter, you know, 'cause we have a quarterly meeting where we go over what our main objectives are for everyone on the team and what we're gonna be focusing on. And then we always like leave a little bit of time to start something new. You know, so say Q one, it could be SEO that we'll gonna focus on or or maybe someday we'll be like, Okay, let's ⁓ run some ads or Go so the one I I didn't bring that up. The one thing we do do paid marketing is Google Ads. And that does we do run Google Ads. I'm sorry, I totally forgot about Google Ads. We do run Google Ads. ⁓ and it does really, really well. But but ⁓ again, we do that internally and we're probably g because it's doing like really, really well
speaker-1: Do run Google App.
speaker-0: That's one of those things that I'm just trying to get schooled up on just for personal knowledge. I like to have like a working knowledge of everything that's happening in the business, whether I do it or not. and I'm just trying to get a little smarter on Google Ads, because it does do really well. And we, you know, over the last year we've been really increasing the the spend on it. And ⁓ yeah. So that is the one thing we do do actually. I forgot about that. But something like that, you know, that's something we might take on as a little side project.
speaker-1: Yeah, and it sounds like it's
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, it is. It it surge ads. but yeah, as we move forward, I don't I don't foresee a time, at least in the next one to two years, where our number one new customer acquisitions coming from affiliates and influencers. So we'll see.
speaker-1: I do find it interesting that I mean, would you even would you consider if you were running ads on meta or anything, just doing retargeting?
speaker-0: ⁓ Yeah. I mean again Yeah, I mean again, that's what I kinda was touching on with the low hanging fruit. I know it's there, you know? Is just ⁓ Does it make absolute sense to do? Maybe, I don't know. It's ⁓ it's just another thing that either I've gotta hire somebody else to do or I have to take away time from someone on my team to do it, you know, or outsource it to someone else. And it just hasn't ⁓ been on the priority list. It might come on. It might, you know, maybe next year. Maybe six months from now. We'll see. Eventually it's gonna happen, you know. But it's just a matter of when.
speaker-1: We're almost out time, but I have one one more question for you. Yeah, definitely. Maybe two. ⁓ just about business in general. Yeah. Because a lot of people out there do struggle with this in the beginning, and then especially as you progress. So I know like keeping the whole family or oriented team, keeping the business small, not scaling too large, which I like can relate to more than you could probably expect in terms of like I have a marketing agency and every marketing agency out there wants to grow as quickly as possible, get as many clients as possible, make as much money as possible. I did the opposite. I grew my team first and then focused on clients later. So for you, one, why do you want to keep it so small? Actually, there's multiple questions to this. Why do you still focus on that even after like t over 10 years of doing this? And then have you actually had any offers that you've turned down to either purchase the business or expand it or anything like that? Like what keeps you grounded to that mission?
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. So ⁓ I'm gonna answer first part first. Yes, we've had a lot of offers to invest in the company with equity, without equity. ⁓ we generally ninety nine point nine percent of times will say no. ⁓ just because ⁓ we we don't need to. You know, we're not we're not trying to scale this company to sell it. We're just trying to You know, ⁓ we've already and this is something we do like once a year is realign our our goals because we've obtained pretty much all of our goals, my sister and I, for what our dream company looked like, you know? And it was pretty much to have a one, provide an awesome product, two, have awesome customer service, three, you know, kind of provide a place where our family can Have fun and work and make it enjoyable. We've kind of both my sister and I have gone through like the our careers in the military and her in the banking world. ⁓ so we're like, okay, if we're gonna do this, let's do it to make it something enjoyable, you know, and manageable. but the reason why we don't want to really grow it to a point where it becomes something we don't love. And I've seen that happen so many times with friends of mine that own businesses, especially when a lot of times when they take on, you know, funding and now they lose control of what they had control of before, they're answering questions to somebody. And that's the one thing, like I I don't want to answer it to anybody but myself and my team, you know? ⁓
speaker-1: You very quickly lose the love, the passion ability to wake up in the morning, be excited.
speaker-0: You do, yeah. Yeah, like I mean, at the end of the day, I do this company 'cause I it's fun to me and I love it. And I like
speaker-1: It's not about we're obviously all here for money, but it's that's only ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, everyone's I mean, every business exists to make money, but you know, I love being able to have my mom work with us and do what she loves doing and that's talking to people and customers. And I mean my stepdad, he r he like runs our warehouse. And, you know, my sister's doing her she does the whole logistics and financial side of the business and but she loves doing that. And then, you know, we have cousins at work for us and friends, and it's like That to me is like ⁓ what I wanna keep. And then if you know, if you're if you're growing just to grow, just to make more revenue, in most cases to eventually exit, you're gonna look at things differently than if you're growing ⁓ to create an aw awesome atmosphere and an awesome entity. Like, I don't ever want to sell our company. Like
speaker-1: Yeah. Like you want your kids.
speaker-0: Our last name is on it. Yeah. Our last name is on it. If anything, if any one of the kids wants to take it, you know, down the road or like I'd rather just close it than sell it, honestly. Like it's not about you know, it's not about the money. It's more about, you know, the fact that our name is the brand. And ⁓ but I want to keep it fun, you know, and enjoyable and I want to look forward to doing it every day. ⁓ so Yeah, so th when it comes to like just growth, it's something I think a lot of people ⁓ don't keep an eye on until it's too late. And it's like, ⁓ my good 'cause it can get out of hand quick, you know? China Exactly. Yeah, you see, ⁓ let's do this, let's do that, let's hire this person, let's hire that person. It's just like then you turn around and it's like, ⁓ my goodness, what what did this turn into? You know?
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: So that's one thing we always try and say focus on, especially as you start growing quickly, you know, is focusing on the original or the the realigned goals for what you want it to be. Or else you're gonna end up doing something that you don't love and then it's like okay, that that's not the point of running your own business. You know? So
speaker-1: Agree. I love that answer. One more question for you. What are your plans over the next twelve months for the business?
speaker-0: Next twelve months, ⁓ we have like very finite goals for everybody. For me personally, ⁓ it's increasing our affiliates to ⁓ to where we're good we're really focusing on more very high level affiliates. So we don't have an actual like I don't have them like an actual number, but I do wanna increase our affiliate revenue in the next 12 months by a good 25%. ⁓ and then outside of just that, we have ⁓ really getting the podcast. ⁓ we have some awesome guests that have been on it and some really awesome ones that are going to be coming on it. So we're really put starting to put more and more time and effort towards that podcast because one, it's a lot of fun and that's kind of why Effie and I are doing it. ⁓ so really just growing that and then from like an actual KPI, ⁓ we're looking at increasing our subscriptions by twenty five percent in the next twelve months. So yeah, the subscriptions are definitely our ⁓ our bread and butter. So
speaker-1: I think you said that's like fifty percent.
speaker-0: Like fifty two percent of our revenue. Yeah. Yeah. So like
speaker-1: Was that just through the text message, email campaigns, all that?
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. I mean at the end of the day our subscriptions, we're we're not looking and and this is like where a lot of I think of companies might go wrong is trying to get people on subscription right off the bat. And we we literally don't I'd rather you try our product first and then it if you love it, awesome. Now we'll get you on a subscription.
speaker-1: It's one of the most annoying things with e commerce brands now. You like you go to then they show you twenty different products and like, ⁓ if you then you can subscribe and save fifty and then you go to check out and you're like, Wait, we recommend this one too. At at that point it's like, dude, I don't even want to anymore.
speaker-0: It's almost force. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So and that's that's what I tell a lot of, you know, ⁓ like newer e commerce brands. It's like if your customer isn't looking forward to that subscription, you're doing it wrong. Like, I don't want our customers like just being on a subscription just for the hell of it. Like, I want them to like look forward to that package coming every month or every three months, whatever their cycle is. You know? ⁓ so It's not about just adding subscriptions, it's about adding quality subscriptions. Yeah.
speaker-1: I mean, everything really boils down to you're out of a lot of the people I've talked to over the last few weeks, like you really care more than most and you ha pay attention to detail more than more more more than most. So even with the s the subscriptions, like you'd rather build the trust with the customer. They want they like they like the product. And now, hey, and again, even going back to like how often do you use it, like there's probably a play there you can go into and then
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Offer them subscription for that. Like if you use it once a month, here's the product for you. If you use it literally daily, here's the product for you.
speaker-0: Yeah, well it's 'cause I mean it's the way we look at our customer. You know, I'm looking at like decades, not like immediate gratification, like how much money can you give me right now? No, I you know what I mean? It's like let's look at like the long term. Yep.
speaker-1: Media gradu It's insane. So I I honestly kudos to you. I I love it. Well, Tony, thank you for joining us. ⁓ if anybody does want to get in touch with you, look at the products, where can where can they find you?
speaker-0: Yeah, we're ⁓ Cassandrinos. I say it slowly. And you just Google it, but that's where we are on our website, all our social medias, all that stuff. So just Cassandrinos.
speaker-1: Fantastic. Well, thank you for joining us. For everybody listening, thank you for joining the Why Marketing Sucks podcast. And we'll see you next time.
speaker-0: Awesome.
speaker-1: Welcome back to the Why Marketing Socks podcast. Today we are sitting down with Tony Casadrinos. Tony, how are you doing today?
speaker-0: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
speaker-1: Thank you for joining us. So for anybody who doesn't know the brand Casadrinos, please explain who you are, what you do, who you serve, what your products are, a little bit of background information.
speaker-0: Yeah, so we're a organic olive oil company. ⁓ it it's ⁓ my sister and and myself started it about almost about fifteen years ago now. most of our team is all entire family. Our ⁓ olive oil comes from family farms in southern Greece, about probably about an hour from Sparta. And we ⁓ we really focus on ⁓ quality first and foremost, but also getting the freshest olive oil possible to the customer. So we actually don't sell in stores at all. We bring it over from pretty much farm to table. We bring it over from our farms. We turn the olives into oil, bottle it and bring it to our fulfillment center, which is ⁓ in Las Vegas, and then get it right to customers' kitchens. and ⁓ you know, we really focus on customer service, high quality, very transparent. We ⁓ Test our olive oil for everything under the sun. ⁓ heavy metals, plastic, microplastics, and then all the olive oil things like acidity level and you know, pretty much everything that makes a good high quality oil, an oil. And yeah, it's pretty much it. You know, it's ⁓ we have a a team of there's ten of us spread out throughout the world. Las Vegas, Nashville, D C and Greece. And ⁓ Yeah, we're just growing it the the right way in our opinion.
speaker-1: your team still all family?
speaker-0: Not all. The few that are not are pretty much like adopted family though. Yeah. That's what it's Yeah, we we keep that family atmosphere, you know. Yeah. ⁓ so th there are my my my mother actually ⁓ who retired about ten years ago from her rest she was an entrepreneur as well. She owned restaurants her whole life. She retired to become a grandmother and now she runs our customer service. ⁓ and she's kinda like I guess like the matriarch of of our company. So she treats like all of the employees as her children, ⁓ to include some of our newer ones that are not family, but it's definitely like a family at atmosphere for sure. You know, and it no matter how big we grow, and we've kind of like intentionally not grown too big too fast, ⁓ trying to keep it as lean and small as possible while growing the company. ⁓ but really just keeping that family atmosphere. So
speaker-1: that. ⁓ I mean my team, nobody on my team is family, but we it feels like family. And when you don't have that, there's really if I the way I described it is like if you don't want to wake up in the morning and log on and talk to everybody on the team, like you don't have anything. Especially especially for like the long term. So I love that. ⁓ and I definitely can relate to that. Now how do
speaker-0: Exactly.
speaker-1: How did you actually before I ask you that, I believe you mentioned to me this all kind of started when you were in the military and you were you ha you were selling bottles of of this out of your trunk and then you realize like, hey, this is kind of this is a thing that people want to buy. Yeah. Give me a little background on that.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. Started just sharing it. Like it was I was sharing it with friends. So we've always had olive oil in our family for generations. ⁓ my father and uncle owned a little din they did the typical Greek immigrant thing and owned a Greek diner in upstate New York. ⁓ I was about halfway through my military career, probably about ten, probably about twelve years in at the time. And I had gone back home to upstate New York, where I'm from, and I brought back a case of olive oil with me. I don't even know why. I like I I wanted some for myself and I was gonna give some to my friends. Now they didn't really have a they didn't even have a brand. It it w they basically brought over a few pallets a year and would sell it to customers, not even as a business, just like, hey, this is our family olive oil. This comes from our village in Greece. And ⁓ so they didn't have it as a business really. I think my uncle was wholesaling it a little bit like to other restaurants and whatnot. But ⁓ so I brought this case back to Philly with me where I was station I was stationed down in Willow Grove and at the time I was ⁓ training at this CrossFit gym in Center City, Philly. And it's kinda like when the paleo movement was kind of up and coming at the time and ⁓ so everybody was like really into like healthy fats and foods. So I started sharing I just I remember actually the owner of the gym had a ⁓ a birthday party for her soon to be husband. And they had some really cheap olive oil on the table. So I brought and I was parked right outside. So I brought in a bottle and everybody like really loved it. So I just like gave out like ten bottles to my friends. And like within a few weeks, you know, just like word got around the gym, like, ⁓ you gotta try Tony's olive oil. And ⁓ everybody kept asking me for it. So I was like, well, I'm actually going back up to Rochester for Easter in a few weeks. So I brought back like three or four cases with me. And it just like snowballed to where I'm like literally selling it out of the trunk of my car. It's like, you know, not as a business. I'm just like, okay, here's I'm sharing our olive oil with everybody. And then ⁓ probably a few months later, I'm trying to remember the exact timeline 'cause it was like a long time ago, but I got stationed down in Texas. So I went from Philly, which I had a really close knit circle of ⁓ fitness friends that were really into healthy eating, and I get stationed down in Fort Worth, Texas, and all my friends from Philly are like, we need to get your oil. So I'm like, nah, I'm down in Texas. So I talked to my dad and my uncle, and I was like, Can you guys ship me a pallet of olive oil? And ⁓ they did. We managed out the logistics of it. I literally lugged a pallet of olive oil into my apartment at the time and created a one page website with a PayPal button. And it wasn't even I was just still wasn't thinking business. You know, I was like, okay, I'll sell it to my friends, type of thing, you know? So they would like PayPal me 20 or 25 bucks, whatever. And then I would take that bottle and ship it to them. I should have just shipped the palette to Philly. And like Yeah, no, I I I just thought of that now. I like, man, we're gonna logistically easier just to get it to Philly. But ⁓ yeah, so I did that, and then like I said, like
speaker-1: That's what you were gonna say.
speaker-0: A lot of the people that I was training with at the time were getting into paleo and that was kind of like up and coming. And I had some friends that were paleo style influencers. ⁓ so word and this is before like Facebook ads or anything. It was like Facebook used to be like friends and family and you'd connect, you know. So I'd post stuff on Facebook and then they started posting stuff on Facebook and like, ⁓ go to this website and buy fresh olive oil. And then after a few months it started like legit growing to where I was making a few hundred bucks a day. And I was like, ⁓ this maybe there's a little side I'm doing the math. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna make this much a year, you know. It's a nice little side hustle. And ⁓ yeah, just but obviously I was like limited on time. I mean I was like active duty in the Marine Corps. So I'm I'm like going to work at five thirty six every morning, getting home around the same time in the evening, five thirty or six. So I'd I'd get orders and I'd pack them up and then the next day I'd take them to the UPS store on my lunch break or something. So yeah, that got pretty ⁓ pretty tedious really quickly after a few weeks of doing that. I was like, man, sure. Cause packing orders, I mean if you get 10 orders, you gotta pack them after coming home. It's like, man, it's gonna take me a good hour and a half, two hours just to pack these up. And then I got to bring them down to my car. And then fast forward a few months, And we found out we were getting ⁓ our squadron that I was with at the time was getting deployed. So I'm like, well, I gotta shut this down because I'm gonna be gone for six months. And ⁓ I talked to my sister, Effie, who's now my business partner, ⁓ and was like, Hey, do you wanna do this business with me and see what we could do with it? ⁓ which was funny about that, like, so we grew up in the restaurant industry. My father and my mother owned a restaurant together, then they got divorced. My dad kept his restaurant, then my mom opened up another restaurant with my stepdad. And my mom like pushed us away from the restaurant industry. She's like, get out of here. You don't want to get stuck in this this world, you know? And then it we it came like full circle, like 10 years later, and we start opening a a food business together. But yeah, Effie said, yes, let's do it. So I brought, you know, I just made her like fifty-fifty partners. And at that time I was getting ready to leave the country for a while and she was pregnant with her first daughter and we decided to go into a fulfillment center. And she was living in Chicago at the time, so like we'll just go up into Chicago. And that's when it got a lot easier for me 'cause I wasn't had to pack orders, but I was able to focus on kind of growing it and selling olive oil instead of doing the manual labor part of things. And ⁓ Yeah, we've been growing ever since then. That's kinda where we're at. Where we left off like ten years ago.
speaker-1: That's awesome. what point was the like the switch where you considered it a side hustle? Like was there a certain dollar amount that you were making that you were like, this is now gonna be a full time thing?
speaker-0: No, well, it couldn't have been a full time thing. So, two part question or two part answer to that question. So when I r realized it was like a real thing, I actually went on a podcast, an impromptu last minute podcast. One of my friends, she had a paleo cookbook that it came out. They were doing a book signing to her down in Texas. So her and her podcast partner were staying with me because they had an event in Fort Worth the next day. And that evening we were cooking dinner and we were talking and eating and whatever. And they're like, ⁓ we got to record a podcast tonight. And it looked at me like, Tony, we're gonna do it on olive oil. I was like, Okay, I've never been on a podcast before. I don't know what this is, but let's do it. So we did it. And the next after it aired, we sold like I think it was right around thirty K in olive oil, which was a ton, you know, like at the time. And ⁓ you know, we had a few hundred orders come from that podcast. And that was one, it was like, okay, I can make some I can do really good with this. And then it was also like an aha moment. I was like, I just gotta do more of this. You know, like I need to go on more podcasts, you know, if we're gonna ⁓ but as far as it being like a full time thing, this is like the dilemma we were in for about seven years, is it wasn't able to be a full time thing because I was like a career active duty marine and I had already at the by this point put in twelve, thirteen years at the time. So I'm like, I still got another seven years before I retire. You know, because I'm gonna do, I'm gonna finish out my career. And Effie at the time was working, she had a really good job. ⁓ she was the assistant to the ⁓ head of investment banking with ⁓ JP Morgan at the time. So there was a lot of times over the next seven years that, you know, most companies you build. to scale and okay, how fast can we grow it type thing where we were pumping the brakes quite a few times ⁓ on the growth of our business because we didn't have the time to do it. And we really didn't want to outsource the growth of it to others. You know? So we just focused on building a healthy company so that with the intent that when I retired from the Marine Corps, I can go into it full time. Effie can leave her job and go into it full time. And that's what we did. ⁓ but so it allowed us the time to kind of like grow ⁓ probably in a smarter way than just like running a bunch of ads and getting as much orders as we can. Like we really focused on like we already had a really high quality product that was, you know, above and beyond what you're gonna be able to find in an in a grocery store in America. So we had that going for us right off the bat. ⁓ then we're like, you know, we really wanna focus on ⁓ customer experience, the actual You know, the actual just growing lo very loyal customers instead of just getting a sale, you know, and really dialing in ⁓ our email marketing, our SMS marketing, and just ⁓ just focusing on kind of things that matter as opposed to just focusing on sales.
speaker-1: Makes sense. Now when you say customer experience, what do you mean?
speaker-0: Just everything from when they first land on our website to making the purchase online to all the follow up emails and marketing and promotions that go on after that sale, ⁓ to our follow up emails and communications with them two months down the road to any time they contacted us for customer service. You know? So just that whole user experience of and what I always, you know, we we always talk about as a team is I mean there's millions of websites out there, but our website is our brick and mortar store. You know, that's like that's that's what we are. That's this is everything. And and I I always use the analogy with my mom because, you know, she she came up in the brick and mortar world before there was really internet at all, you know, and and ⁓ with her restaurant, I'm like, okay, so this is our restaurant and our customers that purchase our olive oil are like our customers that would come into your restaurant and prior to the internet, like how did a restaurant get really famous or popular? It was all word of mouth. So we really focus on making our customers our greatest salespeople and our instead of our Facebook ads, we want our customers to be our advertisers for us. You know? So we really focus on ⁓ nurturing that individual customer to be like our biggest cheerleaders for us. You know. And doing
speaker-1: If you're having somebody over for dinner, like they're gonna be talking about it, like as they're naked, or just like yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So do you do a lot of education around
speaker-0: We do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's kind of that's what sets ours apart from most, you know, outside of being like a really high quality product is really explaining how this process happens. Because it is a process. Like most people don't realize what goes into with any food products, most people don't really realize what goes into getting it to their kitchen table. But just like I mean, our like our olive oil literally comes from little remote villages in southern Greece, which ⁓ if anyone were to visit, it's like going back in time. I mean, like traffic down there's a a hundred goats crossing the road, you know, it's like is it's back in time in a lot of ways. ⁓ but you figure like one average ⁓ bottle of olive oil, it literally takes one tree will produce about eight of those. If that like six to eight bottles is what you get from one tree. Once a year. Once a year. Once a year. Once once a year. Okay. Wow. So this tree's growing olives all year round to to do one harvest. And all our olives are like hand picked too. So you gotta pick the t olives off the tree, you take ⁓ to the mill, turn them from olives into olive oil. That's about a two hour process. ⁓ then it gets bottled and then it gets palletized, crosses the Atlantic. gets to our fulfillment center and from there it's, you know, dispersed out. So it's like there's just like a lot of steps that go into just getting it here. But outside of that, we're like very ⁓ we communicate a lot to our customers about not just that process, but what happens during the whole ⁓ growth of the olive and what kind of separates like even our trees from like conventionally grown olive trees, which is the vast majority. ⁓ and The land, the soil, like what really sets it apart. ⁓ and then the whole like family aspect of it. You know, we're not some giant corporation that's just like running, just focusing on profits. You know, we're like actually ⁓ love our customers. We actually like talk to them all the time. Everyone on our team talks to our customers. You know, my mom the most, she's like on the phone all day long with our customers. to where she's become friends with a lot of ⁓ like all over the country or world. but yeah, we all we really ⁓ focus on customer service big time.
speaker-1: I love that. That's the most important aspect. Now, how often do you get feedback from the customers?
speaker-0: All like daily. Daily. Yeah. I mean I I I'm in our inbox. I mean, I don't respond to our emails all the like once in a while, but I I read a lot of them. I see ⁓ My I mean my mom, like, she she probably works more hours than anyone in our company. She's like she loves it though, which is awesome. But she's in our in her inbox like twelve hours a day, I swear. and then on on phone calls all day long with customers, you know. So if there's any issues, obviously that skips brought up to myself and Effie and we ⁓ we go from there with it. But yeah.
speaker-1: Now I have to ask, did you get your worth work ethic from your mother?
speaker-0: I'd say in my and it's funny you ask. We're actually filming a podcast tomorrow about things we learned from our parents and grandparents. ⁓ yeah. Cause so I mean everyone in our family or everyone in my immediate family is like entrepreneurs from grandparents to parents. And they like they came over here with nothing and, you know, built some pretty awesome businesses in their own right. But I think I learned a lot just from seeing them as a little kid. Like we're And we were grew up in the restaurant, like we were working at like six, seven years old, like chopping potatoes and whatever, peeling potatoes and ⁓ yeah, so I think just seeing them over the years growing up and then also in the military, like I definitely learned a lot of good stuff there over a few decades, you know.
speaker-1: The reason why I asked is is my mother's the most hardworking, mm, badass woman I've ever met in my life and that's like why I am who I am today. My father was too. ⁓ but I grew up like single mother, watched her work two jobs for twenty years and all that. So I just bad to ask 'cause I'm sure there's like some kind of
speaker-0: ⁓ yeah, I know for sure. I don't know how they did it. Like w I Yeah, when I was in I think it was a lot harder to make money back then than it is now. I mean, with with they didn't have the internet, you know, so it's like it was a lot more boots on the ground grunt work that they were doing, I think, back then than you know, how many people we can reach out and touch nowadays via SMS or email or ⁓ paid media.
speaker-1: Yeah, looking back, it's crazy.
speaker-0: ⁓ things were definitely different back then. And even when my mom and stepdad were my age, man, they were they had a they had a big fine dining Italian restaurant that it like sat like 150 upstairs, like two hundred downstairs, fifty people outside and a bar. That was back when there was like a smoking section and a non smoking section. But ⁓ they'd be open till like two in the morning every night. I was like, man. And I used to work there before I went to the military as a busser or server. And man, the hours they put in, they were working like a hundred hours a week. They were like living there. And that's I think that's why my mom pushed us away. She's like, get out of this shit, you know? But ⁓ yeah, that's it's it was it was in crazy times back then.
speaker-1: My ⁓ my mother's second job was being a waitress at restaurants for as long as I remember like growing up. That's why I figured seeing that as kind of similar. So she would leave at like six in the morning to go her to her job at a dentist office and then she'd come back and make us dinner. Then she would go to her waitress job and then she would come back midnight, one, two in the morning, she'd wake up and do it all over again. Seventy
speaker-0: Yeah. No, I mean it's it's an awesome skill set to learn. That's actually one one thing my mom ⁓ w would instilled in myself and Effie when we were teenagers was like, hey, learn how to wait tables because no matter what happens, you know, people are always gonna need to eat. So if you ever need to make extra cash or just, you know, in between jobs or whatever, you can always go wait tables in a restaurant. Which my sister actually did all through college and even when She got her first job in Chicago. She was working at this local restaurant right across the street from her house, which is actually a really fun restaurant to work at. Like her whole circle of friends worked there. She actually met her husband there. So, you know, it ⁓ it's it's something you can always take with you. And you actually, so a lot of the stuff we learned. serving tables at my mom's restaurant, we apply to this day on our w like it's the same thing. I was making that analogy earlier on the website, a really good server will do the things to get that average order value of the check as high as possible. You know? And we apply that stuff right now on our website. Like if you have a pre-purchase upsell, you know, there's your appetizer. And then you have your your main course is like whatever the main purchase is. And then your drinks or your dessert and all that is your post purchase upsells and down sells. You know, so a lot of the things that you do in real life, you know, it it all applies to the online world. It's just a different way of looking at it. So I remember the time to sell stuff. If you if if you're waiting tables the right way or running a restaurant the right way, you could totally apply that to online business. You know.
speaker-1: Absolutely. Absolutely. I remember when I was younger being told just to like go work like retail jobs, go be a a waiter, go do all these different things. And when you're younger you're like, Why would I do that? Like it's not gonna help me later in life. And then you realize like all those little skills build and build and build.
speaker-0: Anything in sales, yeah. Yeah, for sure.
speaker-1: Absolutely. So remind me, you can purchase the products online and in stores.
speaker-0: No, not in stores. Just online. Just online, on our website and Amazon. It's the only places we sell our brand on. We do sell to grocery stores, but with their own labels. ⁓ we sell to a lot of restaurants that they use in their kitchens or they'll sell the olive oil in their restaurants, but our brand we only sell on our website and Amazon because that allows us to control the quality of the product. Where if I were to sell it to any
speaker-1: Just online.
speaker-0: even a high end grocery store, once I sell my product to them, they can sell it in nine months from now, which generally happens because it goes to a distributor, then it goes to the distribution center for the that individual store, then it goes to the store shelves and it sits there for God knows how long. And time is not a good friend of olive oil. So you want to consume it as fast as possible. So there's a difference in in taste from an olive oil at six months old and two years old. ⁓ most people don't. And that that's like kind of why we educate our customers, you know, because it will taste noticeably different. So if you have a really fresh olive oil, it tastes different two years later, but when people are consuming it for like the positive properties with like the antioxidants and polyphenols, ⁓ those degrade over time as well.
speaker-1: So
speaker-0: So you want to actually have the freshest stuff possible.
speaker-1: Now what are the serving size that you sell?
speaker-0: We have all different sizes. We have little travel packets that are like a tablespoon. ⁓ and then we have four different glass bottle sizes from two hundred fifty milliliter, five hundred, one liter, and a one hundred. And then we have ⁓ a big can or a bag in a box that's three liters that we sell as well, which that's an entire tree. So to get that one can is an entire tree that you're buying for the year.
speaker-1: My mind goes crazy with all these different ideas whenever people are talking about this thing. So I got a couple ideas for you just to throw them out. One, ⁓ I think there's some kind of like calculator you could do on your website based off of that knowledge right there of like it actually doesn't take like you want to use it pretty quickly. So depending on the usage from the customer, if they use it daily, if they use it weekly, monthly, based off of that calculator, then it recommends the size of the product they should.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, and that's a good idea.
speaker-1: I even think like having some kind of animation of the tree in terms of like one tree equals this amount and then it just shows them that like where it actually comes from and like how much work it goes into. The other thing that I just keep running through my mind is a video that you could easily do of like starting at the tree in like your family's land.
speaker-0: And then
speaker-1: Somebody's kitchen. You know what I mean? The whole process.
speaker-0: Have you ever seen the movie Lord of War? Okay, so the opening scene of this movie
speaker-1: I don't think so.
speaker-0: Watch it later. It's a little violent at the end. But it it's a it's pretty much the the production of a bullet being made. And the whole life cycle of that bullet from being brass and lead and gunpowder, the entire process all the way to going into a combat zone, kind of like a military thing. But either way, we want we're gonna actually film a video that's the same thing, but for an olive. So it's but it's gonna be through the lens of the olive. So growing on a tree, getting picked, going into a burlap sack, going to the mill, going through the process of turning into oil and then getting palletized, getting on a ship, going to our warehouse, all the way to the kitchen counter. So we're gonna be filming that actually next fall. We already are in the process of storyboarding it all out and everything. But but it's gonna be from the view of the olive itself. You know, so
speaker-1: that. All right. A couple more questions here. ⁓ let's see. Actually No. We've kind of touched on a couple of those. What's been the most frustrating part about marketing for you?
speaker-0: Yeah. so we the most frustrating part I wouldn't even say it's frustrating for me per se, but there's so many ⁓ there's so much noise with like paid marketing, you know? And ⁓ yeah. And I've got a lot of friends that own agencies, you know, like that are running and we don't run we don't do paid media at all. ⁓ we we pay some influencers, but we don't do paid media When it comes to meta ads, ⁓ YouTube ads, like we're not doing it. And
speaker-1: You've never done it.
speaker-0: We have. the first time we did it was right during the first ⁓ it was during an election cycle. So it was a little interesting. It was a presidential election cycle. and even that at the end of the day, I mean, I know, you know, we've got low hanging fruit out there, but ⁓ I would much rather focus on what we know works and just keep multiplying that and I I think you get a much different customer when they're coming to you based on the influence of somebody that's tried your product or is endorsing it, whether it's a family member, a friend, an influencer you're following, a chef, whatever, than any ad we could ever run. You know, if your cousin is telling you like, hey, you gotta try a solid oil, that's like different than anything you've ever tried before. Or someone has people over for dinner, you know. So w yeah, we can run ads. We can run ads on YouTube, Meta, TikTok, I mean you name it. There's no shortage of places where you can put money to market your product. But and not that we're trying to be like cheap with it, 'cause we we definitely pay our affiliates out well. But it's more about just the quality of customer we're getting. In return.
speaker-1: The lifetime value is probably significantly higher.
speaker-0: Yeah, we we're we really ⁓ it's funny 'cause I mean we've been around over a decade now and I really don't I look at lifetime value in like decades at this point, not what are we gonna make this year or in the next three years. you can go through our like daily orders and Shopify and it's not uncommon to see somebody over a hundred orders deep with us. You know, for olive oil. It's just a it's just a food product, you know. But that's what we're really trying to to To grow is customers like that, that they try our stuff and they're like, I'm never going back to anything else. You know? And
speaker-1: Kind of going back to that family oriented brand where they feel a part of it and kind of going to a different brand would feel almost disrespectful.
speaker-0: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Especially when you meet ⁓ in real life. Like we've I mean, we're obviously limited with we're all spread out around the country and we're kind of limited on time on what kind of events we can do. But there's events I've done in the past like twelve years ago that I met somebody and talked to them for two minutes and they're still customers now, you know? So we still do try and do in person events because in my opinion those are the hands down, the best customers you're gonna get is people you actually meet in real life, talk to, and they try your product and then they're they're a customer for life. You know? So to me, I would rather put much more time and energy behind doing real life events or being on podcasts like we're doing right now and educating customers more like ⁓ I mean this is about marketing, but like I I do go on a lot of podcasts just talking about olive oil and food and Transparency and food, production, all that fun stuff. ⁓ so when you actually get to explain, hey, this is why it's different and somebody actually listens to it, I'd rather focus our time and energy on doing things like that. You know, or getting more and more affiliates and people that can promote it to do to so as opposed to just ads.
speaker-1: Now can we go in a little deeper on the affiliates? Because this is why I love talking to especially e commerce brands, because everybody does it differently. Like you don't run ads, but some people run spend six, seven figures of
speaker-0: They do. Some people live and die off ads a or a day. Yeah. A day. Or a day. Yeah. It's so definitely.
speaker-1: More so organic works for you pro like I would say the best. And then affiliates, like what degree and which where would you put that on the on the priority order?
speaker-0: Top. Yeah. I mean, well, outside of our c our own customers, when it comes to new customer acquisition, hands down our affiliates, like for sure. and Yeah, it's because that's new customer acquisition. You know, we can control what we have in our email list, our SMS list, and our buying customers. ⁓ and we market that's one other thing I want touch on ⁓ when it comes to marketing, because it is marketing. It ⁓ especially as companies grow and their email lists and SMS lists grow, is keeping sight of every single one of those email addresses is actually a human. You know, we kind of lose sight of that. So not only are they actual real humans, but paying customers is they're all very different. You know, so the one thing we really focus on big time and Efrosini, who's my cousin and our email and SMS manager, ⁓ is really segmenting those emails out based on their customer attribution. So, you know, you've got like for us, for example, and most e commerce brands are gonna be like this, you have your email list and SMS lists, like Okay, of all these people who have purchased, who've who's purchased and who has not purchased, those two different people are very different and how you should market to them. But a lot of people will just send out one email blast to everybody and call it a day. But we're talking to two very distinctly different kinds of people here. We have people who've tried our product and those who have not. So the people who have not tried our product are kind of like segment number one. And then you have your customers who've purchased one time. That might have been yesterday or a year ago. But those are two different people too. And they should be marketed too differently. Like someone who hasn't purchased in a long time is very different than someone who just got a bottle last month. Then you have your customers who've purchased more than once and are still regulars. ⁓ they should probably be marketed differently than the person who hasn't purchased or the person who's only purchased one time, you know? Then you have your subscribers, which for us, I mean, that's like 50% of our cust our of our revenue comes from subscriptions. So our subscribers, we want to market to them differently. We don't want to try and sell them olive oil. They're already buying olive oil. We want to like market, reinforce why they're buying the oil and also up sell them different products that they're not currently purchasing. So like try vinegars as well to your next order. ⁓ and then your multiple time customers who are still active, like trying to be get get them to become subscribers. You know, so just like inside of your own p network of people, ⁓ is really focusing on breaking them up into the different kinds of customers they are. And I feel like that's like the first thing every e com brand should do right away. If if they're not doing it, like is really break breaking up and segmenting out that those email and SMS lists. and marketing to them appropriately.
speaker-1: I see that done incorrectly all the time. Yeah. Where everybody, especially large e commerce brands, they're just focused on getting new customers and then they leave their existing customer base somewhat like behind. Yeah. As a second thought.
speaker-0: But it should be your first. Exactly. Yeah.
speaker-1: And that's also why I lit up when earlier in our conversation, ⁓ I asked you if you actually take feedback from customers. Most people miss that component of one, the whole customer experience, but then they're also marketing into that as well. Taking their feedback, understanding why they like the product, what they don't like, why they're purchasing it, how often they're purchasing it, what they're actually cooking it with, so then you could recommend that to other people. Like that's why I lit up because that I also see being done either not at all or incorrectly, where your customers are number one priority. If you're not talking to somebody who's actually using your product, how do you know how how to market after that or who to market to from there? Or going back to your point, marketing the people you are that are already fucking paying you.
speaker-0: Yep. No, definitely. Definitely. It's it's it it's ⁓ I mean how many times do you like purchase something online and like two days later you get an email like trying to sell you the same product you just bought two days ago? I'm like, you know, you gotta you gotta do this a little differently, guys. But so yeah, that so that's that's like what we can control within our network. And then when it comes to the whole affiliate thing, for us that's new customer acquisition. So instead of like worrying about, you know, acquiring our customers on meta or you know, any other platform. ⁓ I just would prefer to have an influencer talking and educating our customer or future potential customers about us and our brand and our product. And it's worked for us and now it's just ⁓ as we've been growing over the years, it's just for me expanding on that, growing that program and getting more and more of them. and also, I mean, there's a few different ways we go about it and do it and different kinds of influencers and affiliates that we have. ⁓ no, we recently started a podcast a few months ago. So we have a lot of our guests that come on are our affiliates as well, you know, the ones that have you know, lar pretty large followings or are interesting to talk to. and we utilize that platform as well to to get new affiliates. ⁓ so there's a lot of different things we do in the whole affiliate space, but ⁓ it's definitely like number one when it comes to new customer acquisition.
speaker-1: Makes sense to me. Now, how do you structure affiliates?
speaker-0: ⁓ as far as payments or as far as like who they are.
speaker-1: Well, I was gonna ask you that as well, 'cause it seemed like you were you're probably a little bit particular of who
speaker-0: Yeah. With the front? Yeah. So ⁓ when it comes to like the who, ⁓ we we know like our customer base, but at the end of the day, we also do have a product that anybody can use. You know, so it's so it's like ⁓ that being said, it's a lot easier to go to Walmart or Target and buy a cheap bottle of olive oil if you just need some olive oil. So we're not really going after your typical Walmart shopper. We're going after like somebody that cares about organic food, healthy food, what they're putting in their body. So we're gonna go after affiliates that promote such things. You know, so like and we do have it broken down into tiers or not tiers, but like different segments of people because we We're constantly going after specific influencers in specific segments. You know, so you might have like a medical profess like a lot of our affiliates are doctors. And th they're sending over like cardiologist. We have a bunch of cardiologists that are influencer style cardiologists that are sending their customers or their followers over to us to become customers because their customers care about heart health and want to eat foods that are heart healthy. Not just Cheerios. But you know, and then but you might also have like a travel influencer, you know? You might have some random travel influencer that's promoting our travel packets on a plane, you know? Or you might have like another the travel packets, yeah, they're single serving. They're they're under yeah, they're they're good.
speaker-1: them on a plate. I always forget what that that like limit is. Yeah.
speaker-0: I think it's like forty milliliters, ⁓ or sixty. I don't even know. Might even be a hundred. I don't know what the heck it is. ⁓ well, we use our travel packets. Those are that's it's a tablespoon. It's it's not much, but so ⁓ yeah. And then you could have I mean, athletes is another one, chefs is another one, cookbook auth authors is another one. Like mommy bloggers is another one. I mean, there's so many different segments of people. So it's like, okay, and it's something we do on the regular is just come up with these different segments of people and niches. I mean, you just go by diets like paleo, keto, vegan, vegetarian. I mean, just name them all across. And like, okay, let's find like 10 top vegan influencers. Let's make them affiliates, you know? Okay, let's go the polar opposite and find 10 keto ⁓ Or carnival, you know, is it's just like there's a million different segments and directions you can go in. ⁓ but we do definitely go after strategic influenc st we strategically go after certain influencers in these different ⁓ segments of of ⁓ not people or diets, but just like groups, you know. So yeah. I mean and there's really no limit to it. And that's why we try and do it.
speaker-1: No, makes total sense.
speaker-0: as a team because it's one thing if I'm sitting here trying to come up with ideas or just you and me, but if we get a group of like five or six of us coming up, okay, who can use olive oil in a way that's like creative? Like even like camping the camping world, right? Or hunters. Okay, you're probably cooking out in the field. Here's your little travel packets. Or a little mini bottles that we could promote to, you know? ⁓ it's almost or Yeah, or if you've got like ⁓ Like real estate agents. There's a good one. You know, we have a really awesome ⁓ gift box that we sell that has a bottle of olive oil and bottle of vinegar and a really sexy packaging. So it makes an awesome real estate ⁓ welcome gift when their clients get a new b ⁓ house. Yeah there's really no limit to it. So you just
speaker-1: isn't. There's everybody can use it.
speaker-0: Yeah. So it's ⁓ it's really kind of just ⁓ and then we have one team member. She literally just does outreach all day long every day. All day long. You know. She has a few other tasks, but when she's not doing that, she's doing outreach. She's awesome at it. And then I I personally do all the onboarding. So she'll kinda like get the ball rolling. as soon as they sign up to be an affiliate, I do like a a welcome onboarding with them. ⁓ and then go from there. But yeah, that's that's like definitely our our our number one source of customer acquisition.
speaker-1: So explain to me, because ever again, this is different for everybody I talk to, how do you structure in terms of paying these influencers?
speaker-0: I mean they get their set. ⁓ we do ⁓ flat rate ⁓ flat rate ⁓ rev share in most cases. ⁓ and then we just pay out once a month at the end of the month. And we do do I have a few select ones that we'll do a CPA on, so there'll be like a customer acquisition, you know, cost. and that is changes based on what landing page you're going to. We send a lot we send different web or different influencer traffic to different landing pages, depending if it's a or sometimes our homepage our our main home page. It all just depends on where the traffic's coming from and what their follower their average follower looks like. 'Cause we can like kind of play around with the the price points of the landing pages based on what the what their average order values are on their sales generally.
speaker-1: So it's mostly now do you send the products for free and then they basic they pretty much get a flat monthly fee to be the influencer for you?
speaker-0: No, the vast majority of them we will send them like a a welcome package, ⁓ with product to like shoot content with. We don't pay them a flat a fee at all. Like they're getting commissions off the sales they make.
speaker-1: Okay. I thought you said flat okay, cool. That makes sense.
speaker-0: Yeah, no, ⁓ the flat fee, the flat rate, I was saying we'll do a flat rate on sales they make. So they might get twenty-five dollars per conversion instead of like a percentage of said conversion. We do have some influencers that we pay a ⁓ a monthly retainer to ⁓ as well. Not that many because when it comes to that, it can go one of two ways in my opinion. Either the influencer is Not selling enough to justify the cost of them. So we'll just say $1,000 just to make it easy. If you're paying an influencer $1,000 a month to do, say, two posts and they only sell $500 worth of product, it's probably not worth it. If they sell $1,000 worth of product, okay, we're breaking even both of us. If they sell $3,000 of profit, okay, well, now I'm underpaying paying that influencer. You know what I mean? So it's like it's kind of a fine line. ⁓ I always like to like I I'd rather pay an influencer more than less just because it keeps them promoting more, you know?
speaker-1: It's like anything. If you're not incentivized to do it.
speaker-0: Exactly. So you but you still gotta weigh that, you know, obviously you still have to run a business and make a profit to grow. but ⁓ I really like the Rev share model because it I think it's the fairest for everybody. because if you if you're doing a flat rate Someone someone's getting shortchanged, whether it's the influencer or the business. Very rarely do you break even or plus or minus even like five to ten percent. It's it's usually from what I've seen, very swayed one way or the other. I mean, I I'll give you an example. I had one influencer, we were paying her a retainer, and she was selling above and beyond. Like I was like, if you were just making taking a rev share of this, you'd be making a lot more money. You know, like I I feel like I'm shortchanging you at this point. You know, so it all depends. There's some just stuff you gotta weigh case by case.
speaker-1: So you sell online only. You don't run ads. You do influencer marketing. A lot of your
speaker-0: We do sell in real life, it's just not our brand. Some grocery stores people have probably heard of carry our out.
speaker-1: For your brand you sell them. For my Yeah. ⁓ so I wanted to ask you in terms of like, do you do anything for organic? Like do you like do you care about SEO? Do you care about getting mentioned in Chat GPT Claude? Like d does the brand or does the business focus on anything like that?
speaker-0: I've read, yeah. We don't. Nope. And again, probably something we maybe should, but we don't. and that and that's one of the things, you know, ha having a small team and running it lean, I mean, you kinda have to pick and choose what you focus on. You know? I mean I I can list ⁓ probably twenty different things that we could and should be doing to grow in other areas, but one thing I learned a while, you know, you y a while ago. You can kind of stretch yourself thin if you try and go focusing on too many things at once. So it's like, okay, what do we know that works a hundred percent? Like no without a shadow of a doubt. And we're always open to trying new things and doing things differently. But you can only do so much of that, you know. So we really like try and really dial in and focus, even myself, you know, because we can get wearing multiple hats, you can go in a million different directions a lot of times. So it's like, what do we know that really, really works? Let's just do more and more and more of that and really perfect that. And then dabble in new stuff here and there with a small percentage of our time. You know? Like for us, the podcast was a new kind of side thing that ⁓ which is, you know, it's been doing awesome and actually doing way better than we thought it would. Not that we thought it'd be bad, but like the numbers are way better than we thought they would be. And You know, so doing something like that, that was like ki kind of for the quarter that we started it was like our little side thing that we did, you know. So next quarter, you know, 'cause we have a quarterly meeting where we go over what our main objectives are for everyone on the team and what we're gonna be focusing on. And then we always like leave a little bit of time to start something new. You know, so say Q one, it could be SEO that we'll gonna focus on or or maybe someday we'll be like, Okay, let's ⁓ run some ads or Go so the one I I didn't bring that up. The one thing we do do paid marketing is Google Ads. And that does we do run Google Ads. I'm sorry, I totally forgot about Google Ads. We do run Google Ads. ⁓ and it does really, really well. But but ⁓ again, we do that internally and we're probably g because it's doing like really, really well
speaker-1: Do run Google App.
speaker-0: That's one of those things that I'm just trying to get schooled up on just for personal knowledge. I like to have like a working knowledge of everything that's happening in the business, whether I do it or not. and I'm just trying to get a little smarter on Google Ads, because it does do really well. And we, you know, over the last year we've been really increasing the the spend on it. And ⁓ yeah. So that is the one thing we do do actually. I forgot about that. But something like that, you know, that's something we might take on as a little side project.
speaker-1: Yeah, and it sounds like it's
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, it is. It it surge ads. but yeah, as we move forward, I don't I don't foresee a time, at least in the next one to two years, where our number one new customer acquisitions coming from affiliates and influencers. So we'll see.
speaker-1: I do find it interesting that I mean, would you even would you consider if you were running ads on meta or anything, just doing retargeting?
speaker-0: ⁓ Yeah. I mean again Yeah, I mean again, that's what I kinda was touching on with the low hanging fruit. I know it's there, you know? Is just ⁓ Does it make absolute sense to do? Maybe, I don't know. It's ⁓ it's just another thing that either I've gotta hire somebody else to do or I have to take away time from someone on my team to do it, you know, or outsource it to someone else. And it just hasn't ⁓ been on the priority list. It might come on. It might, you know, maybe next year. Maybe six months from now. We'll see. Eventually it's gonna happen, you know. But it's just a matter of when.
speaker-1: We're almost out time, but I have one one more question for you. Yeah, definitely. Maybe two. ⁓ just about business in general. Yeah. Because a lot of people out there do struggle with this in the beginning, and then especially as you progress. So I know like keeping the whole family or oriented team, keeping the business small, not scaling too large, which I like can relate to more than you could probably expect in terms of like I have a marketing agency and every marketing agency out there wants to grow as quickly as possible, get as many clients as possible, make as much money as possible. I did the opposite. I grew my team first and then focused on clients later. So for you, one, why do you want to keep it so small? Actually, there's multiple questions to this. Why do you still focus on that even after like t over 10 years of doing this? And then have you actually had any offers that you've turned down to either purchase the business or expand it or anything like that? Like what keeps you grounded to that mission?
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. So ⁓ I'm gonna answer first part first. Yes, we've had a lot of offers to invest in the company with equity, without equity. ⁓ we generally ninety nine point nine percent of times will say no. ⁓ just because ⁓ we we don't need to. You know, we're not we're not trying to scale this company to sell it. We're just trying to You know, ⁓ we've already and this is something we do like once a year is realign our our goals because we've obtained pretty much all of our goals, my sister and I, for what our dream company looked like, you know? And it was pretty much to have a one, provide an awesome product, two, have awesome customer service, three, you know, kind of provide a place where our family can Have fun and work and make it enjoyable. We've kind of both my sister and I have gone through like the our careers in the military and her in the banking world. ⁓ so we're like, okay, if we're gonna do this, let's do it to make it something enjoyable, you know, and manageable. but the reason why we don't want to really grow it to a point where it becomes something we don't love. And I've seen that happen so many times with friends of mine that own businesses, especially when a lot of times when they take on, you know, funding and now they lose control of what they had control of before, they're answering questions to somebody. And that's the one thing, like I I don't want to answer it to anybody but myself and my team, you know? ⁓
speaker-1: You very quickly lose the love, the passion ability to wake up in the morning, be excited.
speaker-0: You do, yeah. Yeah, like I mean, at the end of the day, I do this company 'cause I it's fun to me and I love it. And I like
speaker-1: It's not about we're obviously all here for money, but it's that's only ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, everyone's I mean, every business exists to make money, but you know, I love being able to have my mom work with us and do what she loves doing and that's talking to people and customers. And I mean my stepdad, he r he like runs our warehouse. And, you know, my sister's doing her she does the whole logistics and financial side of the business and but she loves doing that. And then, you know, we have cousins at work for us and friends, and it's like That to me is like ⁓ what I wanna keep. And then if you know, if you're if you're growing just to grow, just to make more revenue, in most cases to eventually exit, you're gonna look at things differently than if you're growing ⁓ to create an aw awesome atmosphere and an awesome entity. Like, I don't ever want to sell our company. Like
speaker-1: Yeah. Like you want your kids.
speaker-0: Our last name is on it. Yeah. Our last name is on it. If anything, if any one of the kids wants to take it, you know, down the road or like I'd rather just close it than sell it, honestly. Like it's not about you know, it's not about the money. It's more about, you know, the fact that our name is the brand. And ⁓ but I want to keep it fun, you know, and enjoyable and I want to look forward to doing it every day. ⁓ so Yeah, so th when it comes to like just growth, it's something I think a lot of people ⁓ don't keep an eye on until it's too late. And it's like, ⁓ my good 'cause it can get out of hand quick, you know? China Exactly. Yeah, you see, ⁓ let's do this, let's do that, let's hire this person, let's hire that person. It's just like then you turn around and it's like, ⁓ my goodness, what what did this turn into? You know?
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: So that's one thing we always try and say focus on, especially as you start growing quickly, you know, is focusing on the original or the the realigned goals for what you want it to be. Or else you're gonna end up doing something that you don't love and then it's like okay, that that's not the point of running your own business. You know? So
speaker-1: Agree. I love that answer. One more question for you. What are your plans over the next twelve months for the business?
speaker-0: Next twelve months, ⁓ we have like very finite goals for everybody. For me personally, ⁓ it's increasing our affiliates to ⁓ to where we're good we're really focusing on more very high level affiliates. So we don't have an actual like I don't have them like an actual number, but I do wanna increase our affiliate revenue in the next 12 months by a good 25%. ⁓ and then outside of just that, we have ⁓ really getting the podcast. ⁓ we have some awesome guests that have been on it and some really awesome ones that are going to be coming on it. So we're really put starting to put more and more time and effort towards that podcast because one, it's a lot of fun and that's kind of why Effie and I are doing it. ⁓ so really just growing that and then from like an actual KPI, ⁓ we're looking at increasing our subscriptions by twenty five percent in the next twelve months. So yeah, the subscriptions are definitely our ⁓ our bread and butter. So
speaker-1: I think you said that's like fifty percent.
speaker-0: Like fifty two percent of our revenue. Yeah. Yeah. So like
speaker-1: Was that just through the text message, email campaigns, all that?
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. I mean at the end of the day our subscriptions, we're we're not looking and and this is like where a lot of I think of companies might go wrong is trying to get people on subscription right off the bat. And we we literally don't I'd rather you try our product first and then it if you love it, awesome. Now we'll get you on a subscription.
speaker-1: It's one of the most annoying things with e commerce brands now. You like you go to then they show you twenty different products and like, ⁓ if you then you can subscribe and save fifty and then you go to check out and you're like, Wait, we recommend this one too. At at that point it's like, dude, I don't even want to anymore.
speaker-0: It's almost force. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So and that's that's what I tell a lot of, you know, ⁓ like newer e commerce brands. It's like if your customer isn't looking forward to that subscription, you're doing it wrong. Like, I don't want our customers like just being on a subscription just for the hell of it. Like, I want them to like look forward to that package coming every month or every three months, whatever their cycle is. You know? ⁓ so It's not about just adding subscriptions, it's about adding quality subscriptions. Yeah.
speaker-1: I mean, everything really boils down to you're out of a lot of the people I've talked to over the last few weeks, like you really care more than most and you ha pay attention to detail more than more more more than most. So even with the s the subscriptions, like you'd rather build the trust with the customer. They want they like they like the product. And now, hey, and again, even going back to like how often do you use it, like there's probably a play there you can go into and then
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: Offer them subscription for that. Like if you use it once a month, here's the product for you. If you use it literally daily, here's the product for you.
speaker-0: Yeah, well it's 'cause I mean it's the way we look at our customer. You know, I'm looking at like decades, not like immediate gratification, like how much money can you give me right now? No, I you know what I mean? It's like let's look at like the long term. Yep.
speaker-1: Media gradu It's insane. So I I honestly kudos to you. I I love it. Well, Tony, thank you for joining us. ⁓ if anybody does want to get in touch with you, look at the products, where can where can they find you?
speaker-0: Yeah, we're ⁓ Cassandrinos. I say it slowly. And you just Google it, but that's where we are on our website, all our social medias, all that stuff. So just Cassandrinos.
speaker-1: Fantastic. Well, thank you for joining us. For everybody listening, thank you for joining the Why Marketing Sucks podcast. And we'll see you next time.
speaker-0: Awesome.
