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When I told my dad and my uncle I actually met them back in Edison, New Jersey, where they were still living.
I went with them for a walk.
I remember exactly where I was because I said, I want to join the family business.
And they said verbatim, you're nuts.
Like, you can't make this up.
I mean, it's classic for my family, of course.
But I was making more money than they were.
But I made it clear, look, I need the keys to the store.
And I'm going to deliver.
And...
My uncle kissed me and he was like I love you and let's you know I don't understand, but I feel blessed and let's do this.
Welcome to How I Built This a show about innovators entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Raz and on the show today how Jeff Braverman transforms his family business from a humble storefront in Newark, New Jersey, into a huge online snack emporium nutscom.
Normally we just interview founders on this show, but today we're making somewhat of an exception because technically, my guest, Jeff Braverman, didn't found the company that he eventually transformed.
It was a small family business that sold nuts in Newark, New Jersey, and it was started by Jeff's grandfather in 1929.
Back then, it was called the Newark Nut Company, and as I say, it was a small local business.
But around 2003 Jeff decided to leave his job in finance to see if he could turn that nut store into a national brand.
Now, at the time, Newark Nut Company was doing about a million dollars a year in sales.
So, yeah.
Very small.
But Jeff saw a huge opportunity in turning the family business into an e-commerce business.
And eventually he rebranded it as Nuts.com.
Today, that same company does over $100 million in sales a year.
It's still family owned, with thousands of products nuts chocolate gummy candy pretzels crackers, you name it.
The story of how Jeff reinvented a nearly 100-year-old company is full of surprises.
A random comment from Rachel Ray that changed everything.
A hilariously bad jingle that turned into marketing gold. even a peanut protest against CBS Studios.
And we'll get to all of that.
But first, Jeff grew up in the 1980s and 90s in Edison, New Jersey, not far from his grandfather's store in Newark.
And some of his earliest memories are of helping out at the shop.
He loved it when we came to the store.
We would sit down and do stuff, you know, help him cut open bags, believe it or not, M&Ms.
We would open up bags of M&Ms and dump them into these buckets.
He would get up with us when the peanut roaster, when the peanuts would come out of the roaster till almost the day he died.
He would get up and help us bag the peanuts.
You know, for me it was special because I would spend a Most of my time I would spend with him, would be at the store.
So to us grandkids he was this still stoic kind of quiet guy, wouldn't say a lot, but very loving and a very proud grandfather.
But with the previous generation, it was tougher.
It was tougher.
How so?
Yeah. kind of his way or the highway.
You do what you're told.
My dad, he tried.
My dad would try to do some forms of innovation or make some changes in the business.
And my grandfather would often say no.
At one point, I remember my dad telling me the story where he wanted to put display cases.
I mean, this is like crazy talk, but like you couldn't see the product in the old store.
And my dad said, well, let's make display cases.
How much more could you imagine how much more we could sell if the customers could see the product?
So you would go prior to that, you walk into the store and you wouldn't see any displays of nuts.
What would you see?
Think about like a, I don't know, like an old country Western store, what you would see on TV.
They were just barrels of product.
Right.
And they would be more in the back and so on.
And then they would, plus cousin would have to know what they wanted.
Right.
And then you would go and put it in a bag for the – scoop it for them.
Correct.
Got it.
By the time you were born 1980 Newark, which is where this storefront was and where the operations were was already – in serious decline right.
Economic decline.
Do you remember?
What do you remember about going to Newark to the store when you were little?
Did it feel safe?
Like, what do you remember about that?
Again, the old store, because I was only four or five, I don't remember that much about that.
But when we moved, yeah, like we had code words if someone was going to rob us.
Because you didn't move that far.
You were still in Newark, right?
Just two blocks away.
But then the customers were scared to come.
Um, but like so, like I remember when the alarm would go off as a kid.
Sometimes I would just go in with my dad and uncle.
They would have to go in and check and I would be in the car.
You know, I think uh, I don't know when first he had car phones came out.
Um, so maybe I don't think I was six years old.
Maybe I was.
12 or 13.
I don't remember.
But I remember having 911 pressed ready to hit it as they went into the store to check what caused the alarm to go off.
Meantime, were you always working there like during high school?
Like was this where your your weekend job and after school work?
Yes, I would go a lot.
Certainly when I was little.
And one nice thing that my dad did for me is just, I was empowered.
Maybe we had no choice, but at seven years old I loved doing the cash register, which was pretty cool for a seven-year-old to do.
But yeah.
So, like you know, summers I would work in the store, you know, as I got older, then I would go in on Saturdays for sure.
Because my grandfather passed when I was about 15.
1995, he died.
Correct.
So I would spend lots of Saturdays.
Once your grandfather died I'm assuming I mean your uncle and your dad continued to run the business.
It was still generating enough revenue to support their family.
Yeah, it wasn't great, though, and they obviously had to work super hard.
I mean, this is you know, most of the time they're just scooping a quarter pound of cashews and doing work like that.
But they did have to evolve and go more into wholesale just because the retail kept on declining.
So who were they selling to?
So for wholesale, it would be specialty supermarket.
The one thing that I learned from my grandfather and my uncle is hey, give the customer what you want to eat, kind of like the golden rule treat others as you want to be treated.
So we actually had great quality stuff.
So there was like this specialty supermarket in more southern Jersey that just appreciated it.
But we would just sell them most customers, we would just sell them, which to me wasn't that interesting, but we'd sell them bulk cases.
They would get 25 pound cases of whether it was going to be medjool dates or freshly roasted peanuts and so on.
It wasn't repackaged at all.
And then those customers repackage them and then sell them themselves.
Exactly.
So at that time, like sort of the late 90s, right as you're getting ready for college, can you estimate how big was the business?
Was it doing $5 million a year, $10 million a year?
No, about $1 million.
$1 million.
So it was a, yeah, it was a small business.
They probably ran things pretty tight to keep costs down.
Very tight.
Right?
So they were, I mean, your dad and your uncle were literally doing like labor.
Like they were doing, they were moving sacks of nuts and things to keep costs down.
Yeah, 100%.
I mean back then when we would get and our claim to fame were these freshly roasted peanuts in the shell.
So we'd get a truckload in, maybe then it was every two months or so.
And the truck comes in with 100-pound burlap sacks.
They're floor-loaded.
These are raw peanuts.
These are raw peanuts in the shell.
Coming from Georgia?
These would come from North Carolina, could come from Georgia.
And then you roast them on site?
Correct.
But we would have to get them floor loaded.
You have to get them inside.
We actually had a second level because we built this building.
But every two months, how much, how many pounds of peanuts?
So a truckload is about 40,000 pounds.
Wow, that's a lot of peanuts.
All right.
Meantime, you're getting ready to go to college and start your life.
And you go to the University of Pennsylvania.
And from what I've read, you were a little bit of like a stock market savant in high school.
Yeah, yeah.
And I know those kinds of kids.
It's always that weird kid who's like really good at stock picking, you know, and they do pretty well right.
And sometimes they don't.
But you were one of those kids.
Yeah.
All right.
So so getting back to your, your life story, you go to Penn and you get a degree in finance and management.
And did you think or assume like I'm going to wind up running my dad and granddad's business, like I'll be a third generation owner of the net store?
Like, were you thinking that in college?
Not at all.
You know, I was always going to help in whatever capacity I could.
But my dad hated it.
It was terrible.
All right.
He was he worked really hard, didn't make a lot of money.
It was super stressful.
Right.
We almost lost the house over this thing.
So like.
There were no expectations placed on me and I didn't place any expectations on myself.
I didn't think I was going to go into the business.
But you did something in college that was interesting to me.
I mean, this is the late 90s when it just started to become easier to register domain names.
This is why I own GuyRoz.com because it was around then that I…
I registered that although I don't think there was a big clamoring for that at the time.
You registered nuts online.com Tell me about about that.
Why did you do that?
I was because of just my stock investing in high school.
I was just very attuned to what was going on in that world.
I mean, most people knew about the internet thing.
But like I'm the kid who, based on Peter Lynch's philosophy, I bought AOL stock, maybe in 1995, before everyone thought I was going to go bankrupt.
And I was like, no way.
So I was closer to this than most, seeing what was happening.
And to be clear, then anyone could make money picking stocks in that go-go era of the internet.
So, you know, I just looked at our little store.
And I see this new thing called the internet taking off.
I was like well, like maybe the whole country could be our.
You know, we could sell to the whole country.
We had my dad and my uncle because of his was struggling so much.
They did try, you know, when I was in high school, to do some type of catalog, but it didn't bring that much in.
So, like i was already thinking of, i already had some exposure, just the seed of other other channels and ways to go to market.
But for me i was like wow, the internet's taking off, let's try it.
Let's go sell nuts online.
So you registered nuts onlinecom probably cost you 10 bucks or whatever, right.
Not a little 60 $69 or so a little more, but yes.
And all right.
So you have this, and what was the plan was to convince your dad and uncle to to have a website and start taking orders online.
Yeah.
So I put together a little business plan.
I met them at the local diner in Edison, New Jersey.
This could have been their first or one of the few business meetings they've ever really had.
And, you know, they were excited by the idea.
And I said, okay, well, I need a budget.
You know, look, I think they had confidence in me.
And I also had a unique relation with my dad, where even in high school, I started managing his money.
So a unique set of circumstances.
You managed your dad's money.
Wow.
Yeah.
It wasn't like he had that much, but yes.
Okay, I got you.
You were like, hey, I'll pick stocks for you and stuff.
Correct.
I started calling a stockbroker, said, why are you recommending these?
Whatever, I got into it.
But then I put together a plan for my dad like how he could retire and what he needs to do and stuff like that.
So he trusted you probably.
He was like, wow.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
Not a hundred, a hundred percent that comes a couple of years into the business, but yes.
So they gave me a budget of like just made up thing, like $700.
Those days, it was really hard to build a website for $700.
Yeah, it was really expensive.
I ended up spending closer to $3,000 because I had to hire a company and so on and so forth.
And you had that money from, what, your stocks?
No, they still had some.
It wasn't like... the business was destitute.
It wasn't a super profitable business but, like when they did the catalog test, I'm sure it costs more than that.
Just perspective.
But what you were saying that, Hey guys, we can sell stuff while we're asleep.
While you're asleep, you can sell nuts through the website, through the internet.
And did either your dad or your uncle say, the internet?
Who's going to buy stuff through the internet?
Isn't that where you go watch?
Not even that time.
You weren't even watching cat videos.
At that time, it was like, you know, I don't know.
I don't know what you were doing in 1990.
Let's put it this way.
Nutsonline.com was my seventh choice for a domain name at the time.
Got it.
I couldn't get the other six.
Because they were probably a little racy, right?
100%.
Yes.
So how did they react when you said that?
I don't think they knew.
I didn't have any huge promises at that point in time.
They also recognize that we have to figure something out.
The business keeps on declining.
I think it was just more they had just confidence in me and let's give this kid a shot.
Yeah.
Why were you – I mean what motivated you to do this?
Because this is a great son thing to do or a grandson thing to do.
Like hey, I want to – was it you want to help the business grow and thrive, or was it just like scratching an itch because it seemed fun?
Because you were not going to do this full time.
It's a great question.
I don't know if it was hey going to do something big, but certainly it was just this familial pull that goes back generations, that just going to do whatever it takes to help.
So I think it was just that pull, just wanting to help, not much more than that.
And when were you going to do this?
Were you planning on doing this?
Because you registered the domain at 99.
You've got to build a website.
At the time, again, very hard to do.
There's no Squarespace.
There's no Shopify.
You need somebody who knows how to do this.
And it's going to cost someone.
And then you need there's no logistics.
There's no, there's a third party logistics operators.
In the same way, there's no drop shipping, like none of that infrastructure that's so easy now.
So how are you going to do this?
One of my friends who was a year older happened to have had a roommate who was building websites.
So it's one of these as simple as that.
If not for that, I have no idea because it was harder and it would have been a lot more money.
So that's also why I built it for like $3,000 or so.
But we would get a few orders trickling here or there.
Could it be one a day, one every two days?
But for my dad and mom, it was the most exciting thing in the world.
My dad would scream out.
We had this little office above the store and he would scream out, we got an order.
He would be so excited.
And then we had this little thing I made as a boy with like a clothes pin type thing.
And he would lower the string down out of the office window.
He would still use that to drop the order down.
So, but then they would...
We had a credit card machine.
Nothing was automated then.
So you have to type in the credit card number.
So we get the number.
Nothing's encrypted, right?
You see the number passes across.
You type it into the credit card machine.
Where I remember as we got going a few years later, like I could do that really fast.
So I would do that for a holiday.
I would type...
My finger's really fast.
The order would come and you'd manually see its number and type it into the credit card machine.
Correct.
And then the amount.
And then you would do... We didn't even have product labels at that point in time.
This is really rudimentary.
We would type in the UPS or FedEx shipping label ourselves.
We would then have to type the tracking number back into the back to the customer.
But the order would come out.
They would go take bags at the time.
They weren't great because there wasn't much else out there but clear cello bags and They would fill them scoop right from the counter.
Have a foot pedal to seal them and you put them in a box and then UPS comes later on and picks it up.
Again, were you thinking this is just temporary?
I actually am really excited about this nuts business and the potential for the Internet here.
Or was there no way you were going to do that?
No way I was going to do that.
You were not going to do that.
You were going to go into finance.
So I was going to go into finance.
You know, I've read the books back then.
I read a book called Monkey Business where I was like, oh, investment banking stinks.
But I still kind of went into it.
It's just hard to go against the herd.
So I just went along with everyone else, but no expectations of going to the family business.
To me, I always had this entrepreneurial bug.
So what was I going to do?
Maybe through the world of finance, I would buy a business or do something like that.
I don't think it was going to be strictly finance.
And I think there were a couple of kind of random kind of epiphanous moments for me.
One is I had to like, I think they said I couldn't take off for Thanksgiving.
And then I just did anyway.
My sister was in Spain and I visited her.
And she wasn't really making any money, but her life was beautiful.
I was like, hmm, okay.
And then I went to a Blackstone sponsored event.
They were very involved.
The chairman was involved in the Council of Foreign Relations.
And so I went to an event, and I happened to have met one of my colleague's uncles who was an entrepreneur.
So not finance, but an engineer.
He was at GE working for the man. working 100-hour weeks and said, hey, I'm better than this.
And he left and went on to entrepreneurial pursuits.
And I mentioned that point about working for the man.
I did have an entrepreneurial management professor who said the greatest risk in life is working for the man.
So I have these seeds in my head.
It's a great, that's a great quote.
Yeah.
And for me, like seeing, I was sad.
I'm a pretty empathetic person.
And let's say you know I'm in the office early on a Saturday morning and I see the partner there making money millions and millions.
I don't know if it's tens of millions, but millions and millions of dollars.
And it was really sad to see this grown man who's not spending time with his kids, not with his wife.
And it was just like sad.
And for me, you know, I just wanted better.
And I felt like look, I felt there was something.
I say this with humility, but I felt there was something special about me that I can do good things in life.
So it was just like these confluence of things.
And when I met with that uncle, that colleague's uncle, I was like well, should I just wait after the one year?
Because I'm sure you get this question from people all the time.
Like, when is the right time?
Yeah.
And he's like, what, you get a stub bonus in December?
Because he was like, now.
I was like, well, I get a stub bonus in five weeks.
Yeah.
He said, just leave as soon as you can.
All right.
So you decide you're going to quit Blackstone and go join the family business.
And at this point, it's still called the Newark Nut Company, right?
Correct.
It's not called Nuts Online.
It's called the Newark Nut Company.
Nuts Online was just a website.
Correct.
Correct.
And what was your, I mean, you know, Blackstone in 2003 or 2002, you were easily making, I don't know, 70, 80 grand a year, maybe more.
Even more.
Yeah, I was making about 105,000 or exactly 105,000.
It's a lot of cash.
When I told my dad and my uncle I actually met them back in Edison, New Jersey, where they were still living.
I went with them for a walk.
I remember exactly where I was because I said, I want to join the family business.
This is before quitting. and they said verbatim you're nuts like like you can't make this up i mean classic for my family of course but uh because they're they're a cast of characters but i was making more money than they were i was really highly rated you know i was well educated and doing phenomenal and They hated my dad more so than my uncle, but they hated what they did, you know.
And you know, what my dad said to me at that point was it wasn't necessarily a carte blanche, but I made it clear look, I need the keys to the store.
And I'm going to deliver.
And my uncle kissed me and he was like, I love you.
And let's, you know, I don't understand, but I feel blessed.
And let's, let's do this.
So you – and you didn't – you joined to basically to take over or to run.
I guess the internet side of this thing.
But what was your deal?
I mean, how would you get paid?
Yeah, and it wasn't even the internet.
I didn't know the internet was going to be the big thing.
So what I did was I said, okay.
Right.
I understood the value or the symbolic value of equity.
This business was worth nothing.
I said, hey, I want 10% of the business.
I want 50% of the upside of profit.
There wasn't much profit.
And I need a draw because I need some money to, I was still living in Manhattan.
So I took a $28,000 draw against my profit share.
Okay, so it makes sense.
All right.
So you're now working full time at the family business, the Newark Nut Company.
And what were you like making suggestions on how to change the business?
Like, what were you doing?
Yeah.
So I just rolled up my sleeves and dug in and just looked at, like let's just study this business, try to see where the opportunities are.
So some would be simple as, hey, we sell raw cashews in the store and roasted cashews.
I know what we pay for raw cashews.
We're buying from our friend the roasted cashews because he was a roaster.
That spread is pretty big.
Well, why don't we just send him the raw cashews?
Pay him just a toll just to roast it.
And that would suddenly save us $10,000.
That's like mana from heaven, right?
So A, I start winning proof points with my dad and uncle because that's like, you know, real money for a business that's not making any money.
And then the other thing I did was, well, there's a couple of things.
One thing I did was I visited our wholesale customers and just said, What more can we do for you?
Mind you, I'm a shy kid.
I don't like selling at all.
And I didn't love that we were selling sometimes commodities in a 25 pound box.
Right.
It wasn't a point of differentiation there.
So we had, for example, the specialty supermarket said I really want you to package the product for us.
My dad and my uncle said, no, too much labor.
I showed them the math.
And then I became the laborer.
Right.
But this is still Newark Nut Company.
Correct.
It's still your grandpa's company.
Right.
But this really is the beginning of why we're doing this story.
And I want to explain this quirk of this story to our listeners because –
You are not the founder of Newark Nut Company.
You joined the family business.
But, and this is the big difference here, you essentially founded a new company.
And this was not what you thought you were doing when you joined, right?
You didn't think that it was going to be a completely different company which we're going to get to.
You thought you were going to help grow this business.
Is that fair to say?
100%.
It was going to be Newark Nut Company and maybe it would be 5 10 20, bigger and it would be a nice lifestyle.
Yeah, you'd have to get a little bit bigger than that to be a nice lifestyle.
Maybe four or five X that, but yes.
Right.
But again, early days, this is pre-stripe, pre-internet security.
People were still wary about.
I mean, there were.
I remember like you get on the Today Show.
You watch the Today Show or the nightly news that Tom broke on.
It's like you know people are using their credit cards on the internet and getting you know many people are reluctant to do that.
In 2003...
People were reluctant to do that.
So how did you start to use the Internet or see the Internet as a bigger opportunity?
What kinds of things were you doing just to even create awareness around what you were offering?
Yeah.
I saw the potential with Google certainly in 2003.
Once I joined the business, I started seeing it.
A book came out.
I don't remember exactly when it was one of the first books about how to use Google AdWords.
And at some point I just hired the guy.
The guy who wrote the book, do you remember his name?
Yeah, Andrew Goodman.
The guy named Andrew Goodman wrote a book.
It was like a paperback about how to use Google for your business.
Oh, I'm embarrassed to say I didn't even and I'm friends with him still, but we don't work together anymore.
But a friend of mine sent me the PDF.
I didn't even pay for it.
So we were one of the first, not the first nut guy online.
There was a couple other people, but we're in that freshman class, right?
Of people online, you know, so there was some distinct first mover kind of competitive advantage.
And kind of I looked at it similar earlier on.
It's like well, if we can sell one order to one customer in every state a day, that's 50 orders a day.
And at an average price of what, 20, 25 bucks an order?
Yeah, maybe a little more than that, and we used to charge shipping then.
I don't remember what it was back then, but it could be a little bit more.
I don't remember, to be honest, back then.
So um, you know, bottom line is i said hey, i don't like this wholesale bulk stuff, this concession supply stuff, i don't like selling, I like more building and engineering than being behind the scenes.
Let's go all in.
Let's take advantage of this early mover advantage and just run faster than This is a stodgy industry.
Let's move faster than anyone else in our space.
We probably had, let's say, call it 150 or so products.
I started adding some more products at the time, but nothing aggressive.
And let's really utilize the power of Google AdWords.
So what did that mean?
I mean, this is 2003.
You're revamping the website.
And again, 2003 websites, these are a different world.
Because before...
And we're going to get to the day when you launched it, because I think it was December 4th, 2003.
Correct.
Is that right?
Yes, yes.
Before that date, you were getting what, between one and five orders a day on average?
Yes, it could be a few orders a day type of a thing.
So what before December 4th, because we're going to get to that.
Yeah.
What did you do?
What did you put in place that was going to change the equation that day?
So we were spending very small amounts of money advertising.
Okay.
And the shift was just still not to spend that much more, but it was going from 3 a day to 100 a day.
Got it.
You were going from spending $1,000 a year to $36,000 a year.
Correct.
Which was a big deal.
Through Google AdWords.
Correct.
Okay, so to December 4th, 2003... is the day you relaunched this new revamped site, Nuts Online.
We launched.
The ad campaign's immediately on.
And it's like the floodgates completely open.
It goes up 10x immediately.
But if we were doing three orders a day, suddenly it's 30.
Wow.
But the reason why you saw this shift was because of the way you used Google AdWords?
Yes, I mean, that was the yes.
We launched a much.
The site was better don't get me wrong and faster and friendlier and easier to use and so on.
But then it also.
Then, at that point, I was able to unlock.
You know unleash, begin to unleash Google.
When all of a sudden this flood of orders comes in, it's still a small team of people.
Like, you guys are literally packing these orders.
How did your dad and uncle respond?
Were they like, oh, my God, this is amazing?
Yeah.
So my dad, I mentioned earlier, but my dad's a creature of habit.
And look in this store, when we would be busy for Christmas, just in the store, he'd be so nervous.
I loved it.
He'd just be so nervous.
It was busy.
But most days it would be dead.
Like we'd be sitting there on Saturdays in the summer.
And it's like, I did the math.
I finally said we're shutting down on Saturdays.
We were making $2 a person an hour.
It was just like there was nothing.
There were no customers.
Nobody buys nuts in the summer unless they're at a baseball game, I guess.
But like the retail business was dying anyway.
There was nothing doing.
So he would be so nervous when it was dead too.
So here, right.
It just like, it's just like, boom, boom.
Like, like suddenly you're talking about, it could be a few an hour.
Right.
And he says, shut it off.
He said, shut it off.
He said, shut it off.
Cause he was so nervous because again, It was just us.
We have to do the work similarly.
You've got to fill those orders.
We're the laborers.
And you know there might have been some expletives said, but it's like, if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
I told them, go home.
We got this.
Go home.
When we come back in just a moment.
The online business gets a huge and crazy boost when some TV fans launch a protest against CBS by sending them pounds of peanuts.
Stay with us.
I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.
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So it's early 2005, and the revamped website for NutsOnline.com is getting some serious traction.
So serious that Jeff has to convince his nervous dad not to shut it down.
Meanwhile, most business is still coming from wholesale in the brick and mortar store in Newark.
But that store?
It's about to get razed to the ground so the city can build a hockey arena.
There went the retail store.
So we had no choice but to find a location somewhere else.
Okay, you did find a location, a facility where you were going to do your roasting and your packing.
Yes.
But no retail store, right?
Correct.
Essentially, 2005 was the end of a storefront of Newark Nuts.
And it was still called Newark Nut Company at that point.
Correct.
It's obviously sad from the family heritage standpoint.
My uncle was probably more sad than my dad, but my dad hated the store.
There's no customers and it was hard and people tried to rob you.
So like, not a great thing.
I think the biggest emotion was fear.
Because the store still brought in revenue.
Even though it wasn't a fun place to work, it still brought in cash.
And margin, much better margin than wholesale.
You're talking retail margins.
You're buying a truckload of peanuts and you roast it.
Granted you're selling a pound bag for 159 or whatever, 179.
It's not a lot of gross profit dollars, but there's margin on it.
Meaning you can't make tons of money, but you can make money.
So great.
I mean, even though the numbers are small, the margins are high.
So there was fear.
But do you remember specifically saying or having a conversation that when something like this, we're not going to have a brick and mortar store anymore, we're not going to have customers coming in with the internet is seems to be working, the wholesale business seems to be working.
We're not going to stand there and sell to retail customers anymore.
We just had no choice, right?
This is a store that was already there for generations, right?
But you could have.
I mean you could have opened up a new – you could have gone to the suburbs and opened a Newark nut company.
I'm just saying it wasn't out of – yeah.
But we just didn't know how to do that.
Would the customers come?
Will they come from scratch?
We already were losing more and more customers.
It was just something that wasn't in the family vocabulary.
And it would be super risky.
But when we moved out, I was terrified.
We were now going to have much more of a real warehouse.
Yeah.
So about a 15,000 square foot building.
And I was nervous.
We had offices in the front.
I was about to sublease it, but then somebody told me not to.
And thank God we didn't.
Yeah, because you were thinking this is too big for us.
So, all right, so you guys are now no longer brick and mortar, no longer customer facing.
Now it's all online and all – a wholesale business.
When did you start to see the the online business just really become the main business?
Do you remember when you start sort of sort of see that happen?
Yeah, if not 2004, by 2005, you know, we started adding a lot of products.
Besides roasted peanuts and cashews.
Yeah, like we started with this base of, you know, 150 products across nuts and dried fruit and seeds, and candies and chocolates and so on.
And then some of it was.
I would just say to my dad and my uncle we're selling salted sunflower seeds in the shell.
Other products we sell unsalted.
Why aren't we selling unsalted sunflower seeds in the shell?
That's funny because they would say, no one wants them, right?
Nobody wants unsalted.
They would say, no one wants unsalted sunflower seeds in the shell.
Correct.
But it turns out diabetics do, and that's what they want to chew on at a baseball game.
And that became like at the time, like our top, if not our top five, it could have been our top 10.
Certainly was our top 10 seller.
So found gaps in the assortment.
There was a serendipitous moment where my friend wasn't well and I donated blood for him on the Upper East Side in Manhattan.
And instead of drinking the orange juice or apple juice, I went to Dylan's candy bar on the corner and I had some of the most amazing chocolates.
And so I called that I had to write a letter.
I thought the supplier was huge.
I had to write them a letter convincing them to sell to me as a distributor.
I knew the Google game.
So like these guys invented dark chocolate espresso beans.
So I knew how to rank number one for dark chocolate espresso beans.
So that one product allowed us to be a distributor for these guys.
This was called Cooperman's, right?
Coppers, coppers, coppers, coppers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I just called and I said, hey, give me your top 40 products and we're going to sell them all.
And that was the beauty.
And it was easy then when we had one distribution center.
Um, and just kept on, you know, going after it where like, I had a friend who had celiac disease and couldn't get gluten-free snacks.
I was like, great.
And at 30 days we certified 700 products.
Bam, organic.
We just kept on expanding.
We would take catalogs from our suppliers and you dump them into a keyword tool.
So you didn't need to do any research.
It just told you what people were searching for.
The U.S. is a huge place.
Lots and lots of people.
So we just went after it super aggressively and suddenly had thousands of products over the next X number of years.
And was your wholesale business still significant?
The traditional legacy wholesale business?
Yeah.
It just kind of stayed the same, right?
Because I did put effort into it and then it was like less effort into it and then it would just be a slow decline.
But the bulk of your business was basically individuals going to nutsonlinecom and ordering product.
That was like more than 60, 70% of your business?
Yeah.
By, you know, by 2010, right, it's the vast majority, right?
I know the revenue we did when we switched to nuts.com.
And at that point, the wholesale business is like, you know, 2% or something, 3%.
So when I mean, this company is still called Newark Nut Company, right?
Correct.
Just out of curiosity, when did you finally just change the name to what it is now?
Once we rebranded in 2012 to Nuts.com is when we changed the name.
Okay, so it's still the Newark Nut Company, but it's Nuts Online.
That's really what you're known as.
And but still you know it's and I think I've read that by 2006 you're doing about 5 million in revenue.
Okay, so you know better than I do.
But yeah, something like that.
Sounds about right to you.
So that's pretty great.
I mean you joined in 2000 three officially formally, and you hit your 5x, now 45x, in terms of revenue, doing pretty well, and it's all coming from the internet.
There was a stunt that you pulled the year after that.
I want to ask you about this because there was a show on TV called Jericho about this town in Kansas and it was post-apocalyptic and how they survived this nuclear attack on the United States.
And it was canceled.
CBS threatened to cancel it because they didn't get enough viewers.
I was looking at it.
The numbers by today's standards are insane.
They got like 9 million viewers.
But in 2007, that was a disaster.
And you sort of got involved in the protest about canceling the show.
And tell me this story, because this is a crazy story.
And it actually got you tons of press.
But what was the story?
Yeah, so this post-apocalyptic drama, like you said, got canceled on CBS.
And fans decided to protest because in the last episode there was this historical illusion and it talked about.
The details matter less.
But a general says the US general says to the Germans nuts, like we're not going to surrender nuts.
So fans decided to send nuts in protest to CBS.
In the show, a character said said nuts in response to something like.
Yeah, I think it's a true story.
Okay.
I forgot if it was the Battle of the Bulge or Battle of the Stone.
I don't remember.
But the general says nuts, so fans decide that's their rallying cry.
Nuts.
And they're going to send nuts to CBS.
Yes.
To protest CBS's decision to cancel the show.
Correct.
So we see these strange orders coming in and my cousin says, hey, what the heck's going on here?
I'm scared.
There's people placing orders for one pound bags of different types of nuts, often cheap nuts like mixed nuts and shell, or peanuts.
Yeah.
Shipping to CBS.
In New York?
Yeah, their New York office.
Okay.
So my cousin was like, hey, we can't ship this stuff.
We have to cancel it.
And I said, hold on.
Let me just do some research here.
And I find out what's going on.
The show's canceled.
Okay.
And I'd never seen the show.
And by the way, were they sending it to a specific person at CBS or just a pound of nuts to CBS?
I'll get her name wrong, but something like Nina Tassler or something like that.
Okay.
Okay.
And I just looked her up.
Nina Tassler.
She was at CBS. there's a lot of energy here.
And I said let's go, let's do something here where you have like, all these people, it's super inefficient and it's expensive to ship a one pound.
The shipping is freaking $8 or something like that. let's harness this energy.
When you're at a fundraising drive, they have the thermometer type of a thing.
I said, let's go, let's get up a thermometer.
And this is where I've always heard this expression, man plans and God laughs.
And then Probably for the next three weeks, I didn't sleep.
Wait, so sorry.
On the website, let me understand this.
You had a banner or something that said, hey, if you don't want CBS to cancel Jericho, click here?
Save Jericho.
Right.
Save Jericho, send peanuts, and we're going to make it super easy.
Give $10, give $20, give $50, whatever this is, because we had a gift certificate functionality.
And we'll send nuts.
We'll send nuts in bulk, in 25-pound cases, freshly roasted peanuts, because that was our shtick.
Still is our shtick.
And, um, everyone came to us.
We start collecting so much money.
I think very quickly it goes through $40,000.
How, how many pounds did you end up a penis?
Did you end up sending the CBS?
So the number I remember was we shipped 40,000 pounds of peanuts.
So that was that full truckload of peanuts.
What did they do with all those peanuts?
I don't know.
I don't remember such a long time ago.
I think they ended up donating them.
We gave them addresses of where to send them, where people could use them.
I mean, just the publicity that you got out of that.
You were in The New Yorker and The New York Times and CNN.
National Enquirer more than once, which was quite embarrassing.
I mean, and by the way, And this was they decided not to cancel it.
They decided to renew it for another few.
Well, it was only seven more episodes, but they did.
They agree.
And and I guess they actually appreciated the stunt.
They like invited you to meet the cast.
Yeah, they flew me out.
I was the celebrity at the CBS fall lineup party.
Mind you, I slept at my friend's dorm or whatever the hell I stayed.
I walked there.
People come in limousines.
This cast were kissing me.
Um, and these were like famous people.
But yeah they, they.
And then, when Nina Tassler brought it back and it, she says just please stop sending the nuts.
But for us, I mean, our website crashed at one point in time.
We were on like K Rock and all these places where like the traffic was unbelievable.
Interestingly from a business standpoint.
We then did some analysis on hey, did these people become customers and come back?
Nah, not really.
But what I realized was we're getting links, as you can imagine mattered a lot then.
New York Times, that's a lot of authority it's lending.
Ultimately, you'll get a kick out of this.
When the campaign was done, I then redirected that page to our nuts page so our rankings would go up once everyone was done with this thing.
Wow.
Meantime the nuts business is growing on.
I mean, obviously you're doing advertising, but it just continues to grow year after year.
I mean, the online business.
Correct.
And you were by this point, CEO of the company.
Yeah, we didn't have quite titles, but you would say by 2000.
Certainly once we bulldozed and moved in I was already calling 90 of the shots.
Now this is just a very different business.
Was your dad and uncle, were they still involved by 2007, 8?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, creatures of habit.
They're helping us laborers.
This is like you get into Christmas season.
You don't hire more people necessarily.
You bring in friends and family.
And it was different with food safety.
Now you can't do any of this stuff, but you feed them.
Let them eat the stuff.
So, all right, so let's go to 2012, because this is a pivotal, another pivotal moment.
I mean, at this point, you are nutsonline.com.
And that year you would change the URL.
And I guess the story I've read starts with Rachel Ray, which I'll ask you about.
But I guess the story goes back even years before that.
So.
You're nuts online, but you realize that actually you'd be better off if you were nutscom, not nuts onlinecom.
That would be a better URL for you to have.
Tell me about why didn't you register that back in 1999?
Was it not available?
Yeah, it wasn't available and I didn't have the money.
I didn't even think like hindsight's 2020 just because I didn't come from like we didn't have tons of money.
I didn't even think about buying a domain from someone.
It didn't even cross my mind.
It was like, oh, these six are taken.
Let me move on to the next one.
Yeah.
Like I remember in 2005, I saved to my files the name of the- Of the person who owned it.
Of the person who owned it, yes.
They had owned a bunch of things.
And I DMed him, which I'd never done, and he wrote back.
And I feel like I gave him an offer that I thought was quite generous.
I think I offered him something like $200,000 then.
And he just said, no, thank you.
So you forgot about it.
Okay.
Correct.
That was in 2008.
Let's fast forward to 2012.
Rachel Ray, she's got- 2011, yeah.
2011, okay.
She's got her show on TV.
And what, you guys provided snacks for her show?
Yeah.
Yeah, it was a wedding episode, and we had a nice wedding candy business online.
What's wedding candies?
Think of like Jordan almonds in this organza bag.
Oh, Jordan almonds.
And you throw the stuff.
They're pastel colored.
Okay.
Who likes Jordan almonds, by the way?
They're not good.
Ours are like super fine.
So it's less sugar, but I can't, I don't like Jordan almonds.
It's gross.
It's just coated.
I think one of my kids does, but I think they're gross.
But whatever.
Put chocolate on them.
Don't put sugar, candied sugar on them.
Yes.
Look, we'll sell a better quality than most.
And we did ship them to Rachel Ray.
And at the very end, she says in the credit, she says, oh, I really want to thank nuts.com.
And we were nutsonline.com.
So I was like, oh, man.
Oh, wait.
Sorry.
Slow down.
She says nuts.com.
Not nutsonline.com.
Correct.
I was like, oh.
When we come back in just a moment how Nuts Online finally gets a name change and turns into an earworm in the most annoying rap jingle ever written.
Stay with us.
I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This.
I'm Guy Raz.
So it's 2012 and Rachel Ray has made a slip of the tongue on our TV show, referring to NutsOnlinecom as Nutscom, which actually is the name that Jeff had always wanted.
I thought it was better.
And like over the years, people would often say, wait, what is it?
Nuts.com?
They wouldn't catch the nuts online.
I think you know I'll say we, but more me had just the foresight that, like this Amazon centric world is going to do a great job at intermediating your relationship with the brand.
Think about when you go on Amazon.
You buy a light that breaks the next day but, like it's vendor, Q B Z, A Y, you know whatever from China.
So I think I had appreciation for where that was going.
How brand even though we had a brand how we could lean in more.
Certainly like hey, if someone sees our ads and it's nutscom, that's like whoa.
These guys have much more credibility when that stuff mattered more from a retention standpoint.
You know, I did back of the envelope math.
If you get a 1% improvement in retention, whatever, that's long-term.
The stuff can pay off from a recruiting standpoint, from employees, everything.
It's just, it's cooler.
And then I just asked a friend.
I asked some friends what they thought.
And they were supportive.
So I reengaged with this guy.
And in the end, what did you agree to?
What was the price?
It was $700,000.
$700,000.
He never countered.
I had to make eight moves in a row.
He would just say, no, no, no, no, no.
He wouldn't even counter.
You would offer this.
No, this.
No, no.
So you were negotiating against yourself.
Correct.
And at the end, I just I was getting fed up, honestly.
And I have principles.
And I was like.
You know, not that this was like a playbook or anything.
It was like, hey, this is exploding in 48 hours.
I'm walking.
And he then accepted it.
So 700 grand for a business doing 30 million a year seems very reasonable.
Were you nervous about spending that much money?
No, it was reasonable.
We were very profitable at the time and I just believed in it.
And again my BS back of the envelope.
Math felt like Hey, a slight and change of one of these things.
You know we'll get a.
Okay, maybe it's not a two year payback but maybe it's a 10 year payback.
Hmm.
Okay, so you have the domain.
I want to go back to the margins thing for a second, because earlier you had mentioned that the retail store did really well from a margin standpoint, even if the overall revenue wasn't so high that you know 50.
You know you're selling direct to the customer.
Well, you've got an online direct to consumer business.
So I'm assuming the margins are, I mean, you got to ship it, you know, and package it up.
But still, I mean, the margins are probably great.
They were great because also there was different times where...
Right.
Amazon didn't create the table stakes of what they are.
Right.
We used to have shipping actually was a profit center where.
Oh, because you could charge for shipping, but that included your costs.
And also look, I wanted to build a business the way I wanted to, so I don't want to condition customers to expect discounts.
I actually wanted shipping because I wanted the hurdle.
Because I wanted to get the good customers.
I wanted to adversely select away the bad customers.
And the complaints we got back then let's say for free shipping, when you would actually look at the customers complaining.
This was then.
It was a person buying a bag of sunflower seeds for 299.
Right.
You can't ever make money doing that.
So all right, just to be clear, this is Amazon changed the game when they made shipping free, because then everybody expected all shipping, which today everybody expects shipping to be free.
Correct.
And obviously you pay for Prime, but people obviously forget that.
You were charging for shipping up until Amazon changed that because you could, because people assumed you're going to pay for shipping.
But you could charge a premium for it because you had to cover your costs.
The person in the warehouse.
And so even though the shipping cost might be $3.99, you could charge $4.99 for shipping.
Correct.
The economics were great.
Advertising, what people call, you know, CAC and so on, back then was very different.
So your advertising as a percentage of revenue was way lower.
Labor was way lower than what it is now.
So yeah, pretty good economics back then.
All right.
I want to just digress for a moment and ask about sourcing, because you're selling – you were selling at this point 150, 200-plus different SKUs, different items, right?
From Jordan almonds to candy to –
Chocolate covered espresso beans.
But were nuts still the primary driver?
Was that still what most people ordered, like cashews, peanuts, walnuts, pecans, nuts?
In 2012?
What time frame?
Yeah, about then.
Yeah.
I would say by then it's getting closer to a 50-50.
Okay.
And where I mean I know that you're buying espresso beans from a Cooper.
Sorry, I keep forgetting the name.
It's okay.
Copper's Chocolate.
Copper's.
Okay, Copper's.
And so...
Where were you sourcing almonds come from California, right?
Peanuts are also U.S., but where are you getting your stuff from?
Yeah, so a lot of stuff is grown domestically.
And look, this is one thing that's unique, even though I came into a small business, but because also we had a little bigger aperture than just a retail store, because we had this little wholesale business.
You know, we had direct relationships with farmers and growers and it's like a nice thing, for example, where we buy walnuts in California.
Last time I actually visited the farm and the owner of that company he's a farmer and processor.
So like he processes for other people too.
He's like, Jeff, you're our longest standing customer.
Like his father did business with my grandfather.
So if it's still domestic, we're going to go as direct as we can.
When it comes to stuff overseas, it depends.
Today, when I think about tariffs and our exposure, I would say direct and indirect exposure to tariffs is like 50 of our products.
Because a lot of your stuff, right?
I mean, like cashews do come from, I think, Brazil, right?
Correct.
Right now, yes.
Brazil or Vietnam.
Look, my favorite product of ours is an organic dried mango.
It comes from Mexico, right?
Right.
It's not, you know, a lot of this stuff, like we have a lot of chocolate in our business.
I ain't grown, not grown, not grown here.
And what we'll do is- And chocolate's getting more expensive, as is coffee.
Oh, well, that's a whole nother story.
Yeah, a lot of stress over the last couple of years.
Yeah, these are all-time 50-year highs.
Well, let's just talk about this for a minute.
I mean climate change, and I don't want to get into this too much, but I mean it's got to affect some of these things, right?
Like coffee prices are going up.
Chocolate prices are going up.
I'm sure that changing weather patterns are affecting certain crops, nuts, for example, right?
Yeah.
Correct.
And look, we've seen stuff.
Obviously, we've been in business for a while.
We saw stuff where almond pricing went up two to three X our cost years ago because there was concerns about there was a bad crop, but they're concerned about drought.
Drought.
In California, I just drove up to five in all almond farms.
And you're like, there's no water here.
This is crazy.
This is all being diverted.
And somehow they figured out better yields and whatnot.
So then almond pricing has moved a bit, but it's come down from those levels.
But yeah, like…
One of the few things I lose sleep about these days is cocoa pricing.
I look at the futures daily because we have a chocolate business and we buy lots of cocoa both here and in Europe.
And...
It's down now.
You know, when I look at, let's say, the futures, in March it may be down 20 something percent from its peak.
But that's 3x where it was two years ago.
Yeah.
Because it's just it's very hard to grow this stuff as the climate shifts.
There's some insect stuff, but a lot of it's just drought.
Yeah.
All right.
I want to go back to your kind of fandom marketing side, because you bought ad space on SiriusXM in 2015.
Yeah.
You – and this is so weird.
You wrote – I guess you wrote a song, a jingle.
I helped write a rap, yeah.
You helped write a rap.
It's a rap about nuts.
And it just played on SiriusXM.
And I've heard it.
And anybody listening to this.
You should go just search for the Nutscom jingle because it is so annoying.
It is an earworm.
But really, you know, tell me the story first about this jingle that you wrote.
Yeah, it's super polarizing.
People either loved or hate it.
People have remixed it, like not our versions.
People have listened to it hundreds of thousands of times.
But yeah, look, I was just dabbling.
I was in, call it 2015 era.
It was like, hey, what other channels...
So we dabbled a little bit, and this was a very useful playbook for when COVID hit.
We did try TV.
We tried some radio.
We tried a bit of different things.
So look, we're trying to be creative and I don't think it was originally my idea to, And then I was supposed to do it, but I'm not really musically inclined and I was sick.
So my brother-in-law did the rap, and we put it on the air.
It was, again, polarizing.
Yo, microphone check, one, two, and three.
It's Nuts.com delivery.
When I need a yummy snack that's good for me, there's a sight I hit when I'm hungry.
From a casher to an almond dried peach or a plum, Nuts.com won't be outdone.
Apparently, you started to get letters in from people saying, stop, you're driving me nuts.
Yeah, it was like 50-50.
50% of people loved it.
50% of people hated it and couldn't get out of their heads.
Like, so was a part of you thinking, this is great.
It's annoying.
People are talking about this.
Or were you like, ooh, it's annoying.
I think some of the talking and stuff came about actually later too though, where we already killed it.
For me, I was just like looking for a certain return.
I think the rap was just okay in terms of it wasn't super performant.
So just the aperture wasn't wide enough for the returns kind of that we were after.
So, all right.
But all of these different attempts and ways of advertising, like on SiriusXM, I mean they continue.
Your business continues just year after year.
It was growing.
Yeah.
So I would think that really a business like yours, in order to survive and scale, you've got to basically be in every office in America, or many offices, and that because you just get repeat.
I mean, when you're selling to corporate offices, it's just automatically someone's hitting the you know reorder button.
And just relying on individual sales, which might be one-off sales, or maybe somebody might order three, four times a year.
It's not enough.
Yeah, correct.
And in this day and age, it's super hard.
DTC space is super hard.
You know, what we find with our – call it on the website but our B2B business –
Believe it or not, even though the gross margins are lower, the net margins are higher when you factor in everything.
Just a much stickier customer and just handling those orders.
And what we found was a lot of this stuff was just accidental.
And then you just learn from it and lean in.
And just along the way, we found stuff where like...
I don't know, but we have significant market share of microbreweries across the US.
Who would have known?
I didn't know.
Who just buy in bulk.
Because they're going to buy their, not their hops or their primary ingredient.
But hey, they want to have some toasted coconuts.
Right.
Pecan flavored brew, IPA or something.
Correct.
And so we found that with offices.
Mm-hmm. where the offices may not even be buying the 25-pound cases.
They actually put out.
They have one in five-pound bags, for example, or single-serve stuff, and they'll put it out.
So it's kind of like, and at that point then let's focus on that and add more and serve their needs better.
Never never, necessarily part of the grand plan, but that's that's.
That's a really healthy part of our business.
It was probably 15 of our revenue or so maybe maybe, actually at that point probably more, maybe 20, 25.
All right.
So you have I mean, you're growing your corporate B2B stuff and then COVID hits.
Right.
I mean, everything closes, offices shut down and the B2B business must have totally disappeared.
But on the flip side.
People were suddenly stuck at home, right?
So imagine your direct-to-consumer sales must have exploded.
Yes.
And then you fast forward maybe a week or two, and then schools are closed.
And...
Now it became, we have infinite demand.
How the heck do you ship this stuff?
Yeah.
Because we're in central New Jersey, which is close to ground zero for COVID early on in the pandemic.
Did you have employees who were scared to come to work and scared to be home?
Oh, yeah.
It was terrible.
We did like – we went to war and back.
Keeping people safe, like tearing down walls of a cafeteria to expand it, putting out bathrooms outside and the trailers to – we put in UV light.
We did –
I was like safety czar as I'm working the plant, like yelling.
You have to just yell to keep people apart.
Some people certainly got sick, but like my worst, one of the worst days of my life, because this was like I was having neurodiverse breakdowns every day was after Easter.
The day after Easter.
People would reflect.
In April, so this is 2020.
Correct.
Correct.
The employees would reflect a lot on the weekends and then more would be scared to come in.
And that Monday we had 70% worker call out.
Wow.
70% of your employees said they can't come in.
Correct.
These are the.
These are the cause we're we're making stuff where we're roasting chocolate coding packaging, shipping.
And I'm just working.
I'm literally working, you know, probably like 10 12-hour days in the plant, then going home trying to save the business at night.
And the employees demanded to speak with me.
And it's one of those surreal kind of out-of-body experiences where in 30 minutes in Spanish I couldn't find my plant manager, who's a native speaker.
I speak well enough.
But in 30 minutes I had to give the speech of all speeches, of why we're here and why we need to stay here, and how.
I wish we could close the factory and go home, but we can't.
And everyone's counting on us.
And yeah.
But it was...
Exciting, too.
Scary and terrifying and also exciting.
I'm sure you've experienced it.
You just put your head down and you go.
You know, one of the things I'm curious about is you mentioned earlier on about watching your dad just work six-day weeks and maybe have half a day off on Saturday and everything.
Just the grind that he and that when you went to Blackstone you saw for a version of that there and that you didn't want that.
And I wonder whether, when you started in 2003 at Newark Nut Company, now it is nutscom.
By this point, you're talking about 2020.
You're grinding.
You're working like your dad was working.
I mean, of course, the return is different.
But how did you feel about about that?
Because you wanted to from what I gather, you wanted to avoid that.
You want to be able to spend time with your kids and your family and all these things.
Yeah.
I mean, look, you don't have so much time to think.
You're talking about specifically in the COVID period?
Yeah.
And even before that, it sounds like you were actually probably working hard, but not 60 hour weeks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Easily that.
But when you love it.
It's like, I'm sure you ask this or people ask you this and so on.
It's about work-life balance.
A lot of theory right now is there's no such thing.
For me, there was no such thing.
I love it.
I work all the time and I'm with my family all the time.
Yeah.
I try to be present.
Like okay, if I'm working on the next business idea on a Saturday night and my kids ask me to play okay, I'm trying to be better about that.
But one thing I did was especially as when I got married and had the kids Hey, like I am going to leave work, right?
I had to commute and so on, but I would leave work.
You know five-ish get home, see the kids eat with them and then do work when they're sleeping and so on.
And I wake up really early, so I work early in the morning.
So look, for me, it's like I rise to the occasion.
This past peak, 2024, we sold more gifts than we expected.
I was supposed to come in for two Saturday corporate volunteer events for morale, because the workers are working so hard in the plant.
They needed me for seven straight days.
These are gift boxes, like tins of- Custom gift trays.
Yes.
We're not like-
We're seasonal, so our business does, you know, December could be double July, but it's not tax.
It's like Harry and David sells these things, right?
Correct, correct.
So we do similar stuff.
Are they a competitor?
I mean, everyone's a competitor at this point.
Yeah.
But no, just in my DNA, like nothing's beneath me.
You know, like you'll see my dad come in, you know, look, COVID, we sent my dad and my uncle home.
Right.
We said, this isn't safe for you guys.
Yeah.
Because my dad's diabetes and so on.
They were, you know, right in their 70s.
But look, my dad will help.
He'll help move when we're in the picking area.
He'll drag these totes around.
And my uncle, he's meticulous about the quality.
So we'll bang out tens of thousands of custom trays, which is a unique thing.
We launched, believe it or not, in 1999.
Um, my uncle will be at the end of the line and he'll approve them.
And one day they really needed him because we were super busy.
He worked the whole time, like 12 hours.
You know, he's got to sit on a stool a little bit.
He's older, but then the team gives him a, you know, a standing ovation.
Coming out of COVID, I think understandably because it was a crazy time.
In October of 2023, you guys, for the first time, you decided to step down as CEO.
You found a CEO from outside the company, outside the family, and you became the chairman.
Was this – I imagine you were just exhausted.
You didn't want to be doing operations every day and just –
And what I started, we were picking up our headlights, build out a team.
COVID gave us the luxury of then let's go after this and really build out a team and not be so lean.
And at that point finally, I had a friend and I finally brought him as an advisor so I wouldn't be just alone in this journey, because it gets really lonely.
And even if you're super successful outwardly, internally there's this imposter syndrome.
And do I know what I'm doing?
And he helped me see a path where Jeff hey, in three years you could focus on MA culture and strategy, for example.
And I actually heard it on one of your podcasts.
It's like, why build on your weaknesses?
I don't have to.
I could have retired 15 years ago.
Why don't I lean into my strengths and do what I love doing and I'm good at?
Get exactly what I like and it could be better for the business too.
Yeah.
By the way, I think that was Sarah Blakely who founded Spanx who said that.
Lean on your strengths and don't worry about your weaknesses.
And versions of that have been said by others, but it's true, right?
And so...
And so today you are tell me about how I mean, how you're involved in the business.
I mean, do you go in every day to the office?
It's you're still in in this, you know, still in New Jersey.
And I mean, what what's your kind of day to day look like?
I don't go in that much.
I wanna leave, give the people space.
So, you know, maybe I go in a couple times a month.
We have a corporate office separate from our manufacturing plant.
I would say I'm still more in the weeds than I'm supposed to be.
Look, I love being in the weeds.
Don't get me wrong.
So we'll see.
It's still this evolution.
And again, I know what I'm good at.
I know where I interfere too much.
I know things get dangerous and so on.
And I'm relatively self-aware.
Of course I have ego.
Everyone has ego.
But I'm okay not being the person.
I don't need to give the speeches to the employees.
I don't need to go to the conferences.
That's fine.
I want to work on fun stuff.
If I can.
Still family-owned, the business?
Correct.
And your dad and your uncle are still both alive?
Yes, they're both alive.
And they're not, of course, I'm assuming they're not involved day-to-day.
Are they still owners?
So I bought my dad out a long time ago.
I probably bought my dad out 17 years ago.
My uncle's still an owner.
Still a shareholder.
He maybe comes in once every couple of weeks.
He helps the team on buying.
He's got these long standing relationships.
And he still has.
Yes.
Can he chisel someone five cents here and there?
It's kind of an old school mentality.
Yes.
But like the people love talking to him.
He goes on vacation with some of our suppliers.
You know, it's a nice thing.
Or if I'm I don't want to step on toes I'll go to him and I'll say, go check the quality of these organic raisins.
Because I ordered some and I was like, they could be better.
What do they make of this?
I mean just the transition or the transformation of the business from what it was to what it is now.
Yeah.
I mean, for them, I mean, they're just amazed.
They wish Papi Sal were still alive.
He wouldn't understand because he would say, where's the cash?
You know, he doesn't see the register and so on.
But for them, look, this worked and it worked really early on.
We never took on investors.
We grew.
We figured out the model.
We grew very quickly and profitably.
And look, even before the true financial success, they got a second lease on life.
I told the story earlier about that.
On Saturdays, we were making $2 a day.
I did the math.
I said, guys, this is not about me shying from work.
This is a waste of time.
No one's coming to the retail store.
So this is like in, I don't know if it's 2003, the latest 2004, I said, we're closing on Saturdays.
My dad said, oh, Papi Sal would never allow this, right?
You just work, you know?
And my uncle says, well, can't we just try it out and let's just do a half a day?
I said, no, this is a joke, right?
Doesn't make any sense for us.
We closed and, like I made this decision on a Monday and we closed on that Saturday, and my uncle on that Monday says, oh my God, that's the best decision of our life.
And they got a second lease on their life where they could be involved in the community and go to temple and just do stuff that most other people get to do.
I bet.
I mean, you know, this question is coming.
But when you think about right this whole journey and what happened and I mean you hope to have five exit and you I mean I think it's estimated you guys are doing, you know, close to 100 million a year in sales, much bigger than a million dollar business when you joined.
How much of where you are now do you attribute to the work you put in the grind and how much do you think had to do with just the luck and timing of the era that you happen to live in?
I was born into a family that had a nut business that was terrible.
My friend's father.
When I was my childhood friend, his father was a dentist and he would make fun of me that my dad sells nuts.
No one expected me to go into this business.
I mentioned earlier something about man plans and God laughs.
You know, stuff comes your way.
And it's what you choose to do with it.
Are you open to it?
And are you going to freaking work fast and hard and smart as it comes your way?
Okay, great.
I chose to join my little family nothing nut business.
And it was amazing.
My dad gave me the keys.
Yeah.
And you know my dad will get teary eyed because he you know what he'll say to the new employees for onboarding, we'll do like a onboarding lunch.
And he says, you know, I hated this business.
I never really wanted to go into this business.
And I didn't really get listened to.
And the thing you know that this is speaking for my dad.
He says the thing I said is if I have children one day, I'm never going to make them want to come.
I'm never going to make them come into the business, but if they want to come into the business, I'm going to let them come into the business and I'm going to let them do their, do what they want.
Um, so this is like a visceral, right?
Right.
Vicarious thing for my dad.
Um, and it's special.
That's Jeff Braverman, the chairman of Nuts.com.
By the way, that annoying rap jingle that we played earlier, Jeff says it's still out there and it's still a thing.
Oh, I mean, people would people would jam me with this.
You know, they would be talking to me on the phone.
They would start playing it.
The only thing I do when I because I still I still have it is when I go to speak at like schools and stuff, whether it's executive, MBA class or just like Boys and Girls Club.
I play the rap at the end and everyone likes it.
Hehehe.
And if you're interested in insights, ideas and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at Guy Raz dot com or on Substack.
This episode was produced by Sam Paulson with music composed by Ramtina Rablui.
It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Olivia Rockman.
Our engineers are Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley.
Our production staff also includes Andrea Bruce, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, Casey Herman, Noor Gill, Chris Messini, Carrie Thompson and Ramel Wood.
I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.
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