Scot Chisholm - Classy, Haskill Creek Farms, & The Future of Wellness Retail

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[00:02:20] Scott Chisholm, welcome to the Future of Fitness, my friend.

[00:02:23] Thanks for having me.

[00:02:23] Yeah.

[00:02:24] Excited to be here.

[00:02:25] It's gonna be a lot of fun.

[00:02:25] I've heard so much about you.

[00:02:26] I haven't told you this yet, but I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago in New York while you were having your Highland Summit of

[00:02:33] the event and it comes up a lot that I'm in, that I live in Whitefish.

[00:02:38] People seem to like that a lot.

[00:02:39] And obviously we're sitting here in Whitefish.

[00:02:41] In real life.

[00:02:43] In real life.

[00:02:43] Yeah.

[00:02:43] IRL, as the kids say.

[00:02:46] Your name came up.

[00:02:47] They're like, oh, do you know Scotchism?

[00:02:48] I'm like, how did, like, how is this coming up in this context?

[00:02:51] Your name's getting out there, obviously, in the more, you know, outside of your specific verticals and what you do into the fitness and health industry.

[00:02:58] And I'm, there's a lot of things I want to talk to you about today.

[00:03:02] I mean, obviously your background at Classy, what you guys are doing at Highland and even probably most exciting, I think relevant to our industry is the Haskell Creek.

[00:03:10] I'm going to call it the experiment that you're working on right now, which has a huge opportunity scale.

[00:03:16] I think it's super interesting.

[00:03:17] I think a lot of people within our industry are going to be interested to see how this thing goes and how you operate it and how you move it forward.

[00:03:24] Because wellness retail or as you say, holistic pharmacies, things like that, I think you're going to be in very, very high demand now, right?

[00:03:31] Currently, but moving forward for a lot of different reasons that we can discuss today.

[00:03:34] So, all right, man, I'm going to stop talking.

[00:03:36] Give us a little bit of background into yourself, you know, maybe the story about Classy, where you came from, all that, and we'll take it from there.

[00:03:42] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:03:43] I was going to add on to your Haskell Creek comment that retail is traditionally a shitty business.

[00:03:47] So part of it is actually figuring out how to make it a good business model because the margin, that's why Walgreens and CVS, they moved towards the pharmacy because the margins are just so much greater.

[00:04:00] We don't have a, we don't have, you know, a pill popping machine.

[00:04:03] We have, we're basically a redo of the front of the store and with an eye towards prevention, not pills.

[00:04:10] And so it's like, how do you, how do you make enough money to make that a successful business and to be able to scale it?

[00:04:17] But we can, we'll tackle that later.

[00:04:19] But that's, that's what this big question mark in my head.

[00:04:21] That's why it's an experiment.

[00:04:23] Okay.

[00:04:24] How do we make retail not suck?

[00:04:26] Okay.

[00:04:26] Table that for later.

[00:04:27] Yeah.

[00:04:28] All right.

[00:04:29] Well, Classy actually started as a passion project to raise money for cancer because my mom had had cancer growing up twice.

[00:04:36] Mainly when I was in high school, she had breast cancer, went through radiation and chemotherapy.

[00:04:42] And you know, the treatments have advanced quite a bit since then.

[00:04:45] This was, oh shit, probably 20 years ago.

[00:04:47] And she survived, but it was really pretty brutal.

[00:04:50] And the second bout especially was very hit or miss.

[00:04:53] Like we thought we, we thought we might lose her.

[00:04:55] What type of cancer was it?

[00:04:56] Breast cancer, aggressive breast cancer.

[00:04:58] Yeah.

[00:04:58] So double mastectomy, the whole bit, like everything that, you know, to prevent it from spreading.

[00:05:04] So it was a, you know, pretty trying time obviously with that happening.

[00:05:08] And she was an absolute trooper and was a complete inspiration for, for me.

[00:05:14] And fast forward the clock, not too many years later, but a couple, I had moved from Boston to San Diego.

[00:05:20] I was living with a bunch of friends and we decided to do this fundraiser for cancer research because of my mom, but also cancer had affected a bunch of friends that we were living with in different ways.

[00:05:31] My buddy's Pete dad had died from brain cancer right around that time too.

[00:05:35] And our genius idea was to do a pub crawl and click cash at the door.

[00:05:40] And when we were trying to figure out a name for the pub crawl, this movie Anchorman that you probably know with Will Ferrell, who doesn't know that.

[00:05:46] Did the young kids know this?

[00:05:48] I don't know.

[00:05:48] Is this like, is this like a Caddyshack or something now?

[00:05:52] You know what I mean?

[00:05:52] It transcends.

[00:05:53] Okay, cool.

[00:05:54] So with Will Ferrell and in that movie, he says, you stay classy, San Diego.

[00:05:58] He's just like, you know, obnoxious news anchor.

[00:06:02] Uh, he also says, fuck you, San Diego, which is a great scene, but we took the stay classy, San Diego.

[00:06:07] And we said, well, why don't we name the, the, the pub crawl, the stay classy pub crawl, never thinking in a million years would go anywhere but that, you know, a bunch of degenerate friends in Mission Beach, California, trying to raise money for the cancer society.

[00:06:19] And that one event raised a thousand dollars.

[00:06:22] And after I worked at Booz Allen Hamilton at the time and I was in my office and I remember shutting the office door and calling the cancer society and be like, guess what, guys?

[00:06:29] We raised a thousand dollars with this awesome pub crawl at Mission Beach, blah, blah, blah.

[00:06:34] And we like plastered your logo all over the, the town and raised some awareness.

[00:06:38] And they actually got mad at me for doing an unsanctioned event.

[00:06:42] Really?

[00:06:42] Yeah, no joke.

[00:06:43] Like she, and I was like, do you, so do you want the check?

[00:06:45] And she's like, well, we want the check, but you have to come down to this event called the Relay for Life that was in Point Loma at the time, which was basically a bunch of middle-aged women, which I'm middle-aged now.

[00:06:55] Middle-aged women walk around a track for like 24 hours and we were 24 years old.

[00:06:59] It was like, that is not how we wanted to spend our afternoon or day.

[00:07:03] But we went there, we brought the check down and we did like one lap, handed it off like a baton and got the hell out of there.

[00:07:09] But like the moral of the story and what we were left with was like, why the, why does giving need to be this hard?

[00:07:13] I mean, what, why are we jumping through hoops just to like do a silly pub call with friends and donate a thousand dollars?

[00:07:19] And so we decided to do more events and recruit young people into philanthropy earlier in life, make it easier, work with charities that weren't as much of a pain in the ass.

[00:07:28] And eventually that led us to developing software that would make our first, our events easier to collect money, basically for people to buy tickets, eventually for them to create a personal fundraising page.

[00:07:39] If they were coming to the event and raise money before the, raise money as the event was approaching.

[00:07:48] And eventually when we would talk to these nonprofits that we were, we were raising money for, they said, Hey, can you know what you guys have built is actually pretty awesome.

[00:07:56] The software, can we use it for our own fundraising, not just your fundraising events?

[00:08:00] And so we said, okay. And at that point we were sort of like inadvertently trans transforming into a software company.

[00:08:08] And so we went through an incubator in San Diego and we repolished the business model, if you will, and decided to phase out our physical events.

[00:08:16] They were fun. We could talk about that as well, but that wasn't really what we wanted to scale and focus a hundred percent on the software.

[00:08:22] And we relaunched as classy, the technology company in 2011. And basically what it did was allow any nonprofit to host online campaigns, crowdfunding campaigns at the time, essentially like a white labeled version of a GoFundMe or a Kickstarter or Indiegogo.

[00:08:39] And those three platforms were huge at the time. And so we were the charitable version of that.

[00:08:44] And no one knew who classy was because the charity would be able to go in and basically launch these campaigns with their own branding.

[00:08:49] So we'd be like the little, like powered by classy at the bottom, almost like Shopify or Squarespace, the same relationship you have with those companies you would have with classy.

[00:08:58] So we're basically B2B SaaS that allowed you to launch these campaigns, fully equipped with your own branding.

[00:09:04] And we went out with that and it started to gain traction. I'm sure we'll dive into the journey, but 10 years, almost 15 years later, we were acquired by GoFundMe.

[00:09:13] So we're actually a subsidiary of GoFundMe now. And both companies combined have raised, I think, 30 billion since we both started.

[00:09:22] And ironically, GoFundMe was also founded in San Diego and I knew the founders very well.

[00:09:26] One was just visiting me here in Whitefish for the Highland Summit, but we both had parallel tracks, them more in consumer crowdfunding and us in B2B nonprofit fundraising.

[00:09:35] And the combo of the two create, you know, I think the biggest platform and giving for both sides of that equation, which is cool.

[00:09:43] Wow, man. That's huge. And, you know, on a side note, when I was preparing for this interview, I heard Anchorman references. I heard Goonies references.

[00:09:51] I was like, all right, we're going to get along really well.

[00:09:54] Yes.

[00:09:54] Before we get into a little bit more about classing and how maybe it's relative to the fitness industry too, it's like, there's always a point of curiosity to me.

[00:10:02] It's like when a founder sells, right? Gets acquired from the point of like that transaction was done.

[00:10:10] You're like, okay, like, holy shit, we did it. Right. What is that moment?

[00:10:16] If you can explain that to other founders who are maybe looking to get to that point, was it everything you had hoped it would be?

[00:10:23] Was it a letdown? Was it more like, yeah, give us some insight. Well, emotionally, physically, what happened?

[00:10:29] So that's a great question. I would say for our particular situation, it was complex because it wasn't an all cash deal.

[00:10:39] It was cash and a very much large amount of equity. So I still own equity in GoFundMe.

[00:10:45] So I'm a shareholder at GoFundMe. So the journey is not done.

[00:10:49] And so for that type of transaction, it's less about like, you know, walking away with a huge sum of money and like riding off into the sunset.

[00:10:56] It's it truly the two companies truly came together because they felt like the future combined was better.

[00:11:04] And this is cliche, but truly this is why we came together. Like neither could build the other side.

[00:11:09] Like Classy was never going to build a GoFundMe. GoFundMe is probably never going to build a Classy.

[00:11:14] So it just made sense to come together and to be able to bridge the gap between individual donors on the GoFundMe side with the nonprofits on the Classy side.

[00:11:23] So if you donated to a campaign, let's just say there is a school shooting or something terrible event.

[00:11:29] You're really passionate about it. You go and donate to that campaign.

[00:11:32] Well, perhaps you're interested in some of the nonprofits that are tackling gun violence from different angles at a root cause, you know, and that would live on Classy.

[00:11:42] So maybe you'd be introduced that nonprofit you would give to them over time. And that was the thesis of the whole very large acquisition.

[00:11:49] And it boiled down to that basically a customer thesis essentially.

[00:11:53] Yeah. So, but to get back to your question, how did it feel? Well, I think it felt you when you're going through the any deal and we had raised $118 million Series D prior so that I'm going to hit on that a little bit too.

[00:12:08] And that had a secondary component where some of that returned to shareholders. So it was kind of like a combo deal.

[00:12:14] And because we did the Series D that actually allowed us to do a transaction like GoFundMe or else we would probably would have demanded it to be all cash.

[00:12:21] The shareholders would have, but because we had done the Series D that allowed us to do this more, maybe progressive deal, almost semi merger with GoFundMe where, you know, we're better together type of thing, which was awesome.

[00:12:32] So the timing of that was really interesting. And normally you don't go sell your company six months after you raise $118 million. We did. And so it just shows you that we really believed in the strategic rationale.

[00:12:45] I mentioned earlier that GoFundMe founders were grew up in San Diego. So, or they, our companies grew up together in San Diego. And so we, I knew them for years and we had joked about bringing the companies together for almost a decade.

[00:12:59] And they had actually come, come after us several times to try to buy us and we just, the timing wasn't right, et cetera, et cetera. So this wasn't just like a random event.

[00:13:07] This has been sort of happening in the background and we were both at peak strength, if you will, and it just felt right for both parties.

[00:13:13] So I would say a sense of relief in that regard, because it was almost like this, this story that like, or this opportunity that kind of wouldn't go away, that just kept re-emerging.

[00:13:23] And we always, it was like tantalizing. We were like, we're really going to do this or not, you know? And so it was like, once I committed in my head and commit anything, it's like, we're doing this.

[00:13:31] So there's that whole due diligence process and everything where, you know, at any given time, no matter any deal you do, whether it's an acquisition or raising money or whatever, it could fall, fall apart at any time.

[00:13:41] So it's like, it's like layering the cake, like putting layers on a cake is very fragile or like carrying a, a fragile like egg or something.

[00:13:49] You know, it's like at any given time, the thing can blow up in your face and it's, you have to be as delicate as possible.

[00:13:55] So from that perspective, it was like, whew, all right, we, we, we committed to it and we got it done.

[00:14:00] Both sides seem happy, right? That this is excited that this is the future together.

[00:14:05] And then I would say after that, as a founder, I wasn't involved operationally by choice.

[00:14:11] I had already actually just recently phased from CEO to chairman.

[00:14:14] So I was on the board of, of classy, but I decided not to join the board of grow fund me and not to be operational and just be an advisor.

[00:14:22] That was awesome for about a year. And then I was like, I started to regret that a little bit, like, not because they were doing anything wrong or I wasn't pleased or anything like that.

[00:14:30] But I was like, I had that itch to still, you know, be connected in some way, but I still closely advise the president of classy, which is essentially the CEO classy.

[00:14:39] And then the executive team of go fund me and even work with the board. I'm just not on the board.

[00:14:44] So I've kind of like, you know, gotten back involved in that way. And it's kind of like a dream position because it's ad hoc.

[00:14:50] I don't have to join any recurring meetings. I don't have any brain damage of like managing people.

[00:14:54] Uh, and, and they call on me when they need me and that's kind of cool. So from that perspective, it's like awesome.

[00:15:00] But there's still a lot more to do together. I mean, this, this is, this is a, a, a, a company at significant scale now doing billions of dollars a year, uh, in volume on the platform.

[00:15:11] And it's not, it's not slowing down. You know, there's it's go fund me, I think is only in, I want to say 20 to 30 countries. That's it.

[00:15:19] So we get donations from, uh, countries all over the world, but in terms of you being able to start a campaign for something you care about only 20 to 30 countries still.

[00:15:28] So there's a lot of international growth for GoFundMe and then Classy is barely scratching the surface. We work with like less than 5% of nonprofits out there.

[00:15:35] So there's just so much more to do together, which is very exciting from a founder's perspective and a builder's perspective.

[00:15:42] Yeah. Wow, man. It's a long way from a pub crawl.

[00:15:45] Right?

[00:15:46] Yeah.

[00:15:47] Although that's what I mean. If I was still operational, I'd be forcing them to do pub crawls once a quarter.

[00:15:51] Good guys.

[00:15:53] I have a big idea for you.

[00:15:54] Yeah.

[00:15:55] I know this is, I know we're focused on board meeting right now, but I think we need to go get fucked up.

[00:15:59] Yeah.

[00:16:01] Um, I want to go back before we go forward on this.

[00:16:04] So like, I think about our industry and the value of doing, you know, fundraising events and partnering with charities and things like that.

[00:16:10] I mean, from like, you know, a major health club chain, like a crunch or a midsize franchise or like a metabolic or an independent gym like mine, which I owned for awhile or big brands, you know, you get CrossFit or high rocks or go rock and all of them are community driven for the most part.

[00:16:28] Right?

[00:16:28] So how would these particular cases, maybe just pick one if it's easier, like how would Classy come in, work with someone like that, um, from a software or service perspective and what are the benefits to these brands and companies for doing something like that?

[00:16:43] Mm-hmm yeah.

[00:16:44] So Classy primarily works with nonprofits, but there had, there are for profits that run charitable events and there's partnerships.

[00:16:51] And so when a for profit company, if you're not, I'll get to the nonprofit in a second, if you're a for profit company that's looking to add a cause or, or giving or some sort of community interaction, then there are cases where they'll use GoFundMe or Classy to host an event or to get people together and donate those proceeds to a nonprofit in the community.

[00:17:12] Uh, but zooming out, I mean, Classy started primarily as an events company in a way raising money.

[00:17:18] Well, not even a way it did start off as an events company, raising money for charity.

[00:17:22] So the functionality and the software is very event centric still.

[00:17:26] So that's setting up a page of basically a microsite for your event.

[00:17:30] It's the registration and the ticketing and everything that comes with that.

[00:17:32] You can do everything from athletic events to formal galas and everything in between.

[00:17:36] So it's a full on, it's event bright for charity.

[00:17:38] I mean, it's a full on event platform at this point, which is super cool.

[00:17:43] Cool.

[00:17:43] You know, that, that, that would be primarily how they'd use it.

[00:17:45] But the value of events for a business or a nonprofit.

[00:17:50] I mean, I think people severely, especially in 2024 under, under value, uh, what an event can bring to the business and what, how, how that drives connectivity with your customers and the broader community.

[00:18:03] Classy as starting in with events roots, even after we transitioned to a tech company, we kept two very specific events.

[00:18:11] One was called the Classy Awards, which was essentially the Oscars of philanthropy.

[00:18:14] We still have it. It's in digital form. It's not as cool. I must admit, but it was literally in a theater every year, 2,000 people in a theater.

[00:18:21] And we used to get, have nominations that were independent of being a classy customer.

[00:18:26] It was all in the merit of your impact and your programs, how, how your nonprofit was moving the needle and whatever cause you were doing.

[00:18:32] And we had a judging panel or board of a hundred different professionals that would declare the winners, essentially independent of Pat and I, who are our co-founders in our company.

[00:18:42] So it was, it was an amazing event where there wasn't a dry eye in the building and you had all these nonprofits coming out and all these other people who wanted to witness this.

[00:18:51] And our brand was in the center of it. And that's just, that really was, I think one of the smartest marketing moves we ever did, but more importantly was an embodiment of our mission and our values and what we stood for.

[00:19:06] And people just felt that. So the trust that people had with our brand, uh, classy or stay classy in the beginning.

[00:19:13] And then classy at the time was a hundred X what another brand could do without something like that.

[00:19:19] And then we did a conference as well, like a really cool kind of creative conference called the collaborative that would also bring our customers, but also people that might want to use our software together.

[00:19:30] That was a little bit more traditional tech conference, but it still was an amazing, amazingly done.

[00:19:36] And again, it's all about driving that community across, you know, having your brand create community, essentially we've carried that forward with Haskell Creek as well.

[00:19:46] I mean, the events are a way to get this community together and it isn't, you know, there's not our, there isn't a straight ulterior motive with events.

[00:19:54] And it's hard to actually even draw a direct line to the ROI sometimes, but you just have to, when you, when you witness it and people come and then they start talking about it.

[00:20:03] I think it's becomes very apparent that it's, it's valuable somehow, maybe indirect, maybe a dotted line, but it is helping your business grow in some way.

[00:20:13] And it's also just really great for the people that are involved with the brand, the community.

[00:20:16] Yeah.

[00:20:17] So very pro events for businesses.

[00:20:19] They are a pain in the ass and it's kind of logistically, but you know, I think it's huge.

[00:20:26] Yeah.

[00:20:26] Well, you know, when you talk about brand, right.

[00:20:28] And how you define brand for a lot of people come on this show far smarter than me and try to define what that means to be a brand.

[00:20:35] I know you're also building a brand right now, your personal brand will probably touch on that, but it usually comes down to like whatever the emotional connection is with the brand.

[00:20:43] Right. Like when you think of Coca-Cola, I think of like polar bears, right.

[00:20:47] During the holidays.

[00:20:48] Right. Like that's what mine's like from a kid.

[00:20:50] That's what I've, I've thought of.

[00:20:51] And I think when you start talking about emotional, it comes to experiences and what people think of when that brand, what's natural emotions that come in when you're doing philanthropic work and fundraising for, especially if there's something, a cause that people really like and believe in, then you have a really strong connection.

[00:21:05] That's really hard to describe as you're saying, but it's, there's value, right?

[00:21:09] Without a doubt, there is a value to it.

[00:21:11] So there's a currency that like just getting people in the same room together that I think it's a feeling and somehow deep down that almost equates to the brand.

[00:21:22] Yeah.

[00:21:22] And how you, a person that attends that event or otherwise walks away and they're saying, you know, in the case of Highland, you mentioned the Highland summit.

[00:21:30] Yeah.

[00:21:31] You walk away from that summit and now you have this view of what Highland is and it's a memory of that event.

[00:21:39] Yeah.

[00:21:40] And it's very tangible.

[00:21:41] Yeah.

[00:21:41] You know, the, the, the, the sights, the excitement, the smell, the feel as very difficult to do in a purely digital environment.

[00:21:48] And so I think events are unique in that way that they almost bring this, like, uh, this tangibility to the brand.

[00:21:55] Yeah.

[00:21:56] And then, like you said, it's about what, what the brand stands for, what the company stands for.

[00:22:00] That's tends to be what people remember outside of iconic imagery as well, or a feeling that you, you equated the polar bears to the holiday season growing up.

[00:22:10] But I think it, it, at its heart for me.

[00:22:13] Yeah.

[00:22:13] It's, it's, you know, all the, the Simon Sinek thing, right?

[00:22:16] It's like, it's, it's yes, we sell software for nonprofits, but what does the classy brand really stand for?

[00:22:22] Like, why are we even doing this in the first place?

[00:22:24] And for us, it was a lot about the origin story and having a problem ourselves running into that.

[00:22:30] And that touched a broader problem, which was basically just lots of people want to get involved with causes.

[00:22:34] And it's very, it's too hard right now.

[00:22:36] Yeah.

[00:22:36] It's too hard.

[00:22:37] You're literally losing support because of that.

[00:22:40] And then we ended up taking a position.

[00:22:42] Mm-hmm .

[00:22:43] Our brand took a position via the classy awards.

[00:22:45] This award show I was talking about that propped up the leaders of nonprofits and said, and a lot of the leaders of nonprofits.

[00:22:52] Nonprofits have a little bit of an inferiority complex with for-profit.

[00:22:56] They're for-profit peers, leaders leading for-profit companies.

[00:22:59] They tend to be looked at as, you know, oh, it's a, you're running a nonprofit or it's an, it's a nonprofit.

[00:23:04] Like it's not as good.

[00:23:05] It's a hobby.

[00:23:06] It's a hobby.

[00:23:06] That's cute.

[00:23:07] You know, cool.

[00:23:08] Scratch your, your passion over there.

[00:23:11] And what we said was, no, the folks running these nonprofits are just as innovative, just as strong of leaders.

[00:23:19] And there's actually a whole lot the for-profit community can learn from the nonprofit community, like from a business perspective.

[00:23:25] And so our brand basically represented that.

[00:23:28] It represented like the, the new age nonprofit or social enterprises, we would call it.

[00:23:34] Yeah.

[00:23:34] And we would prop up those leaders and almost give the space a new look, if you will, or, or introduce the nonprofit space to the average donor in a different way.

[00:23:43] Yeah.

[00:23:44] Amazing.

[00:23:44] And I think for our listeners too, I want to bring this into like a tangible, like something I, as a gym owner nine years that we had our strength to give event every year.

[00:23:53] Well, for five years, cause it took us four years to come up with it.

[00:23:57] But, uh, it was huge, man.

[00:23:58] Every year we pick a different local charity, right?

[00:24:01] So whether it be like the police fund or, you know, um, girls Inc, whatever it was, we would pick something.

[00:24:06] We would partner with them, everybody in our gym.

[00:24:08] We have a day event they would sign up for it.

[00:24:10] They would get sponsors for their individual performance that day.

[00:24:13] Plus we would have raffles.

[00:24:14] We had all these different ways to bring in money and partnerships.

[00:24:17] So by the end of the, when that day arose, it was like, okay, there was tables all over the parking lot on our gym with different sponsors or different people doing raffles and things like that.

[00:24:26] We had this leaderboard of who rose, raised the most money.

[00:24:28] So it got really competitive, right?

[00:24:30] Really in a fun way.

[00:24:31] Yeah.

[00:24:31] We got, you know, press from it.

[00:24:33] It was all these things happen.

[00:24:34] And at the end of the day, my reward was I got to walk.

[00:24:36] I got to walk and deliver a check.

[00:24:38] Right.

[00:24:39] And that was the coolest thing.

[00:24:41] It was like the happiest thing I did all year.

[00:24:43] So there was so much benefit to that.

[00:24:45] And that's just a small example of what you can do.

[00:24:48] And I think when you look at, you know, companies that do this at scale, you know, we talk about the go rocks or the cross fits or whatever, like they do a lot of this type of work, which probably great partners for classy.

[00:24:56] If they don't do it already, you know, there's a lot of power to it.

[00:24:58] So lots of work there, man.

[00:25:00] Let's, let's get into transition.

[00:25:06] I think it's a little bit of a concept for Haskell.

[00:25:07] So walk us through that.

[00:25:09] So yeah, San Diego to Montana.

[00:25:11] What was that transfer like?

[00:25:12] And then, you know, what was the concept for Haskell?

[00:25:14] Yeah.

[00:25:15] So we had several good friends in the area, so we were already on our way here and then we got stuck here with because of COVID.

[00:25:22] Yeah.

[00:25:22] And we ended up never leaving.

[00:25:25] 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020 early 2020.

[00:25:28] Yeah.

[00:25:29] So, you know, not that unusual of a story in general, but we fell in love with the area.

[00:25:35] And again, we had some really close friends here, so it felt like home pretty quickly to us.

[00:25:40] We're both from the East Coast.

[00:25:41] Actually, we're used to seasons, used to skiing, things like that.

[00:25:44] So, you know, fell right into it.

[00:25:46] But that was at the time that I was transitioning from CEO of classy for over 10 years, had about a 300 person team under me, was fried.

[00:25:55] And I was transitioning to chairman of the board, which was a lighter weight role, but still is still a substantial role.

[00:26:03] The GoFundMe thing hadn't happened yet.

[00:26:06] And so when I got here, I had all these health issues that had started accumulating from the 10 years of stress and just getting beaten down from, you know, migraines all day, every day, to an ear ache that just constantly wouldn't go away, to crazy pressure along this one side of my face, to trouble swallowing to the point of choking.

[00:26:24] So I was out there looking for answers for this.

[00:26:29] And I was basically banging down the doors of traditional doctors.

[00:26:32] I was actually in the Kalispell hospital getting scanned for cancer in my throat.

[00:26:36] And every single doctor would basically say, there's nothing wrong with you.

[00:26:40] I'm like, well, clearly there's something wrong with me.

[00:26:42] Like I can't even swallow certain foods type of thing.

[00:26:46] And eventually, a friend eventually recommended that I go see a naturopath and kind of take a different approach to solving this problem.

[00:26:54] And so I did, and I saw a couple.

[00:26:56] And they opened my eyes to the power of, you know, deeper set of blood work and understanding like really what's going on in your body.

[00:27:04] Not the, not the, you know, kind of surface level blood work that you get every once in a while at the traditional doctor, like deeper blood work to really see what was going on.

[00:27:12] And to focus on nutrition, lifestyle, and then natural supplementation to correct or help correct or help guide some of the, you know, things that were going on in my body that were just like basically an inflammatory response to stress at the end of the day.

[00:27:32] Yeah.

[00:27:33] What I was seeing the migraines, all these, those are the, those were the downstream effects of that.

[00:27:39] It started way earlier and was like almost like brewing, like just boiling in me.

[00:27:43] And I can handle stress pretty well.

[00:27:45] Like you would like even my wife doesn't quite know if something's bothering me until it kind of explodes, if you will.

[00:27:53] And this was basically the body version of that.

[00:27:56] Like I was holding it in for so long that it, it needed to come out somehow.

[00:28:01] So I ended up going on a pretty strict elimination diet.

[00:28:05] I became gluten free.

[00:28:07] I realized I had some different allergies, all this different stuff, fixed my diet basically.

[00:28:12] And I really worked on the, the, the, the, I really worked on understanding what the blood work was telling us and would take specific supplements for those deficiencies and whatnot.

[00:28:23] And pretty much cured myself in 30, 60 days after years.

[00:28:28] And so it opened my eyes to the power of, of that path of solutioning and understanding your body, listening your body in a more holistic way.

[00:28:36] And the traditional doctors not only said nothing was wrong.

[00:28:39] They offered to put me on whatever medicine, you know, a painkiller here or whatever.

[00:28:44] And there's so many stories out there of, of being over prescribed, uh, uh, opioid or something maybe with good intention, maybe innocently enough.

[00:28:54] And then that turns into an addiction.

[00:28:56] And that just kind of sent me down a rabbit hole of saying like, this is pretty fucked up.

[00:29:01] Like how, how is, you know, why are we prescribing these types of drugs to everyone when there's a more preventative approach?

[00:29:09] And I'm certainly not the first person on earth to, to think there's this way more, more people that are deeper in this space.

[00:29:15] But to me, uh, you know, it was almost just like an awakening.

[00:29:18] I was like, wow, this is crazy.

[00:29:20] This whole world of people working on here or working on this type of stuff.

[00:29:24] And naturopaths, if you look it up on, maybe they've changed at this point, but that if you look it up on Wikipedia, the definition of a naturopath is almost like kooky science.

[00:29:34] Yeah.

[00:29:35] It's pretty ridiculous.

[00:29:37] The perception of that group of individuals who are doing phenomenal work and a lot of times are testing methods to cure illness in ways that are much healthier for you than the traditional, uh, doctor or hospital in a much less invasive way.

[00:29:52] So it really made me appreciate kind of like the classy awards with nonprofits.

[00:29:56] It made me appreciate this group of professionals doing this work.

[00:30:00] And it was also very difficult outside of visiting a naturopathic doctor to find any of these medicines anywhere, these supplements, these high quality supplements and understand how to take the blood results, the blood work results and translate that into what I should take and how to fix myself.

[00:30:18] And so we ended up conceiving classy, uh, sorry, classy.

[00:30:23] We ended up conceiving Haskell Creek to basically fill that void, to create a brick and mortar store that would allow someone to go in and shop for the highest end supplements.

[00:30:37] But also we started expanding also into skincare and lifestyle products and all anything that could basically, uh, work on your preventative health and avoid the pharmacy and pills.

[00:30:49] And so we kind of call it a healthier alternative to a Walgreens or a CVS now, but it started with that simple problem of, you know, how do I fix myself, my own, my own problems and how can I find the medicine?

[00:31:01] You know, the, the holistic medicine that I, that I need under one roof.

[00:31:05] And it just didn't, it didn't exist.

[00:31:08] There's a platform called Fullscript that a lot of naturopaths will send you to.

[00:31:13] And I think that they've done pretty good work, but they pretty much have a stranglehold on the industry.

[00:31:18] Oh, absolutely.

[00:31:19] And a lot of naturopaths and doctors in general send their patients there because they don't really have an option.

[00:31:24] And so we started to hear that more and more and more too, from the, from the doctors themselves.

[00:31:27] We'd love to send our patients somewhere local.

[00:31:30] And in fact, we start when we open, we finally opened, we just started seeing, we started seeing patients come in and say, Hey, my doctor sent me here for X.

[00:31:39] And that was like a huge light bulb moment.

[00:31:41] Like maybe we could like simulate the doctor patient relationship that, that, that Walgreens or a CVS has with, with the pills and the pharmacy, but in a more holistic way.

[00:31:52] And so we're kind of working on that now too.

[00:31:53] How can we have a direct line to the, to the, to the naturopathic doctor's office?

[00:31:59] And could they send in a prescription quote unquote, because oftentimes it isn't medical in that way and have, you know, inform or create a, a routine or a plan for that patient and fulfill all of that for them over three months, six months, whatever, whatever they need.

[00:32:16] So we're going down that path too, which has been a really cool thing to explore.

[00:32:19] But at the end of the day, it's, you know, Walgreens and CVS serve the purpose.

[00:32:24] Those are very old school companies and they were probably amazing at one time.

[00:32:29] They've completely shifted into the, uh, farm pharmacy and the pill selling business.

[00:32:36] Basically you can get fentanyl at a CVS at our Walgreens and the front of the store.

[00:32:41] They've pretty much given up on most of the revenue comes from the pharmacy.

[00:32:44] They sell candy in the front and cigarettes and alcohol and all these things.

[00:32:48] And Hey, if you want the after thing, cool.

[00:32:50] But in no way is Walgreens healthy.

[00:32:53] Like not even close.

[00:32:55] Even the skincare is, is just laced with, with toxins and chemicals and stuff.

[00:32:59] So they've lost the consumer trust.

[00:33:02] People go there simply to get, you know, a prescription filled.

[00:33:06] The rest of the store is lost its way a very, very long time ago.

[00:33:10] And so we felt like we could, we could fill that gap.

[00:33:13] We could come in and offer up a new Walgreens or a CVS for 2024.

[00:33:18] And people care way more about what they put in their bodies these days.

[00:33:21] So in the receptions, but awesome.

[00:33:23] Yeah.

[00:33:24] Uh, so my wife and I, a couple of weeks ago, we were at a taco Tuesday at the VFW, which

[00:33:29] is like the opposite of health and wellness, but we.

[00:33:32] Yeah.

[00:33:33] Oh, it's great, man.

[00:33:34] Have you been there?

[00:33:34] Oh yeah.

[00:33:35] Well, we order from there all the time.

[00:33:36] $2, $2.

[00:33:37] It's great.

[00:33:38] Yeah.

[00:33:38] Can't beat that deal.

[00:33:39] But we walked, I'm like, oh, we got to check this out.

[00:33:41] Cause I'm going to be interviewing Scott soon.

[00:33:42] So we walked across the street and she'd never been there before.

[00:33:44] I had been in there a couple of times and describing the retail experiences.

[00:33:48] First of all, very clean, very nice, very well lit, right?

[00:33:52] Well curated, anything from, you know, multitude of, of supplements and brands to skincare

[00:33:57] to, I mean, you can probably list all the things and then.

[00:34:00] Props to my wife, by the way.

[00:34:02] Yeah.

[00:34:02] She led the design and then Colette, who is our, a clutch story.

[00:34:05] Who's our GM of retail.

[00:34:07] Both of them are really the collaborators on the, the aesthetic and the buying and all that.

[00:34:11] Well done.

[00:34:11] Well done.

[00:34:12] And there's probably a lot more room.

[00:34:13] I mean, there's a lot more room in there to still.

[00:34:15] Absolutely.

[00:34:15] I mean, you have to be pretty responsible with that component of it.

[00:34:18] And then in the back, right.

[00:34:20] You kind of go to the back.

[00:34:21] There is also a cannabis counter, right?

[00:34:23] Which I know not all States.

[00:34:25] We'll be able to do, but I thought that was really interesting because.

[00:34:28] You know, my hypothesis is that there's, and this is probably what you've already proven

[00:34:32] out in your own heads.

[00:34:32] There's a lot of people out there who are cannabis curious, right?

[00:34:36] But they don't want to go into a normal dispensary for a lot of reasons, which I 100% understand.

[00:34:42] So maybe it's opening a gateway into maybe some of the healing opportunities with cannabis

[00:34:46] as well, right?

[00:34:47] Or just the, you know, consumption of alcohol is way down.

[00:34:50] People are looking to alternatives for that.

[00:34:51] So it's really interesting.

[00:34:52] It was like, oh, and then there's this like well-lit beautiful, like really attractive thing.

[00:34:58] It says, come check me out back here.

[00:35:00] Right?

[00:35:00] So give us some insights into how you design now.

[00:35:02] And it's on the corner.

[00:35:04] It's, you know, the location is, is amazing.

[00:35:06] I don't know how you nailed that.

[00:35:07] I always looked, I drove by that location back when it was like Himalayan sea salt, whatever

[00:35:12] it was that they were selling there.

[00:35:13] I saw the remnants of that business when we were demoing.

[00:35:15] Yeah.

[00:35:16] It was a huge salt wall in the middle of the, all the construction.

[00:35:20] Yeah.

[00:35:20] Morgan has been around for a while.

[00:35:21] I could probably tell us what that was all about, but I always thought it would make a

[00:35:24] good location for a donut shop, but you're obviously doing something much healthier for

[00:35:27] the community.

[00:35:28] So I appreciate that you did that, but yeah, walk us through like the curation and the

[00:35:32] actual retails, you know, the size, the footprint, like what you guys are thinking

[00:35:36] and what, you know, what is scalable now and what would you have to tweak in order to scale this thing?

[00:35:40] Well, I'll start with the camera.

[00:35:42] I'll start with the cannabis side and work backwards.

[00:35:43] Sure.

[00:35:44] If that's cool with you.

[00:35:45] So my good friend from high school, Craig McViney is one of the reasons, when I mentioned

[00:35:51] we had good friends that were in Whitefish prior, he was one of them and he's a master grower.

[00:35:56] And so when we first got here, he was thinking about starting up a cannabis concept and we were

[00:36:02] going to invest in him and back him.

[00:36:04] And in parallel, we were going through this whole, I was going through that health journey.

[00:36:08] We were thinking about this Haskell Creek more.

[00:36:11] It wasn't even called Haskell Creek at the time, but more of this health, like holistic

[00:36:13] health concept.

[00:36:14] And so if we just basically decided to kind of, they're two different companies, but we

[00:36:19] decided to like pair them together almost like sister companies.

[00:36:23] And our original store was out on Vorman Road, more like a country store.

[00:36:27] And that was sort of like a serious test case out there.

[00:36:31] Cool location.

[00:36:31] Very cool location, very community centric, lots of events, but that helped us sort of

[00:36:35] like see what people liked, what they didn't like, if this concept would work.

[00:36:39] But there were two stores in one and more or less you had the dispensary and then you

[00:36:42] had this holistic health side.

[00:36:44] And so the success of that store gave us the confidence to open up the downtown store

[00:36:49] that you're talking about on this corner and invest as much as we did.

[00:36:53] And primarily, you know, the risk, at least initially was around the health and wellness

[00:36:57] side.

[00:36:57] We weren't sure if that was going to work.

[00:36:59] The cannabis, it's a little bit more straight down the fairway.

[00:37:02] You know, there's going to be people that as long as you're doing it high end in quality,

[00:37:06] which we do, we don't use any chemicals or anything.

[00:37:09] It's it's most of our products are solvent lists.

[00:37:11] So very, very high end line of products that we all we do all in house.

[00:37:15] And Craig's, you know, in the team at cannabis counter are brilliant with all of that.

[00:37:20] I can't take much credit outside of the branding, the packaging and that type of thing.

[00:37:24] And the and the aesthetic was again once was my wife.

[00:37:27] So we kind of have helped him on the brand side, but we're partners in that business, too.

[00:37:31] But downtown, we decided to pair them together again.

[00:37:35] There's a hallway and they're clearly two different stores.

[00:37:38] But we do see quite a lot of crossover, especially for people that are interested in, you know,

[00:37:43] sleep pain relief, those types of categories.

[00:37:46] And what we didn't expect was that the demographic of the cannabis counter would slant as as old as it has.

[00:37:55] So 60 and over.

[00:37:56] No way.

[00:37:56] I mean, it's definitely younger, too. Don't get me wrong.

[00:37:58] But this that store is not like, you know, bong ripping hippies.

[00:38:02] Like it's not like us in our, you know, in college or something.

[00:38:05] It is it is people with specific ailments looking to go fix those ailments, specifically pain relief and sleep being the number one and two.

[00:38:14] And so we designed our products with, you know, sort of these themes or these categories.

[00:38:19] We have feeling categories.

[00:38:20] We call them.

[00:38:20] And so, you know, certain products help you sleep.

[00:38:24] Certain products help you relax.

[00:38:25] Certain products help you even focus.

[00:38:28] Certain products help you socialize if that's the thing.

[00:38:30] And that really helped the consumer identify what they're looking for.

[00:38:34] And we it pairs them to the strain of plant because each strain is a little different.

[00:38:38] And and then they can use the product for that specific thing.

[00:38:42] That was a huge breakthrough in that business because it just made it more accessible, made it easier to understand.

[00:38:48] It didn't put things in such like crazy old school weed language that the average person didn't, you know, didn't get.

[00:38:54] And so it opened up a whole nother market, if you will.

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[00:40:17] For these cannabis products.

[00:40:19] And again, it's slanted older, but it slants female.

[00:40:22] It's a lot of people that just you would not expect to be in a dispensary because it doesn't really look like a dispensary.

[00:40:27] We have our products out on the shelves, not behind bars.

[00:40:30] You know, there's no policeman at the door.

[00:40:32] Yeah.

[00:40:33] So people thought we were crazy for some of these things and we didn't, we just thought it was, isn't that how you just treat customers?

[00:40:39] Like what are they going to like come in and just grab a bunch of shit and run out?

[00:40:43] Like if that happens, oh, well, we lost some money on that, but that's like such a rare, I mean, that's just probably not going to happen.

[00:40:49] Yeah.

[00:40:50] Do you really need things to be secured down?

[00:40:52] Like, you know, it's Fort Knox.

[00:40:54] No, probably not.

[00:40:55] Let's just treat them like, let's not treat them like less than a treat or customers like criminals.

[00:41:00] So that was kind of the ethos of that business.

[00:41:02] Now back to Haskell Creek, you know, the curation, it was very centered around supplements initially, really trying to figure out what are the highest end supplements?

[00:41:10] What are the most tested supplements?

[00:41:12] What are the brands that people can really trust?

[00:41:15] We tested everything on ourselves, basically like a Tim Ferriss style.

[00:41:19] We became the guinea pigs.

[00:41:20] Like, I mean, truly.

[00:41:21] And we, we, we identified probably five core brands and that became part of our formula for the rest of the store.

[00:41:30] Rather than having 20 brands or 20 types of vitamin B, we want to have the best one or two brands for that specific thing.

[00:41:39] Yeah.

[00:41:39] And that keeps the stored less cluttered.

[00:41:42] It keeps it not feeling like a GNC or the health aisle at some grocery store that's just packed to the brim with as many like options as possible.

[00:41:51] It keeps it clean and simple and curation and the research becomes our superpower.

[00:41:57] So we actually have a very small team, but my, and my wife and Carrie do a lot of this themselves.

[00:42:02] We actually have another couple of people that help us with the research.

[00:42:05] We have doctors that we go out and use as an advisory board.

[00:42:09] So when you see a product in classy, I keep calling it classy.

[00:42:12] When you see a product in Haskell Creek, we got all worlds just blending together.

[00:42:16] That's muscle memory.

[00:42:16] Yeah.

[00:42:17] When you step into Haskell, you know that it's been researched, that product's been researched, it's been vetted.

[00:42:23] And if in the rare case that someone says, Hey, this product has X in it.

[00:42:29] Did you guys catch that?

[00:42:31] And we didn't catch it.

[00:42:32] It goes immediately to review and we'll pull it no matter.

[00:42:35] It doesn't matter how cool the brand is or anything like we'll say, yeah, because we have a band ingredient list and we, we take it very, very seriously.

[00:42:42] And I think that trust is paramount to the model and the curation and just going up, you know, beyond the, the, you know, the, the average distributor, you know, book that you can buy whatever products.

[00:42:53] Like really searching for these brands that are trying to do it right all over the country, if not world has, has become the superpower of the store and what customers come back for.

[00:43:01] But we ended up expanding beyond supplements to skincare, to like lifestyle products from healthy sleeping and bedding to lighting to, you know, Blu-ray glasses.

[00:43:12] I mean, we've really spanned the different categories, but what we did was we looked at a Walgreens and a CVS and we said, what are all the categories that they cover outside of greeting cards and candy and cigarettes?

[00:43:22] Yeah.

[00:43:22] Would we want to have a healthier equivalent for all of these or some of them?

[00:43:27] And where we ended was about 80% coverage against a Walgreens or a CVS.

[00:43:31] So what you would expect to buy in a Walgreens or CVS, probably 80% of that you can find in a healthier alternative in Haskell Creek.

[00:43:40] Yeah.

[00:43:40] But we started kind of narrowly and we just kept expanding.

[00:43:42] Like you said, we're, we're going to continue to expand and in the future, hopefully by next summer, we're adding a very limited menu, but awesome, healthy cafe as part of the concept as well.

[00:43:56] And so that's going to have like smoothies and salads, and it's going to be very focused on like a brunch, almost like, like breakfast and lunch.

[00:44:04] Yeah.

[00:44:04] Cause that is missing here, but most importantly, it's there.

[00:44:06] Thank you.

[00:44:07] Most importantly, we're putting it in there to showcase the products that we have in the store.

[00:44:11] So when you buy a smoothie, you know, think like Jamba juice, but healthy, you can add boosts and things to that, to that smoothie.

[00:44:17] Well, guess where that's coming from?

[00:44:18] It's the supplements and stuff that we sell in the store.

[00:44:21] So we're going to be showcasing that through the cafe, which we're really excited about.

[00:44:25] And we plumb for that.

[00:44:26] That's why there's that awkward, uh, like bar when you first walk in, that's actually the cafe.

[00:44:30] Okay.

[00:44:31] Yeah.

[00:44:31] Yeah.

[00:44:32] All right.

[00:44:33] So there's extra space in the, in that, that left side too, there's going to be tables and stuff and there's going to be a bar at the window that you can sit at.

[00:44:39] Yeah.

[00:44:39] So it's, it's very specific, very narrow.

[00:44:41] We're not, it isn't a place that you sit down and work for, for hours necessarily.

[00:44:46] It can be a little bit of a social place, but it's more grab and go and it's more to showcase the products.

[00:44:50] But like we're going to, we're, we're getting a little team of chefs to help us.

[00:44:54] Like it's going to be an awesome menu.

[00:44:56] Yeah.

[00:44:57] Well, I know I have a lot of friends in this industry.

[00:45:00] You're going to be interested in this retail concept because they love this stuff.

[00:45:02] I'm thinking Brandon Collins, Stuart Brower, Lisa Keeker, I'm talking to you.

[00:45:06] You're probably going to want to come check this stuff out, but the curation of the supplements is huge.

[00:45:12] And even like, I've been in this industry for a while and I probably, probably forgotten more than I remember about like supplementation and all this stuff.

[00:45:20] Even then when I want to go buy some creatine, I like my experience is like, okay, I know there's a couple of brands out there.

[00:45:24] I trust, but I'm not going to do the research, man.

[00:45:28] You know?

[00:45:28] And I don't believe anything that says on the website.

[00:45:30] And I noticed you guys have some really good, you have Thorne, you have Momentous, you have some really high end brands.

[00:45:34] Symbiotica.

[00:45:35] Symbiotica.

[00:45:36] Yeah.

[00:45:36] So the curation I think is, is what people will be willing to pay more for.

[00:45:41] Exactly.

[00:45:42] Even if they don't pay more for it.

[00:45:43] Right.

[00:45:43] It's exactly right.

[00:45:45] It's the thing that takes the most time and other companies, frankly, are just aren't willing to do it because a lot of times the supplement side of their business isn't their core business.

[00:45:52] Yeah.

[00:45:53] And in our case it is.

[00:45:54] And so we are very dedicated to making sure that's the case, but we also do that with the skincare and any other products in the store as well.

[00:46:01] So we're screening ingredients across the board.

[00:46:03] Right.

[00:46:03] And we will do that for the cafe as well.

[00:46:05] Right.

[00:46:06] For instance, take the average smoothie.

[00:46:07] It's basically just sugar.

[00:46:08] It's just like sugar water.

[00:46:10] Right.

[00:46:10] It's not healthy at all for you.

[00:46:11] Ours will be completely different than that.

[00:46:13] Like it's just small things like that.

[00:46:15] Like a smoothie is not a smoothie, you know, it's not, it's not automatically healthy for you.

[00:46:19] And I think that's basically the, the, the skeptical eye where that we're applying to all products.

[00:46:24] I mean, when I walk into Walgreens now that I know as much as I do, and it isn't as much as probably a lot of your, your listeners, but it's enough to be dangerous.

[00:46:32] I mean, I'm like completely turned off.

[00:46:34] I'm like repulsed and it's, it's crazy to me that they can even get away with, with selling what they do.

[00:46:40] But the average person just isn't informed or doesn't have the time to be educated and that's not their fault.

[00:46:45] Right.

[00:46:45] They just assume that a wall is Walgreens or a CBS is a safe place and it's been vetted.

[00:46:50] And that's just may, may have been the case a long time ago.

[00:46:52] It's not the case anymore.

[00:46:53] No, no.

[00:46:53] I haven't bought a supplement from one of those stores in like 15 years, totally 20.

[00:46:59] Uh, pay me a picture here, Scott, like, I don't know, I'll put a time horizon 10 years from now.

[00:47:06] Right.

[00:47:06] So we'll say, uh, 2035, where, where can this be?

[00:47:10] Like what's the vision of this?

[00:47:12] And then what do you foresee is the biggest challenges for you to get there?

[00:47:16] Yeah, I think, I think the retail model is a challenge brick and mortar.

[00:47:19] Sure.

[00:47:19] It's just hard, you know, that you, you want to be able to offer these products at affordable prices.

[00:47:27] I don't wear a premium brand.

[00:47:29] So we're not trying to be a discount retailer necessarily, but you have to, you can't mark them up a 500% to make the model work for you.

[00:47:39] You know, there's, there's real costs that go into running a brick and mortar business.

[00:47:44] Hard costs that are very different than a software business that I'm used to from the staffing to the rent to the everything.

[00:47:50] All of that adds up quite a bit.

[00:47:52] So it's a low margin business in general.

[00:47:54] So one of the biggest things that we're trying to figure out is how do you make it a solid business model?

[00:47:59] Solid enough to want to do a second store.

[00:48:01] You want to do a third store.

[00:48:02] You do get some economies of scale there, but there's still a fundamental core question of how do you make each store successful in its own right?

[00:48:12] How do you make it a good business model with, with enough margin there to, you know, incentivize everyone that's involved to want to do more.

[00:48:19] People typically will, will open store that there's a lot of models like that where, you know, they, they go after a hundred stores, a thousand stores, because that's where the money's made.

[00:48:28] Each store, you know, maybe makes a hundred, 200 K on the bottom line, but you add that all up and then it's a lot.

[00:48:34] We don't really want to do that.

[00:48:35] Like we want the store to be really successful for the community, but also successful as a business.

[00:48:39] And when we got into the, the white fish, uh, downtown one, we said, this is the last store we ever open.

[00:48:45] We're okay with that.

[00:48:46] As long as it's like great for the community.

[00:48:49] That's the starting point.

[00:48:50] That's the first principle of this.

[00:48:52] Second is, can we make this a good enough business model where we're not, we're not selling.

[00:48:57] We're not looking for investment or anything like that, but an investor would come in and go, oh, that's an investment.

[00:49:02] That's a really attractive opportunity.

[00:49:04] If we could get it to that point and the margins to look decent enough, then maybe we'll open a second and a third because it makes business sense.

[00:49:12] But we're not doing it to open multiple stores.

[00:49:15] We're doing it for the community first.

[00:49:16] We're kind of, like you said, it's a big experiment.

[00:49:19] We're sort of tweaking the business model here and there.

[00:49:21] And by the way, the business model is also, it's not just the products we sell.

[00:49:24] It's the cafe.

[00:49:25] It's the frequency in which people come in.

[00:49:27] So if you shop there once a month versus once a week, that's a big deal for a retail business.

[00:49:32] It's the frequency.

[00:49:33] It's our relationships to the doctors and getting their patients to come in.

[00:49:37] So it's multi, it's multifaceted.

[00:49:39] It's not just put shit on a shelf, mark it up and then set.

[00:49:44] You know what I mean?

[00:49:45] Like you have to have a multi-dimensional business model, I think these days to make it work.

[00:49:50] And then people always go, why don't you just also sell that online or why don't you ship and all those things?

[00:49:54] And sure that we could do that over time.

[00:49:58] Absolutely.

[00:49:59] But right now people come to us because of the convenience, because of the community, because we're there.

[00:50:04] It's a real human.

[00:50:05] They can ask questions.

[00:50:06] When you move online, now we're automatically competing with the biggest retailers, online retailers in the world.

[00:50:11] And that's just another whole ball game.

[00:50:13] And in 2024, you just don't have a lot of people that are solely focused on brick and mortar, which is kind of like the irony of the whole thing.

[00:50:19] It's kind of a shitty business model, but it also is an opportunity because everyone's focused on digital this and digital that and online this and on.

[00:50:26] We're like, let's go back to the basics here.

[00:50:28] People want that.

[00:50:29] Yeah, exactly.

[00:50:30] And we're finding people want that.

[00:50:31] So it's like a really interesting moment in time.

[00:50:33] Like if you had said in 2020 or something, or even before that 18, 19, oh, I mean, we're going to open like a chain of brick and mortar health stores.

[00:50:41] And people would be like, what the fuck are you talking about?

[00:50:43] Yeah.

[00:50:43] But because of COVID, because it all sort of opened the door, I think, for a store like this to exist.

[00:50:50] And someone will do this.

[00:50:51] I've said that before.

[00:50:52] Like someone will do this model in some variation.

[00:50:55] So it's like, why shouldn't it be us?

[00:50:58] Or at least, you know, we can contribute to that movement in some way, shape or form, even if it's just in Whitefish, but hopefully it's, you know, in other places too.

[00:51:06] Well, I think people crave retail experiences.

[00:51:10] And the important part of what I just said is experiences, right?

[00:51:13] It's not just, you can't just go to Walgreens and pick up like, I'd rather just go to Amazon, right?

[00:51:18] But if it's an experience where it's curated, smells good, like all these things, right?

[00:51:23] Kind of like boutique fitness and not too dissimilar ways.

[00:51:25] It's like people who go to a big, large health club, they could work out from home, but they come because it's an experience.

[00:51:31] There's community.

[00:51:31] Maybe they know the person at the front.

[00:51:33] They go get their little punch card for their smoothie.

[00:51:35] They always give a nice tip.

[00:51:36] Like it's stuff like that.

[00:51:37] And I think I was, uh, I'm sure I'm not certified anymore, but a functional diagnostic nutritionist for a while.

[00:51:43] That's part of my practice, which was based on blood work, right?

[00:51:46] Get a bunch of blood work in, do a lot of, you know, self reporting from the, from the patients.

[00:51:51] And then you would prescribe a shit ton of supplements, right?

[00:51:55] That was the business model.

[00:51:56] I didn't get too much into it.

[00:51:57] And then you make percentages on that, right?

[00:51:59] So it became a reoccurring revenue model for these people.

[00:52:02] And I'm like, there's gotta be something similar that you work in here, which sounds like you're eyeballing pretty, pretty hard right now.

[00:52:08] It's like, how do you make that into like, oh, more of it's like a, yeah, it's, it's almost like a membership or reoccurring revenue model for these businesses that could be really attractive.

[00:52:16] From an investor standpoint, cause that's what they want.

[00:52:18] Right.

[00:52:19] So, yeah.

[00:52:19] I mean, what, what do you see on that front?

[00:52:21] Like what kind of partnerships are you looking for?

[00:52:23] And notice you're talking to people who could be those partners or to point you towards those partners.

[00:52:27] Like what, what are you thinking?

[00:52:28] Well, the blood work and just other tests, I think are, it really are the starting point in the unlock because then that allows a professional doctor to work with that person to say, hey, here's what's going on in your body.

[00:52:41] Here are some deficiencies here, you know, let's, let's get you reset.

[00:52:46] And then we can be the fulfilling partner to that doctor.

[00:52:50] We don't want to be the person that recommends or makes the, well, we can't make the, you know, the, the health advice directly.

[00:52:58] Um, we want to be there for them so that it's convenient for both parties to essentially go help that person in whatever way they need help.

[00:53:07] Right now.

[00:53:08] And I'm sure when you were in your practice, you were, you were using a site like full script or whatnot.

[00:53:13] I don't know if it existed then.

[00:53:14] Yeah, they have a stranglehold and what they do is they buy in bulk.

[00:53:18] Obviously they store it and they're able to charge, you know, or they're able to pull massive margins on that and give, uh, a revenue share back to the practitioner.

[00:53:29] And I totally get that from a practitioner's perspective that can become a meaningful part of their business.

[00:53:35] Right.

[00:53:36] Most of it.

[00:53:36] Right.

[00:53:37] In some cases, but the folks that I've talked to around here, at least they don't want that to be the big piece of their business.

[00:53:43] Actually, they don't, they don't like that relationship with the company.

[00:53:47] Yes.

[00:53:47] They, if there's some sort of incentive for them to operate with full script or Haskell Creek or whoever, then that's looked at positively, but they don't want to be dependent on that or feel like they're in a position where they, um, are pushing those supplements on someone.

[00:54:03] And I think that's a really fair assessment.

[00:54:05] It's like, how can we come in and say, all right, well, here's our store.

[00:54:09] We have these things, you know, you can always trust that it's going to be stocked to whatever degree you want.

[00:54:14] If you have requests, you can, you can add them and you can just send your patients right down the street.

[00:54:18] And most of them feel like just that convenience alone and the trust with, with us and their, and their patient is, is more valuable than the financial incentive that they would otherwise receive from.

[00:54:35] Fullscript. And that was actually a surprise to me. I, I, it's, it, it was less that they, it was less that they wanted someone to replace the full financial incentive that Fullscript gives them.

[00:54:45] It was more that they just didn't have an option and they felt trapped. And so that's been a really interesting insight lately. And we're just running, honestly, I'm just going around interviewing practitioners. We don't even have a formal program yet, but we're developing it right now.

[00:54:56] Yeah. And it's, it's more to understand those incentives and how, you know, w w how tight of a grip they have on the practitioner community.

[00:55:06] And what I'm finding is, is a really warm response to alternative approaches and a high value on the in-person, the convenience and the warm reception, like almost like an extension of their brand and their practice, but down the street through Haskell Creek.

[00:55:22] Yeah. So if they feel like, like you said, the experience, if it's welcoming, if they get what they want, if that whole thing is top notch, then it's almost like it's their store. It's almost like it's their, it's an extension of their business. And I think that's the key right there.

[00:55:37] So we're still exploring that, but I think it has huge promise, honestly, for the, for the model.

[00:55:41] Yeah. Well, I think there's not that it's true, but I think for a lot of practitioners, it feels like a conflict of interest when you're prescribing supplements for someone's health, but then you're earning a commission.

[00:55:51] Right. Yeah. It's kind of like the dirty, it's like a little bit of a dirty seat.

[00:55:54] Yeah. It just doesn't feel good.

[00:55:55] Yeah. Right. And I think fundamentally that's probably what irks people, whether they're willing, you know, or knowingly saying it. See, it's, it's very interesting, man. It is, it is very, I mean, we start looking at that and what about some of the more fringy

[00:56:07] not fringy, but things like peptides, right. Stuff like that, where like people are really starting to show some, some solid interest. I would say, you know, HRT and things like that, but I don't think I would ever want to touch that, but it's up to you. But like, what about stuff like that? Are you starting to see possibilities where it could go into that area as well?

[00:56:22] Yeah. As long as it's vetted enough or it is, it's, it's not too risky for, for the business. But again, through partnerships, I think for us, it's, we're the, we're the curator of products and we're also the space that these things can happen.

[00:56:36] Or the relationship between doctor and patient can happen. So I didn't mention before we actually built in like a practitioner room for local practitioners to see their patients and quote unquote rent that room. We're not charging, but just, they can come in there and they can be there and they're in their patients can see them there.

[00:56:54] Or we could do blood work days or we could do esthetician services or whatever, right in the space. So we'll rotate those services through, but it's, it's kind of along the same lines. If we feel like there's.

[00:57:06] A service that our customers could find valuable, then we're going to put it on the calendar and we're going to promote it. We don't get, uh, you know, a cut of that. I don't even think, I don't even know if it's legal to get a cut of that, but like what's great is we're just convening those folks to a single location.

[00:57:21] And they know again, that we've vetted that and it's trusted. So we can send hopefully our members to different practitioners from around the region. So you build a relationship that way too.

[00:57:32] Yeah. Yeah. You know, I, I've always felt.

[00:57:35] I'm the basic premise. If you're creating more value, things will work out.

[00:57:39] Totally.

[00:57:40] Right. And that's, you know, you're a successful entrepreneur and you probably see that too. I can't equate the math. I know we're running up on time, Scott, so I want to respect it, but you have a couple other things I want to make sure we touch on too. So you have the Highland.

[00:57:51] Group, right? Summit. You just had that recently in whitefish and I was.

[00:57:55] Super bummed. I couldn't make it at a conflict. I was in New York that week.

[00:57:57] And then also you're building your own kind of personal professional band brand in the B2B side of things. Maybe tell us a little about Highland, what you're doing there and some of the other stuff that you do too.

[00:58:06] Sure. Yeah. Highland started, you know, really as a coaching program initially just one-on-one. I was coaching some, some founders, earlier stage founders, typically around a million in revenue.

[00:58:18] They have a product, it's in market, but they're looking to scale it. You know, they're looking to grow it and liked the one-on-one coaching thing, but didn't feel like that was going to make as much of an impact as I thought I could if in more of a group setting.

[00:58:32] So we created Highland, which is essentially a group coaching program and community. So it's me actually delivering masterclasses and curriculum on a variety of topics, business topics, how to scale your business, very centered around leadership teams and organizational building, basically all the unsexy stuff that no one wants to talk about.

[00:58:54] It's a, it's a real true operations stuff because everyone wants to talk about sales and marketing and all that stuff. And that's important. Don't get me wrong. I'm a big sales guy, but the program's actually on like the more meat and potatoes type of business stuff that people sort of gloss over or they don't want to pay enough attention to until the house, you know, falls, falls, falls inward.

[00:59:13] So that's what Highland is. And what's awesome about it is that the community side of it, you know, the peer to peer side is really taken off too. We have members from across the country, several in Montana, but we have a lot of States, most States, I would say.

[00:59:27] And they're starting to have member dinners without me involved and get together and all these different things. So it's really cool. Like they're learning from each other because they're going through the same types of issues and it's industry agnostic. It's not tech or it's not just tech.

[00:59:41] Like there's a good amount of tech founders in their SaaS founders, but there's everything else too. There's DTC, there's retail, there's CPG. We were just mentioning before this podcast, Alice mushrooms, the founder of Alice mushrooms is in there. That's an awesome mushroom chocolate company that we sell at Haskell Creek and they have other products too.

[01:00:00] So really it runs the gamut, which is really cool. And why I did it that way was because I learned the most or I had my, my biggest epiphanies, if you will, from getting out of my own tech bubble and going into some other space with other entrepreneurs from different industries.

[01:00:14] And I was hoping that same type of energy would happen here where is it's just like, you don't know what you don't know. There's an always be learn, always be learning was a classy value, but now it's become a highland value.

[01:00:24] It's like, no, you, you talk to folks in different spaces because they're maybe looking at the world slightly differently and you can learn something from that, you know, get out of your bubble.

[01:00:34] And so we had the first ever in-person event called the Highland Summit in Whitefish last week. And we're going to do probably more events in real life, but this was the first time most of us had ever even met each other in real life, which is kind of crazy. It's been mostly virtual.

[01:00:49] We get together pretty much every Wednesday virtually, but this was really tremendous. We recruited like a bunch of successful entrepreneurs from the founder of Dollar Shave Club, the founder of Team Rubicon, which is a social enterprise veteran led disaster relief organization, et cetera, et cetera, just tons.

[01:01:07] And we, each panel was designed tactically to teach the founders, the earlier stage founders, something about leadership or company building or whatever content generation you're, or building, uh, building a, uh, uh, uh, content machine was actually one of the panels.

[01:01:22] And we, we drew upon my experience building my personal brand and the, and building an audience. And we created a panel on that, which was kind of cool, but every, every single panel was tactical. So the, the founders would walk away with something.

[01:01:34] And then we had like an amazing chef curated dinner and all this stuff. And it was just about bring coming together in real life, learning from each other, and then bringing in people that have, have been there, have done the thing and can talk, you know, kind of in reverse and reflect on their mistakes, their lessons very openly and in a raw, uh, kind of way.

[01:01:51] So that's what we did. And, and, you know, reports are feedback still coming in, but it's been like glowing. So I think we'll do it again. Again, this is one of those things where I didn't wake up one day and say, Oh, I'm going to start this thing called Highland. It really was totally organic.

[01:02:04] And I just, I get a lot of energy working with other entrepreneurs and all these different spaces. I don't even like one guy's doing this robotics companies doing these autonomous underwater vehicles that go to crazy depths to explore various areas of the ocean.

[01:02:18] I, I, I, I know nothing about that zero, but guess what? Like the same universal principles around building a team apply to him that they applied to classy to anyone, right? Like to, to, to a gym owner. It doesn't, it doesn't actually matter.

[01:02:30] Yeah. It's about people, um, and scaling the people and the company. Um, so that's kind of the, the common thread, if you will, um, stage or industry agnostic stage specific. Everyone's kind of in that call it 500 K to maybe $10 million in revenue range.

[01:02:48] Awesome, man. And you had drew blood. So yeah. Childhood, a favorite. So being from new England, I got to interview drew blood. So to kick the whole thing off, that was really cool because I mean, what, what that guy has gone through is amazing adversity wise, you know, being that for people that don't know the story, I'm sure your audience actually probably does, you know, getting hit.

[01:03:12] So viciously and finding himself in, in the hospital, uh, I read that he lost half of his blood in his body. Yeah. It was a serious, serious injury. Most people don't know that. And he, he woke up one day in a hospital bed going, wow, it was the number one pick of the NFL draft. It was franchise quarterback. And now I don't, everything's uncertain. You know, I'm not even sure I can play again.

[01:03:35] Uh, and so, you know, his future was very different from that day forward, but he got back up and played many more seasons and his stats are actually phenomenal. Like he's a top quarterback ever. So, you know, that's, it's pretty cool. Yeah. He's also way taller than me and his hands are huge.

[01:03:52] Yeah. He looks humongous and, uh, he did a great job on the Tom Brady roast.

[01:03:56] Dude, he crushed it.

[01:03:58] He crushed it.

[01:03:59] I mean, what, what, what, it says a lot about his character.

[01:04:03] It does.

[01:04:03] To, to have, you know, and it's, it's who could have written that storyline, right? Like little Tom Brady.

[01:04:11] But one of my favorite images is blood. So with his arm around Brady, after coming back the season, they won the Superbowl and basically coaching him from the sideline.

[01:04:21] And, you know, someone else could have been a total jerk in that situation or standoffish. And he was there coaching Brady. And ironically, Brady gets hurt and blood. So has to go in.

[01:04:32] To the AFC championship game. And he blood. So won that game and put him into the Superbowl, which then Tom played again. But people forget that.

[01:04:39] Like he actually had a tangible role in that first Superbowl and won the AFC championship. So it's just an incredible story. And he's also an incredible human.

[01:04:48] Like, you know, there's a lot of people that are, there's a lot of people that are doing.

[01:05:17] our ass off. Um, but you know, it's kind of a full circle story. It was kind of neat.

[01:05:22] Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome, man. I would love at some point to hear about

[01:05:25] how you got that interview, how you prep for that interview as someone who loves to do interviews,

[01:05:29] but we'll, we'll save that for another time. I watched the roast.

[01:05:33] Scott, I would urge people, uh, to go follow you on LinkedIn. You put out really good content.

[01:05:37] I've been enjoying it for a while. I think I've been enjoying it since before I even

[01:05:39] know that you lived here in town, which says something, right? Yeah, that's really cool.

[01:05:43] So, uh, really valuable stuff. I mean, other than that, is there anywhere that you'd want

[01:05:48] the audience to go or if they want to reach out to you, how would you, how would you do that?

[01:05:52] LinkedIn, Instagram, NX. It's just my name, Scott Chisholm, Scott with one T and Chisholm,

[01:05:58] like Stockholm. Uh, it's a weird name to pronounce, but you can find me. I'm really active. I, I post

[01:06:04] pretty much daily and we cover topics exclusively cover topics that we think founders and operators

[01:06:11] would find valuable. That's it. We're not in, we're not posting content to put the next leadership

[01:06:16] meme out there and try to growth hack, you know, to get big, to get a whole bunch of eyeballs and

[01:06:20] followers. We literally put out content that we think will be valuable. Much of that content lands

[01:06:26] into my newsletter and then into my blog. And much of that content turns into actual curriculum

[01:06:31] that we're teaching in Highland. So even the social posts are, you know, what I believe to be,

[01:06:38] you know, an interesting way to look at business or, or a tip that someone could take away and,

[01:06:42] and actionable. And then that grows into actual curriculum. So it's been super fun. Honestly,

[01:06:47] I've met so many, never thought I kind of like have a love hate relationship for social media.

[01:06:52] I don't really like social media, but I must say the surprising thing about just posting more was

[01:06:58] there's a lot of shit out there and a lot of noise, but then there's like one to 5% of like

[01:07:02] really, truly amazing people I've met through this and not just through Highland, just like people just

[01:07:06] reaching out being like, wow, I've been, I've collected all your, your LinkedIn carousels.

[01:07:11] And I tried to piece them together and I'm like running my company, you know, through some of

[01:07:14] this. I'm like, whoa, that's insane. I didn't realize anyone would do that. I was literally just

[01:07:18] posting to get things out of my head initially. And, and I try to post in frameworks, not direction,

[01:07:25] like super like, Hey, go do this right now, you know, type of thing. Cause everyone's business is

[01:07:30] unique. You carve your own path, but I try to offer up, Hey, this is how I maybe did it.

[01:07:35] This is the mistakes I made. This is an idea for a direction. Here's what's worked for me.

[01:07:40] You can decide how much of that you want to take and apply it to your business. And I fully expect

[01:07:44] people to take some, not all and make it their own. And I think that general attitude where it's not

[01:07:49] like, Oh, I know better than everyone. I know how to run every single person's business. I do not.

[01:07:54] I happen to be pretty good at the operations and the, and the people side of things,

[01:07:57] but still everyone's situation is unique, but the content is, is truly trying to help people

[01:08:03] with the unsexy topics that don't get talked about enough. And you kind of need to have gone through

[01:08:09] to be able to talk about them the way that, that I have been able to. Uh, and more recently I've been

[01:08:14] bringing on guests, not only in Highland, but to also contribute to the content to like operators

[01:08:19] that I really respect. So it's become a little bit of a collaboration too.

[01:08:23] Awesome. Do you have a podcast?

[01:08:24] Not yet. So Highland it's weird because Highland, I do masterclasses, but I also bring in guests. So

[01:08:30] it's almost like a private podcast. Okay. And we're trying to figure out how, how much of that

[01:08:35] should also be public and try to hit both sides somehow. It's a really interesting question

[01:08:41] because it's almost like a, it's almost like a private podcast in front of a live studio audience

[01:08:44] is what it is right now, which is kind of a cool dynamic. Oh, super cool. But then how do you take

[01:08:49] that? Like you just technology wise and stuff, how do you, how do you make a polish that up and

[01:08:53] make it something that someone would enjoy and not feel super scattered, you know, all over the

[01:08:57] place, but well, Scott, I, uh, I think we'll just wrap it up right there. I could talk to you for

[01:09:01] hours, man, but I really appreciate what you're doing. The content is fantastic. And, uh, you know,

[01:09:05] I'm sure at some point I can help nudge you to starting a podcast. I've done that a hundred times

[01:09:10] with people, uh, there's so many great benefits to it, but, uh, yeah, really interesting what you're

[01:09:14] doing here. Congratulations on all the success at classy and what you got going at Highland. And I think,

[01:09:19] um, Pasco Creek, I urge people to go check it out. If you ever come through whitefish, you know,

[01:09:24] physically stop in, but at least look from a branding perspective. And if you want more on a,

[01:09:28] you know, from a third party, what I think about it when I walk in and my, you know, uh,

[01:09:32] interpretations of it, I'm happy to do that too. So that's awesome. Great conversation.

[01:09:35] Really enjoyed it. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, Scott Chisholm.

[01:09:39] Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of

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