YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Salguero

lines on the record: 126
first: 2022-10-03
most recent: 2022-10-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, and how freaking lucky I was, you know, as a very novice surfer, I feel like my time at custom made was just paddling against waves that were just knocking me over over and over and over and never waiting for a break in the waves, just like keep paddling, keep paddling, keep paddling. And this business, I mean, really has started snowballing from the first day we launched Kickstarter. I mean, I can say unequivocally that like we got really lucky. Like our timing was really good. I'm not sure if we had started a year before or a year after, if things would have been the same. But the timing was right. And it's just been a remarkable shift in like seeing the difference between a boulder being pushed up the hill and a boulder rolling down the hill. And I worked way harder at my first company. And it didn't work.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It just might take 25, 50, 100 years. And so, yes, is there a possibility that someone swoops in and says, hey, let's buy a butcher box and here's a price. And I'm like, okay, you know, like, great, let's do it. That's possible. But the future I'm planning for is one in which I have to plan on my succession and the company continuing.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I always caveat my feelings on selling the company with the statement that there's no letter sitting on my desk, right? Like it's easy to say I'll never sell. It's a lot harder when there's a letter on your desk saying we want to buy and here's the price. But when I look at, when you look at iconic food brands in this country, you look at brands that have been around that are well known. They all have a similar DNA. They've been around for 100 plus years. A lot of them are family controlled and they're multi-generational plays. And so if we are trying to build an iconic brand in meat.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so what happened was all of the venture capital for box subscription companies, it just dried up in an instant. And what you saw was a lot of them sold, so like plated sold to Albertons and green chefs sold to HelloFresh and like, oh, they all sold. And I look back at the decision not to raise money. If we had gone and raised money, we would not have a business right now. Because if we had built a model that was like, oh, we're just going to like buy a bunch of customers and hope for the best. We would have liked it's a game of musical chairs, and when the music runs out There's no more money.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was tempted twice. One time we almost got documents, but have said no, have continued to say no. But one of the things that happened while we grew this company. Is blue apron went public and immediately started trading well below their last private.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. I mean, we had grown quickly for the many years before that. Going into the pandemic, I think we did 225 million dollars and coming out of the pandemic. We did 450 and then 550. So, yeah, we've grown very quickly, clearly struck a nerve in terms of delivering a product that people are really looking for. And we've done it our way. And I think that's like validating for, I don't know, like my first company I failed miserably. And this, at least I felt like a miserable failure. And so, yeah, I think we are now seeing that we have a much bigger role to play than just being a hobby business.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting stuff with carbon credits, and there's like all sorts of ways in which we can approach cracking grass fed beef in this country. It's a big, big, big challenge, though, because it's like an entrenched, massive industry. So it's, you know, in some ways, I look at us now as a business. And here we are seven years in. We've grown to be a decently large company. We haven't taken any outside funding. I've decided that this is my life's work. And I kind of feel like it's almost our obligation to take a crack at transforming this industry because it's so rife for disruption. It needs it so badly.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what I want to work on, what I want to spend every waking day and moment working on is how do I transform meat and starting with grass-fed beef? And so we're looking at all options. We're looking at like, do we need our own processing facilities? Do we need to own the last stage? Do we need to be the financing vehicle? Do we need to do the technology layer? You know, there's.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, absolutely I'm going to take a detour and answer your question. But I read somewhere that CEOs have a seven year shelf life. And at the end of seven years, you need to either replace yourself or reinvent yourself. And my seven year mark was Memorial Day weekend of 2022. And I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to replace myself or reinvent myself. And I don't want to replace myself, but I do want to reinvent myself. And if I look at the last seven years, what did I do? I'd spend a lot of time with my hands in the business and my head down. And now I want to have my head up and to be really to be working on what I call the transformation. You know, we've said as a company that our mission is to transform meat. That's a big mission.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. I don't have the courage to, but would love to do a marketing campaign that is eat less meat, but make sure it's raised the proper way. What we'd love to do is to build out a program that is actually carbon negative and that we can prove it from like. The ground up. That is if you talk to me in 10 years, my hope is that I have helped to transform meet by creating a carbon negative beef in the United States that honors the farmer because the farmer is not honored in the system today, honors the animal, treats the animal with humane respect, honors the environment. And the belief is that all of that is better at the end of the day for the customer.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Ellen Savory has done this work. He's given a TED Talk if he wants to see it, that you sort Move the animals around naturally as they would on the savannahs and they trample the dirt and then they fertilize it and then it grows flowers and yeah.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now is not necessarily good for the environment, but we believe, I believe, that there's a way to raise animals that regenerates the soil, and there's a lot of really interesting research on Ellen Savory.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there's a lot to unpack there. I don't want to build a A bigger problem in the world. I believe that meat is here to stay. A question of how do you make it work and how do we make it sustainable when people look at the beef industry, I think it's important for people to recognize that what we are talking about is a very small percentage of the beef industry. So grassroot beef in this country is about 2% of the overall beef consumed. So generally, the large confined feeding operations are the places where some of the research has been done on environmental impacts. And we agree that there needs to be a better way. What we're trying to do as a company is to find a third way to raise animals. I don't think that the solution is let's move to impossible burgers. And on the other side, you've got kind of the beef enthusiasts who are like, yeah, well, this is American-made beef. And like, we're just going to do it. We want to honor that what's happening in the industry right now.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. I mean, at that point, we didn't really even know because our accounting systems or books, it was just really hard to actually know how much money we were making. But no, we were not dramatically profitable by any means, but we were profitable.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and because I started this business as a hobby, our backbone, like the farms, the processing facilities, pick pack and ship, customer service, all of that was third party. And we do that to this day as one of the ways that we've been able to be very capital efficient.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, it was a super efficient model that didn't require a lot of manpower or a lot of humans, right? Because you were doing, you were handling sort of the technical relationship with the customer, but then everything else was handled by these other...”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had to be. People oftentimes ask, well, how did you build a company with no outside capital and no bank debt? And one of the things that really worked to our advantage is that company in Wisconsin that cut all of our meat for us and shipped all of our boxes, they were pretty bad at billing us. You know, it turned out that they would be like five weeks of float in between them shipping their boxes and then charging us. And then it was 30 day terms. So like they kind of helped us finance it at the very beginning. But yeah, no, we always had to be profitable. And so we were always looking at the cost of the box and what can we do and how can we increase the gross margin and all the things that I didn't have to worry about in my last company because we were incredibly funded.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually think we stumbled into this, but right from the beginning, we were attracting a customer who didn't want to be told what to do with their meat. We were attracting a customer who might be a little more adventurous in the kitchen or might have some knowledge already who wanted to be able to do what they wanted to do. And so that's like categorically different than the blue aprons or hellofreshes of the world where it's like, Here's your spice packet, and here's your potatoes you're going to saute this with. And we kind of took like the most important element of one of those boxes, the meat, and just made it all about the meat. And people really loved that approach.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, their bodies are better adapted to that type of diet. But with them, one of the big issues, first of all, you've got antibiotic use in both, right? And humane treatment is a really important part as well. So, you know, essentially, we're looking for the grass fed equivalent, but that doesn't mean that they just eat grass. It's like, what are those claims that then transfer over to other species?”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crass fed meat was a big part of that and is a big part of that culture. And it's kind of a An important subculture. And we've talked about this because it's fueled brands like RXBAR, for example, that really kind of fueled that company. And I know that grass-fed beef is really important, but obviously pigs don't eat grass and either do chickens. They eat corn and feed. And that's okay, I guess, right?”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at the time we had one box, it was $129. And so they would get anywhere from $10 to $15 per month. And they loved it. I often joke that I think the American dream is to sit on your ass and collect checks. And that was essentially what was happening. I mean, people were able to send an email a quarter to their email list and say, hey, ButcherBox is great. You should sign up. And then just on a monthly basis, just get pretty sizable checks. And so we reached out to anybody in paleo, in CrossFit, in Keto. Keto, it was just kind of starting. In that world, we reached out to all of them to try to get them to promote ButcherBox.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So if your link gets somebody to subscribe, every month that they pay the subscription fee, and it's anywhere from like 99 to now almost 300 bucks, right, depending on the box, that influencer would get $10 a month.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so they would each get a unique link. And then when people click on it, it drops a cookie onto their browser. And so if they were to order over the next 30 days, that influencer would get money. But because we didn't have a lot of money, what we told these people is like, we can't pay you a lot of money because we needed to make sure that we were what we called box one profitable, like that we made money on the first box. Right. And so, what we offered them was a residual. It was like, yeah, we can't pay you like $50 up front. What we can do is we can pay you $10 every month for the life of that subscriber.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We called it like a Trojan horse. These influencers are like, yeah, that sounds awesome. Like, of course, you can use my recipe. Make sure you have my website on there when on. Oh, by the way, what do you guys do? We're like, oh, this is what we do. And by the way, we're launching a referral program. So if you want to become an influencer for us We'd love to have you.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. The first thing we did is. Because we had this curated box of mystery meat, people didn't know what was going to show up. We wanted to include recipes in the box to help people cook it, but not ship any of the ingredients, just like. Just the meat, but then here's a recipe for teriyaki chicken or short ribs or whatever. So what we did is we reached out to these influencers and we're like, hey, we started this company and we started it because like we followed this diet and we used your website and we really love this recipe for squash and”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was in a rush because I wanted to not only get the boxes for people, but then to get them to sign up as subscribers. And so we were shipping our Kickstarter boxes within two weeks of the campaign being over. And then what we did is we, so we launched our website. But with the Kickstarter people, we shipped them all a box. And we started calling them and saying like, hey, do you like your box? Do you want to sign up as a subscriber? Can we take your credit card? I believe we sent about 1,100 boxes to different customers. And we got like 60% of them to sign up. So right away, we had 600, 700 subscribers.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prancing around with cows. Yeah, you can still find at Kickstarter ButcherBox Kickstarter video. And so we did a 30-day campaign. We went out to raise $25,000 and we ended up raising $210,000.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the video was all about the nostalgia of how people used to go to a butcher shop and talk to a butcher and really be connected to the meat that they're eating and that we're trying to bring things, what we said back to nature.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So we just went for kind of center of the plate stuff that we knew people would like. We added recipes to help people learn how to cook. And everyone got this box curated by the butcher, by us. Delivered to their door.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the idea was hey, we're going to know we get 500 orders, we're going to know what that box looks like, box one, and we're going to ship it out to everybody. And like, we're not going to have to worry about inventory. Because where you get into trouble is if you have a bunch of different SKUs and you're trying to carry them all in case the customer wants that versus that.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and it's amazing how these constraints can actually shape the business that you're in. So we launched with a Kickstarter campaign. And the idea behind the Kickstarter campaign was that we were going to be able to get a whole bunch of pre-orders, and then we were going to be able to order the meat from Nesvigs and ship it to customers. And the other thing that we did, which was very unique and had really never been done before. And again, it was because we wanted to save money, we said, you're just going to choose, do you want beef? Do you want beef and chicken? Or do you want beef chicken and pork? And then we're just going to send you whatever we want. Like we're going to surprise you. And the reason why we did that is because I didn't want to carry a lot of inventory.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. At the beginning, it was that I didn't think the opportunity was big enough to have outside investors. I thought this was going to be a very small company Right. So I had this goal that I was going to start the company for less than $10,000. Because I didn't think that if it's a hobby, like I wasn't really willing to spend more than $10,000 to get this thing off the ground. And then as I got going, I didn't want outside influence on how to build this company because I thought that my first company, some of the outside influence didn't help. And I didn't want to have to deal with that again.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. All right. So you have this idea to do a meatbox. And he come up with a name Butcher Box, which is a very good name And you knew that from your previous experience that you did not want to seek out outside investors”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So if you were going to ship a box from Wisconsin to California, which was a five day ship, you were putting 25 pounds of dryness in that thing.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, literally unlock the business for me. I would not have been able to do this. But he had some contacts of people in Iowa, and he believed that they could provide what we were looking for.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ron has these connections and he has the know how of how to do this. But where do you start to forget about getting customers? That's going to come later. Going to source this stuff from? I mean, does Ron had the answers? Where do you find the meat?”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it became rather than just like grass fed beef, it became a beef chicken pork. That was kind of what we were looking at. And Ron had all these connections. He had a connection with a company in Wisconsin called Nezvigs. And Nezvigs had a meat cutting next to a frozen fulfillment distribution center. So it really solved all of our problems all at the same time.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the reason for the monthly subscription was when we were at Custom Aid and we had these makers who were at the very beginning who were this listing service, monthly subscription is amazing if you keep the person, right? And so I just thought, well, people buy meat all the time. I imagine they would just prefer to have a monthly subscription. And I was looking for a hobby business, and I felt like it would be much easier to just sell someone once and then, you know, kind of dial in meet subscription. And so Ron comes in and he says, first of all, he's like, it's too much beef. You need to move into other things as well. He's like, you know, people are going to want chicken and they're going to want pork. And by the way, those two species have the same issues in terms of being able to get a high quality product.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So basically, that was all the money you made over a period of seven years. So, you did not have a whole lot of money to start this thing, but you had this idea And he comes out, and this guy presumably Ron is he's a wellspring of information, right? Because he has done this before.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, I knew at that point, I knew I was going to start an LLC and was going to give him stock in the LLC. Yeah. And once I met with him and he's like, oh, this is totally possible. Like I can do this, this and this and set this up. Then it was like, okay, let's go. There's a business here.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was like, sure, fly me to Boston. I'm happy to meet with you and tell you everything I know. So he flew to Boston. We met, and I ended up giving him equity in the company rather than paying him. And I would not have been able to start this business without this guy.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, some are, not all of them, but some are. And that was what people had brought to market as like the first grass fed. Rather than a product where they were really thinking about what the animal's eating and like how that's going to taste. And grass fed has changed dramatically over the past five years.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it wasn't like high quality stuff. And so the perception that a lot of people had about CrossFed was like, oh, I tried it. It's like really chewy and gross. Game-yeah.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not that much. Not much. To date, there's not a lot of beef raising in the United States that's cross-fed. It's about 2% of the overall beef. And also beef at that point, grass-fed was like nobody was really worried about the quality and the taste. And so a lot of the grass fed that came out early was actually dairy cows or older.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Multiple steps. There's a slaughterhouse, and then generally that goes to a cutting facility where then they cut it into steaks, and then that has to be packaged and frozen. And then they have to go to Fulfillment Center, and then the fulfillment center ships it, and it has to have a certain amount of dry ice in it. It has to be in the right box. And yeah, all of those details, I had no idea how to do”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. It's largely gift giving business, largely large in the holiday time frame. So I read an article, he was quoted in it. I hunted him down on LinkedIn. I reached out to him and he was like, oh, actually, I've been out of Omaha for over two years and I don't have an encoped anymore. And I'd be glad to help you.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Omaha State's been around for 100 years, 100 plus years, and they were really the only big direct-to-consumer steak shipper.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I couldn't figure out how to make the business work. I couldn't figure out how to ship a box frozen in the mail, how to buy GrassFit beef, where to buy grass-food beef.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And we ended up because these farmers are like, oh, I need to sell you half a cow. We ended up needing to like sell it to friends or sell, I actually ended up bringing it to custom aid and selling it to people at Custom Aid because it was just like too much meat for our freezer. And I remember distinctly where I got Custom Made and I sold someone some meat and he's like, this would just be so much easier if it was delivered to my house. I was like, yeah, that would be easier, wouldn't it? And I just got obsessed with like, okay, let's say, how would I do that? And I called the project meet with a name, which would have been a really bad name to lead with. And the idea was, hey, why don't we try to ship you your monthly allotment of grass-food beef?”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I guess at this point 2015 sounds like we're talking about the ancient history, but you could buy, and you can still buy this in some places, like a share of the cow, like a quarter or a half. Basically, you've got to buy a lot of that meat.”
2022-10-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · ButcherBox: Mike Salguero · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT