YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Saltarelli

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72
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2021-12-23
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2021-12-23
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1
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  1. “Picking them out, convincing the boards to spin them off to him or sell them the assets, and then turn those assets into really successful businesses. And it started in the 90s. They were in selling long distance minutes. So he was with Bell. He was a reseller of long-distance minutes.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Rury Olson is this incredible Montreal entrepreneur. He was the first person to start 56K modem when the internet was pumping out in Canada. So he was the largest internet provider in the 90s, sold that company. Again, everything he did was came from nothing, poor as hell, grew his way, only started making success in his mid-30s, largely with people would say he was unsuccessful up until then, and just kept us thinking in the pocket and getting involved in businesses. What Rory's skill set was, and I'll say even till this day, is he would get intertwined with big companies. At the time it was Bell, BC, in Canada, and multiple of these different types of companies. And these conglomerates had assets within them that they had no idea what to do with a lot of the time. And they would end up getting stuck in the belly of the beast, let's call it. And Rory was really good.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Better than what was on the market. And in order to do that, we most probably had to build a manufacturing plant and we get into the reasons why we had to build that manufacturing plant. But nobody in the game was building manufacturing plants. Like all my peers in CPG think were mental for having taking that route. And that route makes sense because when you're building a plant, forget it. If you think you can build a manufacturing plant and get the profitability in under five years, you have a serious thing coming for you in terms of realization. Everybody was not wanting to make that decision. But for us, we weren't trying to get anywhere quickly in five years. So it didn't matter to invest in a manufacturing plan and take that really long-term vision. And I think in a decade from when we start, people will ask us, wow, how did these scores get here? Well, I'll say exactly like in training camp, it didn't happen this summer.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Entrepreneurs think that when you read like the headlines and the media and everything, that results always need to be within 12 months. And that's true to a certain extent based on where you are in the trajectory and what the narrative is and how you're raising funds. But ultimately, the longer the vision, the more you're going to optimize for things that your peers are most probably not optimizing for in decision making that will allow you to actually have a competitive edge over the long term. And that's where it's a mind fuck for a lot of people is that it's not instant gratification. And so humans tend to avoid things that are not instant gratification to bring it back to midday squares to make the correlation to how even it was similar to what we were doing in hockey. When we started this, the goal was to build the next Hershey's. And in order to do that, we needed a product that was 10x.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “A long time, and that pressure of saying, Hey, I may not be the best next season, but if we have a game plan and we stick to the game plan, time will do its thing. At a young age, that alleviates a lot of pressure from you. And so when I was showing up every season and getting a little bit better to my peers, maybe I wasn't succeeding, but to myself, I was succeeding in a major way because I was one step closer to this far vision of the NHL. And I remember as I was really starting to hit top tier where I started going into like the top five goalies in Canada, that's when people started to take notice. And I remember somebody asked me one training camp when I came back one summer and I was really at the top of my game, what did you do this CCA? I said, it was not what I do this season. And we started this game plan five years ago. It's not a last six month thing. And so I think.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Let's take sports, for example. I started off really, really bad and became really, really good. I remember, again, there was a gentleman that came into my life, Rory Olson, that we could speak about as well, that saw potential in me, took me under his wing. And the reason I want to say this to the audience is don't think that I came up with any of this stuff on my own. There was a lot of people coaching me through. And so Rory put me with one of the top sports psychologists. His name is Howard Schwartz. He's out of Montreal. He does all MLB pitchers. Howard really brought the idea of A, stopping to focus on where were we going to be specifically this season. He asked me what my goal was. I said, I want to make the NHL. So my goal is a point in the future that is very far. So we have to stop optimizing per safer what's going to happen in September at training camp because I might not get the results I want in six months. But if we keep chipping away today, we're going to get somewhere.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Value on future moments versus the current after he died, I completely just changed. I was horrible at school before he passed away. I was horrible at sports. And after he passed away, I excelled at everything. I think that was largely because I realized that the only person that's going to get shit done for me is me. It was very lonely 10 to 20, even though I had a great family and a great mom. It was a very lonely time because everybody was suffering in silence. It was a tragic ending, but it changed my whole game. I mean, I went from being a kid to an adult quickly and realized that the only person that's going to pave the path is myself. I had the good fortune of having a father that taught me both through his learnings, but also what he didn't know he was going to teach me, which was dying and having to have all of life unfold after that. That was it, man.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So plans don't mean as much as we do. And I think he spent probably too much energy on a life that he was going to live versus the life that he could have lived. And so although we had an extreme amount of great times together, we didn't spend enough time together. That really changed my life completely. I know today we call it work-life balance. I don't know how I feel about that expression. But what I feel is presence. I've always felt extreme presence. I always feel this rush because he died at 42 years old. So people are always like, Nick, what are you in the rush for? I'm not in a rush. I just know that I'm not promised tomorrow. So I act accordingly. Like I really, really do. And so I think the best thing you can do is act as if you're not going to live forever and plan as if you're going to live forever to the best of that balance. And I think a lot of people put too much.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Warps your entire vision of like what time and space and energy actually means because from one moment to the next it was over there's some serious learnings from his passing one was that your plans in life don't mean anything My dad had plans and even to the best that he tried to protect what would happen after he passed away it all went to shit anyways his partner was misgiving to us. I won't name his name because I've made peace with that, but he put our family into a”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Process the emotions of what he was going through. Maybe I didn't have the intelligence yet, but he always spoke to me like he was speaking to somebody his age, which really helped me, I feel, develop earlier and just have a different view of the world. And then two was this larger than life figure of enjoying life. And that's why for me, I think the way he died was really tragic. And I speak about this pretty openly because it really taught me moments in life. And I know it's cheesy, but he died. We were in a car together driving. Didn't feel well. Said he had to pull over and had a massive heart attack and died. And we were literally in a conversation while it happened. That experience of death and that you can experience death in so many different ways. But seeing it happen like in a regular moment the way this conversation has happening really”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Business. I literally lived in warehouses or manufacturing plants. And as you know, my dad died when I was 10. And so I only got 10 years with him. And people always ask, that's so young or so short. Here's the thing I'll say on that subject matter that's really, really important. I look around at some of the people I know in my life that still have their parents in their lives and they don't have relationships with them or they have negative relationships. And so I think time is really irrelevant for how long we get to spend with humans. It's like what type of quality we have. And so the 10 years I got with my father were incredible. I spent every single Saturday with him in a deep way. He was a hard worker, so we didn't get much time in the week. But every single Saturday I would go and spend a full day with him. And the one thing I always loved about my dad is he treated me like an adult when I was a kid. He never spoke to me like a kid ever. Even though I may have not been able to.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Of why I look up to them. Why I look up to them is they made really unachievable tasks seem so simple. And I think the smartest people in the world do that a lot because it's not complicated. It's literally one foot in front of the other, long-term vision. I'd really love to speak about long-term vision at some point versus short-term vision because I think my generation's plagued with short-term thinking. And that long-term vision, there was one thing he always said in every decision he made, Lino Supudosi in here, was we're building the biggest cheese company in the world. This is a legacy business, and I hope it's going to be here after I die. Every decision he made was always optimized for that. I don't think it's luck or even a mistake that they're the second biggest cheese conglomerate in the world, a dairy conglomerate, not even cheese anymore, just cheese. My dad was a huge piece. He was a great entrepreneur, my father. He was a food distributor. So I grew up in the...”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, literally a seminar that was being hosted, I think, by one of the banks, and everything he said he did. And my takeaway from watching that happen was, oh, this gentleman makes everything he says happen in a really basic way by just putting one foot in front of the other. Two, everybody around them would always say, I remember when he did the big cleanup. So he reorganized the entire business from a family business to get ready to be this massive growth trajectory. Oh, they can't do it. They have no business growing outside of the Quebec market, not even out of Canada. Then they went and they bought a company that was bigger than them. And they were scrutinized for that. And everybody just kept them throwing rocks at them. But here he just kept them putting one foot in front of the other. I think he's like the third richest person in Canada. He's always on those lists. That's not part of the reason.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And I remember just that I'm making this happen, and this is what's happening. And all he started to do was surround himself with the right people. And I even remember he took my dad. They were doing a course on public markets. And he took my dad to one of the courses with him. Like a general, like they would have. You know what I'm trying to say?”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Lino Saputo Sr. was always relentless in all the conversations I would hear him have with my dad. It was always extreme focus. I can't explain it. There was this like relentless focus of every year if you put a few bricks in front of the next brick you built an incredible house. And so when they were, let's call it a non-public company, they were this really large family business. And when they were this really large family business, I think they had a lot of things going for them and a lot of things not going for them. And Leno was always super in touch with what wasn't going for them. And for instance, I remember him early on in 94 or 95 talking about taking the company public. You have to understand this is a non-high school graduated human being who's an immigrant from Italy who never had any business doing anything in the public markets.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Life is to show that you could just do it. And we've been videotaping everything from the beginning. We possess nothing special as individuals, us three as founders that suggest that we have a better shot at making a $100 million company over the next person. And it's worked tremendously along the way. I can't tell you how many messages we get of people like, okay, this motivated me to do this or this motivated me to do that because at the end of the day, we have nothing special. There's really only two things that we have hard work, determination, and the ability to tell great stories and connect with an audience. If you have those two things, I think you can literally go as far as you want in the world or not.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Fun, a journey of life that took me in so many different directions to finally getting to midday squares. And when we got to midday squares, I think why we're doing it publicly is you don't realize how many good people there are in the world. And my brother-in-law, who's my partner Jake, really introduced me to the idea of”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Go every Saturday, we would go for haircuts, and I would get to be a fly on the wall of listening to these two gentlemen speak. And I saw literally a business go from Saputo family started a cheese manufacturing plant in their garage in Montreal. And they are today the second largest dairy conglomerate in the world. They trade, they have about a 13.5 billion market cap. And I kind of witnessed this all unfold. And this is where people chastise me a lot when I say like, it seems simple. It seemed like it was a simple thing with a lot of hard work, a lot of grit, a lot of that, but it didn't seem unobtainable to build a massive company like that. And I just had this bug that I was like hooked on that, especially when you're under 10. You don't really know exactly what that bug is, but you know that you're really excited about things. And that kind of”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “My whole life, man, I've been misunderstood. I think my other two partners have been misunderstood a lot too. I've always been a massive dreamer at every single point in time. One of those things were put down by people. And so I think why I'm so public about it is that I really believe people need to stop having these constraints on what they can do and why they can do it. I've been speaking about trying to build a business like Midday Squares for as long as I could remember. And it was always like that's just not obtainable for you. That's not possible. And then when I grew up, though, I had this really unique experience of being able to see something. And you know, this is where privilege comes into play. I think my dad was an immigrant from Italy. He came over at the same time as this other family roughly called the Caputos. And he became very close with one of these gentlemen. And I had the good fortune of my dad passed away when I was 10, but up until then.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Chocolate bars had existed, but all of the bars in the plant based category that had function and used chocolate were not using real chocolate. They were using chocolate couvature, which is palm kernel oil-based chocolate. And it's really shitty. It's like a thin little one millimeter chocolate experience On the real chocolate report, what was fascinating is every single bar that was there was rectangular in nature and really thick. And that's where that moment was. And Les, who's now my wife, was my wife at the time, was making this product for me. We were roommates. And it was just like, this is the thing that we got to bring to market. And that was 2017. We went. We went and made that product happen because I felt that there was just a huge opportunity in chocolate.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “But from someone in MA, I love reports. Any type of reports, I love reading them. And I was just reading it. And what was so fascinating, I had heard through so much reading that plant-based proteins were on a tear, but the real chocolate report was really interesting. And so real chocolate is chocolate that can't use palm kern oil, has to be above 50% in cocoa mass, and can only use irregular sugar. So no sugar alcohols, none of that stuff. The report from 2009 to 2017, this type of chocolate was just seeing unprecedented numbers. And it was led by companies like Lint, Hugh Chocolate, and what was so fascinating to me when I was reading the report was everybody that was in the real chocolate category, and I think this is why largely big Titans in the industry missed it per se, is if you went to go look at the plant-based category, it looked like”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, so I like to say a lot of people like to put us in the bar category, but we're really trying to reinvent what a chocolate bar is. So Midi Squares, we call it a functional chocolate bar. The number one question I always get after is, well, what's a functional chocolate bar? It's meant to give you a little bit more than just that sweetness and that kick. So the whole bar was designed to curb cravings, give you hunger coverage until your next meal. We called a midday squares because you're supposed to be hitting it in the afternoon. But more importantly than anything, the hypothesis of the company has been simple. If Hershey's Nestle Mars started today, what those companies look like, in our opinion, they definitely would be bringing to market the chocolate bars that you know them so well for. My wife came up with the recipe fridge. She was making the product for a while. It was not obvious at all that this was going to be a business. And then what made it the business was I got a piece of data. I can't name it publicly.”

    2021-12-23 · Invest Like the Best · Nick Saltarelli - One Foot in Front of the Other - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 54] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source