YouSaid · the spoken record

Roger Dahle

lines on the record
68
first
2021-07-20
most recent
2021-07-20
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Does yeah up until really the last year and a half we hardly spend any money on social media all of it was aimed and spent on TV marketing and our TV marketing budget was X but we always spent X minus because we'd run out of inventory and I want to advertise on TV when I can't supply it and just make customers mad so we pulled back on TV advertising every year for the last three and a half four years And we've made a directional change in that we're starting to split that budget up less on TV, more on social media. And like I said earlier, over time, I see that the majority of our spend will probably be on social media, but I'll still do TV traditional advertising. The other thing that we've done is kind of gone to the streaming services, the OTT stuff, and we're creating our own content there to put on those channels. We have a relationship with a guy named Bruce Mitchell.”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “It kind of changes over time. They've all done well. TikTok has just exploded over the last 12 months. It's just gone nuts. But as far as driving revenue back to the company, probably Facebook right now”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “How much are you invested into platforms? You said you have a videographer, you have a chef, you have photographers. Do you think of that as your YouTube team? Do you think that as your TikTok team or are they responsible for all the platforms?”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “We think about everything, right? We consider all options and all opportunities as they present themselves to us. But, you know, we're just pretty simple. We're just driving a brand. We're watching our social media every single day. We're using the influence that we can. When we spend money, it's for advertising. It's not necessarily for creating huge numbers of followers, if that makes sense. We don't spend money doing that. We spend money advertising our brand and what you can cook on a blackstone and how fun it is. And everything else drives behind that just naturally.”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Of a combination of developing a relationship with these individuals and them taking the initiative on their own to do these kind of things. And then us contacting them a lot of times they would contact us. And just over time, the relationships developed and it turned into kind of what it is today.”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Do we have a culinary trained chef on staff? He lives in Florida, but he also has a unique set of skills in that he is a phenomenal behind the camera guy editing and everything else that goes along with that. Helps in a lot of ways besides being a chef and cooking for us every day. He does a phenomenal job behind the scenes. We have another influencer that's on staff, full-time employee of the company, and he travels around and does road shows at different retailers, does the griddlemore tour with Walmart. So we have a wide variety of people that have come to us naturally by Engaged with the brand on their own online, and then we watch those sites and then contacted those people at a point in time and they became part of the team”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “And they gather more information, and then they figure out where to go make a purchasing decision. So really, in 2015 is where I look to is really where we really started to resonate with the end user customer. And they really started to learn about Blackstone. So there was a good seven, eight years in there where I was incubating the product, keeping it alive, but the revenue that it generated during that timeframe wasn't enough as a standalone company, not even close. But when I finally got the product launched with enough retailers that it made sense, I divested myself of all my other business interests and focused 100% on Blackstone, and that was 2015.”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Forth between mom and dad, and no one giving them an answer. So that's really what happened in the middle there, and it really took time to get it out in front of the consumer and make them aware, number one, of this style of cooking, and number two of our brand. And it wasn't really a pandemic that did that or TikTok. It was really we started doing TV advertising. I'd spent some time in the Infomercial world and had a few of those stripes on my back from learning hard lessons. And so I brought in some people who knew a lot about TV advertising and marketing. And I said, I'm going to spend money on TV. I don't care if I lose money. I want to advertise my brand and I want to advertise our style of cooking. And I didn't even have, to this day, we don't even have an 800 number to call an order. It's just informational drive people to our website, which drives them to Amazon, which drives them to Walmart.com, depot.com, all the websites.”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “So, building our brand was important. We were cooking a different way. That was different. And that took time for the customer to perceive that. Even though everybody walks up to a griddle and goes, oh, that's cool. I've never seen that before. Where can I get one? So a lot of those things were happening as we just kind of incubated along. The other thing that was really challenging is who was going to sell this product? Where did it fit? I would show up at retailers where I thought it would make a lot of sense, like some of the hardware channels. And they'd look at it and they'd say, that looks too much like a sporting goods product. And we don't have sporting goods in our chain, so we can't sell that. It's not a traditional gas grill. So I would go to sporting goods retailers and they'd say, that's too big for us. It won't fit on the shelf. You need to go show that to lawn and garden buyers. And I'd go to lawn and garden buyers and they'd say, yeah, that looks like sporting goods. So it's kind of like a kid getting tossed back.”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “At the time, I was running other businesses that I was involved with, and I like to call that time frame an incubation period for Blackstone. I knew it was a great product. There was no question in my mind, this is an item that needs to be at retail. The other thing that was unique for me is it was the first chance I had to really create a brand because all the products I was doing at that time were private label or celebrity-endorsed or somebody else's brand and we were just selling them to retailers because I had a lot of strength in that area and good relationships. But Blackstone was always there and it took a while for it to really catch on, right? Because people who cook food outside traditionally think that your steak has to have serial lines on it for it to taste good. So we had to fight that perception. Number two, no one had ever heard of Blackstone. And a lot of people still haven't heard of Blackstone.”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “The first ones that we sold were to a local retailer in Salt Lake City in Utah called Sportsman's Warehouse. At the time they had about 75 stores. And they're kind of hunting, camping, outdoor type company, so it seemed that it would fit for them because it is somewhat portable and a little bit easier to move around than a traditional gas grill. So we figured people could take it to camp or Boy Scouts or things like that. And they're the first customer to buy it. And that was probably 2006.”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Well, the first one that I made was on a yellow notepad with ruler in my pencil, and I kind of sketched it out and got it as big as I wanted it to be. 36 inches seemed to be a really nice size by 20 inches deep. At the time, I had started my own business in marketing products to retailers, and we were always trying to come up with new ideas. I'm an habitual entrepreneur, if you will. And so we're always coming up with ideas. And I had this griddle in the back of my mind. So I drew it up on a piece of paper. The time I had a guy working for me who traveled to China and did our sourcing for us on other product lines. I said, go over there and find me a factory that could build this thing for me. Explained what I want. And it took about a year of sourcing a good factory and finding the right one and prototypes going back and forth. And at the time, I didn't have any inside engineering, so I was really...”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “But you couldn't go to a store. And so, in the back of my mind, I always had this idea somebody needs to make a griddle that you can go buy at the store so you can cook breakfast on it. And that's really what got me started with it.”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Really got inspired with the idea years ago, even as a young boy, the first time I saw a flat top grill being used was with my dad. And every year he would take me to the local lions club 4th of July breakfast that they cooked on homemade, I guess you could call them griddles. And these were big pieces of steel that guys figured out how to put fire underneath it and heat it up and cook breakfast on. And I always thought that was neat. And then as I got older in my local community, I noticed that for large family gatherings, for Boy Scout events, just family parties, people who wanted to cook breakfast somehow they were getting these big griddles and they weren't commercial ones coming out of restaurants. They were mainly homemade or just made at some welding shop. Later in life, as I got into my career and started doing what I'm doing, I again was intrigued by”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Was doing some research on Blackstone before he came on. I found some of your patents, you're listed as the inventor of a lot of different elements of the Blackstone griddle. Tell me how that went. Were you in the garage hammering out griddle tops? And you're like, this is a product of the light bulb go off, the heavens open. Give me a sense of start to finish here.”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “We refer to ourselves as an outdoor cooking appliance company. We specialize in making only griddles, which is a flat top grill. Some people call them flat tops. We market and sell our products through US-based retailers, Walmart, Loe's, Depot, Dick's Sporting Goods. We have a wide variety of customers that we sell to, and a little bit direct to the consumer on our own website and direct to the consumer through a lot of those other retailers websites in Amazon.”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “It's nice to have you here. Blackstone, it's a product that has gone viral on YouTube and TikTok. Your company is pretty young. It's not been around for a long time. Give people a sense of what Blackstone Products is and what the Blackstone griddle is.”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Is now affected by the chip shortage. I keep saying in our production meetings that every company is a tech company, and this conversation is like the ultimate proof. Seriously, it might be one of my favorite episodes yet. Roger Dolly, CEO of Blackstone Products. Here we go. Roger Dalley, you're the CEO of Blackstone Products. Welcome to Decod”

    2021-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Blackstone became the darling of grill TikTok with CEO Roger Dahle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT