"Imagine if you just did the f'ing work."
Casey Bard had a decent side hustle on Shopify and a full-time job... until he got a call from his boss letting him know that he no longer he had a job because the company leadership may be going to jail. That was the turning point where Casey knew his Shopify side hustle had to become his full-time income. This is the story of how Tacticalories Seasoning Company came to be.
Takeaways:
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
3/2/2021
Casey Bard: So, cool. How you been, man? Is this officially the longest-
Kurt Elster: Courtship?
Casey Bard: Courtship. Yeah, we were in the courting phase for three years.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, I think they get around. But we’re recording, so today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, I am joined by Casey Bard, who I have wanted to get on this show for a long time, but I’m glad I waited because he has quite the journey and story to tell. And last night, we screwed up our dinner. We did. We set out to make lo mein-
Casey Bard: Your family. Not me. Yep.
Kurt Elster: Yes. We set out to make lo mein and the lo mein had turned green. It had gone bad and so instead we made some NUGGS. Some chicken NUGGS. Some tendies. And I love when that happens, because that’s when I break out my favorite wing sauce: Tacticalories HELLDIVER wing sauce, which is good because A, this sells out all the time. It’s tough to get. Limited edition product. Very, very delicious. And to discuss that is the founder of Tacticalories and creator of this delicious wing sauce, among a whole bunch of other things that have really livened up my food. I’m thrilled to have him here. Casey Bard from Tacticalories. Casey, thank you for joining us.
Casey Bard: Thank you, man. I’m super excited. I mean, Kurt, you’ve been such an instrumental part of this whole game. I think I’d still be here without you. I think I’d be here without Shopify. But it would be a lot more challenging. I would have spent a lot more money and it wouldn’t have been as fun or… It would have been a different trip. You know, I think that you’re somebody I look to as one that saved me a lot of time and money. And as a business, as somebody coming from the standard, this is like such a prototypical… The big boy, six figure salary job, trying to start my own thing, being able to kind of take that first step with some guidance and with a little bit of a plan, not a perfect plan, but some ideas, it’s been really amazing.
So, I just want to thank you, too. I’ll have to cut you the commission check here soon.
Kurt Elster: Just keep me awash in wing sauce and I… More than even. That’s how much this flavor is worth to me. But no, thank you.
Casey Bard: Appreciate that.
Kurt Elster: I appreciate that. And you know, that’s really… That’s why I do it, is to champion entrepreneurship and to help make the… to encourage people and help make the journey easier along the way. But this isn’t about me. I want to know about you. I want to know about Tacticalories. What the heck is Tacticalories?
Casey Bard: My first concept with Tacticalories was to start a blog account where I could speak, I could use my background in nutrition, and speak to a population that I felt like needed some help, and that’s like the tactical population. Law enforcement, first responders. I did like a three gun shoot, like basically an accuracy competition one time, and I brought my meals, and I brought my hydration, and I brought all this stuff to this event, and all these guys that their lives depend on… I mean, they’re law enforcement, they’re wearing a lot of colors of green and a lot of letters on their vests, they’re eating fucking corn dogs for lunch, you know?
They’re all sitting around, and I just thought to myself, I’m like, “Listen, my life doesn’t depend on it and I’m taking it this seriously, the health and fitness, nutrition end, and these guys are just… Their life very much depends on it.” And our life, as civilians. Our life depends on their preparedness. And you guys are just fucking up. So, I remember saying, “Listen, this is an interesting spot.” I’m not really interested in helping in a clinical setting. My field work I did with cancer patients, and HIV patients, and that’s too much with me. I’m not interested in it.
So, my heart wasn’t in that, so I thought as far as performance nutrition it would be interesting to work with the tactical population, because I liked a lot of the people that I met there. So, I came up with a Venn diagram. I said, “I have to make a nutrition company name.” Let’s think of some things I like. I like guns, knives, camping, flashlights that are too bright, stuff like that, so what are some-
Kurt Elster: Flashlights that are too bright.
Casey Bard: Right, so-
Kurt Elster: I have my fair share of flashlights that are too bright.
Casey Bard: Knives that are too sharp, guns that cost too much money, flashlights that are too bright, too much-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You just defined tacticool, that niche. That’s what that is, is like, “Let’s take something kind of engineering nerdy and very… and then just make it over the top aggressive and excessive, and just ultimately a fun engineering project.”
Casey Bard: Yeah. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: As a kid, I thought flashlights were cool. Now, oh my gosh, they’re exceptionally cool.
Casey Bard: Like when you have a flashlight that is dangerous is where it starts to cross-
Kurt Elster: Yes! Or you’re like, “This thing’s warm.”
Casey Bard: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, I thought, “You know what?” So, I put a Venn diagram. I very literally had it on a whiteboard, and I said, “What are some words around all these things I just said?” Guns, knives, flashlights, all that stuff. So, I just put a bunch of words up there that kind of meant something to me. And then on the right side I put, “Now, what else do I want?” Nutrition, right? So, tactical nutrition, so food, protein, steaks, brisket, all these different things over here. So, what I eventually did was find through the use of a Venn diagram tactical calories. Hey, that C-A-L at the end of tactical, C-A-L in calories, Tacticalories actually is kind of cool and it kind of tells… Man, I could do a lot of stuff with this.
So, I start writing and I’m like, “You know what? But Tacticalories kind of lends itself to a tactical approach to food consumption or a tactical approach to readiness, right?” So, I’m thinking I can probably make a consumer product here, too. It’s not just around diet coaching. Because that doesn’t… Eventually, that got kind of old where it was just like, “Here’s what to eat.” Once I had kids, I realized it wasn’t as easy as following a meal plan, you know?
Kurt Elster: Right.
Casey Bard: It was like prior to kids, oh yeah, I can just do whatever the fuck I want. But after that… So, I started to kind of say like let’s create this consumer product that I can sell, because this is what I’m doing in my day job anyway. Let’s produce a low barrier of entry, low cost, because I can’t afford a ton. I mean, I can invest a couple grand in this startup, not a ton. I don’t want to get into the firearms industry, because I’m not a… I don’t know anything about guns. And I’m not a forger, and I can’t do knives, so that’s kind of all out. I don’t want to start a coffee company like everybody else. I don’t want to start a beard oil company like everybody else. What can I do that is really me? Because I think that that’s the basis and that’s kind of what my first takeaway was.
If anyone’s listening to… If they’re still in that brainstorming phase, it’s like what I did was I found what’s really me, so that when I invest and I go to events, or I immerse myself in this, I really like it. I’m really interested in it. And it almost grows exponentially because of that, right?
Kurt Elster: It drives you.
Casey Bard: It drives me. This is all I do.
Kurt Elster: I love this idea that you said, “Okay, Venn diagram, what’s the overlap of things I’m interested and things that are practical to sell?” And you came up with such a atypical idea that I don’t think anyone else would think of, and your approach, like the moment you see it, you immediately gotta go, “What?” Like when you hear Tacticalories and you see the labels, you go, “I gotta know more.” And it’s inexpensive, and so it’s easy to try, and then once you do, you’re like, “Oh, man. It’s really good.”
Casey Bard: So, I started to say a few minutes ago, I talked about at 14 I was making my own food, right?
Kurt Elster: Right.
Casey Bard: So, essentially I’m 34, so for the last 20 years I’ve been cooking my own food, and now cook for my wife, and kids, and last weekend for 100 people, so in that I started… Once I got to college, I had a really cool deal with the bodybuilders that I lived with. They said, “We’re too meatheaded. We just do steroids in our parents’ basements. I don’t really know how to cook.” So, I just go, “Okay, I do, so if you guys buy food, I’ll cook it.”
Okay, so this is in college, and they would do that, and then what I would do is I would go buy like Montreal steak seasoning and add like hickory smoke to it, or Montreal steak, Kickin’ Chicken and add some habanero powder to it, just to kind of liven it up. I was making my own sauces, making my own… Nothing too crazy. It was usually a base and then I would take a different direction, you know? So, fast forward, that was in my… around 20. Now, I’m around 30, trying to figure out how to create a business. I go, “What if I did what I used to do, where I make my own seasonings and sell them?”
And really, my kind of proof of concept was I guess my… Where I realized that there could potentially be interest is I walked into a grocery store and there’s levels, right? So, there’s levels to everything. If you walk in, they have all the produce right up front, there’s crappy produce and there’s organic, high end, crazy produce, right? The meat, the same way. There’s choice stuff or there’s crazy, prime, you go right to a butcher and get… There’s levels on everything. Beer is a really good example. You can go get Miller Lite or you can get your local craft beer, and people don’t… I mean, I like craft beer. I’ll pay 25 bucks for a four pack with a promise, right? With cool marketing, and a cool company, and a cool story.
So, you can keep going all around in your grocery store, then you get to the spice rack and it’s fucking bland, and that is a pun, like intentional, right? So, it is bland, there’s nothing going on. So, I thought to myself, “Why not?” I mean, there’s local barbecue sauces, everyone has kind of like a regional barbecue sauce, but McCormick has it on lock in terms of the dry rubs. So, I said, “What a fucking open book here.” What if I took what I know about marketing small consumer goods, took some of these ideas from my college age, because these rubs, I still make them, you know what I mean? I just… I don’t sell them. I just make them. Salt, pepper, garlic, and then some other special ingredients. What if I do this? What if I start selling it?
So, I invested 500 bucks. My first batch, I did by myself in my bathtub. I mean, that’s like metaphorically, but-
Kurt Elster: Not literally in your bathtub?
Casey Bard: No. We bought all the bowls, and everything was done to… I have a little bit of a background in good manufacturing practices with touring all these nutraceutical facilities and stuff, so I kind of had an idea of how to turn my house into that. Very, very first batch was done, I fucked everything up. My product weight, I ended up… Little things, little mistakes like if it says five ounces on the outside, I filled it with five ounces of stuff and then what I forgot to do was tare the scale, so I included the… You know, so I sold, I underfilled essentially my first batch, which is a massive fine from a food compliance standpoint, so a lot of little things.
I utilized my friend to draw the labels, my other friend to print the labels, my other friend to help me fill, my… at that time they would have been like three-years-old kids to help me warehouse them in my little office. I mean, it was really unique, and I’ll tell you what, man. What was probably… If I’m addicted to things, one thing that became immediately addictive was the little cha-ching. And it’s something that this whole community… I don’t know if we talk enough about how impactful and how fulfilling that was after months of work, of this kind of concept, and now I’m making my own money. This is really me and this is a direct result of me putting time and effort into a project, and now it’s coming out, and every single one of those cha-chings was… I remember telling myself like, “I don’t know of a time when this isn’t going to be awesome.”
I can’t fathom scaling to the point where I’m not going to leave the cha-ching on. Fast forward, in November I had to turn the cha-ching off.
Kurt Elster: Which is… That’s the place you want to get to is when you’re making so many sales, you have to turn off the notifications.
Casey Bard: I did a product launch from a truck stop in mid-state Kentucky, near Lexington, Kentucky. I was driving to Georgia for a whitetail hunt and I had to do a product release. And I’m trying to figure out how to get out of this cesspool of humans and my fucking phone won’t work because it’s too busy cha-chinging so that my Waze app can’t help me get out of here, and I was like, “Oh my God.” I’m like, “I need to tell this story to Kurt.” This is such a point, like I’m sorry I’m inconveniencing you with too many sales. Doesn’t mean I’m not making mistakes, because I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the last 18 months.
Kurt Elster: Which I have in my notes here. I have mistakes, question mark, as one of the things to note down. So, when you started, you started, you’re selling your product, already you’re making mistakes, underfilling stuff.
Casey Bard: Yeah, what I was gonna say, there’s basically been two launches with this company. There was this dustbowl launch of just a side gig.
Kurt Elster: It’s a side hustle.
Casey Bard: And then in April of this year it’s gonna be two years from when I said, “You got your last paycheck. It’s first time in 20 years you’re not gonna get a… Somebody’s not gonna toss you a couple grand on Friday.” Right? So, there’s been very… There’s two very real… It’s the same company, but very different stress levels, very different severity of action.
Kurt Elster: So, you put this thing out there as a side hustle, you’re enjoying it, you’re making 20 to 30 grand a year off of it, which is a great supplemental income. We’re buying toys with it, which is totally fine. I’ve got my fair share of toys. And then, unexpectedly, through no fault of your own, you lose your job. And that was the thing, and I remember you called me, and we talked about it, and you said, “I think I’m just gonna scale Tacticalories. I’m going to go all-in on this and see what happens.” And of course, I encouraged you, and it worked out, and we’re lucky it did.
So, take me back to that. What is that… How did you make that decision and then what, when you said, “Okay, I’m gonna go full time with this.” What’s that look like in practice?
Casey Bard: So, I remember where I was sitting. I got basically two phone calls and one of them, I was sitting in a park. I had just got done taking a little hike over lunch and got a phone call from the president of the company and he was crying.
Kurt Elster: Oh, boy.
Casey Bard: I mean, he’s getting ready to go to prison, so he was crying, and he explained to me everything that… maybe some of the things I wasn’t clued into. And you know, I just sat there. I was like… Some of the ideas, I’ve tried to retain these for situations like this, where I can kind of explain this situation to other people that may be in similar situations. I thought a few different things. I thought one, I’m so thankful for my family. Namely, my wife, because this is about to get fucking weird, right?
I have kids. This isn’t just me. If I’m alone in a hurricane, I’m gonna just hunker down and everything’s gonna be fine. Now, I got baggage. I’m thankful for my wife, who has a corporate gig in the health insurance industry and everything’s good.
The second thing I thought is I’m really fucking glad this isn’t the time when… My friend, Matt Vincent, has a company called HVIII Brand Goods. H-V-I-I-I. HVIII. So, he had kind of gone through a similar situation. I remember him hearing this and it immediately resonated at that moment. He said when he lost his job he walked out and told his wife, “I just lost my job.” And what his initial thought was is, “I’m really glad I didn’t wait till today to start my apparel brand.” Right?
And that’s the first thing I thought, is like, “Oh my God. At least I have… Even if it’s a step stool, at least I can get off this ledge here.” At least I have something. 25 grand a year is at least something, right? I mean, I can buy milk with that, right?
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Casey Bard: So, those are the two things. I was so thankful that against, through the opposition… This is before. Now, everyone works from home. It’s accepted. When I worked from home, there was a time I got yelled at because they could hear birds in the background in a meeting. Right?
Kurt Elster: Geez.
Casey Bard: So, things weren’t accepted, like you need to be in the basement, you need to be doing work. You need to be putting it in. So, against all that, I lived two lives for a few years trying to build my side gig. So, when it finally snapped and this is all I have, it was almost like I had already made my bed, you know? I encourage people through and through. With minimal investment, try this and that. Try it. Because this felt natural. Once it started rolling, this was really my life, people really believe me. When I tell you something’s gonna do X or Y, I don’t have many people say, “Hey, it did J instead.” I tell the truth, you know? This is how it’s gonna… If this is a hot sauce and it’s not gonna be that hot, I’m honest. This is not the hottest thing you’ve ever had. It’s these flavors.
I’ve tried to retain all my honesty, all my integrity, customer service, all that stuff the whole way through. So, I knew at that time, sitting in that park, that I had a really great opportunity, as good as any. However, I was still valuable to other people. So, I said I have two different options. I can either be a consultant for the supplement industry, I could essentially take everything that I had learned, which was the pinnacle of this industry, and I could probably be very, very valuable. I could probably make two to three times what I was making. I get to put a suit on everyday. I get to fly all over and I get to tell people how to sell supplements.
And I just… To be honest, Kurt, when I turned like that early to mid-30s, I’m a lot more interested in brisket than I am creatine. You know? I don’t really… I’m not in love with that anymore. What I’m in love with is this stuff. So, fuck it. Maybe I’m leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table for this consulting gig. Because I mean, that’s the truth. I did. But it was also the time when my kids are… You know, they’re four years old once, and they’re two years old once. Two years old once, three, four, five, if I can find a way to be at home more and build something that’s my own, I kind of want to go to Disney and not worry about it.
When I went on my honeymoon, I was still running meetings from Jamaica.
Kurt Elster: Oh, geez.
Casey Bard: For this old company, because there was no lift, man. There was no lift. I sold my soul to them. I’m a ginger that had a soul and I sold it. So, you know, it’s one of those things. I do have a very unique story, but it’s one that kind of had to play out the way it did for everything to work the way it did.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely. Yeah. You have survivorship bias. Like in hindsight, everything seems like it really fell into place and it worked out. But it’s all by design and it’s by the opportunities you created for yourself.
Casey Bard: You know, people talk about negative self talk and I’ve never really been that. I mean, I look back and I’m like, “I’ve made a lot of fucking good decisions here.” You know what I’m saying? I’m very lucky, because I’m about due for a really poor one, you know? Generally, I try to use my heart and my goal, like what do I want? Plan your life the way that you want it. Do you want an office with a bazooka in the background? Yes.
Kurt Elster: I was just staring at it and I was gonna say, “Hold on. Is there a grenade launcher?”
Casey Bard: A single shot rocket launcher. Yeah, it’s an AT4. But you get one shot, buddy. Pick it.
Kurt Elster: It’s a metaphor and it’s a rocket launcher.
Casey Bard: It’s a metaphor, bro. Relax. If you have that opportunity right now, I mean, you’re basically set free. You know, it’s basically I just got a divorce. You know, like do you need to recalibrate or are you gonna go right back to what you just left? I get to recalibrate now, and I get to do whatever the fuck I want, and why not at least try this? Am I going to put 40 years now into Tacticalories? I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m doing in two months out. Kurt, this is the reason I haven’t done this yet, is because I can’t… I mean, as early as this morning, I was trying to… It took a lot for me to get on this meeting. It’s not easy, but because I love it, and I love everything that I do, every single day, I wake up with anxiety like when you’re going on vacation, like that positive, like, “Ooh, I get to go do something.” I do that every fucking day now.
And my face looks different, my voice is different, my body’s different now, all because I’m building my temple, you know what I’m saying?
Kurt Elster: No, absolutely. I want to go back to the relaunch. When this thing becomes your full-time gig, and it has… One, how has it done? How has that gone? And two, how’d you do it?
Casey Bard: Okay. That’s a really good… Now, you know, I told myself, I had to ask myself, “Am I gonna share numbers and stuff on this?” And you know, it doesn’t really matter, because I don’t really care. Regardless of any way, I talk to people pretty loosely about everything. And what I’ve seen last 18 months, closing in on two years, is I knew I had to start planning things to make this real, so how do I do that? And this is what I really want to kind of dive into with you. I took a look at the industry and saw what they’re doing, and generally what it is is other people making products. It’s a copacking agreement or some type of private labeling agreement, okay?
Kurt wants to start Kurt’s rubs and he finds somebody to make him these rubs and he orders a couple thousand at a time and he markets them, okay? What I found is that much like the supplement industry, it’s hard to really keep a fire for more than that single product launch. And everybody does the same thing. Here’s our whole line all at once, or our spring collection. Boom, there it is, right?
It’s super convenient for the customer, because they can buy what they want. Right now, they can kind of pick if they want… You know, I just want steak seasoning and all the other stuff’s all hot, so I’m just gonna kind of… Or in the apparel industry, it’s like I can match things in this collection, right? And what I found was it was really hard, I could always see struggle in these other companies’ social media presences in staying relevant, because all their… They folded. Their cards are out. What do you do? If you have four products, you release them in a collection, what do you do week seven? I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. What do you do?
Casey Bard: What do you do? I don’t know. That’s a good question. Share another… Hire a photographer to take more interesting pictures of rubs sitting beside meat. I mean, how much can you do that? Now, the successful people, somebody I see, a company that I used to watch a lot is Huckberry. They do a really good job. Now, that’s different. They’re not a manufacturer. They’re a retailer. I get it. But what I found is they had their general vibe, their general… It’s kind of like this is how all, everything you find here is going to be here. But they did such a good job of always showing me something that was kind of currently relevant, whether it be seasonality, whether it be current world topics, whether it just be things I purchased from them in the past. Things like that.
They did a really, really good job of keeping things fresh and keeping this kind of… So, at that point, I thought to myself, “This is almost like a subscription box that isn’t a subscription box, because I can order what I want.” But I’m finding myself buying from these few retailers not once a month, sometimes once a week. You know, if they make it kind of advantageous for me to buy like that.
So, I thought to myself, what if I started to do this, where I have all these recipes, I have all these ideas. Why do I have to put them all out at once? You know, is it capital? Is it manpower? What is it? And I think that there’s… Each brand is gonna have a different answer for that. But what it allows me to do is give 100% GAF score. Do you know what a GAF score is?
Kurt Elster: No.
Casey Bard: The amount of give a fuck that you put into something. G-A-F, right? So, I can put 100% GAF into a honey habanero dry rub. The output tends to be… and this isn’t just me, this is you listening, like somebody listening, the amount of GAF that can be applied towards that product if it is… if I’m only focused on one, two, three things, is way higher than if I’m trying to do an all out new launch, like a big collection. It’s just impossible, especially with a small brand like mine. I only have four employees here, so we can only do so much per day. We only can turn so much out.
So, I thought to myself this is a really good… What if I just managed residual product launches? Because product launches are pretty exciting. I get to… I’ve studied everything that Ezra’s written on product. Ezra Firestone. Everything that he’s written. And he and I worked together really, really closely prior to 2020. They have used my testimonial. I used Zipify Pages until I eventually hired a designer in house that can apply this stuff, and I still… It’s an incredible product, but in order to keep these residual… the residual income, I had to be able to sell things where they had to be able to reside more commonly.
The cadence, the product release cadence had to be higher. So, I know it doesn’t work for everybody’s brand, but if there is a way that you can essentially hold back, sell a product at a time, figure out ways… There’s all these different things on what you can do once you drop a product. You can complement them. You can contrast them. I mean, that right there, now we have three products. You know? So, that was really kind of what I thought. I thought, “I like making money every 10 days.” I like a big drop every 10 days, because what I’ve found is if you do that average, it’s way higher than if I start dropping… What I started doing was dropping once a month, which was attainable. Now, it’s every four to 10 days we’re doing a new product.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. On the receiving end of it, it feels like once a week to every other week, and it 100%... I know what’s going on. And 100%, it still works on me. The urgency and the scarcity makes me buy. And I know like I have… My cabinet is all Tacticalories and I know which ones I’m low on, and so I just watch the launches, and if it’s something interesting, I’ll try it, because I know that however you describe it is exactly how it’s gonna taste. You mentioned earlier, like honesty and authenticity is important, and certainly it is. When you have to describe the product to someone especially.
And then knowing, “Oh, hey, I’m low on wing sauce. I don’t know if he’s gonna have wing sauce when I run out, so all right, I’ll just buy three bottles right now because this is my chance.” It totally works and I pay attention to it.
Casey Bard: Well, and the other thing that we do is like people try to call my bluff all the time. And it works, it was like inherently for inventory management, like how many bottles do I have? 100? Perfect. So, everyone always says like, “Oh, that’s a good thing. Oh, you’re selling out, that’s a good thing.” Now, what we faced moving into the… You know, you had asked about what about 2020, right? So, what happened in 2020, to cap it, we grew four times. 4X in 2020, okay?
Kurt Elster: Whoa!
Casey Bard: Yeah, so that had some inherent challenges. We hit some crazy numbers that I never thought this was gonna become, you know? But with that, we ran into some manufacturing issues, because guess what? The same plastic that we use for seasoning bottles is the same plastic they use for hand sanitizer bottles. So, there’s no clear plastic. You cannot source pellets from Asia. There’s nothing. Nothing. McCormick was… They have their own facility to produce… It’s not that we can’t produce it, it’s that we do not have the raw material to produce it. They have the machinery; they just don’t have the raw materials. There was a lot of imbalances in the spice trade because of travel issues and importation issues. Lids, black lids, red lids, lids with flippers, lids without flippers, that was my 2020, is trying to say, “Hey, guys. This batch of X seasoning may be in a pouch. Is that cool?”
I had people, “I don’t give a fuck if it’s in a baggie, dude. Just send it.” So, what a lot of people… It’s not that easy. I have… I’m sitting on right now at any given time, I have $20,000 in labeling. I just… It has to be compliant. I can only fit 4.3 ounces of this rub in these pouches. I can’t put a five ounce sticker on it. So, now my designer has to redesign it. I have to figure out how many servings there are in here. I have to have everything approved through my manufacturing process. Then I have to have it printed, and that takes a week. And then by the time I finally have it printed, and because of the low volume I’m doing, it costs me 50 cents a thing.
All these different things caused issues, so I grew four times in terms of revenue, but I had to spend a shitload more than I’ve ever had to spend to just assure that the brand was… and I had to make some quick hires. I had to make some quick build outs. I mean, this is… Since, what is it, the 10th of February, so February 10th, 2020, this is the third building we’ve been in since then. So, we did three. You know, two moves in 2020 through it, too. We moved in July and we moved in November.
It was a lot of fun. I’m already trending to… I mean, January crushed January 2020, so my big thing is what I’ve found is in my customer ecosystem, people stay pretty happy, because I’ve… Like you’ve brought up, it’s a relatively inexpensive product. Up until 2020, I had never had a return. You know, so we had already done like 10,000-
Kurt Elster: Wow.
Casey Bard: 10,000 orders without a return, so people were like… I had a guy message me, “What’s your return policy?” And I’m like, “Funny you say that. I don’t have one. I’ve never had to. Why? What’s going on?” And he just said… I remember the first return was, “My son bought me the same product my wife did, and I don’t need two grill baskets.” So, like okay, well, here’s your money back. Give it to somebody. Because it costs too much to ship back. He’s like… That’s pretty much what my return policy is now.
So, learning all these different things, 2020 was such a trial by fire, you know?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Casey Bard: I mean, it was positive and negative at the same time. Coming out of it, it was wild. Everybody started eating at home. We were a little different, because we’re in New York, so it hit us a little early. We had to figure out how to manage the COVID protocols just in our own warehouse. Shipping and receiving, we were doing single occupancy, but we were doing it 24 hours a day. So, we essentially had three eight-hour shifts throughout the day.
The guys in the warehouse were amazing. They took it with stride. It’s been crazy to be… All the sanitization that we’ve had to do with all the packaging, and we’ve still maintained a majority of those practices now. Things are a little bit different, but we’ve maintained a lot of that stuff.
Kurt Elster: Oh, absolutely. You mentioned you’re sitting on 20 grand in labels and I have noticed your branding and your labels are always amazing.
Casey Bard: Thank you.
Kurt Elster: Talk to me about these labels. How are you… How is your shit so cool? That’s what I want to know.
Casey Bard: I do mushrooms and go into the woods every weekend and I conceptualize, and I use a former tattoo artist.
Kurt Elster: Aha!
Casey Bard: So, that’s like the secret, that it’s not a secret. Find somebody who’s a dope drawer. You know? It’s so funny, like don’t… Like fuck Fiver. I mean, Fiver’s great for a lot of things. But being able to work with a true artist… At first, he was charging me. Now I was lucky enough, I was able to bring him on full-time this year with everything that was going on. A lot of these tattoo artists, they do relatively inexpensive illustration that’s really, really good. They’re good at putting ideas on paper. You go in, you’re like, “I want a John Deere tractor with a potato driving it,” and all these crazy things, and they do it, right? And you see this-
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Casey Bard: There’s one on every corner. They’re classically trained to take crazy ideas and turn them into reality. I was lucky enough that the design that Chris provides is very similar to… He’s drawn a lot of my tattoos. I like his style. That’s me. Again, this is kind of… It all comes back to Casey. I’ve kind of joked because the flavor, it’s usually like, “Let me taste it and then I’ll build the marketing around it.” If I get COVID, I’m fucked, because I can’t lose my sense of smell and taste, because I’m the nucleus here.
So, that’s really… Just the fact that I’m a little bit of an asshole, I’m a little bit of I’ve been through a lot, I’ve been forged, so all these ideas, I mean that’s… If I’m good at anything, it’s probably that. Everything else is kind of a learned thing. I don’t have many tips on how to be more creative, so lean on people that are. I think that tattoo artists in some parts of the country right now are completely out of work. It’s a really good opportunity to spend $100 to $150 to have amazing artwork done. Now, I was lucky enough, again, to find someone that understands that these do have to be converted to digital eventually, and now he… Chris does all of my work from my… actually the design, to he actually does the full digital design of my labels, too. So, I appreciate it.
Kurt Elster: And they’re quite extraordinary.
Casey Bard: It’s fun.
Kurt Elster: If you are in doubt, you should check it out.
Casey Bard: I appreciate it.
Kurt Elster: You are just nonstop winning. Give me something you screwed up.
Casey Bard: Ooh. I’m not nonstop winning, but I may… I play that on TV. One thing I screwed up in 2020 was I was forced into growing pretty quickly. I attempted to hire somebody to basically CEO a second brand, paid him up front, because that was part of the deal, and I don’t have many details that I really even want to visit, but I paid him up front for about a month, month and a half, gave him some equity in the company, and he didn’t produce. So, trying to unfuck that relationship was very, very expensive. You know.
So, that’s kind of the big one. When I think of the big, tens of thousands challenge, that was that one. Some other challenges and some other bumps, listening to other people has been a blessing and a curse. So, as I’ve continued to move through, I’ve just reminded, am I confident in myself so far? Which, I’ve always been confident, so I don’t know how it is to not be confident in my business, so I’m sure there are people that are like-
Kurt Elster: That’s a great problem to have.
Casey Bard: Yeah, but I’m sure there’s people that aren’t in that situation, right? Like, “Well, I don’t know what I’m doing.” Well, ask yourself what to do and make that first step, you know? Do I regret hanging onto my big boy job as long as I did? I don’t think, because it was paying my bills, and that’s I think the basis of all this, with a family… That’s what I had to do at the time.
I don’t know, man. I can’t think of a ton of mistakes. You know, I’ve kept my… I’ve tried to keep my customers as happy as I possibly can. I’ve tried to answer every big promise that I put out there, I’ve tried to answer it accurately. I don’t have a ton of big, big mistakes. I wish I did. That would make for good TV.
Kurt Elster: No, that’s good. That is perfectly good. I want to move you to the lightning round. So, in your business, what’s one thing you do every day that you wish you could automate?
Casey Bard: Well, I’m working on this afternoon having a girl come in to interview for this position, but customer service has become something that I look back at the automation of my brand… What am I willing to kind of give up? Customer service I don’t believe has to still be done by me and it still is, you know? It’s every broken bottle, every missed shipment is still kind of managed by me, and what I find is it’s taking me away from really what’s moving the company forward.
Ours are so unique, I find it really challenging to automate. Not that… Driving down the highway is pretty challenging too, but Tesla did a pretty good job from what I’ve seen, so I think it could be done, but it’s just like me having the confidence to kind of pass off customer service to somebody that has no frame of reference is gonna be really challenging. I just don’t know how that would work, so that is one of them.
One thing I don’t ever want to automate is the concept and design phase, you know?
Kurt Elster: Right. I think that’s where you have the vision and the taste, and you need to drive it.
Casey Bard: Well ,and kind of as a… To kind of cap this, it’s like to know what you do, like what I just happen to do well, I do customer service really well, but should I be doing it? Probably not, right? But I’m also… It’s okay that I’m doing it, because it’s saving me money and it’s the only reason that I can keep paying paychecks and that I can keep moving on is because I haven’t just hired out everyone. I still own 100% of the company. I’ve never taken any money from anybody else, you know? I’ve borrowed some and I’ve paid it back. Period.
So, I don’t have that big bank account to just hire a staff. It’s really been built like a cabin in the woods, like this is what we have today, this is what I can accomplish today, and that’s really what I’ve done.
Kurt Elster: All right, two questions left and then we’re leaving, because I want to go make-
Casey Bard: I know. I’m getting hungry.
Kurt Elster: … some wing sauce. What’s something that Shopify merchants or entrepreneurs in general are obsessed with that you just don’t get the point of?
Casey Bard: Letting somebody else do all the work, drop shipping.
Kurt Elster: Drop shipping.
Casey Bard: You know, the whole drop shipping thing doesn’t really make sense. I pop in and out of some of these Facebook groups and one of the challenges, I’m like, “Imagine if you just did the fucking work. Imagine that! Imagine that! Imagine if you just bought a few hundred inventory or whatever that number is. Imagine if you shipped from the States. Imagine if you fucking owned something, you know? Imagine if you took a risk on yourself.”
If you really believe this enough to steal somebody else’s money, then believe it and put some… Roll the dice a little bit. I find that really challenging and I’m really holding back.
Kurt Elster: You know, the next question was what’s something weird that you recommend everyone tries at least once, and I think you just answered with it. Imagine if you just did the fucking work! That’s fabulous.
Casey Bard: I agree.
Kurt Elster: We’re sticking with that. I love it.
Casey Bard: Imagine that.
Kurt Elster: Man. That’s got me excited.
Casey Bard: Yeah, me too. Me too.
Sound Board: Crowd applause.
Casey Bard: Very few sound bites today.
Kurt Elster: You know, what happened was I cleaned the desk and I moved the sound board, and it’s just too far away. I’ve really gotta lean. I just need to move it back. I’ll do that when I get off the call here. Casey, this has been absolutely thrilling. I love it. Shared some great stories, some anecdotes. I hope this was inspiring for people. It should be. It was inspiring for me!
Casey Bard: Cool. Good.
Kurt Elster: Where can people go to get some sauce?
Casey Bard: So, you know what’s crazy is we talked about how good of a name Tacticalories, but nobody knows how to spell it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Casey Bard: Not nobody, because obviously some people do, but the word tactical and the word calories together, but not tactical calories. So, Tacticalories. So, dot com.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. T-A-C-T-I-Calories.
Casey Bard: Yeah. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Like tactic, alories.
Casey Bard: Exactly. Tacticalories.
Kurt Elster: Tactical. Ories.
Casey Bard: I’m sure you’ll link it.
Kurt Elster: And I put it in the show notes, of course.
Casey Bard: Yeah. Instagram. We started the TikTok thing. I just don’t dance a lot. We have a lot going on and I’m working with some new content creators, so it’s a blast, man. Instagram is really where you’d find us, @Tacticalories. We’re always giving stuff away. Always selling stuff. And we have a product launch tonight, my friends. 7:00 PM. Raspberry rum chipotle salsa. We’re doing our relaunch of it. I think the last time we sold it; it was out in a day. We have another 1,200 jars of it we’re labeling right now. We’re getting ready to sell it tonight.
So, launch more products residually. Hold some back. Don’t put it all out at once. Don’t show all your cards. Plan it out even if it’s every… If it’s once a month, start there. Figure out a way to launch a new product, whether it’s either be competing or complementary, once per month.
Kurt Elster: I will… My advice is listen to Casey, for he is wise, and grab yourself something delicious from Tacticalories.com.
Casey Bard: And guess what? I’m not gonna give a coupon code because I’m anti-coupon code these days.
Kurt Elster: No. Yeah, no. No. We don’t need to devalue your brand.
Casey Bard: I know that’s like a thing. That’s a thing. Yeah. It’s a thing. Buy full price, you know? If you liked what I had to say, buy full price. Or don’t. You know, contact me if you do listen to this and let me know what you have to offer. I would love to be able to potentially purchase it or not.
Kurt Elster: Are you gonna drop your email?
Casey Bard: No.
Kurt Elster: No? How do they get ahold of you?
Casey Bard: No. @Tacticalories.
Kurt Elster: All right. I got it. We will… Well, I hope some people reach out, and let me know. Let me know what you find. Casey, thank you. We’ll leave it there.