0 (2s):
Boom, shake the room, fire nation. JLD here with an audio master class on the truth behind launching companies to drop these value bombs. I have brought to Vinnie Tortorich on the mic. He's a best-selling author of fitness confidential. He has the fitness confidential podcast that gets a million downloads per month. And he's also the owner of purevitaminclub.com purecoffeeclub.com NSNGfoods.com in home of ultra fat products. So you can see this guy knows what he's talking about when it comes to launching companies. And we have a lot to share. When we get back fire nation from thanking our sponsors, looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, just like you to increase our profitability by an average of 104% per year, all for less money than it would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee.

0 (51s):
Schedule your free consultation today with clay Clark, a former small business administration entrepreneur of the year thrivetimeshow.com/fire thrivetimeshow.com/fire. Did you know that 97% of text messages get opened in 90% are opened within three minutes. You need to be texting your customers and podium can help for a limited time sign up for 20% off your plan at podium.com/fire. Vinnie say what's up to fire nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know.

1 (1m 28s):
Hello, fire nation. Glad to be back, John. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Wow. Something. Most people don't know. Well, you know, here's a deal. I'm a health and fitness expert, and most people know I've been into ultra cycling and ultra events and the whole thing. So oddly enough, I love to exercise. And of course I eat right and take care of my health. So people would think, Oh, well, fitness is the most important thing to this guy. And fitness may be well it's number one, but it may have a rival financial health has always been as important to me. You know, just watching my money, watching where it goes, protecting it, you know, investing in myself, not leaving it in the hands of other people.

1 (2m 16s):
So I look at, at financial fitness as, as much or more than I even do my own physical fitness.

0 (2m 24s):
I love hearing that for sure. And I mean, we actually had a really fun chat before I hit the record button here where both myself and Vinnie fire nation, we escaped California. We're not talking about the fires. We're talking about the insane taxes, which by the way, Vinnie, I don't know if you're so tracking this, but they're raising state taxes to 16.5% there that's just state taxes, which is absolutely mind blowing. The only problem I have with Vinnie, to be honest with you, fire nation is that he stopped about 1200 miles to shore. He, he needs to get into a boat, even a canoe paddle out into the Atlantic, come a little from Virginia Vinnie, angle yourself down towards the equator. Don't stop till you hit Porto Rico and come join the world of 4%.

0 (3m 8s):
My man, come on.

1 (3m 9s):
You know what? We actually talk about it because you know, my wife is European. So I could be anywhere in the world that has a computer. If I can run a computer, I could be anywhere in the world. And it felt so good leaving California and going to a quote unquote, normal state. But John we've talked about it. You know, I keep going, you know, my buddy, John, that guy's killing his. Yeah.

0 (3m 35s):
Okay. Let me just, let me just say this Vinnie, this is what I want to happen. I want you and your wife to come down, visit me for a weekend and I will blow your minds with the beauty and amazingness of the islands. And by the way, from st. John from San Juan international airport, we have direct flights to Germany, to Portugal. I mean, we're talking five hours in the air. You're in Europe. It's absolutely unbelievable. So that's for another time, but the invitation's always there. Vinnie. I would love to host you here. Love to, I want to talk right now about you and starting companies, because a lot of people and a lot of people in fire nation included, they think that they need to go directly to outside investors to go to venture capital, to raise all of this money before they even think about starting a company.

0 (4m 21s):
But you started a very successful vitamin company with zero outside investors. Talk to us about that. How did you pull that off?

1 (4m 29s):
Yeah. Yeah. I think you have my partner, Andy Schreiber in the vitamin business on the show at some point. And what had happened was look the whole time I was in California. And the reason I went there was to start up businesses. And every time I had a great idea, it turned out, man, I would have made like two or three pennies on a dollar because when you're borrowing someone else's money or you have these investors, they're taking the big financial hit, they're taking the big chance. And even though you've invented something, they want the lion's share of it. And when you go to a bank and beg a bank for money, first off, you have to have a, like a whole business plan written out in the whole thing.

1 (5m 10s):
And I, every time I went to a bank and said, I wanted to start a vitamin company, they were like, who are you? And why should we trust you? Even with my, with my plan in place? They were like, yeah, we don't think so. And so that's how that whole thing started. I got lucky that that was a lucky move in my life. I wrote a book and I, the book is called fitness confidential. And the book, you know how they say you should dance? Like no one is looking. I wrote a book as if no one was going to have a reader. So anything and everything that I wanted to put in that book went into that book.

1 (5m 51s):
And it turns out that it was this weird colossal success. So for once in my life I something right. And for most of my life, I had money in my pocket. I wasn't living so hand to mouth. You know, I was a fitness trainer for all those years. And to live in LA, I was probably making 120,000 a year. And they cost almost all of that after taxes, just to live a normal life in LA. So when the book came around, I had a chunk of change and I'm going to be honest with you, John, I thought about, Hmm, I could probably buy a car Yvette or Mercedes, or I can really go look like I'm doing well here because I have a lot of money for me.

1 (6m 39s):
And then I went, you know what? I've always talked about, putting my money where my mouth is. If I said, if I ever hit the lottery, which couldn't happen because I never played the lottery, I would do. I would do my vitamin company because I have this great idea for these completely pure vitamins. And so I had this money and I said, okay, will it be a Mercedes or will it be vitamins? And I sunk all of my money into this vitamin company and everyone, every my parents, my friends, all of the business people I knew, everyone told me I was out of my mind. I said, you're insane.

1 (7m 20s):
You're insane. What are you doing? And I said, I'm doing what I want to do. And here we are, you know, it's a multi-million dollar company and it's, you know, we get approached. People want to buy this company all the time now, pure vitamin club.com. It has done really well.

0 (7m 36s):
I can. So clearly remember having you back on the show when that was just an idea of any, you've built this into this amazing and exciting company that, you know, like you said, is getting now approached by outside investors, by just outside companies that want to buy you, gobble you up and obviously replicate the success that you've had. And to me, you always have been that fitness guy. So to me, vitamins seem to really on-brand for you and other things you've done as well. But you started a coffee company, which seems, you know, at first glimpse, just a little off brand. So what was your motivation for launching that company?

1 (8m 11s):
I started drinking coffee when I was four and every time a doctor would say, well, cut back on coffee. I would say why. And they would say, because it's not healthy for you. And I would say why. And they would say because too much caffeine. And I would say, what's wrong with caffeine. The fact of the matter is they didn't have an answer for me. And it wasn't until Google came into our lives where, you know, you can Google yourself right about anything. I started looking into coffee and it turns out that it's the number one antioxidant in the world. Wow. Next to water is to healthiest thing. You can drink even more so than T and T is really good for you. And then the American heart association started saying, if you have one cup of coffee a day, it can lessen the effects of a heart.

1 (8m 55s):
If you have two or more, it's even better. There is no upper limit to how much coffee you can have right now. Some people might get the jitters from coffee and you may want to watch it. But for most people, coffee is very healthy and I'm very health conscious. So I started on my front porch the same way I started at my kitchen table, you know, mixing different vitamin levels together. I just bought a roaster and just started roasting on my front porch in LA. And the neighbors all thought I was nuts because coffee mix a lot of smoke and everything else when you're roasting. And I came up with these roasts. And once again, I'll put my money where my mouth was and I started, I know I'm making this sound simple, but when you're playing with your own money, you don't have anyone to answer to.

1 (9m 42s):
Right? So I just went down to Costa Rica and talked to some farmers and said, can I get your green beans? I like your beans. And, you know, we made deals and, and you know, all of the, you know, not all of, but a lot of the different countries in Africa and said, Hey, I want to get your beans. I like your particular beans. I want to do this specialty coffee. And next thing you know, you know, I'm spending money on green beans and contracting with a company to do exactly my roast. It's not that difficult when you have your own money and you can start playing with it

0 (10m 14s):
In fire nation. That's the thing like once you've already done what you need to do to get a little financial cushion, to build up that little war chest. Now you can start taking some risks. Now you can start maybe pursuing some passion project projects and doing some really cool things that who knows may just click and go to that next level. And you have a movie that I know a lot of people in our audience have already watched. It's called fats, a documentary, which went to number one on iTunes and Amazon. What made you think you could even make a documentary in the first place?

1 (10m 46s):
I didn't think I could. I was against it the entire time. And as a matter of fact, when Peter Parr, Danny, the guy who already had a hit documentary under his belt with the band Chicago, a film called Chicago now more than ever, he, he approached me and said, Hey, we need to do this. And I said, I'm not going to put my own money into this because I don't, I don't believe in me when it comes to this. I really didn't believe in me. And he says, no, I don't think you realize the voice you have. And I didn't, I'm going to be honest with you. I doubt it me. So Peter said, look, if we could get a hundred thousand dollars, we can start this movie.

1 (11m 29s):
And I said, well, I'm not putting the money up. And he said, well, how, how about we crowdfunded? And I thought that was an excellent idea because I was 1000% sure that nobody would give me a pitch. Then I could just shut Peter up. You know, it's like, look, Peter, no one gave us money, so, okay. I'm not going to put money into it. So we're done. Well, we were asking for, I think 150,000, but we had both decided if we had gotten to a hundred, we would do it. I hand shook on that. Well, we ended up getting a quarter of a million dollars and actually we got more than that because some people privately called me and said, I'm going to stroke you a check for 10,000, 15,000, but I don't want to do it through the crowdfunding thing because why give them a percentage of it.

1 (12m 20s):
So we got private donations to, and we went off and did this movie. And my biggest fear was I hustled on this harder than I hustled on my own products, because this wasn't my money. And I certainly didn't want to let anyone else down. I was scared to let people down. We went a hundred percent into this 200%. Actually we just signed a deal with gravitas ventures who got the first movie to number one for us. We have coming out on January 1st, 20, 21 in a few months, fat, a documentary to no, I've been busy behind the scenes. And I did another documentary for you brother. Yeah. Look for that folks.

0 (13m 1s):
And this is another just great takeaway that, Hey, even when you do kind of have that little financial cushion, you don't always need to just be saying, that's the only stash that I can take from, like, if you've gotten to that successful place, there's people around you who can support you in this. And you know, I've taken a similar route to Vinnie as well. Like back when I wanted to launch my journals, the freedom journal, the mastery journal, the podcast journal. I had the money. If I wanted to, to say, okay, I'm going to invest, you know, tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars to get these journals created and the inventory and shipped over here and all this stuff. But I was like, you know what? Let's make fire nation a part of this journey to see if they really want it. And then they can feel like they're a part of it too. And we did 300, sorry, $453,000 in 33 days on Kickstarter for the freedom journal.

0 (13m 47s):
Just a year later, we did $300,000 for the mass regional on Kickstarter. And so that is another option. Another way to look at things. And so for Vinnie's movie fat, a documentary, like he won the crowdsourcing route and went to number one on both iTunes and Amazon super cool stuff. And we have something that we're going to be talking about. When we get back from thinking our sponsors, that Vinnie hasn't had the opportunity to talk too much about yet, because it's pretty new, but you're gonna have to stick around for that fire nation. We'll be right back. Did you know that 97% of text messages get opened and 90% are opened within three minutes. You need to be texting your customers. If you're spending time on the phone, scheduling appointments are any tight battle with your competition, or you need to convert more sales from your website.

0 (14m 32s):
You need podium. Podium is a business messaging tool that brings all your messages into one centralized inbox. Your whole team can access empowering you to save time while responding to your customers. Faster podium is helping all kinds of businesses serve their customers at the highest level, including doctors, mortgage brokers, insurance agents, lawyers, retailers, and more, whatever your business podium can help. And podium customers have seen fantastic results. One plumbing company converted 60% of their web traffic into leads and a national retailer collected over 18,000 reviews across this locations. And for a limited time, you can sign up for 20% off your plan. They're so confident that if podium doesn't make your business better within 90 days, they will send you a $150 Amazon gift card by your nation.

0 (15m 12s):
Visit podium.com/fire to get started. That's 20% off. If you visit podium.com/fire, looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, just like you to increase their profitability by an average of 104% per year, all for less money than would cost to hire a full-time. At minimum wage employee, I fire nation meets clay. Clark clay has been coaching businesses just like yours since 2006. Yep. Even through the great recession. And he does it for less money than would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee at a time when inc magazine reports that by default 96% of businesses will fail. Within 10 years, clay is helping businesses like yours to grow on average by 104% annually. How is this even possible? Clay only takes on 160 clients.

0 (15m 54s):
So he personally designed your business plan. Plus CLIs team helps you execute that plan with access to graphic designers, Google certified search engine, optimizers, web developers, online ad managers, videographers workflow, mappers and accounting coaches visit thrivetimeshow.com/fire to see thousands of video testimonials from real people, just like you, who clay has helped over the years. That's right. Do your research and view thousands, not hundreds of proven, documented and archived video testimonials from real people, just like you at thrive time, show.com/fire, thrive time, show.com/fire. Then schedule your free consultation with clay himself to see how he and his team can help you thrive. So Vinnie we're back and you have just recently launched an S N G foods.com.

0 (16m 39s):
So talk to us about that. What does nsng stand for? What are your first products and how the heck is it going, brother?

1 (16m 47s):
Yeah. In SNG food. When I wrote my book fitness confidential, it was before anyone had mentioned the word keto, the word keto didn't exist. Kenogenic diets existed. They've been existing forever, but the word keto, the term Quito didn't exist. And I was low to put that term in my book. I didn't want to say ketogenic because 12 years ago, people would have mistaken it for ketoacidosis, which is a deadly situation. So I was, I was scared to use it. So I said, okay, what's close to that. And what was close to that is just don't eat sugars and don't eat grains, no sugars, no grains.

1 (17m 28s):
Also known as N S N G. So as a matter of fact, my wife's Rena said, you need to get your attorney to go and trademark. And I went, nah. And she was like, no, get your trademark. Now. I was like, I'm not gonna spend a thousand bucks on that. You got to be crazy. Thank God. Thank God I did because I own an and all of his forms because it's become its own thing. Yeah. And I cranked up in SNG foods a few months ago and it all came about because of one of my sponsors who was making a similar product and I saw ways to change the product.

1 (18m 9s):
And I'm going to be honest with you. I was, I found out behind the scenes that even though I was the number two way that people were learning about their product on the internet, they didn't want that they were going to get rid of me because they didn't like my image. They thought I was too old, even though my, my crowd is the 30 to 35 or whatever, you know, they were like, Oh, he's kinda old. You know, everyone calls him Gran Torino online and all this stuff. So they were going to get rid of me. And I was like, Serita goes, well, should we start looking for your next sponsor for the show? And I said, no. And she goes, but that's a lot of money.

1 (18m 51s):
You're going to be giving up for that sponsorship. I said, I've, I've had an idea for a long time, by the way, the number one way people were finding out about this product besides me was Joe Rogan. So I, I, you know, and they wanted to get rid of me the number two way behind Joe Rogan and people were fine, but I said, no, I don't want to go and make and, and get another sponsor. I want to sponsor it. I'm going to make a better, I'm going to make a better mouse trap. And we came up with innocent G foods. The product is called ultra fat are borrowed from my vitamin company, my ultrasound, which is the leading electrolytes for ultra runners and ultra cyclist around the world.

1 (19m 38s):
We can't keep the stuff in stock. I took from that. I took from my coffee company, one of my coffees and grounded down to a Turkish blend. I mixed it with the finest raw almond butter I could get and added the best coconut oil in the world and just mixed it all together and came up with a product that any athlete can eat out on the trail. And, you know, in the kayak, in the rowboat, on the mountain, you know, running biking, it sounds like an old tampon commercial from the eighties. You know, you could get used to doing anything. And as it turns out, parents are, you know, giving it to kids, type two type one diabetic kids, and they're, you know, giving it to them to go to school as a healthy snack.

1 (20m 26s):
We had no idea when we cranked up John, we made three times what we thought we could sell in the first couple of months. And within two weeks, we had to start writing to anyone who was buying the stuff and saying there's a two week backwater. Wow, sorry about that. We couldn't keep up with production. We're now producing it around the clock. We, we run a 24 hour shift and we're still w we're still not caught up. It's been this crazy phenomenon on ultra, over at, in S and G foods.

0 (21m 2s):
I mean, for me, Vinnie, like I look over, you know, the last few decades of your life. I mean, you've just done so much. I mean, with vitamin companies, coffee companies, documentaries books, your podcast is obviously awesome. So what the heck is next for you? I'm going to take a nap.

1 (21m 21s):
I'm still excited about all the companies. I'm always finding new coffees around the world for pure coffee club. I have a new product I've been working on for a long time for pure vitamin club. But I think that the place that has the most growth for me is number one in us, in G foods, because there are so many food products that could be had in a good way. You know, that people, you know, if these big companies for years, I would go, if Unilever and Kraft would just do the right thing, and now I'm going, wait a minute. I can just do the right thing because they're never going to do the right thing. You see, they have a little something called bean counters and they're going, well, we can save a half a penny here and there.

1 (22m 5s):
I don't look at pennies. I'll look at how can I make the product the best. And yeah, I get an I'm a small company. I'm not selling the stuff around the world. So a half a penny here and there for them becomes billions of dollars. And they have stockholders and everything else, you know, but for me, I don't have any stockholders. I own the companies. So I have no one to answer to. So yeah, we're going to be building up a lot of foods and innocent G foods. And there's, even though I'm on my second movie right now, we're looking at that as a, another thing, you know, we're looking at moving number three, because gravitas is, you know, the distribution companies going.

1 (22m 49s):
Do you have any other tricks up your sleeve? Like, yeah, I think I got another one Emmy me. And I told him when I was thinking and they were like, please come to us first. We've done good by you twice. I was like, I guaranteed them that. So in January, I'm going to, I've already started writing the third movie. And so I'm going along that line.

0 (23m 11s):
Can you do one thing for me? Sure. Can you take a nap? Oh brother. It is always great catching up with you. I love it. Truly. I'm looking forward to joining you on your show in the upcoming near term future and for fire nation. Give us a key takeaway. We've talked about a lot of awesome stuff today. Give us one takeaway. You want to make sure our listeners really walk away with, from this episode, any call to action. You want to give to fire nation and then we'll say goodbye.

1 (23m 41s):
Yeah. I've said this on your show before. I will say it again because it's that important to me. Never, ever, ever think about your IQ. IQ does not make you successful. If I went off of my IQ, I would still be broke. I always look at FQ. I even wrote about it in my book, fitness confidential FQ stands for failure. Quotion is the number of times you can fail and come back. No one. And I mean, no one has failed. As much as I have in my life. We sat here and talked about a few of my successes. If we lined up all the failures versus my success, you will go, this guy's a colossal failure.

1 (24m 22s):
And if you look at anyone who's been anywhere near successful, look at Colonel Sanders or any of these people who started these massive companies. It w when you looked at all the failures, I actually knew the guy Al Copeland, who started Popeye's fried chicken. Popeye's he, he failed over and over and over Popeye's was actually called chicken on the run. And it failed because it had a bad name. He reopened the same recipes, same everything, and named a Popeye's and boom, same everything. He became one of the world's great successes. So failure quotient keep failing until you don't fail anymore.

0 (25m 2s):
I love it. And fire nation, hopefully you're going to be checking out N S N G foods.com, check out fat, a documentary and everything else that Vinnie has going on, because it is simply straight fire. So get up in there because you know that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with VT and JLD today. So keep up that heat and head over to eofire.com type Vinnie in the search bar. You're going to get to the show notes for this episode, obviously, but we've done a bunch of these episodes together, and Vinnie always drops value. So go back, listen to those other ones. They are incredible as well. Vinnie. Thank you, my man for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with fire nation today, for that, we salute you and we will catch you on the flip side.

0 (25m 49s):
Hey, fire nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by Vinnie. And one thing that I've identified over the years in years and years, successful entrepreneurs that are productive. They're disciplined. They are focused. They follow one course until success. That's why I created the mastery journal. It's a gorgeous foe leather journal. That's going to ensure that you master productivity, discipline and focus in 100 days. And fire nation is my best work ever. Visit the mastery journal.com use promo code podcast for $15 off the journal. And thank you for listening to my podcast. I'll catch you there fire nation, or I'll catch you on the flip, the flip side, looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, just like you to increase our profitability by an average of 104% per year, all for less money than would cost to hire a full-time minimum wage employee.

0 (26m 40s):
Schedule your free consultation today with clay Clark, a former small business administration entrepreneur of the year at thrivetimeshow.com/fire thrivetimeshow.com/fire. Did you know that 97% of text messages get opened in 90% are opened within three minutes. You need to be texting your customers and podium can help for a limited time sign up for 20% off your plan at podium.com/fire.