Episode # 139 Greg Vetter- Founder at Tessemae's All-Natural Salad Dressing

[Music] Hello everybody, my name is Bruce Montgomery and this is my colleague Tracey Pries. Hello everyone. And where with the Road to Retail? On our podcast Tracey and I hope to offer insights and ideas for how emerging small and challenger CPG consumer package goods brands can establish and grow their business. Bruce and I have been working in CPG commercial operations for over 30 years, working on brands of all sizes. By commercial operations we mean all aspects involved in establishing and growing brands across channels and platforms. On our show we bring on guests that are brand founders, leaders, investors, as well as all kinds of suppliers to these emerging brands that are subject matter experts to share their unique insights with the audience. To keep up with the show please follow the Road to Retail podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Leave us a review and consider sharing the show with a friend or colleague that may benefit from the content. 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Hello, everybody and welcome to the latest episode of the road to retail. We're really glad that you've chosen to join us and look who's here. It's Tracy Priest. Tracy, how are you? I always decided to show up today because Bruce, we have a fantastic episode, a good friend, long time friend of the CPG industry. So very excited about today's episode. Well, why don't you just tell us who's here rather than tease us with that? Absolutely. So we've got Greg better. And he is the founder of Tessie Mays dressing and I have the opportunity. Many years ago, Greg, to work with you and your family on the launch of the dressing brand and just have fond memories of selling things to retailers. So anyway, great to have you on the show today. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey. Greg better, founded Tessie Mays in 2009 since road a book started a brand accelerator, launched a produce business, launched a ready to drink vodka business, surprisingly have a portage on business. And everything in between. So it's been a wild 16, 17 years and happy to be here. That's awesome. Well, Greg, one year you can actually do something. That's a pretty, that's a pretty full flight. So let's see here. I'm sure there's a bad joke, but food to port apodies. That about covers it. So you're particularly integrated. Thanks for joining us today folks. Hey, say so Greg, thank you so much for coming on with our audience of largely small emerging challenger brand. You were there at one point and maybe you are right now with some of your other ventures. You know, when it comes to salad dressings, you know, when you go to the store, there's not a shortage of potential options there. What gap did you see that let you and your, as Tracy said, your brother that you guys thought man, even though it's crowded, we see something here. So what did you guys see? I mean, we were actually shockingly the first clean salad dressing and we were kind of three years before the clean eating movement and we were kind of very, very early in the organic movement. I was at the time convincing retailers that organic was not a trend and nobody was believing me outside of all foods. So it was kind of the first clean, great tasting salad dressing on the market and then it was our job to scream that from the rooftops. So Greg, one other thing here. We just attended the founders innovation day in New York where lots of emerging brands come and one of the comments that many of the leading retailers made from the stage giving council was, hey, you know, some of you guys that have had some success locally or at your farmer's market. You got to do some more research to understand your consumer and is your packaging sharp. Did you guys do any of that or did you just kind of go for it and figure it out on the fly? We went for it and figured it out on the fly. I think the key for what we had was that it tasted great. I think everybody over thinks everything else are packaging the beginning was trash. We hired a marketing group kind of three years in and he joke he joked it has folksy charm and he goes and that's just a really polite way of saying it's horrible. But what we realized was anybody that tried it, they bought it. So we built our entire business around demoing because we realized we didn't have a brand. It was expensive. We knew who we were. It looked really weird on the shelf because at the time we used olive oil and it was in the refrigerated set so it solidified so it looked horrible. But then when people tried it, they were like, this is the greatest tasting thing I've ever had my life. So with that in mind, we go, okay, well, we got to get more people to try it. But that did is it bought us time to figure out all the rest. And I think a lot of times with brands, there's so much stuff to do. Because in reality, if I had done any research on salad dressing, I never would have gotten into it. We had low velocity. We were in refrigerated logistics. We had a glass bottle, which is heavy. You can't sell refrigerated glass at the time on Amazon. So that limited what we could do. I mean, the list was so long. But the beauty of all of that is it forced us to really kind of get a deeper understanding of our consumer and our consumer loved it. So regardless of everything else, regardless of someone saying you're packaging sucks. It's too expensive. It's to this. It's to that. The consumer was buying it. And so I think at its most fundamental level, the product must be superior. And then that will allow you to figure out the rest. That's a great advice. My favorite one of my favorite Greg better stories is when you started to get into this and it's of course your mom's recipe. You guys Googled how to start a CPG brand. We Googled basically everything for the first couple of years and we did not. have chat, GPD or any of that, that would have actually made everything unbelievably easier. But when I was filling out the paperwork to get into Whole Foods as a test for the grand opening, you know, they gave me 200 pages of paperwork to fill out on how to be a food manufacturer or to be a food manufacturer. And I'm just like, uh, Google, what is a hasop plan? What is a hasop plan for salad dressing? So, say Greg, you would not recommend that, uh, that approach today to any brand founder. No, no, I would not. And no, but yeah, it was, it was aggressive. No, but kidding aside, before we move on with, with Tracy's next topic, what Greg said, folks, is super important. Part of what makes the magic of founders as Tracy and I talk to more and more each week, if you study too much, you probably won't do anything. Yeah. But if, but if you don't study at all, you may regret it because when you do finally stop and study a little bit, you're like, damn, that wasn't that hard. I should maybe should have checked that first. But it's, it's why people innovate, right? Because who would have ever thought, you know, you need like a ninth set of athletic clothing, but some of the new brands right now were the ones that are winning. It's very true. Yeah. Tracy. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about differentiation and, and I know you totally agree that it's critical, especially today. And you talked about your point of difference of testy maze, tasted great and healthy. But, you know, tell me maybe a little bit about how you said something that really caught my attention. We were screaming that from the, from the mountain tops to these retailers that didn't really get it at that point. So how did you do that? Did you use data? Did you, you know, how did you convince these retailers outside of, you know, whole foods? And I remember attending, you know, a public meeting with you. And they were like, what? refrigerated what organic what healthy no sugar? What? Yeah. So I mean, how did you, I mean, I was there during those years, but tell maybe our audience like, how do you screen your message from the mountains off to get retailers attention these days? The, the real thing was just we burned the ships. I mean, we fully committed in every single one of those meetings to get the deal or never get into that retailer ever again. All right, we were not polite about trying to convince these people that cleaning and organic and great tasting was not a trend. They were wrong. We were right. We were willing to do anything to get a shot. We were willing to buy everything back. We were willing to do an entire demo program. I mean, we were literally willing to do anything outside of giving it to them for free. We tried to maintain our kind of price integrity and in the premium nature of the product. But, you know, people just did not believe us. And so our goal in every meeting was just basically countering every no with a solution for yes or at a minimum giving us a chance. And if it didn't work, we wanted to eliminate all of the risk to the retailer. We'll buy it back. We'll do this. We'll do that. We don't care. Just we promise you that it will work. And when the retailer partnered with us and they allowed us to do the demo platform that we had developed across basically every kind of region across the country, it always thrived every single time. Because the dressing and this really kind of hits home or it needs to hit home with people. If someone tries it, they need to love it and they need to want to buy it again. And so you can have the most beautiful packaging on the world. You can have every health claim imaginable, which I have seen every single one come and go. If it does not taste great, nobody cares. And so we really were in fighting the fight. And thankfully we were able to get our shot. And then we delivered, which allowed us to go from one store to every store in the country. I love what you said. You burned the boats and brother, you did. There's no no doubt about that. And see back then, a healthy food, any kind of healthy food, everybody thought, oh, it just tastes like crap. Yeah. Right. It was just terrible. And back then, some a lot of that was true. Yeah. So Greg, when we had our pre-call to discuss you coming on the show, you mentioned something really interesting that was a challenge. Can you speak a little bit about how tough it was? You know, you're telling the story, how tough it was to get retailers on board. How hard was it to find people that could meet the manufacturing specifications that you guys were looking for to ride this clean train? Well, nobody could. And it was interesting because we weren't, in theory, we weren't doing any rocket science. And so we had to, we would go to co-packers, we would explain what we were trying to do. They would try and change the recipes and the formulas. We realized that all that mattered was the taste. And so then we ended up starting our own manufacturing plants to deliver on the quality. And then eventually, as everybody realized that clean eating in organic was not a trend, we were able to basically convince a co-packer to allow us to take over their plant and teach them so that we then had too many manufacturing plants making our product. But in the early days, you know, trying to convince somebody to use fresh garlic was like the hardest thing in the world. And we ended up basically rewriting the process authorities rules and regulations on fresh garlic just from being stubborn because there was a botulism scare in 1978. And so everybody changed the rules around fresh garlic in consumer package goods. And I, I just wasn't going for it. I'm like, no, all of Europe uses garlic. This is insane. We're going to do it. What are your thoughts on, you know, this, that, and the other. And we ended up developing kind of a safe way to use fresh garlic in mass salad dressing production. But when you think about trying to deliver the highest possible quality product to a person, and how hard that actually is in reality, it really does kind of again, going back to like doing too much research. If I had done any research on fresh garlic in mass production of salad dressing, you know, the first thing that would have come up is, yeah, you can't do it. You can use dehydrated garlic. You can use garlic powder. You can use, you know, natural flavor that tastes like garlic. You can use a garlic oil. But in reality, everybody here knows when you use fresh garlic in your cooking, it tastes way different. Oh, yeah. And a garlic powder. So really taking the risk of developing our own manufacturing processes and our facility to then buy us time for the rest of the industry to be open to looking at alternative manufacturing processes was critical for us to be able to stay differentiated over time. Yeah. You were definitely a pioneer. No doubt, no doubt. So Greg, let's talk a little bit about some of the awards and recognition that you and your team were able to earn as you started to get some payoff from all the hard work of blazing this trail and kind of creating a subcategory within salad dressing. So tell us about some of these rewards. Those first ones, man, they had to have felt great that someone on the outside, aside from people buying it and saying, damn, this is tasty. We're like, look what these guys are doing. Yeah. I mean, ink magazines entrepreneur the year was was pretty great. And then when we redesigned our packaging and then getting the Nielsen Design Impact Award as kind of the most impactful packaging shift was really cool. And then probably one of the biggest ones, but probably not big to anybody else except for us was we got Sam's Club supplier of the year. And when you think about how hard we had been working in for how long to be able to have those kind of very spaced out pillars of recognition. It was nice, you know, as a founder and an entrepreneur, you think you should be getting way more than that. And that's just any, you know, that's any athlete that's anybody, you know, you think you should get every award that has ever come out, but it was good to be recognized and really it was better for my team because it showed them that all of their effort was being recognized. And I think that that was really important for them. That's awesome. There's no doubt. All right. So let's talk about in the beginning, Tessamay's decides, yeah, we're going to retail and no spoiler alert. You went after Whole Foods first. So tell us first how you why you decided to go to Whole Foods and you have to tell my favorite story about how you got into the very first Whole Foods. Well, I wanted to go big, right? You know, a lot of times you hear people, you know, get into some farmers markets, get into some local shops. That takes, getting that yes takes the same amount of effort as getting a yes somewhere else. And I don't think people realize that. And so I just started cold calling the local Annapolis Whole Foods. And I finally got a guy on the phone that said, yeah, bring me a sample today. Now we weren't a business yet. We didn't have a bottle. We didn't have a name. We were nothing. So I had my mom make the greatest batch of salad dressing that had ever been made. And she's telling me this isn't going to work. She goes, what are you going to bring it in? In. And I'm like, give me this little Tupperware container with a red lid. Crunchy Romain lettuce dressing on top. I'm going to take this due to salad. And she's like, you're going to do what? I'm like, I'll let you know how it goes. So I walk in. They call the guy over the loudspeaker. He walks up and he's like, you know, show me your product. Show me your packaging. And I hand him this little Tupperware container with a red lid. And he's looking at me like, I'm on drugs. So he opens it. He takes this piece of wet lettuce out, licks the dressing off. And he looks at me shocked. And he goes, that's the greatest salad dressing I've ever had. And he goes, you need to call the regional office. I'm like, well, why don't you call the regional office for me? I'll show up to that meeting, which I did. I did the same thing to the regional office. And they handed me 200 pages of paperwork. And they said, Hey, well, by four cases from you, that's all we're committing to for the grand opening of the new store, which was May 5, 2009. And so then I spent the next couple months googling my way into becoming a food manufacturer, coming up with a name, finding a bottle, doing the food science, doing all of this craziness. And that is how we got our start. Crazy story. So using my advanced math, that's 50 pages of paperwork per case. That would have been the top like make a living long term. So that's, so that's a that's unbelievable. And I can only imagine the look on the guy's face when this, this young man shows up with a Tupperware salad and probably forgot the fork, but luckily, I did. Yeah, but the best story is the happy ending is they bought four cases and they sold all of it in one weekend. Yeah, so we got in for the grand opening. I think it was a Wednesday, maybe a Tuesday. And this crowds forming, I think the opening was at 10 a.m. And I have a demo set up, you know, I'm like so new. I got a apron embroidered. And I've got recipe cards. And I got little samples of lettuce with dressing on it with a toothpick in there. And the doors open and people are just they're running in. And I'm kind of the first person they see and produce. And I'm just saying, Hey, would you like a sample? It's my mom's salad dressing recipe. Me and my brothers are bringing it to the world. And the next thing I know, it's all gone. And so I go to the director of the East Coast. And I'm like, Hey man, I'm out of that dressing. And he goes, there's more in the back. And I'm like, no, it's all gone. He goes, you sold four cases of salad dressing in 30 minutes. And I'm like, yeah, he goes, go get more. I go, you told me that was for the month. I got to go make more. And so we ended up selling 650 bottles in five days of one flavor in one store. And that really set the stage for us to basically grow as aggressive as aggressively as we could grow. That would have been a hell of a velocity metric. Oh, it was unbelievable. They did they did a report on the top items of produce at the end of the week for the grand opening. And we were in like the top five. It was like lettuce, bananas, Tessie Mace and all, you know, all these regional presidents and VPs are there. They go, what the hell is Tessie Mace? So my gosh. So Greg, as you guys started to get traction, you know, a couple of years down the down the road, let's say, how did you think about managing the different channels you were now getting into, you know, your own website, you know, you've had a presence on Amazon for a long time. You mentioned, you know, glass and Amazon and refrigerated. You obviously figured that out. And then moving into brick and mortar. So how did you guys decide to manage these channels from both the price point and maybe a skew mix standpoint? Why don't this is a challenge all brands hit whether you're liquid tide or Tessie Mace in the first year? Yeah. So we stayed in the natural channel for a couple years. And then what happened was all of the mainstream retailers started to realize that organic was not going away. And the first one that started really aggressively pursuing that was Safeway because they were trying to sell to Albertsons. And so we were in the NorCal region of Whole Foods and doing really well. And basically, what Safeway was doing was they were kind of taking the top items in every category from Whole Foods. And they were calling them and they were bringing them into Safeway to basically show that they were a cutting edge retailer that had their ear to the ground on what was up and coming. So they reached out to us. Initially, we said no, we're not interested. And then we eventually went in. And so initially, we went in at basically the same price point as Whole Foods. Because again, they didn't really understand who we were. They were cool with premium. But we were probably overpriced for their consumer. So we started then looking at, okay, let's classify the Safeways and the Kroger's and the Harris-Teeaters and all in the Albertsons is a different category. The public's is. And let's give a slight kind of decrease in price based on volume because they were five times the stores. And we began to see where our kind of price point flexibility was for that consumer. And so we found a sweet spot for that consumer, which was basically right under five bucks. So it was like $4.99 was the sweet spot for the conventional grocery shopper. And then so then we had volume commitments. And we said, listen, we can give you this price point. If you buy this much dressing from us. And that's what we did for the rest of the conventional grocery store chain or chains. And it ended up working well. Initially, I think we went in at $5.49. It went well. It didn't go as great as it could. Once we really started getting velocity, we had money to pay for data that really helped us in terms of how we thought about skews and flavors and what was doing well and what wasn't doing well. So we tested it a bunch in the beginning from $5.99 to $5.49. And really, we saw the greatest shelf sale return at that $4.99 spot. Excellent. Excellent. Tracey. Yep, so talk to us about the marketing vehicles that you guys used to really drive awareness and trial. You mentioned demos, but what other other vehicles did you use? And then how did you evaluate those? Because a lot of those things, social media wasn't big really back then. So talk to us a little bit about that. So yeah, I mean, shockingly, we were kind of like in the cutting edge of social media. I mean, if you want to feel old to say that, you know, it's like, oh, I'm going to go, yeah, people were just setting up business Facebook pages, you know, and people were like, what's up? So we were doing that. And then really the demo platform was really important. And then the big wave that we saw the most impact was like the rise of the quote unquote mommy blogger. So we really saw this massive uptick of women bloggers focused on clean eating and food for their families. And so that was also during the rise of Instagram. And so we really started following and asking all of our consumers like, who's your favorite blogger? Why? You know, and so we started doing kind of low level partnerships with these people. And it did not cost us a lot of money because they were so excited to be partnering with a national brand. We were giving their consumers discounts. And the discounts were specific to buying our product online. We did all of our own drop shipping out of our warehouse. So we really tracked the impact of a blogger when they did a sponsored recipe and what the overall impact was from that region. And then that's how we tracked kind of the effectiveness of those campaigns. So we really didn't do a lot of national TV or radio until kind of the summer of 2019. We did our first national TV radio and digital campaign, which went unbelievably well. But then, you know, COVID came and you might as well let that money on fire because all of the amazing results we had that we thought we could leverage into more skews into retail, more retailers, other innovation products. I mean, people were focused on chlorox wipes and eggs. So yeah, that's great. I love it. So Greg, along the way, many brands have to figure out how to fund either their startup or their growth. And with the success you had, you know, what advice would you give to emerging brands when they start to think about raising money? You know, what did you learn during your process? So that's one thing to think about. And then the follow up would be when you and your team decided, yeah, we've got something here, but we need some fuel to grow. What kind of profile were you looking for in those initial investors? Well, in the beginning, no one believed it could ever scale or work because again, we were three years ahead of the organic, clean eating trend. So to take advantage of the moment we knew was coming, we were, I mean, we were just talking to high net worth friends and family and individuals, friends of friends. And we're telling them like, we got a national deal with Whole Foods. Come on, I need 200 grand or I need 100 grand or I'll take 10. And so we ended up having a cap table of 52 different people. And yeah, it was, it was a lot. And the interesting part was we only went out for money when we had something massive coming. So it was a very straightforward decision. It was, they got a national deal with Safeway, yes or no, or you in. We got a national deal with Kroger, yes or no, or you in, you know, we're innovating into a shelf stable line in all of the retail, tailors. Are you in? And so there were some benefits to that because the power was dispersed among 52 people. But at the same time, it was really chaotic. And you know, when you're talking to young brands who want to raise money, there's a million different ways to skin a cat. And I would tell you, look at alternative funding methods first if you truly believe in what you're doing, right? Like, refire house, take a home equity line of credit out on it, take out credit cards, look at state grant options, you know, do that first. Because when it's time to get investors, you should really be prepared for what they're looking for from this deal because they're looking for a massive return in a very specific amount of time. Right. And I'm not sure entrepreneurs really understand that because usually the entrepreneurs are not the finance wizards because if they were, they're not getting into sale dressing because they've done research and that is stupid to do. So Greg, one quick follow up here. So once you took on investors that might have been outside, you know, your circle of people you knew personally or friends and family, when you take that money, you're point about, hey, they're giving you money and they want it back and a return in a certain amount of time. You know, what did you learn or what counsel could you give in terms of like, hey man, your life's going to change a little bit. You're going to have reporting. People might call you. I mean, how did you handle what counsel would you give on? You're going to have to put up some walls. Or else all you'll be doing is taking phone calls and responding to crazy emails all day. Yeah. The first key is grow because if you're, if you're growing and you're putting the money to growth and there's positive headlines to talk about, that is a very, very good thing. The other is always have solutions to your problems already underway. Nobody wants to hear there are problems and you don't have the solution. They want updates. They're okay with updates. They're okay with the reality of the world, but you better have some solutions already underway and giving progress reports on solving all of those problems. So I think our board was good. We had a good board structure. They all represented the investor base. Well, we were always growing exponentially. We were always doing big things. And so prior to COVID and then the supply chain crisis, there was always positive stuff to talk about. Now, there was also negative stuff, right? I mean, there's manufacturing issues and there's marketing issues and there's retailer issues. There's a million different problems that come up in businesses. Everybody understands. But having solutions underway was critical to maintaining my leadership position. Yeah, that's great advice. It's interesting. It's interesting you say that. I was speaking of a CEO of a small company this morning and he comes from a intense finance investing background. And he said, "Bruz, man, he goes, there's a fire every day in CPG." I said, "Yeah." So remember that if you ever go back to the investing side of the table. Yeah. And, you know, I would say that that was always frustrating because you would have these meetings, whether you're raising money or you're not. And everybody basically had the same background. They went to the same schools. They did the same internships. They went to the same banks. They would come in and they would ask the same questions. And the questions are good from a surface level intellectual perspective. But they were very off base for the reality of what it takes to manufacture something. Right. Yeah. So you always felt like you were having to convince someone. of a reality that they were never going to really be able to understand. And not until, you know, you get somebody from finance that then goes into CPG today, ever truly get, oh, your janitorial team, which you have to have in manufacturing, you got to clean everything, every four hours or something, was on heroin and poured bleach on the floor scrubbers back to the battery and created a mustard bomb. And you had to evacuate the facility. And that's why productivity was down that week. You know, like you, that happened. And so you can tell someone that, but they kind of look at you like, really, man, someone was on heroin and you know, so, well, while we're sharing more stories, one of the best ones I had to sit in on was we were representing a woman's health product. And the product had had an absolute blowout month. And the investors are like, that was great. Why did we do so well? Well, that account was having women's health month and there were lots of displays and end caps and promotional activity. Well, can we do it next month? No, it's woman's health month, not woman's health quarter or year. And it's like, so you're so you're saying you can't get it done. Count to 10, Bruce. Right. No, it's woman's health month. We'll do it next year at the same time. So to your point, man, people, people just think everything's an equation. Yeah, it's not always crazy stuff. It's not so Greg. And a fellow entrepreneur calls you and says, hey, I'm thinking about starting a CPG brand. What's your, what's your best advice to them? What's your number one thing you tell them? Go prove yourself wrong. I say, take your product without emotion and go ask strangers what they think. Not your family, not your family, not your friends. Don't give anybody an update on what it is and what you're doing on your, on your passion for the space, walk up to strangers and go, hey, I've got, not even I've got what do you think of this thing? And just see what their reaction is. Go put it on a shelf and ask people walking down the aisle. What do you think of this thing? Prove yourself wrong. And if you can't prove yourself wrong, then you're closer to being right. And in that process, that will give you a lot of the information you need to be successful with CPG in retail because that is what is happening in the world. You got a busy mom with three kids, four kids, whatever, they're screaming, they're in an aisle. And you want to be this little thing on the shelf and you want her to choose it. Is she going to choose it? And are there barriers to purchase for her or him or whatever the product is? And so that's usually my, my advice, which is like go get random people to give you their feedback and don't give them any insight into what it is, what's going on, who designed the packaging, just listen. And because that's what the consumer is going to be doing in a grocery store. Yeah, exactly. Well, and that's great counsel and Tracy and I tell tell the audience all the time, you know, just because you had some success at the farmer's market where you know you're interacting with a person who might stand there and listen to your story for three minutes. The example you just gave of a mom or dad with a couple of kids and they're trying to buzz through their list and get out of there before Johnny Punches marry in the head again. It's a whole different ballgame. All right, Greg, we're heading toward the finish line here. So question, who's had the greatest influence on your career? And what did this person do for you that's really stuck with you over time? You can either name names or just give examples, but it's always interesting to hear, you know, maybe it was a piece of harsh criticism early and you're like, damn, that was harsh and then in the years later, you're like, that was actually really well done. Yeah, I didn't, unfortunately, I didn't really have a lot of mentors. So I was kind of always looking for those. But one book that changed my life was just Napoleon Hill's Thinking Grow Rich. And so when I figured out and learned how to set goals and believe in achieving the goals come hell or high water, that completely changed the trajectory of what I thought was possible in my life. And so there's obviously been a million people that have been in there kind of momentarily and have given me great advice. Some were horrible people that I would consider enemies. Some have been magnificent people that I think are true, you know, stand up pillars of society and character. But when I really kind of think back of like, how was I able to take the risk that I was able to take and move forward through the darkness of it all without any experience or any money, I just used to listen to Napoleon Hill's rare recordings of his actual speeches when I drove. And that really helped me through it. That's awesome. I love that great book. Great book. So we're rounding third and heading home here, Greg. So our fun question of the day. Tell us your favorite sports team, band or brand and why you followed them. Well, I'll have to go currently with my sons. I don't have any favorite sports teams. I'm a supporter of whatever my kids want to go see and do. So my kids love the Buffalo Bills. So right now we're heavy into the NFL season supporting the Buffalo Bills, even though we have no ties to Buffalo whatsoever. And then I'm very excited to see if Indiana pulls this off in the couple of playoffs. So those are the kind of two teams I'm keeping my eye on. I love it. I'm sure your kids are Josh Allen fans. Huge. Huge. No, when you talk, Greg, about just belief regardless of what other people might have been saying or thinking about your venture, I saw I live in central Virginia. So Frank Signetti, the IU coach, was right up the street here in James Madison. Yeah. And one year they finally got Virginia tech to play him. And they went into Blacksburg and smoked them. Yeah. I mean, and they're interviewing the coach after the game. And they're like, were you surprised? And he's like, I thought we'd beat him worse. And when they beat Ohio State to win the big 10, the person interviewing him goes, coach, could you ever imagine that you'd be standing here? And this was Signetti's second season at IU. He looked at her and goes, we're a year behind schedule. I was like, I like this guy. I also like him. He does a lot of googling too. Well, I like that. That was the all-time great press conference. I win a lot. Google me. Google me. Hey, Greg. So how can folks get in touch with you or follow you or learn more about your current ventures? What's the best way to track Greg better? Yeah. I'm on social media. I have a website, GregoryVetter.com. And I'm always posting stuff on LinkedIn and social media, Instagram and TikTok and all that good stuff. And so, if somebody reaches out through my website or on social media, we usually get back to them pretty quickly. And that's all people can find me. All right. Greg, thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. All right, Tracy. The big finish. Absolutely. Greg Vetter, you are awesome. Great advice for our small emerging brand audience. Love to reconnect with you and tell old war stories because there's quite a few. We didn't even tell them all today. We just told some of it. It was a highlight reel today. So we really appreciate you coming on the show today. And so, audience, thanks for joining us and look for this episode soon and continue to follow us on Apple and Spotify podcast LinkedIn YouTube. We also have a website, www.roadtoretail.com. We post every Tuesday and all of our episodes links are always in our post. So click on those and follow us. So we appreciate it. and thank you again Greg. - Thank you guys. Good luck out there folks.