Every Decision Built With an Exit in Mind –
Dr. Mark Brinson, Evil Bone Water

[00:00:00] John Sanders: Welcome to Charting Opportunities Uh, I’m John Sanders, advisor with Portus Wealth Advisors. We do personal financial planning and investments. Uh, we work with small business owners. We help them grow their business, uh, maximizing value before they go to [00:00:30] market. Uh, charting opportunities is events that, uh, we do every month, second Wednesday of the month.

Uh, we bring in, uh, a special guest. Uh, sometimes we’re talking technical topics. Uh, sometimes we’re bringing in a business owner who is starting, growing, um, selling, has sold post. Um, the objective is to have someone here that will, uh, be able to provide some valuable insight [00:01:00] to, to you guys as fellow business owners and, and partners.

So, um, welcome to the Barrel Room. Uh, we’ve been here for almost a year now. It’s just a great space. So if you are needing an event space, uh, Triple C are friends of ours. Uh, it’s been a great spot. You can rent it, so let us know if it’s somewhere that, uh, you’d like to have an event. My guest today is…

I’ll be honest with you, this is my first cousin. [00:01:30] Um, he gave me a discount on his speaking fee. It’s the only reason- … that, uh, we’re able to have him here today. Uh, Dr. Mark Brinson’s come up from Clearwater. Uh, so Mark, thanks for, for joining us. Yeah, no pr- Oh. Yep, no problem. Yeah. Yes, I’ve known John since he was born.

Known me longer than I’ve known you. That’s right. So yeah, Mark and, and Kara, his sweet Kara, his wife, is here. Thank you guys for coming up. Uh, really appreciate you guys being here. So a little bit about [00:02:00] Mark. Um, right, so he is doctor, he is a veteran, served in the Army. He has started a business. He has sold a business.

He has started another business. He’s currently growing the business. So today’s gonna be about, uh, letting Mark really share his story, um, you know, his, um, ups and downs along the way and, and, um, hopefully you guys can take away with some, some insight kind of going forward. So we were chatting yesterday, and it’s funny, I’ve known him my whole [00:02:30] life, but I learned a lot about some of the early days and, and we were chatting, you know, about where, you know, Mark kind of grew up, and we’re both originally from, from New Bern, North Carolina.

But he spent time in Florida and, right, you were high school, and so post high school in my era, so what did you do? And the plan, you know, wasn’t start a business. The plan initially was you were going to be a professional triathlete, right? So how, how did that kind of come about? 

[00:02:58] Dr. Mark Brinson: Yeah, [00:03:00] so, um, when I was in high school, uh, I started doing triathlons probably when I was, like, about 15, and I started to get really good at them after the first year.

I think the first one that I did, I probably finished in the last 10 people that, that did it. But I was kinda hooked from the beginning. And I got all the way to where, um, uh, in my senior year of high school, the first part of it, I was– I think I was top 10 nationally, and I was top five, 10 in the state of Florida.

There was a lot of us down here. And so my– what I [00:03:30] wanted to do at that time, like what I thought my mission was going to be, is I’m going to be a, a pro. And I had some sponsors lined up. And back then, sponsors didn’t give you money until you won a lot. And so, like I had some bikes lined up, some Speedos lined up, you know, I think a, a sports drink that was lined up.

And, you know, at, at 18 years old, you’re just, you’re super happy about all that. And I had a, um A incident though, that was in that last year when I was really starting to win, that sort of changed my life, and it did move me towards medicine, uh, eventually. Um, [00:04:00] I had, uh, my, my stuff planned out. I, I didn’t start swimming at a young enough age that I was really, really great at it, but I could hold my own.

I could probably breaststroke as fast as I could freestyle, and I’d breaststroke my way through it, then I’d freestyle as far as I could, and then I’d breaststroke, freestyle. Um, but in all the races, there was this one guy that used to blow past me on the bike like I was standing still. So, you know, uh, I would beat him in the swim, he would just trounce me on the bike, and then I’d [00:04:30] always chase him down on the run, but it was just like it was miserable.

Um, because it was like the hardest race to ever. And when I finally had it, it was the Sunshine State Games in Jacksonville, Florida, and it was a, a, a beach swim, so I swallowed kinda some water. It’s hard to not swallow water if it’s rough in a beach swim. And so the whole time that you’re doing the triathlon, you’re kind of burping a little bit.

You’re like, “Ugh.” And so, um, anyway, he… Same thing. He just passed me like I was standing still, [00:05:00] and I knew the finish line was coming up really soon, and I knew that he was right in front of me. So I pass him and I’m yelling at everybody, “Where’s the finish? Where’s the finish?” And this is Jacksonville, Florida, this isn’t like it is here.

And Jacksonville, Florida, they’re like, “It’s there.” And I’m like, “What do you mean there? There’s nothing there in Florida.” I mean, the highest elevation is like 12 feet or something like that. Well, they had put a parking lot like 50 meters up and two stories up. So the last part of the run [00:05:30] was, you know, a sprint uphill.

So I beat him, I crossed the finish line, I won, and immediately there was somebody trying to interview me and I threw up all over everything. I mean, I just, just puked all over the place. Um, so I was like, “This will absolutely never happen again. I am going to make sure that he does not beat me on the bike next year.”

And that’s what I did. So for the whole winter, I just biked like crazy. My thighs got huge. I biked with Team Florida, which a lot of them were going to the Olympics. Um, I sat in with them whenever I could, and I was getting really, [00:06:00] really fast and I was like, “It’s not gonna happen.” But then, uh, missed all my school dates because, you know, I’m young and dumb and I’m not going to school.

I’m gonna race. I can always go back to school, which turned out to be true. I could have always gone back to school, and I did. Um, but what happened is I started to develop knee pain in this area uh, February when I swam, excuse me, when I, uh, biked. And then it started to hurt when I ran. And then finally it started to hurt when I swam.

And I knew by the time it’s hurting when you swim, [00:06:30] you’ve got something that’s really wrong. And I grew up fairly, fairly poor. We didn’t have any medical insurance or anything like that. And I didn’t, you know, like if they tell me what’s wrong with me, I’m not– I can’t do anything about it anyway, so I’m just gonna rest it.

I’m going to– I said, “I’m gonna do whatever I can to try to stretch it and just see if it gets better.” So months later, it still wasn’t better. Uh, middle of summer comes up, both my buddies, best friends go into the Army, uh, infantry. Well, one of them was infantry, one of them was tanker. And I told them the whole time leading up how stupid they [00:07:00] were.

But then I’m sitting there working two jobs, lost all my school dates, lost all my, uh, sponsors, nothing to do. And we went out drinking the night before they left. I, uh, woke up at four AM to unload a truck at Ruby Tuesday’s and then commenced to cooking all morning. I went through like two gallons of iced tea while I’m cooking and with, you know, ’cause I was so dehydrated.

Took my apron off, went straight to the recruiter, and ten days later, I was, uh, in basic training. I, I took the ASVAB the day [00:07:30] after that and got a ninety-nine. They’re like, “Oh, you can do whatever you want.” And I’m like, “Well, what can I do for three years or so?” And they’re like, “Well, infantry.” And I’m like, “Give me infantry.

No idea what it is, but that sounds like a fantastic idea.” So just bang, bang, shoot them up in the woods all the time. Um, but anyway, uh, it turned out that I got really, really lucky because when I got into the infantry, the first part of it, I got selected to go to The Old Guard, which is ceremonies, parades, funerals, stuff at the White House.

You still do about ninety days of bang– real light infantry, the helicopter and stuff like that. [00:08:00] Uh, your, your mission is to protect the Capitol, uh, in my particular unit. So I was excited now, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m excited, but they’re gonna find out about my knee.” And I hadn’t run In four months, five months, I’m like, “They’re gonna find out I’m not gonna be able to do this, then I’m gonna be a triple failure,” or for whatever reason.

Um, and then the day for the PT test came up. You’re supposed to run two miles as fast as you can. I ran two miles in 10 and a half minutes, which was my old race pace, with no pain. And I’m like, “Oh, no [00:08:30] pain.” I’m like, “Wait a second. Why didn’t I have any pain?” So, uh, the future doctor in me now knows what happened is my quadriceps got so big they were overpowering my hamstrings.

So the answer really wasn’t to rest, it was to get my hamstrings where the, the power ratio was equal, and I probably could have done that had I known that in probably three or four weeks, uh, with some general work on this too. Anyway, so I’m in. I’m in. I made the best of it. And it was there where I started to really look at injury [00:09:00] as something that wasn’t permanent.

Um, I even had a heel spur when I was in the infantry where they were like, “No, that’s it. You’re gonna have to…” I was in a special unit, and they were like, “You know, if you can’t do stuff with the rest of the people, we’re gonna have to kick you out.” And I was like, “Well, I think I can, I can get through this.”

And we did. You know, within six months, my heel spur was no longer there on X-ray, um, just by what I thought was corrective exercise, naively knowing these things weren’t supposed to disappear. So I was kinda hooked at the time. But anyway, the punchline to this whole thing comes years [00:09:30] later. Um, I’m out of the infantry Uh, and I’m sitting in my apartment and for whatever reason, I hadn’t watched TV for a couple of years because honestly I was concentrating on a lot of business stuff while I was going to school.

I was, uh, really absorbing everything I could from all of the big names. I had no money to do anything with it yet, but I thought that I would someday. So I studied all the, all the great books that you possibly could. And they were like, look, you have to turn on your TV because there’s a storm coming.

This is a dangerous hurricane. You [00:10:00] need to watch what’s going on. And so I turned on the TV and after watching a couple of stations, I’m like, you know, this is, it was June, July. This name sounds really familiar. Why is this name so familiar? So I called my mom and I started to look up. Uh, I said, who was the person that finished second in this race or this race or this race?

So the guy that used to beat me on the bike was Lance Armstrong. He, he used to come down from Texas to race and I used to make so many excuses. I’m like his bike’s so much better. He drives his dad’s [00:10:30] Porsche here. I had so many excuses for it, but the excuse was that simply he was way better than me. Um, so Lance Armstrong ruined my triathlon career, but, but it was for the best because I’m around six, three and feel comfortable around two 15, two 20.

And the guys that really, really are good, I would have been okay. But the guys that are really good are around, you know, five foot 10 and a buck 50 and they just fly. They would fly past me. So anyway. So triathlete, uh, army [00:11:00] beating Lance Armstrong to starting St. Acupuncture. Talk about the business, kind of how you got into it, how you got into the medical field.

Yeah. So real quickly, I wanted to be an osteopath, which I don’t know if you know, is the same license as an MD training used to be significantly different. It used to be a very hands-on type training, holistic training. It’s become kind of same, same in America, unless the osteopath, the DO goes towards that hands-on stuff, but it’s really hard to do in our medical system these days because in our medical system, there’s, [00:11:30] you have to, there’s times that have to be met, you know, um, and the hands-on work takes time.

It’s, it’s slower, et cetera. Uh, so when I was, uh, wanting to do that, I was in physical therapy for a while just to save money in order to go to osteopathic school. And I started getting in 95, all of the, uh, catalogs and realizing that it was best, basically an MD program, which is about two thirds drug and drug interactions.

And then the other thirds departments and stuff like that. You get a lot of your real training and your residencies and your internships. And, [00:12:00] uh, did not wanna do that, and so I had a little existential crisis, so I went towards acupuncture physician or doctor of oriental medicine, a witch doctor, which is, uh, in Florida, a very, very inclusive license because it was the way I wanted to practice.

It wasn’t that I even … I mean, I was very phobic of needles. It wasn’t that I believed in acupuncture or anything like that. It was that I was gonna be able to use all the tools that I wanted to use to be able to help patients. I also thought about, what is my office gonna look like? What is [00:12:30] my staff gonna look like?

What is my week gonna look like? You know, who am I gonna have to be around all the time? So I kinda backdoored the whole thing and found this license that includes everything except basically prescription drugs and surgeries. So where I ended up practicing, um, was kind of a combination of osteopathic hands-on work with acupuncture, with herbs, basically trying to get people better as quickly as possible.

Um, usually most people between three and eight sessions they, they’re out the door. Um, and that led to me starting [00:13:00] something in St. Simons Island, Georgia, which is a small barrier island between Jacksonville and Savannah Uh, it’s like stepping back in time. It’s a lot of the good old South that’s still there.

Everybody’s real nice. There’s no crime. Um, there’s only predictable crime. Like, “Oh, she killed her husband? Yeah. Well, he was kind of a jerk.” You know? It’s one of those things. It’s, like, nothing surprising there. Um, but it made for great family medicine practice. I had practiced down in St. Pete area, uh, St.

Pete, Florida before, and I really hated it because I knew all of these business things that I learned [00:13:30] in the ’90s, but I didn’t like it with medicine. Some of it made me feel a little icky. I later found out that that’s not really how it should be, you know, if you’re matching, if you’re matching your customer or you’re matching your patient with something that they really need, you know?

And it took me a while to kind of figure that out, but then once you do in private practice, you know, things really start to hum for you, and it eventually led to an exit. Um, I ended up selling the clinic after Evil Bone Water took off to somebody that has [00:14:00] made it now a modern, uh, up-to-date… I was like the old family doctor, bring me a chicken family medicine type doctor.

But it’s a modern, up-to-date facility now, and, um, yeah, it w- it was really good. It was a, it was a good… Not, not a, not a super high level exit like you would think of in a lot of businesses, but for a clinic, it was really quite good. Yeah. Everything was great. So before the exit, though, you started to dabble in, like you alluded to, Evil Bone Water.

So you started the new business, um, right? And so what [00:14:30] inspired you to kind of go down that path and start working there and saying, “Hey, I’ve got a product. I wanna start selling this”? What, what led to that? Well, that’s, that’s not how it happened at all. I mean, it is, but it isn’t. Um, I, at some point along the line, when I stopped thinking about money is when I started making money, and what I started thinking about was, “How can I help more people?”

So that was it. How do I help more people? How do I help m- more people this week, this month, this year or whatnot? That’s when the clinic started to [00:15:00] thrive. And, um, part of that is I wanted to keep my pricing structure fair. You know, you’ve gotta be strong to give strength, so I still wanted to make sure that I ate and was able to move things forward, which you always have to do.

Um, but what had happened very, very interestingly with China starting in the late ’90s is, um, they started to change things that they imported to America. Now, some people will sometimes say, “Oh, that cheap Chinese crap.” Well, that doesn’t really exist. It’s just that their business, uh, ethics are a [00:15:30] little different than ours.

I can go to this factory, say, for instance, where the commercial version of, of Xiang Gu Shui is made And I can go to this factory and I can say, “Look, I want you to make me a version that I can sell in America that’s got just the bare minimum herbs in it, the bare minimum quality, and I want it as cheaply as you can possible make it, possibly make it.”

And they will do that, and they will extra do that. They will get that price down to you for next to nothing because that’s what you asked for. I could equally go to the same [00:16:00] factory and I could say, “Look, I want you to make me a super premium product of this. I want you to make it this much better.” I’m

And they could just equally do that. And it’s like that with all the goods that we get from China for the most part. There’s factories that are making something like that’s a KitchenAid product, that all they do is they switch their line parts off for the la- later part of the day with plastic pieces instead of metal pieces to make the same exact thing that you’re paying half the price for.

So anyway, when they started to embrace this capitalism communism mix, which I found [00:16:30] was really, really quite intriguing, like in the late ’90s, uh, it started to affect my business. Because before that, in Chinese medicine, what we got was what they got. You know, if it came over to America, it was the same quality that they got, and we could navigate it.

You know, this particular formula, uh, I don’t necessarily trust that factory. They’re okay. This particular formula, I really trust that factory. They’re great, right? But then all of a sudden they started to figure out that Americans think that lavender is lavender is lavender is lavender. It’s [00:17:00] all the same.

It’s just lavender, right? But if we were to talk about something like steak, you know that there’s different grades of steak, right? You, you just know. Um, but it’s not on our radar that herbs are like that, and herbs are like that, and way more than most herbalists in America know. Most herbalists in America can only get like B or C quality herbs, even at its finest, because in Asia, they usually don’t let A, AA, AAA, or Imperial grade even leave their soil.

They keep it for their own people. When I first figured that out, I was like, “Wait a second. What?” But then I was like, “Uh, [00:17:30] you know, this … It’s a China first policy.” Um, so what they started to do is they started to water it down, and then progressively they started to realize that they could price creep and that we wouldn’t even know it, or that we wouldn’t even care as long as the creep

So they’re creeping up with the prices. They’re creeping down with the quality. And then in the early like 2010, they really started doing it almost blatantly. Nobody was batting an eye because you got to figure when these herbs [00:18:00] started out in my profession, I mean, I think in nine- or 2000 for the commercial version of Sheng Ji Xue, that’s

that was the, the cheap version, I probably paid $4.50 a bottle for it. So skip forward and, um, it was nine years ago And I’m in my clinic, and I got my invoice in for… ‘Cause this is stuff I, I’d use every day. You can use it to, uh, prevent needle hematoma, you can use it to numb points, you can use it to heal broken bone half the time.

Use it for [00:18:30] all sorts of things. But all of a sudden I looked at my wholesale price and I’m like, “It’s $15 a bottle.” And I’m like, “And it’s only got six herbs in it,” when it used to have, you know, 12 herbs in it or whatnot. Um, and it’s got cheap alcohol, and it’s got… It was still a good product, right? But I’m like, “I’m a master herbalist, and at $5 a bottle, I’m not making anything.

But at $15 a bottle, I’m gonna make some of this.” So what I decided to do, that was the classic pinch point that you get in businesses. It wasn’t because I wanted to make this [00:19:00] commercially or anything like that. I was just like, “This is kinda stupid and kinda wrong.” So I went back to the 500-year-old formula, and I researched it, and it had a lot of weird herbs in it and weird names, because they were local to the, the person’s, uh, they were local to the person’s, uh, village that was there, right?

But this stuff in China was supposed to be a national treasure, and I didn’t get national treasure from it until I took that original formula and I put back all of the rare, [00:19:30] expensive or hard-to-find herbs back into it, which took me about six months to figure out the proportions and source it properly and everything.

And then I tested it with all my patients that were coming in that were used to using the commercial version. They were like, “Oh, my gosh.” They were like, “This is, this is just light years better. This is so much better and so much more versatile.” And then when we started selling commercially, it took another big leap, but S- so yeah, for…

It, it’s Evil Bone Water, but you don’t drink it, right? It’s an ointment. That’s the only thing you can’t do. Just don’t drink [00:20:00] it. Right. Um, and it, it heals all of these things, right? And so it’s a great product. You probably wanna buy some, but sorry, you can’t, right? You’re strategic around sales, um, and it’s not in…

You can’t find it in CVS or Walgreens. Talk to us about kind of your strategic sales approach and why and how it works. So from a business standpoint, this is where things get kind of interesting. Um, I never flexed my business muscles when I was, when I had a clinic, because I just didn’t [00:20:30] feel right about it.

But now that I’ve got this amazing product, I’ve got this thing that people are just raving about, um, that are telling me it’s, it’s, it’s amazing in every single way and, and people that I trust Uh, I thought to myself, “All right, well, I could just try to make some money off of this,” but that’s not what I wanted to do.

What I wanted to do is I wanted to help as many people as possible, right? So the very first thing I did is I shared the formula, and I shared the information of how to make it in two different [00:21:00] videos online. And what ended up happening is those videos overnight blew up. Now remember, this is nine years ago when if you got 100 views on a video, it was a lot.

Overnight, I got like 3,000 on each of those, and I was thinking to myself, “Who in the world would wanna watch these? These are super boring.” I mean, this is me boiling stuff. This is me m- I mean, this is not something that anybody would really wanna watch. Um, and I expected questions. I expected questions like, “Well, where did you source this?”

Or, “How did you get that?” Or where… And the, the formula wasn’t refined at that [00:21:30] point. It was six months towards before refining. But the overwhelming question was, “Well, can, can I buy some?” And at first I was like, “Uh,” and this is after I had kind of perfected the formula to a point, right? And so I just sort of flippantly said, and I say flippantly, but the business part was there.

I said, “If you buy a case So I’m not going to sell you a bottle. I’m not gonna… And, and I say a case because typically formulas like this take six months to a year [00:22:00] to produce. But by using modern brewery and distillery techniques, as a matter of fact, we’re in a brewery and distillery now. We’re in a brewery now.

Our facility looks a lot like this. We kinda look like a brewery and a distillery, and, uh, we, we pack everything, we do everything in-house. Um, but I was like, “Only if you buy a case,” because I wanted people that were serious. I wanted people that wanted to use it, and I was thinking, “I’m not going to make any money on this by making money off my people.

I wanna set up a win, win, [00:22:30] win. I wanna set up where the patient wins because they get something that’s higher quality than they can possibly get from China. I wanna set up where my retailers win because they are gonna have a high, high margin on this particular product, and I wanna set it up where we win as well, but we’re only gonna really make that win if we scale.”

So when I think scaling from the very beginning, I know that I’m gonna save money in the future. I know that I’m gonna save money when I order 5,000 bottles, 10,000 [00:23:00] bottles, 20,000 bottles instead of 24 bottles, right? I know that when my account reaches $100,000 with USPS, I’m going to get it for half the price.

I know these things are going to happen. But it was a lot of discipline, a lot of, uh, calm discipline that made me in the beginning say, “Look, I’m just gonna sell you a case. If you trust me, I trust you, you’re gonna get these cheap as crap, and you’re gonna continue to get them cheap as crap, and we’re gonna have a high MO- MO- MOP?

MOQ? [00:23:30] Um, uh, suggested retail price, basically online. In-clinic they can sell for whatever they want to, but, uh, I want a high, uh, a list price of, of 40 online. We’re gonna keep you safe. We’re gonna make you money. You’re going to help to spread this safe Chinese medicine throughout.” And that’s really what we did, and it was, it was that, that idea from the very beginning that every single thing we do is gonna be a system of scale going all the way up the line that’s made it a success.[00:24:00] 

Yeah. So you, you still have to get the word out there, right? So a couple years ago, I’m, you know, scrolling Instagram, and every now and then, you know, there’s something that kind of catches your attention and you’re like, “What is that?” Well, it was a picture, and it was two majestic, you know, horses, and on each of the horses, right, there was this guy who was shirtless and sculpted and in one hand he had an American flag, and in the other hand it was this big machine gun, and on the other horse was this, you know, [00:24:30] uh, very attractive female in a bikini.

And then, you know, I looked closer and I was like, “This, it kinda looked familiar and, but the heads are a little not really in scale with the body.” Um, it was Mark had put his head on, uh, the, the male, and Cara was on the female. And then, then, you know, product placement, Eagle Bone Water over here. That’s kind of been your marketing approach, right?

Is, “Hey, let’s take a crazy picture. Let’s, uh, badly Photoshop it and put the, [00:25:00] the product in there,” which doesn’t cost you very much, but gets views and kind of resonates with your group of AccuDox that you, uh, sell to, right? Well, I don’t know if it resonates with them. Uh, it was a, it was a big, uh, kind of leap to do this, but it was very authentic.

So one of the reasons that we’ve kind of built sort of this moat where we’ve got our own little product, we’ve got our own little thing where we’re not competing with a lot of other people, is we’ve created this really authentic brand. We have a lot of transparency in our brand. [00:25:30] Uh, usually when people scale and when they make stuff, they don’t share their, their trials and tribulations or how they did this or how they did that, which is kind of annoying because it could help the next person come up the path.

So we decided from the beginning to be extremely authentic. So my first thing was what I used to call one-finger Photoshopping where I would just really poorly put my face on, like, some ridiculous picture that was gonna get, like, viral in the next couple days, ’cause I would go into all the deep, dark circles of the web to do [00:26:00] this.

Um, and what was funny and what still keeps me doing stuff like that is some people still really believe it. I still hook a fish every once in a while, and it’s just, it just does my heart good when they’re like, “Oh, that was really you. I remember when you went to, to, um, capture pythons in the, uh, Florida Everglades.”

And I’m like, “No, that wasn’t really me Um, but so the point is, you know, one of the things that brought you guys out here is that, uh, well, John’s here and John’s speaking. But also one of the other things that brought you out [00:26:30] here is that it said that I’ve done all this with no ad spend, and I have an ad spend, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t done anything.

Like if I paid myself to do what we’re talking about, I probably would have what you would call ad spend. Uh, we do not, we do not market, we do not advertise. I’ve said that from the beginning. We provide value. So if you– I will either post something as an expert, because for doing Chinese medicine at a high level for all these years and instructing internationally and stuff like that, [00:27:00] I mean, I should be good at what I’m doing or, you know, or I should have gotten out of it a long time ago.

So I can offer the profession a lot of insight, um, which I do on a lot of private groups. But then I also offer entertainment on the other side, so something ridiculous. So I’m kind of like the idiot savant of Chinese medicine. I’ll post something really, really high level, and then they’ll bounce back to my page, and they’re like, “Oh my God, this guy’s an idiot.”

But at the same time, it makes you very accessible, which I think assess- [00:27:30] accessibility has allowed us over the years to help so many other people as well. Well, I, I’ve always told people, we are only gonna make Evil Bone Marrow. That’s it. Oh, if you made so many other products, if you made so many other products, you could, you could get those same customers.

You don’t have to acquire a new customer. And I’m like, “Well, that’s not what we wanna do.” We wanna help those customers make something else that we’re getting ripped off on with a really inferior product for a really high price that’s coming from other countries. You know what I mean? I wanna help American manufacturers.

We don’t [00:28:00] offer, uh, coaching. We don’t offer, um, where I’ll, I’ll help you produce a formula. We don’t pay for any of that kind of stuff. But if somebody has a pinch point, you know, I help them, and they know that I’m helping them without wanting anything in return. I’m just trying to, like, raise all ships is what it’s about.

Help as many people as possible. And that’s provided us another part of that moat that we talk about. It’s provided us a lot of good faith. You know, people really like us, um, ’cause we really always kinda try [00:28:30] to do the right thing. But yeah. So great product, great network, great marketing, um, produces growth.

So starting on the, in the kitchen, on the front porch, kind of mixing up the recipe to a lot of demand and growing and scaling. Talk about growing pains and smaller warehouse to bigger warehouse and assembly lines and kind of how did that process go? Uh, so the, the pains are so great, and the pains are [00:29:00] stuff that we always share.

You know, everybody shares like their Instagram picture where everything’s like rosy and whatnot, but they don’t share what the pain points are. We, we share the pain points. So, um, like what it, what it didn’t say was What it didn’t say on the thing that, that kind of brought you here, the flyer or whatever, that was, uh, when we talked to John a couple years ago when we were back at 250,000 units.

We’re at over 600,000 units, probably closer to 700,000 units now. We’re really cranking along. And our, um, what’s great [00:29:30] is, like, our cost to acquire a customer or whatever doesn’t really matter as much to us because our customers tend to be repeat customers, and they buy quicker and quicker and quicker ’cause they’re selling quicker.

Um, is it a little bit like a cult? Eh, I mean, maybe a little bit. But, you know, it’s the good parts of a cult, not, like, the bad parts of a cult. But really, uh, so that number, which is kind of cool, that don’t buy a second case is only about 30%. So if you think about all the clinics that [00:30:00] are out there, all the purchases, it’s only about 30% that don’t repurchase, and we’ve never done anything to try to reacquire them.

Um, a lot of times we know that they’ve gone on to a different, a place where they work or things like that. We, we, we haven’t spent any time with that. Um, but yeah, and, and a- as what a lot of you probably know too, as far as business goes, um, it doesn’t matter how good your product is, you know? You’ve gotta get kind of the name out there.

You’ve gotta get all of the other things that go with the business that actually works with it, and that’s what we’ve [00:30:30] concentrated on. We’ve concentrated on overfulfilling. We’ve concentrated on keeping our prices low. We concentrated on keeping, uh, our people really, really happy. So reviews, uh, almost all of our reviews if you look us up online are five-star, four-and-a-half star.

If you look us up on any of the, um, uh, AIs, AI is lo- loves us, loves us. And those are the things that we didn’t pay for, but with consistent, persistent effort, just mostly by [00:31:00] me and/or all the people that are using our product, have created. So I, I wanna… You know, you can throw money at a problem, and I’m not against that.

Sometimes there’s certain problems where I’m like, “You know, let’s throw some money at this, and this is probably gonna fix the problem.” But with your consistent, persistent efforts as far as any of your socials go or any of the helping other people go or things like that, um, I kinda wanna really reinforce that’s, that’s how business really works these days.

You know, it’s almost going back to, it’s [00:31:30] almost going back to old school, where everything went digital for a while, and everybody’s like, “It’s so easy because I just go and I order this online, and I get this online, and I don’t know who it came for.” But then it’s like, oh, that’s kinda like, it’s not only, um, uh, what do you call it?

It’s not quite as satisfying, but then what if something goes wrong? Um, I know this wasn’t part of the question, but one of the things that we started doing after the pandemic, because we were starting to get some pretty good growth and trying to keep up, is, uh, at that [00:32:00] certain level of business, we, we, we passed break point one a couple years ago.

If any of you guys know what the, the 10 break points to a billion dollars are, we’re a very little dog on a very big porch. So we passed break point one. We’re up against break point two, which is supposed to be the hardest. Um, when we started to get to that point, uh, I noticed that during adversity, adverse times, so whether it was the pandemic or whether it was, uh, something that went on with the stock market or something that went on with the presidential change or something, [00:32:30] whatever it was, that any of these companies that we didn’t have a rep with, that we didn’t have a personal relationship with Didn’t care one bit.

They didn’t care how big our account was. I mean, they couldn’t care much less. And so what we started to do, and this is gonna sound like kind of creepy, but… And Don’s one of these. But about three years ago, we just started collecting people. So I only do business, for the most part, where I can have a rep, where I can [00:33:00] have somebody I can talk to, where I can have people.

All these people that are, uh, uh, we’re getting bottles from, we’re getting labels from, we’re getting… We even just switched our label company to one of the… It was one of the last ones where we had a rep, but it wasn’t as good. We switched to a family company. Best change we ever made. Cheaper, much better.

Because they watch out for us, and we watch out for them, you know? We’ll tell them, “We’re gonna have a surge.” We’ll tell them, “We’re gonna have a dip,” just so that they know what’s going on. So I think one of the things, um, with the, the help- [00:33:30] raise all ships, help all people thing too, that leads to your business doing better, is to think about that.

Think about, you know, think about collecting people. Um, they end up helping our business out quite a bit. I know collecting people is kind of weird. Yeah, no, we don’t, you know, we don’t refer to it as collecting people, but we often talk about how business owners need the right team in place, right? So the financial advisor, the insurance agent, the M&A guy, the CPA.

So we’ve got partners in the room here. So, um, you know, from a business perspective, collecting [00:34:00] people, having the right teammates in, in place, and partners in place is, is super important. So, uh, journey is not over, right? There’s still a lot of opportunities with the company. So we were talking about this.

We had lunch yesterday, right? Coming back and, and crossing the, the light rail. Um, I, I wanna make sure that you’re staying far back because you’re the one that knows the secret recipe and how to mix it, and if something happens to you, valuation of the company is not what it is with, with you around. So [00:34:30] having conversations around, you know, minimizing the risk, and hiring, and having the right person in, and creating people that, uh, you’re able to delegate a lot of your responsibilities, so you can spend more time, you know, photoshopping your face onto, to p- to people and that, those sort of things.

Um, you wanna talk a little bit about sort of the, the FDA equivalent, sort of GMP, and opportunity to continue to grow? Yeah, so absolutely. So this, uh, tends to happen at everybody, [00:35:00] to most businesses after break point one. You’ve, uh, you’ve done a lot of it on your talent. You’ve done a lot of it on your customer service.

You’ve done a lot of it because you’ve got this freaking great business, uh, ethic and business work ethic and whatnot. But then all of a sudden you start to hit some what I call big boy problems or big girl problems. You’re like, “Wow, this is, this is really kind of got- gotten real.” You’ve, you’ve gotten to that point based on your talent, your product, your, your whatever it happens to be, um, which is, which is where we’re at And so we’ve got a team [00:35:30] of, I tell you, we have six people, something like that.

Anyway, got family members, bunch of family members and stuff like that, a slew of them. We still haven’t figured out how to hire like the five and six-year-old family members without getting in trouble, so it’s mostly like our people that are already graduated high school and whatnot. Um, we’re gonna, we’re gonna fix that though.

Um, but, um, but anyway, uh, getting to the next breakpoint, one of our methods that we’re gonna use is I’ve told every single person that works for me, [00:36:00] “I want you to work on obsoleting your job.” I want you to work every day on figuring out how you can define your systems that you already do, so you can teach somebody else to do that job really efficiently, they can refer to it, so that you can step into the next higher role, and then somebody else can do what you’re doing right now, right?

Um, and with a, with a honest evaluation of that, I am not a CEO, uh, by any means. I am a COO. I do mostly, when I [00:36:30] look at it on paper, chief operating officer stuff, which before this, I was like warehouse manager, basically, if you look at it on paper, right? But over the last year, I’ve exited myself out of warehouse manager.

That thing handles most… I only have to be dirty a couple days a week now. It’s like I call my dirty days and my clean days. And I was like, “Oh, my clean days I’ll be CEO.” But no, no, no, no. I’m still doing chief operating officer stuff. And so I’m looking at all these lists of things, and I’m going to exit myself out of those, and then maybe one day I’ll get to do some CEO type stuff, perhaps, right?[00:37:00] 

Um, but I’ve told them, them all that. And one of our keys to this, with our particular business, to skip up to the next breakpoint, is we’re going through something called GMP. Um, you probably have never heard of it because in America I never heard of it. It’s something that is ubiquitous in China.

Everybody knows about it in China and Asia. It’s good manufacturing processes, right? So if I buy something from Asia and it has a GMP stamp on it, that means a lot. That means that there is [00:37:30] a third party that has tested all of their systems, has looked at their manufacturing process, said it’s clean, said that it’s great, said that it’s contaminant-free, and that regularly checks up on them.

And they usually use companies out of Australia. So it’s like something that I’ve trusted for decades. But then I found out all of a sudden, wait a second, it’s in America. And we found out because we were trying to get into the VA pharmacy and they’re like, “Look, we’d love to have you here, but you got to get GMP or FDA.”

Now most people don’t know FDA costs hundreds of thousands of [00:38:00] dollars, but then also you become a drug. Even if you’re a natural product like we are. You know what I mean? We’ve got 11 of the highest quality possible ingredients you could have. We’d still be classified as a drug, which makes no sense. But we’d also be pigeonholed into only being able to make what claims that we had proven through research.

Research costs about 100 to $175,000 per. So every claim that I wanted to make, I have to pay 150 grand to get all of those FDA approved. So we want to stay [00:38:30] GMP. We want to stay cGMP. But cGMP opens up the doors To everything. It opens up the doors to every hospital system, to CVS, not that we’re gonna be in CVS, but we wanna be in all the hospital systems.

We wanna be in the VA. I wanna be in MREs, you know what I mean? Like, if I had that when I was in the infantry in MREs, something that can stop bleeding, that can stop infection, that can stop itch, that can whatever, I would have loved to have had it. It would have been just something that I would have waited for my little bottle for.

Um, but here’s, here’s the [00:39:00] part that really should resonate with every business owner about CGMP in my case, but what it would- how it would relate to, like, your business. To be GMP, what it means is I’m going to have to have SOPs for everything. I’m going to have to have all my ducks in a row, so if the FDA ever does come into my business, they’re like, “Yep, you’re good.

How do you do this?” Well, here you go. Here’s the SOP for it. “Well, how do you do this? How do you clean this?” Oh, well, here you go. Here’s the schedule for it. So I don’t plan on exiting. I [00:39:30] would love for this to be a family legacy business for the rest of my life, but I always do everything as if I’m going to exit.

Don’t think that you’re not gonna exit. I didn’t think I was gonna exit a clinic before, but we had done everything as if we were going to exit the clinic, so when it came time, it was a pretty smooth transition. You know what I mean? They had all the stuff ready to go. We had SOPs for everything. Uh, we had, uh, backups to backups to people.

We had all of our supplies. We had everything ready to go. So our next phase, uh, is GMP. [00:40:00] We’re about halfway there, and I will tell you, I am so… Ah, you know, I’m a little bit of a chainsaw instead of a scalpel, so I like to go in and just freaking get things done, and paperwork is not something that I like to do.

But this is something that you just kinda have to embrace or, better yet, find somebody for your organization that will embrace it. There’s people that love that stuff. The people that I have that do things like what John does, et cetera, they love doing that stuff. I hate doing that stuff. So if you [00:40:30] find really good people that you can trust, that’s, that’s where it’s at, you know?

Um, so that’s kinda what we’re doing to move towards the future. So the takeaway is to have the SOP for the GMP for the FDA? Yes. Um, you’re, you’re… I mean, you’re an idea guy, right? And so lots of ideas, this being an example of how to grow. Another example of, hey, well, I said the secret sauce, but on the card back there, it lists all the ingredients of, of what goes [00:41:00] into it, right?

And a, a big ingredient is the alcohol. And so one thing is, hey, we’re gonna start in-house, um, making our own alcohol, which saves us money, and this… It seems like every time I talked to about you, “Hey, this is this new idea that we’re gonna start doing this, and this is gonna increase margin. This is gonna save us on this.

We’re gonna continue to grow. We’re gonna be set up to, you know, continue to, to do that.” So, um, a lot of things to, to still work on. You’re continuing to grow. You’ve been super successful. Um, it’s been awesome to watch the business grow and all the [00:41:30] ideas, and I’ve been entertained by all the marketing, social media posts.

Um, anything that we haven’t covered yet that you wanna share? Yeah, so the biggest takeaway that I hope you get is that, um, I mean, if I can do it, anybody can do it. Uh, but also, um, get a little evil bone water on your skin. So John was working with us for two years before he all of a sudden calls me one day and he’s like, “Man, this stuff really works.”

It took him two years before he even tried it. He’s like, “Wow, we had something going on. Oh gosh, this stuff really works.” [00:42:00] Um, no- To be fair, when you hit 40 you start to need it a little bit more than I did before … he, he probably didn’t need it when we first started. Um, but no, anyway, if you have an idea, every step of the way people told me I was crazy.

“You’re crazy for only selling wholesale. You’re crazy for not doing Amazon,” because we don’t have any Amazon sales. “You’re crazy for only sticking to one market. You’re crazy for using imperial grade herbs, which are just unheard of. You’re crazy for spending extra money on potable alcohol instead of [00:42:30] just ethanol or whatever else you could use.”

But I had the vision for it and I knew that if we could just grow into it, you know, it was going to be perfect, and that’s… It’s played out like in every sense of the word. And that’s why we do everything in house. Um, that’s why we brew everything, we distill everything, we bottle everything, we… Plus I love our team.

Our team is just fantastic. We solve problems together, and the reason it’s not as fast as it could be if we hit the ground like ready to [00:43:00] go, but being okay with being in that learning process, I want to encourage you because it… What it’s done is like, like, we spent the last year resurrecting a filling and bottling and capping line that’s, who knows how old it is.

It was in a warehouse sitting somewhere that we got for next to nothing, right? But we resurrected it, so now if we get a brand new one because all of a sudden GMP hits and we’ve got a VA contract, we’ll get a brand new line and all my people will know how to work that line, fix that line [00:43:30] or maintain that line.

You know what I mean? So all of a sudden we got this brand new thing that we spent all that human capital time and learning. So, you know, build your team. I mean, that’s, that’s really what it’s all about. Build your team, keep your vision, don’t let people tell you you’re crazy. I mean, you know, crazy is a sub…

What’s the difference between crazy and, uh, not crazy? Maybe success. Um, yeah. But anyway. Any questions? The name. Where’d the name come from? The name. Yeah, so [00:44:00] absolutely. This is one of the questions that we get like most often asked because it’s a very, uh, it’s a, it’s an off-putting name to some people for sure.

Um, the actual name, uh, Shengju Shui was the commercial version that got dumbed down over the years and whatnot. Which means rectify bone water, right? Um, yeah, some of the, some of the Chinese translations don’t really translate. You’ll get one symbol that’s like a paragraph that you’ve got to kind of figure out.

Um, so what happened though when I was in school, we had … [00:44:30] I, I went to a school that was just phenomenal. I didn’t realize how good it was until the internet really caught on like that we just had 18 double doctors from China, MDs and DOMs, that were the best of the best that had come over here basically for their green card is what they did.

But they were awesome. And, uh, I was learning medical Chinese because I thought … I, I really wanted to learn that because the formulas, the name of the formulas tells you a lot about what the formula does. So I chose instead of Latin of all the formulas to learn medical Chinese and the common [00:45:00] So I’m sitting in a clinic one time and, uh, there’s some newer interns, and they ask, “What does Sheng Gu Shui mean?”

Because everybody’s using it in clinic. And the, uh, the Chinese master herbalist, he goes, “Oh, evil bone water. ” And I know that’s not what it means, and I know he’s not a sinister chuckle type guy. He’s just not. So I just let it go out of respect, and I’m like, “Oh, okay, whatever.” And I just figured he was just messing with the student, right?

So [00:45:30] then three years later, as a senior intern, I’m sitting in a clinic and it’s another master herbalist, and a student goes, “What is, what does Sheng Gu Shui mean?” He said, “Oh, evil bone water. ” And I’m like, “What are they talking about?” And I s- I still, honestly, I don’t know why they were doing that. Part of it is that this formula, this national treasure, it was, uh, appropriated by the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution because one of the biggest, um, militaristic guys was a [00:46:00] family member that had the formula that was against the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao.

So it might have something to do with that, but I’ll be honest with you, I really don’t know. But I do know that after all of the years in clinic, uh, when I would want people to use Sheng Gu Shui at home, right? I would tell them the evil bone water story, what I just told you, and they would all remember it.

It was very memorable. Uh, they would absolutely never come back in and ask for Sheng Gu Shui. How many of you are gonna ask for Sheng Gu Shui, right? How [00:46:30] many of you are gonna approach that? And I’m probably even saying it wrong. Uh, but they would say some of that bone juice, some of that, you know, stuff in the red box, some of the whatever.

And so when I named my product, I’m like, “I’ve got to name it evil bone water.” So Sheng Zhe Gu Shui means rectify or vanquish evil bone water, or evil bone water for short. And again, everybody told me I was absolutely crazy for that. And people still… It’s, it’s an unapproachable name sometimes, or it used to be.

Um, so they’ll ask for bong water, Mark’s water, [00:47:00] this, that, and the other. They’ll ask for all sorts of crazy, crazy stuff. But at the end of the day, they ask for it and they know what it is. Uh, you could call that now from a business standpoint, what’s become known as kind of chaos marketing. I mean, I guess I fit into that before there was chaos marketing, you know, like Liquid Death and a few of the other things like that.

Um, but yeah. Yeah, it’s just, uh, it is a bad translation or a partial translation of, yeah, the Chinese. Do you have questions? Other questions over here?[00:47:30] 

How we got into the what?

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my wife’s back there just smiling ’cause I almost made her crazy. So we went from the clinic porch to the clinic pharmacy as things grew. We, we started with five orders a week, or three to five orders a week, and then it just kept growing from there. We’ve done a 35% a year growth for every year, [00:48:00] except this year we’re off just a little bit, but year after year.

So we were always trying to just keep up, which is never why we really goosed it. We didn’t really hit the gas or, or give it much marketing because we just couldn’t keep up with it until now. Um, but we, we went from, uh, the porch to the clinic, to half the garage, to the other half of the garage, which is when my wife started when, when Sweet Kara started getting a little upset with me.

Yeah. And then we rented our first warehouse, which I thought was [00:48:30] way too much, and then we almost, like, after two years that was too much, and then we bought our first warehouse, uh, which I was like, “Oh, 5,000 square feet, that’s gonna be great,” which we feel like is too tight now. Um, so it was all organic.

Again, we used, uh, we used none of our money. We used no loans. We used no nothing. But we also made what we had work. Uh, it’s very, very easy in business to say, “If I just had this one piece of [00:49:00] equipment, this is gonna make all my problems go away.” But I was more of the thing where, all right, if I buy this tank that I can get for $2,000 and I modify it for another 500,000…

or $500 instead of paying $15,000 for what I really need, um, I think I can make this work, and we’ve done that the whole time. We’re at the point now where we can buy some maybe custom equipment and things like that, but we’re still using tanks that we modified two years ago that were supposed to be temporary [00:49:30] that are, like, doing the job that they’re supposed to.

So, uh, that, that is a really, really big thing too. Be s- Like, I, I feel like being scrappy is really, really important. You know what I mean? Like, we can do this. And I tell… I have to tell my team, I have to pump, I have to pump up and, and talk my team up all the time on this because I’ll tell them, “Look, this piece of equipment that I just got for you guys, it is gonna be a little rough.

It’s gonna take us a month. We may make it work, we may not make it work, but it’s gonna be worth it because if it doesn’t, we learned a lot, [00:50:00] you know, it’s fine. You know, you don’t have to obsess on it if we learned a lot, and if we don’t, we’ll get another piece of equipment and make that one work.” And so the people that end up staying with us and staying with us long term, they have that thing.

You know, we’re, we’re all learning together. We’re figuring this out. And of course, we pay our people accordingly. We try to make sure that they’re, they’re well compensated and well bonused and all that kind of stuff, ’cause we love them. We don’t wanna lose them. So Mark’s gonna hang out a little bit. If anybody else has any other questions.

Well, you-[00:50:30] 

Yeah, so, so be persistent, but also decide if you really want it. Don’t get it just because. You know what I mean? We’re, we’re doing fine. We were doing fine as far as money goes and stuff like that a couple years ago. But again, our mission is to help more people, and I really, really want to get this into the VA to help veterans and whatnot, um, because I think it also promotes my profession too.

It lets you see that, [00:51:00] that Chinese medicine is not scary, that everything from China, the herbs and whatnot, are not bad. Um, otherwise, we, we would not be doing, you know, GMP. But I’ll, I’ll go on the other side of that too. Uh, let’s say for instance that we decided for some other reason or we decided just because, the process of doing it is making us where we could be sellable, and not only sellable, we could be sellable at double the price.

You know what I mean? If we ever wanted to exit, which we don’t, again, [00:51:30] like I said. But it’s making us do things right. You know, I always said that you always want to try to do things… I’ve always tried to do things as if, as if someone was gonna walk in, as if you wanted to sell, as if you wanted to whatever.

But something like this process makes you. Um, but if I had to say anything about that, Department of Treasury, Department of who handles alcohol, et cetera, be diligent. Uh, only give them what they’re looking for. You know what I mean? They, it, it seems like a very daunting process, but persistence and time cure a lot.

Persistent, consistent effort [00:52:00] over time is one of my favorite things. You know, I might not be the best, I might not be the smartest, I might not be the strongest, but consistent, persistent effort over time is gonna fix it. You know? So anyway, that with FDA. We’ve got Pine Glasses back here branded. If you have not taken one, please grab a Pine Glass.

We’ve got books back there. We’ve got Evil Bone Water samples. We’ve got stickers. Mark’s gonna stick around. If you have any questions, please say hello to him. Again, if you need a place to, to rent [00:52:30] space, uh, beer room, this is obviously a great space, so let us know. We’ll help you out. We’ll get you here. Um, our next event is July the 8th.

Again, it’s the second Wednesday of every month. Um, please come back. If you’re not getting the emails, um, talking about the, the events and links to register, let us know so we can get you on that newsletter. Um, bring a business owner friend. Uh, the more the merrier. We appreciate you guys coming and, uh, [00:53:00] coming back.

So, um, again, uh, please join me in giving Mark a round of applause.