204: Scaling a $100M+ Beverage Brand in an Industry Few Survive with Aaron Hinde

Starting a business is hard. Starting a beverage company is almost impossible. With a 95% failure rate in year one and 99% by year five, most founders never make it out alive.

That’s what makes Aaron Hinde’s story so compelling. As the Co-Founder of FITAID, a clean-ingredient beverage brand now valued north of $100M, he’s navigated a landscape that destroys nearly everyone who steps into it.

In our conversation, Aaron breaks down the truth behind building in one of the harshest categories in consumer goods, from the retail relationships that quietly drain millions to the dozens of moments his company nearly went bust.

If you’re building a brand, scaling a team, entering a competitive market, or simply trying to figure out how to keep going when the pressure of entrepreneurship hits, this episode will reframe what’s possible.

Mic Drop Moments

• “Timing’s everything. It’s like surfing. You could paddle your ass off, but if you’re not timing that wave properly, you’re just not going to catch it.” – Aaron Hinde

• “People say, ‘Oh, anyone could be an entrepreneur.’ I’m like, ‘No, you can’t.’ Most people just want safety, security, check-in, check-out, simplicity of life. Like, this is anything but simple. It’s been the craziest rollercoaster, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world either.” – Aaron Hinde

• “ Beverage has a 99% failure rate in the first five years. 95% failure rate in the first year.” – Aaron Hinde

• 01:04 The Hidden Retail Fees That Kill Beverage Brands
• 04:30 The Most Important Metric Beverage Founders Should Track
• 07:00 The Real Differentiator Behind FITAID Energy Drinks
• 09:52 “Clean” Energy Brands That Aren’t Actually Clean
• 11:21 Deciding When to Launch (or Kill) a Product Line
• 16:18 Why Entrepreneurship Isn’t for Most People
• 20:15 Dean Jackson’s Framework for Defining Success
• 23:06 Resourcefulness, Persuasion, and Relationships at Work
• 30:38 How to Save Your Company When the Market Collapses
• 35:10 How Great Leaders Keep Their Teams Aligned
• 38:56 Facing Your Blind Spots As a Leader
• 44:31 The Non-Negotiable That Would Kill a $500M Offer
• 47:33 What He’d Do Differently If He Started Again
• 51:14 The Freedom That Comes From Dropping the Mask
• 52:47 Aaron’s Advice for New Entrepreneurs

Brad Weimert: Aaron Hinde, you went from a thriving chiropractic business in California into a brutally competitive beverage space, which you’ve now grown this beast of a company, LIFEAID, FITAID, et cetera. What made you think that you could move from direct beverage sales into retail?

Aaron Hinde: Ignorance and insanity. If that’s how you take a big fortune and you make a little one, you move into retail. I mean, so much has changed in the last 15 years. I mean, when we first started our first five years, we were direct-to-consumer and direct-to-gym only. We had zero retail presence for five years. And so, we were doing that thing before that was kind of the cool thing to do. We were sponsoring CrossFit, we were sponsoring Spartan Race. And some of those buyers would pull us in. So, we got pulled into our first Whole Foods division. We got pulled into H-E-B out in Texas, and some of those have been great partners. Then there’s been some that haven’t been so great partners.

There are certain retailers out there that will charge $100 per store per SKU. So, let’s just say I want four of my FITAID drinks on the shelf. That’s $400 I’m paying before I sell one can for the right to be sold and have this little piece of shelf space.

Well, if you look at what your margins actually are after you pay a distributor margin and the retailer needs to make their money and their margin, you’re usually operating already on a compressed margin. Then you’re paying the slotting fees. Then you have to pay a promotional calendar. A lot of those promos that people run, like, “Oh, look at this brand’s on buy one, get one free.” Well, guess who pays for that free can? It’s not the store. It’s the manufacturer. It’s the brand itself. So, if I’m selling a $4 drink and I’m on BOGO, so two for $4 instead of $4 each, I’m getting billed back for every can that’s sold $2 per can from the retailer. It’s called penny pass-through. It means that you’re getting stuck with the entirety of the promotion.

So, that’s why retail can be so challenging. You start adding up. In addition, just for the right to be on sale, a lot of retailers now are charging $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 for the right to be on sale in addition to the penny pass-through. So, you start adding up all these fees, and it’s crazy how brutal the retail landscape has gotten. And now a lot of retailers are moving to their own brands. They’re really pushing. Whole Foods has 365 like Safeway Select. Like, you look at each retailer now, Trader Joe’s has always been that way. It’s almost all Trader Joe’s internal brands, where they’re really banking on higher margin, Kirkland brand at Costco, et cetera, pushing their own brands.

Brad Weimert: So, one point of clarity, and I want to talk about that. You mentioned buy one, get one offers, and if you want to run those, what you said was somebody spends $2, and then you pay the retail establishment $2. Does the retail establishment get the margin on the second can also?

Aaron Hinde: Oh, absolutely. They’re not taking a margin hit.

Brad Weimert: That’s f*cking crazy.

Aaron Hinde: Once in a while, they’ll have a little bit of margin compression depending on the retailer. But for the most part, the brand is taking the vast majority of the hit, if not the entirety of the hit, and again, the entirety of the hit’s just called penny pass-through, meaning whatever the actual dollar amount of the discount gets passed right onto the brand in a bill back.

Brad Weimert: Damn, man. That’s terrible.

Aaron Hinde: Yeah. It’s challenging.

Brad Weimert: So, what’s the metric that you should watch as a beverage company that you actually pay attention to? Because you mentioned like seven just now, right? All the different channels of promotion, placement, et cetera, et cetera.

Aaron Hinde: One of the most important metrics that took us a little while, and having really a rockstar CFO come on board to pay close attention to, is your contribution margin per channel. Because a lot of people like, “Poo poo Amazon,” or, “Oh, it’s expensive to deal with.” But if they actually fully baked contribution margin on their direct-to-consumer business, you would go, “Oh, actually, Amazon looks pretty attractive,” because you got to bake in not only your cost of goods, but the box costs, the shipping costs, right? Like, my warehouse costs, my site costs. So, I have all these costs, and when I bake it fully in, “Oh wow, Amazon taking their fee,” and me just shipping them pallets and having them do all the distribution, that’s actually a higher contribution margin in some channels.

Or in some cases, if I’m looking at retailer, looking at contribution margin for retail as a whole, but then per retailer, which was really eye-opening. We had national distribution through CVS, and then when we looked at what they were billing us back in this like just this black hole of chargebacks, you realize, “Wow, not only am I not making money, but it’s costing me a million dollars a year to have a relationship with this retailer.” So, like learning, like who are the good partners and who aren’t? And it’s really easy from a consumer’s perspective to see who the good partners are and who aren’t, because if their stock price’s been tanking over the last 15 years, that means that they’re not a good partner.

Because what happens, it’s a self-fulfilling kind of prophecy here is they start chasing short-term cash from pressure from the higher-ups. So, they’re hitting all these brands with massive slotting fees and crazy charges, which creates a revolving door. So, instead of offering the best products for your customers, they’re chasing the short-term cash. And when you start offering bad products, because these products, these brands are just willing to write the checks to be on the shelf, then your sales overall start to go down, and then the store quality goes down, and you’re attracting a…

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Sort of like an HOA at an old building. So, like as a luxury condo.

Aaron Hinde: Exactly. The HOA keep going up and up and up as the building deteriorates, right? Yeah, exactly. It’s a great analogy.

Brad Weimert: More and more to fix in the building. Yeah.

Aaron Hinde: Exactly. Yep.

Brad Weimert: So, one of the things that I think is interesting about FITAID in general, and let’s take it to present day, and then we’ll back out, but first off, you have a unique product offering. You came into the market with sort of a nootropic offering that I didn’t see, or there wasn’t as much competition as there is now when you started. But in 2022, you launched FITAID Energy. The energy market is super f*cking competitive. What was unique about your offering, and what non-obvious ingredient do you think actually started to move that product for you?

Aaron Hinde: Yeah. I mean, back in when we first started in 2011, we were the very first functional beverage platform out there. I mean, it really didn’t exist, right? You had energy drinks, which all energy drinks are basically the same. It’s a caffeine model, right? And you had the emergence of coconut water and kombucha for kind of functional purposes. People were drinking coconut water for some hydration and electrolytes type of thing, and kombucha for gut health. So, there was this emergence of these functional categories. But what we did is we took kind of the cool, sexy, hip factor of the energy drinks and said, “Well, how do we make these very unique and very function-specific?”

So, FOCUSAID being the very first nootropic beverage on the market because there were no nootropic beverage. It didn’t even exist. People didn’t even really know what nootropics were, or FITAID for post-workout recovery. We were very early to creatine and creatine RTDs. But specifically for the energy drinks, nobody’s drinking energy drinks for health reasons, right? They drink it because they need a pick-me-up. So, it’s like, okay, well, how do we create something that’s true to our ethos and make sure that it’s naturally sweetened? So, no sucralose, no aspartame, low to no sugar, no use of artificial dyes, and clean caffeine. So, we want a completely clean caffeine source for us. We use green tea and/or yerba mate, depending on the blend. We don’t use synthetic caffeine.

Synthetic caffeine comes from these gigafactories in China, full of industrial chemicals. It’s nasty, nasty stuff. So, that’s what our big differentiator was like, “Hey, we’re going to create an energy drink, but actually create a clean one that a nutritionist or your doctor would go, ‘Well, if you’re going to drink an energy drink, this is actually a pretty good stack.’” And from a caffeine level perspective, I mean, people that drink coffee, which I do in the morning, drink a 20-ounce coffee, you’re getting typically quite a bit more caffeine than you would in even one of these energy drinks.

So, here’s a question for you. What clean energy companies out there that are your competitors are not actually clean? And what ingredients do they use that piss you off that you feel like the FDA should be on top of?

Aaron Hinde: The biggest ones are like CELSIUS, Alani Nu, and I’m super grateful for those companies. I think they’ve done a great job in disruption. There’s always a one, two, and three in any industry forever. As I grew up, you grew up. It was Red Bull, Monster, Rockstar. That hadn’t been disrupted forever. BANG came along, disrupted Rockstar as a number three player. Jack, the founder of BANG is crazy and ended up imploding his whole company. Then CELSIUS swooped in and took that number three spot. CELSIUS has done and Alani have done a great job on attracting women to a category and energy drinks that has been 99% male forever.

But every single woman that I’ve ever seen drinking one of those products, and I engage a conversation with them, they all believe that these are clean, natural products, but because that’s the way they’re positioned. It says no artificial flavoring on the front or stuff like that, which they go, “Oh, well this must be natural.” They don’t realize that they’re sweetened with sucralose, aspartame, and/or Ace-K. They use some natural caffeine sources like green tea, but then they’re also using synthetic caffeine because it’s much cheaper, which comes from China. So, there’s a lot of kind of mixing of quasi-clean ingredients with the more traditional energy drink ingredients, and that kind of thing.

Brad Weimert: Good to know. You have now, like when I first found, I don’t actually know how we met, but when I met you and I got introduced to your product line, you maybe had five, and now you have kind of a host of different flavor profiles and different products. How do you choose when to introduce a new product? And how do you run a test long enough, and no one to kill it if it doesn’t work?

Aaron Hinde: Yeah. I mean, timing’s everything. We were late to energy, even with clean energy. That was, as you mentioned, was super established. We were really early to recovery beverages. We were really early to nootropic beverages. I think we’re timing creatine, RTDs, and our creatine powders perfectly right now, like creatine’s completely on fire. So, timing’s everything. It’s like surfing. You could paddle your ass off, but if you’re not timing that wave properly, you’re just not going to catch it. So, we’ve gotten better, and we’re pretty nimble on like going, “Okay. What’s the landscape look like? What’s our current audience already consuming that we’re not able to provide for them?”

And that’s why we launched our essentials line, which is some very basic high-quality methylated B vitamins, and high-quality magnesium glycinate, and a few of these things because our audience was already taking these, right? So, it’s like, well, if you’re putting in your order for your drinks, you might as well add these other items that we can provide at a very cost-effective manner and put it in with your drink order. And so, the timing of it is everything. And then, look, sometimes you got to kill some of the babies, and that’s been tough to do over the years. But we’ve just got a few products. It’s like I’ll give you a good example. Our LIFEAID drink, which is our namesake drink, our LIFEAID drink was an anti-inflammatory blend.

I’m like, “Inflammation’s huge. Chronic inflammation is a big issue, like this is an area we need to focus on,” and so I formulate with turmeric, and ginger and cayenne, like all these anti-inflammatory ingredients taste pretty good. Like, wow, it’s a really effective drink. I’m really excited about it. But we can’t use the word anti-inflammatory because that is a disease claim that we’ll get you shut down by FDA and FTC. Well, guess what? It didn’t sell because we couldn’t say. We couldn’t spell out what this drink is for. If you drink a FOCUSAID, guess what? There’s no ambiguity. It’s got something to do with focus, right? FITAID has something to do with fitness. So, that’s our strategic advantage is being able to put the functionality in the name of the beverage, and we couldn’t do that with LIFEAID, and it didn’t sell, so we had to kill it.

Brad Weimert: Is it dead now entirely?

Aaron Hinde: It’s dead. We just sent out the last of the cases to our subscribers yesterday and, yeah, it’s donezo.

Brad Weimert: Rest in peace.

Aaron Hinde: RIP. Pour one out for.

Well, look, you mentioned timing and timing is relevant as far as ingredients or profiles or timing the market, but not flavor. So, how do you know when to launch a new flavor? Like, when you launch, let’s say you go the energy drink route, do you launch three flavors? Do you launch six? And at what point do you know, “Hey, this isn’t working, I’m going to kill them”? Do you test those things closely? And how do you decide from the beginning?

Aaron Hinde: Yeah, you can dive into the research. There’s a lot of great organizations out there that you can pay for the research and look at what are the trending flavors, what’s going to be big next year, and again, that’s a lot of timing too. I mean, there’s kind of staples in beverage, like a lemon lime, like in sodas, right? It’s like cola, root beer, kind of a lemon lime. Those are like just staple flavors. Well, when do you launch like a Cherry Coke or something like that? Or do some more exotic derivative, and that kind of thing? And so, it’s looking at trends and going, okay. We’re never like launching some crazy candy flavors. Like, we’re not a Skittles brand. We’re not doing ghost unicorn turds and stuff like that, right? So, our flavors are typically a little bit more concrete.

This one here I’m drinking is Juicy Apple. It’s got a really fresh like juicy apple flavor profile. So, looking at where the trends are at, looking at what’s kind of congruent with our ethos, and where are we allowed to go. And sometimes we’ll launch something as an LTO for a short period of time, see what it does. And if it does really well, we can bring it back the next year as a permanent item.

Brad Weimert: Limited time offer.

Aaron Hinde: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. So, let’s back out to creating this company because it wasn’t a straight line, and it wasn’t an easy path at times, as we’ve talked about over the years. And let’s talk about it because you’ve taken on money at different points in time, and I think most importantly for most entrepreneurs, as a starting point, you had a functional business before you started it. You were a chiropractor doing well or well enough. Why did you start it in the first place? And how did you get it off the ground?

Aaron Hinde: Yeah. When I was a solopreneur, I had a great practice. It was just me and a couple of staff. I mean, high margin. I worked 25 hours a week. I made on the lowest end, in 10 years in that profession, I probably made 350K. On the higher end, $0.5 million. It’s pretty damn good.

Brad Weimert: 15, 20 years ago.

Aaron Hinde: Yeah, that’s 20 years ago, too. Where I was at, at the time, like I thought that I had kind of hit the peak. Like, okay, I can’t do anymore. I can’t see any more people. I’m already treating NFL guys and NBA athletes and politicians. And like, okay, my brain wasn’t developed enough to see what the other potentials, possibilities were. I was like, “Okay, now what’s next? I’ve kind of done this thing.” And Ryan and I, we’re always bullsh*tting about different entrepreneurial ideas and having a lot of fun just riffing on different ideas. And we found one that stuck. And we dipped our toes in where we were kind of working both for a period of time, and probably way too early, burned the ships, and went all in on this.

It ended up, over time, working out, but it’s been anything but a straight line. I mean, we’ve almost gone out of business, bankrupt at least a dozen times. We’ve had every type of issue you could possibly have in business. We’ve had it thrown into that all of the personal challenges and the strains on relationships and not being there as your kids are growing up, and then my house burned down, my brother died, and my mom died. And it’s like dealing with all of the loss and everything, while you still got to keep the ship afloat and moving forward. It’s not for everybody. And people are, “Oh, anyone could be an entrepreneur.” I’m like, “No, you can’t.” Most people just want safety, security, check-in, checkout, simplicity of life. Like, this is anything but simple. It’s been the craziest rollercoaster, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world either.

I’m having fun most of the time, and even if I had all the money in the world and I don’t know that I would do a whole lot different outside of fly a PJ. I mean, like, I love my life. I got friends that got a lot more money than me, and I look at them, I go, “I wouldn’t trade them.” Like, your wife’s a b*tch, or like your kids don’t like you. Like, my kids love me. I have a great time with my kids. My wife’s amazing. My friends in my community are freaking A tier. I have a hundred people over to my house, and we throw crazy DJ parties. I just got to DJ with Donald Glaude, a legend of house music. I’m like, “Really? I’m DJing with Donald Glaude right now. Like, what happened to me? Someone, wake me up right now. This is amazing.”

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I grew up in aggressive sales, and somebody told me through that journey that, and this is also kind of I think pre-popularized entrepreneurship, right? Today, entrepreneurship is alluring for people, and like the celebrities of our culture are entrepreneurs, many of them. But 25 years ago, or, yeah, probably 25 years ago, nobody knew the names of the entrepreneurs.

Aaron Hinde: That just meant you were unemployed.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Right. Or you’re a small business owner, you know?

Aaron Hinde: Yeah. Your girlfriend’s dad would be like, “Oh, so you don’t have a job.”

Brad Weimert: So, I was in sales, and I remember getting pitched on this idea that salespeople were of the happiest people. And the mentality there I think is just you have highs and lows in sales. But it is your job to control those and drive towards the yeses of the highs. And that’s the whole job of sales. And I think that the entrepreneurship is very much the same way. I find it irritating and comical that the opening question almost always, when you talk to people, is, “Oh, how’s everything going?” And I’m like, “Shut the f*ck up. Like, what do you even mean? Like a lot of good sh*t. A lot of bad sh*t. Just all the time.”

Aaron Hinde: Yeah, exactly. All the time. I think Dean Jackson does the best job on this, and this is one of the be… I mean, Dean’s a great guy. He is an amazing human being. I think the sharpest marketer, well, maybe Alex Hormozi is now, but 10 years ago, definitely Dean was my number one guy. He gave me a reference once. He’s like, instead of chasing this elusive term, success, this thing that’s out there, and like if only this, and then when we get there, as you know, you’re like, “Oh, whatever, that was yesterday. Like, what’s the next thing?” Right? He reframes it, and he says, “I know I am being successful when or I know I’m living success when,” and you list it out.

One of my things was I know I’m being successful when I could spend a month a year in Kauai. I know I’m being successful when I can work from home whenever I want. I know I’m being successful when I can have gatherings of all of my favorite people at my house and at my property and do campouts and stuff. I know I’m being successful when my kids just randomly call me to check in and tell me they love me. Like, you can go through and literally create that, and you’re like, “Oh my God, I’m there.” Like, I’m living success right now instead of always chasing, have the appreciation to know that, hey, I am living success, and what would I be doing differently if these other things change?” And it’s like not a whole lot, like I said.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think one of my takeaways from that is it serves you to take the time to do the exercise. And so, I think it’s very normal to hear advice like that and be like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. Write down my goals. List it out.” But like until you do that, it’s just theoretical, right? It’s this elusive framework that you can’t really see, touch, or feel. And as soon as you put it down, you can look at it and say, “Oh, wait, I’m already checking all these boxes.”

Aaron Hinde: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: I like that. Well, so tell me about the first time that you thought the company was going to collapse or the scariest time that you thought it was going to collapse.

Aaron Hinde: It almost collapsed before we even got started. I mean, when we had this great idea, at first it was going to be a supplement company, and then it morphed into beverage because when we grew up, NoDoz was a thing. And now, I mean, 15 years ago, NoDoz didn’t exist anymore, and it was all Red Bull. It was like, okay, same functionality, different delivery method. One can have branding on it. The other one doesn’t have branding. You just pop it down. For those that don’t know, NoDoz was these pills that you’d buy in the liquor store that keep you up all night. It was like, oh, probably all the illegal ingredients now, like heavy caffeine and ephedrine, like just bad stuff for you.

Brad Weimert: Oh, yeah. It was definitely ephedrine.

Aaron Hinde: You took one, you’d be like just shaking, that type of thing. But when we first said, okay, let’s do this beverage company thing, okay, we want to put it in cans because we don’t want plastics. And we’re from Santa Cruz, like, I’m not a full enviro, but I don’t want plastics floating in the ocean. This is before even the microplastics in your nads thing and stuff. And cans are infinitely recyclable. So, we call the can manufacturer in the United States at the time was called Rexam. They had a West Coast rep. We got to realize beverage has a 99% failure rate in the first five years. 95% failure rate in the first year, 12 months. So, this is a one-and-done business for the vast, vast majority of people out there, right?

They have this great idea. They put their entire life savings to create a beverage company, and thanks for playing. Nobody buys it, and you’re out of business. So, we call up, this guy’s name was Kevin. He was the West Coast rep for Rexam.

Within minutes of, not even minutes, seconds talking to me, he knows that I know nothing about beverage and I’m a one and doner, right? And I go, hey, I heard that there’s these things called silver bullets. Silver bullets is a can that doesn’t have any printing on it. It’s literally just the same can, but completely blank. “I’d like to buy some silver bullets off you. Will you sell me two pallets?” He’s like, “Kid, get lost. Everything’s made to order. It’s made to print. We don’t have any extra silver bullets laying around,” like whatever. “You’re dumb. Stop wasting my time.” Hangs up on me. And I think I had him on speaker phone, so Ryan could hear, and I’m like, oh, man. Well, there goes our beverage business because the minimum at the time was still like over 200,000 cans minimum to produce, right?

Brad Weimert: Jesus.

Aaron Hinde: We’re talking about a mass capital outlay just to get the cans, not to get the liquid, not to get it filled, not to get it shipped or distributed, just the cans. And so, I’m a big fan, I’m sure as you are, of Cialdini’s work, so I had read Influence multiple times and everything. And so, I’m like, okay, so I go to CVS and I buy a card, like a thank you card. Kevin, thanks for taking the time to speak with me today. If anything ever changes with the silver bullets, please let me know. And I put my cell phone number in there and I put $100 Ruth’s Chris gift certificate in there and mailed it to him.

Well, literally, like a week later, I get a phone call, “Hey, it’s Kevin.” He doesn’t mention the card, but he says, “I found a couple pallets of silver bullets if you still want to buy them,” I guess, off to the races. So, yeah, that was a challenge. When we went down to the flavor house to finally formulate them, I had all my formulas for these different drinks, I’m all excited, all natural, no artificial sweeteners. Zero to low sugar. All these supplements based on PubMed research and all these dosages that are effective, I hand it to the food scientist. She looks at it, she goes, “We can’t do this in a beverage. This is too much functional ingredient. You can’t make it taste good without sucralose.”

I grabbed the paper bag. I’m like, okay, well, we’ll go somewhere else because we ain’t compromising. She’s like, “Well, you guys already booked the lab time. Let’s see if we can make it work” and that kind of thing, and that started that relationship and we went back and forth. And Darin Ezra, who owns Power Brands, who’s a still good friend of mine, and we worked with him in the early days. I’ve heard him say this a hundred times now, but this is what hooked us in. We’re going through this with the food scientist and he’s looking and he is pretending like he’s having an influence on the formulation and stuff, man. And he’s a South African guy and then the food scientist’s name at the time was Nyati and he goes, “Nyati, take good care of these boys. They’re going to be rich.” And he just walks out. He’s like, we’re staying with this guy. He knows our future.

Meanwhile, every time I’m in the lab, I hear him use the same line on every single person that comes through there. So, I always give him a hard time about it every time I see him. “Take care of these boys, they’re going to be rich.”

Brad Weimert: That’s influence, right? I think that people underestimate how much value there is in your ability to persuade, and $100 Ruth’s Chris gift certificate at the time or a cheesy line of endorsement that you don’t mean that’s not authentic at all, those both move the needle, oddly. Yeah, beginning of March…

Aaron Hinde: Those people, even if you get it intellectually, if you’re not actually putting it into practice, like how many of those 99% of failed beverage companies are actually taking those extra steps. Even, like I just flew in last night, I was out in Phoenix, I took some buyers to the Arizona Niner game, right? Took the buyers out, schmoozed them everything. I got a meet and greet with Budda Baker after the game, so I’m down, me and Budda. I mean, Budda knows me. He is an investor in the company. We’re kind of buddies. Like, they get their picture with Budda. They’re down there in the player locker room, all the players, like it means something.

At the end of the day with all of AI and all the automations and all this stuff, sales is still all about relationships. And one thing we always talk to the team about is like, look, everybody has an emotional bank account. With every interaction in life, it could be with your spouse, your kids, business partner, whatever, you’re making an emotional deposit or withdraw, right? It is like no neutral interactions, just deposit or withdraw. So, the key is to make enough deposits because sh*t always happens, right? Somebody’s package gets damaged or you say something and it’s taken the wrong way or whatever, but you need to have that emotional bank account at a massive surplus for when the inevitable withdraw happens, it doesn’t bankrupt the relationship.

And so, we’re very conscious about that. Doing a lot of the little things of, whether it’s handwritten notes or little gifts or kind of going the extra mile to really help solidify the relationship because at the end of the day, products need to sell. They need to turn off the shelf, but the relationship gives you maybe the little extra time that you need to hit the velocities to justify your space on shelf.

Brad Weimert: Okay, so feeling like you’re going to fail early on in entrepreneurship is distinctly different than having an established company that’s doing millions of dollars and getting to the point where everything is about to collapse or it feels that way. And I know that you’ve had those moments too. What was the biggest one? And how did it get resolved?

Aaron Hinde: As on the more mature side of things?

Brad Weimert: Yep.

Aaron Hinde: The most immediate, which would likely resonate with a lot of entrepreneurs out there, I mean, coming out of COVID, we had a complete 180 in the financial markets, like all of the people that were funding, writing the checks, private equity, venture capital, friends, family offices, et cetera, everybody just clamped down due to uncertainty. So, it went from a growth at all costs model. Like it doesn’t matter how much money you’re burning, just grow, grow, grow. Great example would be like Soylent. Remember Soylent? When Soylent ran, they’re on like the cover of Forbes Magazine, like Soylent, Soylent. No one will have to eat food again. Tech valuations, a16z’s investing or I don’t know if they did or not, but it was like all this hype, hype, hype, hype, hype, hype. Soylent just completely retracted out of retail. They’re almost non-existent anymore.

At some point, you have to stand on your own two feet. And coming from a small business background, the thought of actually having a company that loses money was very foreign to me. It took pushing from our private equity partners, like, hey, you guys need to start spending a little bit more or invest in growth and that kind of stuff. It’s okay if you have some losses. Well, then all of a sudden, around 2021, it was like, nope, no more checks are being written. You got to just make it happen. You got to stand on your own two feet.

And many, many mid-level beverage companies, CPG companies, in general, were unfortunately not able to make that transition and are out of businesses. There’s probably, that I know personally, at least a dozen brands that were doing between $10, $20, $30 million a year in revenue, it’s not insignificant, that are now have gone bye-bye because they couldn’t stand on their own two feet. And it’s still happening. I mean, we just got word yesterday that a couple of our former employees were now looking for jobs again because the companies they were working for went bye-bye. It’s like crazy.

But that’s the biggest one is like, okay, we’re not funding losses anymore. Turn it around and you got to do it immediately. And so, making the tough decisions when it comes to headcount and staff, when it comes to retail partners, I mean, even if you were losing money with the retailer, it’s still significantly contributing to top line revenue, right? So, removing that top line revenue really affects overall growth. So, being very disciplined on the expense side of the ledger and on the revenue side, and like what’s good revenue, bad revenue, pulling back what doesn’t make sense, restructuring the organization, getting lean and mean, we let go a significant number of folks and go, okay, what’s it going to take to turn this thing around in the shortest amount of time possible, meaning get profitable? And we are able to do it.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that’s wild. And I suppose it’s something that in retrospect, we know that the financial markets shift. We know that interest rates shift. We just both grew up in business in a, like large chunk of the time, in a good financial market, right? Post ‘08, we had a hell of a tear, and so it’s easy to forget, right? Our memories are not that great. But on some level, it should have been predictable, but I think it’s not for most people and very few pivot effectively through those alterations because it has to be such a significant change to the business itself.

Aaron Hinde: It’s not only a change to the business, like you can get it and go, okay, I need to execute as the owner, the entrepreneur, the C-suite, but getting everybody else on board when it’s been like all gas, no break, doesn’t matter what the ROI is, just do it as long as it contributes to growth, like that’s the biggest challenge is getting the organization turned around and in full alignment. Because if you’re not in full alignment, there’s all these little sabotages that happen subconsciously in the decision matrix. And we had to let some people go that had been with us for a while because they weren’t able to mentally make that change and get in alignment.

And for me, I always know, I mean, my favorite Henry Ford quotes, when everyone is moving forward together, success will take care of itself. Like alignment is at the key of everything. Personal alignment, alignment with your significant other, relationships, business partner with your team, like you got to be in full alignment. And when you’re not, that’s when stress occurs, that’s when the wheels fall off, that’s when bad things happen. So, getting that team in alignment, that was a big challenge because it’s like you’re dealing with a big organization and now, hey, by the way, we got to do things, basically a 180 of how we’ve been doing them.

Brad Weimert: How many people are in the company? And what do you do to keep people in alignment?

Aaron Hinde: Right now, globally, we’re around 60-ish. But at our peak, pre-2020, we were around 100. So, we made some significant changes there. What do we do to keep people in alignment? A lot of it is frequent communication. So, I have a daily check-in 8:30 AM every morning with the executive team. Sometimes there’s nothing to talk about. Sometimes there’s things to talk about. We do a weekly all hands with everybody, including those that are time zone can make it from our European business. We do forward-looking vision statements based on Verne Harnish’s work and stuff. So, we’re aligning around what we are going to achieve for that quarter and we’re reading every week a forward-looking vision statement as if we’ve already achieved it.

But it’s really woven into everything that we do, and I’ve just gotten a lot better personally as one of the owners and leaders of modifying my style of communication based on who I’m communicating with. I’ve always been more like alpha male, get your sh*t done, like blah, blah, blah. And if I’m talking to a college athlete that is working for, so someone like that, especially a male, they respond great to that. Like, what the f*ck? Get it done. That’s the stuff.

If I’m speaking with a female who maybe has some abuse or something in the background, like you got to change your whole demeanor. You got to bring it down. Be more Socratic. Change your tonality. And so, getting everybody in alignment isn’t just about marching down the field and line up behind me, let’s go to war. It’s like really an individual thing of like, okay, how is this person going to respond? Do I need to have this tone or that tone? Do I need to be more Socratic or more just giving the directive?

Brad Weimert: I love hearing that because I think that the journey of leadership for entrepreneurs is actually one of the more difficult ones. And who you are that allows you to launch a company and brute force it, and I’m speaking mostly to, I think, bootstrapped entrepreneurs more than funded ones because I think the funded ones start from a different place if they go seek out VC in the valley, for example, right? There’s a framework for leadership that you follow in the beginning, kind of, and obviously, at different phases in the company, that changes, but nonetheless, I think that the person that can brute force their way to a million or 5 million or 10 million or whatever, whatever the threshold is, that person needs to fill a different role moving forward. How has your mindset changed from the early days when you’re doing a couple million bucks to multiple eight figures?

Aaron Hinde: Being aware, I think it’s landmark that has the whole thing. You know what you don’t know, but the biggest realm is you don’t know what you don’t know. So, really, actively exploring, where are my weaknesses? My wife reminds me quite frequently of what those are. And actively being open instead of being reactive, being open, if I’m getting feedback from my team or from anybody on the team, from Orion, from my business partner, from my wife, like, look, Aaron, don’t react, don’t defend yourself. Be open. What is the truth here? And what can I do to improve myself from a leadership perspective, from a communication perspective? I think certain plant medicines could be really good with this on opening your eyes to what you don’t know you don’t know or opening your eyes to ways that you’re choosing to suffer.

People may refer to it as generational trauma. I don’t buy into that. I believe that it’s a generational choice, maybe a subconscious choice that we’re making, but we’re choosing this perpetuation of suffering, that my dad chose and his dad chose and from the very first man in my lineage and like, what are– I think some people have called it historically, like sins of the father that are passed down, like having awareness about what my propensities are. Where is it easy for me to go? A lot of addiction in my family, it’s very easy for me to push the chips all in, take big risks, maybe go a little to swing the pendulum too far one way or the other. And Orion has actually been really good for me to help kind of tighten that up and eliminate the extremes because yes, the extremes can pay big, but there’s also big risks. And it’s like, this is where you could blow it all up and it’s like, why are you taking that level of risk?

And if you really listen to interviews of the highest-level folks financially, it’s all about minimizing the downside. I mean, Ray Dalio’s big thing now that he’s been talking about for several years is all about like, seven to nine uncorrelated investments. So, whatever happens in the markets, you’re not just all in on the S&P. Maybe you have some gold and silver or crypto or sports teams or B2B debt or there’s all these different buckets that you can look at and like, hey, they’re kind of uncorrelated for the most part, so this one can go down, but these ones still stay strong. So, kind of thinking about it from that mindset and looking at different industries, whether, like that example was like financial, markets, and stuff, like, how do I take these lessons and incorporate it into what I’m doing in consumer packaged goods and with this team and this scale?

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I mean, I think that the core of that is communication and self-awareness, right? It’s assessing where you are, why you operate the way you operate, and being thoughtful about changing that when it’s necessary and being thoughtful about when it serves you and when it doesn’t serve you.

Aaron Hinde: 100%. Yeah, well said.

Brad Weimert: Those are much easier to say than do.

Aaron Hinde: Totally. And actually, as entrepreneurs, you’ll probably find it’s easier for us to do an assessment of other people, of our friends and other entrepreneurs. Like, I can give them amazing advice when young entrepreneurs come to me and I ask them a few questions, like, okay, I know exactly what you need to do, but looking in the mirror and reflecting on yourself, that’s the more challenging part of like digging deeper and setting the ego aside and going, hey, how am I actually showing up in the world here?

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think simultaneously, entrepreneurs tend to be some of the more reflective people because they’re in a position where they are responsible for the outcome, any way you want to slice it. And so, I think the more ownership you have in the outcome in your world, the more it serves you to be self-aware. And so, the people that accelerate and keep moving forward in the journey, certainly the best ones are the ones that are thinking about the things you just talked about.

Aaron Hinde: Yeah. And the demon’s always going to be on the shoulder, the angel’s on the other one, and like, yeah, it’s a never ending process of self-awareness, self-development. Like, is there a perfect leader? Is there a perfect entrepreneur? I don’t know that there is. I know that there is the best version of myself that exists somewhere in the multiverse and I’m actively working to catch up to them and find them and be that person.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think you hit it on the head, man. I think it’s a journey and it’s a pretty f*cking strange one.

Aaron Hinde: It is.

Brad Weimert: So, ups and downs building, are we still calling it LIFEAID now that LIFEAID is dead?

Aaron Hinde: I mean, I refer to it as FITAID just because it’s like, why go against the market? Everyone knows this as FITAID. So, I’ve been changing how– we haven’t made the official switch yet on all the paperwork and stuff, but no, we’re FITAID now.

Brad Weimert: So, been building FITAID. What’s the current valuation of the company?

Aaron Hinde: Oh, we’re probably– the market’s changed. Like, I don’t even know, and I wouldn’t even want to go out to market right now. The timing would be horrible from a macro sense.

Brad Weimert: Sure, let’s go height a bit then.

Aaron Hinde: Yeah, I’d say like $150 million, somewhere around there.

Brad Weimert: So, markets declined since. The financial market has been not great since shortly after COVID. If a $500 million strategic called you tomorrow, what is a term that they could have that would cause you to walk away and not take that deal, and why?

Aaron Hinde: It would have to be congruent with our ethos, like we got into this in a very idealistic manner that people are being poisoned by sugar, water, and synthetic ingredients that’s negatively affecting our health. And every day reviews come in of, that I read every single one of them that says, you guys have changed my life. I used to be addicted to soda or this energy drink and I had all these health problems and I was told I was going to have to get on medication. I was like, I cleaned up and I started eating healthier. I switched what I was consuming, putting in my body, and that’s changed things for me significantly. Like, that’s what keeps me jazzed up. We put it on our Slack channels, like, check out the good we’re doing in the world. So, there’s a lot of companies out there that I think could carry that torch on for us and scale it to a way that it deserves to be scaled.

And then there’s some that couldn’t and wouldn’t and would refuse to do so or would just kill it. There’s a lot of brands that get purchased and just get put out to pasture. And so, I’d want someone, a partner that had the same vision for it that we do, that hey, it may not be one thing, it may not just be sucralose in our diet that has caused this health epidemic in this country, but it’s one of the things, it’s a combination of all the things that has made us extremely unhealthy, specifically as Americans. And I think the tide’s starting to shift back towards like, let’s really pay attention to what we’re putting in our body. I know in my household we’ve gotten rid of most of the crazy gnarly synthetic cleaning supplies and the type of detergent we’re using, the type of toothpaste and deodorant I use. All of that stuff now matters because I know it’s all contributing in some small way. And so, finding the right company that has that vision and is putting out great products in the world and would want to continue to do so would be the right partner for us.

Brad Weimert: Love that. So, we kind of started here, but if you were to start over, would you have started a beverage company or would you do it again?

Aaron Hinde: I am a glutton for punishment, so of course, yeah, I’d do it all over again. I would do some things differently. The shiny object, the ego stroke is, oh, we’re venture backed. We’ve got private equity, money, whatever, like there’s nothing wrong with bootstrapping. There’s nothing wrong with staying super niche in a channel and putting a ton of cash in your pocket. Like if we would’ve just stayed selling direct to consumer, direct to gym, never went retail, and like, we’d probably be cash flowing and putting a several million dollars each in our personal pockets every year, like, there is nothing wrong with that.

The more you stroke the ego, the more binary the result becomes. We either sell big or it’s worth nothing. And so, there’s nothing wrong with creating a real business that serves a great product or service in a niche industry and just kind of milk that for everything it’s worth and continue to do really great for that. I think the best example of this for the entrepreneurial community that’s been around for a while, look at Dan Kennedy, right? Dan Kennedy is a legend of direct response marketing. Literally, everybody we know that is successful in their niche on D2C or info products and stuff learned from Dan Kennedy. Every single one of those niche markers that we know is probably worth from a financial perspective, a lot more than Dan Kennedy, because Dan Kennedy was the generalist that put out like these are the principles to everybody, and these people took them and went really deep in this little obscure niche of carpet cleaning or chiropractors or dentistry or whatever it was and crushed it and generate a lot more revenue.

So, don’t think you have to be everywhere and you have to have your picture up on billboards and be in all the stores and all that stuff, like that sh*t doesn’t mean anything. Like, create a great life for yourself, double down on the real currency of life, which is relationships. The way things are changing right now in this country, I’m really excited about, but it’s crazy what’s going on right now. Crazy. And it’s all connected.

So, what is the currency of the future? Is it Bitcoin? Is it the dollar? Is it gold? Is it this? No, it’s community. That’s the relationship. That’s the currency because if it all goes to sh*t, I want people around me that have my back and I have them and the trust is deep and we can work and coordinate and grow and defend and hunt and like, that’s what it’s all about. And so, that’s where my focus is, like my community is phenomenal. I’m going to continue to nurture that. I’m doubling down on what’s working and my life personally, community from the business.

I took Hormozi’s stuff during his launch a few weeks ago. And the biggest takeaway I got is so simple from him. Maybe it cost me six grand to get this takeaway, but it was worth it. It was like, look at what’s working and just do more of that. Like, you got something that’s crushing. Why are you going to do this other thing? Like, just keep doing that and do double that, triple that, like keep going until it doesn’t scale anymore. Do more of what works. I think that piece of advice can be taken to every aspect of our life.

Brad Weimert: What’s something that you used to think was super important, but you no longer make time for it?

Aaron Hinde: I used to be so concerned about this role that I would play in friend groups and that type of thing. And it was all predicated upon me putting on a specific mask and then filling this role and these expectations of these people around me. And what I’ve realized as I’ve matured and now that I’m 50 and my friend group has really evolved, the true friends are the ones where the mask comes completely off, and it’s like, this is me, raw, unfiltered, quirky. I say what I say, like, I mean what I mean, and like you’re either attracted to it or you’re not. And allowing that process to take place and allow myself to repel who’s not supposed to be in my life anyway and attract who’s supposed to be there, it’s like the stress level of life has come so far down despite all the challenges and things that happen and all the sh*t storms that I’m constantly dealing with. The stress has actually come down because I’m allowed to be myself and be around people that love me for me and not me for who I thought I should be.

Brad Weimert: Beautiful. Before we wrap, what advice do you have for a brand-new entrepreneur starting out?

Aaron Hinde: Come back to my buddy that I mentioned before, Dean Jackson. His number one principle, choose a single target market. It’s like blocking and tackling. Choose a single target market and go deep in that market and be authentic to that market. Orion and I met in a CrossFit gym in 2009. I had been treating CrossFitters since the earliest days. I remember seeing Greg Glassman getting kicked out of Gold’s Gym and World Gym when I was 19, 20 years old. We were authentic to that community. We were early in that community. We worked out in that community. I treated those athletes and people running HQ.

How many beverages have tried to come in and out of CrossFit since then and not one of them has been successful? Because most of them, some of them were, but a lot of them, especially the big boys, were not authentic to that community. You can’t just pay your way in. So, choose a single target market and make sure that you are authentic to that target market. Not just because you think there’s a big opportunity there, but truly like, hey, I eat, breathe, sleep. I’m part of this community. I’m authentic to it. And so, that’s where I’m going to focus and create a product or service that actually uplifts and something unique for that group.

Brad Weimert: Dope. Aaron Hinde, it’s great hanging out, man. Appreciate you carving out time.

Aaron Hinde: Hey buddy, always a pleasure.

[END]