This episode of 'The Next Next' features Mike Salguero, founder and CEO of ButcherBox, a direct-to-consumer meat delivery service. Mike discusses his journey from running his first startup, CustomMade, which failed after raising venture capital, to creating ButcherBox as a side project that grew into a $500 million revenue business without any outside capital. Mike highlights how he balanced building ButcherBox with family life, implementing practices such as working from home on Fridays. The discussion also covers what he learned from his previous ventures, how he adapted his business approach with ButcherBox, and the challenges of scaling the company while maintaining a healthy work-life balance. They also touch upon AI, its influence on their business, and Mike's vision for ButcherBox as a multi-generational company.
Building a Balanced Business: Mike Salguero on Scaling ButcherBox Thoughtfully
In this episode of The Next Next, host Jason Jacobs interviews Mike Salguero, founder and CEO of ButcherBox. They discuss Mike's journey from the failure of his first startup, CustomMade, to the success of ButcherBox, a direct-to-consumer meat delivery service that now boasts over $500 million in revenue without raising outside capital. The conversation explores the importance of maintaining a work-life balance, the challenges of scaling a business independently, and the role of AI in enhancing customer experience. Mike shares insights on how to build a company that aligns with one's lifestyle goals while addressing broader industry challenges, such as worker welfare and sustainable meat production.
00:00 Introduction to Mike Salguero and ButcherBox
01:15 Mike's Journey from CustomMade to ButcherBox
03:01 Balancing Family and Business
03:33 The Role of AI in ButcherBox
05:35 Building ButcherBox: Philosophy and Growth
07:46 Lessons from CustomMade
11:14 Launching ButcherBox
20:33 The Growth and Challenges of ButcherBox
27:38 The Power of Saying No 28:18 Balancing Personal and Professional Life
29:43 The Importance of CEO Forums
31:34 The Plate-Spinning Analogy
33:06 Golden Plates: Health, Relationships, and Kids
34:41 Navigating Financial Independence
37:24 Reviving the Founder Mindset
40:04 Empowering Your Executive Team
45:20 Challenges in the Meat Industry
50:51 The Future Vision for ButcherBox
54:07 Final Thoughts and Reflections
Jason Jacobs: Today's guest on The Next Next is Mike Salguero, founder and CEO of ButcherBox, a direct to consumer meat delivery service that specializes in high quality, humanely raised meats. Now, I've known Mike a long time. I got to know him when I was running my first startup, RunKeeper, and Mike was running CustomMade.
Now, CustomMade raised a bunch of venture money, and the company didn't make it. It ran out of cash and it traumatized Mike a bit. And he headed out with ButcherBox. It started out almost like the driving range where he was like, Oh, it'll be a side project. It'll be fun. Now that little. side project that will be fun turned into a over 500 million in revenue monster without a dime of outside capital.
Not only that, but he's built it a lot different, really prioritizing family. staying at home with his kids every Friday and generally just being really thoughtful about culture, about delegation and about finding a way to build an enduring company while building an enduring family as well. We cover a lot in this discussion, including what Mike learned from CustomMade the origin story of ButcherBox.
We talked about how and when he knew that ButcherBox might be different than what he had initially envisioned and how he listened to where the company naturally wanted to go versus trying to steer it where he wanted to take it. We also talk about some mistakes he made along the way and some of the challenges of juggling professional pursuits and family pursuits and how those interrelate and interact.
And we also talk about AI and how he's thinking about AI and how he's thinking about the future of ButcherBox, how he's thinking about legacy, how he's thinking about building a multi generational company, and where AI comes into play, which, look, AI doesn't come into play as much in this episode as some others, but man, this is an awesome discussion.
But before we start
I'm Jason Jacobs, and this is The Next Next, it's not really a show. It's more of a learning journey to explore how founders can build ambitious companies while being present for family and not compromising flexibility and control, and also how emerging AI tools can assist with that. Each week, we bring on guests who are at the tip of the spear on redefining how ambitious companies get built.
And selfishly, the goal is for this to help me better understand how to do that myself. While bringing all of you along for the ride. Not sure where this is going to go, but it's going to be fun.
Okay, Mike Salguero, welcome to the show.
Mike Salguero: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
Jason Jacobs: What's funny, I thought I was bringing you on for kind of half of my journey because I'm on this one half journey about how to build different and, be a lot more present with family and stuff like that and then the other half is how how I will transform how startups get built and funded and how a middle aged founder like me that wants to be a lot more present can leverage those tools to help enable it.
And I thought I was only talking about the first part, although you told me right before recording that year. about to do some stuff with AI too. I know nothing. I asked you nothing. So we'll do it live. But but that was a surprise actually, since you have a I was going to say a meat company, but how do you describe it?
Mike Salguero: Yeah. We are a meat company. We ship raised animals or well raised meat in the mail. But ultimately we're a customer service company. And so the application of AI for us is a lot around. Happiness of our customers. How can we make them more happy? What types of deals and offers are they looking for at what time?
If you think about our products that we ship you on a monthly basis, a box of meat in the mail, and that meat is frozen. And if you imagine your average customer is getting that product putting it in their freezer and then forgetting about it, because most Americans, when they think about what's for dinner, they open their refrigerator.
So anything that we can do to inspire our members to cook more often which we see as a really good thing, it's a good thing for your health. It's a good thing for your children's health. It's it's good for the environment. We think eating around a table is a good thing. So eating at home is we're pro eating at home.
So anything that we can do to inspire that is something that I think that AI slash experientially, how can we drive that?
Jason Jacobs: So you are not pro eating in a car on top of your school iPad while you're trying to get your homework done and eat dinner on the way to sports practice.
Mike Salguero: No yeah. Hopefully you guys find at least like one meal a week where you can sit and sit around the table and enjoy. There's a Spanish saying called sobremesa, which is like sitting around the table. Which I think is a lost art because we as, as parents overschedule our kids, run around with them, think we're like helping unclear whether we are, I guess the jury's still out on that
Jason Jacobs: been talking a little about this off offline, so it'll be interesting to see how much of that ends up coming up in this discussion
Mike Salguero: Yeah. I guess it really depends on the motivation, right? If you're, if your kid is this is what I want to do, then okay, great. But otherwise is it you or is it your kid? Which by the way is like my whole philosophy on, on running a company. So I started ButcherBox about 10 years ago and I started it.
I'd run something else for eight years that didn't work out. And I felt like I lost my soul running the company. And I started
Jason Jacobs: that and I met you when you were running
Mike Salguero: Yeah, when I was soulless running around. I started ButcherBox and also had a four month old at home. And the thing that I found to be like, so interesting is I think businesses and kids are like very it's very similar.
The way I run my business is very much the way I raise my family, which is keep them safe. In the case of business, that's don't run out of money build some guardrails. So in the case of business, that's a core values, you try to teach your values to your kids. And then they're going to be what they want to be.
And I think that is one of the things that I I, upon a lot of reflection of the first company I ran, I was like in misalignment with what the company wanted to be. The company wanted to be something different than what I wanted it to be. And ButcherBox, I really tried to, this sounds woo, but I tried to listen in to what did what does the company want?
To be, and it turned out that the company wanted to be something much bigger than I had expected. I built this as a hobby business. I was like your podcast trying to figure out like, Hey, maybe I could run something with everything's outsourced and it's just me and one or two people.
And that would be so great. It'd be like a hobby. And that was the whole idea of butcher box. And then it became pretty clear that butcher box wanted to be something bigger. But I kept that philosophy throughout. And I equate it to like Simone Biles's parents. I just have this picture of Simone Biles, who's the famous gymnast.
She's two years old, three years old and doing backflips in the living room. And her friends, her parents are like, I guess we're going to get her into gymnastics. It's
Jason Jacobs: Is that the story?
Mike Salguero: I have no idea if that was the story. I'm sure they but you can't push somebody like you, you don't, I, maybe I'm wrong these talents are generally born and then fostered.
And so we did a lot of fostering with ButcherBox, but it really wanted to be something bigger than what I had anticipated. And I think the same with kids, like the kids are just going to, they're going to be who they're going to be. I can only do so much.
Jason Jacobs: Oh, gosh, I have so many questions. So it's gonna be a challenge to figure out where to start here. But I know where I think I'm, I want to start, which is let's go back to custom made. You didn't name it, but custom made was your your first company where you were running around soulless.
And you mentioned that one of the reasons you think with the benefit of hindsight that you that it didn't work is that the company. wanted to be something different than what you wanted to be but you were the founder. Maybe talk a bit about how that bifurcation occurred. And I'd also be interested to understand with the benefit of hindsight, how much you think that raising gobs of venture capital was the reason versus just a contributor versus a non factor at all.
Oh,
Mike Salguero: So I think there was like three, three core components of custom made that really changed my experience. One, I had a co founder, so it wasn't me as I'm the founder. It was me with a very vocal best friend, co founder who we fought about everything. So that had. I had to change my perspective a lot.
The second was, yes, we had gobs of venture capital. We raised about 30 million of financing and those venture capitalists have a point of view. And you have to take in their point of view. And the third was I was young. I was 26 when I started custom made and had never done it before and very impressionable.
So when somebody comes to your office and they have all this experience and they represent all this money and they've done big things in the world and they're like, that experience sucks or that person stinks or like you need to do this or you need to do that. You, as a 26 year old, I listened.
I didn't have enough like mental fortitude to be like, yeah, you're wrong. And here are all the reasons why you know, unlike you and your first venture where things seem to work out really well, at least outwardly.
Jason Jacobs: No. One of the One of the reasons why I was all screwed up after the exit is that we were in like carbon monoxide wartime for several years and then Had to do a bunch of hard things to save the company and then got healthy and got almost profitable and then ended up landing the plane and having a pretty good outcome.
But after that, everyone was like saying what you just said and I didn't feel worthy at all. I felt like a complete imposter that just didn't deserve to be sitting in the seat I was sitting in. And I was like what am I going to do now? And I sweet I had to do a long walkabout to sort through all that.
Because I did not feel pride when when we landed the plane, I felt like guilt.
Mike Salguero: That is a common common reaction to selling a company. I have found, I have not experienced it myself, but I, in talking with a lot of friends, there's like this empty feeling at the end of the rainbow.
Jason Jacobs: It's life changing. It completely like, stablize the future of my Family, which is insane, and I care way more about that than I do about stuff,
Mike Salguero: Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: Just like flexibility to pursue things for love versus pursuing things for cash but and I felt incredibly fortunate, but again, I also didn't feel I think over, over time I have come to realize that like you, I was young.
I was a first timer. I made a bunch of mistakes and sure, if I had a do over, I would have done a lot of things different, but like you can't, that's not how life works. And and I did the best I could with what I had and most people would have quit like a million times over and I didn't quit.
So I'm actually in, in that way I'm proud that I, Landed the plane in the end took a lot of grit,
Mike Salguero: That is the mark of a great entrepreneur. The the not quitting piece. I oftentimes find, people ask me like, Oh, how'd you raise money? Like I've gone on 10 meetings and I'm like, yeah, I went on 70 meetings. to raise money,
Jason Jacobs: but I want to talk. So you talked about some of the factors that led to the Misalignment and to, to ultimately the, the company didn't make it but talk a bit about how that felt at the time, and how long of a walkabout was there in between, and then how ButcherBox was.
Yeah. I have a whole nother set of questions, which is that you didn't raise a dime of outside capital and you're like my entrepreneurial hero for that. And you can do it different and, four day work week and be present with your three girls and all that, right? Or four girls if you count your wife, right?
But but then what I want to know is okay, now you're like north of 500 million in revenue doesn't your life suck just like it does for every CEO running a big company or are you still quote unquote doing it different? But we can get to that a little
Mike Salguero: Okay. So yeah, we got to go quick here. Okay. Essentially what happened that custom made is lot of really amazing people helped me build a company. We raised outside capital from Google first round capital, schooner capital, Atlas. Which is now accomplice. And we ended up being pressured to hire a quote unquote, better people.
Those people came in, we hired for resume, not for core values. And they, stomped on our core values a bit. We didn't really, we didn't have core values. But the culture of the company
Jason Jacobs: The intuitive unspoken ones.
Mike Salguero: yeah. The cult, the culture of the company changed. We had to, yeah, professionalize, which was probably what we
Jason Jacobs: each other at 9am like we were doing at Runkeeper?
Mike Salguero: exactly. We couldn't walk around barefoot and and that was hard. That was hard for me. Plus the business wasn't working. Ultimately we tried to we raised money ahead of product market fit.
And our investors thought we had product market fit, but we didn't. And so we just started building on top of something that didn't exist. And it didn't work. It didn't work. And so in on a Friday before Memorial Day weekend in 2015 I literally shut the gate of custom made because it was like an old retail center was our office and close the, close the padlock.
And it was like, And on Tuesday
Jason Jacobs: in the background that was like, and cut.
Mike Salguero: and cut. Yeah. I was like, yeah. And then on Tuesday, so I took the Memorial Day weekend off. Tuesday I had an intern from Babson show up at my door at 9 AM. Who I had convinced to come work for me for 11 an hour. And he was going to work this summer on this concept, which was going to be butcher box.
So I didn't take any time off. I
Jason Jacobs: that was our that how long was that in the works?
Mike Salguero: So I had so the last year at custom made, it was pretty clear custom made wasn't going to work. And so I had just started like thinking about what would be next. But hadn't really put all the pieces together, but I knew myself well enough to know, and this goes into doing things different, like I knew myself well enough to know that if I, if it was just me.
If I had to wake up on Tuesday morning and alright, I'm gonna start working, that wouldn't work, like I just wouldn't be motivated. I get motivated by having groups of people around me and we're all like working on something together like common good. And I knew enough about myself to know that like I needed I needed someone to hold my hand over the summer.
So when Bobby showed up at 9:00 AM on the Tuesday, and he's like, all right, what are we doing? I was like let's go to a coffee shop. It was like we had to start with, find a desk to work at. And we spent the summer building
Jason Jacobs: Mike, did you have kids at this time or not
Mike Salguero: I did, I had a, what was she, nine, nine month old. Yeah. So my,
Jason Jacobs: As a young guy, first company, cratered into the ground were you feeling were you feeling some financial pressure at that time?
Mike Salguero: I had, I was fortunate to have done secondary, which is something I encourage all founders to do. So if you do go on the venture to capital train around your series B if you can, you should cobble together a secondary round, which is basically some of the money of the shares that you sell or your own.
So we were able to do a secondary and that was enough
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, so you weren't rich, but you at least had some time.
Mike Salguero: I had some time. And so I didn't feel a time pressure at all. And I thought, why don't I spend the summer trying to spin up this hobby, because it was going to be a hobby. It'll cover my expenses and then I'll have real freedom.
I can go do whatever I
Jason Jacobs: how'd you pick this hobby?
Mike Salguero: So I had three concepts happening or three concepts that I was incubating at the time. And so it chose me, although that's like pretty cliche to say, but one of the things that I tell founders who are trying to think about doing things different or starting a new company is to start with your lifestyle plan.
So you start with what kind of lifestyle do you want? Oh, I want to work, I want to work out every day. I don't want to go to an office. I don't want to have a lot of people reporting to me and I want to sell a physical
Jason Jacobs: You are speaking my language right now.
Mike Salguero: Like
Jason Jacobs: It isn't that set of stuff, but I have some pretty big constraints on the personal side, which is confusing me because I'm still a really super ambitious entrepreneur, but I have just a lot more constraints than I'm used to having,
Mike Salguero: Yeah. Yeah. So I encourage people to like go take a walk in nature or go do whatever it takes to like, be able to listen to your heart and then write that down. What is a day in the life look like of Jason three years in the future? What are you doing? Who are you talking to?
What's your day look like? Are there for breakfast? Are you there for dinner? Are you running around for sports? What's your day look like? And write it down. And then it's okay, yeah. How does the business that I'm about to start or I'm going to incubate or I'm going to do?
How does it fit into that lifestyle plan? Because ultimately what we're looking for in life, I think is An amazing lifestyle and then your business should feed that unless you're like gonna go change the world which let's be honest Most of us are not you know, it's What are you what's important to you and then try to build a business that helps drive that importance.
That's like very backwards to what most people do. What most people do is they start with a business plan and they build like a 15 page business plan with all the financials and how are we going to do this and what's going to happen. And the challenge with that is you build the business plan, then you build a pitch deck, then you go and try to pitch investors.
Then try to get some money, try to get product market fit and you build and build and build. And you never ask the question of what do I want this? Is this what I want? And by the time you pick up your head, eight years later, you're running this business that you're like, shit, like this sucks.
I don't like any of the people. I don't like the problem space. I don't like the customers. Like my first business custom made, like I didn't really like the makers and I didn't really like the customers. It wasn't like a passion project for me. Like my friend and I just wanted to start a company.
And if you're not focused on what is my lifestyle? What do I want? What types of interactions do I want? Et cetera. It can really backfire. So when I had decided what I want to be out of my lifestyle, which had a lot to do with spend time with my kids and be, be present and travel and do all these other things.
I had three ideas that I was running with. One was a billboard company, one was a bond company, and the last one was ButcherBox. And what I would try to do on a weekly basis, and this was while custom made was falling apart, my co founder took over as CEO, and so there wasn't much to do except for watch the thing smack into a wall.
And so every week I'd just try to like progress. These ideas a little bit further, like what's one thing that you can do this week to see if the bond company has any legs. I still think that bond company is like fascinating. I'd love for somebody to do it. And then it's Ooh, actually, that won't work.
And it's okay. So with butcher box, the big challenge was how do you ship? Meat in the mail, couldn't figure it out. I was like, this business will work. There's definite market need. I got into it because my wife and I were trying to eat better and we couldn't find grass or beef. Like there, there's definite market need.
There's no one doing this. I think we can do subscription, but it was like, how do you ship a box of meat in the mail? And one week I reached out to a guy who ran Omaha Steaks or he ran, he was, he ran operations for Omaha Steaks and he made some introductions and voila, like we it all started to work.
And so that was, that happened as I was leaving custom made and that was like, okay let's see if we can make this work. In. And we get going and the idea was, I'm going to put 10, 000 into this legal fees in turn, everything. We're going to launch a Kickstarter to see if there's any sort of signal here do customers actually want this and we'll see.
And so we worked this summer got a Kickstarter up and running. We launched Kickstarter in September and it just. Took off like it, it, we tried to raise 25, 000, we raised 215, 000 and we had some stuff like we expected to do better than 25, but not 215 and yeah, things just went from there and we grew very quickly and despite many meetings and conversations and questioning we have decided not to raise money.
Because I don't want to serve that master right now. It just doesn't feel like it's the right time or I'm not sure there will ever be a good time. Yeah, it's just I think there's a lot of really intriguing large companies that are changing the world in whatever way they are that have not raised money and those founders just seem a lot happier.
And so it's like, why not do that?
Jason Jacobs: It'd be helpful if you're willing to, maybe if you had to chunk the ButcherBox story into chapters or seasons. What are the different seasons that the company's gone through? And similarly, to the extent that you're comfortable, I'd love to understand just the family seasons and how those have interacted along the way.
Mike Salguero: Yeah. Yeah. So
Jason Jacobs: also just, selflessly, that's something I'm struggling with.
Mike Salguero: we launched in 2015 in September of 2015 and Kickstarter went really well. The next year we had a tiny office and just started growing. And so we went the Kickstarter year we did about 300, 000 in sales. The next year we did 5 million. The next year, 35, the next year, 105. So we grew like very quickly.
And then 105, 225, and then COVID hit, we went to 450 and then I could talk about. At the company, we had a group of pirates people who had a massive chip on their shoulder. A lot of people who had failed at their a venture or, just had something to prove and did not have any pedigree.
And I felt the same
Jason Jacobs: a great profile. And that, I I've felt that way my whole life.
Mike Salguero: yeah, I felt the same way about myself. Like I had just failed in this company. I was like, I'm not doing venture again. I remember one of my
Jason Jacobs: sports I was a little 5'7 5'7 5'8 Jewish hockey player,
Mike Salguero: Yeah
Jason Jacobs: that's the equivalent of no pedigree.
Mike Salguero: Grit. And you build this this just I don't care. I'm going to make this work. Like you, you're not going to stop me. And we had a whole crew of those people. And I decided actually, at the very beginning that part of my lifestyle plan was I'm not going to work on Fridays.
I'm going to basically be with my daughter on Friday because at the time my wife was working Monday through Thursday or sorry, no, she was working on Fridays. I forget what her schedule was, but she was working on Fridays. And I was like I'm going to stay home. I know it'll be a challenge, but I'm going to stay home.
And that. That was amazing. It's still amazing. I still run with that. And I had time. So my daughter was young. And then when she was two, we had twins. So we had three girls. And every Friday, it was just me with them. And the thing that I didn't expect but absolutely happened is my team, my gritty team of pirates who like, had not really done business before they were all forced to grow up because they knew on Friday I'm not reachable.
And if you do, I was reachable if there's some big problem of course I'll get on the phone. But if you do reach me and it's not for a good reason, I'm going to let you know that. Huh. Okay. This is what I would do. By the way, it's Friday. Like, why are you calling me for this?
This doesn't like, it feels like you could have just solved this yourself and they're like, Oh yeah, you're right. And I'm like, yeah. So I, I protected that time. I actually found that time was like, I was quote unquote, not working, but one of the things that CEOs are like supposed to do is think, but it's very hard to think when you're just bombarded with emails and like all this stuff all day long, my Fridays became my thinking day because when I'm like hanging out with my kids and like playing with Legos on the floor, I'm like Oh, yeah.
What about this? And yeah, I by no means. Chapter one was the pirate year up until COVID pirate years. That was five years grew the business dramatically. Every year was like, two X three acts just and of course I'd go and talk to venture people and they're like, if you raise capital, you might be able to go faster.
And I'm like, dude, like I'm going plenty fast. We're at like 250 million after five years. Like we're good. We don't need to go faster. Then COVID hits, we close our offices. Everyone goes home. And I, things got, things were great for the first part of COVID. We were just signing people up hand over fist and like no marketing whatsoever.
But then we started running out of meat and we had to go on a wait list. And we there was just, And then inflation started picking up, especially in meat. Meat was one of those things where like people were dying in plants. And it was just like, we were at the epicenter of the COVID, like COVID stuff.
We layered on a bunch of people into the company. Cause it was like, wow, we're like 450 million and we're 80 employees. And we need more people around here. And so over the course of three years, we went from 80
Jason Jacobs: that when you say we like in the custom made example, it was like the, the VCs and you were the little 26 year
Who's the we in this case?
Mike Salguero: yeah.
Jason Jacobs: Blame it on the VCs. You don't have any VCs in
Mike Salguero: Roy, it's the Royal. We ultimately it was me and I had a a C, a guy who came in as a CFO this guy, Tom, who then became my COO. He was like my number two. So we were calling the shots, but and then we had an executive team. So we were all calling the shots.
But yes, ultimately it was me. And as I now,
Jason Jacobs: and was that, describe that feeling. Was it like the pirates need some supervision
Mike Salguero: yes, as I now understand it, this is a classic business cycle piece of the business cycle, which is company scales very quickly. Company gets to around 500 million in revenue. Company decides that they have no idea what they're doing. Company brings in a lot of people to build processes and whatnot.
Company slows down like that. That's the.
Jason Jacobs: you that. Every company I've built that passed 500 million in revenue, that's what happened to us. Spoiler alert, I've never done anything
Mike Salguero: Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: Just for any listener that thought I was serious.
Mike Salguero: Yeah. In our first company, we did that before we had product market fit. That was a mistake in this company. I did it. And yes, I'm the one to to blame. I did it probably at the right time. Like the reality was our website was crashing. We had been hacked.
Like we, we just didn't have controls in place and needed, we just needed it. Better supervision and better people around us.
Jason Jacobs: But you just over rotated to the controls?
Mike Salguero: Yeah. So there's this great book they talk about it's called like the Cycles of Business and they talk about how in the pirate stage, it's like capital E, capital letter E for entrepreneurship and lower case P for process. And then you swing all the way over to like capital P process and lowercase e entrepreneurship like entrepreneurship is dead, right?
It's like you want to get something approved. It's got to go through five layers of approvals before it ever sees the light of day. And the reality is that all the people we brought in are just doing their job like, right? We're like, Hey, we have no idea what we're doing here. Help us out. And they're like, Great, we'll hop in.
And so that's like chapter two is 2021. You got inflationary pressures, you've got process, you've got like a whole bunch of stuff.
Jason Jacobs: And what was the family chapter to? Unless you want to do it
Mike Salguero: No. Geez. My twins were born in 2016 and yeah, I, I've been very present throughout. I didn't grow up with a dad. So I wanted to be like, I've said, no, I want to be home. I want to be home for dinner. I want to be home on Fridays. I want to be there in the morning.
It's very hard to pull me away. And when you're a CEO, especially if your company is reasonably successful, you could be gone every week. No problem. Like between the conference and the invites and the dinners and the, Hey, you want to go to the Bruins game? And Hey, do you want to go out to dinner?
And Hey, do you want to come to Austin and give this talk? And I imagine. That can seem really flattering to a lot of people who then are like yes. I realized, especially because of my first company I said yes to everything. I realized that's it just, the invites never stop.
And I don't think it really helps the company.
Jason Jacobs: I'm just saying, but you did say yes to this podcast.
Mike Salguero: Yeah, it's during the day though, so I'm just like not doing, work. I'm on the podcast and, with your reach, I'm just
Jason Jacobs: Oh, my reach. Yeah.
Mike Salguero: get in front of all your, yeah, get in front of all
Jason Jacobs: Someday this is going to be
Mike Salguero: Bye ButcherBox folks.
Yeah, they'll go back to one of the first episodes and they'll be like, huh. So I was home. I was present as a father. I worked on my health a lot more. I, worked out a lot and like really took my,
Jason Jacobs: like on, on the road to 500 million. This is what was
Mike Salguero: Yeah. Like I, I just didn't, I didn't let it, I didn't let it, take me over. And it all comes down to like that plan that okay what does my day look like?
And I've rewritten that plan every three years. Here's the lifestyle plan I want now. And I will say that somewhere along the line, I took my eye off the ball.
Jason Jacobs: I was going to ask because you just said that you, you said that that like slippery slope of like controls, and like less and less entrepreneurship, less and less pirate. And then the company got in a bad place. And so if it were me, when the company gets to that bad place, like all my personal crap goes right out the window and ah every bad personal habit is back full in effect, like over caffeinated, under rested, working around the clock, road warrior.
Mike Salguero: at your spouse. Yeah. The whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. So somewhere around there is when the wheels fell off everything at the same time. I, in, on retro, in retrospect, like I think like you just said over, over caffeinated, overstimulated just trying to cope by doing whatever not knowing how to make the next move at the company.
Some of the early team started leaving.
Jason Jacobs: And yeah don't answer any questions if you don't want to, but did you have a CEO forum or some kind of outlet along the way?
Mike Salguero: yes throughout my entire journey. Yes,
Jason Jacobs: did you have to keep switching up the group as you entered different phases of the business so that you were around leaders of similar scale?
Mike Salguero: yes. There's a group called EO, which is entrepreneurs organization. The buy in for EO or like the requirement for EO is a million dollars in revenue. So I was in EO throughout
Jason Jacobs: you have 500 members, 500 memberships?
Mike Salguero: Yeah, exactly. I was an EO throughout my throughout my custom aid journey and then was an EO at when we started ButcherBox and then there's another group called YPO, Young Presidents Organization, that you have to be over 20 million.
So as soon as I got up to over 20 million, I joined that one. And that has all sorts of people as people who, have retired or people who are running like a 25 million thing and a part people who are running like a billion dollar thing. And it's everyone in between. But yeah, that group I hold a lot of my success and gratitude for YPO because you get together with a group of people, it's eight.
Eight business leaders on a monthly basis. You talk about all your challenges and and wins. And the idea is if life is a bell curve of experiences, there are very few people who you can talk about the tails with. And this is a group that like, that's the whole point is like process the tails.
So it has nothing, it really has nothing to do with business. It's not Oh, like. How do I come up with a employee handbook? It has everything to do with like, how do I show up at work and like, how can I learn more about myself by my interactions?
Jason Jacobs: And if things are getting funky at home and at work at the same time as you're sorting through that, how do you know which one to give attention to? And are they interreliant or are they separate and distinct?
Mike Salguero: Yeah. Okay. I heard this analogy once, thought it was great. I've built on it and it's how I run my life. The circus act where they spin a plate on a broomstick. You like get a plate and you spin it on a broomstick and the plate is spinning on a stick and then once one plate is spinning they grab another plate and they do the same thing and that one's spinning and then maybe that one's the first one starts to wobble so they go back and like mess with the stick and it starts to spin and then they do another one and then they do another one and then they do another one and all of a sudden on stage there's Okay.
10 to 15 plate spinning all at once. And the job of the person who's doing the plate spinning is to know which one's wobbling and to run over to it and Jimmy it a few times. So it starts spinning again. And so I think one of one of the, one of the problems of entrepreneurship, which is both a, a superpower as well as a problem is, when all the plates are spinning really nicely we as entrepreneurs are many entrepreneurs.
Are like, Oh, everything's spinning and instead of sitting back and being like, wow, isn't this so great? Everything's spinning. We go and grab another plate. We're like, we need a new initiative or I'm going to write a book or I'm going to do this. It's just it's a sickness.
It's I got to start something else because everything is like working. And yeah. Basically what I used to talk about was like, Hey, the job of the entrepreneurs to know which plates are wobbling and to go attend to those plates. And so if your family life is wobbling or your kids need something and it's wobbling, recognize there's a wobble and go spend your time making sure that thing will start spinning again.
What I've now come to realize is there, there are the in this analogy of plates, there are a few golden plates and you cannot let those wobble. You just can't let them wobble. So you always have to go back to attend to those plates. And those, in my opinion, are your health. Your spouse or relationships and your kids.
Those are the ones that like, I don't care if, the reality is oh, our revenue is down. Who cares? If your health is wobbling it doesn't matter. And the reality is, if you like, have a heart attack you're not going to worry about your revenue. Like you just aren't you're gonna worry about like survival or if you're if your wife leaves you or If your kids get sick or all those challenges that happen Those are actually the most important things in life your connections, you could put your friends in there I don't know if that's a golden plate or All of that stuff is so much more important than your work life.
The challenge is that we as entrepreneurs, we like, we connect our ego to our work which works really well when it's going well, like when it's growing, it's wow, I feel on top of the world. But that's a mistake because as soon as things go bad, you just start. Trying to like will yourself back to success and everything suffers as a result.
And so I think that even with the best structures in a business that was started as a hobby and, profitable growth and no investors, I too have taken my eye off the golden plates at times. And that's something that. I just can't do anymore.
Jason Jacobs: One question I have and feel free to answer this in a ButcherBot specific way or just more general advice, but for founders who choose to take the independent path and are in a position where they could raise money and they consciously do not how have you thought about and how much have you worried about what if this all goes to zero?
Because you've mentioned, for example, that you're an advocate of secondaries. In the venture market along the way, typically at B, take a little money off the table, get your head out of a vice, so if it all goes to zero you won't be applying for unemployment.
You'll have some flexibility to lick your wounds and recharge and figure out. What to do next. What's the equivalent of that in the independent path? How much is too much? And just, yeah, how how have you navigated that in or what advice would you have for other founders who are trying to navigate that and committed to staying independent?
Mike Salguero: Yeah, so I think that you need to figure out how to enrich yourself along the way. And other shareholders, if you have any. We did not raise money, but we gave away shares to our employees. And so you have an early employee.
Jason Jacobs: in the form of stock options or?
Mike Salguero: We started as an LLC, so there was something different. They were called profits interests, but same mechanics basically.
But these people who helped start the company it's six years in and it's I just helped build a behemoth. I want some money. And it's yeah, we gotta figure out how to get you some money. When you build a company and it's profitable and you don't have outside investors, let's say you have a 10 million business and you made a 10 percent profit, that's a million bucks at the end of the, at the end of the year, I am not a believer in deploying all of that money.
Back into the business, I think you should be trying to pull some out somehow. And so along the way, as we've been profitable, I have built ways in which I can pull out money. And so that is so if the company was, if the company was to like. Fail right now. And also when you don't have money you do things in a more sustainable way.
So we have a big cash position. We're very conservative. Yeah.
Jason Jacobs: All going into crypto,
Mike Salguero: it's all, yeah, it's all in crypto. Yeah. My own coin bacon. Just kidding. I don't have a coin. Yeah. So we. You have to basically don't plow everything back into the business. That just increases your risk.
What you want to do is to pull some out and diversify.
Jason Jacobs: So we talked about the golden plates on the personal side, and we talked about how things went Ari Ari, if that's a word, A W R I, I think that's a
Mike Salguero: a rye?
Jason Jacobs: yeah. But with the business, right? But what did the professional getting healthy path look like and where do things stand today?
Mike Salguero: On the professional side like I said, it is a, apparently a very classic business cycle to go into, where it's like lots of process swing, the pendulum too far. And the only way to bring it back is for the founder to be or a CEO to be very involved in bringing that pendulum back to the founder mindset.
And there's actually a great book called the founder mindset by these guys at Bain who studied this. And how do you bring back the founder mindset? Like one remind people about the customer and the customer's needs. So it's sometimes there's. Too much process. And we're just like stymieing the customer's experience and we think we're helping, but we're not to just re ramp up the sense of urgency.
Like we're gonna, we're gonna launch this at this time. And then three is just like really, being clear about what you want, right? So I probably spent too long gossiping in the background about like, why is this taking so long? I don't understand. I don't know why we're, taking this approach or why does this have to go through legal or what, just like instead of realizing as you did quickly, like at the end of the day, this is your problem.
So like. Why don't you go say to people, I want this done by this date, or I need this, accomplished, or I want you to not like, look at this or whatever those things are, ultimately, I'm the guy in control. It was like retaking control last year. To end the growth we went from 225 to 450 during COVID and then 450 to 550.
And then we went 550 to 570. And then last year we went down to 500. So we, we had a big drop or no, sorry, two years ago, we went down to 500 last year. We grew again. And I'm hoping this year we'll be at our highest revenue ever. Hopefully we're out of the kind of the dip, right? We had one down year.
We all felt bad about that. I felt bad about that, but we're back into growth mode. And it's feeling good and it feels like it feels different. And what it really took was me being intentional and realizing it's still my company and it hasn't been taken over. And this isn't like last time.
And I get to call the shots and just doing it my way.
Jason Jacobs: And and what, what went on with the, the balance and being present in the gym and the meditation and the, I don't think you, I don't know if you said meditation, but but like that whole side, did it take a backseat during this
It a turnaround because you said it was a big drop, but it was a little drop and you're still like effing huge.
Mike Salguero: Yeah
Jason Jacobs: hiccup, I would call it.
Mike Salguero: no, I, I think that it's actually the opposite. It's like I was spending a lot more time like obsessing over all the details and instead of asking my team to obsess over those details for me. And that's the thing is like it, it actually is, it works so well with the way that I believe a company should be run, which is like you hire these executives and you pay them a bunch of money and like they don't want you breathing down their neck.
You know what they want? They want to be left alone. So you just like you'd be very clear with them about what you're looking for in what time frame, why this matters to the customer, and then you just let them do their job. And so I actually recently have, gotten rid of my regularly scheduled one on ones I'm not meeting with people on a one on one basis unless they need me and then I'm totally happy to meet with them.
And I spend most of my time, like either getting the word out about About ButcherBox doing a podcast, something like that or people are coming to me with a problem, not like they're coming to me because they have to meet with me every week, but they're coming to me because they really want my opinion on a certain thing and so I'm loving my time.
I'm loving what I'm doing. I don't feel like I'm overly involved or overly stretched and I'm still home for dinner. I don't know. I probably have dinner out Twice a month, maybe? And like once is with a friend. Maybe once is with somebody from work. Very rare. I prefer to be home.
Jason Jacobs: Oh I'm interested to hear your thoughts on for me, I feel like I'm a zero to one pirate and then I can get I can, I'm less of a business model person and I'm more of put myself in the center of the action and get really well connected and uncover paths that are exciting and get to train on the tracks and get a bunch of interest and excitement around it.
And then as soon as it starts getting operational, it's Whoa like that, like I'm not operational. And that's an energy suck, not an energy generator for me. And I, I don't, At one point early in my career it was like, or in my founder career, it was like I'm gonna be the guy that like scales it bigger and bigger and like I just don't, I don't know that I'm that guy and you seemingly are that guy, do you feel like that guy?
Did you aspire to be that guy? And do you ever, like how do you even think about that? Yeah, do you worry you're not that guy?
Mike Salguero: Yeah. So I would encourage you to question where that's coming from. Like, where is this story that you're not the guy coming from? And it could be you're just not the guy and you're like, Hey, I'm very in tune with how I feel. And I don't like it. And my case I was working with a coach and I was like, when this thing gets to a million dollars a month in revenue, so this is like year one and a half.
When this thing gets to a million dollars a month in revenue, like I'm not the right guy. And he's like, Why don't you set your sights a little higher? I was like, okay, fine. When this thing gets to 10 million a month, like I'm definitely not gonna be the right guy. And then, so there's been all of these times where I'm like, I'm not the right guy.
I'm not the right guy. I'm definitely not the right guy. Oh, now we're having trouble. I'm not the right guy, but none of it has to do with the business. It, everything has to do with a deep sense of unworthiness within me that, that's where it comes from. It doesn't come from like the business.
But yeah, I won't be the guy forever. And I think most of the value in these things is created in the zero to one anyway. So if you're like the zero to one guy and you can just turn these out and have a team run it or do whatever, that could be a really compelling model. For me I love, similar to you, I love being like in a small room with a bunch of people with a lot of grit and I'm like the conductor of an orchestra.
What are you working on? What are you doing? What about this? What about this? What, just going down the line and just like everybody's just doing, I can oversee everything. That's very different you might, there are people in the company I've never talked to but then what are they working on?
No idea. It's like somebody who reports to somebody who reports to somebody who reports to me is telling them what to do. It's it's scary. It's different. And the question is, how do you, for me, has been, how do I build the same experience? And for me, that's working with my executive team.
So really using them as my team, like keeping
Jason Jacobs: You've done what you're saying that I do, but the difference is that you just do it in a scaling business by just constantly putting the right team around you and then being really intentional about empowering them and staying out of the way, quote unquote, for them, but also for you because you don't want to be all up in there.
Mike Salguero: Which is hard. Like sometimes my executives say Oh, we need to move on from this person. And I'm like, I really like what they're doing. I think that's a bad idea. And then I'm listening to myself. I'm like, all right, you say you don't want to be the center of attention. If you don't want to be the center of the universe, like you got to just like yield when they say things, and Yeah. But understanding my superpower or like asking a question that I'm like, this is so obvious, but to them, it's not or, pushing them in a different direction or helping them think about something at a much bigger scale than they're thinking about they still need me for that.
It's not like they can just run. But they don't need me to be like, Hey, it's Monday morning. Like how many people did we sign up? And can you give me a breakdown of like why we didn't or did sign up with more, more or less people than we want it to it's they don't need me for that. That's just like my own anxious energy coming out.
Jason Jacobs: What do you worry about these days, Mike?
Mike Salguero: A few things. So I work in meat as we talked about. I think that meat is a very interesting space to work in because it's so transformation is so needed and we see an increasing desire for meat that was raised better. The environment treated better. The farmer paid more. But it's a very entrenched industry and one thing is meat is beginning to be politicized. It's like we should be banning meat. There's a lot of that talk versus like the right saying like why is the left wanting to ban meat? Like we need more meat, so there's anytime anything gets politicized like I'm uneasy.
There's also with the new Trump administration. There's a question on like what's next? Who knows? Would there be tariffs? We bring in some of our meat from Australia, our grass fed beef. Would there be tariffs? It's just it's hard to navigate in that space. I would say.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah, I don't want to take you off the rails from talking about what else worries you. But are you active at all in terms of government relations? Is that a
Mike Salguero: we are. Yeah. Yeah. We the,
Jason Jacobs: a head of policy internally?
Mike Salguero: we don't have a head of policy, but we got very involved in the eats act, which is part of the farm bill. California, Massachusetts, both passed provisions whereby eggs and pork in their states can only be raised to a certain standard. And the farm bill, First, that got challenged by the Supreme Court or at the Supreme Court by the pork industry.
Then they now have provision in the Farm Bill to get rid of it. So we we actually got about 35 other organizations to write a letter to talk about our support or our opposition of the EATS Act. And went and did lobbying and, went door to door on Capitol Hill, which was super fun.
So yeah, I've we've started to get involved politically. I also got involved in a question in Massachusetts, which had nothing to do with work, but that's been fun. It's been pretty interesting to be like growing up, you're always like, Oh these companies are bad. They're talking to, they're intermingling with politics, and that's bad.
And then you just realize that's what people do. And you choose issues that matter to you. Not necessarily that you even make money from, but that matter to you. And you go push hard and try to make a difference. We're now
Jason Jacobs: worried about potential tariffs. And then what else you worried about? You were about to say and then I cut you
Mike Salguero: yeah. That whole realm is I think there's a really compelling, interesting movement right now, the Maha movement, the Make America Healthy Again movement. And there's a question, one of the things I'm worried about is Kennedy getting confirmed. Is he gonna get confirmed? If he does get confirmed how can we help shape a meat policy that will make some sense.
And so that, that's like top of mind right now. And then we've just, we've I would say the current worry, it's the 10th of February. The current worry is, are we on plan for doing what we said we wanted to do? So we're only six weeks in, but we're already starting to see signals. Seems like we are.
But yeah, that's like the current thinking. And then, yeah, just balance balancing it all. It's just a constant rebalance and reformulation and, that's that's work. There's work to be done there.
Jason Jacobs: coming back around to where we started. So is AI still like a little sideshow? Or do you feel like it's going to have impact in your business? How much are you thinking about it and how how influential do you think it will be over the next three, five, ten years?
Mike Salguero: Yeah I would say right now AI is a sideshow. We have, we're a Microsoft environment, so we have co pilot for everybody, and there's definitely a whole bunch of writing and it's review season right now. People are just adding, putting stuff into copilot to create reviews.
That stuff's happening, but I see that as like making workers a little more efficient, which is obviously a big piece of AI, but that's happening and I think that's. Pretty neat to watch. And then the main show would be how do you deliver the customer a better experience based on their behavior?
So that they order and eat and don't leave. That's an area where I could be very helpful. And so that's that's where we're spending a lot of our time is like thinking about that and building that and working on that. And so if if a customer is going to leave or wants to leave or, that we're thinking about how do we retain them?
How do we, help them get through whatever hump they're going through, same with
Jason Jacobs: Is it impacting at all, oh, go ahead,
Mike Salguero: Yeah, same with customer service. It's like customer calls in to complain delivering that, that customer service agent, like what's a good way to solve this issue that you can do at scale and gets better and smarter over time is is a huge opportunity.
Jason Jacobs: and is it changing at all the quantity of hires, the profile of hires? Are you bringing new roles in? Are you working with outside firms? Like where's the expertise coming from?
Mike Salguero: Mostly external firms. We do have some people internally who are just very fired up about AI and are constantly pushing the envelope. But we're very much a buy versus build organization that was rooted out of the start as a hobby business. And so we're just cobbling together best in class and just trying to, build a system that works.
And so that it's very on brand for us to go find an. Like a company to help with our AI versus doing it ourselves.
Jason Jacobs: How far out do you think, dream, plan for ButcherBox? And in your wildest imagination what does ButcherBox look like in the future?
Mike Salguero: I said, I do these three year visions. And the last vision that I did I sat down to write a three year vision and I was like, you know what, like this isn't the right way to look at the business what this business needs is a 25 year vision or a hundred year vision, depending on how you want to look at it.
So when you look at iconic food brands in the U. S. They tend to have something in common, which is they're closely held, family controlled, and long term holds. So if you think about like Hershey's or Campbell's or Mars or Tyson they're all in the same vein. They have just been around for a very long time.
Some of them are slightly public, but it's just like a piece of their overall capital structure family controlled, and just like multi generational holds. And so when when I made that observation, we just started building towards a multi generational play. That doesn't mean that somebody could come by and say, Hey, here's a huge check.
Come by. We want to buy a butcher box. Like we would obviously look at that. But I don't have any plans of going public. I don't have any plans on selling and I don't have any plans on, selling a piece to private equity. What I'm really interested in is building a big enduring company. And why?
It's two reasons. One, I think to build an iconic brand in this country, which the opportunities to build an iconic brand in meat, a brand that people know and love in meat, which has not been done. That's going to take time. And the second is I believe that meat needs to be transformed. I like to say that I agree with vegetarians.
Meat is broken and it needs to be transformed. And the problem is that you have all of these companies that are private equity backed or publicly traded and they're not going to make the change because they don't have enough time. And so what I love about where we sit as a company is we are able to take a long term perspective.
So the first seven years or I said, yeah, seven years I was in this business, I'd go to the meat conference and look around the room and just be like, why is nobody, why does nobody care about worker welfare? It's like a whole, it's like the whole industry, like nobody cares about the worker in the plant and like, how many injuries are people getting and are they allowed to take a break and vote and whatever else?
Like, why does nobody care about this? And the reality is after a while, after pointing all the fingers, I realized oh. And so it's been a really fun experience to recognize that you want people to go against the EATS Act. That's us. We need to galvanize all these companies and all these brands.
And you want to build something for worker welfare. That's you too. And so the only way that you can, be crazy enough to sign up for something like that is if you have just a very long term horizon. Other than we need this done this quarter. Cause that's just not going to work.
Yeah, so we're just going to be around for a long time. I don't know how long I'll run it. My current thinking is I'd love to run it to a billion dollars in revenue, we'll see, maybe that's just another, Pyrrhic victory goal written on my board that when I cross it off, I won't feel any better about myself.
But that's my current one. It's wow, it'd be cool if I could run it to a billion dollars in revenue. That'd be that'd be pretty fun.
Jason Jacobs: Mike, anything I didn't ask that you wish I did?
Mike Salguero: No, I don't think so. Maybe what type of customer do we have? I think the type of customer we have is the one listening to your podcast. Somebody who cares deeply about themselves, about their environment and is trying to make healthier choices at home. And we provide a box at a great value.
And you don't have to go to the butcher shop or the grocery store to get it. Other than that, no, I'm super excited to watch your journey from afar.
Jason Jacobs: Thanks. Yeah. And thanks for being a co conspirator on that journey. In general, but also in, in this chat definitely some food for thought, especially that part about the the scaling leader thing. I think that gives me some good food for thought. The good news is that.
But I have nothing to scale right now other than my public walkabout. But but at some point I'm, this public walkabout is gonna lead to something to scale and yeah. And so I think you'll hear from me again when when I get to that crossroads,
Mike Salguero: Can't wait.
Jason Jacobs: Yeah. And any call to action for for listeners other than signing up for ButcherBox, anyone you wanna hear from?
Any, anything you want 'em to think about that you haven't. Is that already?
Mike Salguero: I don't think so. No. I think that's that's good. People can find
Jason Jacobs: goes without saying, man but huge congratulations to to you on everything that you've built. I really respect how you've gone about building it, the humbleness that you bring even today, and also just how intentionally you've been about balancing professional success with it.
Thank you. personal success and how transparent you are about how hard it is, right? Cause it, it is super hard. Like none of us have the answer. We're all just doing the best we can, but I think hopefully people will find some value in just hearing that it's hard for everybody, not just for them,
Mike Salguero: Yeah. Thank you.
Jason Jacobs: but good luck, keep it up and road to a billion.
Mike Salguero: Thank you.
Jason Jacobs: Thank you for tuning into the next, next, if you enjoyed it, you can subscribe from your favorite podcast player. In addition to the podcast, which typically publishes weekly, there's also a weekly newsletter on sub stack at the next, next dot sub stack. com. That's essentially for weekly accountability of the ground.
I'm covering areas I'm tackling next and where I could use some help as well. And it's a great area to foster discussion and dialogue around the topics that we cover on the show. Thanks for tuning in. See you next week!