Making Barebells a Billion Dollar Brand with Quinten Thompson (Vitamin Well) | E30

In this episode of ‪What Worked, Mike and Tyler interview Quinten Thompson, former Director of Finance and Operations at Vitamin Well, about his role in launching NOCCO and Barebells in the US. Follow Quinten's career journey from a Big Four auditor to a startup jack of all trades.
Quinten shares his insights about:

• Going from selling to CrossFit gyms to Trader Joe's
• How he tackled tasks like fleet management without previous experience
• How the team grew from three people in a shared office

We'd love for you to connect with us:

• Mike Wu
• Tyler Rachal
• Quinten Thompson

Hire the best nearshore and offshore talent:
https://www.hireframe.com/

Transcript

Mike Wu
What's up everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of the What Worked podcast. Tyler and I are very excited to have a special guest with us today. Our friend, Quinten Thompson. Quinten, thanks for joining us.

Quinten Thompson
Thanks for having me guys.
 
Mike Wu
Yes, of course. This is a long time coming. Quinten, for those of you who don't know him, we brought him on for a lot of reasons, but most recently, the company that he worked at, Vitamin Well, sold last year at a $3 billion valuation. Quinten joined the company five or six years ago in 2019 as the Director of Finance, and he was employee number three on the US side of the business. So he really built the US business from the ground up.

Vitamin Well, you might know brands like NOCCO, the beverage, and Barebells as the protein bars. Quinten had a big role in growing the business here in the US, but also just transforming what I perceived as like a niche crossfit product and brand into a mainstream kind of universal product that eventually got into Trader Joe's and other retailers like that. 

So without further ado, Quinten, could you give us a little bit of background for those of you who don't know you, but also for me and Tyler, just like, know, who are you and what'd do before joining Vitamin Well?

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, yeah, sure. I have a background in finance and operations. I started my career like a lot of finance and accounting people at a big four firm. So I have a degree in accounting from the University of Minnesota. Went to work at PWC as an auditor like a lot of kids do. Got my CPA and then quickly realized that's not something that I really wanted to do for the rest of my career, but it was a good learning experience, I would say. And then went to work at US Bank after two and a half years, just for a year in their leverage finance group. So financing LBO is for really mid-market, PE firms. So $5 to $50 million in EBITDA, I would say. And then on a whim, I went through a breakup and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna move to LA. So I kind of on a whim quit that job and I really wanted to move to LA really for the weather and obviously the city, but really to get involved in startups. 

So through a mutual friend of Mike and Tyler's and I, I got connected at a e-cigarette startup, really starting in finance and accounting. And then it kind of grew to a little bit of ops, a little bit of marketing. And by the time I left there after, I think I was there about five years, I was doing the product development and global marketing. So we had an office in the US and the UK, and I was actually the one developing these products.

For those of you that don't know, the e-cigarette market is kind of killed by regulation. So that startup really didn't end up working out. and then I somehow threw an old colleague at PWC, who actually interviewed for my job that I had at Vitamin Well. He was like, hey, this is not really a job for me based on my background, but you might be interested in this. So, I found the CEO on LinkedIn of Vitamin Well, emailed them and said, hey, I hear you have this position. I'd like to have this job. And then pretty much within a week, I had interviewed probably seven different times with multiple people and got the job as the director of finance to start.

Tyler Rachal
That's so cool that you did the, you did a cold direct message. I feel like so often I give that advice, but nobody takes me up on it. Had you done that before? 

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, I've never done that before. Every other job that I've gotten before, I've kind of knew somebody, had some connection to the company like a lot of people do.He told me about the role at a very high level. And I had seen the product once on a YouTube channel once and I was like, I know what this, at the time it was just the energy drink, I know what this product is. Sounds cool. Yeah, just cold emailed and it worked out.

Tyler Rachal
That's how I found out about them too. I would watch, he's kind of an OG CrossFit YouTuber, Craig Richie. 

Quinten Thompson
That's how I found out, that's the guy I knew. That's how I found out about it.

Tyler Rachal
That's so funny. Yeah, so I used to watch all his old content and he was always talking about it and I was like, man, this looks good. And I knew he was all about it. So there you go, we're both getting influenced by the same influencers. 

Quinten Thompson
Exactly.

Tyler Rachal
I gotta ask, and this is maybe me. Sometimes I think I have a little bit of like a cinematic mind. I see things like movie scenes, right? And so you mentioned that you were doing audit and you knew that wasn't the life for you. Was there a singular moment? Obviously, probably it was a, you know, maybe death by a thousand paper cuts, but was there a single kind of time where you're like in a basement and some corporate building in Minnesota and you're like, yeah, I gotta do something else. What was it for you?

Quinten Thompson
It was the busy season of my second year, I was working in Chicago. My big client at the time was Ken Griffin’s Citadel, his hedge fund. So they flew me out to Chicago for the audit for that. So I was there about six months. And during January to March, they wouldn't let me go home every weekend. So they made me stay in Chicago and I was working seven days a week, like 12 hours, 14 hours, even on a Sunday. And then at the end of the audit, I remember I got a bad review for that job and I was really pissed off about it. So I kind of pushed back and I was like, I was just asking questions and trying to understand why we were doing things the way that we were. You know, it's my second year, I'm not an expert. And the senior at the job gave me feedback, Quinten just asked too many questions. He's trying to understand too much of the job. And I was like, okay, this is not right for me.

Tyler Rachal
Yeah, that's never a good sign. I was going to say, did Citadel ever end up any legal trouble? I think any time you're asking too many questions, that should be concerning in general, if that's a problem. 

Quinten Thompson
No, as far as I knew, they're always clean, so.

Mike Wu
For the record, for the record.

Tyler Rachal
They're good? Yeah. Good, good. Thumbs up for the record. For the record.

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, for the record, Ken, I didn't say anything. It's always been great.

Tyler Rachal
We're not trying to break any news here on What Worked. Yeah, that's awesome. But it's just funny, I had to ask this story and I appreciate you humoring me. You hear that so often, people say I was doing audit and I quickly knew it wasn't for me. And I just the follow up thing that I always have not for you. But then I always wonder, I'm like, I need to talk to someone who is like, yeah, this is a thing for me. Because I, so often, I guess it's just, it's the circles that I run in really.

Mike Wu
They're out there, yeah.

Quinten Thompson
For sure. I mean, even when I worked at the bank, we would get these pitch books from investment banks about these companies. And I always felt that it was weird as a 25 year old who knows nothing, frankly, about running a business that I'm supposed to judge whether I'm going to give this person a hundred million dollar loan. I was like, this doesn't seem right to me. So that was the other part of the reason why I wanted to really get involved with the business and kind of grow something, even though it's not my own, but just kind of be there from the ground.

Mike Wu
Yeah, I want to piggyback on what you just said, Q, about what you were looking for. But, I didn't know you had so much conviction about wanting the job at Vitamin Well, when you reached out to the CEO, said I want this job. In retrospect, you made a great decision, right? Things have panned out, it's kind of the dream if anyone's trying to join an early stage startup or CPG company, this is the outcome everyone's hoping for. But what was it about the job or Vitamin Well at the time where you're like, I want this job, this is a place for me.

Quinten Thompson
I was just going based on what my old colleague had described to me. I knew that at the time they just had two employees. So they had the CEO and he had hired a field sales rep to kind of go door to door to gyms in LA and sell this drink. But like I mentioned to Tyler, I had seen this product on this YouTuber who is based in the UK. So I had done some research and found out, OK, it's a Swedish based company. They are distributed around the UK, Germany, France, Spain at the time. So I was like, okay, it's starting in the US as this startup in the US market. But it kind of was this comforting feeling of, there's kind of this mothership parent that is somewhat successful because at least from what I can see, I have no idea of like they're financially successful, but they look successful. That was a safety blanket, if you will, that felt kind of nice. 

And then I met my boss, the CEO in the US. He was from Red Bull for 20-25 years. We just kind of clicked right off the bat. I think we have very similar ways of communicating and senses of humor. And I was like, OK, it just felt right, right off the bat. I left that first interview and I was like, look, I know I have to meet our CFO or head of accounting or whatever and all these other people, but I'm not concerned with this. I really want this job and it just felt right.

Tyler Rachal
That's amazing. And you get the job, spoiler alert. So you get it. And I'm just curious, you mentioned big giant parent company, but ultimately you were joining basically a new business unit acting as a startup, essentially a startup within a larger company. What did you inherit with the job? What was actually there? Was there anything? It sounds like you had a boss who had a pretty good, proven track record, I imagine with Red Bull, but outside of that, what was there?

Quinten Thompson
So at the time, I believe we had about half a million cans of product at some random warehouse in Carson. There was no mechanism to ship the product or get the product anywhere, I just know it was there sitting in Carson. We were stuffed into the conference room, not even a conference room. I would say maybe a 10 by 10 side meeting room in a marketing agency that our global CEO was on the board of. So we were like stuffed in this other business. 

Tyler Rachal
Yeah, yep, We know how this goes.

Quinten Thompson
We had a bunch of product scattered throughout the office. So I was sitting at my desk that was a glorified folding table with product behind me. And then I remember my boss got his first sale. And he went to Staples that day and got a receipt pad. And he hands me this piece of paper. That's like two cases of Caribbean NOCCO and he's like, hey, I don't know what we're supposed to do with this, but like, just go figure that out. And I was like, okay, cool. So we were really starting from scratch. I mean, we had a QuickBooks account, we had 500,000 cans. At the time we didn't have a payroll system. We had no benefits. We didn't have 401k. We had nothing. We had QuickBooks, we had cans, and we had, you know, now three people.

Tyler Rachal
Was there ever a moment where you had like a no shit moment where you kind of like, what did I sign up for? Or were you just like, this is what I wanted the whole time.

Quinten Thompson
No, I'm like, this is incredible. This is like the best, this is the best job ever.

Tyler Rachal
Okay. Yeah, that's so cool. True startup life.

Mike Wu
Yeah, so you came in as Director of Finance, but you obviously need to do a bunch of different things, walk us through like that, that zero to one. What did that entail for you?

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, it's funny because when I started it was Director of Finance. It was, okay, I'm going to be closing the books and stuff like that. But then it quickly morphed into, well, we actually don't have anyone for ops. So I kind of just quickly everything that wasn't sales or marketing related was kind of owned by me. So whether that be our systems, our warehouse, how do we get products to customers? How do we charge customers? All of that stuff had to be set up. 

So I think the first thing that was on my agenda was after I got that paper receipt, I was like, okay, we need to figure out a way how to charge customers and record these sales. And then secondly, I have to figure out how to even get product to customers because our CEO and our sales rep were going in the field and doing these deliveries. But I realized quickly that it's not going to be how they're going to do every delivery and we'll probably just FedEx the four or five cases that they order when they do their reorder. So that meant going to the warehouse, talking to them, figuring out what their capabilities were. And then the next thing after that was, OK, well, how do we get paid? My boss was like, well, we can just get a check or cash. And again, I'm like, OK, all these small gym businesses-  there's a lot of gyms out there. The gym business is tough. I know that these guys aren't great at paying their bills. So, okay, we need to figure out a way to store their credit card on file and automatically charge them for the shipment. So it was kind of just, how do I figure out or how do we figure out one step at a time as a problem rises, okay, what's going to work for this and what's going to at least work for the next year, year and a half or so. And I'm not, I'm not trying to build something that's going to work forever, but what's going to just help us now.

Tyler Rachal
Totally. And for a lot of those things that you needed to put in place, did you feel like you could pull a lot from your previous experience with the e-cig company? How deep did you get into operations at that company?

Quinten Thompson
I didn't do a lot of operations. In my interview, I was like, yeah, I know a little bit about operations. I knew that we sent stuff on trucks and we had a freight broker and that's the extent of what I knew. But I also had, at least from my finance perspective at the vape company, I knew that a lot of the customers, these were small independent vape shops across the country that we would sell to, also larger distributors. And the larger distributors we gave terms to, the small independent vape shops, we weren't shipping until we got paid, whether it was through a Zelle or a Chase QuickPay, or we had their credit card on file and we would charge them. So I kind of drew that connection together of okay, we're probably gonna do the same thing here. Let's put that together.

Tyler Rachal
That's amazing. There was accounts receivable lessons that you'd learned before. That's a huge one. It's just being able to avoid, I'm sure without that knowledge, there's the potential to get stuck with a huge list of overdue accounts and nobody has any money to pay.

Quinten Thompson
For sure.

Mike Wu
When you couldn't draw on your past experiences to figure some of these things out, what did you do? I'm always curious what someone's framework or playbook is for figuring something out for the first time.

Tyler Rachal
Yes. Google, right?

Quinten Thompson
There's lots of Googling.

Tyler Rachal
Yeah, today it will be chat GPT.

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, for sure. I remember my second, my second week, my boss was like, we need to figure out how to get cars for our sales reps. I bought my own personal car, but setting up a fleet account and managing all that I've never done before. So I was like, okay, well we kind of like these Mazda CX-5s and there's a Mazda dealership down the street from us. So I just go into the dealership very like, I don't know what's happening. I'm like, Hey, I want to lease like five cars from you. And they're looking at me like, okay, what are you talking about? I'm like, I have to work for this company, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, no, that that's not really gonna work. So they weren't really helpful. 

And I went back and just kind of googled fleet management, fleet services, whatever. Emailed probably 30 different companies. And usually when you email these companies, you have to say, what's the size of the business and all this. And at the time, we have no revenue, we have nothing. So to underwrite leases for us, I get would be difficult. But luckily about three people emailed me back. I got on a phone call with them and just asked them really stupid questions like, okay, this is my situation. How can I go about doing this? No, no, your company's too small. Okay, what if I give you a larger deposit? What if I do this? Okay, whatever. And then this one random guy in Wisconsin, a field sales rep for the company out of Ohio was like, I can get this done for you. And he ended up being our fleet provider for the next five years. 

Mike Wu
Shout out to that guy. Amazing.

Quinten Thompson
And I think at our peak, we had like 30 cars with him.

Tyler Rachal
Yeah, that's very, very relatable. Mike and I have that same type of story, not with Fleet, but basically with many other key business things that you need. And it's so defeating because you go to all these companies, and you're like, Hey, I would love to give you my business. And they're like, you got to be bigger, buddy. And you're like, where are these boutique providers? They're hard to find.

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, exactly. Google is your best friend and just having the courage to ask stupid questions. I feel like a lot of people don't want to sound stupid. And once you get over that, you can learn so much more.

Mike Wu
Yeah, that's two takeaways. I don't want to go without reemphasize other things, ask stupid questions. Don't be afraid to do that. And I really liked the detail you showed you. You contacted 30 providers and three called you back. That's always helpful for me. I think a lot of times, you might get discouraged after contacting four or five and no one's getting back to you, but you're like no, I got to contact 30 and hopefully one of them gets back to me. Luckily three did and one worked out.

Tyler Rachal
Yeah, and probably by the 30th, you were probably emailing, I imagine, with lot of them, but humor me. If you're having 30 conversations, what I always think is so effective about doing things like that is by the 30th conversation, you've learned the lingo. The first time you're like, hello, I need five cars, by the 30th one, you're talking their fleet language. You're like, here's what I need. Here's the length of time I need. Here's where we're to be the amount.

Quinten Thompson
Like I need a service contract. I need registration management. Yeah.

Tyler Rachal
This many miles a day. Yes, exactly. And I think that's what's so great about doing those exercises is like, it always blows my mind when somebody just talks to the first company and they're like, here you go. It's just so helpful to actually learn, you can learn so much from those conversations.

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, 100%.

Mike Wu (19:17.381)
Yeah, Q, I kind of want to talk about two different paths. I want to get deep into the products. think first, yeah, I got my favorite right here. The bars, we haven't even got to that phase of things. I think we're still in the not-go-drink phase. I want go to the bars, but I also want to just talk about what you did in terms of building out systems, processes, and the team for the company.

Tyler Rachal
So you're getting started, you're figuring things out, you're getting your fleet of vehicles, you're hiring your initial sales reps. You're kind of getting some initial systems in place. At this point, what products did Vitamin Well actually have? And then how did that change over time?

Quinten Thompson
I guess I'll go back to the main products that Vitamin Well sells as a total business. So 2008, we launched our first product, which is called Vitamin Well. That's not sold in the US, so you won't really see it anywhere. But it's very similar to Coca-Cola's Vitamin Water, if you've had that product. Granted, it's much better than Vitamin Water, I think Vitamin Water is terrible. If you go to Europe and you can find Vitamin Well, trust me, you should buy it, it's very delicious. And then in 2014, they developed the brand NOCCO, which is the energy drink. So as Mike previously mentioned, they really focused on that CrossFit community really to start. It's broadened a lot since then, but that was kind of their starting point when CrossFit was super hot back then in the early tens. 

Tyler Rachal
Can I chime in with my own really quick review on the energy drink? This is what I'll say as someone who considers himself an energy drink connoisseur, aficionado, if you will. The two things I'll say is the flavors are always really good. They're not too in your face fake, like, you know, like a Kool-Aid tasting type thing. 

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, syrupy, yeah.

Tyler Rachal
Yes, the flavors are good. This is going to be a weird description, but I would describe it as the cleanest caffeine hit that you will kind of ever get. The caffeine, it's like the energy lasts, feels like forever. But it has a very even, I don't know, this is like bro science that I'm talking probably right now, but it feels very even. In other words, when I drink something else, I get this like the jitters because I'm like, whoa, I just drank whatever it is, insert competitor. But for this, it's like very steady and I just don't feel like I peak and crash like I do with the others. And that's me, obviously not paid by NOCCO, I just think it's a really good product. And I think that's why it's big in CrossFit, because CrossFit is a hard community to break into, but if you're in, people are very loyal.

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, 100%. And we don't have any of those, people really like those jitters or those tingles and the product purposefully does not have those. So that was 2014 NOCCO. And then 2016, we launched Barebells, which was the protein bar. And, that's a quick summary of all the brands that they've launched or the products that they've launched. But mind you, the company historically has done a lot of different things with these brands. So at a time in Europe, there used to be a Barebells ice cream. There was a Barebells caramel sauce. There was a Barebells pudding. The company has tried so many different things, again, really in Europe just to see what can really hit. So in terms of product development, I named three brands, but mind you, there's been a lot of things with these brands over the years.

Mike Wu
Interesting. That we're not even aware of.

Tyler Rachal
Why didn't the water make its way here? Is there some sort of American FDA clearance that it can't get or just don't want to compete with Vitamin Water?

Quinten Thompson
I think it's more of like do we want to do the water or do we want to do the energy drink? So when we launched in 2019 in the US, I think energy drinks was a hotter market. It's curious to think like if we were to relaunch now in 2025 with the way that hydration is super hot right now versus energy drinks, would we have done Vitamin Well? Maybe. And who's to say, I don't know what their plan is for the future, but I always push during my time, I'm like we should bring Vitamin Well here because I think it would do really well.

Tyler Rachal
Yeah, very cool. Wow.

Mike Wu
Interesting. How did the bars come about?

Quinten Thompson
So 2019, we launched with just the drink and when I started here, I'd actually didn't know about any of these other products to be honest, I just knew about NOCCO. So then late 2019, they're like, hey, we have this protein bar, we're gonna launch it in 2020. So they sent us some samples and both me and my boss are like, these are really, really good. I don't know much about protein bars. I've never been a protein bar eater myself. So I don't know what it compares to, but I know that this tastes really good. So we were kind of just told, January, 2020, we're going to launch the bars. And we were kind of going to do the same strategy that we did with the drink. We have our field sales reps at the time. By this time we had them in California, Arizona, Florida, New York, kind of our key markets. And we're just going to kind of sell them to CrossFit gyms, bodegas, little independent retailers, whatever we could do to kind of build a base. hopefully we can take that sales data, go to a Ralphs, to 7-Eleven, Vons, something like that. And be like hey, we have built this customer base. We'd like to sell your product in the store. That was kind of the thesis that we had.

Tyler Rachal
How did the thesis end up playing out? Was that basically the strategy you ended up going with? Did you get to the Ralph's faster? And I will say also one additional question, it's burned in my brain. Mike and I, before we started Hireframe, we went and we were looking to buy a small business. We ended up touring and talking to this small, what would you say it was like a packaging, distributor company, Mike?

Mike Wu
Yeah, the company did packaging, sold packaging materials and did a little bit of packaging itself too.

Tyler Rachal
Yes, exactly. But the thing that was burning my brain from the conversation with the owner of that business or owners was they talked about beverage companies always being their best customers, because it was basically like the wild west where they would just blow up and eventually usually sell the Coke or Pepsi. But they also kind of described it as just this wild west industry where there's upstarts, aggressive competition. My question to you is, as you're trying to build your business here, did you encounter that as well? What are your own stories about the Wild West that is the beverage industry?

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, the beverage industry is,sometimes it has a lot of rules, sometimes it doesn't. So, a lot of rules will be like, let's say you're talking to a Walmart or a Target, they have their own cycles where they'll bring in beverages every February, let's say. And you sell it in August, and that's the cycle. And there's really no breaking that cycle. But then you'll see other things where at one point we had this, we weren't in Target officially with NOCCO. But we had this kind of like, we called it like a license to hunt. So we could go to these Targets in SoCal specifically and sell it into the store. 

Tyler Rachal
To who? Who would take that meeting?.

Quinten Thompson
The store manager or something. So our sales rep will go in there and be like, Hey, yeah, whatever. And the guy's like, yeah, sure. We can take it. Here's this like free unplanogram space, put it in there. And then like we would go back in a couple of days and then Celsius had come in and basically taken our spot. So we're going to take our spot back and put up a hang tag of like, here's the price. And then, you know how Target will have those little cafes sometimes in in the front of the store, we would be like, okay, can we put the product in the cooler? Cause cold product always sells better than non-cold product. So we would take out some other product, put that in there. So it's just kind of like this daily battle within, especially like that Target example. 

We did the same thing at independent 7-Elevens. Most 7-Elevens are independent, so we would go in there, sell in NOCCO, take somebody else's space. So let's say there's like eight rows of Celsius, the person will take away three rows, we'll put in three rows of NOCCO, and then you'll come in later, and Celsius has taken that back, so you just have to go in and merchandise pretty much like a few times a week just to keep that space.

Tyler Rachal
Wow. Yeah. So it is crazy competitive. And you mentioned when you're talking to the store manager of Target, are they thinking outside of I've got this spare space that hasn't been basically spoken for. Do they think beyond that? Or is there some sense of okay, you guys are an energy drink. Let me think about what energy drink brands we have right now. Where does this fit in? I'm not looking for an energy drink right now. I'm looking for something like hydration. 
Or they just literally like, yeah, I got  a couple feet over there, take it.

Quinten Thompson
To be honest, I can't speak for their mindset, but I can speak on what are sales reps who would do it. And we had two different kind of distinct sales reps that were really good at it. We had this one guy who was very schmoozy and he's just like your buddy. He was really good. And then we had another guy who was more just I'm gonna annoy you every single day until you say yes to me. And so he would just kind of wear you down or the guy's like, fine, just put it in here. Don't come talk to me anymore.

Mike Wu
Yeah, I'll you put it here if you leave.

Quinten Thompson
I don't think that the guys at the store were thinking strategically of like, okay, well this SKU does this VPO. No.

Tyler Rachal
They were either relenting or they were just like, yeah, this guy's my homie, so…

Quinten Thompson
This guy's cool, sure, put it in. Exactly.

Mike Wu
What can you tell us about the scale as you're as you're growing? We're talking about this early stage, but as you're describing what a field sales rep does it's clear that it's like hand-to-hand combat, they're going into the 7-Eleven location a few times a week. How many sales reps did you have? You start out with these two guys maybe and then did you grow it? I've seen them to come into the gym. They're fantastic. They give away product and that sort of thing

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, the first year we probably got up to, if I had to map it out, we had like, let's say six to eight of these guys across the country. 

Mike Wu
Huh. Not as many as I would think.

Quinten Thompson
No, no, LA would have one, San Diego would have one, Arizona would have one, Miami had one, then New York city had one. And then over time, eventually maybe LA had two or San Diego had two and we added probably like two to each market. But when we're talking scale, especially this first year, it's small. We were celebrating when we had 50 accounts and we would have a Monday morning sales meeting, we're like, OK, guys, did a good job last week. We sold a thousand cans OK, great. Cool. And a thousand cans wholesale is not that much
in terms of dollar value. That first year is really, really small and we were just happy for every single account that we got that first year.

Mike Wu
Got it. Was there an inflection point?

Quinten Thompson
So the drink business, need quite a bit of scale, to be successful, but certainly to be profitable. That inflection point, I would say more so came year two from the bar perspective when we launched with Trader Joe's. That was in July of 2020.

Mike Wu
We gotta ask you, for all the CPG founders out there that are working on a product maybe nights and weekends and trying to launch this thing, how do you get into Trader Joe's?

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, I don't want to disappoint them. But basically what happened is the buyer, the bar buyer, she had known about Barebells because she had been to Europe and tried the product and she had read some press releases that hey, Barebells is in the US now. So she reached out and was like, hey, would you be interested if Trader Joe's carried the product? And we're like, absolutely, we would love to do that. Because mind you, at the time, we're still selling to Susie Joe's CrossFit and random 7-Eleven in Venice. So that happened in early spring of 2020. Obviously we came to a deal and launched soon thereafter. And then that's pretty much the launching point for the rocket ship that came over the next five years.

Tyler Rachal
That was your big flagship account. And Trader Joe's, typically they don't take other people's products, right? Or, I've oftentimes heard they will use other companies products as a means for experimenting with a product category. And then they ultimately are going to come out with their own kind of version of that or something within that category. But they don't want to mess around with protein bars, I guess, because I still see it and it's very clear it's one of the most popular SKUs there, because it takes up a lot of shelf space.

Quinten Thompson
Yeah. So for some reason, I don't even know if Trader Joe's makes their own branded protein bar. But if you go to the protein bar section, it's all nationally recognized brands. So I don't know if it's just a vertical that they don't want to touch or they think is too finicky. Because I also know that they're really big on trying new things and developing new products. I've never made or developed my own protein bar. But based on what I know of like our product team does, it's quite difficult to make a good tasting protein bar. So maybe they just don't want to go through the effort.

Mike Wu
We've mentioned flavor and taste. It's a kind of subjective, right? But is that one of the key drivers of the success? Just, Hey, the drink tastes good, like Tyler described, the caffeine - I like the way I feel when I drink it, I don't get too jittery. The bars tastes good. I know I eat one at least a day. I've tried over like a hundred protein bars and I used to keep like a spreadsheet of them. Barebells is like…

Tyler Rachal (36:34.764)
I take it back. I am not an aficionado. This guy's an aficionado. That is not. I'm lightweight.

Mike Wu
Yeah, I was like tracking things like grams of protein per calorie and that sort of thing. And the ingredients and Barebells is the best tasting one for sure that I've had. How big of a role do you think that played in Barebells or, just the company's success. And does that extrapolate to other CPG companies and startups?

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, I would say that during the early years, especially 2020, 2021, when Trader Joe's is really cooking, for one, if I talk to people today, everyone says that they've tried the bars, they found the bars at Trader Joe's. So to me, Trader Joe's is by far the number one key for us. But secondly, like we were never really big on all this ad spend on Google or Facebook and digital ways to gather these customers. We would go to trade shows, we would do sampling events, but nothing crazy. We weren't spending millions and millions of dollars per month on marketing spend or anything like that. So for us, it was more about the product speaking for itself. And like you said, to this day a lot of people are still like, this is the best tasting protein bar. And I think that word of mouth and that organic content that people would create for us on Instagram, like, hey, I discovered this product at Trader Joe's,you got to try out this bar. And I think Trader Joe's is the perfect store for that because it has a culture of, hey, try out these new products. So there's so many pages and people dedicated to just talking about the stuff that they find. And it was just kind of like a perfect storm for our product and discovering it naturally.

Mike Wu
So cool. Yeah.

Tyler Rachal
It's amazing. Yeah, I know I've literally watched those videos where people are exclusively content creators for Trader Joe's and all they do is they cover the new products that are coming out. So that makes total sense. So as you guys are scaling, I got to imagine the complexity of these deals as you're dealing as you go from dealing with hardcore crossfit box or whatever it is to now giant big box retailer. For yourself personally, how did you get that experience to actually be able to manage? Cause I got to imagine there's a lot of potential bad turns that you can take or mistakes that you could make with those. What were some of the challenges and working with some of these big box retailers and how did you solve them and how did you build a team to support you?

Quinten Thompson
The biggest problem that you have, especially on the finance side for any of these larger retails, it's not just a simple of, Hey, I'm going to sell you this product for $2 a unit, you're going to sell it, you make your margin, you're happy, I'm happy. There are some retailers or chains like that, but those are few and far between. A lot of them have these rebates and kickbacks. So it's like, okay, I'm going to sell it to you at $2, but every quarter I'm going to bill you back for 20 cents of what I purchased. Plus, if I hit this kind of level of sales, I get an additional 10 % off. But if I hit this, I get an additional 15 % off. So if you think about accounting and the accrual basis of how you manage hundreds of different deals like this, that's a huge challenge. And throughout the entire time that I was here, it was always a huge challenge. Especially because we grew so fast. 
Our approach or my approach was, okay, I know that let's say 80 % of this spend is going to come from our top 40 customers. The bottom 120, you know, I'm just going to leave them. I'm going to be conscious of them and come up with some type of estimate of how I want to track these and at least make sure that they're somewhat relevant. But for these top 40, like I want to really, really be in the weeds.

And so what we ended up doing is like having monthly or bi-monthly meetings with the sales reps of just understanding the deals to make sure from an AR perspective, when they come in that we're accounting for them appropriately, we're accruing for them, or at least trying to accrue for them appropriately. And, I'm saying this all, this takes months and years for you to really kind of nail down and even the largest companies in the world of CPG, this is always going to be your number one headache. So I think we were no different than that. That was always a struggle for us because like I said, each deal is different and sometimes there's so many different layers because it's not like, hey, Barebells is in Walmart, for example, but we don't sell it directly to Walmart, that goes to a distributor, that distributor has their own kind of compliance fees or metric fees or on time delivery fees. And then they delivered to Walmart who then will charge us sometimes for things. And you kind of have to really be a master of your business from a finance perspective, you need to know just as much as the sales reps know in this business. You can't just sit back and be a bean-counter, if you will. You really need to understand the economics of each deal.

Tyler Rachal
Totally. Plus you're, I imagine, in lockstep communication with the parent company. As your part of the company grows, the U S region grows so much, how are you forecasting? Cause I got to imagine that forecasting becomes extremely complex and also the consequences, there's a much higher risk if you are off. Back in the days when you just had a half a million cans in Carson, that's different than underestimating or overestimating. So how did you guys handle that?

Quinten Thompson
We kind of did it two different ways. We mostly did a ground up forecast. So we would have our baseline business. And let's say we thought we were going to get into HEB next year. We would say, OK, HEB is 300 stores, we think we'll get three SKUs in, or that's what we pitched to them. And we come up with some type of VPO assumption, which is volume per outlet. So the number of units per SKU per day per facing that will sell. So I will spit out some type of general number. So we'd come up with this bottoms up approach of just kind of our volume in terms of sales units. We always talked in units of a product, whether it be bars or cans. And then my boss and I would kind of just gut check it with what we think, which I know kind of sounds crazy, but forecasting can be as much of an art as it is a science in terms of your knowledge of the business and what this specific customer can do or grow. So if Trader Joe's was doing, these aren't real numbers, but was doing 100,000 bars a month, I'm like, okay, well, I don't really think it's realistic that next year it's gonna do 400,000 bars a month. But I do think it's feasible based on what we've seen in the past two years that we can grow 40% if we add no SKUs. So we'll do 140. 

So the biggest thing with our forecast that we had to be accurate on, obviously we wanna present the board correct numbers and everything like that, but we need to really be focused on can we secure enough product to meet that forecast. So if we go and present, hey guys, we're gonna go sell half a million units next year, but supply chain and our co-man facilities only have a capacity of 400 on a global basis, well, we have a problem and now somebody needs to go find this hundred. So if all of these dozens of people who work on these teams are gonna go find this capacity, you need to be damn sure that you're gonna sell this product. Otherwise that's where it becomes really, really difficult. So that's where we were pressured on the most. Especially because  we would always forecast years out even. So we would do like even up to five years, because if we want to add a new production line or we want to bring on a new co-man or something that takes a lot of time. So if you want to order a new production line, it's not something that you can just turn on within eight months. This is probably a three year horizon that you're talking from we need to order this production line to it's made and it's installed and it's configured and it's up and running to spec. That's probably a three year process. So we need to forecast out and be relatively good at that because these tens of millions of dollars of decisions making these lines are being made on what we said we're going to sell..

Tyler Rachal
Totally, that makes a lot of sense. As you are scaling, and your team building, you have this dynamic of the parent company, but ultimately you're building your team. What did you look for when you were initially hiring and how did that change over time as you were becoming effectively a really big business, even within a bigger business?

Quinten Thompson
Yeah. So I think when we were much smaller, maybe this is wrong, but it felt more to me like a parent child relationship. So they would kind of help guide like, OK, maybe you need some help here. We really want to step up this. So we're going to hire someone for this from my perspective. So I just hired a lot of people who didn't have a lot of experience. So like my number two that worked for me for… I was there for six years, I hired her a month after I started and she's still there. She was an EA before. So this was her second job that I hired her to be, I think her role was like ops specialist, which was basically just do whatever I tell you to do. 

Mike Wu
Do everything.

Quinten Thompson
So I remember at the time, I told you about this warehouse we had in Carson who couldn't really ship product. They couldn't make FedEx labels for some reason. They didn't have a shipping account to ship anything on UPS or FedEx, which don't ask me why. So we had to email our freight broker who did our containers who would then send us a label and then we would email that label to them for every single order that we had. 

Tyler Rachal
Wow. And then they would just print tape. Oh my goodness.

Mike Wu
Crazy.

Quinten Thompson
So I was like that process, I was like, hey, we're going to fix this process, but we had to do that. And so obviously, if I hired an ops manager who came from like a General Mills or something, I don't want somebody to come in and be like, you're doing it all wrong. This is the way that we need to do it. It's more so just like I want someone who's like guys, we're going to fix it. But like, it's just hungry to kind of do what I'm doing is just figure out things as we go. So that's kind as we started the first couple of years, that's mostly what I hired, was people to be like, hey, a lot of our stuff is imperfect. These processes aren't great, but one, you can put your own spin on it. And secondly, like we're working on getting it better. 

As we got to like that 2023, 2024 mark, especially as I talked about a lot of these customer deals and their rebates and kickbacks, that's when you really, or I tried to really focus on hiring people that had direct experience in that. Because the jobs could be much more specialized of this is your one role. Whereas, especially like the early ops people and early finance people, my first finance hire was, okay, you're doing cash recs, you're doing AP, you're doing AR. Now in a financial control segregation of duties, that's not the brightest idea to have some person do all of that. But also at the same time, like I have no choice. So you kind of just have to do it. But now, you know, we have people who are just AR in terms of just collecting credit from customers. Like, hey, you're overdue. Like, that's one person's job. Another person is just applying cash to customer accounts. You know, in the early days, you can never do that. So I need more of a jack of all trades versus, I need this specialized person. 

And then over the years, I realized that, yeah, as we got more mature as a business, our business in the US has really material differences than the one in Sweden or in Europe, just the way that we operate. A simple one being these deductions in billbacks and credits that these customers take, whether it be for compliance or the sales process or promos, they just deduct it from the check. So if I'm expecting $100,000 check, I might get a check from this customer for $68,000 and it'll have 50 lines of different deductions or charges that they're taking from us. Some might be 50 cents, some could be $50,000. So we need to kind of go detangle that and process that. But in Europe, what I've been told at least is that customers send them invoices for that. So it's easier to process from an AP perspective, like, okay, we can pay them money versus on an AR side, we kind of have to decipher what it's for and do all this extra work.

Tyler Rachal
Why do Americans, why must we always over complicate? It feels like we build entire industries, as you're talking about that, I think about insurance and healthcare. We're always like, but can we make it more complicated?

Quinten Thompson
I personally, it's like maybe the conspiracy theorist in me, not to say that I am. 

Tyler Rachal
Put it on, tinfoil hat, do it.

Quinten Thompson
But tinfoil hat is the more confusing it is, the less you're gonna say, hey, this is wrong and get that money back. You're just gonna be like, oh, it's a thousand bucks. I don't really know what it is. I don't have time to figure it out. Just give it to them. And they just made a thousand bucks for doing nothing.

Tyler Rachal
Without a doubt.

Mike Wu
Yeah, that could be it. I could see that. Hey, we're coming up with the hour, I, you know, in the spirit of the podcast, I think maybe we just start to wrap up at least Q and talk about what worked. You've shared with us a big part of the journey, there's so many details actually want to offline ask you about now that we've had this conversation. But when you look back, 2019 to 2025, those six years, can you distill it down? Like what worked for you guys? And maybe even like, if you could go back and do it again, what would you consider doing differently?

Quinten Thompson
Yeah. I think the number one thing that worked for us is, whether we did a million dollars of revenue that year, or we did a hundred million dollars of revenue that year. I think the way that we approached our customers on a whole, we never got really too big for our britches. And we've seen that with other competitors, like they get some success in the market and they want to raise prices all the time. They don't want to promo as much. We never really took that mentality and we kind of always stayed scrappy, especially from a customer perspective. And so an example of that would be, let's say that we had just launched a bar, like a key lime flavor bar.

Tyler Rachal
Yum, you got my attention.

Quinten Thompson
And yeah, it's actually a really good bar. And so in the grocery space or like Walmart and Target world, they only normally order four packs of products versus 12 packs. So we will launch this and let's say the Walmart buyer was like, hey, I really want this four pack, can you launch it in three months? Now, let's say we never forecasted for that. Obviously, Walmart's a huge customer. And maybe we had planned to do it a year from now. They're asking us to do it in three months. We would move heaven and earth, whether we're doing a billion in revenue or a million dollars in revenue to make that happen for that customer. Whereas I think a lot of companies, once you get to a certain size, you're like, sorry, we can't do it. We can do it at this timetable, but we would do kind of whatever it takes to kind of make that happen. And we never lost that. And I think that that goes a long way, especially during this world where prices are rising, people are putting on these prices, we are always very conscious of what we would do from a customer perspective. And I think that that went a long way in building trust.

Tyler Rachal
Absolutely. And it's cool to see that. We're a service business, so that obviously resonates with us. But you don't hear that too often with a company in the CPG space. So, that's cool to see that that principle works there too. And I'm sure it was a big part of your guys's growth. My final question here is, stop me and we can, of course edit this if I'm incorrect here, but I feel like you're taking some time, you're I you're a good friend of ours. So always joke you're doing you're like

Quinten Thompson
Eat, Pray, Love

Tyler Rachal
Yeah, you're doing an Eat, Pray, Love. Q gets his groove back, whatever it is, you're taking a little bit time before that next adventure. So I will say I call this whenever I do what worked episodes, I call it like the infomercial, right? Don't feel the need to sell yourself. But I am more more curious. If you were to shoot a quick spot where a potential future business partner, employer, whatever you want to say, company that you want to advise, give a quick bit about what is it that you're looking for in your next opportunity?

Quinten Thompson
Yeah. I mean, look, based on my past experience, I've done a lot of different things. E-cigs, this protein bar company, an accountant worked at a bank. It's not up to me whether I want to stay in CPG or I'm kind of agnostic to what the industry is. I think I'm just mostly looking for some place that I can learn and take the way that I think and approach of, hey I didn't know anything about operations or building a protein bar business and putting that onto something else. I don't want to be a cog in a machine of a 50,000 employee company. My interest is in learning and developing my skills and taking my skills and just learning as much as I can, whatever that's about. And if the product is exciting and I can get behind the product or the service, that's all I could ask for.

Tyler Rachal
Absolutely. Can I make a friend to friend recommendation of something that I'm been learning about? I think it was the, the owners of Vita Coco, I want to say, or whatever it might be, but now, now I've seen it now several times, where these, successful people in the wellness space, beverage space, I think mostly beverages, they'll go on to basically create like a family office, where they have a series of investments, but they also seem to almost run like a little bit of like an accelerator incubator type thing. I feel like your skillset would be incredible there. And that wouldn't be just limited to beverage, but that's where I see you. I see you totally doing something like that. And then maybe eventually taking more of a full-time role in one of their investments or incubator companies. That's what I see.

Quinten Thompson
Yeah that I mean I like that idea.

Tyler Rachal
Yeah, yeah. I'm your agent. I'll start contacting them right now.

Quinten Thompson
Exactly just set it up Tyler.

Tyler Rachal
5%. I should have gone 10%. Damn, my negotiating. 

Quinten Thompson
Yeah I would have said yes right away.

Tyler Rachal
Well, I haven't got to all the add backs and the rebates and everything like that. 

Quinten Thompson
Okay, cool. Yeah, that's just the frontline cost. Frontline cost.

Tyler Rachal
Let me just say that figure you mentioned earlier, picture getting a check of $60,000, but of which I take $50,000. That is definitely what it's going to.

Mike Wu
You only get, yeah, you get a 10 K check.

Tyler Rachal
Yeah, as you as you explain this this is unfortunately like the the sort of evil side of my entrepreneur brain as you explain that all I kept on thinking about was I was like how do Mike and I start a business where we get to pull off shenanigans like that here you go here's $60,000 that I have taken $50,000 out of.

Quinten Thompson
Have chat GPT write you 100 page terms and conditions something put in a bunch of stuff and be like hey you signed this like this is this is my phone call charge back per minute like I had three phone calls with you $50 a minute boom done

Tyler Rachal
Yep. That's it. That's the prompt will be make this so confusing, they just will be too tired to even question it. That's it.

Quinten Thompson
Exactly. And I have some companies in mind that have really crazy ones. So if you can tell Chat GPT to pretend to be this company, then it'll know.

Tyler Rachal
Yeah, I love it. Cool. Well, Quentin, it's been awesome. You're obviously a good friend of ours and it's been so great to see your success, whatever your next adventure is going to be, they're going to be lucky to have you. You're just that awesome combination of extremely smart, extremely humble. I just love what you were talking about, how crazy that first office space was. You were like, this is it. That's like Mike too. Mike Mike gets jacked up about that. 

They call that in the different faces of building a company. There's this analogy where they talk about the dirt road. And the idea is when you're first starting a company, you're hacking your way through the jungle. And eventually you want to get to the dirt road. The dirt road becomes a little bit more of like a paved road, like maybe stones, cobblestone. And then eventually as a company, you want to get to the highway, right? But different, different people are going to be better suited for different stages. You are 100 % a jungle, dirt road guy. And that's probably why you get along so well with us. That's right.

Quinten Thompson
Exactly. No, I appreciate that.

Mike Wu
That's the title of the episode. Q, are you on LinkedIn? Where can people find you? If people DM you on LinkedIn, are you gonna be able to reply or should you just give out your phone number?

Quinten Thompson
Yeah, yeah, Yes, that is the best place to find me.

Mike Wu
Okay. All right. Quinten Thompson, find him on LinkedIn. We'll put the link in the notes for the show. But thanks Q. Thanks for doing this.

Tyler Rachal
Thank you, Q.

Quinten Thompson
Thanks guys, appreciate it.