For the Love of Goats

How Beekman 1802 Used GOAT Wisdom to Build a Beloved Brand

• Deborah Niemann

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Description

What do you get when two city guys buy a goat farm during the Great Recession? A global skincare brand built on goat milk—and timeless wisdom.

In this inspiring episode, Deborah talks with Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Dr. Brent Ridge, the founders of Beekman 1802, about how they went from weekend farmers to building a multi-million-dollar business using lessons learned from goats, neighbors, and small-town living.

🧼 From making goat cheese and soap
📚 To releasing their new book G.O.A.T. Wisdom: How to Build a Truly Great Business with Harvard Business Review
💡 They share actionable insights for homesteaders, small business owners, and anyone dreaming of turning their passion into a meaningful business.

You’ll hear about:

  • How goats (and a neighbor’s kindness) saved their farm
  • Why they started with goat milk soap and what they learned along the way
  • The importance of not doing everything yourself, and focusing on what you bring to the table
  • The power of treating customers as “neighbors”
  • Lessons in marketing, scaling, and community-building
  • And how to convert everyday wisdom into entrepreneurial success

Resources Mentioned:

Connect with the Beekman Boys


Thanks for tuning in!

No one ever said raising goats was easy, but it doesn't have to cost a fortune or drive you crazy! You just need the right information.

🔹 Check out Goats 365 membership

🔹 Or explore The Goat Academy

🔹Looking for Deborah's books? They can be purchased wherever books are sold, or you can get an autographed copy on our online store.

Happy goat-keeping! 🐐

Intro 0:03
For the love of goats, we are talking about everything goats, whether you're a goat owner, a breeder or just a fan of these wonderful creatures. We've got you covered. And now here is Deborah Niemann.

Deborah Niemann 0:18
Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode! I know I start a lot of episodes saying this is going to be really fun today, but I really, really mean it is going to be so much fun, especially for me, because I get the opportunity today to interview a couple of people that I have been following for, I don't know, 15 to 20 years. I first read Josh's book The Bucolic Plague. When it came out, it was all about their move to the country and how they got started with goats.

Deborah Niemann 0:48
So I am joined today by Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge, and they are going to be talking about their whole journey. But they just came out with a brand new book called G.O.A.T. Wisdom: How to Build a Truly Great Business. And I know I've interviewed a lot of people on here before who have had goat milk businesses for cheese or soap or whatever. I remember it was soap maker Deb making the goat milk soap in her kitchen, and they were wrapping it themselves by hand back in the beginning. And I totally resonated with that, because that's exactly what we were doing on our farm. So anyway, welcome to the show, guys.

Brent Ridge 1:27
So great to get to chat with you. We've waited to be on your podcast forever, so we're excited. And yes, goats did save our lives, just like a lot of your listeners, we know that you think goats saved your lives too. And yes, anything that we could have ever made with goat milk. In the beginning, we tried goat milk soap, goat milk cheese, goat milk fudge, goat milk gouda, goat milk ice cream. We've done it all. Finally settled on skincare as our path.

Deborah Niemann 1:54
Yeah, I remember that, oh my gosh, people loved your cheese, and they were so disappointed when you stopped making the cheese. So before we go any farther, I gotta know that, like not everybody on here is has been following you forever, like I have, and I resonated with your story so much, because I always tell people that we were just a bunch of clueless city slickers when we moved to the country, I thought people have been growing their own food since the beginning of time. How hard can it be? And as it turns out, it was actually a lot harder than I expected. So why don't you tell us a little bit about how a couple of New Yorkers wound up out in the country, in upstate New York?

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 2:34
Yes. So we worked, as you said, two New York City guys. Brent was a physician. He also worked for Martha Stewart for her health and wellness division. I worked in advertising. I've written a couple of books. And we were traveling in upstate New York one weekend in 2006 and we came across this little town called Sharon Springs, which we fell in love with. And on our way out of town, we saw a farm that was gorgeous, beautiful, and it happened to be for sale, so we bought that farm.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 3:01
Originally, it was just going to be a weekend place. Both Brent and I grew up in the country, so we thought, well, you know, this will be a return to our roots a little bit. And then we got a letter in our mail box from a neighbor farmer. John was his name, and he was losing his farm. He had 80 goats and nowhere to bring them, and he asked if he could bring them to our empty barn. So we should sure, you know, and you know, and you come to John, there's another little house on the property you could have. And so everything was great for about two years.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 3:25
Then we lost our jobs in the Great Recession, 2008 and we had to start all over again. We had no money to pay for the farm, no money to pay our mortgage, and we literally Googled, what can we make with goat milk? And that's how it started. Goat milk soap was the first thing that came up. Or actually, this is the little known truth that we rarely tell cheese was the first thing to come up. But then we researched how much work you have to go to get licensed to produce cheese. And so we said, well, soap might be easier. So we started with that,

Deborah Niemann 3:53
Yeah, that is exactly what happened to me. I was giving cheese to people, and they were like, Oh my gosh, this is so good. Can I buy it from you? And so I started charging people for my cheese. I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired so I can tell the story. I started selling cheese to people, and then one day, somebody called me and said, Hey, my mom's doctor wants to buy some of your cheese. And I just about fainted, because I'm like, I am sure this man is not expecting a block of cheese in a little ziploc bag with no label.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 4:23
Which are the best kind of cheeses, to be honest, to be fair,

Deborah Niemann 4:26
yeah. And I remember that night at dinner, I was really, really quiet. And my kids are like, Mom, why are you so quiet? And I was like, Oh, I'm just wondering if, like, I could wind up in prison or just find, like, a really huge amount of money for selling goat cheese without a license. And yeah, it was crazy expensive. So whenever people ask me what they should start with, I always say goat milk soap, because the startup costs are way less. So instead of learning to make goat milk soap yourself, you guys found a soap maker and started working with her. So how did that work?

Brent Ridge 4:59
Yeah, we, right after, we googled and saw goat milk soap. Then the next thing I Googled was soap makers in upstate New York, because, yes, you can find out how to make goat milk soap in many places online, lots and lots of YouTube videos for it. But we were just starting out, and we needed someone who already had equipment. And, you know, because we were kind of in desperate straits, like we had this million dollar mortgage on the farm. We're like, we have to do something, and so we need to get started fast. And so Josh got Hasley learned how to code, and coded our first website himself started working with Deb making the bars of soap.

Brent Ridge 5:33
She was making the bars of soap in her barn at the time, and that's how the company started. And, you know, that's and I think that's one of the things that has been so important to the growth of our company, is we've always appreciated the importance of neighbors. And you know, when we started out in Sharon Springs, of course it was Farmer John, the original neighbor and the original act of kindness, but it's always been with the help of our neighbors. And when we first started at the company, it was like, Okay, can we save our farm? And then the next step was, can we save our little village, which, you know, small upstate New York villages have are in dire straits. As we grow the company, we just keep thinking, how many more people can benefit from what we're doing. And we always say our company grew neighbor by neighbor by neighbor, and really from the very beginning with Farmer John and Deb.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 6:18
And I think since so many of your listeners, you know, have a small business focus around goats, or they want to start one around goats, I think one of the things that we learned really early on was to realize what you bring to the table, or what we brought to the table, you know, I remember in the beginning we would go out and be like, Hey, John, we're going to help you learn how to milk today. We're going to help you out. And that lasted like a day and a half. And then John was like, I got this. It was taking three times as long, you know, three times as much help.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 6:47
And yes, we could have invested all the soap making equipment, but Deb was renowned, you know, in the area, for making amazing soap. What did we bring to the table? We brought our media background, marketing background from advertising. So I traded Deb McGillicuddy a logo for her company. You know, I created a logo in marketing for her business, in trade for her making our soap and so it's really, what can you bring to the table? Don't think just because you have goats and you want to start a farm based business, that you have to do everything yourself. In fact, that probably is the worst thing to do.

Deborah Niemann 7:16
That is a really good point, yeah, because it is challenging. And a couple months ago, I interviewed a retired physician who started a cheese-making business, and she buys her milk from local farmers.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 7:29
Yeah, you can rather really hard to do it all. You can't do everything yourself. It's fun to know how to do everything yourself, but it's not efficient to do it all yourself.

Deborah Niemann 7:36
Exactly, I think even with my online business, I learned how to do everything myself, and I did it myself eventually. And then I started hiring things out, you know, like this podcast. I edited the first 19 episodes myself, and then realized, okay, I can do it, but this is not my zone of genius. I don't love this. And so I hired an editor,

Brent Ridge 7:54
that's right, and by first knowing how to do it yourself, you knew how to judge whether someone was a good editor, and so that's actually one of the goat wisdom lessons that we put in the book, is that a new entrepreneur should always learn how to do every task in the job first before they delegate it out.

Deborah Niemann 8:10
I love that. That is awesome. So I know you've written a lot of books, and I have a lot of them. I think every goat owner would just love to read Josh's first book, The Bucolic Plague. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. I've also got one of your cookbooks, because you guys have just really done it all. So what inspired you to write a business book?

Brent Ridge 8:27
Well, you know, we've been in business now for 16 years, and have really grown from those days wrapping the bars of soap around our dining room table to a global skincare brand. And our agent said, you know, I think it's probably time for you guys to write a book on entrepreneurship that really talks about how you grew this business, because so much in popular media these days, the only representation you get of success are like tech billionaires or social media influencer, guru, executive coaches, you know?

Brent Ridge 8:39
And we're like, you know, there's just a world of small to mid-sized businesses on Main Street millionaires. And let's not only highlight those types of people, but also say, You know what you can do this. You can grow a big business right on your main street in your own community, if you have the right tools and the right thought process and mindset for setting a good foundation for your business. And so that really was the idea from the book. How could our story be inspirational and married to really good, practical advice for laying the foundations of a good business and put those two things together? And the really, yeah,

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 9:42
I was gonna say, and those tools aren't necessarily, you know, like big secrets or, like, super tech savvy futuristic things you need to learn. The tools are things that we've all known forever. Our grandparents knew them. They're, you know, age old wisdoms that we maybe have forgot about. But what we tried to do in this book was not just remind you, but say this is how they apply to today's contemporary business world, everything from an empty vessel makes the most noise to you can lead a horse to water you can't make them drink to make hay while the sun shines. These are tried and true things that we just rattle off and take them for granted, but they are really actually wise sayings and wise guideposts for all of us to follow, even with a contemporary business.

Brent Ridge 10:18
And they're tried and true. You know, so many business books these days are, you know, five hacks to do XYZ, or, you know, five easy steps to be a millionaire. And none of them are necessarily true. They are like, you know, kind of instant gratification. Or they sell you an idea of instant gratification. But what we're saying is, you want these tried and truisms that we're talking about. These are things that started out with the original entrepreneurs. So many of them are agrarian based, right? They were based in farm life.

Brent Ridge 10:48
And the reason they have been around for so many hundreds of years, even though most people aren't farmers anymore, is that there's true wisdom to them. They have been verified. They've been replicated. These things matter, and that's why we wanted to encourage people to do and when we sought out to write the book, we told our agent, yes, there are many people we could publish with, because we've done so many books in the past, but for this particular book, because the message we're trying to communicate, we really want someone with the stamp of approval of Harvard Business Review to write this book with us, and do this book with us, because part of what we're saying in this book is you don't need an MBA to grow a successful business.

Brent Ridge 11:27
You may not even need a college degree to grow a successful business. A lot of what you need to know are things that are inherent, that maybe your grandma taught you, like those life lessons that your grandma taught you, those are the things that create the foundation for a great business. And so we just want to inspire everybody out there who has that dream not to discourage themselves because they don't think they're qualified. You can do it. You have the wisdom to do it.

Deborah Niemann 11:53
Absolutely. I love that, and I know one of the things that the book talks about is focusing on the customer. When I used to go to craft fairs with my soap, and I'd be like, I was just going on and on about, you know, the goats and the goat milk and the all essential oils and everything, just blathering on and on about the soap, and I probably would have sold a lot more if I had been focused on the customer and their needs. So what kind of lessons can you share with our listeners about that?

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 11:55
That is very true. One of the things that we always say, it's not what you want to say, it's what your customer wants to hear. And one of my favorite examples is actually back when I was in advertising, and I worked for a food company, I won't say which one, but they made macaroni and cheese, and they were very proud because they finally got their cheese to a certain percentage point where they could say they were 100% real cheese. And they wanted that all over the packaging. They wanted new commercials that they won that now 100% real cheese, and they were legitimately proud. They worked very hard to get the cost to a point where they could do that. But we pointed out to them, the minute you say we are now 100% real cheese, everyone is going to be thinking that for the last 40 years, that you are lying to them with your macaroni and cheese. So that's we always start with, what's the customer want to hear? What is not what we want to say about something. We could be very excited about new product. But to your point, if it doesn't matter the customer, you know they have no need for it.

Brent Ridge 13:15
And I do think that is important. You do have to be able to read to the customer like, say you were at a farmer's market, some customers that stop at your booth are just going to be enthralled by the idea of goats or that you can make some people don't even know you can make soap from goat milk. So they're going to be enthralled by that story, and the romance and your personal story as the founder and why you decided to start this company, and that's going to be the reason they feel compelled to buy the product.

Brent Ridge 13:39
And then some people are going to stop because they have a skin issue, they have eczema or they have psoriasis, and they're going to stop because maybe they've heard that goat milk is great for sensitive skins. And what you have to do is make sure that you are listening to what the customer needs, what they're telling you they're needing, why they're stopping, and lean into that aspect of your story. You can't just go on autopilot and tell the same story to every customer.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 14:03
Another important thing to our story with our customers is we've always called our customers neighbors. We don't even remember when it started, but from the very beginning, we were calling our customers neighbors. The reason that word has always worked so well for us is that internally, with our team, with Team Beekman, the word customer is just transactional. It's make a sale, get your money. Move on.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 14:23
The word neighbor is an ongoing relationship, and you have to treat your neighbors better than you do a stranger on the street. I mean, maybe you shouldn't, but it's wise to treat your neighbors better than just anybody. And so our internal team has a closer relationship with our customers, and then our customers at the same time, they don't feel like customers, they truly feel like neighbors in a neighborhood.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 14:45
So as we scaled, and this is really difficult for small home-based, farm-based businesses, to scale without people feeling like you're selling out or compromising, and we've been able to scale from our dining room table to, you know, one of the top beauty brands in the country. And I think the reason we had the goodwill from our neighbors to do that was because they felt like they were part of the success because they were in the neighborhood. So our whole neighborhood made it from our dining room table to Ulta, not just us as a company. I mean, our neighbors are so proud every step of the way, every time we grew. And I should be there, the reason we did grow,

Deborah Niemann 15:18
Yeah, I remember that I was one of the followers of your blog back in the day, and I even wrote a couple blog articles for you. It was so much fun. And you guys were always there. When I know somebody that has a business and they complain about like, people asking questions on their blogs or on their YouTube channel, and I'm like, why are you complaining? Like you want people to be engaged. And that was one of the things I remember about you guys from the very beginning. From the very beginning, you were so engaged with everybody on every channel, whether it was your blog, your Facebook page or whatever, you were always answering people's questions and taking them seriously.

Brent Ridge 15:55
Yeah, we still do, you know, we still manage. Of course, our brand has their own social media pages, but we have our own personal pages. And when people are there, we're interacting with them and answering their questions. Because we really do love it, like we love communicating with the neighbors. We're so excited, you know, this is our first book in, wow, probably, what, five years or so. So we're so excited to be going out, you know, on a book tour again, where you can, like, go to little bookshops and, meet with, you know, the neighbors, like, we just love that. And you know, even to this day, I still start every morning going through neighbor services. That's what we call customer service at Beekman. I read through neighbor service emails to see what people are saying, what questions they have, what are we doing that's not meeting their needs. I still do that, and I think it's so important as a founder to do that.

Deborah Niemann 16:45
Yeah, I found out about your book because we're on LinkedIn together, and I saw you saying you're coming out with a new book. And I was like, Oh my gosh, this is awesome,

Brent Ridge 16:53
And that's how we got to your podcast finally.

Deborah Niemann 16:55
Yes, exactly. It's so cool. What you've done for the little village of Sharon Springs too. Like, that's something I wish I could do for my little village of Cornell. It's like 450 people and mostly dead. You know, there's a grain elevator and a Casey's gas station, and that's about it. And you guys have just really done such amazing things for Sharon Springs. I remember seeing some of your early stuff where you're having your festivals and everything. I was like, Oh my gosh. How does a little village like that handle this influx of 1000s of people? Can you talk a little bit about how the village of Sharon Springs has evolved around you guys?

Brent Ridge 17:34
Yeah, and we tell this story about the beginnings of the Harvest Festival. You know, when we first got there, we were, you know, again, we were two city guys, and we saw all of this wealth of agriculture around. And I'm like, city people love, you know, this type of experience. And so we said, we should have a harvest festival.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 17:51
We went to the village board, and we proposed, you know, can the village throw a harvest festival? And they were like, I don't know, you know, we tried that. It didn't really didn't work so well. And I was like, Oh, well, what went wrong? And they said, well, JFK was shot, and it was really a downer time. And I'm like, that was, like, 30 years ago that you tried it. But that's, you know, we all know that's how small communities are. You know, they get stuck in their ways, and if you try something new and it doesn't work, then you don't try anything new again.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 18:22
So we went out and did it ourselves with some friends of ours. And it really first year we had about 500 people. Word got out we had then we had our television show in the interim, and word really got out, and we got 5000 people the next year, that first year where we had 1000s, we ran out of food because there's only one and a half restaurants in Sharon Springs. The half one is the gas station, and we ran out of food on Saturday morning of the harvest festival weekend, and by the afternoon, we started seeing people walking around with hot dogs and hamburgers. And I asked one of them, I said, where that come from? And they said, Well, somebody up on the hill is handing them out.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 18:55
And it turned out, one of our neighbors had driven the three miles to the nearest grocery store, bought all the hot dogs, hamburgers, coleslaw, potato chips, everything out of the grocery store came back, set up a grill and gave it all away. And when we went back to try to repay him afterwards, he said, You guys worked so hard last year to bring people in. I wanted to make sure they don't go home hungry. And that's how a community grows. Is just by that sort of mutual, constant sacrifice, especially a small community that's struggling. You know, people really, really have to give of themselves, and if you believe in your community, you have to set your ego aside. You have to set aside your sort of selfish desire for profit or growth and just pull everything together and try to help each other. And that's a long answer, but it's very tough, yeah, lead by example.

Brent Ridge 19:42
Lead by example. Like Josh said that first year, you know, we did ourselves. Josh dressed up as William Beekman, who was the builder of our farm back in 1802. Dressed up in like leotards, and stood on the highway on Route 20, ringing a bell like waving people down into the harvest festival. And by the time we finished the harvest festival. We did 10 years of the harvest festival, and the pandemic shut it down. We grew to a weekend that brought in 20,000 people into little Sharon Springs, New York, and it always remained a community driven project, like community volunteers working to run that festival, because some of the businesses on our little Main Street, which is maybe half a mile long, they made more money during that weekend than they did the rest of the year. And so there was motivation to participate and work hard and make it happen.

Brent Ridge 20:29
And yeah, we never spent a single penny on marketing. The key was everyone in town knew that everybody went home had to go home wanting to come back and wanting to bring somebody else. So that's how we grew from 500 to 10,000 people. That final year, everybody came back, and everybody brought somebody.

Deborah Niemann 20:47
Wow, that is amazing. Yeah, I love how you told a story in the beginning about how you started, you know, with just the customers, which you referred to as your neighbors, and then the community of Sharon Springs, and then the larger world. How do you think that can apply to other people in other areas?

Brent Ridge 21:07
Well, I think you always have to think about who are going to be your biggest advocates first, right? We always say this when you're starting a company, you know you're the entrepreneur, the founder, you are the original salesperson. And then when you grow a little bit, then maybe you hire someone who's good at sales, and they're your salesperson, and that's fine. You could stop there and have a very good business, right? You've got your salesperson. You're doing whatever. You have a very good business.

Brent Ridge 21:32
If you want to scale a business, then your customers have to become your sales people, because that's the only way you can reach mass awareness. And these days, you know, we live in an attention economy, and so you need every single one of your customers, no matter if their audience is the members in their household, whether they have a social media following, they have 100 followers, or they have 1000 followers, or 10,000 followers, you need everybody to feel like they are part of the story and they want to talk about your product so your customers have to become your sales people if you are going to scale your business.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 22:06
And I would go back to what we were talking about earlier, about knowing what your customers want and be prepared to pivot to satisfy that need. Because you may go into your business thinking you're one thing, which is what we did. We thought, you know, we came from a city background. We knew all of our friends. We thought all of our friends would want to buy very expensive handmade blankets, very expensive handmade things. And so we thought it was a city person looking for artisanal goods.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 22:30
But it really turned out our message resonated with other people in small towns and other craftspeople. And so we really built our customer base based on a demographic of small town in Midwest and not sort of cool, hip, coastal people, although that's where we originally thought our audience was going to be. We just listened to them and said, Oh, here's who our message is resonating with. Here's who we're going to market to.

Brent Ridge 22:52
In the same way with the skin care business. You know, as Josh said, we started out in doing very different verticals. We had always had skin care and, you know, the body care that was the original. But we had a whole vertical of gardening and gardening products. We had a whole vertical of food products. Of course. We had all of our media products, and then we had home decor as well. But it really was the skin care that people were really interested in, particularly when we were coming back for when we went on TV retail. And people just really said, No, this is making a difference in my skin.

Brent Ridge 23:24
And so then I just put my doctor's hat back on, and we started really researching the goat milk and have done over 324 clinical studies on goat milk and skin now, and skin microbiome. And we just really listened to what our customer was saying and they needed. And we're like, okay, we're going to figure out why goat milk is so good for the skin.

Brent Ridge 23:44
And that's why I was saying, you know, before we started the podcast, you know, we are so proud of all of the people who are out there making goat milk soap, selling it in their communities, selling it at farmers markets and crafts fairs and things like that. Because the more people that learn about goat milk and they use that first bar of soap, you know, wherever they happen to buy it, they're going to see the difference it makes in their skin. And then they're going to want to learn more.

Brent Ridge 24:13
And you know, what we're trying to do at Beekman is have all of the science to show. Hey, this is why it's important. And you know, Josh and I often say, you know, we have been blessed to travel all around the world, and anytime we're somewhere, we always go to farmers market. We'd rather go to a farmer's market than a museum. And invariably, no matter if you're in Africa, if you're in India, if you're in China, you go to a farmer's market, you will find someone selling goat milk soap. And there is not another single skincare-utilized ingredient in the world where there's somebody in a culture using that, which is amazing thing, if you think about it.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 24:55
We still say today, even on QVC, and I just had when people call and we say, if you know somebody making goat milk soap in your area. Buy it from them. Don't buy it from us. Yes, that's how we all grow together.

Deborah Niemann 25:06
Oh, I love that so much, and you're so right. Like when I moved to the country, I was complaining to somebody about the fact that I could not use any soap other than this one unscented soap I got at the health food store, which was driving me crazy, because I used to be a fragrance junkie. And she said, “Well, you have goats, why don't you make goat milk soap?” I didn't even know what she was talking about, but I did. I did the research, and I started making it.

Deborah Niemann 25:32
And not only did I discover that, like, oh my gosh, I can play around with all these essential oils and have some fragrance back in my life, but my son, who had, cracked and bleeding elbows and hands. It all went away like it completely took care of his skin problems. You know, I said, even if I don't sell it anymore, I will always be using goat milk soap, even if I'm not making it, I’ll be buying it from somebody else.

Brent Ridge 25:55
Well, that's wonderful. And now, you know, and before, people just didn't know why it was working. But now, with all the research that we've done, we understand the science behind what are the components in the goat milk that make it so beneficial to the skin.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 26:10
This is actually a great thing, since we know so many of your listeners do make their own soap and try to sell their own soap. Here is what we know works with the customer. Goat milk has the same pH as human skin so it doesn't strip your skin. That is probably the number one message that works.

Brent Ridge 26:24
And that's the important thing for barrier health. And you know, we've been talking about the barrier health for so long, but that really is, if you're selling your soap in a market, talk to the customer about barrier health, because the way they cleanse their skin is the most important step of skin health in your skincare routine because you don't want to disrupt the barrier.

Josh Kilmer-Purcell 26:42
I'll just give them three things to remember when they're selling the same page of your skin. Goat milk has a very, very similar protein structure to human milk, so your skin doesn't repel it like it does other things. That's why it absorbs and then third that we were the first ones to actually do the science on this, goat milk has 31 key nutrients that benefit your skin, and you can find those on our website. So if you are somebody who is selling soap in a market or wherever you're trying to sell on your website, those are the three things that we found customers like want to know most why goat milk works for skin.

Deborah Niemann 27:14
That is great to know. So we will also be sure that we put a link to that in our show notes as well. And I think you may have just gotten yourself automatically invited back to do another episode to talk about those 30 something studies that you've done.

Brent Ridge 27:29
That's 324 clinical studies.

Deborah Niemann 27:29
Oh my gosh, that. See, my brain could not even comprehend that number. I'm like, it was a three something.

Brent Ridge 27:33
Yeah.

Deborah Niemann 27:33
Wow. That is awesome. So you have to come back now and talk about that, because I love talking about research

Brent Ridge 27:46
Me too. And then Josh is always good about translating the nerd in me. So yeah, I will rattle on. And then Josh will say, but what he means is this.

Deborah Niemann 27:57
Yeah, that sounds terrific. So everybody can look forward to that. So I want to pull it back to the book that just came out. Now, like I know you've got a lot of goat wisdom in there, which I love. What is the biggest takeaway you think for people?

Brent Ridge 28:11
Okay, well, there's a takeaway. But before we answer that, can I ask you a question,

Deborah Niemann
Sure.

Brent Ridge
What is that bit of wisdom, that parable or that maxim, maybe you heard from your mom, your grandmom, or you read it somewhere. What is that one thing that you come back to most often in your life?

Deborah Niemann 28:31
My mother used to always say, “Tomorrow never comes, so don't procrastinate.”

Brent Ridge 28:36
Okay? And do you come back to that often?

Deborah Niemann 28:38
Yeah, yeah. It's like, all right, I gotta do this now

Brent Ridge 28:40
That's see, that's your goat wisdom, and that's what we want people to really understand. First, we want people to understand what is that guiding principle for their life? What is that piece of wisdom that they have been given and always learn how to you can apply it to so many aspects of your life?

Brent Ridge 28:58
The second thing we wanted people to do in the book is that by the time they finish the book, in addition to our inspirational story and lots of business psychology that we partner with Harvard Business Review on. There are exercises at the end of each chapter that help you convert information into wisdom. And you know, we live in a day and age where we are bombarded with information, so much information that our brain cannot even comprehend the vast majority of it.

Brent Ridge 29:29
And so what we want people to have, we hope people have built by the time they finish the book, is to one recognize when they see something as a piece of information that is important to something that's happening in their life. How can they recognize it, and how can they immediately convert it into wisdom so that it can become applicable to helping them solve their life problems? And that's how you will have a success in life, and you will have a success in business converting information into wisdom. And I think so much these days we're so distracted by so many different things that we don't so that's what we hope people will accomplish.

Deborah Niemann 30:05
Awesome. So I know your book is available everywhere that books are sold, it is all over the place. Where can people find you online?

Brent Ridge 30:13
They can find us. Our website is https://beekman1802.com/ , and if they want to follow us personally, our Instagram is at Josh and Brent, and our Facebook is at Beekman 1802 Boys. Yeah, we'd love to hang out with them.

Deborah Niemann 30:28
Awesome. And we will put those links in the show notes too, for anybody who's driving or gardening or milking goats or whatever. Thank you so much for joining us, and I look forward to having you come back and nerd out on the science of goat milk sometimes.

Brent Ridge 30:41
Absolutely, always happy to do that. Thank you so much.

Deborah Niemann 30:43
Yeah, thank you. And that's it for today's show. If you haven't already done so, be sure to hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss any episodes. To see show notes, you can always visit FortheLoveofGoats.com and you can follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/lovegoatspodcast. See you again next time. Bye for now.

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Deborah Niemann

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