How Danny Buck grew his business to $30m a year from his kitchen table with Chase Dimond.

Hey guys, we're here for episode six of the e-commerce opportunity. I have the fortunate opportunity of having Danny Buck on. Danny, my friend, how are you? I'm great. Thank you very much for having me for the away leg, I guess. This is our second podcast, so it's not often you get to share a podcast twice with the famous Chase, so thank you very much. Yeah, dude, of course. No, it's crazy. The seats have turned. I was in your position, I think you had me on about a year ago when you were doing yours, so it's cool to be on the other end, but how are you today? I'm great, I'm great. Yeah, still recovering a little bit from the heavy Easter. I don't know why it seems like a mini Christmas every time we do it, so the families get together and yeah, just try to build again. No one knows what day it is at the moment, we've got lockdown and we've got like bank holidays and all sorts, but I'm there. We're back in the office today, running the show again and yeah, just catching up, try to get to grips with what's an absolute nuts marketplace at the moment for us. Dude, I'm sure, I mean, full disclosure, Danny and I do work together, so I know just how crazy and how good things are going, so very proud of you and very excited for this episode. Do you mind sharing for those that don't know you, kind of what you're working on? Yes, yes. Okay, so it started off kind of as a holding company called Brand Builder and the intention of that was to build fast growth direct-to-consumer brands. We kind of set out with the intention of growing relatively small brands, maybe growing up to sort of like five million pounds, so I guess, what's that, like seven, seven and a half million dollars and then sell them on, but along this journey, we ended up creating three brands which have just absolutely skyrocketed in the last year, obviously a horrendous year for a lot of businesses last year, but for e-commerce, it just, it pushed us, what, maybe three years ahead, so all of a sudden, we found ourselves in a position where, I mean, I think we did something like two million in 2019 and then last year, we did 17 million dollars, so like the jump just went boom, but try to actually run that and cash flow that and make sure you've got just basics going was obviously wonderful, but really tough as well, so we're still trying to work out, like Q1's just finished, so we're working into Q2 now and Q1 started exactly the same as last year, it's scaled up and we're still growing and it sounds like a real kind of posh problem to have, but managing growth is a whole level of complexity that I just didn't expect to have at this stage, so pretty much my day-to-day at the moment is understanding, are we growing as quick as we could be and should we be slowing down, like should we be controlling things, is something on a break, so that's pretty much my role at the moment, just fighting fires and kind of diagnosing problems. Yeah dude, that's fascinating and congrats on all the success, what were you working on right before this, like was there anything that you were doing that set you up to do this, what were you working on? Yeah, so my background's kind of your side really, I started off as an agency owner, so when I was 22, I did a management buyout of a smaller division that I was working at, again kind of going in at the deep end, but the company I was working for, they weren't interested in the web game as it was called back then, it was just web development and e-commerce was quite new at that point, so at 22, I'm 36 this year, so he's like 14 years ago, so what we had was, we had the small web team, I did a deal with the guys to sell just this division to us, we then moved over, started with four people and then that four people ended up, within eight years we were on about 120, I think our biggest, 110, something like that, our biggest, and we were one of the biggest e-commerce agencies in Europe, so we specialised in Magento, which I don't think a lot of people talk about these days, it's a curse word I think, and we just, that's what we did, we were doing big development projects and then we'd sell marketing solutions on the back of it, and the marketing solutions were great, we got retainers, we did like growth retainers, it was like a mix of SEO, PPC, email, which God, if you would have seen what we were doing on email, you'd slap my hands, but you know, just those little growth retainers, so it was really nice, you do like a nice big web project or e-commerce project, like we'd build a website and then we'd follow on with marketing retainers and I did that for about eight years before this, yeah, sorry, that'll be longer, sorry, 10 years it would have been, sorry, 10 years it would have been, wow, you were in e-commerce before it was even cool or really, you know, a thing, that's awesome, can you walk me through like your decision, like how did you go from owning this agency for 10 years to deciding to want to build and own your own brands? Yeah, that's an interesting question, yeah, so what kind of spurred me along was, we got to the point where we were, when we started we were like 100% web development and then we like slowly like 10% marketing and by the end we were pretty much 60% marketing and my role in the company, I was one of the co-founders, but one of my main role was the digital strategies for the client and what I found was, we were doing, I think something like, we had, I'd say like 100, 110 staff, 120 staff, something like that and we were doing around four million pound turnover, really profitable being an agency, like it's, you don't have stock, your time is your stock sort of thing, so super profitable and had a great lifestyle, but what I found was the digital strategies that I was putting in place for our clients, they had say 20 staff and we're doing like 25 million, 30 million and I was thinking, ******* hell, I'm allowed to swear, sorry, yeah, all good, yeah, but I was thinking, wow, like these guys, you know, this is a marketing strategy, they've got a retail infrastructure which, you know, and the products and everything, which is absolutely fundamental, but this strategy which I've written and our guys are delivering, they're doing so much more money than us, they're driving Ferraris, I think I had a Merc or something at the time, I was like, what, like surely I can do this and it kind of, that crept in, like, you know, I got the thought maybe two years into it and then those two years passing, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger and I just thought, at some stage, although this has been my bread and butter, I've got to make a jump and try it myself and that, the itch got stronger and, you know, and that's kind of, that was the big decision to just start one of my own brands and that was it, I basically did a deal with the agency, so there was four shareholders at the time, we basically got to the point where we had like a board and an operational board and we had, I was trying to create SaaS products, I was kind of like, I was the black sheep, I was the one trying to, like, do other things because I was getting bored with the agency life, it was 10 years in at this point, so it was, you know, it was a long slog and we had, I think we had a SaaS product, which, you know, now you see in the Shopify store, they, the guys in the Shopify store did a much better job than me, but it was like ways to track profit and ways to measure revenue and, you know, that one of those sorts of apps, but it didn't really, it didn't really work too well and I could just see, I was trying other things, which wasn't my core business, so I agreed a deal and I left, I left in June and I'd start, I started, I think it was June 19, 2019, sorry, that's not true, 2017 and then in October, I launched Circular, which is our first brand on Kickstarter. And that's a watch brand, correct? That was a watch brand, yeah, that was the first one, I had had visions that people would buy multiple watches, they would buy a watch a month, if I got the price right, that's, that was the vision for it, because I did a lot of fast fashion clients and I thought I could bring fast fashion to watches and it didn't work out, I'm not afraid to say, it didn't work out in the end, it had a massive like bang in its first year, we spent a and along this journey of launching my first brand, I basically, I did a deal with the agency where my shares would be sold and would be amortized over three years and about four months into that agreement, three months maybe, they closed the company down, so I was in a position where for 10 years work, I got like nothing of the equivalent, I got some money but got nothing that company closed down and I was left in a position where I'd forked out quite a lot on stock, I had a bad cash flow problem, basically a bad, bad cash flow problem and I had a brand which was nowhere near profitable because it was so new, I had cost commitments and we couldn't afford to pay the mortgage, so I had to start doing consulting again, which is where I created Brand Builder, that's where I created it, so I had Circular which launched as a Circular Limited which is like an LLC or something like that I think, so we launched that and then I quickly had to create Brand Builder which was going to be my consultancy whilst I just had to just do some calls, do some, we wrote like mini business plans, they were called the Brand Builder plans, we used to write business plans for people that wanted to start a brand but didn't know how, so we'd create them and I just did them because I needed a couple of grand to pay for the car and pay for the mortgage and stuff like that, so that was a tough moment, a tough part of the journey which I didn't expect basically. Man, I so appreciate you sharing that, right, hearing you go from 2 million to 17 million, it sounds like roses and rainbows and all these great things but a lot of people don't see the things that could have stopped you, you could have easily thrown the towel and we probably wouldn't be here talking about this if you had, right, so a lot of respect, a lot of kudos, loads of questions, so when you were doing the consulting because you obviously have your back against the wall, you had to pay for these things, how long did you do consulting or do you still do the consulting or now obviously the business has matured and you kind of are not focused on anything else? So I did it for, I'm trying to think when I actually stopped it, the money was good so basically it went from being a real struggle to get money to actually then the money started to get quite good and then it was a point of I'm concentrating more on the consulting than I am on the brands and the brands are getting big so there was a point at that, I'm just trying to work out when that crossover was but it got to that point, it got to that point where I thought I've got to stop doing the consulting now because we need to focus on the brands and then the money that we're getting from the consulting will then start paying ourselves out the brands, that happened, I think that was about a year in, I think it was about a year roughly, yeah, I think it was about a year that we did it for but along this journey we, my wife also came up with an idea for a brand which is our, was our second brand which was Honu, which was, it's a jewellery brand which donates 10% of net profits to saving sea turtles, there's a funny story about that but I won't go in too much into it but basically it was invented whilst we were on holiday, we came back, there's a picture of Amy looking into the ocean like having a life crisis and then that picture basically was when, when we were looking at that picture when we got home, that's when the idea hit so there's like that picture's like up in our house and stuff like that, it's like a good memento but yeah the consulting side, you know, I was building the personal brand to help with the consulting, to sell the consulting, all that sort of stuff whilst getting in a cash flow position for the business to become profitable and you know loads of good stuff happened throughout that consulting although, you know, at no stage did I say to myself I'm going to have to get a job but there was, there was a lot of self-belief I think in that period and that's, that was vital because you know, I don't know if you saw on my last, my most recent Instagram post I talked about my, my rock bottom was when I, I, we had, we had a few things going on, we were paying influencers, we were bringing in consultancy money and then we were trying to spend it back out on the brands and there's a few times where it didn't work so we'd have, we'd have literally our, our cash, our money to pay for, pay for the mortgage or to go out and you know actually do it and we're trying to invest in the brands to get them off the ground and like with influencers that don't work, you know, we paid some, we paid an A-list singer a lot of, a five-figure sum and it, and she brought in one sale and I remember just like very, very close to tears, the wine and the whiskey got battered that night, it was, you know, that one of those moments where, you know, they make it, those, those moments make you and that, it got to that point but, you know, without that year there would have been like, I am, I'm now, I'm, I'm really strong on cash flow, I'd never done cash flow before that year but now, you know, I'm, I consider myself a much better internal like operator than, than what I was four years ago, you know, I didn't, I was in charge of the sales at the agency, I wasn't in charge of cash flow or finance or managing the team or anything like that but because of those moments that, that was like, that was like life telling me these are the Yeah, dude, those, the scars run deep, right, they, they force you to change so, well, I mean, I think we've known each other now for like a year and a half and we've worked together for, I don't know, 12 to 14 months and I actually didn't know a lot, a lot of this backstory so I appreciate you sharing that. In terms of you splitting your time, right, so you've got three current brands, how do you split your time across three brands and what tools are you Okay, so I wouldn't recommend anybody launches three brands at once ever, ever, ever do that, that, that's probably been the hard, again, like talking about the, the luxury problems but that, that has been a real struggle so why that's been a struggle is if you get three brands that grow at once, especially during a pandemic where they grow times 10, times 8, something like that, to cash flow that growth is, is very difficult so, and that's it, that's if you don't want to get loans or, you know, or you don't want to get like, there's, there's a lot of, a lot of people where you can get loans and, and we did along the way, we had to get like, we used PayPal and Wayfly, like different, different people that we would use, they're not sponsored by the way, and we had to, you know, we had to use certain people because it was for stock, like if you can't afford stock then your business is nothing so it got to that point where we did actually need to invest, sorry, go outside for a little bit of funding but that quickly got to a point where we, we were running our own cash flow but growing three brands at once is very, very difficult and there's a lot of, there's a lot of time where I get imposter syndrome between those because I feel at some, like one, one is growing really, really well and then we go right, that's okay now, we'll go and concentrate and do something on this one and then this one suffers and then the dip on the big, the bigger one is, is more than what the uplift would have been on the medium one. So it's very hard to manage the time but we do it well and the, and the only, the only way that we feel we can do it is by saying no to pretty much 90% of new stuff, so we will, like TikTok ads as an example, loads of people jumped on TikTok ads, we were like, **** TikTok's big, we need to get on it, should we just do ads because that's easier than the organic side? Nah, we don't know enough about it, let's just focus on Facebook ads, email and Google and whatever other stuff we're doing well at the moment and we ignored it and then since then I've seen a lot of brand owners that I speak to have gone, it didn't really work anyway for us, so I feel that those sorts of decisions, by keep it, by sticking to what we really know and doubling down on the channels that we know we can do well and bringing in awesome consultants like yourself and to help us with that growth, that, that is the reason why we can scale three brands at once, so we put a lot of emphasis on very slick processes which are super focused and we, we say no to 90% of things and that's the reason I say 90 is because we'll always look at, we'll always look at it and assess it and there will be certain things that we'll do, so like we, about 10% of our ad budget goes on Snapchat because we do think that's an opportunity that we'd like to grow and yeah and that's it, so we, we kind of, we kind of do all the basics really, really well and that's, we have like on a Monday we'll have our planning meeting and our Friday we'll have a review meeting and then the team gets to work remotely, on holiday, wherever they want to work, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday to get the job done for the week and that's kind of how it works with us, so it's, everybody's got their own to-do list, we review the results either like the Friday later or sometimes on the Monday depending how it falls, so everyone's in charge of their own, everyone's got their own autonomy and it's, it's focusing on the basics and just letting people do what they're good at. Awesome, I want to talk about the team a little bit, what, what's the size of the team and do your team members, do they work across the portfolio of brands, so is one person working on all three brands or are you having people specialize where person A is only on Crafted and person B is only on Circular and person C is only on Honu, like how do you, how do you kind of manage the team, how big is the team and how do they work within the company? Yeah, so everybody works for brand builds, so brand builder is kind of like a, an agency with three clients and the three clients are its brands, that's, that's, that's probably my agency background, which is, has pushed that, that operational structure, I think, I think that's where it's come from, but you know, there, there is times where we feel that we should have a dedicated team, but that's a, that's a much bigger conversation and I think that's for the future, but we, we have it, so yeah, we have like a centralized team and we do, we do what we believe is absolutely necessary in-house, so for two brands we outsource fulfillment because they're, they have multinational warehouses, so warehouses in the UK, US and Europe as an example, so for us to do that operation and staff that operation would be, it would take up a lot of my time, so we outsource that, but then for one brand, which is predominantly UK, we do that in-house, so that's an example of like fulfillment, we just have, we have mostly outsourced, but one brand we do in-house, then the marketing side, that's all in-house, with consultants like yourself, we have, we're just working with someone on our influencer side at the moment, obviously self on email and that's it, consultant wise, we do Facebook ads in-house and there's a reason for that and, and that's, that's pretty much it, other than that there's, there's finance, legal, they're all outsourced, but we're, we're pretty, pretty much a marketing company with a bit of fulfillment and then we, the process which I really like, you know, the agency client relationship side, I, I really like that we've kind of got strategy in-house and, and we do have, we have the tactics are delivered, but we get our, we, we get like different perspectives and point of views from experts, so for us, you know, we look at, look at what we were doing before we met you, like we were just, we were sending campaigns like anybody to our, to everybody, you know, to literally our entire newsletter and then you get, you guys come in and you then offer expertise and improvements based on what's working outside and, you know, you improve our operation, but that, that's an ongoing process, like, so I feel like working with agencies, the new way for us, or the good way for me working with agencies is getting that consultancy and, and expertise, I think. Yeah. And dude, for, for me, I have like this framework on how I think about like how brands and agencies to work together. And a lot of it was honestly kind of influenced by, you know, how you thought about working with us, right? You're a seven figure brand at the time growing quickly, and instead of bringing us in to do it all for you, you guys wanted to maintain, you know, creative control, but also like the, the know-how, right? So with Josh on your side and with you, like you guys wanted to learn and you guys were really hungry to learn. And I think the fact that you guys were paying us, you know, money to basically teach you guys and handhold for lack of a better word, was actually really intelligent because now Josh is a beast and, you know, we still have been consulting together, but there's going to get to a point where you probably don't need us. And maybe, maybe we've already gotten to that point, but you just know it's a small price to pay to really advance your staff. So I think it's a really cool and interesting thing where, you know, when you're a six figure brand, it makes sense to when you're kind of like low seven figures, maybe it makes sense to, you know, outsource some of it. But like, as soon as you get closer to like mid seven figures, you know, low eight figures, if you can own that in house, I think it makes a lot of sense. And the way that you start is, you know, as you're scaling. So long winded, I think the way that you've approached it is really smart. So hats off to you and the team, and it's cool to see Josh's growth and the email growth of all your companies. And for you, you're basically paying for consulting on one and you get to apply it to all of them. So I think it's a no brainer. It makes a lot of sense for someone that does it like you. Yeah, it's, I guess that came from a bit of an insight of understanding the agency game as well. Like I believe, you know, in-house to actually move as quick as we want to move, that either costs you a lot of money with an agency or it can't be done because you've got other clients and that's fine. I get that. But the big, the big plus for working with someone like you is you work with loads of clients. So if there's a trend, if something's moving, like if all of a sudden text-based emails are doing miles better than gift-based emails, you'll go, you should do this. And then the next email we get, you know, we get that insight and that's worth an ongoing consultancy. I don't even know, or we'll renegotiate our retainer and then I'll tell you we'll stick with it forever. But yeah, that's it for me. It's the ongoing insight. And then, you know, we, we can do it. And, you know, on, on, on Josh, you know, he, he was, his attitude is unbelievable on that. It's that attitude, you know, that attitude is past the moon. So email knowledge across the company has grown. So, you know, assist Josh's assistants, or if we've got somebody who's looking, looking to learn in a certain area that needs, and he needs help on certain tasks and things like that, you know, that's all come through. But, you know, I've always hired based on attitude, not ability, you know, Josh's last job was he was a barman in Gusto in a, in a restaurant, basically in England and his attitude to learn. And that's it. That's it for me with people. It doesn't matter if they've got experience or not. It's about the attitude to learn and then being able to pick it up obviously plays a big part. And that's, that's been great for us on a, you know, that one of the things we want to talk about maybe is based on the Instagram questions was culture. And I think culture is that when you, when you scale in really quick, it, you know, everyone can be on board and love it and stuff like that. If it starts to slow down a bit, then you really see people's attitudes and do they want to dig in and help out and stuff like that. And, you know, we've seen when we've had our tough moments, the team want to dig in, everybody wants to work for each other. And if somebody's off sick and it's a total, you know, it's customer support or it's social media or something, everybody will fill in for each other's role. But that for me comes from attitude and not ability at all. Yeah. Look like at the end of the day, it's a company, but really what you're saying is you've built a family, right? Family's there through the good and the bad, and they will be loyal, right? You're loyal to them. You found Josh, he worked at a bar, right? Not a lot of other people to give him the opportunity. So he probably feels to some degree that he has a lot of things and a lot of loyalty to you. Right. So it's really a two-way street where you treat your employees good, they treat you well, and you all grow, right? As the company grows, they grow and pay, they grow in responsibility. So I think that's fantastic. I have one or two more questions, and then I do want to get to the social media questions. This one's kind of an interesting one. I'm curious to get your thoughts. What's one skill that you've taken from your business that you find yourself using in your personal life? So that's a great question. I think the biggest lesson that I've learned from this business and the last business, and then what I've started to apply is saying no. So saying no to things, because I was a magpie in the last one. I was like, let's do this, let's do this, while that service is new, let's try and do that service. And whereas this one, I've seen a lot better growth by saying no to things. So an example of how I've applied that to my life now is I'll say no to three nights out a week so I can exercise a little bit more, or I'll say no to, it's a bit different now with lockdown, but I'll say no to an extra Zoom call to speak to my family or something like that. So I feel like I've made a list of what I feel is my priority, and then I've rewritten the rules, basically. So I feel if it doesn't need to be a meeting, it could be putting an email, and that's that time that's been saved. I can spend on downtime. I just feel like having a PS5 day or PS4 day or whatever, and chilling. I'll do that because I feel like the downtime side of it makes the work side a lot, a lot stronger. You perform a lot better. And I feel like that is probably the big thing that I've learned, the whole saying no and what's essential besides me. I love that. Whenever my wife asks me to take out the trash or do the dishes, I'm going to be like, hey, Danny told me on the podcast, start saying no more often. We'll see how that goes. I don't know if you've read, do you know Mitch Harper? Have you heard of Mitch Harper? The guy who started Big Commerce? No, I haven't. I was trying to find it the other day. I couldn't find it. He wrote a really good blog on working out your worth. So work out what, if your plan is to sell your company, work out the current profit, the expected multiple, and the end sale value of what you think you could sell for. Divide it by your hourly rate. And then whatever that comes to, then say, so if your wife ever asked you to take out the trash, go, for me to take out the trash, that's going to cost 50 quid or that's going to cost 200 quid. And then flip it that way around. We'd get someone to do that for us. I just loved, I love that blog post where it's basically valuing his time properly. He did that so he could get a gardener. That's fascinating. No, I'm going to check that out. There was one other example. I think the guy that started the landing page or the squeeze page, he used to say that everyone thought he was the coolest guy and he was famous, but whenever his wife asked him to do things and he says no, she's like, I don't care that you've made the squeeze page, the landing page, that has added no value to my life. Go take out the damn trash. So it's just kind of funny. That's really interesting. One more question for me, and then a couple of questions from social, and we will do a part two because there's going to be dozens of questions that we don't get to. I saw something, I don't know if it was on your Twitter, on one of your profiles, called Building Simple Brands. Is that a book? What is that? Can you talk to us more about what that actually is? Yeah, that's a book. I wrote a book on how we went from basically building brands on the kitchen table to where we are now, which on a run rate to $30 million this year, and it was literally, I feel exactly the same. I'm as happy as I was then as I am now. It's about enjoying the journey and what we did along the journey, all the mistakes we made. I feel like I'm really plugging this. It's not a plug on this, but it's basically everything that's happened in my life. I just decided to write it all down. It was called The Truth About Building Brands. If anyone's bought that, this is me all over, but I've procrastinated and I didn't like the title, so I changed the title. So it's called Building Simple Brands. It's basically what I've done to build the brands, which I class as simple. They're really profitable and they're good brands, but for me, building simple brands is about a lifestyle as well. Pre-lockdown, me and my wife love to travel. That was the whole purpose. How can we build brands which can be run remotely, travel the world, and just be a bit happier, maybe forego a bit of profit for a more stress-free life? It's the start to finish journey. That's what that is. Amazing. No, I appreciate that. I was curious about what that was. All right, so four questions from social. You already answered one, so I'm going to go to the four of the five and again, dozens of questions we'll get to on the next one. How do you do things that you don't want to do? I find that a real strange and stupid question. One, you just do them. So you just got to do them. If it's got to be done, then you do them. But for me, if I'm feeling a bit demotivated, I'll exercise. If I'm feeling demotivated, then there's a reason. Am I tired? Have I not had enough sleep? Do I need a drink? Is there a reason why I can't be asked to do the job? I'll understand that and I'll come to terms with it and then I'll go, right, so I'm feeling demotivated because I'm a little bit tired-ish or just can't be asked, so I'll go in the gym or I'll go for a run, I'll go for a walk, listen to a podcast. I'll discover what motivates me and then I'll go back to the task. I think that's probably the nicer answer than just do it, but yeah. No, that's great. I appreciate that. Next question. How did you pick your brand names? I'll always look, so coming from an agency background, look for the domain names. I'll always come up with, I'll go through, I'll go, right, so I think the first one we did was Circular, so I didn't just ping, that's a great name. It was like, I think the first name was Mystic. It was awful. I was thinking like a fast fashion brand, awful names, but basically what I would do is I'd find the domain name and I'd come up with, it just came, I can't remember where it came from, but it just came, the idea of Circular, like Circular being time and obviously Circular.com or .co was unavailable, so I took the letter out and I know Nathan Chan has done that, the founder, he did that and probably got some inspirations. I used to speak to him years and years and years ago and then I took the letter out and then it was all available. All the domain names were available, so Circular, that's how we come up with that name. We then did the same with Crafted. We wanted something that was like crafted jewelry, but Crafted.com was unavailable, so we took the E out. Honu has a bit more meaning behind it because Honu is, we first saw sea turtles in Hawaii and the Hawaiian meaning, the Hawaiian translation of sea turtle is Honu, but we couldn't really remove a letter from that one, so we just put the word shop in front of it. But it's always domain based, so if I come up with an idea for a name which I think is great, I'll always try and find the domain first. If the domain doesn't exist, then I'll swerve it. Love that, thank you. Next question, how do you find great manufacturers? I get asked this question probably 50 times a week. There is no solution for this at all. The way that we find manufacturers is we go to Google, we will look on all different kinds of websites, so find out where you want to buy from first. Do you want it to be sustainable, so you want to buy locally and domestically, or do you want to buy it from sustainable places like Portugal? Find out where you want to buy it from first, then start Googling as much as you can. Then send emails and wait until you get replies and start judging the supplier based on their communication. Let that be your first wave of cutting off suppliers. If they're awful at communicating, it's not going to work, so we remove that bit. Then you whittle 50 suppliers down to 10 and then get samples off all 10, if you can afford it. Then you've got an assessment based on communication, which you've now done first wave. Second wave will be cutting out, I shouldn't be talking about waves and pandemics. Second cut off will be whether you think the samples are good enough and then whittle down to three and then start talking about pricing and supplies. The reason why you want to have three is so you can start to negotiate your deal. If you go in with just one and the terms are 100% up front, then that's your choice, that's all you've got. But supplier number two said we could do 50-50, would you be open to doing 50-50? Then you've got something to negotiate back with. It's a process along. There is no way of finding a supplier other than doing those steps. Awesome. Yeah, it's helpful. The last question for today and I'm super appreciative of your time. Practical strategies for building a community around your brand. Good product. That's it. It's a good product. If you get a good product, it'll be shared amongst the community. If you get a bad product, they will all criticise it. By product, I'd incorporate shipping and your whole e-commerce operation. But if you do the fundamentals right, then the community will build itself. You do it wrong and they'll slag it off on your Instagram posts. The big thing with Circular's watches was we'd pay influencers to wear a watch and then they'd take it off. They weren't asked about the product. With Crafted, Circular now is a sunglasses brand in Honu. People wear the product. They love the product. It took a bit more time and cost and research to create better products. But the better the product, the more it gets shared in the community. The more people tell their friends about it, the more it gets better. Obviously, you have to re-engage with those people. But without the fundamental, a good product, it wouldn't go anywhere. I think that's the silver bullet. Amazing. Dude, this was fantastic. I have loads of other questions and there's loads of other questions on social that we didn't get to. We'll definitely do a part two, but thank you for being here. What are the best places for someone to ask a question, to connect with you, to follow you? Is it Twitter? Is it Instagram? Is it both? And what are your handles? Yeah, it's The Danny Book, B-U-C-K on both Twitter and Instagram. They're the two main channels that I use. Twitter, you'll get a mix of me talking about football, but also sharing advice in between. I either do 50 tweets in a day or none for two weeks. You get that. And then Instagram, I put everything on stories. Sweet. I'll drop those links below. Danny, thank you so much for being here, man. Lovely. Thank you very much, mate. Appreciate it. Cheers. Bye.