Selling Mountain Bikes All Over the Planet  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source]] - Full Title: Selling Mountain Bikes All Over the Planet - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/9db0e162-48b4-41c9-a506-310885719135 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Early Business Lessons** - Jeff Cayley learned business by doing from a young age, including selling items on eBay as a child. - He opened Worldwide Cyclery at 21 and grew it focused on high-end mountain bike enthusiasts. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak How would you introduce yourself? Jeff Cayley Yeah, cool. Well, I'm definitely not a software developer, although I am very much a nerd in a sense. I love technology and business and finance and all of that, but don't specifically work in that. So, yeah, I grew up in Southern California and, you know, was just always into extreme sports. Mountain biking was the most prominent one for me. And I started racing a lot when I was a teenager and raced a couple of years professionally out of high school and broke plenty of bones. And I was doing enduro and downhill racing and, you know, had always worked in the industry in the off seasons as well. And from there, I opened up a mountain bike shop that was online and in store with the idea of it being very much tailored towards the high end enthusiast portion of the market. And I wanted it to be very multi-channel retail. So e-commerce heavy, but still have a good in-store presence as well. And that was in 2011. So I opened that business when I was 21, which was quite some years ago now, and just grew it and scaled it. And we did a lot of unique content marketing to sort of put ourselves on the map and have always had a lot of fun in the game of business, like trying to trying to make sure our marketing came Across as enjoyable and fun and authentic and creative and unique and really wasn't super tactical with, it wasn't calculated in a sense, it was just more real. And this is what we are. And we educated people on the things we knew about in the space and did right by our customers and worked really hard to build a good business that had repeat customers and all that and Curate sort of all of the best stuff the mountain bike world had to offer. So, yeah, we've done that for quite a long time. And around 2016, I kind of started seeing some sort of cracks forming with that business model of bicycle industry retail. And so Worldwide Cyclery, just for context, was a retailer. So, you know, think your traditional bike shop, albeit, you know, mostly online and specifically geared towards the high-end segment of the mountain bike portion and catered towards The enthusiasts. And that business was, it was just the model was changing in a sense that a lot of the brands in the industry were starting to sell consumer direct and the retail landscape was changing Because of that. COVID came along and the bicycle industry went through this massive boom cycle. Everyone who was already a mountain biker just rode more frequently and got more into the sport, more intrigued with it. And people who weren't necessarily mountain bikers got into the sport. It was just a great socially distant activity to get into. And the whole industry boomed, all the categories. That lasted longer than most people thought it would. Happened probably a couple of years. Then it went through a huge bust cycle. And needless to say, you know, pre-COVID, we had done a couple of things as we saw some faults and cracks with the business. And one of which was fire up a mountain bike hard goods brand, which actually did the design and manufacturing of things like pedals, grips, bars, stems. So we saw that business called Trail One Components, and it's really tailored towards giving back to the sport as well as manufacturing all the products. And then we also acquired a very small brand that we did retail called Kettle Mountain Apparel. And it was in its infancy, one of the distributors we worked with had made it as sort of a cross functional versatile apparel brand that had some mountain bike pieces. And we actually ended up buying it from them because we really wanted to get into the apparel space because we just really enjoyed apparel of all kinds in the outdoor segment. And we did a lot more. And when I say we, it's like me and my business partners, we did a lot more than just mountain biking. So that was in late 2019 that we did that. And that business now, Kettle Mountain Apparel is actually a bigger business than Worldwide Cyclery. It's grown and scaled really fast. And so, yeah, now I'm basically running Worldwide Cyclery still, which has three retail stores, still a big online business, running Kettle Mountain Apparel, which makes some mountain Bike specific gear, but mostly adventure travel apparel of all kinds, all menswear, and then Trail One Components, which is a mountain bike hard goods brand. So yeah, that's a long winded way of saying, you know, just some random kid from California who was really into mountain biking and outdoor stuff, and also really enjoyed the game and Sport of business. ([Time 0:04:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c85f9d15-136c-4236-a429-2a53aaa39bae)) - **Industry Insight Fuels Strategy** - Deep industry knowledge revealed strategic opportunities against incumbents. - Understanding competitors' strengths and weaknesses helped locate where to fit in and compete. Transcript: Jeff Cayley Yeah. Yeah, it is. You know, and I think part of that is just industry knowledge. I always tell people that, you know, when they're interested in business or starting a business. And, you know, I think one of the most important things is you just really need to understand your industry. Who are the players in the industry that are, that matter? Who are the newcom Who are the incumbents? How are they acquiring customers? How are they retaining customers? What's their reputation like? What's their strategy? Is their strategy getting dated? Is it still relevant? If you just think and ask a lot of those questions, and the more you have clear and concise answers and understanding of all of that stuff within an industry, that's where you can begin To see really strategic places where you can fit in and compete and do well. And so that's, that's what I did. I was in the industry so long that I, that I knew and understood all these players and, and their strengths and weaknesses. And I, and I also understood a lot of how the industry was evolving from a very granular backend side of things. You know, Jensen had started in, I think, 1999, right? So I was a kid. I used to buy from them when I was a little kid. And they're still a great business chugging along, right? But their model, because it started so long ago, it was before a lot of the brands and distributors within the industry had good B2B e-commerce platforms. And before those e-commerce platforms that they used for the B2B side had really good APIs. And then it was before a lot of these software products that, you know, came about, which was basically a more sophisticated ERP system that would allow you to take an API from a distributor And configure it and conform it and then send it to Shopify, eBay, and Amazon. And so there was a lot of technology and software products popping up in the e-commerce space, while simultaneously the sort of backend software side of things within the industry With these brands and distributors was getting more sophisticated. And I just, I was so in the industry, I saw all that stuff and understood how that stuff was happening. And when you do that, you start to realize and see opportunities and you start to also notice what competitors and usually incumbents aren't as attuned to that stuff. And maybe they don't want to integrate it because they're, you know, it's because it's a challenge because, uh, they, they're, they're fine the way they're doing things. They want to continue doing them that way, or because they have these legacy systems that are hard. So you just start to see all this sort of stuff. And that's how you figure out where you can compete. And yeah, that was a lot of it. It's sort of boring behind the scenes stuff, but it is important stuff because when you want to go up and fight against really good competitors out there in an industry, you have to understand The industry landscape in a very intricate way like that. ([Time 0:22:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8d3991c0-0050-461d-8569-0aeea3b82cfe)) - **Serve, Don't Sell** - Use authentic content marketing and YouTube videos to build fans, not just customers. - Educate and serve enthusiasts to differentiate your brand and inspire loyalty. Transcript: Jeff Cayley Amount of tactical effort into that because you kind of can't as a retailer, because as a retailer, you're mostly confined to this about 30 points of gross margin, which is quite small. So you don't really have much room for customer acquisition costs. So you have to pretty much do it in a very, very bootstrapped way. And that came down to content marketing. And that was, you know, so I got really interested and good at SEO and like figuring out how to take knowledge out of my head about random things, whether that was how to set up clipless Cleats on your pedals, how to tune your suspension, random stuff like that, and writing it out into articles. And then we started making YouTube videos and we started just talking to the camera and rambling off random things that we thought, you know, most of the original ideas for the YouTube Videos were, we're fielding all of these customer questions. And there's a lot of this complicated compatibility stuff in the bike industry. It's like, does this fit this? Does that fit that? What would happen if I put this fork on this bike? Random stuff like that. So then we would just make questions or we'd make YouTube videos based off of those questions to just educate people. And there was still a huge gap in the marketplace on YouTube for that. Like there just wasn't those videos. So we just started making educational mountain bike videos about upgrading your bike, things tips and tricks random stuff like that um and that was largely free in a sense right it was Just me talking to a camera we do some super basic editing and talking on youtube and people really liked it and and that had a lot of side effects that i never knew were going to happen because Not only were we then educating mountain bikers and getting views and getting sort of brand awareness, but then people were going, hey, I actually like these guys. Like these guys seem cool and genuine and they helped me. And people sort of are naturally have some level of reciprocation in them. And they're like, because these guys helped me, I want to buy at this retailer. And we saw that happening. Oh, like this is actually building us fans, not just customers. It's people that actually genuinely appreciate that we wrote and and or filmed useful educational mountain bike content that was helpful for them. And then now they like us and want to shop with us instead of our competitors selling the exact same product at the exact same price. So it, you know, you start just learning these things like, oh, wow, that actually worked quite well. Let's just double down on that and make more useful videos and let's make more useful content. And so that was the next sort of big lever that helped really put worldwide cyclery on the map that made people realize who we were and just want to shop with us. That was a big one, right? And of course, there's like the thousand other small things that, you know, people love to gloss over, but if you, if any business is successful, there's a thousand other things behind The scenes that you have to do to win. Right. It was like, maybe the big overarching obvious strategy I can tell you was, yeah, we got, you know, quite sophisticated at content marketing and built an audience. And that made people want to buy with us. But realistically, we still needed to have a good website. We still needed ([Time 0:29:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6f884465-ef9d-4cf4-b7f2-f46008b83a96)) - **Educating Buyers Authentically** - Jeff explained how their retailer position lets them educate on product differences, not just push sales. - They highlight nuanced preferences like brake feel to help buyers choose authentically. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak With. And so it wasn't like, Oh, Jeff said X. So Adam does Y and therefore, you know, happiness ensues and, you know, no crashes. Yeah. Yeah. Jeff Cayley I've, it's cool to hear. Cause, cause I've always tried to communicate that there's not always just a black or white, right or wrong. Like there's a lot of personal preference. Some people like the feel of, you know, Shimano brakes for that exact reason. You don't. Um, and that's okay. Let's all admit that, you know, and that's I don't know, a lot of people are not willing to admit that if they like what they like, they think that's right. And it's like, no, that's not how the world works. And you can communicate that better and explain that some people like this for this reason, and some people like that for that reason. So I don't know, part of that's just, I think, being able to communicate that stuff well. And, and as a retailer, you're kind of uniquely positioned to do that. Because if, you know, one of the brands themselves makes that content, they obviously have to be obscenely biased towards their product. But as a retailer selling multiple ones, you can sort of better educate people on the difference that like the intricate differences between them and, and explain that, yeah, It's Just personal preference in a lot of ways and explain why they're different. And then people can think about their own preferences and try accordingly like you did with break. So that's cool here. Adam Stacoviak So content market was obviously the ([Time 0:42:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/67fd4ba4-ec0c-4694-b328-7c647c05f58e)) - **YouTube Shapes Culture** - YouTube defined and amplified Worldwide Cyclery’s mission internally and externally. - Transparent content shaped company culture, clarifying why and how they serve customers. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Of those. Um, did you see a dramatic difference whenever you started to create content? Like even from not so much, say get customer make money standpoint, but like people enjoy working here more like morale. Was it more fun? Did you grow your network as a result? Like what were the amplifications and benefits of just like diving further into YouTube? Jeff Cayley Yeah, that's, that's a fantastic question because it's a good point in that. Yeah. A lot of those, yes. Um, big, big changes there. And, and like I kind of alluded to earlier, the YouTube videos were initially just, Hey, this could be a great way to build brand awareness. And we have a lot of, um, knowledge about bikes and all these components and our industry. Let's share that on YouTube and let's share answers to the questions that we're getting all day. So we did that. And then we started realizing, Oh, people really appreciate this and they reciprocate and then they're becoming fans and they're getting more into the sport because of what we're Doing. So yeah, that was really fun. And it did internally change the culture too because the brand was a lot more defined, sort of why we exist and the services we provide, whether that's good content marketing, educational YouTube content that also makes people laugh at the same time and operating a good business and supporting people having fun on bikes. All that stuff became much more clear. It's like you can sort of write, this is why we exist. This is our mission, vision, values. You can write all that crap down. But unless it's very viscerally clear to the staff who works there and the customers who shop there, it doesn't really mean anything, right? And for us, YouTube made it clear, it made it very tangible, like, oh, yeah, this is very clear. This is exactly how we support people having fun on bikes. This is how we educate the mountain bike community on the on the knowledge that we have of all the stuff we sell. This is how we curate the products. It became very visible as it, as the YouTube channel grew and as the business grew. And it was very visible to us and our team internally as, as well as externally. So yeah, I think that's a cool piece because a lot of businesses can, you know, you can have a big business, but it's still very behind closed doors, how they acquire customers, how they Treat their customers, how they treat their employees. But a retail business like ours, especially with a lot of content marketing and YouTube, it became very clear, you know, in any way you look at it, who we are, what we're all about, what We do, how we do it. It's very just obvious and out there in the open. So yeah, I like that aspect because it definitely changed a lot of things in our business that, that made it a lot more real and tangible and, and just transparent to every, anyone and Everyone, whether they're inside or outside. ([Time 0:43:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/23b1ba89-f1b8-4286-b56b-702bfa126807)) - **Pivot with Industry Shifts** - Adapt marketing strategies when industry and Google search landscapes change drastically. - Recognize retail's declining margins and pivot to owning and controlling your brands vertically. Transcript: Jeff Cayley So i i can definitely explain that um you know in a perfect world uh if you know i was a trust fund kid we would just make all sorts of fun videos all day. You're not a trust fund kid? Adam Stacoviak Unfortunately not. You're not going to supplies of cash? Jeff Cayley Unfortunately not. Come on, Jeff. I wish. But so, so the way it's evolved is, you know, as I sort of mentioned earlier, that the bike industry has gone through some crazy tumultuous boom and bust cycle with COVID. And, and even pre pre COVID, we'd recognize the industry was just evolving that the sort of heyday of the online retailer was, was coming to an end because all of these brands were starting To sell consumer direct and they were starting to get good at it. And that's a sort of a, it's just an annoyance to a retailer because, you know, worldwide cyclery fundamentally is meant to take, you know, we have, we have a, so over a couple hundred Different brands that we intentionally curated the best brands in the mountain bike industry and the best products in the industry and got them all in one place. And you can shop them all in one area. That is a, you know, still a relevant value proposition and very convenient when you want to buy a new Fox fork and a Maxxis tire and a pair of Shimano brake pads all at the same time in one Place. It's, and it was even more necessary and useful when you couldn't really buy those from anywhere else other than other retailers. But now that you can buy directly from Fox or directly from Shimano or directly from Maxxis, it just changes things because now you're competing directly with the brand selling direct. And if people don't necessarily need to buy two or three things at once from different brands, they just want to upgrade or just want to buy one thing. They just go to the brand directly. You're never going to outcompete that brand when it comes to SEO. If someone's searching for just that brand, obviously just that brand is going to show up at the top always. And if people end up there and they can just easily buy from there, they just do. So it's, so the industry just really changed, right? All of the brands in the industry, you know, if you look at it pre-COVID, probably 10% of them sold consumer direct. And the other 90% just didn't. And they just sold through retailers. And that's how the industry worked. That's all changed. And now it's literally flopped and about 90 of the brands in the industry sell consumer direct they still of course have retailers but they're competing directly with them in the sense Of when you go to buy them when a customer goes to buy a product so the industry is just totally evolved and and we saw that happening and it's just it's just the nature of the beast um it's A bummer like it you, nobody's happy when their, you know, original and good, healthy, fun business model starts deteriorating. Like, that sucks, but welcome to business. Things evolve, things change. The classified ads in the newspaper got demolished by Craigslist, which then got demolished by the internet. You know, it's like, it's shit just changes. So worldwide cyclery's business model is just uh it's not dead it's not obsolete it's just not nearly as viable and it's not living in the heyday that it once was in that sort of 2010 to 2022 era and because of that you know because of seeing that we we wanted to do we wanted to really get into basically owning our own brands more vertically so we could kind of control everything. And, and kettle, kettle mountain apparel was a huge one for us that we really saw a lot of potential in and wanted to grow and scale and put effort into. And that catalog now, you know, we've, we've got, um, 40 different styles of all sorts of stuff for outdoor and travel adventure wear. And we design it ourselves, we manufacture it, we market it, we sell it, we fulfill it, we do the whole thing very vertically. And it's our brand outright. And that brand has grown substantially. And that's and it's really the you know, if you look at all three of our brands that that brand has the most longevity and sustainability in its business model. And so a lot of our focus has gone there, mine specifically, and kind of the key leaders in the business have really focused there. It's new. It's exciting. It's fun. It has longevity and sustainability to it. And we have so much more control over it because we're not a retailer. We're just actually the manufacturer of everything and the retailer. It's all more vertical. So a lot of our efforts gone towards Kettle. And the way we've grown Kettle thus far hasn't been the same strategies. It's been a bit more paid marketing because that's a more viable customer acquisition strategy than the content marketing side of things. And every industry, every product, like there's just different levers and different things you can do to help grow revenue. And for Kettle, that's not necessarily been content marketing just yet. A little bit, we're dabbling in it, but it's been more so, you know, making a really good product and then making really good digital ads and making sure we're there in front of the right People at the right time that are looking for, you know, menswear of that sort. So we've put a lot of effort into that. And we have pulled back effort on the worldwide cyclery content marketing side, because the business model just kind of sucks now, if I'm being honest, not only is worldwide cyclery Competing directly with all the brands it sells now when it didn't pre COVID. But the industry's had that, you know, that boom and bust cycle and the bust cycle is dragged on for what feels like two and a half years now. And it's still in it, the industry totally over inventoried itself. And that's caused a huge amount of discounting and margin deterioration. You know, all these things just really added up and, you know, on the tech side, simultaneously, what's really a huge issue for everyone who was in the e-commerce space, especially The ones that did content marketing, is you don't get organic traffic from Google anymore. It's just basically pay to play. You type in a Google query for a product, and 95% of the page is paid pay-per ads everywhere. The organic stuff is so far smashed down below the ai overview and the paid shopping results with images and the paid click you know text ads it's it's it's so your organic traffic like If you just look at the the structure of a google search engine results page pre-covid versus now it's dramatic how different it is like people just used to get a lot more traffic from Google for free organically. And those days are just gone. Google has just kicked everyone in the nuts. And that's just totally smashed e-commerce businesses that were fairly dependent on content marketing and forced them to pay to play. And if you're forced to pay to play in an industry that has terrible margins, and now you're competing in the ad auction against the freaking same brand you're selling, selling it direct. It's just sucks. So it's like we. Tell like it is, Jeff. Tell like it is. So we have to, you know, we have to be acknowledged that and pivot accordingly. And, you know, Worldwide Cycle is still a good, healthy business and it's fine. But, you know, it's the heyday is over. Right. So we've moved on a little bit from it and said, you know, we're not going to neglect it. It's still a great, awesome business. There's still a value prop to having the curation of all the stuff there. Um, so we've, you know, now we've just toned down the level of content. We put out ([Time 0:59:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1219236c-b76a-43f0-9b2c-42581632266b)) - **COVID Boom and Bust Story** - During COVID, demand for bikes surged while supply chains broke down, causing chaos. - Customers overbought items, which later led to oversupply and industry bust. Transcript: Jeff Cayley The sport. And then they pulled back how often they participated in the sport. And while they were participating a lot and sort of overindulged in the sport, they bought a lot more stuff. They got really into it. You know, they had to cancel their Disney world trip to Paris because of COVID. And they instead just did a regional trip and went to Moab and rode mountain bikes with their family. Right. So people really overindulged in the sport, which was great for the time being, but then it's rained back. Gyms opened up, soccer fields, baseball fields, football fields, everything just kind of went back to normal post COVID and people stopped riding bikes as often and they had bought A lot and the industry then overproduced a lot which then cost a caused a huge amount of discounting across the board and and people also just had you know they're buying good hard goods That last a long time so they're not like the consumption of anything and everything in the in the bike industry whether that's even consumables like tires, grips, chains, pedals, Stuff like that, like even that's tapered off because the participation slowed down. And because a lot of people literally bought extra grips or extra tires, because there was like these weird times where there was no inventory during COVID because the supply chain Disruption. So, so there's, there's still this bus cycle going on. So there's so much less demand and consumption across all categories in the industry happening right now, that it's not as easy to just make video about X and sell X. Whereas pre COVID it was, you know, like things were normal and steady and chugging along and you could introduce people to new products they hadn't heard about an upgrade that they Had hadn't had. And they're like, wow, that actually looks like it would be sweet. I'm just going to buy that right now. Um, so it was way more clear, um, you know, pre COVID and then during COVID was, was just nuts, right? Like you, you could, you could sell anything. Um, uh, it was crazy. The industry was nuts, right? It was, it was so ([Time 1:09:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b333e1ee-bb1e-4677-ae9c-6c1ffad442ce)) - **Apparel Offers Greater Longevity** - Apparel market is larger and more sustainable than bike retail. - Focusing on making technical, durable products at the right price served an underserved niche well. Transcript: Jeff Cayley Really just making the stuff that we specifically want. And at, you know, we specifically want it at this price point. So not as outrageously as expensive as Patagonia or Arc'teryx, um, but expensive enough that it's actually really good, like really good, high quality fabrics, and it can come with A lifetime repair policy. Um, and it can come with really high quality zippers and buttons and trim details and, um, fabric that lasts and actually performs well. So you got to hit some level of higher-end price point to make that happen, but it doesn't need to be Arc'teryx level, which at that point you're just paying for a fashion brand. And it can't really be below that towards the Amazon or Costco price point because then it just frankly falls apart and doesn't function well. So we're kind of figuring like this is a sweet spot we think is relevant and what we want, and these are the designs and aesthetic that we want. So we're just really trying to make stuff that we specifically like and enjoy price point wise, functionality wise, looks wise. And luckily that had so far has just resonated well. Right. And we found the people who also care about those same things. So yeah, that's, that's been fun, but that's like kind of the gamble you take in a lot of business when you're creating a product is like, well, we like this. Hopefully other people do. Adam Stacoviak Yeah. Well, ([Time 1:29:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/27e845b5-0e34-4c95-a1fc-436024f8242e)) - **Building Trail One with Experts** - Trail One products benefit from collaboration with veteran engineers and careful industrial design. - Jeff and his team thoroughly vetted factories and engineered components with a distinct, cohesive design language. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Let them go and do the right work. Or how much personal hand did you have in the design? Cause there's a lot of minimalism and a lot of similarity in the like from the bolt to the stem to the you name it there's a lot of similarity to the just the look and the feel yeah so kind of Jeff Cayley Keeping that consistency with the industrial design language across the whole product line uh is something we've always been cognizant of. And the way we've been able to pull that off is, yes, myself and Liam have had a ton of input on all of this stuff. And we've also been fortunate enough to I had a longtime industry friend who's actually one of the original founders of Race Face since left Race Face once they got acquired by Fox. He, he was able to connect us to, and he's actually one of the founders of, of trail one, one of the co-founders. And he was able to connect us with a incredibly talented PhD level engineer that did a short stint at race face on a work visa. Um, he's an Irishman, but he did a short stint at Race Face on a work visa in Canada for a while. And now he's actually back at the University of Dublin teaching like really sophisticated engineering classes. And it's a side, so Trail One's a side project for him as a co-founder too. So we've got some really good people on the procurement side, figuring out the best factories to manufacture this stuff and then the engineering side to actually do all the really technical Cad drawings of all the stuff and then you know liam and i having a lot of input on how things look and should be shaped and specs and all of that so um yeah it's just piecing together a team Adam Stacoviak Like that that uh you know can execute on on good products so yeah yeah we've done a great job uh i will tell you i don't own any trill one products ([Time 1:33:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dd9fa508-f6e1-4812-acdd-c922099f1e40)) - **Use AI to Boost Efficiency** - Leverage AI tools like ChatGPT to improve efficiency in writing, customer support, and automation. - Human touch remains essential as AI is not yet replacing jobs in the business. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Does ai play a role at all in your day-to life as an individual? Are you using AI? Is it helping or hurting your business? Jeff Cayley Yeah, absolutely. I am definitely a nerd and all that stuff and love it and enjoy it. And I've been an early adopter of all of it. And yeah, I use ChatGPT daily for a whole range of things. I always experiment with our businesses on Google Workspace. So I always dabble in experiment with the way that Google is integrating Gemini, which is largely terrible and not very useful. Our customer support staff and the content guys, they're using it to write articles, reply to emails. Yeah. So we're leveraging it every which way we can and every which way that's possible to, you know, whether that's automate tedious tasks or, or a lot of it's just, just language related, Like writing things and replying to emails, stuff like that, proofreading stuff. Like there's, there's so many useful cases for it. I don't know, by and large it's you know, people love to say how helpful it is. And yes, we've absolutely seen some efficiency gains for it because of it and use it all the time internally for personal reasons or business matters. But it's not revolutionized anything yet. It's not like I'm not firing people because I've replaced them with AI robots, like just answering customer support queries automatically. There's still the human touch the the humans are just much more efficient so far um way ([Time 1:42:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ec945b5f-7c54-472d-918d-46790ca2e030)) - **Lifestyle Business Philosophy** - Jeff aims to run a lifestyle business focused on pride in products, employees, and customer experience. - He values sustainability and work-life balance over rapid growth or exits. Transcript: Jeff Cayley For you and these next steps you take yeah so you know my my take on business in general is i'm not trying to conquer the world. Quite the opposite. I'm trying to run a lifestyle business and do it really well. And what I mean by that is I want to have a business that I can be really proud of in the way that it treats its customers, the products that it produces, the way that it treats its internal Employees, the way that it brings things to the world, whether that's humor or creativity or content. I like a business that I can be proud of that hits all of those things in a really good way and just provides a great, awesome life for myself and the team. And that's it. Like we don't have revenue targets. We're not trying to, you know, be like, Oh, let's hit this next year. Let's hit that next year. Like, no, we don't have investors. Like this is just, we're having fun over here. Um, can we make it, can we make a good living running a good business with employees that love working here and customers that love shopping with us? Like, that's it. That's all just calm down after that, you know, like just have a good life. So, that's, that's my outlook on it. Um, well, thanks man. I mean, it's, it's definitely, it's definitely contrary to the typical, you know, hustle at all costs, build a unicorn, sell it. Like, no, I'm not at all. Like I just want to run an awesome, fun business and have a good time doing it and, and make sure that along the way we're, you know, building products that we can be proud of. And the people love working here and people love shopping with us. Like, that's that's it. Like, that's that to me is important. I feel much more sort of fulfilled and vindicated when I see positive testimonials about the service we provide, the products we make and the happiness and, you know, cheerfulness Of our internal staff. Right. And our ability to take care of them like that to me is what matters. Um, I'm not going for an exit. I'm not going for an IPO. I'm not, none of that. Like, I'm just trying to, you know, enjoy myself, enjoy my life, make sure I take plenty of vacations and time off and stay fit and take care of my body and make sure the rest of the staff Does that. And, um, yeah, to me, that's like what a lifestyle business is and should be. And that's what I care about. So definitely contrary to, you know, I think most hustle at all costs, build and scale, be the unicorns take is it's like, I'm talking kind of the opposite. That's good. Adam Stacoviak It seemed like a healthy ([Time 1:50:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/15bdb746-dcd9-44af-bd4f-9623592f7896)) - **Work Where Passion Meets Lifestyle** - Choose a career or business that aligns with your passions and lifestyle to increase fulfillment. - Avoid grinding in jobs you hate since modern opportunities allow pursuing enjoyable work. Transcript: Jeff Cayley That. And yeah, man, fun, fun chatting all this stuff with you. I mean, one of the things that, you know, if I were to be an advocate for anything, I'm definitely an advocate to live a good life and, and just be thoughtful about the way your career is Shaped, whether that's your own business or, or how well your career kind of feeds your lifestyle. I definitely am an advocate for lifestyle businesses. Like I explained, like try and find a business you can run that is fun and enjoyable and you can be proud of. Um, and, and, or try and be in a career or a space, a job that you really enjoy the lifestyle of it. Um, and you love your work and you love the industry that it's in. Um, I'm just an advocate for that. Cause I, you know, I've, I've seen so many people come to our businesses from these corporate jobs. They're just like I couldn't do it like I'm a I love bikes my whole life or I loved outdoors my whole life. And I've been an engineer at Gore-Tex and I just can't stand it anymore. And then they like take a huge pay demotion and come work in a much more fun industry. And they're like, this is so I should have done this forever. And so, so I'm definitely an advocate to like, really be, you know, to tell people, just be thoughtful about how you spend your eight hours a day working. And ideally it's in an industry that you're passionate about and can really feed your lifestyle and your hobbies in a good way. So yeah, that's, that's the only thing I'm a, I'm a true advocate about. And I, and I want people to think about and consider, cause you know, I think the days of, you know, us having to grind away to just make a paycheck at a job we hate just to survive, like those Days are kind of gone. Like we've got so much more opportunity and how big and complex this economy is now that take advantage of that and actually love what you do in your work yeah and i will say that the the ([Time 2:01:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/eec3148a-5e58-4585-aab8-620c43699739))