In this episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I sit down with Dean Brennan, CEO of Heart and Soil Supplements, to unpack the meteoric rise of this innovative health brand. From zero to $50 million in just three years, Heart and Soil has disrupted the supplement industry with its focus on nutrient-dense organ meats and regenerative farming practices. Dean shares invaluable insights on building a brand with passionate customers and maintaining profitability during rapid growth.
Key topics discussed:
• The power of organic growth and building an engaged audience before launch.
• How premium packaging and high-quality ingredients can actually protect profit margins.
• Strategies for creating compelling content that inspires and guides customers.
• Structuring your week as a CEO to balance deep work and management responsibilities.
• The importance of psychological barriers in health transformations and plans to build an ecosystem similar to Dave Ramsey's approach to personal finance.
This episode is packed with actionable advice for eCommerce entrepreneurs looking to build a brand with 'staying power' in today's competitive landscape. Whether you're just starting out or scaling rapidly, Dean's journey with Heart and Soil offers valuable lessons for sustainable growth.
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Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(04:08) The Benefits of Animal-Based Diets
(12:40) The Importance of Packaging and Branding
(19:07) Organic Growth and Protecting Margins
(24:16) The Importance of Organic Content
(32:59) Prioritizing Deep Work and Structuring Time
(42:36) Building an Ecosystem to Overcome Psychological Barriers
(45:48) Outro
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Show Notes:
- Dean Brennan (LinkedIn)
- Dean Brennan (Twitter)
- Heart and Soil
- Andrew Youderian (LinkedIn)
- Drew Sanocki (LinkedIn)
- Dr. Paul Saladino
- Seth Godin (LinkedIn)
- Preston Rutherford (LinkedIn)
- Story Brand - Donald Miller
- Asana
- Dave Ramsey
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Connect With Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more
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Transcript:
Dean :
It is not about us, it is about the customer. It's about barriers that they have to achieve the outcome that they want in their life.
Brett:
Hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I am super excited about my guest. If you look at some of the rising stars, some of the success stories, some of the companies that you want to model in the D two C space, this one has got to be on your short list. Talking to the CEO of Heart and Soil, Mr. Dean Brennan, we got to hang out at Ezra Firestone's Blue Ribbon Mastermind in Austin, Texas. I was blown away. Not only that, not only was I blown away by Dean's story, which we're going to get into today, but I'm a client, I'm a customer. I buy the product. I'm a big fan. And so we're going to dive into the wild success behind heart and soil. But with that, Mr. Dean, Brennan Dean, welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time.
Dean :
Yeah, thanks for having me, man. Really excited about this and I loved meeting you back at the Blue Ribbon event and I think this is going to be a fun conversation.
Brett:
Absolutely. So for those that don't know, heart and soil, not sure what's, for those that are not familiar with what, I'm not sure what they're picturing right now, but what is heart and soil and why do you think it's so wildly popular right now?
Dean :
Well, we could say heart and soil supplements,
So we're a supplement company. It's funny, I say heart and soil too. I usually drop the supplement piece. But yeah, we're a supplement company and I think we're a little bit different in a lot of ways. When you think of supplements, you generally think of multivitamin or something that's generally produced in a lab, a lot of synthetic ingredients of things of that nature. We've realized our founder is an md, Dr. Paul Saladino, that Americans don't really eat nutrient rich organs anymore or nutrient rich animal foods. And if you look at the nutritional profile of just liver, you'll find that it's one of the most nutrient dense, if not the most nutrient dense food on the planet. And so we kind of find ourselves in this point in time with chronic disease, just taking over rising medical costs, everything like that. It's talked a lot right now in the political realm, but we've become a sick nation and we've kind of abandoned the real foods that we used to eat that used to drive our biology and help us thrive. So to make a long story short, nobody likes to eat liver. Liver doesn't taste all that great. It's not the thing you think of when you're like, I'm going to go have a really good dinner, let me cook up a bunch of liver. So we take liver and other really nutrient dense animal foods and freeze dry 'em, very low temperature process. We source regenerative farms that are good for the environment and we put it into a convenient capsule for you to take.
Brett:
That's awesome. And I think, actually, I've got to tip my hat. I dunno if you know Andrew Derian from e-Commerce Fuel Leader in the Space. Awesome.
Dean :
I just talked with him three weeks ago, was on his podcast.
Brett:
No way. So a combination of him and Drew Sinski are the reasons I became a hard and soil
Dean :
Supplement. I just talked to Drew too a week ago. Yeah,
Brett:
Good guys. So I think the way Drew made a post or something about doing a postcard for you guys or something, and Andrew chimed in and said, I got the postcard and I ordered and it's amazing. And then I bought it from the LinkedIn post. So it was like a roundabout way of these guys in e-commerce let me know about your product. And I was like, this is really cool. And so what has been the vibe or the perception around the brand because over the last 10, 15, 20 years, I don't know, I'm just making up numbers, but for a while the thing has been plant-based and vegan and stuff like that. There has been a resurgence or maybe an emergence lately of hey carnivore diet and the fact that red meat actually is really nutrient dense and especially thing things like liver and other organs really nutrient dense. Has there been pushback or has this mostly been widely accepted? What's the Talk about that just a little bit.
Dean :
Yeah, I love that because for me, it comes back to my story I think a little bit in terms of how I found this animal-based diet and plant foods have always been, at least in recent history, all the rage in terms of nutrition. I was somebody that early on in my life, in my twenties, I had ulcerative colitis and I thought at the time that plant foods were super nutritious and that they would do my body good. Now, I will say that when I went through that experience, so I essentially doctors couldn't tell me what I was supposed to do. They're like, you just have this genetic thing and we don't know what causes it, and you're just going to have to take this medication for the rest of your life and someday you might be in a colostomy bag. So here you go. And that was
Brett:
Not what you want to hear as a young man for sure.
Dean :
It was devastating for me as a young person who prided myself in being an athlete and healthy and you're like, man, I got a lot of years left to live in my life and I really got to deal with this. What? So anyways, to get back to your question personally, how I found my way to animal-based is I tried a lot of different things. I was able to put my ulcerative colitis into remission just by removing processed foods, beer, alcohol, and then manage my stress a little bit better and sleep a little bit more. It was in college when I was diagnosed with that. And I fortunately grew up kind of in the country and my parents didn't have a lot of money. And so I thought to myself at the time, I wonder if what I'm eating is causing some of this stuff. And so I intuitively made some changes and was able to heal in a lot of ways. What's interesting is I still had issues for a while that would just surface every so often. Even when I thought I was doing everything and at the time what I thought was right was eating a lot of spinach,
I was buying the big package of spinach and I bought into this thing that it's extremely nutrient rich and you need to eat a lot of it. And I was taking it by the handful just raw, and it was irritating my gut. So wasn't until later I kind of tuned into some people who were talking about plant foods in a different way. You probably remember the paleo diet. And
Brett:
Totally
Dean :
That kind of caught my attention because I thought this nutrition thing is very hard. One day the news is telling you eggs are good. The next day they're telling you eggs are bad, totally red meat's good. No, now red meat is bad. And that was difficult to navigate. And when I started looking at things through more of an ancestral lens, looking at how did our species evolve, how did we survive all of these years with pretty much zero chronic disease, how were people able to hunt into their sixties and run and sprint and do all of these things? That was the first key to me where I was like, this makes sense. If I look at, I almost don't even need to get into the science of it, but when I look at things from this perspective, I can very easily make decisions for my health.
Should I be sitting all day? Well, our ancestors probably did that. Didn't do that. Totally. So probably not. Anyways, I'm getting a little bit off track, but to answer your question, I think that the plant stuff is kind of caught on in a mainstream way, and I don't think it's been looked at through the right lens. I think a lot of the research that you see is survey-based, and a lot of the research that you see that's against meat is also survey-based, which means that when you see a study that says for the most part, oh, red meat, bad red meat causes this, they're surveying a large population of people like let's say in the United States. And there's these confounding factors. Most people that eat meat probably also smoke cigarettes and do X, Y, Z, and that's not considered in the research. So we have gotten a lot of pushback, but I also think that's what has really propelled a lot of the growth because it's different. And I don't know if you've ever, not nutrition, but any other type of product that you've ever bought that was a little bit different that you identified with, you want to tell 10 other people. So I think people doing this kind of diet or looking at, Hey, I'm taking a product like whole package that has full testicle in it and it contains naturally occurring testosterone, which no plant has that, right?
Brett:
A bioidentical, you're I going to find testosterone in any plant.
Dean :
Yeah, a bioidentical form of testosterone that actually your body can utilize. You're not going to find that in the plant world. There's a lot of things you can't find in the plant world, but when you're taking that supplement and you tell your buddy, Hey, you wouldn't believe what I'm taking that has some word of mouth.
Brett:
You got to take my bold testicle pills. Yeah,
Dean :
Yeah,
Brett:
I was telling you off air. I did. I'm a little bit ornery. I did sneak a whole package pill to both my wife and her sister let them take it because I was like, Hey, this will give you energy. We had this family event and they were tired, so take this, it'll be great. And then I told 'em it was bull testicles. It was a fun moment for me. But what's really interesting too, and to piggyback on this and I want to get into several things, the way you're growing and some of the unique things you're doing, I got a couple of things I want to dive into there. I also want to talk about how you're running the company as a CEO. I think it's really fascinating. I always want to learn I'm leading a fast growing agency. You're leading a fast growing e-commerce company, so I want to dig into that too.
But another quick note on this plant versus animal-based diet. I did a gut health intelligence test a couple of years ago, and what's interesting, this company, I'm not affiliated with them, but they say there's not really very many universal superfood. And as I got my results back, some interesting things came up and then I dug in a little bit deeper. Only 50%, according to this company, only 50% of the population should eat broccoli. About half the population, broccoli is an irritant and it will actually block the absorption of other nutrients. Kale not a universal superfood, it's one that I should avoid. Spinach is one that I should avoid completely red meat was on my allow and even recommended list. Super, super interesting. And I found as I started shifting and eating a little more the way this recommended, I felt better. My daughter takes plant-based protein. She loves it when I take it, I feel terrible afterwards. And so yeah, I think we're missing a lot. And I love the way you said it. Just think back to our ancestors. What were they doing? They were eating a lot of meat and so makes a lot of sense.
Dean :
Yeah, it's good. And to your point of the broccoli thing, plants evolve to have plant defense chemicals. They don't want to be eaten. The fruit of a plant does. That's how it passes its seed. You eat a seed or an animal eats a seed, it poops it out, it grows a new plant. That's how it reproduces and carries on its chain. But the leaves of plants, they have a lot of defense chemicals, phytates, they bind to nutrients. And so just because you read on a package or your a G one supplement that it has this and this and this in it, it doesn't mean that your body is actually utilizing it and it doesn't mean that it's not binding to nutrients and you're just not utilizing the full source of nutrients there.
Brett:
So love this little science break. So try some heart and soil supplements. I highly recommend. Let's talk about some of the things you do that are unique that I think are really valuable. I want to talk product packaging for a minute. I remember when I first got my first order, the box was really cool. It had a bowl on it. It's a really neat artwork. You open it up, it's a glass container for the supplements. It feels really high end. It was just nice. It was a nice experience. Sometimes you order supplements and I'm a supplement guy. I try all kinds of stuff and you get just a plastic bottle and a cardboard box with paper stuffed in there. I'm assuming that's a very thing, but can you talk through why you do the packaging the way you do it?
Dean :
Yeah, very intentional. I mean, the first thing I'll say is that plastic is a big problem in our environment
Brett:
Totally
Dean :
For a lot of different reasons. But one of 'em is BPAs and the chemicals, the plastics leach into food and into water and it can cause problems with your hormones. And so being a health company that actually cares about people's health, we're never going to put anything in plastic. That's just a decision we made on day one. It's something that we talk about. So I'd say that's point number one is, and it's funny, when we were sourcing the glass and stuff, we had a lot of people just, we had so many people that were just pushing us towards these plastic products. It's easier to get on the line. It's like you have less breakage, all of these things. And we were just uncompromising and no, we're using glass and let's figure out how to do glass. We actually just launched a protein powder product today and that was a whole other thing. We are not using a plastic container. What most protein comes in, we're using a card. We have this cardboard. It's a
Brett:
Really cool packaging by the way. It's kind of a cylinder and it's cardboard. It's got your signature bowl on the front of it. Yeah, so how excited I'm about that. I don't do well with most protein powder, so I can't wait to try yours because confidence is going to be better.
Dean :
Absolutely. So that was the first part of the decision is we have to give our customers, we have to follow through with what we say we can't be. I think that's where brand trust breaks down and everything else with companies is when you say we care about this or we do this, and then you don't do it. Even the experience with the frontline team that you're working with, if you don't have the experience of how you say as a company you're going to do things, if you don't do it that way, you got a problem. So everything from the experience with our frontline teams, with our packaging, we want to be who we say we are. So it boils down to that. And then the other thing is the design on the cardboard. We just wanted it to have kind of a natural type of feel. I didn't want to overdo it. You see this packaging that's way overdone and we source from regenerative farms and we're kind of about returning to our roots as who we were back then. And that comes down to craftsmanship, who makes things anymore that are nice that they spend time on. So we thought about all those things with how we package our products and I think that's how our packaging evolved.
Brett:
Yeah, it's really great. I think there's been lots of studies on the psychology and the experience behind product packaging and of course when you think product packaging, a lot of people go to the Apple example and just how fun it is to open an Apple product and you feel good. You feel like you made a right choice when you open that product. I feel the same way when I open the heart and soil supplements. What I've also found is that we keep our supplements in part of our kitchen, so they're kind of visible as people come in. But having that glass jar out, I've noticed a few people look at it and say, what is this? Because it's also unique. It also says beef organs on it, which is also a little bit of a like, what are you doing here? I'm expecting a kale supplement. What's beef organs? But have you heard that before? Do you think this helps fuel word of mouth or are the products displayed maybe just a little bit more in a house because of the packaging?
Dean :
A hundred percent. Yeah. We get pictures from customers that send us pictures of how their supplements are displayed on their counter. Funny personal story, I think I could say it probably will take a couple of minutes. So I didn't have any experience in e-com before even getting into this whole thing. And you kind of have these proud moments sometimes. My dad works in North Carolina and he works on appliances and goes to people's homes. He was a business owner and then switched jobs at some point close to retirement. And my dad's not plugged into the health world. He doesn't know really what heart and soil is. He knows I work there and he knows it's a labor of love for me. But anyways, one day he's in this customer's house fixing their refrigerator and the customer grabbed something off of his counter and was like, Hey sir, I got to talk to you. I got to talk to you about, have you heard of heart and Soil? I was struggling. I was obese and had energy problems and he had all of our supplements lined up
Brett:
On his counter. He got the product evangelist trying to convert your dad,
Dean :
And he's talking to my dad. And I don't know, I think of some of my top wins in my career and just because I respect my dad so much and it's kind of a cool moment as a son, your dad is out in the wild in another state of the country and this guy comes up and shows you and tries to sell him on the products that I'm essentially involved with. It's pretty
Brett:
Cool. And then your dad being able to say, well, yeah, my son is the CEO of the company. That's a cool moment for your dad too,
To feel some pride for his son. That is so great. I think it's also really cool that with the right packaging and the right presentation of your product, it does impact the psychology of how someone experiences it, not just in displaying it and talking about it, but do they feel like it's working? And I know you don't eat supplements from a taste standpoint, but I've seen studies that show the packaging and the wording impacts the taste of a product, but I think it does impact the way someone experiences your product. But I think one really correlating topic here is margin and profitability. That's really been the name of the game as I know you guys have experienced, you guys launched in the pandemic, what a crazy time to launch an e-commerce brand, but then e-commerce took off. So there was a period of time there where it was all about growth at all costs, and there was wild times for e-commerce.
Now really the trend is okay, growth but profitable growth, you guys have been able to grow exceptionally fast with little to no margin degradation. You've been able to maintain your profitability, maintain your margins, and I would guarantee that some of your cost of goods are higher than others. So how do you think about that? How do you think about spending more on product packaging and more on ingredients and how that actually protects margins rather than herd it? Because I think a lot of people are attempting to make shortcuts on some of those things to give them more margin, but I think in a lot of ways it does the opposite.
Dean :
So for us, man, there's a few things that come to mind. One is the reason why I believe that we've been able to grow as quickly as we have without degradating margins is due to organic growth. That'd be the number one thing that I would even say. And that's a difficult thing to do. So you say like, well, why? Right? I assure you that it did not happen in the ad channel
Brett:
100%.
Dean :
And I was just talking to somebody about this the other day. They're like, man, what did you guys do? You shot out of a rocket ship and there were some timing things. It was a time of covid. People were thinking about their health. You had people really kind of thinking like, well, oh my gosh, what can I do to protect myself against Covid? There were those types of things that I think helped propelled us. But the number one thing that happened that people don't always realize is you got to back up. From launch date about four years, our founder, Dr. Paul Saladino, for four years built earned attention. Earned attention and an own audience podcast. Two of them every week daily Instagram posts, email newsletter. That was four years of not making a return, but building an engaged audience that legitimately wanted to hear from him and would've really cared. Seth, God always says, do you position yourself in a way in which if you left, would people miss you? Right? If he would've left on that day before launch, a whole lot of people, thousands of people would've missed him and would want to hear from him.
Brett:
Great way to put it
Dean :
That I think is the number one driver is the organic growth. And the hard part, when you get to the place where we're at right now, we went from zero to about 50 million in three years, and you hit a little bit of a different growth phase. And so the challenge is how do you continue to amplify that organic growth? Because I think the organic growth helps made the paid acquisition more efficient. It's difficult to do, you can't really measure it, but we're spending a lot of time thinking about those things right now. So organic growth is the first thing. The other thing, I mean, we pretty frequently revisit our terms with our suppliers,
Brett:
With
Dean :
Manufacturers,
Brett:
You've,
Dean :
We've made a lot of progress over the four years in those areas, which we could have easily not done and just let it go because the margins are good and it would've been no big deal. But if you can work on those operational components and save a margin point, a couple points here and there, it's huge for your business. It's huge. And it kind of prolongs the time that you can stay in business and you have extra resources to be able to hit that top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel.
Brett:
Yeah, you've got to protect margin. And I love the way you described that is finding a point or two here and there. It adds up and it allows you to either invest more for the customer, so invest in that next product, invest in that protein product, or it allows you to invest in great content or community or advertising or something, or just allows you to be a really healthy company, which then you're going to build to weather storms. Because one thing that we've learned lately is that nothing stays the same. You've got the global pandemic and then crazy inflation, all kinds of stuff, and it is not a predictable life. We live, right? And those companies that were not able to protect margin are really hurting now, really, really hurting the last year or so. It's been a struggle. And so companies like yours where you are protecting margin, you're in such a great place.
I want to talk a little bit about content for a second because this is so important. I don't know very many great brands, whether that's a consumer brand or great agencies. That's the space that I live in. Obviously as a service provider that don't do something related to organic content. And I think the very best are very good at organic content. My buddy Preston from Chubby, he talks about this all the time. It was one of the unlocks they had at Chubby and they had a 10 figure exit and then a billion dollar IPO. They started investing in organic content, fun, irreverent content related to their wild board shorts and other things that they sell. And sometimes you mentioned hard to track a return. I posted this content, what was the ROI on this content? I don't really know, but I know collectively what it does for me.
And I'm an ad guy, that's what we do as an agency. And I'm a firm believer in paid ads, but you've got to have a community as well, and organic fuels ads. It makes my job easier as an ad guy if you got go to organic content. So you guys do email marketing really well. That was another thing I was very impressed by. I would find myself reading your emails or go to, oh, delete this email. Like, oh, that's interesting. I'm going to click on that and then I'd read the whole thing. But yeah, how do you guys approach content? How do you think about it? Is the founder still really involved in content? Talk a little bit about that strategy.
Dean :
So our founder, he has his own kind of personal brand, and that's still very top of funnel for us and drives some people into our ecosystem content for us, if I could boil it down, it's like I believe that you need to have something to talk about that is worth talking about that other people care about. And in our, not that it's all about mission statement and this kind of woo stuff, but for us, at the end of the day, we want to inspire people and guide people to better health. And that's the way I look at content. I'm like, the first question to me is how can we inspire people? And then how can we guide people? How can we hit the inspiration piece? And then where in the funnel, what channels does it make sense to incorporate this more practical guidance types of pieces where someone's like, oh, if I'm shopping, do I have a shopping list?
How do I do that? And so that's how we approach content. We're like, how can we reach people, inspire? How can we give 'em practical steps to incorporate this stuff? And then how can we get them to share a piece of content with somebody else? So from a high level, that's essentially what drives it. And I think you need a product that essentially works and you need something worth talking about. And we have the blessing of our entire team believes in this stuff and they live it. Almost every single person here had a health condition that they were able to resolve using this lifestyle and our products or just eating liver. And so the people making the content, it comes through, it's subtle, but we're not relying, we're not saying, Hey, X and Y agency who doesn't really understand what we're doing. We're not having them create the content for us. We're doing it. And there's something about that
Brett:
Always better if you can do it, in my opinion, get someone to maybe help with the polishing of it or something. But the core should come from you. I think
Dean :
I agree. I a hundred percent agree. The passion comes through. And that was part of the strategy too, is like we're telling somebody, Hey, this and this can help with your health outcomes, so we better have people on camera that actually do it. We're not going to be the doctor that's telling you, Hey, don't smoke, it's bad for you, but then you're taking a smoke break and smoking a pack of cigarettes. We do it and we live it. And I think that that comes across in the content. It's a high level strategy. It's not a tactic, but it's more what fuels it, I believe.
Brett:
And that's so much more effective than having the goal of I must create content. I've got to create content today. That's what I got. And almost always that's going to come across as stilted or invaluable or you're just going to be talking to talk, but you guys are inspiring and guiding. And really your whole team is that guy that encountered your dad who's like, Hey, I got to tell you about that. I just got to tell you about it. I know you're fixing my appliance, but I got to tell you about these supplements, right? That's your whole team. And so the content comes naturally there. Am I inspiring and am I guiding? And then that's also a good way to, okay, maybe I have an off day creating content as we all have them. Is this inspiring at all? Is this guiding anybody? Is this helping in any way? Okay, I got to rework it, but I love your content, love your emails. So thank you. Keep up that work for sure.
Dean :
I was going to add one more thing to that that I think is important, and it is quite obvious to a lot of people that have been in marketing for a while, but one book, Donald Miller StoryBrand,
Brett:
One of the best dude, loved
Dean :
Donald Miller, huge fan. Yeah, I've listened to him for a while, and Seth Godin also. But that book I remember is when everything clicked for me and I was like, oh, and this is pre heart and soil when I was doing other creative marketing. But that's been one kind of guiding principle for us, is that it is not about us, it's about the customer. It's about the barriers that they have to achieve, the outcome that they want and their life. And so if you look at our newsletter, our Instagram, our YouTube, our podcast, that principle, you can see it across all of our different channels and sometimes we stray away from it a little bit, but that's one consistent that we've had from day one. And I think it's very, very important if you're, it's not about you. Who are you trying to serve? What are the barriers in their life and how do you help them with your product and with your messaging?
Brett:
Yeah. I love the way Donald Miller positions it. You are not the hero in your customer's story. They are the hero in their story. You're the guide. You're the one who's helping them unlock and get to another level of the hero journey. You're the ones climbing Mount Everest, you're the 10, Zig the Sherpa, helping them along the path to get where they want to go. And sometimes, yeah, you do have to postures, maybe I don't like the word posture, but maybe you got to position yourself. Here's why we're so freaking awesome, but so that we can support you so that you can become the hero that you want to be and deserve to be and things like that. So yeah, it's a really great way to position it. Love Donna Miller and how to build a StoryBrand. Awesome, awesome stuff.
Dean :
I had one more thought as you said that, and this might be useful, but this is an example of it. So we were maybe a couple of weeks ago actually, that the team was producing some real content for Instagram, and it was essentially showing off what we're doing at HQ and what we're eating. And one teammate kind of called it out and is like, oh, we're like, Hey, this is about us. Look at what we eat. And it sparked a conversation that was like, it's a subtle difference, but it's like, okay, let's still show what we're eating, but let's say, Hey, I come into work every day at eight. I struggle with having energy at 10. Some of you may experience that as well. This is what I eat for breakfast, right?
Brett:
Yes. You
Dean :
Flip that around and you add that context to where it can resonate with somebody and you're not just talking about yourself or just showing a highlight reel of what you're doing as a brand.
Brett:
Yeah, totally agree. Because you can be inspiring by showing someone what you eat for the day, because like, Hey, this is how I solve my energy problem. I want to help you solve your energy problem too. So here's how I do it. That's valuable. Just, Hey, take a look at what I'm eating is not
Dean :
No, exactly. That's
Brett:
Valuable. That's great. So one thing I want to get into, and this is something you shared at Blue Ribbon in Austin. We're a growing agency, we're acquiring other agencies. That's kind of one of our areas of focus as we move in the next three to five years. I'm investing in brands. I love this space, but I've got to be more and more disciplined with my time. There's a time in my twenties when we didn't have kids and I can just work all the time, and they're like, whatever. But now I've got to be focused with my time. And so I'm just really curious, how do you structure your day or your week rather as a CEO, and what insights might we be able to gain from that?
Dean :
It's changed a lot, and this is something I tweak a lot, and I think everyone should. Yeah, me too. You can set something and try to force yourself to do it for an extended period of time, and it can get to a point where it's not productive. So I've noticed that as a CEO too. There's always different pressures at different phases and you have to adjust and adapt and kind of meet the moment where it is. But there's a few things that have always worked for me. One is I do deep work better in the mornings than the afternoons, and so I'm very protective of my time in the morning. So generally I'll break out. Monday is my more management day. It's when we have our leadership meeting, and we do do that one in the morning, but we do a lot of deep work and make decisions on things, and it's more strategy focused.
I do a lot of one-on-ones on Mondays. I get those knocked out at the beginning of the week. I think it's good to kind of start the week with some momentum and have those conversations and not if you have those on Thursday, I think you've missed some days. So I'd like to get off with good energy with the whole team. The other days, Tuesday's more like product or research focused. Wednesdays I dip into the financial stuff, but my meetings, if I have a meeting with our fractional CFO or whatever, that's kind of on that financial day. But in the afternoon, the deeper work is in the morning Thursdays. I try to, aside from this conversation, what Wednesday generally if I'm talking to anybody outside of the company, I do that Thursday afternoon.
Brett:
That's great.
Dean :
I try not to kind of mess up the flow of those other days and make sure that I'm giving my due diligence to whatever the topic is for that particular day. And Thursdays are a little r and r too. I try to take the morning hikes on Thursdays, get in more of that reflective state, if that makes sense.
Brett:
Totally.
Dean :
I kind of go on and off with this habit, but I found it really helpful to write things down by hand. And so I'm a big fan
Brett:
Of, you remember better when you write by hand? A
Dean :
Hundred percent. I've tried. It's funny. Most of my life I've been at a productivity nerd, so I've tried every productivity system, workflows, connecting apps together. I've tried so many things, and the one thing that it just works every time is writing things down. I remember it better. I retain it better. And as a reflective exercise to when's the last time you thought back? What happened a Friday afternoon? What happened this week? Where was I good?
What decisions did I make? Were those the right decisions? What could I have done differently? I think most people rarely do that kind of work, easy to do. It's like any other habit that's really powerful and compounds over time, but it just is something that's easy to let go. I try to do that stuff Thursday and then Fridays, I try to keep those days light as well. And I do a little bit more strategy work, longer term, three year type thinking for the company on those days. Of course, any business fires pop up all the time and sometimes it gets disrupted. I'm not trying to paint a perfect picture for your audience, like, oh, that's impossible. But more or less directionally that's what I try to do. And sometimes a wrench gets thrown into it and that's okay. You don't stress over it. You just kind of move on.
Brett:
Yeah, totally. There's going to be days, there's going to be weeks where it gets derailed a little bit, but that's all right. You get right back on track. And I really liked the way you laid that out. The way Alex Ozzi kind of talks about it. You got either manager time or maker time. Those are the phrases he used, and it's a different mindset, right? Manager is all about efficiency and it's also about people and relationship and let's get as many meetings in as we can and let's tackle problems. The maker time, it's kind of like I need space, I need room to breathe. I need to go deep and kind of get lost in something and think creatively. And so those usually don't go well together. But my calendar is actually similar in a lot of respects to the way you're doing it. I like more meeting days early in the week because I think if you're waiting until later in the week, I wouldn't be able to focus if I didn't have my meetings and my check-ins and our all hands and all that stuff. If that was later in the week, I would've a hard time going deep the first part of the week because I'd be worried about stuff.
And so I think getting that, taking care of that, prioritizing that first frees me up anyway to do other things. I really like the way you also said, Hey, Thursday afternoons, that's when I talk to outside people from the company. And I think you have this temptation and this's, this temptation as a CEO of a growing agency, I need to be accessible and people need to be able to reach me. And no, what your responsibility is to your team and to the company and maximizing that return. You are not responsible for outside people. And so obviously you need to be accessible to a certain degree, but keep that confined. And I think that's really, really smart. So you said that that's kind of evolved over the years. Did you any resources there? Trial and error? How did you land on that?
Dean :
Yeah, I kind of landed on that. I mean, it's taken many shapes or forms, like the deep work stuff and the shallow work morning, afternoon, that's always stayed consistent. One thing that I've refined that really helps a lot, and you kind of hit on this a little bit, but I think somebody needs to take inventory of what is the deep work that I should be doing that's going to add the most value. You can go through day to day and spend time on things that aren't really that meaningful. And so what I do, and there's a million ways you can do this, is in my project management or my task management software. It's Asana. I have a custom field for deep work or shallow work and then a priority.
And what I found really works for me is that I have an input capture. So anytime in a meeting, anytime somebody texts me, anytime it's in Slack and there's an actual action that I need to take or a question in my mind of something I need to figure out, I input capture that into Asana very quickly. And so this list starts getting created in there, and I don't pay attention to that list until the end of the day. So my last 20 minutes in the day, I go into that list and I'm like, okay, is this important? Is it not? And I kind of move, and this is the key, is I will block out time if that thing's going to take more than five, 10 minutes or it involves an hour of deep focus, I block it on the calendar and I attach that task to it.
So that helps me not get distracted by this giant list of things that I need to do. Because if I set my calendar on Sundays, I set it for the whole week and it evolves a little bit. That's why I revisit it every single afternoon. I might adjust some things for the next day moving forward, but if I do that right, then when I show up every day, I know exactly what I need to do. The resources, the conversations I had are all right there. So I'm not poking around in 10 different systems to try to figure out where I'm at. And I take notes on that stuff in the task. And so it kind of keeps me on track. That's been one of the biggest, I hate the word game changer, but it's been the biggest tool that's really helped me focus my time and energies in the right place.
Brett:
So good. Always trying to get to that highest and best use of time. And not that you can't do small stuff, sometimes we have to do that, but yeah, prioritizing, preparing. So you go into your day and you know what you're going to do, and then if you get derailed a little bit, that's all right. Then you just get right back on track and knock out the list.
Dean :
And what doesn't work or what hasn't worked for me is blocking every single minute of the day because it's easy to do that if you start. Most people when they start doing that, they block out every single minute. I drove myself crazy doing that, and I failed over and over. I wasn't getting all the stuff done. And then it would just add up. And
Brett:
Then if you feel like, oh, I missed that block. Oh, I missed that block. Ah, just screw it. I missed the whole
Dean :
Thing. Exactly. Or you start noticing that tasks that you blocked, you don't actually do 'em when the time comes up. That's a signal to me like, oh, this isn't really important. So then I either delete it or I figure out somebody who should work on it. And most often or not, it's just not important,
Brett:
Really, really good. And man, that's one of the biggest unlocks is just realizing maybe I don't need to do this at all. Maybe I need someone else needs to do it, or maybe we just don't need to do it, which I think is pretty powerful too. So Dean, this has been awesome. I'm mindful of time. I know you got a hard stop. Very generous. You're very generous with your time. This was really, really helpful. What's next for heart and soil supplements? I'm super excited to try the protein, and that just got released, so that's new. But what's next for you and or heart and soil?
Dean :
A lot of exciting things. I'm spending a lot of my deep focus time right now on, I don't have an answer to the question yet, but we talk about this organic growth and how to amplify it and word of mouth, how to amplify that. And at the end of the day, for us, it's like how do we not just drop the supplements on somebody's step and walk away, but how do we actually become actively involved in their transformation and in their journey? I found I'm really inspired by what Dave Ramsey has built at the Ramsey
Brett:
Network. So good, so
Dean :
Good. And I've got a number of things planned, but what's interesting there is I had this aha moment one day where I was like, whoa, this network that Dave Ramsey has built is really good at moving someone from in debt to out of debt and happy. And then I realized that the same things that get in the way with changing your health outcomes are the same things that get in the way with personal finance. It's very obvious. Everybody knows, oh, I should spend less than what I make. Everyone knows that. It's not like it's not rocket science saving some money, not rocket science, but for some reason, 90% of people can't do that. But he's built a framework that gets people to their goal works.
Brett:
It works.
Dean :
And that's when I realized that health is the same way. It's like there's nuance in it. There isn't personal finance, but there's a lot of confusion and nuance. But at the end of the day, most people know I shouldn't be drinking a bunch of alcohol. I shouldn't.
Brett:
You should move a little.
Dean :
Yeah, I shouldn't be overeating. I shouldn't be eating all these processed foods. People have an intuitive sense of what they should do and what they shouldn't do, but they don't do it. So what gets in the way, it's those psychological barriers
Brett:
And
Dean :
It's the psychological barriers in the finance world. And so I started studying kind of his ecosystem, and I've talked with some folks over there, and I'm trying to figure out right now, how do we build even more of an ecosystem and maybe some non-physical products to actually help people in that same kind of way that Dave Ramsey does in personal finance? And I think that'll be a huge unlock for us as a business, but I think it's going to be an even greater unlock for the people that we're trying to serve.
Brett:
It's a big challenge, but kudos to you for working on tackling it. Yeah, it's not that we don't know what to do per se, it's that we don't have the inspiration. We maybe don't have tools, and then we don't have the guidance that we need. And so it sounds like you guys are providing that already to a certain degree and wanting to go deeper in that, which is really, really awesome. So super great, man. Thank you so much. Heart and Soil co. Check it out. Buy some of that new protein, try the beef organs, try anything else that looks or sounds good to you, try it. I'm confident you're going to love it. Any final words of wisdom or anything else that the audience should check out?
Dean :
I just want to say thank you. This was a great conversation. I enjoyed it. If people do want to look me up, I'm on Twitter. Dean c Brennan, you can find Heart and Soul on Instagram pretty easily. Just search heart and soil. Heart and soil supplements. But no, I've loved this conversation and I haven't done a ton of these, and I get a little nervous for talking in front of people, but this was great,
Brett:
Dude. Yeah, you're a natural man. This was easy for me as a host and super fun on it, and I wish we had more time. I guess one of those things where we're like,
Dean :
Dang,
Brett:
Conversation's over that was super, super fast and really good. So yeah, kudos to you. I'll link to Twitter and Instagram and stuff. Obviously it's easy to search and find, but I'll link to it in the show notes as well. Cool. Dean Brennan, ladies and gentlemen, Dean, thank you so much.
Dean :
Thanks for having me, Brett.
Brett:
Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? And if you haven't done it, leave that review on iTunes. That helps other people discover the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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