TruLocal.ca Co-Founder Marc Lafleur Shares the Journey of Quitting Your Job, Entrepreneurship & Getting on CBC’s Dragon’s Den

Transcript

00:00 Hey everyone, it’s Tom Karadza and hopefully you’re enjoying the new year is getting off to a great start. Listen, we have a podcast. We have a whole bunch of podcasts coming your way. I think this month alone we have nine different guests coming on the show, so there’s a lot of stuff coming out over the next few weeks, so stay tuned for all that. That’s assuming everybody gets here. Sometimes we have to rework schedules and stuff like that. But listen, this episode is a lot of fun. Um, we were talking to Marc Lafleur who’s one of the cofounders of trulocal.ca. So it’s true without the trulocal.ca. And what they are is a basically a subscription service where you can get a box of meat from local farmers delivered to your doorstep every month. So there’s no long-term plan to this thing. You can just go off and go on their website, select the cuts of meat that you want.

00:50 They now have like wild fish as well. Our family gets some wild salmon from them, were customers of them. In full disclosure, I’m. We’re not connected to them in any way. We’re just fans of them, so we thought, why don’t we just reach out because they obviously fit with our whole, your life, your term is message, you know, we’re trying to help people build the streams of income and build some asset bases in their lives through real estate. What these guys are doing is breaking down and making it much more simpler to get local good quality food options delivered to your door. So in the last few years, many of you have probably listened to. Nick and I talk about different food options and nick and I will often argue about different foods and diets and that whole bit, but the bottom line is we boned both want access to good quality food and what Trulocal has done is made it really simple for you to go online and order your good quality meats from local farmers here, Ontario, and it delivers to your doors a doorstep.

01:41 This kind of stuff has been available in the states, but it’s pretty new concept to Canada. It works really well. So we thought, why don’t we just reach out to them and have them on the podcast to talk about their, uh, their story and the best part about Marc coming in here to the OAKVILLE offices and sit down for the, for the podcast is that he’s just a super interesting guy himself. So we had a great chat about Trulocal and how that all got started in their Dragon’s Den appearance because they were on Dragon’s Den, but just about him and his life. He’s 27 years old. He was making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year really early in his twenties and decided to quit that job that he was doing so we can go off into the world of entrepreneurship. So he kind of fits that whole, your life, your terms message directly.

02:20 He’s kind of a real living, breathing example of that. So the, the show ended up being a great chat of someone who’s living life on their terms and the company that they’re forming with his cofounder. Trulocal.ca is just a great company as well, so it kind of worked on multiple levels, so we had a great chat. I think you’re going to love it, especially if you have anyone in your, if you’re a parent and you have your kids about to go to university or in university just to hear how one graduate, uh, made his way through university and then at what they did right after university is super interesting to us. So we think you’re going to find that really beneficial. And at the end he shares a discount code if you’re going to test them out. He was offering anyone listening to this podcast, this, we didn’t ask him for this, he just decided to do this, which is super cool.

03:02 Um, there’s a code, it’s your life 20, which will get you $20 off your first box from them and a pack of Bacon. So it’s your life 20 is the discount code. If you’re going to experiment with them, try them out. Um, you get $20 off and a free pack of Bacon. So, and before we get started with this, if you’re listening to this and you think 2019, maybe the year that your going to start real estate investing, you can get a free copy of our book which breaks down how some of the strategies that we’ve used with hundreds and hundreds of investors at this point. It’s literally been thousands of investors. We’ve done over a billion dollars of real estate investment with investors here in Ontario and one of the strategies we’ve used is summarized in this book called income for life for Canadians. It’s been downloaded tens of thousands of times times by people all across the country. At this point you can get a free digital copy of that book at Rockstarinnercircle.com/books. So if you’re listening to this and you need a copy of it or you want to give this to a copy of some this, this to someone, he can get a copy and email it off to them or send them a link. It’s at Rockstarinnercircle.com/books for a free digital copy of income for life for Canadians. I think that’s it. I’ve spoken enough on the intro. Let’s get on with the show.

04:17 Are you ready to live life on your terms? Is it time to take charge business, building the economy, health and nutrition and more in your life. Your term show with Tom & Nick Karadza. Are you ready? Let’s go. Good,

04:43 so we are live. We got Marc. We have you locked in here now. I just want to share how I first heard about you because I was ordering. I think I was still doing the cow thing where I ordered the. I think nick and I ordered a full count once that we split. That took like half my freezer. Probably not. Can you tell us a cup of tea? Yeah, that was a couple of years ago. That was the first time we did. You said it right the first time we got a cow. We laid it all on the ground and I think we’re like, okay, you have the two kids. These two steps, I’ll take these two stakes. Do you remember dividing it up like that? Yeah, we were, but it wasn’t like I’m getting a strip loin. No, no. It was just like whatever. I don’t care, you know.

05:17 But uh, yeah. And then uh, got into Trulocal and uh, just like the idea that I wasn’t going to have like 20 things, packages of ground beef or stew for a b for stew, that I can actually choose the food I wanted to, to, to get. So I wanted to choose the state. I think from you guys, I typically get the wild salmon, which I’m a big fan favorite, is it? I’m blown away with wild salmon. Uh, so the wild salmon, I get the bone broth. Um, I’ve had ribeye steaks, I have the chicken, get the, the, I think it’s like a chipotle chicken marinated, marinated just, which is really good. And I’m lazy too, so I can’t cook very well. So having anything really one step

05:58 closer to being ready to eat.

06:00 Yeah. So just, I had no idea in Canada, we had the ability, I thought we always had to go to the farms. Um, so I just want to start kind of stepping back one step and I don’t even know if you have all these answers, but why do you like it? Just before we pressed record here, you were telling nick, hey, as long as people aren’t getting food, you know, or, or as long as I think your point was, as long as they’re getting good quality food, we’re happy. No, he’s one of the grocery stores under the bus, but he didn’t say any names so I was just going to avoid it. But yeah. But we all did. We all agreed immediately. So, um, why are you saying that? Like what is it about that that is important to you? Yeah, so

06:35 it’s funny. So if you talk to me, I guess probably like six years ago now when I was in school, like I didn’t really care where I was getting my food at all. You know, like I would go to buy anything on sale, you know, ground beef, one 99, a pound like that was right up my alley and it wasn’t until I stumbled into this job that it was in the meat space, which I couldn’t tell you how I ended up getting it, like my degree is in health and I totally veered into this random area. But like I was telling you before, my buddy said I talked really fast and he’s like, you know, what sales is for you, so want to try doing this. And uh, it blew my mind at the difference between, you know, farm raised value added meat products and conventional farming.

07:08 So we just realized that there wasn’t really somebody making it super easy and making it convenient. Like a lot of the Times the solutions out there, we’re getting a half cow and then you end up with some prime cuts and a lot of the leftovers that you might not be into. Or it’s a brown paper bag sorta solution. So we figured look like there’s a lot of cool things going on with ecommerce. Let’s take some best practices from other industries and make these make this type of stuff he used to get for people, so that’s kind of how it all all sort of came about

07:32 and your website is pretty easy to use. I’m going into full freaking sales pitch mode for them. I didn’t think I was going to go that quick into the website is really, but it is a good website, but the reason that I find I’m telling people about it is I didn’t realize how healthy quality meat can be for you and I have the story to share is that I took a friend of mine too. We have relatives in Croatia. I took them over to Croatia and all they do in that countries talk about food quality and where you’re getting your food. Even if you eat at a restaurant, they’re like, oh well you know where that guy gets his vegetables from, so don’t eat there. You want you to hear like their whole lives are around food quality. Right? And I took him over there and this is probably like 20 years.

08:07 Nick, this is marco. Took them over there and my aunt and a family over there, they cook up some meat and it was uh, you know, all chopped up. It’s not nice cuts like we do here. It was all kind of chopped up and they gave him the fattiest pieces that they could get off this thing and when we were leaving there, he’s like, your family really hates me, man. He goes, I was trying to pull some of the lean pieces in. Your aunt would slap my hand and give me the fatty pieces. And it always stuck with me. We always joke about it for years we kind of joked about it and then it was a, a couple of years later I was back there and I asked my aunt about it and she’s like, no. She goes, we consider the fattier chunks of meat from a healthy. The way she said it, she said the fat on a healthy animal is where all the nutrients are. We were trying to give him the best cuts of meat. So the lean pieces, we don’t actually fight over. We try to get like fatty kinda

08:56 good as long as it’s a healthy animal and it blew my, you know, when you have one of those moments. All my blew my mind. I’m like, wow, I had no idea. Yeah. So like me, it blew my mind too to be honest. So like I didn’t even know that until recently. Well I guess a little while ago, but like there is a lot of different preferences when it comes to me. Like if you’re somebody who’s a little bit more health conscious, you might be going for more lean cuts, but there is like a massive school that people out there that when they talk about quality meat it’s the more marbling and the fattier and all that type of stuff. Right. So our focus has always been more towards sort of the 100 percent grass fed leaner cuts side, but you’re right, 100 percent. Like a lot of people will be like, oh, I don’t want that cheap lean meat.

09:31 Like I want them more marbled stuff. Which is actually kind of a big joke in the industry because now arguably leaner meat is lower quality, so arguably let’s say grass fed product giving leaner meat is a lower quality, but now supply and demand producers and farmers are understanding this, they’re actually raising prices on it. So it’s this crazy phenomenon going on where they’re raising prices on the grass fed stuff even though it’s arguably once again for different reasons. A lower quality type of meat. So if you look at like I prefer the lean meats, like I’m more of a lean meat kind of guy. So I’ll always go for grass fed and Trulocal’s kind of all around sort of the idea of more sustainable farming and smaller scale and that’s where you’ll get sort of the leaner cuts. But it’s in the past five years, like it’s really changed.

10:10 Like if you talked about, uh, five years ago everything was about, well, is this product aaa? And AAA is in no way shape or form talking about quality is talking about marbling and everybody wanted aaa products because I think everybody is still. The majority of Tripoli is only marbling. Yeah, AAA is only marbling, so aaa has to do with the marbling and the greater the beef. So in Canada we have like a Aa Aaa and in the US it’s like prime us slay prime. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So this is nothing to do with the, the greatest, the greatest, the greatest. Well, okay. Okay. And how do they, I don’t even know, do you know, how did they grade? What’s the grade of an animal? And you know, I always say this like I do a good job of dealing with the farmers independently, but when it comes to actually going down and grading and stuff, I couldn’t tell you too much and we always go ahead and source out like the products.

10:53 We also, we have aaa products and we also have 100 percent grass fed. So one of the things that we realized as well is that people want choice. So we’ve got products for example, that are 100 percent grass fed, but we’ve also got products that are organic. So we give people the ability to choose and we realized that when we started really seeing that Trulocal was more of a marketplace rather than kind of forcing one train of thought onto people. I guess that’s smart. From a business point of view, I would probably just want to force what I thought was good for everybody. But from a business point of view, it makes sense. It’s more of a marketplace. Choose what you want. Yeah. And all of it obviously revolves around the local sustainable. Sure thier high quality aspect of it. But you know, we, you know, there’s a hard argument to be made for organic versus 100 percent grass fed and there’s no right answer to be honest.

11:36 Like what do you prefer? What are you going after? Right? They all have their pros and cons. So what we like to do is when you go to a lot of places, usually they’re going to really lean heavily in pitch heavily the product that they’re offering because they’ll usually only offer one if it’s a 100 percent grassfed beef farmer, they’re going to talk about how, you know corn fat is bad and if it’s a corn fed farm where they’re going to talk about how grasp that isn’t as good or isn’t as tasty. The nice thing about what we do is because we offer organic and we offer 100 percent grass fed and then we offer, you know, I’m a raised without antibiotics. People get to choose what matters most to them and that’s kind of where we started seeing Trulocal takeoff was just kind of finding the suppliers that do things locally, do things sustainably and giving people access to these suppliers directly.

12:15 Got It. So it wasn’t enough just to offer like a grass fed solution. You really needed to offer other solutions for sure. Survive supply though. Do you guys have. So like I wanted to ask when you were talking about the wild salmon, like at certain times a year, can you, you always have wild salmon, you can’t get it at certain times a year, right? We do always have wild salmon. So with that being said, like we’re still tiny company. Like you know, we service our Ontario supplies, we only service Ontario and for us we get the wild caught salmon from Alaska. So if you’re an Ontario, you’re getting wild caught Alaskan salmon. If you’re MBC, obviously you’re getting the wild caught salmon. So it comes from different suppliers depending on where you are. The whole point of Trulocal revolving on the local aspect is that people in Ontario get Ontario suppliers obviously with the exception of the fish because you’re not gonna find any materials.

12:56 Here in Alberta gets Alberta suppliers and BC residents get BC supplier. So that’s kind of one of the fun parts about it is going buildings, relationships with all these different suppliers and learning the ins and outs because each artistically that must just be. That sounds like tough work, man. Setting up all those local connections. Yeah, it’s no joke, like all the farms and we’ve been to every single farm, like we’ve, the final frontier for us was actually the fish, so on our website we actually list the suppliers we work with and we do like little showcase videos of them so people can see kind of the behind the scenes and where it’s coming from and we’d been to every single life from start to finish sort of supplier and seeing how the animals are raised and everything. And the one funnel frontier was obviously the fish.

13:32 So we use, for example, in Kitchener we use um, coddles catch and they’re out of kitchener but they’re obviously getting the salmon from Alaska. So we went to the place to see how they kind of process and package it, but we never actually seen the animals. So it wasn’t until we got to BC and we’re dealing with a company, they’re called organic ocean. Some of the coolest guys I think we’ve ever met. And they actually took us on their, on their fishing boat and we actually were pulling salmon out of the water. Like it was the craziest thing. We’ve now I can genuinely say that like I’ve seen the ins and outs of the majority of the industry and it was a really, really cool experience. So, so to Nick’s point that I guess at some point as you guys grow, you may at some point run out of the ability to have wild caught salmon.

14:07 Nick, if half of Ontario freaking start using Trulocal, they’re not going to be able to supply it. Imagine that much, but right now you don’t have a supply issue right now. We don’t have any supply issues. We’re doing good right now and I didn’t mean to explain when we started this and maybe in the Intro, I’ll have done this by the time you’re listening to this part of this, this podcast, but the meat arrives in a box so it arrives in a box. All the cuts that you’ve selected with some dry ice. It’s amazing stuff. So are you, is that out of a distribution center obviously. Then in Ontario you guys are putting those boxes together from all the different farmers? Yeah, like we literally like hand pack those boxes. So we have. So we have a place that we ship out of in Ontario that goes to interior orders.

14:44 We have a place in Alberta and we have a place in BC. Yeah. Cool. And then I noticed some of the packaging is from the farmers directly. So you guys are getting free food from the farm. They’ve packaged it, you’re putting it in my box and shipped off to me. We don’t do any of the packaging ourselves. We connect directly with these farms. Like we’re the ones who were able to get them all together and give you kind of that one stop shop location. But that’s, you know, our whole, our true. That’s called Trulocal connecting you to the source. Like they’re just asking,

15:07 doing the marketing and helping with the distribution of their food because they don’t want to. I mean it. Most of the farmers don’t want anything to do with that and it’s not their specialty. They just want to do their farming. So it’s probably a benefit to them

15:17 about this. Like we use someone here for some of our chicken called hidden rue farms and her name is Lori and she’s the sweetest lady you’ll ever meet and it’s her and her husband who raised these chickens under the uh, Ontario artisinal chicken program, which is pretty much like one of the highest end sort of artisinal pasture raised their outside every single day. She only raised them in the summer and you understand that this lady, this does, she does this full time. So she’s raising animals full time and then it has to go to the farmer’s market and try to sell the product. Right. It gets really tricky if you’re trying to do it at a small scale. So with us it makes it a lot easier because hey, we have a bunch of people looking for this type of product and we can get the product to them.

15:50 So why don’t we just partner together and consistent source of business for her. So now she knows, okay, Trulocal is going to mean this much to me. It helps. It’s changing the space a lot. Like it’s actually the next evolution. I think for small scale farmers, because they’re, they’ve been left behind in the digital age, so that’s what Trulocal is all about and that’s what we’re evolving into is kind of being the one stop shop from the consumer side. It’s like, okay, I know that I can shop with one of my favorite farms because they’re obviously listed on Trulocal and that’s where we want to eventually get to and if people are listening to this they’re going to definitely think the podcasts on one point five speed. Listening to you, I gave you, I gave you a heads up in advance. I probably take it down and speed, but it’s good. I mean I speak quickly, but you definitely have me beat. I get excited. I think

16:31 beyond even what you’re saying, I think it’s an evolution of just food in general. Like I really think people are going to understand just because I see it in Europe, like everyone talks about the quality of food over there all day every day here. We never talk about that, but except in the last few years I found now the conversations are just starting where it’s like, hey, where are you getting that food? How are you getting that food? What kind of food is that? That’s a new conversation. Before it was always just like, what’s the sale on the ground? Beef. Exactly know. Exactly. I, I agree with you to a point though, because I always looked at the other side and I’m like, so it increased your specifically that area of Croatia where, where we go? Yeah, that little note where there isn’t much. It’s just on the coasts.

17:08 There’s a much industry other than tourism and the people there that, you know, so they don’t have as much going on as compared to like the busy north, typical North American lifestyle neck or. Right. Um, yeah, yeah. So you’ve been girlfriend’s mother. Oh really? Okay. So she’s been to Croatia a few times, so it’s right in between, kind of do whatever they can split it right on the coast there. Right. So there’s not, you know, the little thin sliver of the country, but even the rest of the country in North America that everyone’s running around so worried about stuff. So I agree with you with you where it’s happening more and I’m, I’m not sure if there is a little bit of a trend towards it. Absolutely. I agree with that. But then I’m like, you know what, as we get older, people have to start doing stuff to kind of, you realize your body starts falling apart so you’ve got to kind of take care of yourself a little bit more. So I’m just wondering is it like wholesale or it just kind of like you’re more

17:50 aware of it, so you’re, you’re, you’re tuned to listening to that type of conversation and because of the stage of your life here at that more people are looking into it because I don’t think the average kind of university or college kid. I think that the Mac and cheese on sale for ninety nine cents, it’s still appealing to a lot. You know what I mean? That’s not going to. That’s what I’m wondering. I think, I guess kind of both sides, I think there’s definitely a trend towards it, like we’re in business for one reason is the fact that people are willing to spend a little bit more to get better quality. I find that I think that’s the biggest thing and that people are starting to realize now back in the day there wasn’t such a stark contrast between it value added quality food and the like, econo sort of conventional, you know, massive volume.

18:25 That’s a good point. And now people are really starting to differentiate the two and you’re starting to see the differences and people are marketing the differences. And that’s what I tell people all the time. If people say like, is it worth the extra, you know, 10 to 15 percent on your grocery bill, am I just put, put them side by side, like literally put it side by side and check the difference, taste it for yourself. And I don’t think you’ll ever go back. So is that 10 to 15 percent? Yeah. Literally like if you start talking about it and people go. And then let’s talk about Trulocal specifically, but we can talk about the industry as a whole. Like with Trulocal, the thing is you get to customize your box and do all this type of stuff and don’t worry, this isn’t a sales pitch or anything, but where I’m going with this is that people tend to fill their box with all their favorite things, flaming Yo wild caught salmon steaks baking bake.

19:04 Well no because actually in the good side of it, but yeah, it’s big and is amazing. That’s going to fill your box up really quick. It costs more. Right? Those are expensive products, but because it’s online, people do a wishlist of things. Right. Whereas if you could buy products like the ground stuff, stuff that you’re gonna eat that I’m more of your staples, it makes more sense. And same with the industry side of things. Like I think a lot of people have this idea that, oh my God, I’m going to spend an extra dollar on this. I don’t know, pound of ground beef yet. You know, you go over your data plan without thinking twice and you’ll, you know, get those Tim Horton’s coffee all the time. I always say this like meat wasn’t meant to be cheap. If you think about it, back in the day, you know, the idea of raising a cow properties 24 months, two years, right.

19:40 And that steak that come, that’s everyday work that now we’ve done it. We’ve taken the cows out to pasture from the barnes and brought it back and stepped into their crap when they’re walking by. When we’re walking behind the big words. What, what kind of a sticks from the tree book? It was a curation word. I don’t know the word truth. You’re like, you know, I was too young and I just remember I was trying to die. Never. I never hit the cows. I feel bad. It was always that, that young guy that did it, not me, he was young. He was smaller than us. He mends 20 cows. We just kinda hung out. Hey, you take care of the men, you got to cut you off. There’s a lot of work that goes into it, right? So, you know, meat was never supposed to be expensive, but as demand grew, you know, massive corporations and people found ways to mass produce this and drive the price down down, down, which means that the quality is a good point when they roasted, like when when they do a lamb roast at our farm there and creature.

20:32 That was a big event. Oh yeah. So to your point, it wasn’t an everyday event. Yeah, it’s a special special, special meal. But now people want to eat steak every single day and now you’ve got this mass production. So what ended up happening is, you know, when you think about media was supposed to be pricier, but they keep driving it down. Like I was saying before, right? So our argument isn’t actually to eat more meat. Like we’re not advocates. I don’t sit here and promote and be like, hey, eat more meat. What I say is you should probably, you know, depending on what your diet maybe eat a little bit less meat, but the quality of the meat that you’re eating should be better. Right. So you can keep your budget in the exact same eating better quality products, just eat a little bit less of, you know, don’t have a steak every single night, you know, switch it up a bit.

21:07 Yeah, that’s a good point. And I also think, I think nick, there’s just a bigger affluent class, you know, just how we talk about the destruction of the middle class will be on the agenda there. Sure. There’s a bigger affluent class that will pay for this stuff. And unfortunately I think the separation will happen over the next 10 years. Where I, I, we’ve talked about this before, I don’t know if we’ve talked about it on this podcast or not, but I really think 10 years from now the difference between people who have and have nots will not be like, what car are you driving? I really believe it’s going to be. What’s the quality of food that you’re eating or are able to link the gaps could be bigger. Yes, I agree. I think that people can afford it will end. They might not even want to advertise it, but they might be getting good quality food and there’s going to be a bigger chunk of the population that maybe wants the better quality food but can’t get it and we’ll go for the mass production stuff that we’re talking about right here.

21:51 Percent couldn’t agree more and I think like, yeah, you’re right. Like I do think that over the next 10 years, like if there’s another crash or something like that, I think that’s where you’re gonna Watch this divide go because the haves are going to be able to scoop in and get all these opportunities that the have nots, which is. Yeah, it’s, it’s crazy. Like there’s A. I think there’s a big and I think it’s coming to be honest. Marc, you’re allowed back on the podcast. You go, hey. No, I’m joking. I’m joking. Um, I, you know what I like your point though about the difference between kind of like the commercialized meet and kind of the small producers the quality. I think, you know, back in the day, like we’re saying it was closer, like it might, it might not be the same, but it was closer and as the commercialized farmers try to keep driving down prices and prices because the Walmart, the walmarts of the board were like, Hey, we need cheaper meat to be able to sell to our customers and they just look for all the shortcuts and the gap has widened a little bit.

22:38 I guess I never really thought about it like that. But it does make, it doesn’t make sense. I’ll share the first time that I ever got, um, I guess from a small local farm around here, I forget which one it was at once and I got, it was, it was a grass fed state, but I’m cooking it and it wasn’t a little bit game here. Right. It’s a little bit flavor if it’s like dressed fed and grass finished. Um, but man, the meat you can’t, you could have burned the damn thing. Like if you, if you had to like, you, you, you, it’s like you have to meet. Whereas like the, compared to the typical kind of conventional grocery store type type thing, it’s just a lot different environment as juicy, not as flavorful. Like there is a noticeable difference for if anyone’s into that and kind of appreciates it.

23:15 The vegans right now are squirming and Oh God, at this point they’ve already turned this off. It’s honestly, it’s night and day. And we always try to tell people that. And that’s always saying we talk about the 10 to 15 percent. I’m like, man, it’s the best. Ten to 15 percent of them are going to spend, you know, it’s uh, and like I said, like coming from like a struggling student at the time, you know, I didn’t care much about it. I think I appreciate it more because I did buy stuff for a dollar 99 and I, I, you know, because I didn’t, I didn’t, I just didn’t even know to look for it. I know there’s a difference. Oh me too. We’ve all been there at all. There’s a difference. Like I would even argue today that people are still wondering like, what is this whole grasp of thing all about?

23:44 I don’t in character, it’s still out there. It’s still not this type of stuff stole, isn’t mainstream yet. Like we’re still in the early adopter phase. That’s where we’re at. And like you were saying before, I think that it’s gonna keep trending more towards. So how did you guys get started in the, like you said you were in school, you health background and then you kind of got this job. But like what, what, what was the genesis of Trulocal, like how did this begin? So yeah, well we, like I said, I was working in this space before super randomly kind of fell into my lap and it was a great opportunity. I was there for about four years and you know, I think that kind of molded my future and you know, financially and all this type of stuff. But it also opened up my eyes to the problems in the space and how, if you wanted to get, let’s say farm quality or value out of whatever you want to determine it as you for the most part, how to drive out to the farms.

24:27 So a lot of people couldn’t do that and the only answer they had was the companies that will go door to door so they will go door to door and kind of offer you a year’s worth of meat at the time. And that’s where I worked. And same questions over and over again. A lot of it was around the business model. Like I don’t want to get a year’s worth of meat at a time. Like I don’t want a store, my freezer, I don’t want to pack my freezer. It’s going to be like my brother who puts half of his meat in my freezer. Exactly. Right. So then, and then you’re the one who kept it. I kept in my garage for you for like four. Fair enough. Tradeoff. Tradeoff. So yeah, we looked at that and we, you know, my background is in technology.

25:00 So, you know, I, uh, I’ve always looked at it where, you know, there’s nothing super crazy and innovative about what we do, right? What we’ve done is looked at best practices and other industries, everything across the board, like ecommerce, Sas, even real estate, you know, we’ve, we looked at it and saw that a lot of these people were innovating and doing cool things. Why don’t we just take what’s working well and those industries and bring it into a space that no one really is excited about, which is once again kind of helping the local farmers and we just so happened to know meat because that was the background. So we’re like, look, why don’t we start here and this is what we’re going to go. And then we realized that it meets hard enough, like meat is very difficult to deal with. That’s why you won’t see a lot of companies doing both very, very well.

25:37 Um, if it’s a niche business. So we decided to focus on the meat side of it and we took it all online. We figured that people don’t want a years worth. So let’s give them the ability to order just a box at a time and they can choose if they want it to come every two weeks, every three weeks or just want one box. We figured let’s do next day delivery because that’s sweet, you know, does one next day delivery and then we give them the ability to customize their box and still have it online. So we figured that, you know, are solving the problem. You identified the problem and solving the problem class and entrepreneurship, that’s what it was. And then from there, my biggest thing is always been branding. Like I know for a fact that I always say this, that if you, you know, if you’re not a Vegan, you’re not a vegetarian, let’s say, and you, you for the most part, you like meat.

26:13 Like you were like, Hey, you know what? I like to eat meat, but I want us to think about meat, right? Like no one likes to think about a steak. So I’m like, you know what, if you could actually make a brand that has a mission that actually has some people can get behind, then people might get actually excited about it and you can look at it from our social, our social people, people really got behind the brand and I think it’s all because of the mission and it’s all because of like, hey look, you know what? Trulocal, if you’re going to be eating meat, if you’d make that decision that it should be better quality, it should be local, should be more sustainable and it should help the farmers and suppliers that are in the area. So for people listening to this who want to start their own and stuff, inevitably the question of money comes up.

26:45 How did you, did you guys have money problems when you started? Did you, is that, is that how you ended up on Dragon Dragon’s den? Is that how you take us to the point of Dragon’s Den? Yeah. So okay. So money problems. There’s two different money problems. There’s business money problems in his personal money problems, right? So we were super lucky, like fortunately throughout the course of my life I’ve had a lot of opportunities financially and like I said, what the job done that before, but I went to this a mastermind event and it totally changed my world and it was ironic because one was that it was Colorado, so I’ll go bundance guys. David Osborne ran the events, he’s at Keller Williams, Guy Out of Austin. Cool. And totally changed my world. So at the time I was, like I said I just bought a couple investment properties and I was really trying to kind of like, you know, expand my network.

27:27 Right. And that’s one thing I realized. I’m like, you know what, I’m going to take a jump here at one of the buddies of mine messaged me and said, hey, there’s this networking event. And like, I forget exactly how we’re going to butcher this, but you either need to be making a million dollars a dollars a year or be worth $5,000,000, neither of which was I even close up. But they’re like, hey, you’re young and you’re doing cool shit. You in. Yeah. Like, you know what, come on, you know, here’s a pity invite. So it was for only guys is about 30 guys and it was just literally to get together and just match them on ideas. So God, this event, it was amazing. I was actually working on a side project at the time. I’m a different website that uh, it was part of the sharing economy but just kind of had some cool things on the go.

28:04 And I actually met David Osborne, the guy who organized the event because we share this awesome love for ping pong. So crushed ping pong, you know, the entire weekend. And he said this thing to me, you know, he’s super successful worth, you know, $100,000,000. And he told me, he’s like, you know what you’re making, you know, x amount, like $200,000 a year. He’s like, that’s the scariest number you’re ever going to make because you’re 22. I think I was 23 at the time. You’re 23 people struggle leaving there $50,000 a year. Jobs, safety of the $50,000 a year job to go start their own business. You know what Kid’s gonna leave 23. It was a grin on his face because he’s like, you know, you know, it was right. So I’m like, I took that home and I realized I was like, you know what, he’s totally right.

28:42 Like for me it’s not necessarily about the money, but at the end of the day I’m, you know, I didn’t have too many skills. Like I didn’t, you know, I was good at sales, right? So for me it’s an amazing skill in itself, but I’m not going to walk into another $200,000 a year job if I lose this job and I can’t take vacations whenever I want. I can’t do all the things I want to do with this. So I realized I wanted more in life and I was like, I had to kind of just pulled the plug. So me and my co founder, we both worked for the same company and we kind of looked at each other and we’re like, you know what, like this is the time. Like we had to do this, so we quit our jobs. Cold Turkey should have planned it way better because you were making good money.

29:10 If I stayed for an extra two, that’s how it would have been. I always say, you know what? And I think that’s part of the journey, right? Like it’s part of the mentality. It’s part of like the genetics is what makes you who you are. So we quit, literally made the decision over Christmas break I think, and then quit January the day we got back, hey, we’re quitting. And then in February we started Trulocal. So we had a little bit money to throw into the business, which helps a lot. And like I said, like, you know, my story worked really well for me. Everyone’s going to have their own story, right? Different means, different opportunities. So we had a little bit of money that we could throw into the business. And then that went by really, really quick though. And then luckily, um, ironically that networking event actually found our first investor, so was able to meet with him and he believed in what we were doing.

29:48 So we got some money there, we had actually just raised money before going on to dragon’s den. So for us the dragons an opportunity, it was an amazing exposure opportunity and at the time we were one of the only people doing, you know, online meet in a box in the mail in Canada, right. You’ll see popups all over the place now. And that’s like any industry it goes. But at the time we were the first guys to do it and a lot of people were kind of like, I’m not ordering steaks in the mail. That’s weird. The US had gotten behind the idea like they have gotten Omaha steaks. Boss takes forever. Yeah, like huge, huge, huge companies doing this type of stuff. And you know, it’s just. Canada is always a little bit behind and population wise. So for us it was like the idea of going on to dragon’s den gave us the, the, I guess the, not the confidence, the, uh, the credibility that we needed to kind of start getting into the mainstream.

30:37 Because once people see you on a CBC show for sure, and then you take the risk, right where it’s like, okay, we’re going to go there and either crusher, so it’s like we’re either going out of business tomorrow because we were like, yeah, I knew meet in the mail suck or always going to be a good idea. So, um, we did it and it was this amazing opportunity and yeah, we’d always been set for the financing side of things. It always been good. We just do a good job of pitching and raising and do what we needed to do. And for us, Dragon’s den wasn’t about the money at all. It was about the exposure. And now we’re working with Michelle, which is awesome as well because I’m sure you found a hit of exposure after that show. Of course, once again, we don’t want to say I stopped kind of watching dragons.

31:10 Then I had gone into shark’s tank, the US version of it, but I used to watch. I know I’m a trader, but it’s unintentional. I think I just put that on my dvr to record. I’ve watched them both in the shark tank is typically more sharing things that entertain us personalities on there and stuff. Right. But uh, okay. So you go down there, you get a bump and exposure, you know, noticeable one. And it’s ongoing too because we’re that company like were those guys right? Like we’re the leader in our space because you look at it like you look at it with meal kits, you look at it with meal prep, they get hyper competitive, right? And everyone’s Kinda just doing the same thing. So how do you differentiate? It’s always going to be this sort of thing that’s priceless to be like, hey, were you the ones on Dragon’s den?

31:48 Like, yeah, we’re the ones that were on dragon’s den. Like we’re the ones who came up with this idea for Canada originally. So it really helped a lot just in that alone. So are you guys shocked? But how fast when you start a business you could burn through money because I mean nick and I, when we started this and we would just burn through money. I don’t think even people understand how fast we went through that first 80. We went through a few thousand dollars, which we thought was going to last us forever. Well, like 80 grand. This is like this all the time. Any more than that? Yeah, that’s a lot of money. I mean by. I can weed through that in a couple months. I feel like it has gone in. Our marketing choices were all wrong. At one point we said we could have had more fun with those marketing dollars if we went and took the money outside and burned it.

32:29 Oh yeah, no, for sure. So that’s cold for marketing strategy doesn’t work? No, I still got a 10 exit like you gotta whatever you think you’re going to spend in Martin in, in Bern. Honestly, tight access, like you’ve got to be ready and like obviously that’s not where you want to be, but especially if it’s your first business and especially if it’s in your first few months, like you got to be ready to, to lose cash and you’ve got to have a backup plan for if you get to that point. We were fortunate that you could go sell people on your idea, like you’re obviously passionate enough about it. You went out and did the networking you found money to push you through. How long has [inaudible] been in business? I don’t know how many years ago. Two and a half years now. Two and a half years.

33:06 You guys are in the building because a good for you. I said guys, yeah, we’re just here to three years to us is like survival for sure. We’re surviving every day and people, people always talk and because we’re on dragon’s den and this and that. I think that we’re like motivated or something on me. I wake up crying everyday, like stuff’s hard, you know, so like it’s. Yeah, we’re very much like it’s me and my friends and you know, friends and family pretty much trying to get this going and none of us had any experience in any of this stuff. Like we had digital marketing and technology, a little bit of a background there, but order fulfillment, customer service, expanding in different provinces, you know, dealing with suppliers. We didn’t do any of that stuff. That’s not what we do, like we had to learn these on the go every single day and there’s still challenges coming up.

33:43 Even now, like putting a team together. That’s a huge thing, you know, hiring, finding the right talent, then not only hiring the right people, knowing when to fire them, right, if they’re not the right people, and then also getting the integrations, the communications among the team, making sure the team can work independently. These are all things that like, you don’t think about it. There really is something that all up. You’ve summed up all the problems, right? There were 10 years in, we’re just smiling at you. Be like, yeah, those are all the correct problems. Every business owner is the biggest, biggest thing. So. But do you ever look back though and like does that $200,000 job look pretty good right now? No, not at all. Not even close. Never. Never, never. I, uh, you know what I always looked at, I just, I just want to, I want to live a life that I can just do whatever I want and it’s not about the money.

34:26 I’ve always said that, you know, and people say it and it sounds kind of Cliche, but it really isn’t about the money. I just want the freedom. Like I really genuinely do. I want to work on the projects I want to work on. I want to work with the people that I want to work with. I want to go where I want to go and there’s no job that can give me that. Yeah, no, that’s cool. I mean, so I want to get myself set up. I’m 27 now, you know, I want to get myself set up and I want to be able to prove to people that, hey, you know what? Like, you know, I was able to put a team together. We were able to get this off the ground and we, we, you know, we, we talked the talk and we walked the walk.

34:54 So where are you now? You’re in Ontario. We’re in Ontario, British Columbia. You said an Alberta or. No, Alberta and Alberta. So to start in other provinces, that is a freaking big deal. Yeah, absolutely. You guys, both of you guys flew out there, met farmers starting call cold calling for referrals? No, we split roles awhile ago so it’s completely different. So like I’ll handle certain things, so just certain things. But it’s uh, we’ve got um, we, you know, in Ontario, it’s funny like I know if our original suppliers are hearing this, the remember when we first walked in there and they’re kind of like a, I don’t know about you guys are, we’re really young. We’re going to change the space and it’s going to be a game changing and it’d be great to begin with this now and then I’ll kind of give you that look and it was hard in the early days to get suppliers and farmers to want to trust you and you know, these farmers spend a lot of time and put a lot of effort into the animals.

35:40 Some of those early customers though, they must be just high fiving you now. And some of my best friends now, like honestly, like some of our customers, the people that I know, every business owner probably says this, but I swear man, we got the best customers in the world. Like our community supports us. Like you wouldn’t believe it’s insane and I really don’t know what it is exactly to be honest, why they get so behind it. But it’s exactly what fuels us at like every single day. So I think, you know, in the early days trying to get these suppliers on board was really tricky. Now though, you know the most recent province we did was BC, we had suppliers messaging I like months before they got whiff that were coming out there and they were messaging us like months before to get on the platform and do that. So it’s crazy, right?

36:22 Like things change, you know, that sourcing suppliers in terms of US choosing the ones to work with is tricky. But having a list of suppliers to work with isn’t like we’ve must have an inbox of over 100 people that are looking to get with the platform that we’re trying to, to, to, to get and facilitate. Right. So that’s just a different, different challenge in itself. Yeah. Good for you guys. And then, so the website, you guys had the tech skills, which I think you kind of dismissed me, not dismiss, but you kind of brushed by that a little bit. Why do you get to those testicles? They came from university or is project management? So this is my third startup, so ironically, uh, so I’ll never forget, I’ll never forget when I realized that I wanted more and it was, you know, I was in university, I was in second year.

37:03 And this is like the time of your life where like if I could get like five bucks to take to the bar to buy like two drinks at like $2 a night. That was a big one, right? Yeah. Good night. Yeah. And uh, it was snapchat. So snapchat which is coming out and I hated it. So I was not about snapchat is must have been like 2013 maybe. You hate snapchat. I don’t know. I don’t even know. I just didn’t like it. I just wasn’t, we don’t use it. But my son, my son is 16 and they all that generation, the snapchat generation, they were old as hell for not using snapchat. It’s, you know. So I all the 27, we’re really old man. Well yeah, that’s a whole other conversation. The yeah, we’ll get into that. But. So I remember we’re sitting around and like I said, I would live with my four friends and we didn’t care about anything other than just having a good time and getting through university.

37:46 I remember hearing on the news or on the TV and it was snapchat had just turned down a $3,000,000,000 offer from facebook and that like hit me like a, like a truck to the face because I couldn’t even conceptualize what a million dollars was at the time. And you just told me this toy, this APP, which I hate by the way is worth $3,000,000,000. Uh, what I like. It blew my mind, so I’m okay. Well, like we’re in the wrong business. We need to go make this because we could do it better. Right. And that’s what we thought. So me and my four buddies who have no business background, no business background whatsoever, the competitor, yeah. We had no business background whatsoever. It looks on my degree’s in health. They were all in like Canon and political science and all this stuff. And we’re like, here’s what we’re gonna do.

38:24 We’re going to get $5,000 together. We’re going to build an APP. It’ll take like three months. It will be millionaires by the summer. Like it’s good. Like we got this all covered. Like that was literally the game plan. Oh, by the way, none of us have any skillsets. Let’s put this business 25, 25, 25, 25, this will be great. Like, let’s make this happen. So that’s uh, that didn’t work out that way at all. So we did that for about two. Even raised the $5,000 to 80. Oh yeah. It was always our money and we put our money in. I think it was actually $5,000 each. So, and at the time and Universe I was that money obviously, but it was used for many reasons other than education. So yeah. So we, uh, yeah, we did that and it lasted six months and it was a complete failure.

39:02 However, when I look at the next venture I went into, the amount of stuff that we used from those failures was insane. So it was, we did a bunch of random Marc, we touched a new public, didn’t know to do this, reach out to news publications and blow them up until they want to feature us. And they would do it about these four random kids doing this app that is obviously going to fail out of Waterloo. Like it was all these things because just had the good store that you’re in university, you’re from what year in Waterloo? Waterloo. The timing work too, right? So once again, you know, you got this whole snapchat after going around and um, and, and yeah, so actually, ironically, the app ways, this was before snapchat was doing the messaging, right? So we’re like, hey look, snapchat’s doing pictures, we’re going to do messaging.

39:40 So you send a message, once you open it, it gets deleted. We also added that little deadline feature, and this is only relevant because this was early back in the day and it was the whole deadline where you could set a timer. So if somebody doesn’t open the message within four hours, I never got it. Right. Right. So we did that and you know, but we, we, you know, we talked to investors, we didn’t raise any money, but we talked to investors for the first time who like absolutely ripped us up. We dealt with the media, we dealt with an outsource developer, all this type of stuff that led into the next venture, which then led into the next event, which was a more of a, uh, it was the sharing economy platform I was talking about. So that one actually we ended up flying out to Austin to pitch some vcs so that got a little more serious and then just got some skills from there to that end up failing.

40:21 And then it was kind of the culmination of both of those, um, both of those businesses and both of those kinds of projects coupled with the fact that the statement is telling you earlier where it’s like, hey, you know, what are you going to leave your job for this amount of money? It was the fact to realize that both of these things I was doing as a side hustle, like both of these things were on the side. I never quit my job for them. So I’m like, you know what? Like if I’m going to do something again, I’ve got to go all in. And that’s what led into this confidence coming from your parents. You’re like, oh, my parents raised me real well. But um, I don’t know. I’m hungry man. Like it’s, you know, I can tell it definitely your hunger, but the biggest thing, listening to your stories, you’re also resourceful.

40:56 Like nick and I always talk about this precipitate specific point where like we wish we could find people coming out of university who had resourcefulness and they had the ability to, like if you hit a roadblock, you’re going to go look for it, not the one, but the three other things that you could do to get around that and then if you have that in your life, you’re going to make it, you’re going to survive. I tell this to my son all the time who’s 16 right now? I’m like, you know, eight. And the biggest thing I can share with you is the ability to be resourceful for yourself. Take the first no for an answer, never accept anything you got to have. You’re going to hit problems. It’s all about how you handle them. You seem to have learned that at a really early age and naturally you have that about you, it seems from just listening to you speak anyway.

41:31 Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, like I just never came from anything. Right? Like when you came up, like I said, like I’m still paying off my ios APP now. You know that by the way, I used it for myself and then my buddy went no money to go to Mexico on multiple trips alone. Communicate. Mexico definitely has a partnership with sap, like hey, you know, it gives them an extra three days or something and the federal government has funded many Mexican trips that they have no idea about. But I remember making my payments. I think I made my final payments around 27, 28, 29, like paying for striking a balance. I’ve been close. Yeah. And I remember that day walking into a CBC, he just feels like the weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulder. So, uh, but the, the Mexico trips were worth it.

42:10 Oh, $100. Anyway. So yeah. You didn’t, you, you’ve taken. Oh, sap. You’re fighting your way along. Just 100 percent. You know, I’ve never, yeah, never came from anything. And you know, my biggest thing was that I just, I always looked at it like I remember. I remember one thing is I remember, I don’t know why, but it hit me like a rock one day realizing there’s no rule book to life. Like when you go through high school, when you go to these things, there’s, you’ve got to do this, you got to do that, here’s how it is, and then you get into kind of even early university or State University realize that like there’s no rule book to any of this shit. Like none of it. There is a zero rule book and that kind of opened up my mind to like, so pretty much can do whatever you want.

42:41 He was gonna find a way to do it. Like if there’s no rule book to like, Hey, you want to get that $150,000 job? Well the rule book would say you have to go through this job and then that job and then that job, but you realize there’s no rule book. Well why don’t you just don’t want to get that job. Right. And I think, I don’t know if that’s what it was, but I do look at that mentality and everything we do. Like this guy said no, that guy said no. This guy said no. Everybody said no, I’m going to build my own way to do it. Or there’s just always a way to make it happen. To me it’s a valuable skill. The most precious of skills I think. Well that’s why you were able to come to ge or be in school and have.

43:14 When you were in school you were sharing, I think before we started recording you were, you had a job, you were making about 70 grand for jobs, so forth for jobs. So I was a $70,000 income the while you were in school. Yeah, that’s what I mean. Just that alone. And that was. Yeah, that was. So that was my last year. So that was my last year. I mean that’s abnormal in and of itself. Your buddies didn’t have four jobs making 70 grand? No. And like to be honest, it was all from that one job like I was doing. So I was doing, actually I worked for red bull as a brand ambassador, so that was more of a fun one. If you take red, if you drink red bull and then start speaking, I don’t know how fast you speak, that’s why I can’t take a cough bad.

43:48 But actually ironically I don’t drink red bull, but a great job to have great organization. They’ve got it figured out. Um, and then as a personal trainer at two gyms and then I was working for that company. So all in all like yeah, I really don’t know where it came from but I do talk to a lot of people and I try to kind of get them because they’ll say like, yeah, you do this, you talk this way, this and that. Like I’m not special man. Like there’s nothing that I do that special. I know I’m hungry and I feel like I might be hungry than other people. But like I’m not overly intelligent. I’m not in any of these things. I think anybody could do what I do if they woke up every day and like we’re like laser focused and that’s one thing. It’s interesting that you quit that job at making 200,000 it really early.

44:23 The gentleman, I forget his name, who said, hey look, it’s, you know, you’re making 200,000 at that age. That’s good that you pulled the trigger at that age because you make 200 every year. It gets harder and harder. Like I’ll never forget meeting one of our cousins and when I first graduated university I got a job offer from Royal Bank. I think it was from like for this how old we are, $35,000 a year. And I remember thinking, I guess that’s good and when I went to go have lunch with him, he was already working there. He said, hey, if you work here, it’s like having the golden handcuffs on man, you’re going to get like that. But he was telling me that like a positive, but I was hearing it like a negative. Like he was telling me they’re going to match your rrsp contributions.

44:57 You’re going to get all this kind of stuff and he was adding up the value in this and I was sitting there at lunch with them and downtown thinking, oh my God, this is horrible. Like I’m going to have to stay in this one job for like 20 years at this time. So he was like literally thought he was helping me, but I walked out of there thinking I’m not going to be able to survive here. I have a moment like that too. And it was when my boss told me, he’s like, so we have just crushed it. I was making good money, all this stuff. And he’s like, Marc, he’s like, I want to offer you a million dollar job. And I was like, sweet. Now that we’re talking, let’s have a conversation. He’s like over five years. And when you said that, he said like, it’s such a good thing, like you’re going to be a millionaire in five years.

45:30 And he said that. And I was just like, yeah, you totally shocked you. I think that was a big thing that put me out the door to allow you to saw yourself in the foot there like that. Just when it hit me, I was like, oh yeah, like, okay, like a sales pitch I guess, but I totally get what you’re saying. Like he was amping it up like it was a good thing, which there’s nothing wrong with that, but like to where I wanted to go in life and what I want. I was like, Nah, this isn’t, this isn’t gonna work for you. So it was something early on that nick and I kind of figured out starting this business and it, uh, it helped us with our income is that I realized that if I’m going to work on any problem, it might as well be big problems.

45:57 Like I know we’ve all read this in books and you’ve heard about it before, but in our lives, whenever nick and I get stuck somewhere, it’s because I feel like we’re focusing on a problem that’s too small for us. And I’m like, you know what? We’re wasting our time figuring out this problem. Let’s ignore the problem. Which I know sounds like crazy bad advice, but let’s ignore this problem in our business right now and go work on something that’s a bigger, better problem and whenever we’ve done that, the problem that we were like that was taking up all our emotions and our kind of energy just magically kind of solves itself now and I just found in life that not only makes you successful in whatever you’re going to do by just finding bigger pumps, it also helps your income. Oh, just just growing your income by focusing on bigger stuff.

46:33 It’s just not good for your relationships you have because if your wife wants to focus on that small problem and you try to tell her, it doesn’t matter. I’ve learned that that’s like, and now you find different ways to get around that. Focus on that problem, and then you explain how that’s the best, most important problem. We need to discuss the kids’ lunches for at least 10 minutes today. You guys go check out a book. It’s called a rocket fuel and another thing that really changed my life and it kind of talks about how so big challenges that people face, especially like early stage founders, is they try to do it all, which I think to a certain extent you do have to know for sure and this really differentiates the difference between a visionary and an integrator and the biggest problem is that everybody thinks that it’s a one and a two, but the fact is it’s a one and a one.

47:16 These are two completely different people that when they get together and learn how to work well together and accept each other’s strengths and weaknesses, it’s like rocket fuel and you look at any major company, you look at, you know apple, you look at Amazon, you look at Tesla, you look at all these are good points. Yellow, Netflix, Reed Hastings, and Patty mccord. You know, you’ve got a tesla and the coo and essentially the CEO. You’ve got tesla and it was like a what? Elon Musk and Bobby Brown. Billy Bob Brown. So I’m like that. Anyway, Steve Jobs and Wozniak, right? And there’s only the reason. Think it’s a one and two twos because one usually gets the spotlight, but usually the two doesn’t really want the spotlight or the integrator. And the biggest thing is that visionaries do what visionaries do well integrated to integrators do well, but a visionary can never do an integrator does and an integrator and the visionary does and as soon as they accept that, it’s like the most beautiful partnership.

48:04 And I think that that was a big thing for me was understanding that hey look, you know, you can’t do everything. I love the ideas and I love figuring it out. I think that I do a good job of that and I can integrate to a certain extent and like you’ve done it, like anybody who started a business is in some way shape or form a visionary and an integrator, but when you’re trying to scale that business, you can’t do it all. You Got 20 employees at this point, you can’t be doing the visionary stuff and the integrator stuff. Right? So that was a really a really good book that I think Kinda like lead to what you were talking to. Very cool. So walk us through the next few years. Where do you see Trulocal? Yeah, well we just want to bring technology to the suppliers and the farmers like we want to make it where you look at now you’ve got companies like instacart and you got companies like, Whoa, Amazon buying whole foods and they’re making everything so easy.

48:44 Everything is so simple. I always say this about these companies and whether or not Amazon competes with you, like whether or not you were competing and selling the same product as Amazon. Amazon is competing with you by changing consumer expectation, right? Everyone gets so used to go to Amazon. You know exactly what you’re looking for. One Click and it’s in your house in an hour. It doesn’t matter if they’re selling your product. When customers go to your website, they expect that same quality of service. So I think there’s a lot of industries that got left behind in the digital age, like it could be five years behind now and I think that farming and I think that a supplier and local food is definitely one of them because the money’s not as big right. If you’re a, you know, 100 million dollar funded business, what are you gonna focus on mass production of food and major grocery stores are going to focus on the news side of it.

49:31 I have no interest in making sure local become a billion dollar company. I like the size that we’re at. I like the market that we’re hitting and I think that we can be the number one player with the brand that we have with the community that we have with suppliers, dealing with it now with the problem that we’re solving. I think that we can be that digital entry point for farmers to be able to connect with consumers, to be able to not have to go to the farmer’s market every single week to be able to just do what they do best, which is raised and produce the product and then partner and allow consumers to buy this online it. So that’s what we want to make Trulocal become. I’m sure some of these farmers are very receptive to that because I feel like there are, at this point, some of them are realizing this, that they’re not going to be able to get their product out the door with someone out without someone helping with the exposure and the distribution of it. Right? Yeah. Um, and then on the flip side, there are customers, so like I’m a customer of yours and yeah, I just want to thank you for starting what you started because nick and I, we’ve been talking about food. I had my own health challenges over like six years with Nick’s help changed up

50:28 my diet and started going to the gym and stuff like that. Really made a huge change in my own life. And then that’s when I started trying to find out good local food and it was difficult and we still have our different sources that we both go to and stuff. But then stumbling upon a company like yourself where you can just kind of go online and build the box and stuff like that. Uh, it’s, it’s huge. I think what you’re doing, and I think as the message kind of gets out there more the value of good quality meats to your point earlier, you don’t have to eat a steak every day, but just when you do, if you get a good quality one, what it could mean to you and your health. So, um, I, I know not everyone’s going to agree with what I just said, but for those who do, um, it’s an option that you guys are bringing to the table that didn’t exist.

51:05 You the hate mail. I always say this is funny because I think the biggest thing like, you know, let people live their lives. You know what I mean? Like you want to eat me, eat me, it’s fine. You know, my biggest focus on it is like, hey look, you know, if you’re gonna eat meat, let’s try to get better quality, more sustainable meat. And that’s I think like if people have choice, right? So I want to thank you. Like honestly, I always say this and like this is pretty much something to anybody who’s listening to as a customer. Like we would not be here today, like I said, I’m a 27 year old kid and people are trusting me with selling the product and all this type of stuff and they’re expecting a service. So I appreciate anybody and I appreciate you a lot for even giving us a shot.

51:36 So. No, it’s all good. So how, so someone listening to this that wants to check you out, where, where do they go? What’s the, what’s the url? Yeah. So it’s just www.TruLocal.ca. Yes. And I do have a special offer for anybody who’s listening. So for you guys, we didn’t ask for this. So this is cool that you’re doing this. Yeah man. Absolutely. Well I appreciate, I feel like there’s a lot of people like, you know, young entrepreneurs, busy people, people that are kind of focused on their health, they all love this type of stuff and I feel like your audience is like pretty much that in a nutshell. So we’re to do your life and it can be YOURLIFE20 and they’ll get $20 off their box and a free pound of Bacon on a regular size box.

52:15 So their bacon lovers, it’s a, it’s good. We definitely have some bacon lovers listening to this. So yeah, really appreciate that. We’ll put that in the show notes somewhere too so they can track that down. But uh, yeah. Marc that. Nick, anything else? No. Thank you so much man. Amen. Thank you guys. Hey everyone, it’s tom Karadza again. So hopefully you enjoyed that. So the url for Trulocal again is Local.ca to go check them out. The discount code that Marc generously offered there was YOURLIFE20. So it’s YOURLIFE20, which is $20 off a box. And a pie, a free pack of Bacon. So thank you again for, for doing that, Marc. Totally appreciate that. Was unexpected but we appreciate it. Um, and then if you’re listening to this and you have any feedback for us or you want any certain guests for us to reach out to the show, we’re kind of picky who we’re bringing onto this podcast.

53:02 Um, we’ve had a bunch of people now that this podcast is getting some traction, we are getting people reaching out to us wind to come on the show if we don’t really know them or being a little bit suspicious. We’re not just kind of accepting anybody to come on here, but if you want someone on the show or you want, you want to request that we interview someone, send out your request to podcast@rockstarinnercircle.com. That’s the best way to get through us through to us for the podcast on. It must be near the end of the dam stuttering like crazy here. So it’s, it’s podcast@rockstarinnercircle.com. That message will get through to us and if you’re enjoying this and you have a chance to give us a rating on itunes, it feel like we’ve earned a rating on itunes. That is like fuel for us with this thing.

53:41 We didn’t know what we were doing when we started this podcast, but the feedback has been incredible, especially last year, our first year and this year. We have a lot of big plans for this, so if you think we’ve earned your rating, if you go off to itunes and give us a rating or a rating and review, we totally appreciate that stuff. That’s. That is the fuel that keeps this thing going, so really, really appreciate those of you who have gone and done that. I think that’s everything for now. Listen, the whole idea behind this is in some way maybe you’re going to take an idea from one of the episodes of this show that will help you live life on your terms, whether it’s listening to Marc here on this one or one of the other episodes, so we really want to have a small impact in, in helping Canadians right across the country, live life exactly as they want it. We call that living life on your terms, so that’s why we’re doing this. We hope you’re taking some value away for the from this. Thank you for all the feedback. I think that’s it from now. Until next time, your life, your terms.