Setti Coscarella CEO of TAAT Global Alternatives: David vs. Goliath | Ep. 192 | Business Podcast
Summary
Setti Coscarella is the CEO of TAAT Global Alternatives. He is building a disruptive alternative to the nearly 1 trillion dollar tobacco market and we’re excited to have him on the show.
He shares his lessons learned from growing TAAT as well as lessons learned from his extensive business experience ranging from banking, to entrepreneurship, big tobacco and now TAAT.
Listen in to see how Setti is leading TAAT to take on some of the biggest businesses in the world.
This is a “how I built this” episode packed with tips from Setti that you can use to build your business and take on the big guys in your industry.
Links from the show:
TAAT Global
The EGDE was formally Build a Business Success Secrets
Hello Friends.
Setti:
Welcome to the Edge. Today we are talking with the Ceo of Tat Global City cast a rela who shares his story, how he became Ceo of Taggert Global and how Tat Global is taking on the giants now. This is an interesting one because that Global offers an alternative to tobacco smoking.
Setti:
The interesting thing is that if you’re not a smoker he actually doesn’t encourage you to even use their product but he’s so focused and understands their niche market of smokers and the journey to go from smoking something that is absolutely horrible for you to something that’s not so bad and a little better in your journey to not smoking that I found it really focused and you can learn from this about really understanding who your market is and targeting them specifically and knowing who you are and said he shares his life journey on how he even got to become the Ceo of Tag Global and his years of experience working in places of big tobacco like Philip Morris and some other companies.
Setti:
You’re going to enjoy this episode.
Setti:
Here we go.
Setti:
Welcome to the Edge podcast, your weekly playbook about the inner game of building a successful business, making you a happier, healthier and richer business owner and here’s your host, Brandon White.
Setti:
Well city, Thanks for joining today, how are you?
Setti:
I’m great Brendan, how are you?
Setti:
Good.
Setti:
Where are you coming to us from?
Setti:
I’m in Toronto right now.
Setti:
Toronto, I was Toronto weather now.
Brandon:
Well it’s actually quite nice, we’re going out the window right now it’s sunny.
Setti:
Why there is nice and enjoying the summer Finally.
Brandon:
Yeah.
Setti:
Right.
Brandon:
Well here in Half Moon Bay this summer doesn’t come until the actual fall for most of other people, It’s 57° here today.
Brandon:
No, that’s a bit warmer here.
Brandon:
I’m in Celsius so There’s about 35°C. Probably just shy of 90.
Setti:
Some odd.
Setti:
How loud that child.
Brandon:
Well he, I want to talk about this company that you have.
Brandon:
I’m really interested in it because I think it’s a big market and it is basically nicotine tobacco free.
Brandon:
It’s not, it shouldn’t even be called a cigarette, shouldn’t know that.
Brandon:
We don’t really call it a cigarette.
Setti:
Trying to figure out what the best call it, We call it tax now.
Setti:
But effectively it looks exactly like a cigarette but the filler inside is made of a proprietary biomass.
Setti:
It’s predominantly him and what we’ve been able to figure out, which I think is really interesting is how to convert the taste profile of the hem so that it doesn’t taste anything like hemp or cannabis or any of that.
Setti:
It actually tastes like tobacco.
Setti:
And when you do that and you apply it to the tobacco market, you have a much higher likelihood of converting smokers from a traditional cigarette over to tap and one of the key value propositions that we want to offer to the market is a combustible product that isn’t addictive yet still satisfying and that’s exactly what that is so nicotine, you know when you think about it as a drug, nicotine is actually quite useless, don’t do anything, there’s no efficacy to it.
Brandon:
There’s no real reason why anybody should consume nicotine.
Brandon:
It exists for the sole purpose of addiction.
Brandon:
And the tobacco companies have been overly reliant on that crutch forever, really, and even though they’re trying to move into other products, whether it debate or heated tobacco, it’s still overly reliant on generating an addiction to keep your consumers intact.
Brandon:
And I thought that was foolish and I came from Philip Morris and I think it’s absurd that you have to draw your consumers in through a subversive addiction in order to keep them.
Brandon:
And there’s no other product on earth that requires that, right?
Brandon:
I mean, I always kind of look at it like if you take the tobacco industry and you apply it, you sort of overlay it on top of the alcohol industry.
Brandon:
It would assume that all of the consumers are alcoholics, but the alcohol industry does just fine without relying on all of its consumers being alcoholics, you can enjoy a beverage because you want to enjoy a beverage.
Brandon:
Well, why can’t you apply that same logic to smoking?
Brandon:
And that’s exactly what it is that we’re trying to do.
Brandon:
We can give smokers the power to choose back.
Brandon:
So now you can decide you want to have a cigarette, have a cigarette, you don’t want to have a cigarette, don’t have a cigarette because our product isn’t addictive and I think giving consumers that power to choose is fundamentally better than taking it away.
Brandon:
I agree, I want to take a break for a minute and just roll back because you, the interesting part of your story I think is that you actually can for Philip Philip mars, can we talk about how you even got started in your career and sort of how you wound up here where you are today?
Brandon:
Sure.
Brandon:
So my background was predominantly in finance.
Brandon:
So after I had graduated from my MBA at the shoelace school of Business, I went to go work in investment banking, one of the big banks here in Canada Td Securities.
Brandon:
I did that for a number of years and then left there and started working in private equity and venture capital.
Brandon:
So I worked with this company, they were manufacturing company, wanted to diversify, spent a lot of time actually in green energy.
Brandon:
So we were looking at a number of different projects that we could otherwise invest or green field out and we, we did a lot of work on solar, also had some experience on the wind and hydro geothermal.
Brandon:
So we took a look at a lot of different asset classes and I did that for a little while and left that started my own company and the live event space.
Brandon:
So I mean I had a very background ran that for a number of years and sold it like a festival.
Brandon:
I’m interrupting you.
Brandon:
So live events, how do you go from banking and being a VC to live events?
Brandon:
Well, I mean at the time the company that I had found it was a live event was called the Gentleman’s Expo and what, what it was at the time.
Brandon:
I saw that there was this massive shift in the market towards experiences and I thought that there was an untapped market because there wasn’t really a consumer show at the time that was dedicated to men.
Brandon:
And there had been a lot of companies that had tried, but what I found was that they always tried to hit the base the lowest common denominator of what they thought men were and it never really resonated all that well.
Brandon:
So what we decided to do is go at it from a bit more of a premium angle and create something that was akin to a GQ magazine brought to life.
Setti:
So we would bring in whiskey experts, we would bring in cigar rollers from Nicaragua.
Setti:
We would bring in athletes to do meet and greets, but we would structure the content around things that were a lot more useful, at least in my mind for men to know.
Brandon:
So we would talk about athlete nutrition, we would talk about athlete training, we would talk about, you know, we would bring in fashion experts to talk about the differences between what would be appropriate attire for work or you know, when you’re, when you’re casual, we would have, you know, a whole wide variety of different things that, depending on what your interests, where you could sort of entertain them while you were there while learn a whole lot about things that maybe you were interested in, but didn’t really know a whole lot about.
Brandon:
And it went really well, we ran that for about four years and then sold it and after I left there or after I exited that business Philip Morris in Canada was in the process of launching a new product which they hadn’t done Wolf, I can’t even remember the last time they would have launched a product like this.
Brandon:
It was called Ecos, which is a heat not burn technology.
Brandon:
So imagine sort of a hybrid between a Vape and a cigarette.
Brandon:
And they were looking for innovative ways on how they might commercialize given the regulatory framework which is quite onerous in Canada.
Brandon:
And you know, I got introduced through a mutual connection to some of the senior folks there.
Brandon:
You know, I had a couple of conversations with him and I said, look, I mean, I used to be a smoker.
Setti:
So I understood the category, I understood the product and I thought that it had an opportunity to help lot of smokers with sort of the pain points they would have with smoking.
Brandon:
So I gave them sort of some of my thoughts and and maybe a bit of outside the box thinking in terms of how they might consider commercializing a product like that in Canada still staying on side with the regulations of course.
Setti:
So we both kind of like what we had to say and they brought me on and I actually, when I started, I actually spent a fair amount of time studying the law, which most people wouldn’t have done that were there.
Setti:
And what it did is it helped army with sort of interesting ideas that would still pass through the regulatory hurdles.
Setti:
And on the back of that, I mean, again, it was about trying to understand the nature of the business that you’re in and in that particular business when you’re at Philip Morris, the rules of the game are the regulatory framework.
Setti:
So if you spend some time understanding the regulatory framework that helps frame your mind in terms of what it is that you should be thinking about and how you might find the gaps right.
Brandon:
And I think doing that, obviously allowed for some success on the product in the market, kind of helped made progress through the organization that was there for a few years and I probably could’ve retired there and it would’ve been great.
Brandon:
But along the way, I got introduced to this company called Tat and I took a look at it at first, I’m like, okay, you know, it seems interesting hemp cigarettes, it’s okay.
Brandon:
I’m just not sure whether it’s really going to resonate, it kind of sounded a bit more like a fat than a trend and then I got to know the team behind it a little bit better, studied the product a little bit more and started thinking I’m like okay.
Brandon:
In theory at least I think it has a chance.
Brandon:
But you know, there’s some things that need to be sort of taken or leveraged from the years of big tobacco knowledge in terms of what it is that they understand about consumers and what it is that I understand about consumers because I had worked with thousands of smokers to understand what it is they like about smoking, what they don’t like about smoking and why they might consider alternatives and then what it is about these alternatives that they might gravitate towards and actually switch over to.
Brandon:
And I think, you know, I was able to apply some of that knowledge and learning a tad and I think because of it we were able to ramp up much faster than a standard startup would have been able to in a space like this.
Brandon:
So I want to, you know, one thing you said as I’m listening to you, I remember I saw this series, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, it was on, it was a five part series.
Brandon:
I think it was called Century of the Self and it showed how the tobacco industry launched cigarettes and they launched at a parade in new york and basically created this campaign.
Brandon:
I think it was, they had women, pretty women walk down the road next to the parade and they lit up and it was something like light up and be pretty or something.
Brandon:
And this whole campaign was to effectively get people to smoke cigarettes and then obviously they get on nicotine.
Brandon:
I mean, what a story.
Brandon:
Right?
Brandon:
It is.
Brandon:
Cigarettes as a manufactured cigarettes didn’t really gain prominence until I forget if it was World War One and World War Two.
Brandon:
But it was one of those two because up until they’re up until then it was basically you would go to tobacconists, tobacconists, they would have all different types of tobacco.
Brandon:
You would kind of create your own blend and you’d roll your own cigarettes.
Brandon:
The problem is when you’re on the battlefield and you’re trying to roll your own cigarette, your likelihood of getting shot and killed is quite high.
Brandon:
So a lot of soldiers started dying and silly as it sounds.
Brandon:
That’s what happens when you got to roll a cigarette before you shoot the enemy.
Brandon:
Right, manufactured cigarettes sort of, it was almost tongue in cheek helped save lives and well it’s actually true, right?
Brandon:
Yeah.
Brandon:
And after the war when they came back, they had just gotten used to a manufactured cigarette and that’s really what helped the category take off and then what really, I think helped the industry catch on again sound a bit odd.
Brandon:
They started adding sugar, sugar to the cigarettes smoking sugar.
Brandon:
Mhm.
Brandon:
What is that?
Brandon:
The number two purchaser of sugar in the world as an industry is tobacco after confectionery?
Brandon:
I actually didn’t.
Brandon:
What is that?
Brandon:
What is the sugar effect?
Brandon:
Does it enhance uptake or what does it Do?
Brandon:
There’s a few things cigarettes are actually almost about 30% sugar by weight.
Brandon:
That’s incredible.
Brandon:
Most people don’t know that.
Brandon:
I wouldn’t know that.
Brandon:
I had no idea about that.
Brandon:
I thought it was just rolled tobacco.
Brandon:
No, the sugar actually helps change the acidity level of the smoke and allows you to inhale it more deeply.
Brandon:
That doesn’t sound healthy.
Brandon:
I mean, of course not.
Brandon:
Right.
Brandon:
I’m listening to myself and listeners are like, yeah man, a blinding flash of the obvious.
Brandon:
Thank you.
Brandon:
But but smoke is one thing to understand that you’re smoking tobacco.
Brandon:
It’s another thing to understand that you’re actually smoking tobacco, sugar.
Brandon:
And probably 10 other things that we didn’t know about because traditional american blend cigarettes are typically a blend of three different types of tobacco.
Brandon:
There’s Virginia, there’s oriental or Turkish and then there’s burly.
Brandon:
So different countries actually have different types of tobacco that they use in their cigarettes.
Brandon:
So in Canada for instance, we only use Virginia as a tobacco for our cigarettes and there’s taste differences between the markets because of the way that they blend of tobacco now when it comes to that american style blend of tobacco.
Brandon:
Some of those tobaccos are almost unpalatable if you try to smoke it like burly.
Brandon:
So when tobacco gets picked, it goes through a curing process.
Brandon:
Now some of the tobacco is when they go through a curing process, keep their natural sugars like Virginia.
Brandon:
So Virginia, tobacco naturally is about 20 sugar by weight after it secured.
Setti:
And, and just so I does the Virginia brand name because it originated in Virginia during when they did that.
Setti:
I’m just curious because Virginia is obviously a big or was a big tobacco growing state.
Setti:
I can’t remember the specifics, but I mean it would make sense that it gained that name because of where it was grown now.
Setti:
Burleigh tobacco, which kind of has a bit more of a punchy taste to it.
Setti:
If you try to smoke that out of the barn, it almost knocks you out.
Setti:
It’s got a three sugar, which is very unpalatable to smoke.
Setti:
So what ended up happening was it was, it was actually a mistake chewing tobacco was the predominant use of tobacco.
Setti:
And then when they made chewing tobacco, they would add things like maple syrup, molasses, chocolate, all these sorts of things to kind of make the flavor a bit more palatable.
Setti:
Well, somebody then decided, hey, you know what, maybe I’m going to try to roll this up and smoke it and it tasted better than just rolling up cigarettes and smoking it.
Setti:
That’s why cigarettes taste different than cigars.
Setti:
Uh, so the cigars are, are not altered or banana has altered.
Setti:
There are also different types of tobacco.
Setti:
So tobacco you use in a cigarette is not the same tobacco, you use it a cigar different variety.
Setti:
There are hundreds of different varieties of tobacco.
Brandon:
Wow.
Brandon:
Yeah, it’s like bananas.
Brandon:
Everybody just thinks banana, but it’s actually quite a few different types of bananas or oranges or apples.
Brandon:
I mean, I guess apples would probably be something that most listeners would uh, understand.
Brandon:
And you go to the grocery store, there’s no such thing as an apple.
Brandon:
You have your royal gala, you have your macintosh, you have your red delicious, you have your honey crisp.
Setti:
Like there’s tons of different types of apples.
Brandon:
There’s no such thing as, hey, I want an apple, you’re right, right.
Brandon:
That make that, that makes sense.
Brandon:
Is that are the leaves bigger and a cigar than a cigarette depending on the tobacco, different tobaccos have different leath sizes.
Setti:
It also depends on how high they are to the ground.
Brandon:
So the ones that tend to come up on top have more exposure to the sun.
Brandon:
They have the ability to grow a bit bigger and then the ones that grow in underneath don’t grow as much because they don’t have exposure to as much sun because basically creates a canopy over and depending on where they are along the stock, they’ll have different flavor profiles.
Brandon:
So they used science to it.
Brandon:
Well, clearly, I mean it was, it was engineered to be addictive.
Setti:
I mean let’s just be, well, I wouldn’t say it was engineered to be addictive.
Setti:
I think that was, I guess if you’re in the tobacco industry a fortunate side effect, the tobacco was addictive regardless.
Setti:
Now what’s interesting is tobacco is not the only thing that produces nicotine.
Brandon:
Uh huh.
Setti:
What else produces tobacco is part of a family of plants called made sheets.
Brandon:
So other plants that are also night shades would be eggplants, bell peppers, tomatoes and potatoes, all of which have nicotine.
Setti:
They do have nicotine, small concentrations.
Brandon:
Now tobaccos obviously I think it’s been sort of engineer, well this is where it gets a little bit more on the engineering side that you can get it to overproduce nicotine through through some genetic crossbreeding.
Setti:
But all of those vegetables would otherwise have at least trace amounts of nicotine.
Brandon:
What else do they put in cigarettes besides sugar?
Setti:
A lot of different flavoring agents, some preservatives.
Brandon:
I mean the ingredients list is long and a lot of it has to do with flavoring.
Brandon:
When you’re working with a natural product.
Brandon:
Right.
Brandon:
One of the key things that when you kind of get to mass production scale is consistency right, well, when your underlying material is a plaint, how do you ensure that a Marlboro for instance is going to taste the same this year, next year in every pack that you smoke when you’re dependent on the flavor profile of the plane.
Brandon:
If you think about it from say a wine perspective, like Somalia’s will be able to taste the bottle of wine and tell you what year it was made and where it came from, right?
Brandon:
So similarly across any organic material, there will be flavored differences depending on the crop, where it’s grown and what the potential conditions were throughout the year that it was grown.
Brandon:
That makes sense In order to maintain consistency of taste so that the Marlboro cigarette tastes the same today as it did 20 years ago and will taste the same 20 years from now.
Brandon:
You smooth out any of those differences with some of these flavoring additives and you also use, you kind of pick different years.
Brandon:
So you’ll have a back stock of say three years of tobacco and you’ll blend it and that will give you a much more consistent taste.
Setti:
It’s like blended scotch, johnnie walker, black or blue or pick up johnny walker is going to taste the same regardless of what bottle you bought or what year or because they blended, right, that makes sense.
Setti:
I’m thinking of myself what I didn’t know you think, you know a lot and then you figure out you didn’t know.
Setti:
So they basically roll these cigarettes because people in the warp getting killed because they’ve got to roll their own.
Brandon:
So they manufacture it at that point, all the people come back from the war and now they have this huge market in it basically just goes hog wild happens.
Brandon:
Yeah, it took off And as time progressed and you’ve got to stay into the late 50s and early 60’s it was sort of the, it’s not even the renaissance was but like the golden age of marketing and that’s when a lot of companies figured out.
Brandon:
But you could create messaging that went beyond sort of features and benefits and that that’s where brains were really born.
Brandon:
Marlboro I think is a perfect case example of a brand Marlboro.
Brandon:
So everybody would probably be familiar with the Marlboro man.
Brandon:
Right?
Brandon:
Yeah, I grew up with the Marlboro man on tv back when they could advertise it.
Brandon:
That probably ages me a little bit.
Brandon:
So Marlboro existed before the Marlboro man Marlboro initially.
Brandon:
And again, I’m just, it is what it is.
Brandon:
Marlborough was initially a cigarette specifically designed for women.
Setti:
Really.
Setti:
Yeah, tagline.
Setti:
So basically the archetype was a Betty draper looking woman tagline was smoked Marlboro, it’s as mild as May and they were one of the first manufactured cigarettes to put that cork filter on it.
Brandon:
So you know that yellow filter?
Setti:
The reason they put that on is a woman’s lipstick wouldn’t show as much on a court filter as it would on a white filter.
Brandon:
It’s just printed paper, there’s no real cork in it right now, Marlboro before the Marlboro man I think was the second worst selling cigarette in America, wow, it’s terrible.
Brandon:
Did not work.
Brandon:
So then legal Burnett comes along, it was a avid smoker comes up with this idea for the Marlboro man.
Brandon:
Now, what a lot of people don’t know is the Marlboro man was the first in what was supposed to be a series of archetypes.
Brandon:
So they were going to have a cowboy, they were going to have an astronaut, they were going to have a policeman.
Brandon:
They were going to have a whole wide variety of different archetypes to express through the market the image of what marlborough was, which was the cigarette for every man, they never really got to anybody else.
Setti:
They hit, they hit jack park on the Marlboro man, which if you think about it in the context of the time it was Westerns were huge.
Brandon:
It was sort of the, you still had a bit of a nostalgia to the new frontier and there was a certain amount of freedom that the Marlboro man expressed and people bought into it.
Brandon:
And within one year of the Marlboro man, Marlboro went from one of the worst selling cigarettes in America for the second best selling cigarette in America the year after.
Brandon:
I think they were the best selling cigarette in America and they’ve never looked back since.
Brandon:
Yeah, I think at least here, Yeah, here in at least the United States or and I’ve seen it around the world when I used to go fishing in Argentina, they still smoke Marlboro cigarettes.
Brandon:
I mean it is the predominant brand when you Marlboro is the best selling cigarette in the world.
Brandon:
Yeah.
Setti:
You see it everywhere.
Setti:
It’s the coca cola cigarettes.
Brandon:
I want to I mean this is great history.
Brandon:
I want to talk about the nicotine.
Brandon:
So nicotine is highly addictive.
Brandon:
As we know.
Setti:
I was either listening to something or reading something said he in it said that I actually tried to smoke.
Setti:
I know that sounds funny but I guess because when you’re cool when it’s cool and you’re in middle school and everybody’s smoking, I could never smoke that stuff.
Brandon:
It was Yeah, I mean, I think I did, I had a visual reaction like I was like, I can’t even do this.
Brandon:
But a lot of writers, a lot of people who stay focused or want to focus believe that that nicotine increases and maybe there are studies that there’s a lot of studies out there is also studies that say that cigarettes are bad for you.
Brandon:
So hesitant on all these studies that people do.
Setti:
But what do you think about the idea that nicotine if it’s used responsibly?
Brandon:
If that’s even possible, can enhance your mind to focus or do something like that.
Brandon:
Listen, I think it’s an interesting question however you have to look at it in the context of someone who is already a smoker.
Brandon:
So really the question would be if I gave nicotine to somebody who had never consumed the nicotine, would it enhance their cognitive ability when you look at it from the lens of when you look at it from the perspective of someone who is already a smoker, you have to also layer in the fact that there is an addiction there.
Brandon:
Now, the way nicotine works, Nicotine when it’s consumed has a half life of 45 minutes so after about an hour you go into withdrawal.
Setti:
Okay, so the fact that someone who is otherwise addicted to smoking is now in a state of withdrawal and it’s probably focusing on the fact that there otherwise irritable then has a cigarette and is taken out of the state of withdrawal and feels that sense of calm can now concentrate.
Brandon:
I think attributes that too some placebo effect that the cigarette is doing, but really what it’s doing is just knocking you out of that state of withdrawal because you’re addicted to it.
Brandon:
So that makes complete sense.
Brandon:
And actually, I did not hear that perspective, but it makes complete sense because the addiction by default makes them irritable and gives them the inability to concentrate.
Brandon:
So when people or writers who have been smoking a long time say that they need the cigarette because it makes them smarter or something, it actually does do that, but only because they are addicted to cigarettes and I think that’s good news that you’ve just given me because I was listening to this thing and I was talking to a friend and he’s like, well you could chew nicotine gum and I was like thinking to myself, well I could to that I give yourself an addiction only to have to take it away every hour, right?
Brandon:
Like can I get smarter?
Brandon:
Someone else that is actually read a book to a lot of things.
Brandon:
That’s very insightful.
Brandon:
Yeah.
Brandon:
Why don’t I go do something?
Brandon:
I mean that doesn’t seem like the best drug if I was going to try to know and again, this kind of goes back to tat and sort of helps frame the problem.
Brandon:
We’re trying to solve The problem we’re trying to solve is the fact that you’ve got a 1.3 billion people who are otherwise addicted to a useless drug, some of which you think there’s some actual efficacy to consuming this drug, there isn’t Still today there’s 1.3 billion people and there’s I think seven point some change billion people on earth that like 18%.
Brandon:
Yeah, there’s a lot of smokers that’s why this market is extraordinarily large.
Brandon:
Like I said in another interview today, I’m like, it’s sort of a global context.
Brandon:
It’s the mount Everest of markets.
Brandon:
It’s giant.
Brandon:
I mean you think about that 18% of the world’s population is addicted is addicted to cigarettes and spending money every single day.
Setti:
Like put it in this perspective, The global market for bottled water is about $250 billion dollars a year, big right?
Brandon:
Tobacco is a trillion dollars a year, four times the size of water.
Brandon:
I’m laughing.
Brandon:
It’s not funny, but I mean what the core thing that you need to live and compared to something that basically you need because you started to need it, right?
Brandon:
And for us having that ability to eliminate the tobacco, eliminate the nicotine, thus eliminating the addictive element of smoking, we can give people the ability to enjoy a cigarette the same way they would enjoy a drink or anything else without having to become an alcoholic, so to speak.
Brandon:
You know, said when I was reading about tat, I was thinking that it almost could be and I’m not saying marketed, but one of the things that I’ve read about is that a lot of smokers, I’ll take my now wife.
Setti:
So when I met her, I don’t know what a smokers, but she did smoke but she only smoke when she drank.
Setti:
Yeah and smokers and that was clearly triggered the drinking, triggered the smoking and then it was probably the whole thing.
Setti:
But oddly enough for her, she really wasn’t addicted.
Setti:
She wasn’t always like, hey, I need a cigarette butt and that ended because she started running more with me and doing stuff and then she’s like, I can’t do that and then we stopped drinking, then we got older and we still can’t do it anymore and get up early in the morning at least.
Setti:
But it’s that motion.
Setti:
So when I was thinking of tat, I was thinking, well someone could switch over and still get that whatever that behavior that they need is to hold something in their hand and get off the cigarettes.
Brandon:
Is that something that could happen?
Brandon:
100%.
Brandon:
But again, this is why we sort of picked this format, right?
Brandon:
Like there’s this the Vape industry, there’s a heat not burn industry, like all of these sort of segments within the expanded tobacco market.
Brandon:
And the problem is they don’t really hit the right form factor.
Brandon:
If you take a look at the universe of smokers, the vast majority of them have tried vaping or some other nicotine delivery system because they don’t particularly like the idea of say smoking Or at least that’s what they believe.
Brandon:
However, when you take a look at the number of smokers compared to the number of vapors, it’s still outweighs 20-1.
Brandon:
So if everybody’s tried vaping, then why is everybody still smoking?
Brandon:
Right, Right.
Brandon:
Because that’s really the preferred delivery mechanism.
Brandon:
All of these other things that whether it be they’re too far away from a taste profile, which is, which is very important when it comes to smoking.
Brandon:
And I’ll give you an example, like I can’t think of anything.
Setti:
Someone consumes with the frequency of cigarettes and doesn’t get sick of the taste.
Brandon:
Yeah, that’s actually 15 of them every day every day.
Brandon:
You’ll be sick in 20 years.
Brandon:
Yeah.
Brandon:
Like anything even things I like I get tired of eating cake or doughnuts or pizza.
Brandon:
Yeah.
Brandon:
Pizza.
Brandon:
And I don’t want to eat that five days a week.
Brandon:
I can’t eat 15 slices of pizza every day for the next 20 years.
Brandon:
It’s not gonna happen.
Brandon:
Yeah.
Brandon:
I will get sick of the taste of pizza probably within the same day.
Brandon:
That’s all right.
Brandon:
That’s incredible observation.
Brandon:
So flavor is a very important component.
Brandon:
So when you’ve got companies like Juul that came along and yes, they created all of this wide range of flavors and now they’re getting in trouble for it because what they ended up doing is attracting people who never smoked in the first place and a lot of youth.
Brandon:
But they didn’t really capture a lot of smokers on mass.
Brandon:
So they built a market that didn’t exist.
Brandon:
They expanded the market nicotine addiction because somebody was smoking Marlboro is not looking for a creme brulee debate.
Brandon:
Right, Right, right.
Brandon:
Like they never buy a creme brulee cigarette, why don’t they?
Brandon:
And yes, the taste is appealing at first, but eventually you’re like this isn’t really hitting what I really want and they end up going back to smoking and that’s okay, that’s better and you would see this time and time and time again, even on the studies that we would do at Philip Morris, you would see it.
Brandon:
People would use Vape or some of these other nicotine delivery systems for three, five, maybe 6 months.
Brandon:
And then slowly they would start because the thing is like you think of those moments when people have a cigarette, you know like like you said about your wife, you know she would smoke when she drinks a lot of people have a cigarette after a meal right?
Brandon:
Nobody finishes a meal at their favorite restaurant and says past the jewel.
Brandon:
Yes, it’s actually it’s true.
Brandon:
And I think one of the things that that’s really cool about what you’re laying out here is that sometimes you think you know what’s going on in the market because when that vaping thing I think jules actually based out of san Francisco possible.
Brandon:
I can’t remember it is that’s where they started and I was thinking well they’re going to be competing with the cigarette manufacturers but when you really start peeling back the onion and you do your work and you under truly understand the market.
Brandon:
It sounds like cigarette companies won’t worry at all because they weren’t converting smokers, they were expanding the market to an existing person who probably would benefit the cigarette later.
Setti:
Yeah.
Brandon:
Now a lot of the cigarette companies went out and bought Vape tech right now what’s interesting is altria bought I think a third of jewel They bought an evaluation I think of $40 billion.
Brandon:
Okay, that’s after three years after they started they did quite well.
Brandon:
Yeah, somebody made, somebody took some money off the table.
Brandon:
Yeah, I don’t worry for them other than sort of the lawsuits they’re starting to face.
Brandon:
Right?
Brandon:
But they had all bought various different vaping technologies.
Brandon:
It was jewel because before Juul vaping was kind of seen as a fringe category.
Brandon:
It wasn’t really gaining tremendous mainstream acceptance.
Brandon:
Jewel was the one that helped take the category into the mainstream.
Brandon:
And on the back of that, a lot of other companies came in and tried to follow suit and they did that with really clever marketing.
Setti:
They put that thing everywhere.
Brandon:
They raised billions of dollars and poured billions of those dollars back into marketing and building a brand.
Setti:
And despite how they’re sort of doing now, that’s one thing that I do think they did reasonably well because whether you smoke or not, you knew what jewel was.
Setti:
Well, yeah, it was everywhere.
Brandon:
I mean, when they made that push, it was literally everywhere, everywhere.
Setti:
And I can’t think of a product that gained traction that quickly.
Setti:
Even facebook took longer than that.
Setti:
Yeah, that’s true.
Setti:
Yeah, it took it took a decade.
Setti:
Yeah, Jewel did it in 18 months.
Setti:
They were a household name like from inception to household name, 18 to 24 months insane.
Setti:
But they again understood that this was an exercise in branding and I think it’s a really interesting point because oftentimes people think, or business people think that you can make a better mouse trap and that will be sufficient.
Setti:
There are lots of better mousetraps that never gained commercial acceptance, right?
Setti:
Betamax was a better video machine than VHS That’s the truth.
Setti:
It was, but it wasn’t, didn’t work or whatever happened, it just failed.
Setti:
Yeah, Blackberry for instance, arguably made a superior phone, but didn’t see that there were other things that they should have been doing to help build the brand beyond just sort of, hey, it’s a secure device.
Setti:
And remember I listened to jim Balsillie speak once and somebody asked them and this is just as Apple, like the iphone was starting to gain more traction.
Setti:
They asked them whether The idea of Apple kept them up in 90 left.
Setti:
He was like, again, this is when Blackberry was still the de facto leader by a country mile, Like business people want a business tool, Kids want toys.
Setti:
That’s what he thought of Apple.
Setti:
Well, I will tell you this.
Setti:
I miss my and I kept that stupid blackberry for as long as I could until I just, the iphone from a functionality just surpassed it without question.
Brandon:
But what I miss is the keyboard, remember the keyboard keyboard, like I could crank out on that keyboard and I’m not saying that that the apple keyboard was in fear.
Brandon:
I just liked the keys for whatever reason made it go faster for me and it held in my hand better.
Brandon:
Yeah, I still miss my Blackberry truth.
Brandon:
They tried, they tried to put out a sort of nostalgia product and I think it did okay and quickly fizzled out because it’s like one of those things like I remember growing up we played Nintendo or the Sega Master System or Atari or whatever it is, the idea of it as a kid is greater than if you were to plug it in now and I actually start to play because it happened I think a couple years ago somebody plugged in like, oh my God, yeah, I want to play these.
Brandon:
First of all, I suck now, I can’t do anything.
Brandon:
I used when I was a kid but like given where the games are sort of evolved to versus what they were.
Brandon:
I mean the entertainment lasts maybe half an hour and then like I can see why I don’t play this anymore.
Brandon:
Yeah, I think you’re right, I’m going to give one exception which probably whoever is listening if you’re younger, you won’t remember this but said and I will remember I used to play Gallagher in the stand up.
Brandon:
Yeah, and I will tell you that to this day, I can still play that game and I still love it.
Brandon:
In fact, I love it so much that I’ve been trying to figure out where I can buy one of these things and put it in.
Brandon:
I just have no room in my house.
Brandon:
That’s the only game.
Brandon:
But that’s just an aside, But you are right like when I went back and I was like oh my God, I used to spend hours playing asteroids and I was really good at asteroids and now I go back and I forget either my wife or my nephew.
Brandon:
Somebody got me one of those things that has every game and their mother on it and you can go back.
Brandon:
And the truth is what happened is what you just said.
Brandon:
I got that present.
Brandon:
I played some games for I tried to place me for an hour and then it’s sitting in a box underneath our tv because so I think that’s an interesting point too.
Brandon:
Actually the nostalgia and remembering of it far outweighs actually going back and doing it and maybe that’s because humans romanticize things.
Brandon:
What do you think?
Brandon:
I think so.
Brandon:
I mean it’s it’s what Disney is built on.
Brandon:
That’s true.
Brandon:
Disney is in the business of selling memories, fond memories.
Brandon:
That’s what they say they do.
Brandon:
You go to Disneyland.
Setti:
You remember the fond memories of going to Disneyland.
Setti:
You don’t remember waiting three hours in line to hitch a ride.
Setti:
Yeah.
Setti:
Well that that is that is that that’s the God’s honest truth.
Setti:
But yeah, that probably happened.
Setti:
You remember the mickey mouse ears.
Setti:
You remember the ride itself but you don’t remember anything else and they make sure that you do remember that.
Brandon:
Yeah, I mean, but I think as humans we have a predisposition to find and romanticize the things that we enjoy?
Setti:
It’s like think about college, do you remember any of the specific classes you would have went to?
Brandon:
Do you remember the time in between?
Setti:
I remember fishing and a few parties.
Brandon:
Yeah, those are the things that kind of help help you remember those times with fondness, but you also need now we’re getting into sort of psychology, but in order to sort of relish in those thoughts, you also need to have trying times that help bring those to the forefront.
Brandon:
Otherwise, if you’re constantly surrounded by things that please you, they’ll cease to please you maybe Disney does the lines on purpose so that they filter out all the lines and then you just have the great experience which is in such a juxtaposition and waiting.
Brandon:
That stupid line is sweating for so long.
Setti:
It’s probably true.
Brandon:
It is you tend to enjoy things that came with a bit of work more than you do, things that were gifted.
Brandon:
Yeah.
Setti:
So let’s go back to tat because it sounds like you and I could probably talk, I mean, you have tons of insights and truthfully your background in going from that event company all the way to Philip Morris I mean, really, that is an exercise in truly under you called an archetype or customer profile is another name for listeners out there.
Brandon:
But one of the things that I’ve Gardner’s so far from talking with you is that you truly understand the customer I tried to and you have to, well there there’s there’s no, there’s no other way around it, right?
Brandon:
Otherwise you’re just perpetually hoping that the thing that you build people will like, or you can listen to consumers and try to design something that at least has their needs and wants in mind and then make sure that you can communicate that to them in a way that’s entertaining and easy to understand.
Brandon:
And I think the sad part is some people never defined their core customer, don’t understand their core customer.
Brandon:
Listen to the feedback from quote unquote customers and chase something that they never get to.
Brandon:
And then they spend years chasing this thing and eventually it burns out because eventually can’t make money that way.
Brandon:
You have to understand the why?
Setti:
Why do people want this product?
Setti:
And I think if you can do a good job of answering that, why you have a significantly higher chance of success because there are ties that bind.
Setti:
So if you’re answering that question for a small group of people, then it really just becomes an exercise in trying to find more people that have that similar need and and go out and fill it.
Setti:
And then on the back of that you start to grow.
Brandon:
But it all starts with the consumer, right?
Brandon:
So let’s talk about tap for a second because I’m curious, we talked a lot about cigarettes and nicotine, but tat is the alternative to that that’s actually healthier.
Brandon:
And when I first looked at this I was looking at one of the questions I had for you is it is made out of hemp.
Setti:
So do you get a C.
Setti:
B.
Setti:
D.
Setti:
Effect from smoking the hemp like you do from the oil and all of that sort of, I don’t know what would chemistry.
Setti:
Yes.
Setti:
So actually you get uh so again I think it’s important first to distinguish that their CBD and THC okay THC is the thing that gets you high.
Brandon:
We don’t have any of that CBD is the thing that makes you calm.
Setti:
We have lots of that.
Setti:
Okay right, right now the way that a consumer would would use hot, they smoke it so they inhale it.
Setti:
I guess you could say the efficacy of the CBD is enhanced and is delivered to the brain faster because it goes through the lungs.
Setti:
So it immediately gets into your bloodstream, immediately goes up to your brain.
Setti:
When you ingest it it takes longer because it has to bypass your liver.
Setti:
That’s what it’s going to ask you because the CBD oils that I’ve tried, You have to hold underneath your tongue.
Setti:
The gummy I imagine has to be or not.
Brandon:
It has to be digested and then get into your bloodstream which probably has a delay of 20 or 30 or an hour.
Brandon:
I don’t know how long and and the oil is your 100 holding it under your tongue is your best bet to get it into the bloodstream fast and not a lot of people know how to do that.
Brandon:
So with smoking it now, the smoking will have any negative effects on the lungs.
Brandon:
Well look, I mean, I’m not gonna tell you that smoking anything is good for you, right?
Brandon:
And again, this is why it’s important to understand how we position this product.
Brandon:
This product is intended for people who are already smokers.
Brandon:
Got it okay.
Brandon:
If you’re not a smoker, I suggest you don’t smoke at all.
Brandon:
And if you do smoke, your best bet is to quit.
Brandon:
Now if you can’t quit, then you should try tack.
Brandon:
So let me tell me, I’m putting the dots together that you’ve been kind to not just put out there.
Brandon:
But really what happens is if their smoker and they get on tat and tat has this CBD effect of calming then it really does help them get off the cigarette because when they get go to withdraw, they take the tat a tat calms them down and now they’re and probably from my experience with CBD, it really does calm me down and help you focus.
Brandon:
Yeah, at least for me it helps me sleep better to after a long bike ride, that’s not a problem, but I have found that it has increased my deep sleep, is that now you cut that cycle, you still have this behavior if that’s what you need to hold something and now you’re cooking with gas.
Brandon:
Exactly.
Setti:
So what it does is like if a smoker moves over to tat and they’re not consuming nicotine eventually they won’t have an addiction to nicotine because it’s like quitting smoking once you’re not feeding the body, that particular drug that creates the addiction response eventually it flushes out of your system.
Brandon:
You go through like this detox and you’re not addicted to the product anymore.
Brandon:
So when people, when smokers can use tat eventually they’ll cease to be addicted to nicotine unless they start consuming nicotine again.
Setti:
And that’s what I mean, that we can put that power to choose back into the smokers hands.
Brandon:
So now it really is a true freedom, just like drinking, having a beer or a glass of wine or whatever it is, you want to have one, have one, you don’t want to have one, don’t have one.
Brandon:
And I think all smokers would be better off at least having that ability to choose because for as much as, you know, a lot of the tobacco companies will say, well, you know, a little bit of willpower and anybody can quit smoking.
Setti:
It’s not that easy.
Setti:
It takes a little bit more than that.
Brandon:
Now when it comes to what it is that we’re trying to provide, you do have that choice because with tobacco, I don’t think you do now have the belief that you have a choice.
Brandon:
But you know, because on top of the sort of ritual of it all you still have that chemical dependency.
Brandon:
We can eliminate the chemical dependency and then you can decide whether this is a ritual you want to continue or not.
Setti:
You know what else I really like about you and tat.
Setti:
And the whole profile is is that you know your customer.
Brandon:
So well that when I brought up can you smoke it?
Brandon:
You basically are completely up front.
Brandon:
This is a lesson for all the listeners out there.
Brandon:
When you know your customer, you’re not scared to say something that would in your human mind start to think that you’re shrinking your market because you said it.
Brandon:
If you don’t smoke, don’t start smoking.
Brandon:
But if you do smoke smoke smoke tat not not.
Brandon:
Yeah.
Brandon:
Well look again it sort of forms like this.
Brandon:
If you don’t smoke don’t start okay Like you don’t smoke you you told me that you tried once you never picked up smoking.
Setti:
I said good for you.
Setti:
And I mean that honestly but don’t start smoking.
Brandon:
Nobody should start smoking.
Setti:
If you do smoke your best choice quit.
Setti:
If you can figure out a way to quit, I strongly suggest you quit and then never smoke again.
Setti:
Okay If you can’t quit or you don’t want to quit and you’re given the choice between continuing cigarettes and potentially choosing pat, I highly suggest you choose tat because then if you do want to quit at some point I think it will be an easier time when you don’t have a chemical dependency to this crappy drug called nicotine.
Brandon:
And you’ll feel better.
Brandon:
I mean the CBD will make you calmer than it would be anyway.
Brandon:
So yeah, I think it’s a it’s a great, it’s not a pitch.
Brandon:
It is your marketing, it is your company, it is the brand.
Brandon:
Mhm.
Setti:
I’m trying to solve a problem not create a new one.
Brandon:
And how are things going so far?
Brandon:
So far?
Brandon:
Things are going great.
Brandon:
We started our initial launch in Ohio very late last year.
Brandon:
So just leading into christmas and New Year’s, We launched in a couple of stores there.
Brandon:
So we’re in over 300 stores in Ohio right now we’ve already signed distribution deals for Illinois for Georgia.
Brandon:
We’re getting some stuff going now in michigan California and Nevada.
Brandon:
And we signed a distribution deal for the UK and Ireland and we’ll have our first product shipped over there in the coming weeks.
Setti:
And on the back of that we’re looking at opportunities to start commercializing throughout continental europe.
Brandon:
Well that’s fast growth but I wouldn’t, after talking to you, I wouldn’t expect anything less.
Brandon:
Have you raised money, yep.
Brandon:
So we’re publicly traded company.
Setti:
So we’re on the Canadian Securities exchange, the ticker symbols T 80 or in the U.
Brandon:
S.
Brandon:
Currently we’re on the otc qx, the ticker symbols T.
Brandon:
O.
Brandon:
B.
Brandon:
A.
Brandon:
F.
Brandon:
We’ve also made an application to uplift the shares to the NASDAQ.
Brandon:
Hopefully we’ll have some news on that in the coming weeks.
Brandon:
That process is going well.
Setti:
And yeah, we’ve raised, so when I started, I started just shy of a year ago, We’ve raised approximately $20 million dollars and we did that within my first four months here.
Setti:
Wow.
Brandon:
That’s incredible.
Brandon:
Congratulations.
Brandon:
Because that’s just, that is a big deal.
Brandon:
Thank you.
Brandon:
It’s been a tremendous journey thus far.
Brandon:
And, and like I said in the beginning, I mean this market at least in my mind is sort of the mount Everest of markets and we’re just now starting to get the base camp and and how many people do you have?
Brandon:
And I’m asking because listeners, I think sometimes think or does this metric city, you’ve been in the business a long time that more employees means bigger company.
Brandon:
And over my career I would like to have the least amount of people with the most amount of revenue so that we have the least dynamics necessarily.
Brandon:
And we run an efficient program.
Setti:
So do you run a remote team or you run an office?
Setti:
I mean obviously Covid affected you in some capacity, but how has that been going?
Setti:
Because you, you actually started if you started a year ago, you started in what some perceive as the worst possible time?
Brandon:
Yes.
Brandon:
Uh huh.
Brandon:
So I mean it was an interesting sort of discussion.
Brandon:
So I mean on one hand you’re kind of sitting at Philip Morris, the big global company, you know, things are going well and you know, you can kind of write out your career there, you want to leave that and you want to jump onto the start up in the middle of a global pandemic.
Brandon:
It was one of those uh what what what what made you do that?
Brandon:
Because I mean, I call these things pivotal moment.
Brandon:
Did you have a pivotal moment?
Setti:
I’m sure, look, you have a ton of experience, You are a banker, you worked at Philip Morris, do you have this?
Setti:
And and and in the entertainment industry, event industry, you’ve got a broad range of experience, sales, marketing, and finance, which is unique.
Setti:
I’m sure a ton of things come across your desk all the time.
Brandon:
This was obviously an interesting one.
Setti:
But did you have a moment when you’re sitting at your desk at Philip Morris, you’re looking out the window and you’re like, okay, today’s mic drop or did you like how does that happen?
Setti:
Well, the opportunity was kind of presented.
Setti:
I I spent a good few weeks, probably a month, month and a half, just kind of going through it and wrestling with myself as well, just trying to understand, Okay, it’s a nice idea, you kind of relishing that thought for a little bit, but is this really something that I’m going to jump this ship for go over here and the more I kept thinking about it, the more I realized that if I didn’t take this shot, it is something that I would likely regret for the rest of my life.
Setti:
What what made you come to that conclusion?
Setti:
Hard to articulate a specific thing.
Setti:
Sometimes you just gotta have to trust your gut and you start projecting out into the future and you say, ok, I’m here, I project out into the future and that’s kind of where I’m going to be.
Setti:
But doing that, I’m always going to be thinking about what would have happened if I took that path instead of this path.
Brandon:
And I guess I’ve always kind of been a bit leaned a bit more towards the path less traveled than the path well traveled.
Setti:
You like the challenge?
Setti:
Yeah.
Setti:
So this is one of those things where I said, I’m going to take a swing and if I strike out, so be it.
Setti:
But if I don’t even swing the back, I’ll be kicking myself for the rest of my life.
Setti:
And and again, was that a slow burn?
Setti:
No pun intended.
Setti:
Or was that a moment that you like?
Setti:
I said, you are in the car driving home and you’re like, I gotta do this, I’m going to do it.
Setti:
I’m going to put in my two weeks on monday Tuesday Wednesday, whatever it was, yep finally came to a point obviously discussion with my wife and kind of talked it through and she was always been very, very supportive, she told me the same thing, look if you don’t take this shot, you’re never gonna you’ll always be thinking about what if so whatever happens down the road happens, but obviously she knows me quite well, it’s like just swing going to play and swing.
Brandon:
So in my mind I kind of had made up my own mind, you know, talking to my wife also kind of helped me mm see it from that perspective and then once I made up my mind that was it Mic drop I guess.
Brandon:
Yeah, that’s the mic drop.
Brandon:
But I think it’s important that you know, I always say that people’s when we talk about business and you talk about your team, you’re like oh well I’ve got you know how many people and here’s who runs what but really your team is at home because without your home team you’re in big trouble hard.
Brandon:
It’s real hard.
Brandon:
But you were asking before about sort of the size of the team.
Setti:
So yeah, I came over here, we’ve got a small office in Toronto, our product is predominantly commercialized in the U.
Brandon:
S.
Brandon:
So we have a much larger team in las Vegas for our production facility is that’s where the founder is located.
Brandon:
So he’s the guy that actually founded this company and then I got hired in to kind of help leader and now we’re in the process of starting to add more people because the the amount of work that needs to get done is greater than the amount of people that we have.
Brandon:
But I do agree with you that there is where possible, staying as asset light as possible is preferable.
Setti:
So where you can hire agencies if you can hire you know certain consultants that can come in with certain expertise to at least get you through the proof of concept and get product in the market.
Setti:
Then I think once you’ve established that you can start looking at adding some more internal people.
Brandon:
But just understand that the more internal people you add in particular functions then begets other functions that have to help you manage all of those other people.
Brandon:
So you can hire a whole bunch of sales people.
Brandon:
You can hire a whole bunch of marketing people but just understand that you’re likely going to need an HR department, you’re clearly going to need a finance department, you’re gonna need an IT department and you’re going to need likely somebody in legal.
Brandon:
So these things sort of balance each other out.
Brandon:
It’s not just, hey I’m going to hire 10 people over here because they need a lot of tools in order to help get the work done but you’re expecting them to get done and there’s sub functions I need to get come in and help you service that otherwise what happens when stuff goes down.
Brandon:
Yeah.
Brandon:
So when you think you’re hiring once you expand once you’re beyond everybody direct reporting to you and you hire one or two or three more.
Brandon:
You’re really hiring, if you think you’re hiring two or three, you’re really hiring four or 5 because you’ve got to have managers and you’ve got to have the back office to actually, who’s going to order the computer for the new employee, who’s going to set up their email, who’s going to do all this sort of stuff.
Brandon:
The onboarding policy.
Setti:
What’s the expense policy?
Brandon:
What’s what happens if my computer goes down?
Brandon:
Who sets a payroll?
Setti:
Yeah.
Setti:
And the, and the list goes on.
Setti:
But you’re manufacturing in las Vegas area Nevada.
Setti:
Uh, that’s awesome.
Setti:
Really?
Setti:
We are.
Setti:
Yeah.
Setti:
And when you went public, did you did you do a reverse, was it a spat?
Setti:
What what was it that got you?
Setti:
It was done through an RTO, it was done for reverse takeover, which is similar to what a SPAC would do in the US.
Setti:
I got it.
Brandon:
And well, you’ve been really races with your time today setting.
Setti:
I’m really grateful for.
Brandon:
I’m not gonna let you go yet.
Setti:
So we’re not good.
Brandon:
I need our listeners need three tips for people who are in business, whether they’re starting a business growing a business or scaling the business and they’ve got, you worked, you worked the gamut because you probably started that event thing in your spare bedroom.
Brandon:
You’ve worked at a giant company that A rounding error is $20 million dollars and or 100 million probably.
Brandon:
But yeah, now you’re in a company that actually was existing and is now scaling and you’re scaling incredibly fast.
Brandon:
What three?
Brandon:
And it could be anything, you know, it can be healthy, can be mental, it could be actual business sort of advice.
Brandon:
What three tips would you give?
Brandon:
Well, I think first of all understand and listen to your consumer, your customer, right?
Brandon:
Because without them you don’t exist.
Setti:
So first and foremost, I think that’s it.
Setti:
Two try to read or at least immerse yourself in industries that have nothing to do with yours because you’d be surprised at what best practices you can pick up when you take the oh when you take some of the horse blinders off because you get so focused on a particular on your industry and you focus on specific parts of it that it’s hard to learn when you’re looking at another industry that doesn’t really have anything to do with yours and you don’t have any expertise that you’re leveraging as you skim through what it is that you’re reading.
Setti:
It can help open your eyes to different ways of doing things and don’t be afraid to leverage some of those learnings and apply them to what it is that you’re doing.
Brandon:
So keeping a trying to keep as well read or continuous education is important and then for as much as we like to focus on work, just make sure you kind of still they’re able to carve some time out for, you know, your loved ones at home because when work doesn’t go so well, they’ll still be there.
Brandon:
There’s a three great tips where can listeners find you and tat?
Brandon:
I know there’s several places you have a website, they can find you on the, on the stock exchange as well.
Brandon:
What’s the, what’s the best place for people to find Tak Global?
Brandon:
So they can go to tack global dot com and that will give them a lot more information on the company.
Brandon:
You can also find us on social attack Global or act try tat and if you’re more interested on learning more about the product and you can learn more about the actual product that try to act dot com.
Brandon:
Perfect.
Setti:
We’ll put all this stuff in our show notes city.
Setti:
Thank you so much for taking time today out of your busy schedule to talk with us and we’ll check in with you in a few months and hear how tat has truly gone global.
Setti:
That sounds great.
Setti:
Brandon, thank you so much for having me.
Setti:
It was an awesome time.
Setti:
Thanks for being generous with your time and joining us for this episode of the edge before you go a quick question, are you the type of person who wants to get 100% out of your time.
Setti:
Talent and ideas.
Brandon:
If so you’ll love our monthly edge newsletter.
Brandon:
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Setti:
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Setti:
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